[CTRL] [1] Mellon's Millions

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner©1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
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Starts of slow, but gets better.
Om
K
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FOREWORD

THE Mellon fortune grew stealthily into the hundreds of millions before the
Mellon name was known outside intimate circles of finance and industry. By the
time the Senatorial spotlight had coupled "Mellon" and "aluminum," the family
was worth a billion. Few knew by what means the Pittsburgh bankers drew such
prodigious nourishment from the nation's needs. Never before had a money-
lender plied his trade in millions with such an utter lack of publicity. Yet
not a citizen escaped making his contribution to the Smithfield Street banking
house.

No other Croesus has levied toll on so many articles and services. The
householder of Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and the Twin Cities bought Mellon coal;
in Philadelphia or New England he bought Mellon coke; in Boston or Brooklyn
his wife cooked by Mellon gas. Once the Pittsburgh family was entrenched in
the public utilities field, thanks to the magic of Koppers gas and coke ovens
and Union Trust financing,. the residents of a thousand communities
contributed to its coffers. Meanwhile hardly a soul knew even the name of the
holding company which owned his local light or gas concern, much less the
Mellons' position in it.

By the latter half of the Third Decade, the intelligent housewife probably
realized the relationship between the high price of aluminum ware and the
Mellon monopoly. Yet cooking utensils were merely one phase of the tightest
metal monopoly known to history. All industry bent the knee to the Aluminum
Company of America; electric companies needed aluminum wire for long distance
transmission; builders required aluminum for lightweight beams or
embellishment; auto and airplane manufacturers needed aluminum parts.

Travel as one would, by air, land or sea, Mellon material was essential.
Besides aluminum, the automobile used Mellon steel, plate glass, paint. If the
iron ore did not come from the mines of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, or
Pittsburgh Steel Company, in which the Mellons, were major stockholders, then
it was from the immense Mesabi range open cuts of the U. S. Steel Corporation,
in which they held a sizable block. The ore was smelted in Bethlehem or Steel
Corporation blast furnaces, rolled and finished in their mills. The very paint
on the automobile depended on essentials produced in a Koppers by-product coke
plant, if it did not come directly from Pittsburgh Plate Glass factories,
scattered throughout the industrial North. The non-shatterable glass, a
patented monopoly, represented a union of Plate Glass and Du Pont facilities
linking two dynamic fortunes. Even the brush which cleaned the car came from
Pittsburgh Plate Glass.

This astonishing company had expanded its scope far beyond its name; the
woodwork varnish probably came from its plants. If the driver bought "That
Good Gulf" gasoline and Gulf motor oils, they were products of Gulf Oil
Corporation, mightiest of Mellon corporations. It turned out oils for every
imaginable use, not ignoring humble furniture polish and insecticide.

If our citizen deserted his auto for a railroad coach, he inevitably continued
adding to the Mellon millions. The coach was doubtless made by the Mellons'
Standard Steel Car Company, or else by Pullman, in which the family became
large stockholders. The railroad ties may have been cut from Mellon forests
owned by National Lumber & Creosoting, processed by the Mellon company known
as Ayer & Lord Tie Company, subsidiary of the American Tar Products Company,
in turn subsidiary of Koppers Gas & Coke Company, in turn owned by the Koppers
Company of Delaware, whose policies were guided by that remote, uncontrollable
body, the Koppers Company, a Massachusetts voluntary association which was
neither a corporation, a partnership nor anything recognized by law as a
business concern.

The rails over which the train traveled probably came from a steel mill which
poured its interest and dividends into the aluminum-alloyed vaults of Union
Trust. Chances were that the next bridge the traveler crossed was fabricated
and erected by McClintic-Marshall, a Mellon company. If it glistened in the
sunlight, it undoubtedly was painted with aluminum.

On his way the traveler flashed past a train of steel gondola cars, produced
perhaps by Standard Steel Car and bearing on their sides, in neat little
plates, the announcement that their construction was financed by a Mellon
National Bank railroad equipment trust. That, incidentally, coupled with the
huge lots of freight under Mellon control, had made them important railroad
people; their men sat on the boards of major railway lines such as the
Northwestern, the Omaha, the Norfolk & Western, the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie. If
the engine pulling our train was made by American Locomotive, it was a
reminder that A. W. Mellon himself was formerly a member of that company's
board and held an important stake in it. The coal that was fed into the
engine's firebox may well have been Mellon coal, either from Pittsburgh Coal's
or Koppers Coal's hundred mines scattered all the way from western
Pennsylvania to eastern Kentucky. The passenger's safety rested in equipment
made by Westinghouse Airbrake, Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing and Union
Switch & Signal, in which the Mellons, during the economic crisis of the
Hoover administration, became major stockholders.

In peace time the Mellon fortune grew steadily with majestic pace; in war it
leaped forward toward new triumphs. It was so in the Civil War and its
aftermath; the Spanish-American War marked the family's entrance into the
choice circle of multimillionaire money lords; the World War shot it forward
as a peer of the more publicized Rockefellers. It was not merely that in war
the demand for Mellon steel, oil, aluminum became inescapable: they were major
proprietors of the chemical tools of Mars. Where else was the Chemical Warfare
Division to turn but to Koppers, designers and builders of go per cent of the
nation's byproduct gas ovens? Toluol, naphtha, benzol, ammonia and ten
thousand and one subtle derivatives of coal gas were Mellon's. Without them
the United States would have been handicapped in peace, impotent in war. The
ships that supplied the army in France were made, in dozens, by the Mellons'
New York Shipbuilding Company. The great battleships of the next war depend on
Bethlehem's armorplate. Shells must be heavy with the products of Mellon's
mysterious by-product plants, where the constituents of deadly explosives and
gases are gathered carefully from coal. The shells must be fired through
Bethlehem Steel's ordnance. All these are for sale, at a profit, by the
Mellons.

