-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner©1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
--[7]--
7
The Road to Washington
JUST when he had acquired his first million at the age of thirty, Henry Clay
Frick was bitten with political aspirations. Casually he remarked to judge
Mellon that he might accept the Republican nomination for Congress proffered
him by his Connellsville district. It was tantamount to election.
"He is getting ambitious," the judge remarked after Frick had left. "But he
would be foolish to take it."
"It is always a mistake for a good business man to take public office," Andrew
Mellon observed later. The main objection, his father had noted, was that a
smart man can make more money in business.
Nevertheless a variety of reasons pushed Thomas Mellon's son into what the
country's business classes regarded as the key Cabinet position when Wilson
handed over the reins of power to Harding. For one thing, the business of
making money had become monotonous to the 65-year-old banker. Armed with an
apparently infallible technique and backed by the tremendous reserves of Union
Trust, he was now one of the richest men in America.
Frick, his lifelong intimate, had died in 1919 Frick's ruthless, irresistible
drive was gone. The money-making madness of the war days was subsiding,
business was quiet and Mellon suddenly discovered himself an aging man. He
harbored no overweening ambition to challenge Rockefeller or Morgan in their
vast hegemonies.
In each of his key enterprises were installed admirably energetic men,
properly subordinate to their employer, trained in the Mel lons' thorough
school of caution mixed with enterprise. Brother Richard was still hale and
hearty, an able lieutenant to oversee the Mellon affairs.
Perhaps he would have liked to retire. But where? Pittsburgh was not a city
in which to retire from business. It was created for work, and for those who
forgot, there was the pall of smoke that stunted shrubbery even in Mellon's
Forbes Street hilltop estate. His peers were as intent on gain as he had been
and there was no place in their scheme of life for delightful loafing along
the by-ways.
And to what could be retire? He abhorred idleness as much as his father. He
liked to work, to have things pressing in on him at every hour of the day, if
only to fill the void which leisure would have created. He had never learned
to play.
Then, too, there was the urge for public recognition. Outside his home city
and certain financial and industrial circles, his name was unknown. It had
never appeared, for example, in that daily chronicle of America, the New York
Times,, before January 1, 1921. Never a plunger, be had engaged in none of
those Spectacular battles which had put the names of Gould, Vanderbilt and
Harriman on every schoolboy's tongue. His father had attained distinction by
his years on the bench and Select Council and his life-long title of judge. He
was, after all, something more than a money-lender.
Andrew Mellon even lacked a home. Ailsa, now 17, was away to school when she
wasn't with her mother. The same held for Paul. Marriage had turned to ashes.
The banker's spirit flinched whenever the memory of that unfortunate venture
thrust itself upon him. Successful in all else, what a failure he had made
there! The banker and his wife had lived lives apart since 1909.
Judge Mellon would never have approved Andrew's marriage in 1900 to the
granddaughter of Peter Guinness, Dublin brewer of stouts and ales. He might
have liked Nora McMullen-most people did. She was gay, pretty, reared in the
social graces. But he would have crossed from his checklist of marriage
prospects a girl who was Irish, twenty-five years younger than Andrew, light-
hearted and pleasure-loving.
When he met Nora McMullen, Andrew Mellon was riding the crest of a wave of
prosperity such as the family had never before known. Money seemed to tumble
out of the sky into Union Trust's vaults. The Mellon banks were the most
powerful in the country outside the metropolis and their head was readily
acknowledged as a peer by the magnates of Wall Street. In those Spanish-
American Wax years and their aftermath, he became as exuberant as was possible
for the taciturn son of shy, nervous Thomas Mellon.
Miss McMullen was touring the United States with a party of friends. Her
beauty became the toast of social affairs in the Iron City. Her brilliant dark
eyes and dusky hair, her Irish countryside complexion, the laughter in her
voice opened new worlds to the 42-year-old bachelor banker. He found time to
escort her through a steel mill.
His trips abroad became more frequent. After three years Nora McMullen left
green Ireland and Hertfordshire, to become a millionaire's wife, and to live
in the city of iron and steel and smoke. The new Mellon city arising on the
Monongahela was named Donora, for her and W. H. Donner, the president of Union
Steel.
