Mellon: An American Life - Hardcover

Cannadine, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679450327 ISBN 13: 9780679450320

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each.

Following a boyhood in nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, during which he learned from his Scotch-Irish immigrant father the lessons of self-sufficiency and accumulation of wealth, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America’s greatest financiers. Across an unusually diverse range of enterprises, from banking to oil to aluminum manufacture, he would build a legendary personal fortune, tracking America’s course to global economic supremacy. Personal happiness, however, eluded him: his loveless marriage at forty-five to a British girl less than half his age ended in a scandalous divorce, and for all his best efforts, he would remain a stranger to his children. He had been bred to do one thing, and that he did with brilliant and innovative entrepreneurship. The Mellon way was to hold companies closely, including such iconic enterprises as Alcoa and Gulf Oil. Collecting art, a pursuit inspired by his close friend Henry Clay Frick, would become his only nonprofessional gratification. And by the end of his life, Mellon’s “pictures” would constitute one of the world’s foremost private collections.

Mellon’s wealth and name allowed him to dominate Pennsylvania politics, and late in life he was invited to Washington. As treasury secretary under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, he made the federal government run like a business—prefiguring the public official as CEO. But this man of straightforward conservative politics was no politician. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol. The New Deal overthrew Andrew Mellon’s every fiscal assumption, starting with the imperative of balanced budgets. Indeed, he would become the emblem—and the scapegoat—for the Republican conviction and policy that the role of government is to help business create national wealth and jobs. At the age of seventy-nine, the former treasury secretary suffered the ultimate humiliation: prosecution by FDR’s government on charges of tax evasion. In the end Mellon would be exonerated, as he always trusted he would be, and throughout the trial, which lasted more than a year, he never abandoned what had become his last dream: to make a great gift to the American people. The National Gallery of Art remains his most tangible legacy, although he did not live to see its completion.

The issues Andrew W. Mellon confronted—concerning government, business, influence, the individual and the public good—remain at the center of our national discourse to this day. Indeed, the positions he steadfastly held reemerged relatively intact with the Reagan revolution, having lain dormant since the New Deal. David Cannadine’s magisterial biography brings to life a towering, controversial figure, casting new light on our history and the evolution of our public values.

About this title

About the Author:

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham, England, in 1950 and educated at Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including the prizewinning The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. He has taught at Cambridge and Columbia universities and now at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE PATRIARCH PRESIDES
Father and Sons, 1855–73

Make your child a partner in your joys and sorrows, your hopes and fears; impart your plans and purposes; stand not on your dignity, but let yourself down to his capacity, if need be, and show your trust in him. You will be surprised to find how much a five or ten year old boy can understand of the ways of men, and how readily he will enter into your views. . . . I experienced the benefit of such training myself, and applied it in raising my own family with the most satisfactory results.
Thomas Mellon and His Times, p. 29

1

A THRIVING CAREER

Andrew Mellon was the sixth child of Thomas and Sarah Jane Mellon, but he was only the fourth to survive infancy. His two sisters were already dead, and although he would not long remain the youngest son, he grew up among brothers only, in what Burton Hendrick called a “eugenic” family.1 Only the fittest would survive. At the time of Andrew’s birth, his eldest brother, Thomas Alexander was eleven: the next, James Ross, was nine: and Samuel Selwyn was two. The two elder boys were close in age and interests: Andrew and Selwyn soon became a second pair, as would Richard Beatty (“Dick” or “RB”), who was born in 1858 and named for one of his father’s oldest friends, and George Negley, who arrived two years later and was named for his mother’s uncle. Even depleted by two early and wrenching deaths, this was a large bourgeois family by the standards of the time. But it was very much a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian household, and while Andrew Mellon knew far more comfort and security than most Pittsburghers, the atmosphere was intense and serious, rather than joyful or easy. Although surrounded by a lush and bountiful garden, the house at 401 Negley was gloomy and forbidding inside. For Thomas Mellon disdained the vulgar ostentation which he feared was “common among those grown suddenly rich,” whom he dismissed as the “shoddyocracy,” and his house was devoid of the elaborate ornamentation, both inside and out, that would became popular among the local plutocracy in subsequent decades. The blinds were often drawn, and the interior was a drab amalgam of Brussels carpets, heavy draperies, and somberly papered walls, with no pictures of any artistic merit.2

This was the morose world of Andrew Mellon’s boyhood, but unlike his surviving siblings, he would continue to inhabit it as an ever more solitary son until he was in his mid-forties. Sarah Jane Mellon was the presiding matriarch, and although Thomas Mellon wrote little about her in his autobiography, she was clearly a redoubtable woman for her time. She was not only rich but tough, having survived eight pregnancies between 1844 and 1860. More conventionally religious than her husband, she was responsible for getting the family to East Liberty Presbyterian Church on Sundays. She also oversaw the household, baking the bread and cooking many of the meals herself. There was a domestic staff of three, including an intimidating housekeeper, Mrs. Cox. On the day of Andrew Mellon’s birth, the housekeeper instructed James Ross Mellon to convey the news to his grandmother, Barbara Anna Negley, who lived nearby, and she soon appeared bearing a willow basket full of yellow apples which perfumed the birth room.3 Andrew Mellon’s earliest recorded recollection was another scene of purposeful feminine domesticity—which he disrupted. When two years old, he crawled beneath a table at which his mother and her sister were sewing, and began cutting the edges of the table cloth with a pair of scissors which had fallen to the floor. Given his father’s “high opinion of the strict exercise of parental authority,” it is difficult to believe this misdemeanor went unpunished.4