If the Mellon fortune, standing astride the nation's two basic industries,
steel and coal, seemed Gargantuan at the opening of the Second Century of
Progress, its future was incalculable. The Mellons had staked out their claims
to an inexhaustible gold mine -that of aluminum. This metal, whose profits had
rained into the family's treasury for fifty years, was just hitting its
stride. Its production, hitherto measured in pounds, was to be totaled in tons
as aluminum became indispensable for building, for speedy transportation.
Electrochemists predicted that within ten years it would be supplanting steel
as the basic metal upon which industry and transport would depend. The
possible demand from the railroads alone appeared almost limitless. Even if
only 500 pounds of aluminum were used in each freight and passenger car, a
total of a billion pounds would be required.

And this metal was the personal property of the Mellons, a monopoly so tight
that its price varied by not a fraction of a cent during the terrific collapse
in markets in the last years of the Hoover regime. When America was forced off
the gold standard, Senators jokingly declared that aluminum should be
substitutedaluminum, whose price had been pegged at 22.9 cents a pound in 1926
and kept there in unfaltering testimony to the Mellons' power.

Even while aluminum, because of its lightness, its alloyed strength, its
silvery beauty, was challenging steel, Mellon metallurgists were experimenting
with a new metal, magnesium, whose future seemed even brighter. For magnesium
was lighter even than aluminum, and open to as many uses.

In Mellon laboratories, Mellon technicians bent over other Mellon materials-
petroleum, coal, coke, gases. While they sought to advance human mastery of
new combinations and forms of these substances, they helped to anchor even
deeper in American economic life the foundations of the Mellon fortune.

Who else could challenge the Mellons' primacy in wealth? A biographer of the
Rockefellers' fortune estimated the market value of their holdings in
1932—after hundreds of millions had been given away—at $15o,ooo,ooo. The Ford
Motor Company, whose proprietor was believed to be one of the nation's three
wealthiest men, was valued in 1933 at $628,000,000. The MelIons could match
that easily with just one of their corporations, magnificent Gulf Oil, whose
assets were counted at $743,000,000

If the Mellon fortune seemed to sprawl out across an entire continent in a
score of unrelated industries, it was nevertheless neatly integrated through
Union Trust, a quarter billion dollar banking institution which could claim
the world's highest bank dividend rate, 200 per cent a year. Through Union
Trust passed the profits of a hundred Mellon companies. As financial agent for
most of the puissant corporations of the Pittsburgh region, it collected meaty
tribute. Under Union Trust's hegemony, the fortune grew until it was measured
at more than $2,000,000,000, while the Mellons were associated in corporations
whose assets and resources were nearly $10,500,000,000. The fond wish of grim-
visaged Thomas Mellon, founder of the fortune, to continue the "well doing" of
his laborious peasant parents, had been fulfilled beyond the wildest limit of
his dreams.

=====

I
The Founder
of the Fortune


NINE-YEAR-OLD Thomas Mellon, the farmer's boy, sold a bag of rye at market and
with 99 cents in his pocket set off on foot for Pittsburgh, twenty-one miles
away, for his first sight of the big city. Walking rapidly, he came up with a
farmer and his team. "Going to Pittsburgh, eh?" said the driver. "Well, you'll
see more there in one day than at Poverty Point in a lifetime."

Tom felt wounded. Poverty Point, after all, was his home, and yet it was
undeniable that life there was crude and hard. That was why he wanted to see
Pittsburgh, to see if it were true that some were able to escape the endless
routine of harsh toil, to accumulate wealth and live in refinement.

He ran ahead to escape further conversation. By noon he was at the edge of
East Liberty Valley. The tall green grass that carpeted the valley danced
under the summer breeze in waves of light and shade. There in the center of
the valley was Negleystown, a store, a church and a few frame buildings. To
the right was the farmstead of the Negleys, proprietors of the valley. Boys
and girls were playing near the mansion, the finest between Pittsburgh and
Greensburg.

"The whole scene," wrote judge Thomas Mellon sixty years later "was new tome.
. . . I remember wondering how it could be possible to accumulate such wealth,
and how magnificent must be the style of living and what pleasures they must
enjoy who possessed it. I remember also of the thought occurring whether I
might not one day attain in some degree such wealth, and an equality with such
great people."

The farmer boy's daydreams were modesty itself compared with the real future.
One of those girls playing by the Negley mansion was to be mother of the
richest family in all America and the farmer boy's name was to become
synonymous with wealth.

Tom left his daydreams and walked down into Negleystown, to view with awe the
steam engine in the Negleys' grist mill, to stare at the flamboyant sign on
the Negley store. Then he trudged on to Pittsburgh.

His host, a friend of his father, showed him the sights, the steam cotton
mill, the rivers and their busy traffic, the glass factories and iron works.
The next morning, his mind still awhirl, he was sent off on his twenty-one-
mile return trip with some bread and a half pint of whisky. The gift of whisky
to a child was nothing unusual; babies were dosed with it and boys were manned
for the stem work behind horse and plow with a draught. Every farmstead had
its distillery and Tom himself knew the mysteries of converting fruit into
liquor.

Tom painted a glowing picture of the city, its wealth and activity, to a
father who showed little enthusiasm. Of the dour Ulster branch of the religion
of Knox and Calvin, Father Andrew regarded the cities as the seat of vanity,
where clever men prospered and honest men were cheated. To wring a living from
the soil was commendable, to gain affluence through the tricks of the law and
the sharp practices of the professional seller and buyer availed a man little
on that terrible day when a stern God would mete out judgment.