It was in the fall of 1900, and great things were stirring in Pittsburgh.
During the honeymoon an immense amount of -work had stacked up at Mellon's
office, awaiting his return for final decision. There were the new steel works
at Donora, a new car works at Butler, the shipbuilding yards at Camden, a
dozen mergers, and big deals in downtown realty. Nora would have to excuse
him, but the pressure of work demanded that for a time be stay downtown late
into the evenings to catch up.
The work, though, like Penelope's web, never seemed to be finished. The truth
was that Andrew Mellon loved the manipulation of millions with an intensity
that no woman could inspire. The Mellon in him would out: he was the true son
of coldly practical Thomas and unsentimental Sarah Jane.
After nine years Nora McMullen decided that life was too short to pass as
Banker Mellon's consort, or as the unappreciated daughter-in-law of the
acidulous Sarah Jane. She tired of the monotony of life in Pittsburgh. Rarely
were there gay social affairs at their home. Her husband shrank from them.
Occasionally business associates dropped in for dinner, but the talk was of
oil wells in Oklahoma, bauxite in Dalmatia, labor costs at the car works, bond
issues for suppliant concerns. More and more of her time she spent in England
with her daughter and her baby boy.
Andrew Mellon made no objection to the separation she sought. She was to
receive $60,000 a year from a $1,350,000 trust fund, and a fund Of $350,000
was set up for the two children, Ailsa and Paul, with Union Trust and her
attorney, Paul S. Ache, acting as trustees, according to an agreement signed
in August, 1909. The children would pass seven and a half months of the year
with their mother, the remainder with their father.
On June 1, 1910, Mrs. Mellon was back in New York to pick up. her children.
They were to leave together on the Oceanic on June 3.
No problem of finance had ever perplexed Andrew Mellon more than the personal
problem that confronted him that evening of June 3. He loved his children, in
his own way. He did not want them to pass into his wife's unchallenged
dominion, where their minds, he feared, would be "poisoned" against him. He
did not want them educated in Europe, far from the stern, practical source of
his wealth. Europe was excellent for a banker's holiday, but a poor place to
train the heirs of the Mellon fortune.
He brought little Ailsa and Paul to New York, and drove down to the dock.
There was the ship that was to take them to Europe. The very sight of it
unnerved him. He ordered the driver to turn back. He barely caught the 10:55
for Pittsburgh, his children with him.
When "All ashore who are going ashore" sounded on the Oceanic at midnight, and
her children had not arrived, Mrs. Mellon guessed what had happened. Leaving
maids and luggage, she dashed off for the Pennsylvania Station and followed
her husband to Pittsburgh. Before any of the twenty-two servants could recover
from their astonishment, she was installed in her rooms with her children.
On September 15, 1910, Mellon filed suit for divorce. His attorneys included
former Governor William A. Stone, Watson and Freeman, Reed, Smith, Shaw and
Beal, Rody P. Marshall, Robert T. McElroy, leaders of the Pittsburgh bar. Also
retained was William A. Blakeley, prosecuting attorney of Allegheny County,
whose influence was relied on to keep proceedings secret. Prothonotary Kirker
became personal custodian of the records.
For seven months not a paper appeared in the court record. Not a word leaked
out in the well-disciplined Pittsburgh newspapers, on some of which Union
Trust held underlying mortgages. News agencies in the city also clamped on a
censorship, and even the telegraph agencies were summoned to aid. The
publishers, all wary men trained in the Pittsburgh tradition, assigned a crack
reporter to the case and were kept informed on every minute detail of the
charges, counter-charges and proceedings. All developments, including the
installation Of $32,500 worth of acoustophones to overhear Mrs. Mellon's
conversations with her attorneys and others, were carefully filed in the
publishers' private morgues.
Attorney Ache finally broke through the ring of silence and interested the
Philadelphia North American in the Mellon case. Mrs. Mellon's was a story of
the illusions of a young girl of twenty who hoped to transfer the social
attitudes of Hertfordshire's landed aristocracy to the steel and aluminum
mills of Pittsburgh. That dream was shattered and she was now faced by a
nearly impenetrable wall thrown up around her by the power of her husband's
millions.