From the very beginning, Andrew Mellon was at the center of that large and growing family over which it had always been his father’s ultimate ambition to preside. These were generally prosperous times in Pittsburgh, despite another slump in 1857, two years after Andrew’s birth, which lasted to the end of the decade: thus he was also at the center of a large and growing industrial region.5 Oil was discovered nearby in 1859, and the iron industry continued to expand. By 1860, there were twenty-six rolling mills, twenty-three glassworks—and fourteen banks, all of which had survived the recent depression. With a population that had reached 50,000, the city ranked sixteenth in the United States, and Allegheny County as a whole claimed 178,000 inhabitants. Pittsburgh was also the birthplace of the Republican Party, which held its first convention there in February 1856: the Mellon family would be among its faithful for the next hundred years and more.6 In this buoyant, fertile environment, Thomas Mellon grew in wealth and stature. In 1857, the Allegheny County commissioners decided to double the real estate tax to pay the interest on bonds that they had imprudently floated to help finance railroad extension in the area. As befitted a lifelong opponent of tax increases and irresponsible speculation, an outraged Thomas Mellon helped organize public protests, and he spoke at many meetings. But his chief activities remained business and the law, at which he would work harder during Andrew Mellon’s formative years than at any other time.7

Thomas Mellon continued to deal in debts, mortgages, real estate, and property developments, not just in Pittsburgh, but also more widely.8 In 1856, he took control from a defaulting mortgagor of a furnace property of 1,700 acres in West Virginia; it was his first acquaintance with iron production, but he chose against continuing operation because of the prohibitive costs of obtaining ore from nearby mountainsides. Three years later, he ventured more deeply into the coal business, and went into partnership with his wife’s cousin, Felix Casper Negley. He financed the purchase of coal works at Braddock and Sandy Creek, but despite kinship, Negley proved an unreliable partner, and Mellon was later obliged to resort to “vexatious litigation.”9 This was not his only business association that would go sour, and in his autobiography he would lament that his judgment of men and character was defective, and that he was too trusting and easily persuaded. Much more successful was a partnership with John B. Corey, David Shaw, and George M. Bowman, all of whom became trusted lifelong friends. The group invested in numerous collieries, among them the Waverly Coal and Coke Company, and they prospered mightily. “As to the coal business,” Thomas wrote to his son James Ross, “I consider it one of the best, and it is highly respectable.” “Coal,” he would conclude, was “the most important article in productive manufacturers.”10

At the same time, Thomas Mellon’s legal practice was growing, and here, too, he sought partners, among them William B. Negley, his wife’s nephew. But again collaboration created more problems than it solved:  “I found it impossible,” he later lamented, “to transfer clients who relied on me to my partners, without losing them altogether.” By 1859, he was feeling “overwhelmed and oppressed” with his increasingly “taxing and monotonous” legal work, but fortunately an opportunity to lighten his load presented itself.11 In April that year, he was approached by three powerful and politically connected friends—Thomas M. Marshall, A. M. Watson, and Stephen Geyer—who invited him to run for the new position of associate law judge in the Court of Common Pleas. With their help, he secured the Republican nomination. The recently established party was Mellon’s natural political home: northern-based, pro-business, anti-immigration. But he “knew nothing about party maneuvering and electioneering,” and his dislike of the political process was such that he refused to campaign personally: “I did not go out at all or appear in public,” he later recalled, “leaving electioneering in that line to my friends.” They worked hard for him, and he won easily in the November election. He promptly dissolved his practice, and was duly sworn in on the first Monday of December 1859. Thereafter, Thomas Mellon was always known in Pittsburgh as “the Judge,” or “Judge Mellon,” and for the rest of his life, even after leaving the bench, he would dress in his formal attire from that time: a long-tailed frock coat and white shirt with a high, starched wing collar.12

For the next ten years, he shared the duties with a senior colleague (initially William B. McClure, whom he had met in 1838 at the prothonotary’s office, and subsequently James P. Sterrett, who would end his days on the state supreme court), and they sat together, or separately, as they saw fit or as the pressure of the docket dictated, except in capital cases, where two judges were required. Previously renowned as a ferociously committed and determinedly partisan advocate, the Judge now moved with unexpected ease to Olympian impartiality.13 But in other ways, he remained characteristically forceful and unyielding. He had no qualms about sentencing criminals to death “if they clearly deserve it,” and he was predictably unsparing in his criticism of those he deemed to be hopeless or idle or failed—or Catholic. He believed that there was “entirely too much sympathy and consideration for criminals” on “the part of the unthinking multitude,” and he soon became equally skeptical of the collective wisdom of juries. His initial inclination was to let the jurors hear the evidence and make up their own minds, with no direction from the bench. But he soon concluded that they were rarely capable of reaching a sensible conclusion about complex issues, and came to favor firm-handed direction from the bench. “The judge . . . ,” he later observed, &...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0679450327
• ISBN 13: 9780679450320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 800