The burden of taxation imposed by the Napoleonic wars and the lack of elbow
room in Ulster for a growing family, had driven the Mellons to America. In
1796 the first of the family emigrated, to settle in Westmoreland County,
western Pennsylvania. Nearly a century later, when Thomas Mellon, considering
his life's work done, wrote his autobiography, he described the first of the
family's emigrants in these words:

"One peculiar feature of our general family character appears prominently in
this branch; the debt-shunning trait so universal throughout all branches of
the Mellon family. Not a single one of this branch was ever known not to pay
his debts; and the reason given for it was that none of them bought anything
which they did not need, and seldom anything they did need till they had money
to pay for it."

On a visit, judge Mellon found them to be "solid, steady, careful men who
appear to have no nonsense in their composition."

His own grandfather Archibald, "straight as an arrow," who shortly before his
death regarded a twelve-mile walk of a Sunday afternoon as a pleasant stroll,
came to America in 1816. He left behind Andrew, his wife Rebecca Wauchob, of
Dutch descent, and little Thomas. Two years later Andrew sold the cottage and
farmlands at Camp Hill, County Tyrone, Rebecca carefully stitched the 200
guineas into her leather belt, and the last of the Mellons left to escape the
curse of high taxation.

When Andrew Mellon's grandson, as Secretary of the Treasury of the United
States, inveighed against high taxes and made known his own concept of public
finance in the "Mellon Plan," he was repeating maxims learned from his father.
"The hardships experienced by my grandfather's family and my own parents,"
wrote Thomas Mellon, "became so thoroughly ingrained in my nature, when a
child, that I have always felt a strong opposition . . . to all measures
rendering an increase of taxes necessary. It was the universal complaint which
drove our people from their homes."

Father Andrew chose a poor year to emigrate. Hardly had the little family
successfully passed the perils of a twelve-week voyage from Londonderry to St.
John, New Brunswick, a week's coasting trip to Baltimore, and three weeks over
the Alleghenies in a covered Conestoga wagon, than the panic of 1819 broke
over the land of promise. Father Andrew, with what was left of the 200
guineas, bought a farm near Turtle Creek, repaired the two-room, puncheon-
floored log cabin that was home, patched up the barn and prepared to sow his
fields. Not all the produce of his fields however would have met Father
Andrew's payments as they fell due in the panic years of 1819 and 1820.
Graybeards of later decades, gathered about the roaring fire of winter
evenings, delighted to recount the terrors of those years. Wheat sold for 40
cents a bushel, butter for 6 to 10 cents a pound, eggs two for a penny.

Payments on the farm were to be made in "money and bags and oats at market
price." So during the long winter months Rebecca and little Tom spun and wove
flax for the rough grain bags, which fortunately continued to command a market
price Of 50 cents apiece.

Gradually the panic lifted, and Father Andrew came into his reward. "My
parents," Thomas Mellon recorded, "were of a class who never wearied in well
doing; and no sooner had they the farm paid for and improved than they began
to look out for new acquisitions." As soon as strength permitted, Tom was
following a plow and when he reached the age of 12, he was able to say that
his boyhood had ended. Among his lighter labors was operating the farm's
distillery.

The trip to Pittsburgh confirmed Tom's suspicions that life at Poverty Point
was not the be-all and end-all of existence. His uncle Thomas, a retired
merchant worth $250,000, gave him the first dram of self-confidence. Uncle
Thomas, in Ulster, had shown a disposition to rise above an Irish farmer's lot
and his mother had hoped that he would "wag his pow in the pulpit." He made
his fortune in New Orleans after the War of 1812 and retired to Philadelphia,
center of light and culture, to wed a belle of the city. He didn't forget his
namesake out in the backwoods of western Pennsylvania. "His example and
encouragement first inspired in me the ambition to better my conditions and
rise to something higher than common farm life."

The young plowhand would stuff one of his uncle Thomas's books in his pocket
or hat before starting for the fields. While resting between furrows, he read
the classics. "I never took to Shakespeare, however, so warmly as to Pope and
Burns and Goldsmith, and the other English and Scotch poets. The fine
sentiments of Shakespeare seemed to cost too much shifting among the quarrels
of kings and vulgar intrigues of their flunkies, and the obsolete manners of a
rude age. . . .

"It was about my fourteenth year, at a neighbor's house when plowing a field
we had taken on his farm for buckwheat, that I happened upon a dilapidated
copy of the autobiography of Dr. Franklin. It delighted me with a wider view
of life and inspired me with new ambition. . . . I had not before imagined any
other course of life superior to farming, but the reading of Franklin's life
led me to question this view. For so poor and friendless a boy to be able to
become a merchant or a professional man had before seemed an impossibility;
but here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and
frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame. The
maxims of 'Poor Richard' exactly suited my sentiments. . . . I regard the
reading of Franklin's Autobiography as the turning point of my life."

Judge Mellon, in his declining years, had an edition of a thousand copies of
the Autobiography printed, which he was delighted to give to promising young
men who came to him for advice and money. A statue of Franklin graced the
front of the banking house of  T. Mellon and Sons, in grateful memory. Today
it overlooks the great banking room of the Mellon National Bank.

Young Mellon soon exhausted the elementary knowledge of itinerant
schoolmasters, who scoured the countryside for scholars at tuitions that
betrayed the precarious nature of their profession. Tom's parents one winter
invested 56.25 cents in a quarter's tuition for him.