"My first great disillusionment came," said her statement, "when I learned
that his people were not of his people at all. I had dreamed of another
Hertfordshire, with Hertfordshire lads and lassies; I had arrived in a strange
land with strange people, strangers in the strange land. 'They are foreign,
Huns and Slavs, and such as that, and you can't do anything with them,' I was
told about the people whose affection I had dreamed of winning for my
children. It was not only men. There were women and children, too, all toilers
in my husband's vineyard; but none of them given the laborer's recognition,
toiling and working on the estate and adding to its wealth but not recognized
as part of it. The whole community spirit was as cold and hard as the steel it
made, and chilled the heart to the core. . . . Nights that I spent in my baby
boy's bedroom, nursing these thoughts of his future, my husband, locked in his
study, nursed his dollars, millions of dollars, maddening dollars, nursed
larger and bigger at the cost of priceless sleep, irretrievable health and
happiness. Always new plans, bigger plans for new dollars, bigger dollars,
dollars that robbed him and his family of the time he could have devoted far
more profitably to a mere 'Thank God, we are living.'"
Mrs. Mellon thought she saw in her position a reflection of the hard, cold
relationships of Pittsburgh. "It crept over me then that perhaps I, too, a
foreigner like his Huns and Slavs, had been weighed coldly, dispassionately,
on scales of demand and supply and as a wife ranked merely as a commodity in
the great plans of this master financier's lifework. The babies were there:
even the male heir was there. Was the wife to be laid off like other hired
help when the steel mills shut down?"
Mellon disliked the notoriety accompanying divorce action. His attorneys told
Boies Penrose, Keystone state boss, that Mr. Mellon, liberal patron of the
Penrose political machine, objected to such publicity. It disturbed public
morals and catered to the prurient morbidity of the mob. They suggested that a
law be passed quietly in the legislature empowering the court to appoint a
master to hear evidence in private, rather than to have attorneys rehearsing
all the details of domestic discord before juries.
Penrose, on such occasions, listened respectfully. He could see that public
morality would be advanced by such an amendment to the Pennsylvania divorce
law. Accordingly, on April 2 0, 19 11, the vaguely titled Scott divorce bill
was passed without discussion by a vote of 168 to 0 and immediately signed by
Governor Tener. Legislators were amazed later to find that they had enacted
what independent newspapers described as a law "making it easy for rich men to
get rid of their wives."
Immediately the Mellon attorneys filed application to have a hearing of the
divorce action held in private before a master. Then it was discovered useful
to have an examiner appointed by the court to take testimony outside the
court's jurisdiction. Boies Penrose took care of that little detail in the
Legislature.
By now the case was in the headlines of the Eastern press. A $2,000 reward was
offered, and in vain, for information as to the identity of the reporter who
was sending out the stories. Even though copies of Eastern newspapers were
bought up en masse as they arrived in Pittsburgh railroad stations, it was
impossible to hush the sensational details of a divorce action which involved
Pittsburgh's most prominent banker and his British-born wife.
Mellon was furious-and helpless. Not all the cunning and pressure exerted by
the city's most expensive lawyers had been able to bring him a quiet divorce.
Impressed perhaps by the public revulsion, the court ruled that Mrs. Mellon
could have a jury trial if she demanded it. She did.
Now Mellon was all for settling. On May 6, 1912, grounds of divorce were
changed to simple desertion. Testimony was taken in private and the decree
granted On July 2, 1912. Mrs. Mellon was given custody of Paul and Ailsa for
six months of the year. In the Allegheny County Courthouse the curious can
still inspect Andrew Mellon's charges against his wife. But Mrs. Mellon's
replies, withdrawn from the records "for examination," have never been
returned.
