DuPont and General Motors Raskob was hired in 1901 by
Pierre S. du Pont as a personal secretary. In 1911, he became assistant treasurer of
DuPont, in 1914 treasurer, and in 1918 president for finance of both DuPont and
General Motors. Raskob had been an early investor in General Motors and had engineered DuPont's ownership of 43% of GM, purchased from the financially troubled
William C. Durant. While with GM, he led the creation of GMAC (now
Ally Financial), the company that allowed GM dealers to offer installment credit directly to customers. He also promoted the use of standard financial statistics to measure the performance of different operations within a diversified company, primarily through his associate
Donaldson Brown. Raskob held the head financial job at both GM and DuPont until 1928, when he resigned from GM in a dispute with chairman
Alfred P. Sloan.
"Everybody Ought to be Rich" In the 1920s, Raskob was a big proponent of investing in stocks. He gave an interview to
Samuel Crowther for
Ladies Home Journal in which he suggested every American could become wealthy by investing $15 per month in common stocks, at a time when the average American's weekly salary was between $17 and $22. The article, titled "Everybody Ought to be Rich", was published just two months before the
Wall Street crash of 1929.
Political activity Raskob had supported Democratic presidential candidate
Al Smith in the 1928 election, and Smith invited Raskob to become chairman of the
Democratic National Committee. Sloan, a supporter of
Herbert Hoover, insisted Raskob resign either from GM or the DNC. Raskob left GM after the board supported Sloan, sold his GM stock, and used the proceeds to build the
Empire State Building. Raskob made Smith president of the Empire State Co., operators of the building, based on a promise to do business together the night Smith lost the presidential election. Raskob served as chairman of the DNC through 1932. He continued to promote Smith's candidacy as Chairman of the DNC, and to advocate for the adoption of an anti-
prohibition policy. Both of these positions were opposed by different factions within the
Democratic Party. In 1932, when
Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was by then on rather bad terms with Al Smith) won the party's nomination and the election, Raskob (a Smith ally) resigned as DNC chairman. Raskob (like Al Smith) viewed many of Roosevelt's
New Deal policies as radical and unhelpful to economic recovery. Toward the end of Roosevelt's first term as president, Raskob began actively working against Roosevelt. Testimony given to the
United States Senate Lobby Investigation Committee revealed Raskob was an active fundraiser for
Georgia governor
Eugene Talmadge, considered a possible anti-Roosevelt candidate for the Democratic nomination in the
1936 United States presidential election. Raskob later became involved with the
American Liberty League, an anti-
New Deal organization active around the time of the 1936 election.
Empire State Building During the Great Depression, Raskob's business interests were focused on the
Empire State Building, which was in competition with the
Chrysler Building to become the world's tallest building at the time. According to one story, Raskob had taken a jumbo pencil, stood it on end and asked architect
William F. Lamb, "Bill, how high can you make it so that it won't fall down?" During the early years of the Depression, the Empire State Building had so few tenants it was mocked as the "Empty State Building". Raskob was also invested in precious metal mining in
Nevada and
New Mexico, ranching, the aeronautical industry and pesticides. Raskob remained with DuPont until his retirement from the company in 1946. ==Philanthropy==