The Mellons' neighbors were Pennsylvania Dutch and ScotchIrish. The Dutch were
kindly, but superstitious, and criticized for their laxity in morals. They
could be found working by moonlight when the signs were propitious. The
Scotch-Irish tried to do better by religion, but the itinerant Presbyterian
preachers seemed intent on "proving the Roman Catholic church to be the
AntiChrist and the whore of Babylon" and berating the Lutherans and
Methodists. As for the Methodists of Poverty Point, they lost their pastor
when he rebelled against the stark sacrilege of his younger parishioners, who
proposed to desecrate the Sabbath by starting a Sunday school.

Tom felt the spark of divine discontent. His companions, he discovered, "were
for the most part rude and coarse, though clever and good natured, and wholly
uncultivated. . . . My habit of reading had created a taste which unfitted me
for enjoying the company of those around me." He had entered that troubled
stage of life, a "hobble-de-hoy, neither a man nor a boy; the veally stage of
existence."

Father Andrew looked upon his son's hankerings after the city with misgiving.
He entreated the boy not to be "led away by folly and nonsense." The
occupations of city life were enervating, and hardly honorable. "Worst of all"
would it be to "enter the tricky, dishonest profession of the law." It was a
"prospect which seemed to him too preposterous to contemplate." Nevertheless
he allowed the boy to attend academy in Greensburg one winter.

Tom was now 17 and ready, thought his father, to assume the responsibilities
of manhood. By dint of unending argument, the boy was persuaded to accept
paternal aid in the purchase of a neighboring farm. Father Andrew went off to
Greensburg, to seal the sale.

"From where I stood I could overlook the farm that I was to own when I became
of age and it was paid for; and on which, if I should marry I was to spend my
lifetime making an honest, frugal living by hard labor, but little more. The
die was cast or so nearly as to be almost past recall. All my air castles and
bright fancies of acquiring knowledge and wealth or distinction were wrecked
and ruined, and to be abandoned forever. Must this be? I suddenly realized the
tremendous importance of the moment. The utter collapse of all my fond young
hopes thus suddenly precipitated nearly crazed me. I could stand it no longer.
I put on my coat, ran down past the house, flung the axe over the fence into
the yard, and without stopping made the best possible time on foot for the
town."

The deal was called off.

Tom's mind was now made up. He studied Latin from a parallel column edition of
Esop's Fables. He sought help from Mr. Gill, who, he observed, might have been
a good Latinist, but a wretched husbandman. The teacher was using oak instead
of locust for posts, although anyone knew oak would rot. "It doesn't matter,"
Mr. Gill told his prospective student, "the world's going to end in March,
1837," His remark brought into sharp relief the question whether it mattered
or not if Tom studied Latin. "Well," observed Mr. Gill, "you had might as well
be studying Latin as anything else in that awful hour."

By 1834 the young man had acquired a preparatory schooling.

One fine June day therefore saw him walking down the pike from Pittsburgh to
Canonsburg to inspect Jefferson College. What the sober student saw there,
after the end of a long morning's walk to save a dollar hack fare, was
discouraging. The students "all seemed hilarious in anticipation of
Commencement Day. They did not present that earnestness of purpose for
knowledge and mental improvement that I had expected." The commencement
parade, with its brass band, struck him "rather as an advertisement to attract
students and tickle the fancy of the shallow public; but what discouraged me
still more was the prevailing frivolity." A survey of the curriculum convinced
him that "by more labor more branches could be included in each session, and
the time for graduation shortened."

Tom chose the Western University, in Pittsburgh, even though it was not known
"with the same degree of eclat and notoriety as Jefferson," and brought in
bed, furniture and cooking utensils from the farm. He was undecided between
the ministry and law. "My inclination was for the law, but I was uncertain
whether I was suited or could succeed in it, wbilst I felt satisfied that in
the ministry I should be provided for by the church in some way."

It was a hard five-year struggle. Expenses ran to $100 a year, a redoubtable
sum. Once or twice he nearly gave up the effort. But his mother, to whose
Dutch ancestry he ascribed "some of my best qualities, such as they are,"
encouraged him with words and money. His father remained unconvinced. The
young man himself still hesitated in his choice of a profession.

"Two insuperable objections existed to the ministry. I could not give up my
hope of bettering my condition by the acquisition of wealth, nor could I
submit to become a pliant tool of any church organization or be subject to the
unreasonable prejudices and whims of those who rule in congregations."

That shyness and diffidence of manner which was to be the most marked trait of
Andrew Mellon when he entered public office, nearly kept his father from
entering the law. He had judged that the law comprised the delivery of
eloquent speeches in court. "I was not aware then that the money making part
of the business lay in the background, and not in the line of speech making to
any great extent; and that those growing rich in the profession were seldom
seen in court."

Distaste for the ministry outweighed fear of the law courts, and young Mellon
apprenticed himself to former judge Charles Shaler. One summer he conducted a
school on Pittsburgh's South Side to relieve grateful parents of their
children. Tom Jones, the ferryman, wished him success "to keep the little
devils off the boats and from falling into the river." Another summer he tried
to sell Hallam's History of the Middle Ages in Ohio, as "much to see the
outside world" as to make money. He was no salesman. For one semester he
substituted for an absent Latin professor.

That Father Andrew's qualms about the ethical niceties of legal practice were
widely diffused was brought to Tom's attention while studying in judge
Shaler's office. The old judge had a picture, prominently displayed, of an
English barrister flourishing an oyster on a fork as two countrymen,, holding
the shells, looked on agape. Underneath was the couplet:

A pearly shell for you and me;
The oyster is the lawyer's fee.

Young Mellon expressed some surprise at the display of such a picture in a law
office as "clients might think it presented more truth than fiction." But
judge Shaler declared that it "gave them a hint which if they did not heed,
still afforded much relief to his conscience."