If Mrs. Mellon had been a more careful student of politics in her husband's
state, she would not have been surprised at the Scott divorce act of 1911. Her
husband was no tyro in politics. True, he had never run for public office. He
had no taste for the crowd's hot embrace. There were men who made an art of
that, and if their views were correct on such vital matters to Pittsburgh
capitalists as the tariff and taxes, they received support more tangible than
mere words.
As in business, Mellon and Frick were partners in politics. Just before
campaigns, Dalzell, Quay, or Penrose would pay a visit to gain their views, as
citizens, on the issues of the moment, and to ask their support, moral and
financial, for the regular Republican slate. So close were the bonds of
sympathetic understanding between Pennsylvania's political leaders-bosses,
they were called in the vernacular—and Frick and Mellon in the west end of the
state, and Atterbury in the east, that it was said that U. S. Steel, Union
Trust and the Pennsylvania Railroad ran the state and named its Senators.
Their interests transcended mere state boundaries. That was illustrated in
1919 when the United States seemed to be headed into the League of Nations
behind Wilson's banners. Colonel George Harvey tells the story. "It is an
interesting fact, not generally known," he wrote, "that the only two multi-
millionaires who supported quietly, but effectively, the successful organized
effort to prevent the inclusion of the United States in the League of Nations
were Messrs. Henry Clay Frick and Andrew W.
Mellon. This endeavor, it may be recalled, was initiated and directed by a
small group comprising a dozen resolute United States Senators and a few
publicists. The contest quickly resolved into a bitter struggle against heavy
odds. . . ."
A small group of Irreconcilables were meeting in Washington to survey the
gloomy prospect. Only a handful of important papers, outside the Hearst chain,
was fighting Wilson's "internationalism." Money was needed, and in abundance,
if public opinion were to be warned of the dangers lurking in Geneva.
Senator Knox revived flagging spirits. He suggested a direct appeal to Frick
and Mellon, who he said were accustomed to act together in such matters. It
was decided that Colonel Harvey would sound out Frick while Knox would see
Mellon. Frick obliged with a generous check, which was promptly matched by
Mellon.
"The desired reservoir," said Harvey, "had been found and it was both deep and
full. All anxiety respecting sinews of war was dispelled. Rejoicing pervaded
the camp of the Irreconcilables, efforts were redoubled all along the line and
the redoubtable little band pushed on to victory which, whether desirable or
not, presently was won in the Senate and ultimately was ratified by the
people.
Frick himself had toyed with the idea of donning a Senatorial toga, back in
1904, to set off a life spent in well-doing. But generally he and his
associates preferred to have practical politicians or corporation lawyers
represent the state. Matt Quay and Boies Penrose were of the first type,
Philander C. Knox and David A. Reed the second. Knox was senior partner of
Pittsburgh's most important law firm, Knox & Reed, counsel for the U. S. Steel
Corporation, Union Trust and other ponderable clients. The Reed was James H.
Reed, director of U. S. Steel and father of David A. Reed.
Frick had commended Knox to President McKinley for the attorney-generalship.
"As counsel for the Carnegie Company, and other interests with which I have
been connected," he wrote the President-elect, "I have had abundant
opportunity, from a business man's standpoint, to judge of his ability as a
lawyer and his character as a man. . . . You could not find a more loyal
lieutenant." Knox however preferred to remain in Pittsburgh in the fat years
following the Spanish War. When Frick declined the Senatorial appointment in
1904, he threw his weight behind Knox, who was duly named. "Mr. Knox,"
recounts Colonel Harvey, "resigned, in 1909 to become Secretary of State under
Mr. Taft and, subsequently being again returned to the Senate largely through
Mr. Frick's influence, was enabled, in the year following the latter's death,
to induce President-elect Harding to appoint their mutual friend, Mr. Andrew
W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury."
Senator Knox knew his client perfectly-better than he did himself. Surfeited
with the praise of underlings, Mellon craved some outward seal of recognition
on his life. He shrank from a gradual decline into oblivion like his father's
last twenty years. But he feared the price exacted for public acclaim would
nauseate him. Shouting in the hustings, catering to the mob for votes, were as
obnoxious to Andrew Mellon as to his father. If there were a private escalator
to political eminence, he might take it.
