The stories of the greed and money is so very much alike. Wilbur B Foshay and Donald Trump seem to have a lot in common.
Foshay was a Showboater. Foshay loved to display his name in huge lighted letters on his famous Foshay Tower. The tower is built on a ponzi scheme and is lavished with gold, silver and expensive elevators and decor. The tower is located in Minnesota and I would bet Al Franken looks at this tower and thinks Trump.
Foshay swindled investors and never paid Sousa for his marching and theme song to celebrate the GREAT TOWER. Three days of partying with women and wine. The great depression was upon the American people but Foshay was a “Let them eat cake greedy businessman who made his fortune in utilities and owned 30 utility companies in the US including territories and central America.
I saw this on the Travel Channel but my goodness, it was so much like Trump that I had to finish watching it later. Someone followed the money and Foshay ended up in federal prison but not like we would had we done the same thing. His sentence was commuted and he received a full pardon by Truman. He only served three years of his 15 year sentence and died broke.
Here is the building and the story behind Wilbur B Fushay. The people of the great state of Minnesota I am sure know this story but I never heard about it. Trump’s antics are nothing new. He just got more politics behind him and celebrities than John Philip Sousa.
n 1906, Foshay was hired to manage the local power-and-light company in Hutchinson, Kansas. In 1907, he married the owner's daughter, Leota Hutchinson Fox, a divorcee three years his senior. During the next few years, the couple moved around the Midwest and West Coast, as Foshay chased utilities jobs. His wife gave birth to two children, William and Julianne.
In 1915, the Foshays settled in Minneapolis. There, Foshay worked for Page and Hill, a manufacturer of electric-light poles and telephone poles. But soon he decided to go into business for himself. In 1916, he borrowed $6,000 and bought the Ponca Electric Company of Nebraska. In August of the following year, he incorporated the W. B. Foshay Company, a public utilities holding company. A holding company's purpose is to buy shares of existing companies. They gain control over them but do not run the day-to-day business. Foshay would spend the next decade buying up utilities companies.
By 1928, he was a prosperous man, at least on paper. His company owned utilities in thirty states, the then-territory of Alaska, Canada, and Central America. The W. B. Foshay Company had become big enough that Foshay figured it deserved its own skyscraper. He wanted his headquarters to be the most beautiful, and tallest, building in downtown Minneapolis.
What he got was a thirty-two-story Art Deco monolith modeled after the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. This was not only the city's tallest building but also the tallest between Chicago and the West Coast. The proud builder celebrated the Foshay Tower's opening with a three-day event over Labor Day weekend in 1929.
Two months later, the stock market crashed. The utilities magnate lost everything. His company filed for bankruptcy. In 1931, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Foshay on charges of mail fraud. He had used the federal postal service to advertise and sell stock in his company, some of which might have been overvalued.
Foshay and his right-hand man in the company, Henry H. Henley, were tried in a much- publicized 1931 court case. The first trial ended without a unanimous verdict after the only female juror, Genevieve Clark, held out for Foshay and Henley's innocence. Prosecution lawyers later learned that Clark had briefly worked for Foshay's company. She was charged with contempt of court for not revealing the association.
Foshay and Henley were tried again and, this time, were convicted. They began serving fifteen-year sentences at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas in May 1934. A vigorous letter-writing campaign moved President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to free the pair in 1937. Ten years later, President Harry S. Truman pardoned both men.
It is hard to believe it is called Foshay Tower/ A Washington Memorial. It gained this name as it was Foshay’s dream to build a dream skyscraper that looked like the Washington Monument.
Greed at the expense of others….The true American dream… Sad.
A letter writing campaign moved Roosevelt to free him… Seems like Forshay had his deplorables as well. Enough to influence a president to set him free. The story ends like this…. He died of dementia at the age of 74 living with his kids.