Thomas Mellon, Bachelor of Arts, was now up for his bar examination. He and a
friend finally. cornered the elusive examiner in his office. "He was not
altogether in a patient or favorable mood for a protracted examination; but he
had disappointed us so often that politeness compelled him to entertain our
application for a hearing; and after succeeding in lighting a candleit was
before the days of gas or petroleum-without inviting us to be seated, and with
poker in hand making threatening gestures at the empty grate while looking
disagreeably askance at us, he demanded of me who was nearest him to define
murder. I gave him the definition I learned from Blackstone. He then demanded
of my companion a definition of manslaughter, and was as promptly answered;
whereupon, in an expression more forcible than polite, he declared himself
satisfied that any student who could tell the difference between murder and
manslaughter was competent to practice in the criminal courts."

In June, 1839, being then of the ripe age of 25, Thomas Mellon, Esquire, swung
his shingle in front of his modest office on Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, some
distance from the courthouse. The office, "of rather plain exterior and spare
of costly furniture within,'' represented an investment of $700, mainly in a
law library. The acquisition of that first $700 summed up, in essence, the
processes by which the Mellon fortune in the next generation was to be
reckoned in. the ten figures. His savings as Latin professor, with $200
borrowed from his father, had been "invested from time to time in little
speculations in the purchase of small judgments, mechanics' liens and like
securities wherever the holders were anxious to realize without the delay of
awaiting their maturity."

The young lawyer had an excellent training in the mechanics of financial
aggrandizement while working in the prothonotary's (county clerk's) office
during his law course. Before him passed hundreds of mortgages, liens, sales
and judgments, mute evidence that successful men were amassing wealth.

Soon dispelled was the lack of confidence in his own future that caused him to
keep some of the copying work from the prothonotary's office after he opened
his own office. His five years? residence in the city and work in the
prothonotary's office had brought him to the favorable notice of scores of
business men. "It was not long before I had business enough, with reading and
preparation, to keep my time fully employed. . . . Before commencing, the most
I had ventured to hope for as a result of the first five years was a living
practice and accumulated surplus of $1,500 or so, but I had fully secured this
at the end of the first year. In fact, I had underrated my own business
qualifications and legal abilities. I had not taken into consideration that I
was then at an age to possess mature judgment; that I -was of an earnest,
cautious and painstaking disposition, had a good education and a rather
extensive and accurate knowledge of the law, and had become favorably known to
many of the business men."

Inured to long hours of work by his early farm training and his heroic
struggle for an education, Attorney Mellon was tireless. A half hour between
cases or clients was devoted to inspecting a new property in which he might
invest, or investigating the financial background of a would-be borrower. As
his cash resources grew, he lent on mortgages and notes. But ofttimes debtors
do not pay, whether from sudden adversity or a more fundamental weakness of
human nature.

Young Thomas Mellon, who was making his money by dint of sternest self-denial,
insisted that those who used his funds must abide strictly by the letter of
their contract. In his first year of practice, he was obliged to file three
suits in his own behalf. David Lynch was the first hapless Pittsburgher to be
sued by the MelIons. He held the unenviable distinction of heading the list of
thousands who were to learn that the Mellons were men of their word-and
expected others to be. His was a debt for $100. Against William Jack the young
money lender obtained judgment for $202.93, John B. Butler stepped up to pray
a stay of execution against Jack, and personally placed his own bail at the
court's disposal. Eventually Mellon obtained judgment against Butler. George
R. Riddle, friend of another luckless borrower and indorser of his note, was
forced by court action to reimburse Mellon.

When Thomas Mellon lent money on real estate, he obtained a mortgage coupled
with a judgment bond. When he lent money on personal security, he obtained a
judgment note. In legal parlance, these bonds and notes were known as
D.S.B.'s, initials of the Latin words, debitum sine breve (debt without a
writ). In other words, the luckless debtor signed a bond or note which
permitted an attorney or court officer to confess judgment for him
immediately. The debtor waived all right to be served, to have a trial or
enjoy immunities and exemptions which previous legislatures had set up in
Pennsylvania for the protection of the already growing debtor class.

The process of obtaining judgment and seizing the debtor's property, by virtue
of a D.S.B., was usually swift and almost automatic. For succeeding
legislatures discovered that no matter what the grumbling of the luckless
working and debtor class, it was necessary to grant speedy justice and
satisfaction to creditors, if money was to be lent, business to go on, and the
country to be developed. Creditors like Thomas Mellon were insistent upon this
point, and legislatures in his time and after, as well as the State Supreme
Court, have been increasingly willing to place their solemn sanction upon
creditors' demands.

The tiny driblet of cases in 1839 soon broadened out into a wide stream of
judgments and for two generations the D.S.B. Mortgage books of Allegheny
County were fat with entries under the Mellon name.

Such practices perhaps were responsible for Father Andrew's appraisal of the
law as "tricky and dishonest." But that was only an uninformed layman's
impression. There was nothing tricky or dishonest in a mortgage which carried
confession of judgment so far as the law was concerned. Its provisions were
plain to those trained in the courts, no matter how painful they proved to
luckless property owners who found themselves suddenly enmeshed in loss.

For Attorney Mellon, schooled in adversity, there was certainly no hesitancy
in applying to the courts for relief on a defaulted mortgage. After all, he
would not have lent his money had he not been assured of safety. He worked
hard for every penny he had, and the imprudence or worse of debtors was not
going to involve him in their ruin. Nor could it be said that he applied his
advantage ruthlessly, to judge from his own comments. To a hard-pressed person
who showed evidence of those sterling Scottish qualities of self-denial and
unremitting labor, he would ease the terms of the bond, waive the interest,
postpone payment. But not many measured up to these terms, to judge from the
civil records.