The stars were in happy concurrence. Mellon needed a change, and the Grand Old
Party needed the cash. The New York Times' Washington correspondent put the
matter rather bluntly: "In his consideration of a selection for the Treasury
Department, Mr. Harding has a delicate matter to decide. The present situation
involves ways and means of paying off about $1,600,000. In the form of loans
this amount has been almost entirely underwritten by a number of banks in the
large cities of the East and the Middle West. The Mellon bank in Pittsburgh is
understood to have underwritten $1,500,000 of this deficit. Through John W.
Weeks, mentioned for Secretary of War, a Boston bank is said to have
subscribed $100,000. This places two candidates for the Cabinet in intimate
connection with negotiations to underwrite the Republican campaign debt."
Apparently, in addition to expert politicians of the DaughertyFall type, the
Harding Cabinet was to boast at least two "fat cats," to use the lingo of
organization politics. Frank R. Kent, analyst of politics, has described the
type: "There are men of large means, who having reached middle age, having
achieved success in finance or business and there being no further thrill nor
sense in the mere piling up of more millions, develop a yearning for some sort
of public honor and prestige. The organization has the power to provide the
position or at least to open the way for a chance at what they want. On the
other hand these capitalists have what the organization needs-money to finance
the campaign. Such men are known in political circles as 'fat cats' and they
are as welcome to the organization as the flowers in
May. . . . The late John W. Weeks of Massachusetts qualified in this class and
if Andrew W. Mellon is not the finest 'fat cat' they have had in Pennsylvania
since anyone can remember, then every sign fails."
The natural delicacy of such men as Knox, Daugherty and Harding prevented
their placing on any such basis the transaction by which the distinguished
banker became Secretary of the Treasury. As a matter of fact there was a good
deal of hemming and hawing. Mellon had literally to be pushed into the office
by the hands of his ardent admirers, if their accounts are to be taken at face
value.
The public received its first inkling on New Year's Day of 1921 that he was
being considered. The Times reported that Senator Knox had urged upon Harding
the appointment of Mellon, identified to the mystified public as "a Pittsburgh
banker." Mellon, it was explained, "is highly regarded in Pennsylvania and was
active in the campaign in raising funds for Harding and Coolidge." It was
desirable that the incumbent of the Treasury office "come from the West" and
not be identified with "big banking interests."
George S. Oliver, publisher of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, which Mellon had
financed, and James Francis Burke, Republican wheelhorse in the Iron City,
went to the front porch at Marion, Ohio, to sound a note which later grew into
a great orchestration. They believed his appointment "would be particularly
gratifying to the business men of the country." But the Presidentelect, like
most of his countrymen, had never heard of Mellon. His advisers produced the
Directory of Directors and the list of heavy donors to the G.O.P. war chest.
The Pittsburgher was summoned to Marion. On February 4, 1921, it was reported
that he was resigning all of his business directorships.
There were ominous growlings here and there in the country. Senator Knox
felt constrained to reply sarcastically to opposition to Mellon "because be is
a successful man." The Anti-Saloon League's indefatigable research staff
discovered that he was part owner in the Overholt distillery. Senator Penrose
was tart. The distillery matter was merely a piece of banking detail. The man
who was to head the prohibition service was not a distiller. Any-way, plans
had been worked out to shift the prohibition unit from the Treasury to the
Department of justice.
Harding apparently didn't realize he was making the wisest of all possible
Cabinet choices in picking Mellon to attend to the fiscal details of the
return to normalcy. "I was asked by Harding about having Mellon for Secretary
of the Treasury," James Francis Burke told C. W. Barron, Wall Street
publicist. "I think his name had been suggested to him by Knox. Harding did
not think it possible to appoint a rich man Secretary of the Treasury."
He was consulting all comers to St. Augustine. "I am going to nominate the
second richest man in the world for Secretary of the Treasury," he told Arthur
Brisbane. "What do you think the public will say to that?" Brisbane's answer
foreshadowed the adulation which was to be showered on Mellon by the business
press. "This writer, who didn't know who the second richest man in the world
was, or the first richest either, expressed the opinion that the people would
be glad to have the national finances in the hands of somebody acquainted with
finance."
