Frederick Henry Prince

Frederick Henry Prince (1859 – 3 February 1953) was an American , investment banker and financier.

He was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, the son of Frederick O. Prince, former Mayor of the city of Boston and Helen Henry Prince. He studied at Harvard University, but left in his sophomore year to get an early start in the business world. He acquired a seat on the , on 10 December 1885 and retained his individual membership throughout his life.

Frederick Prince made a fortune through his investments in a number of business ventures. Seeing the potential for the stockyard business, during the first decade of the 20th Century, he began buying up small companies, merging them into the giant , of which he was chairman. A significant and integral part of the food and tobacco sector, to ensure control over delivery service to his stockyards, Prince's company acquired outright or held a controlling interest in the Pere Marquette Railway and the Chicago Junction Railway, which gave his stockyard operations hundreds of miles of rail lines and close to 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land. In the early 1920s, Prince acquired Armour and Company, one of the country's major slaughterhouses and meatpacking operations.

A friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., in 1925, Frederick Prince helped finance Kennedy's acquisition of the Robertson-Cole/Film Book Offices, which would evolve to RKO Pictures.

A Republican Party member and delegate to the 1928 convention, Frederick Prince aided President Franklin D. Roosevelt efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1933, he formulated a widely debated program for consolidation for the nation's railroads. Known as the 'Prince Plan', it was projected to create savings for the nation's railroads of $740,000,000 annually. The Plan was rejected, because it would have thrown thousands of workers out of their jobs. This experience led him to also propose sweeping changes in the United States Constitution, to make the President more independent.

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