Mellon - An American Life

By David Cannadine

In this current climate of diminishing government funding, it is important for us to turn to other means of supporting public purposes - philanthropy being one.  Britain therefore has wisely looked to America where they have never had the same level of government support for social causes.  The percentage of individual charitable giving to GDP is more than double in the United States than in the U.K.  A key issue is tax incentives.  Gifts of capital and assets in Britain do not have an allowance similar to that on gifts of shares, and the recent review by Sir Nicholas Goodison “Securing the best for our Museums: Private Giving and Government Support.” published by H.M. Treasury in January 2004 recommended a tax allowance to encourage getting more art into museums.  Sadly nothing was done to implement this recommendation.   But, without obvious and understandable tax benefits the rich are unlikely to put as much back into the community as they do in the United States.

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate and meaningful that David Cannadine, the new Chairman of the National Portrait Gallery, should have written the biography of Andrew Mellon who had been America’s greatest collector of art and who was the uncharacteristic founding benefactor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.  Mellon has now been dead for almost seventy years and the fact that there has been no full-scale biography published in that time constitutes an enormous gap in American biography.  Curiously the 200,000 word Mellon biography by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Burton J. Hendrick, commissioned by the Mellon family soon after he died in 1937, was never published because while the Second World War raged, and while Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President of the United States, Andrew Mellon’s financial affairs were under severe scrutiny.

Andrew Mellon was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1855 six years before the American Civil War broke out.  He was the son of the banker and judge Thomas Mellon and was educated at the Western University of Pennsylvania - now the University of Pittsburgh.  Very early in his life he demonstrated his unique financial ability, and joined his father’s banking firm in 1872.  Ten years later at the age of 27 he had the ownership of his father’s bank transferred to himself.  In 1889 he helped organise the Union Trust Company and the Union Savings Bank of Pittsburgh.  Branching out from banking, he financed the massive industrial expansion of Western Pennsylvania and between the 1860’s and 1920’s, during which time America became the world’s leading economic power, he amassed fortunes in oil, steel, shipbuilding and construction.  Gulf Oil, Alcoa and the Carborundum Company were giant American corporations that grew out of Mellon’s conviction and financial support.

A lifelong Republican, Mellon was appointed U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and became a member of President Warren G. Harding’s Cabinet in 1921.  Two years later he introduced the “Mellon Plan”, a programme for tax reform.  He also reduced the public debt inherited from World War I obligations from almost $26 billion in 1921 to about $16 billion in 1930.  Mellon continued to hold high office throughout the administrations of Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.  However, with the onslaught of the Great Depression Mellon became increasingly unpopular.  In 1932 he left the Hoover Cabinet and accepted the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he served for only one year before retiring to private life.  That year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected as President of the United States and Mellon became the subject of an income tax investigation stemming from Roosevelt’s attempt to malign the previous administration.  Mellon was in short “the embodiment of the discredited political and economic order which Roosevelt detested and which he had been elected in 1932 to overthrow.”  Thus the ageing Mellon was embroiled in a two year civil action beginning in 1935 and dubbed the “Mellon Tax Trial”.  Charged with fraud and tax evasion on a massive scale it was a bitter time for Mellon, who was only exonerated after his death.  

Cannadine’s imposing biography of Andrew Mellon reveals him to have a complex and flawed personality, who although eminently successful in business was a discernible failure in personal relationships.  “He made little small talk, was a poor public speaker, rarely smiled and hardly ever laughed.”  In fact in his simple open rebellion against his father he launched himself into a wholly unsuitable marriage to a girl from England, which brought him more humiliation than happiness and ended in scandalous divorce.  In truth he treated his young wife more as a client at his bank and, not surprisingly, relationships with his two children suffered in his dark and brooding shadow.  Mellon’s daughter, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, lived an unhappy life - lonely, insecure and unfulfilled.  His son Paul never resolved the double burdens of paternal disappointment and vast inherited wealth.  In his autobiography Reflections in a Silver Spoon he castigated his father “both for his remorseless desire to accumulate money and art and for his indifference to human relations”.  It was an unflattering portrait.

Nevertheless Cannadine, an academic historian (Cambridge, Oxford and Princeton), guides us in his compulsive biography Mellon through wealth’s triumphs and fortune’s travails to the painful treatment he received at the hands of Roosevelt - the newly elected and vindictive New Deal President, who set out to discredit the highly acclaimed and long-serving Secretary of the Treasury.  It was an humiliating trial that allowed Roosevelt to cast Mellon as the pariah of the Democratic thirties. The trial ended in 1936 but the outcome, which was to exonerate Mellon posthumously, was still not known when Roosevelt invited the beleaguered Mellon to tea at The White House on New Year’s Eve 1936.  For almost a decade Mellon had become America’s greatest collector of art, acquiring over half of the magnificent Russian collection at the Hermitage Gallery from the unwitting Joseph Stalin.  It was not a confrontational meeting.  Rather the two men sought to come to an agreement where Mellon’s dream to create and endow the National Gallery of Art in Washington would receive the President’s permission, and also that of the Democratic dominated Congress.  It was a decision that had to be made quickly for Mellon was dying of cancer.  Roosevelt did indeed give his authorization, causing the necessary legislation to be passed.  Construction on the gallery began the following year.  Shortly after this Mellon died - a somewhat shattered man with an enigmatic reputation.  He had however in his final months provided the American nation with an unprecedented gift which remains today a lasting memorial to a conspicuously remarkable life.