Small wonder that at the end of five years young Mellon had saved up $12,000—a
sizable sum in those days. Pinchpenny economies, such as board at $2 a week,
had had something to do with it. "My nature and early training," he explained,
"protected me from the folly of earning money and throwing it away. . . . In
pursuance of the wise advice of a favorite poet, I was disposed

To gather gear by every wile
That's justified by honor.

Accordingly when I obtained money I used it to the best advantage in the
safest and most profitable investments I could find."

Not only mortgages, but the land they represented, intrigued the speculator.
The man who could foresee the future movement of population across the face of
the young city of Pittsburgh had but to plant himself strategically across
that path, and wait to sell. This indeed was the very life and breath of
honest gain to Attorney Mellon; it called for those qualities of shrewdness
and foresight that appealed to his thrifty Scots nature. It was confirmation,
in dollars and pennies, that virtue lay in denying one's self immediate
gratification in favor of treble gratification in the future.

His choice of a law office at some distance from the courthouse, but in the
line of the city's commercial expansion, vindicated his judgment. He leased
the entire lower floor, and made $1,000. His appetite whetted, he bought an
unfinished building and soon resold it for $400 profit. Here was gain indeed,
that would have made Father Andrew's eyes start from their sockets. A year's
hard work on the farm would not have netted the old man what his son had made
in one shrewd stroke of business. True, he had contributed nothing to the
building, had not altered a stick or stone of its structure. It was a trick
that would pay him handsomely in the years to come, as the gawky young city
outgrew the narrow tongue of land between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers
and reached out along the valleys and highlands.

For all his success, the young man felt uneasy. He had no home and knew none
of those little tricks by which young people come together. So he asked his
parents to come to town, to make a home for him.

Two years of that experiment proved he was no authority in the warmer affairs
of life. Unquestionably he had shown ability in estimating the appreciation of
property and that fine point beyond which a prospective purchaser 'Will
advance his bid no more. But if he had thought to make his father happy by
relieving him of the hard toil of farm life, he was mistaken. Mother Mellon
liked the hundred and one conveniences of city life well enough; there were no
cows to milk and no water to be fetched. But Father Andrew couldn't stand it.
He suspected the city. The sight of so many clever people making money without
sweat of the brow or ache of the back disgusted him; in fact, it struck a blow
at the worth and usefulness of the toil he and his ancestors had bent to.
Worse, there was nothing for a man to do but sit on the front porch, stroll
down by the river to talk with the boatmen, peer into iron foundries with
their hellish noise and commotion. He picked up and returned to the farm.

That left Thomas, now 30, just where he had been before. "The prospect of
returning to a boarding house or hotel was discouraging," he confessed;
"marriage was the only alternative. Thus it was when I went out in search of a
wife."

He suspected little difficulty. He had succeeded in other affairs. There were
obstacles of course; he had never had time to cultivate the social graces.
Occasionally he visited private homes, but "such visits were without serious
purpose. I had always avoided pointed attentions such as would indicate
affection. . . . I never would trifle with female affections, nor excite
groundless hopes. . . . I always felt a contempt for those who acted otherwise
to gratify selfish vanity. I had mingled little in society, seldom even
attending the theater or other Places of public amusement. Reading and rest in
the evenings in my room was more agreeable."

It would be unkind to insist that Thomas Mellon did himself justice when he
declared he sought marriage as the only alternative to a boarding house. Yet
he went about the business of selecting a wife as methodically as he would a
lot upon which to build his home. A list was made of the eligible young women,
and their virtues and faults were carefully catalogued. When the choice was
made, the transaction would be negotiated in a businesslike way, and the
marriage date set. Or thus he fondly imagined.

"Compelled to extend my researches into new fields," the wooer obtained
introductions to several young ladies. "Some were too gay and frivolous or
self-conceited; others too slovenly and ungainly, and others again too coarse
or stupid. It was a rather more difficult task than I had expected, and I was
impatient of spending much time on it. Great beauty or accomplishments were
not demanded." He wanted a "wife for a helpmate, not for display;" he was too
old to be led astray by "premature emotional excitement or falling in love."
Fortunately he was thirty, the proper time for a man to marry. The time for
women was between twenty and thirty. At these ages the minds of both sexes
"are more likely to be clear of the fog arising from the veally condition of
the emotions at an earlier date."

Where method failed, pure chance came to the rescue. His friend, Dr. R. C.
Beatty, was about to be married and asked Mellon to be his attendant. The
doctor was naturally ecstatic about his bride-to-be, but Mellon paid little
attention to that. A chance remark about the girl's sister caused him to take
notice. She was "rather too independent" for the doctor; had no "elasticity in
her composition, and did not seem to appreciate gentlemen's attentions."
"These traits excited my curiosity sufficiently to inquire of other parties
more about her family connections and the society in which she moved."

Inquiries brought favorable answers, but Dr. Beatty neglected to make the
introduction. Mellon appealed to Sarah Liggett. Miss Liggett bad already been
ruled out; she was the "right type of womanhood for wife and of a good family
and very wealthy; but I feared hereditary consumption." Miss Liggett
accompanied the young suitor to the old Negley mansion, the same which twenty-
one years before had excited his boyish imagination. He met Sarah Jane Negley,
"quiet, pleasant and self-possessed." I remember thinking to myself, in person
she would do if all right otherwise . . . the surroundings were favorable,
neither too coarse not too fine; country life and reality blended with the
refinements of wealth and education."