It wasn't Senator Knox who first whispered the Pittsburgh banker's name in
Harding's ear, according to that peerless Ohio politician, Harry Daugherty. It
was Daugherty himself. Harding's campaign manager was discussing the
Treasury—a subject close to his own heart-with the President-elect.
"The one man in the United States, in my opinion, for that position is Andrew
W. Mellon of Pittsburgh," ventured Daugherty.
"Mellon . . . Mellon," Harding muttered. "I don't know him."
"Well, I do," he answered. "I've met him and in my opinion he is the ablest
financier in America. He would doubtlessly deny it, but I believe he is the
richest man in this country, richer than either Ford or Rockefeller. And he is
the only man that the big. interests, the Rockefellers and Morgans, will not
bluff."
"And you think his great wealth is a recommendation?" Harding broke in.
"I certainly do. A man who can quietly make the millions this modest-looking
man has gathered in is little short of a magician. If there is one thing he
knows it's money. He will make for you the greatest Secretary of the Treasury
since Alexander Hamilton and render the nation an immense service if you can
get him."
And so Daugherty, by his own admission, was the first to fasten on the
Pittsburgh banker the sobriquet that was to cling to him for the next ten
years.
Daugherty's version of Mellon's visit to Marion rang true. Finding no one to
meet him at the station, he walked a mile to the Harding residence and seated
himself quietly in the reception room. A newspaper man discovered him and
informed the astounded attendant. "Are you Mr. Mellon of Pittsburgh?" he
inquired. "Yes, but I can wait Tell the Senator I am here at his bidding. I
know he's busy. . . . Tell him I'll take my turn."
"Well, what did Uncle Andy say?" Daugherty inquired after the interview was
over. "Said he didn't think he'd make a very good Secretary of the Treasury,"
Harding responded. "Thought he'd be criticized because he owned interests in
so many different enterprises over the country. . . . I asked if he thought
there'd be any real conflict between his duties and his interests," Harding
laughed. "He tried to smile and couldn't quite make it as he replied: 'I
wouldn't let them conflict, of course, if I assumed such a duty. But honestly,
I don't believe I would make a good Secretary of the Treasury!"
"Good," commented Daugherty. "You'll hear from Knox and Penrose."
Daugherty also claims credit for forcing the inclusion of Herbert Hoover in
the Cabinet, against vehement opposition from the Senatorial clique. Mellon
proved the trump card in this play, according to the Daugherty version. "No
Hoover, no Mellon," was his dictum to Penrose and Knox.
"You actually mean to tell us," Penrose growled, "that the appointment of
Mellon is not yet decided? . . . If Uncle Andy gets wind of this hesitation
over his name, nothing will induce him to accept the place." The Keystone
Senators accepted Hoover, and Mellon's appointment was announced soon after.
In a measure it was true that Andrew Mellon was almost literally pushed into
the Secretarial chair, which he secretly coveted, and from which it was
impossible to pry him years later. His hesitancy was understandable. Politics
meant the mob, probable criticism, catering to politicians whom he detested.
He distrusted democracy; in his banks and industries, autocracy was preferred.
Knox allayed his fears. This was to be a business man's Administration. The
Cabinet after A was merely a Board of Direc tors, and his position would be
absolute control over the nation's finances. Harding was a soft, pliable,
good-natured man: the real authority would be in the hands of hard-headed men
of business such as Mellon and Knox. The presence of an overwhelming
Republican majority in Congress meant that orders would be carried out as
smartly as in Aluminum Company of America.
On February 28, 1921, Andrew Mellon visited the gloomy Greco-Roman monument
known as the Treasury Building. After a two-hour conference with young Parker
Gilbert, he was found wandering about the corridors a bit tangled as to
directions. "I just came down to look around," he explained apologetically to
reporters. A few minutes later he was lost again in the labyrinth and had to
be shown to the door.
