# Henry Crown Chicago industrialist (1896–1990), born Henry Krinsky to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants — his father a sweatshop worker — who left school after eighth grade, built a sand-and-gravel business into the fortune behind [[General Dynamics]], and founded the [[Crown Family]] dynasty that still holds the largest stake in one of the country's largest defense contractors. He is in the vault as the origin of a family whose money runs through defense, Chicago civic power, and Democratic politics in equal measure. ## The business With his brother Sol he founded S. R. Crown & Company (steel brokerage, 1915) and then **Material Service Corporation** (1919), on $10,000 of borrowed money: sand, gravel, lime and coal for a city that was pouring concrete, sold with a salesman's genius for the long relationship and a lender's patience. Material Service supplied the Chicago building boom, the New Deal public works and the war; Crown served as a colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers' procurement operation in the Second World War, which taught him the defense business from the buying side. In 1951 he bought the Empire State Building for $51.5 million (sold 1961), and in 1959 merged Material Service into General Dynamics, then the largest defense contractor in the country, taking a fifth of the company. Forced out in 1966 after a boardroom fight, he bought his way back in 1970, and by the mid-1970s the family controlled the firm that builds the Navy's submarines, the Abrams tank, Gulfstream jets and the F-16 (until its sale to Lockheed). His son Lester ran General Dynamics' board for decades; his grandson James Crown chaired it until his death in 2023. ## The pattern Crown's method — patient capital, political friends in both parties, philanthropy at scale in Chicago (the Aspen Institute, the University of Chicago, the Art Institute) — produced a dynasty that looks nothing like the vault's usual defense-money profile: the Crowns are Democrats, Obama's earliest big backers, and among the largest donors to Jewish and Israeli causes, while owning the company whose contracts the [[Defense Primes Sector]] page tracks. The point for the [[Crown Family]] page and the [[Military-Industrial Complex]] pages is that the defense industry's ownership does not sort by party; the contracts do not care. See also [[Material Service Corporation]]. ## See Also - [[Crown Family]] · [[General Dynamics]] · [[Material Service Corporation]] · [[Defense Primes Sector]] · [[Military-Industrial Complex]]