The inspection proceeded. "I wished to scrutinize closely and proceed
cautiously." Miss Negley gave him no opportunity to proceed otherwise. She
"did not seem at all susceptible of tender emotions or to appreciate my
attentions. . . . It was no little annoying that after leading the
conversation to the very verge of Some tender sentiment or serious discussion
of personal relationship, she would break the thread of the discourse by a
remark or suggestion foreign to my purpose. . . . I was not there to take
lessons in flora culture or botany, or. to learn the history of birds, fishes
or butterflies. I did not want to spend evening after evening in admiring
pictures in her album or in having items read to me from her scrap book. But
to her credit I must say she never inflicted any music upon me, as she
professed no special proficiency in that accomplishment."

This protracted courtship led the young businessman-lawyer to ponder the need
for radical reforms in the art. He was wasting valuable time that might better
be spent examining deeds, inspecting property, counseling at law, collecting
bad debts. His orderly mind devised a procedure to eliminate the "shy, coy,
evasive methods in use." His four-point program included: Agreement that both
parties are candidates for matrimony; agreement that each is acceptable to the
other prima facie, subject to rejection on further acquaintance; no love to be
excited or admitted on either side until each party is fully satisfied with
the nature, disposition and character of the other; each to be bound to the
other by honor and etiquette, in case the relation is declined on either side,
to entertain no ill feeling in consequence, and never to divulge any
information whatever obtained during such preliminary stage.

Thus Cupid was to be regulated by Blackstone. Courtship was a "business,"
rendezvous were "interviews," and marriage a "transaction." To the objection
that hot blood o'erleaps cold reason, the barrister had a ready reply. "It
need only to be made fashionable to become the approved style," he claimed.
"Those too young might lose their heads and shut their eyes too soon in the
performance; but those who are too young ought not to enter on the business at
all."

Theories or no theories, the suit went no better. "I had an earnest ulterior
purpose beside amusement and conventional chitchat on general subjects, and
she did not seem the least disposed to promote that purpose. . . . It was
becoming monotonous. I had now been in search of a wife for nearly six months
and had spent much valuable time, somewhat to the prejudice of my professional
business."

He turned to an early love, fair Mary Young, toward whom the earnest scholar
of the backwoods had cast many a "furtive glance" in the rude little
schoolhouse at Poverty Point. "Throughout all my tedious years of study and
bachelor life, Mary would occasionally appear to my fancy in all her early
beauty. . . . She was poor and obscure, but what of that? . . . She might not
possess the social graces of refined society, but they were unessential or
could be acquired."

He bridled the gray mare and was off for the little country cottage where the
honeysuckle twined and the birds sang merrily all the day. But it was no
cottage, he discovered. Memory had played him a trick. A desolate log cabin
met his eye. He entered. In the semi-darkness he saw a gnarled old woman
sitting by the fire, smoking a clay pipe. A hen with a flock of chicks paraded
across the floor.

"Mary," cackled the old woman, "you must learn this hen to stay out after
this." Tom's eyes followed her gaze across the room. She was addressing a
tall, lank, ungainly creature on whose form hung slovenly garments. Mary
reached up to the shelf, took a crockery pipe, settled herself on a stool and
commenced smoking. Mellon fled.

"Very little would have decided me just then to abandon the pursuit of a wife
in disgust." Nevertheless he was soon back at the Negley mansion. "I no longer
possessed the amiable mood of a wooer; impatience and baffled expectations
annoyed me, and at each successive visit I usually left in a temper unbecoming
a lover and unsuited for expression in her presence." Nevertheless he was
obliged to admit that he had known her only three months.

Then came magic, not comprehended in Blackstone's pages.

"In the dusk of evening when the clear moonlight was streaming through the
curtains, we happened to be left alone for a minute or so-an unusual
circumstance. Feeling that now was the time, I drew up my chair closer to her
than I had ever ventured before and remarked that I supposed she was aware I
had not been paying attention to her so long without an object and that I had
some time ago made up my own mind and now I wished to know hers. . . . She
neither spoke nor gave any sign. I drew her to me and took a kiss unresisted
and said that would do, I was satisfied; and left her abruptly, feeling
unnerved for conversation . . . the die was cast—I had crossed the Rubicon."

That night, as he turned his horse up the lane, strange thoughts rushed
through Thomas Mellon's head-thoughts that harked back to the time when the
farmer's boy had first contemplated the vastness and splendor of the Negley
estate and imagined "how proud and happy must be the family which possessed
them."

Reflecting in later years, judge Mellon wrote: "All in all, I saw no one that
pleased me better, or that I thought would wear better roughing it through
life. . . . There was no love making and little or no love beforehand so far
as I was concerned. . . . When I proposed if I had been rejected I would have
left neither sad nor depressed nor greatly disappointed, only annoyed at the
loss of time." The "transaction" was "consummated" on August 22, 1843

Such was the courtship of the parents of the Lord of Aluminum and Oil and
Steel, Secretary of the Treasury, and Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

History often hangs by a slender thread. But for James Ross, Thomas Mellon
would not have married Sarah Jane Negley and Andrew William Mellon would not
have been born to become a modern Augustus.

After her father Jacob Negley worked himself into the grave trying in vain to
repair the ravages of the panic of 18ig, James Ross, old friend of the family,
had stalked in on the sheriff's sale to buy up Jacob's property in East
Liberty.

The widow and her eight children had expected to be dispossessed; the kindly
old man, noted as a luminary of the bar, wit, and former U. S. Senator, paid
off the debts of the estate from the proceeds of the Trojan efforts of Mrs.
Negley and her brood.

In 1837 the estate was clear. James Ross asked Robert Hilands, county
surveyor, to tell off the property into eight shares, to be divided among the
children. Each was valued at $50,000. The widow held her share of her father
Winebiddle's estate.

