What makes Charles Koch tick?
One guy's Deutschy daddy issues [deluxe edition]
Today’s story comes from Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker. If you’re interested in shorter content from Mayer and/or never eating store-bought chicken again, I’d recommend a recent article she wrote about the poultry industry.
Here’s my takeaway from this week’s story
A person’s upbringing can play a huge role in the fuckery they cause.
The Kochs’ destruction of democracy and the planet touches just about every part of American life. In fact, it’s easy to tie them to the ongoing Supreme Court battle (RIP RBG)—Mitch McConnell is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Kochs’ funding largesse. But why turn a turtle into a puppet?
Simply concluding that some people are evil obscures the roots of the problem. No single evil genius engineered a political system that allows an evil genius like Charles Koch to fund an evil cumquat like Mitch McConnell who could now push through a Supreme Court nomination process that screws over the majority of the country.
Rather, a lot of smart, privileged people have used American politics as a vehicle for exercising personal demons on a gigantic stage. I find this a good lesson to bear in mind when looking at U.S. history, if only because it reminds me to instruct friends to try therapy or Taekwondo before taking their issues out on the entire planet.
As always, this week’s script is below. We’re off next week. See you in two Thursdays!
Ben
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Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about Fred Koch and how he shaped his son, Charles. I read about them in Dark Money, by Jane Mayer.
The Kochs are the family behind Koch Industries, one of the only companies that has simultaneously been ranked as a top ten polluter of air, water, and the climate as a whole. Charles Koch, who alone has $42 billion, also leads the Koch network of donors, a 400-person club hellbent on removing all corporate restrictions. They are pretty much their own political party, spending almost as much on elections as the major political parties. So if you picture Ted Cruz like the penguin of American politics, then picture Charles like the Joker: some billionaires just want to see the government burn, and they will burn a lot of money, and a lot of fossil fuels, to make it happen.
Sometimes I’m left wondering why. Well, I’m no psychologist, although I did stay at a Climate Change DenyInn last night, and I’d speculate that some of Charles’ eagerness to eliminate the government has to do with where it all began: his father, Fred C. Koch.
Raised in Quanah, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border, Fred was a wild child but also very clever, and in 1927 he invented a new process for extracting gas from crude oil. In fact, the process was so good that the major U.S. oil companies shut him out of the industry. Fred sued them, and won, but crippled by lawsuits for many years, he took his talents to Great Britain.
There, he came to the attention of the Soviet Union, which by the late 1920s, had a new leader: this guy, AKA the hot revolutionary whose poster you almost hung in your dorm room before you realized it’s Stalin. According to family lore, when the Soviets telegrammed Fred to ask for help setting up new oil refineries, Fred tore the telegram up—until they offered to pay him in advance. So Fred took the job, and rubles in hand, in 1930, he helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen oil refineries.
Curiously, the official history of Koch Industries then skips until 1940. Hmm… who could Fred have possibly worked with during that time that the company wouldn’t want to publicize? Oh, right, this guy, whose poster you never hung because you knew it was Hitler. Ze Fuhrer also turned to Winkler-Koch Engineering, as the family business was then known, for help fueling the Nazis’ military escapades. During the 1930s, Fred traveled frequently to Germany to advise on the construction of what would become the Nazis’ third-largest oil refinery. 42,000 civilians later died in the allied offensive that destroyed it.
You could say there were some casualties on the home front, too, because one does not simply make a fortune working with dictators without kinda becoming one. In 1938, Fred said he was “of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.” Now, I’m no economist, but it is crazy that the fastest way to get unemployment to go down is to either ask Jared Kushner for his advice, and do the opposite, or to force people to work.
Which, by the way, is exactly what Fred did to Fred Jr., aka Freddie, born in 1933, and Charles, born in 1935. He would refuse to let them play with friends and instead made them pull dandelions and dig ditches to instill a strong work ethic and desperate need for therapy. David, born in 1940, and who died in 2019, explained that, “Father put the fear of God in [Charles]. He said, ‘If you don’t make it, you’ll be worthless. You’ve disappointed me.’ Father was a severe taskmaster.”
Oh, poooor Charwles. Seriously. Because while Fred Sr. was traveling to Germany and the boys’ mom, Mary, was often busy with other pursuits, they were overseen by a series of nannies, including a German Governess who let’s just call Ms. Trunchbüller. Ms. Trunchbüller—a fervent Nazi and huge Hitler fan—enforced a strict bowel routine for Charles and Fred, and for fun, read them Der Struwwelpeter, an 1845 children’s book with a series of very German stories like Struwwelpeter, a boy who doesn’t groom himself and grows into a disgruntled member of Bon Jovi, and Die Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug, about a girl who plays with matches, sets herself on fire, and is forced to do the wave with two enthusiastic cats.
Combine the iron fist of Fred Sr. and nannies like Trunchbüller, and you get an authoritarian upbringing that affects us all. A report by a researcher who reviewed the family’s private correspondence suggested that Charles’ hatred of government, and belief in libertarian policies, can only be understood as an extension of his childhood conflicts with authority. After his father died, “only the governments and the courts” stood in his way.
So you kinda get why Charles would want to remove all restrictions on his behavior as an adult. As a child, he was forced to live out the real-life version of Holes. On the other hand, just because you have daddy issues, doesn’t mean you have to take them out on everyone, nor does it mean you have to irreparably pollute the planet, nor does it mean that you also have to work with Nazi sympathizers. But when making his first foray into philanthropy, that’s exactly what Charles did, and his first target wasn’t the courts or the government, but education, with results that are still playing out today.
Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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Take a deep breath, look at some trees, and (try to) have a nice weekend!