The Pittsburgh banker was the first member of Harding's Cabinet to be sworn
in, and was to be the last of that company to retain a secretaryship. Senator
Knox called Chief justice White to his office to perform the ceremony. Among
those who witnessed it were officials of the Mellon companies and business and
political associates of Pittsburgh.
"I really didn't want to come to Washington," the Secretary explained years
later. "I did not want absolutely to refuse. There really was no substantial
reason why I should refuse." His plans then were to go back to Pittsburgh
after four years and "meddle with business as I liked without being tied down
to it."
The new Secretary, second or third richest man in America, had to be
introduced to America. The mystery at first appalled conscientious editors.
They were aware he had a middle initial. The usually meticulous Times'
copydesk held on for several weeks to "G"; others decided it was "J," "D" and
other likely letters. There were no references in the handbooks to the
Pittsburgh multi-millionaire. In a list of the hundred wealthiest families in
the nation, drawn up in 1914, his name was not mentioned. The Times, in an
article devoted to the "lesser known Cabinet figures," was able to state that
he was the richest man in Pennsylvania, among the fifty richest in the
country. "Despite this," the writer added, "he has a strong interest in the
welfare of wage earners. When capital puts down the iron heel, he interferes."
The article added that he had been director in corporations capitalized at
$1,613,674,464. He was against the League of Nations but favored an
association of nations. His political views were akin to Senator Knox's.
Another writer gave a somewhat clearer picture. "He looks like a tired double-
entry bookkeeper afraid of losing his job; worn, and tired, tired, tired."
The mystery gradually gave way to paradoxes from which was built the "Mellon
myth," useful to three Presidents and to thousands of income taxpayers in the
higher brackets. The contrast between this timid, shrinking figure who blinked
in the sudden glare of publicity, and the immense Mellon fortune gave rise to
the belief that be was vested with certain magic powers. The public had been
fed on potent, lusty Croesuses who fought for their millions in spectacular
battles that resounded through the nation's press; here was a man, a veritable
Midas, whose name had never appeared in the headlines to crush a strike,
corrupt a legislature, break a competitor, or swindle a thousand stockholders.
It was a monument to the discipline of the Pittsburgh newspapers. The man had
as well been born but yesterday: that in fact was among his greatest assets in
an Administration laden down with figures lacking in child-like innocence.
Andrew Mellon sat at the left hand of Warren Harding in a Cabinet that did
credit to Harry Daugherty and the Senators who framed it. The venerable
Charles Evans Hughes lent dignity as Secretary of State, and far down the
table was Herbert Hoover, humanitarian and Secretary of Commerce. The
Secretary of War was one designated as a "fat cat." In the important
inquisitorial post of attorney-general sat none other than the ineffable
Daugherty. Will Hays, Presbyterian elder and expert money-raiser, was
strategically placed as bead of the nation's postmasters. Edwin Denby and
Albert B. Fall, both destined to leave the Cabinet by request, were at the far
end of the table as Secretaries of Interior and Navy. "Puddler Jim" Davis and
Henry C. Wallace completed the picture with Calvin Coolidge, who sat between
Hoover and Davis and said nothing. The new Secretary was to learn many lessons
in politics at first hand from such masters in the art.
Mellon spoke rarely in Cabinet. When he did, it was with the authority of
millions. The possible scrapping of a government war plant was being
considered and various Cabinet officers were expressing their theories. Mellon
was asked his advice. In a scarcely audible voice he remarked: "I have not
looked into it thoroughly yet, but I had a similar case recently in one of my
own plants to deal with. The amount involved was the same-$ 12,000,000. I
scrapped mine." Harding and his Cabinet were silent.
His infrequent remarks begot an awe which was soon communicated to the press
and the ruling business classes. The Chinese Eastern Railway question came up.
Harding leaned over to Daugherty. "Now we've got him," he whispered. "Surely
he wasn't in on this."
"I don't suppose, Mr. Mellon," said the President, "that you were interested
in the Chinese Eastern Railway, were you?"
"Oh, yes," came the casual answer. "We had a million or a million and a half
of the bonds."
"It's no use," said Harding. "He's the ubiquitous financier of the universe."
pps. 109-123
--[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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