Sarah Jane Negley's grandfather, Alexander Negley, settled in East Liberty
Valley in 1788. Some say he was a Revolutionary soldier whose land was granted
as a soldier's bonus; others say he bought it outright. In any event the
waving fields of grass which enchanted young Tom Mellon in 1823 were now
dotted with the houses of the sons of Jacob Negley. The newlyweds moved out to
East Liberty to share the ancestral home. Even then the young lawyer-realty
dealer must have cast an appraising eye upon the broad acres of the Negleys,
visualizing sub-divisions and lots, houses, stores and streets. Clearly, the
expanding city within a few years would march along the wide road that Jacob
Negley had laid out through his farm for the Pittsburgh-Greensburg Pike.
Mellon could congratulate himself that despite the time spent in courtship, he
would recoup handsomely as the city displaced the grain fields of the Negleys.
Indeed, could a young attorney, ambitious but not yet wealthy, have made a
more advantageous connection than with the cash-poor but land-wealthy Negleys,
part of whose estate was to be passed on to his sons, part to be administered
by himself as trustee for the brothers and sisters of Sarah Jane?

Years spent in "well doing"—solving the legal difficulties of business and,
financial leaders, administering estates, investing judiciously in real estate
and coal lands, financing small industrial enterprises-increased Thomas
Mellon's worldly goods, until he measured them in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Now he begrudged every minute spent in solving other people's
troubles, tried in vain to delegate his talents to partners, failed in that,
and then decided, in 1859, to close his law office forever.

Among those who failed him in his business was his brother, Samuel. "His
desire to accumulate wealth was as strong as mine," but he despised the law
and "had no inclination to make money dealing in notes and other money
securities." Frequently Samuel appealed to his thrifty brother for loans and
when he died owed him $3,000. After his widow had paid off $2,000 in small
amounts wrung from her store, Tom remitted the remainder. "He was of the
Wauchob side of the family," Tom observed.

Attorney Mellon was glad to escape into the sinecure of a judgeship in the
county court of common pleas, when opportunity offered. The sturdy body which
he had driven at top speed for forty years was balking. He felt that he needed
a rest, to refresh both body and mind. Business was dull in face of the black
clouds on the political horizon, soon to break into the storm of the War of
the Rebellion. He was glad to escape that controversy. He disliked war, an
interruption of business as usual. He distrusted the Illinois rail splitter, a
demagogue who threatened to tear the country to pieces over an issue which
could be adjusted with the slave owners.

Who is this Thomas Mellon, asked the populace of Pittsburgh of the candidate
for the judiciary when his name was presented, much as the nation inquired,
who is this Andrew W. Mellon, when he became Secretary of the Treasury. The
elder Mellon hated the mob, shrank from contact with it even on the platform.
Applause he distrusted; hisses he disregarded. Friends at the bar who pushed
his candidacy had difficulty in convincing the Republican wheelhorses that he
was "regular."

For ten years, judge Mellon, embodiment of stern, unsmiling justice, meted out
decisions and sentences with such satisfaction to the bar that he was honored
with a banquet when he stepped down from the bench. His careful, painstaking,
judicial nature fitted in well with the demands of that position. Crime and
punishment were simple matters. If a murderer cut his own throat in jail
rather than face the gallows, "this growing tendency to self-destruction . . .
is not to be discouraged." It was disagreeable to condemn a fellow man to the
scaffold "to be banged by the neck until dead; but it is not so hard if they
clearly deserve it."

Mellon's judgeship was specially created to mitigate the barbaric sentences of
judge McClure rather than to ease any pressure of business in the courts. The
duties of office were light, especially in the opening war years when
litigation was in the doldrums. For the first time in his life be possessed
leisure. He turned to the classics and to the new philosophers of the
daynotably Herbert Spencer. He studied evolution and reconciled science and
the deity.

By the fall of 1862 business began to pick up. War orders refreshed the
spirits of Pittsburgh capitalists. Idle iron foundries sprang back into life,
new ones were started. judge Mellon found less time for philosophy.
Particularly the vicissitudes of coal shipments down the river required
attention.

After being lost for two years among the rebels, a fleet of Mellon's coal
barges emerged triumphant at New Orleans and sold their coal to Admiral
Farragut's fleet—only to find that General Butler's brother, in charge of
commissary, held up payment, angling for a bonus.

Mellon was indignant and hastened to Washington. "It was in the greatest
excitement and heat of the war, when Washington itself was threatened," he
relates. Unabashed, he pressed through crowds of officers, there on urgent
military business, to his former colleague of the Pittsburgh bar, Secretary of
War Stanton. He won his $40,000 at last despite Butler's claim that the coal
was rebel coal. But without interest. This with other expenses, Mellon
figured, about equaled the moot bonus, "but we had the satisfaction to
disappoint the thieving propensity of these gentlemen."

Mellon was informed that Butler had profited by selling -the navy's coal to
merchant ships at enormous prices. "The war made him a man of immense wealth .
. . yet, whilst I am writing this [in 1884] he poses before the world as the
poor man's candidate for the presidency."

War always caresses Pittsburgh. By 1863 judge Mellon was able to report
business "so active that such opportunities for making money had never existed
before in all my former experience; and for some two years before the end of
my term [in 1869], although the judicial office was entirely to my taste, I
discovered that . . . my salary afforded no adequate compensation for the loss
sustained by declining passing opportunities for making money. . . . And above
all this I had two bright boys just out of school, the idols of my heart,
merging on manhood, and with fine business capacities, whom I was eager to
launch on this flood tide of business prosperity."

So judge Mellon gladly reentered business life in 1870.

pps. xi-19
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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