-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner©1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
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13
The Apogee of Andrew Mellon
N0 figure in public life in post-war America was lifted to such eminence as
Andrew W. Mellon. No journal of public opinion was too mighty to honor itself
by honoring the Secretary of the Treasury. The business classes which set the
stride and tone of the Third Decade blessed him for the beneficent sway of
prosperity.
The acclaim which greeted him in 1926, after the passage of the Mellon Plan,
grew steadily into a great chorus. At first praise came only from those
intimate circles which knew of his prowess in Pittsburgh. Volume of applause
dated from May 1, 1921, when he made public his first suggestions for tax
reduction and economy, and reached one of its peaks in the campaign that
elected Calvin Coolidge in 1924. The delegates to the Republican convention
that year rose to their feet with a mighty roar to greet the fugitive figure
of the Secretary as he flitted to the platform. He was the man behind
Prosperity and Victory, the symbol for all those who profited from Harding's
return to and Coolidge's maintenance of normalcy. His own extraordinary rise
to pecuniary preeminence gave an implicit endorsement to the fiscal policies
he advocated. In an era which enshrined Success, he was its very embodiment.
The man reached the apogee of his power on February 26, 1926, the day when
Coolidge signed the Mellon Tax Plan. The President, shrewd and practical man
whose aphorisms would have delighted judge Mellon, let no false pride stand
in his way in ceding the laurels to his Chancellor. The entire Administration
acknowledged his leadership.
Probably at no other time in American history could a man so aloof from the
mass of his fellow-men, so lacking in the common, homely touch or the
dramatic appeal, have achieved such prestige. It was a tribute to the
single-minded concentration of the articulate classes in the country on one
aim-the acquisition of wealth. All other values faded into insignificance.
The business man was the hero of the day, the corporation promoter its beau
sabreur. Financial news expanded from a scant column or two into pages and
became a main circulation feature. The quotation on U. S. Steel was a matter
of more absorbing interest than the news from Washington.
The bitter sallies which his enemies made on Secretary Mellon turned back on
themselves. The methods by which he achieved his millions were sacrosanct,
whatever they may have been. Few inquired. The policies he advocated profited
the molders of public opinion and were therefore above criticism. The conduct
of his Department was in harmony with the wishes of people of importance who
paid taxes, and was therefore not to be changed.
All but the inveterate of his political enemies had given up the battle by
1926. Bourbon Democrats fraternized with him. Mostly, his opponents spoke for
a return to a simpler era, and the country had not the slightest intention of
following them backward. It was pushing ahead along the plateau of permanent
prosperity. It was true that Mellon's critics were either misfits or
radicals, either unable to cope with high-geared corporate industry, or
intent on some distant Utopia which practical men labeled visionary.
Never before had a man so obviously a plutocrat dared to hold high public
office. Popular suspicion would have forbidden his elevation to the Treasury.
A New York merchant had been forced to resign as Secretary of the Treasury
when it was brought to President Grant's attention that he was engaged in
trade and commerce, in violation of federal statute. Not even his announced
withdrawal from worldly interests could still the popular clamor against him.
By 1920 however the country was in a mood to accept Croesus as its guide. The
Valley of Democracy, which had checked too-open rule by men of millions, now
accepted the leadership of wealth, eager to share in the golden stream. The
vast minions who participated humbly or not at all in that stream seemed
voiceless. The masses of industrial workers in the cities, thanks to Frick's
victory at Homestead, were not permitted to organize their forces or their
thoughts into a homogeneous movement. The farmers of the Western plains found
themselves relatively unimportant in a nation now frankly described as
industrial.
The press at once reflected and led the nation's drive toward the amassing of
individual riches. Of the 24,000 daily newspapers from Maine to California,
it was possible to list on the fingers of one hand those which were out of
step with the philosophy of rugged individualism and the actuality of
plutocracy. Well-to-do publishers sympathized eagerly with Secretary Mellon's
fiscal policy and were glad to overlook irregularities in the conduct of his
private corporations or his public affairs, which in other times would have
been the subject of burning editorials.
The Secretary himself, for all his physical diffidence, was a tower of
strength to the wealthy and near-wealthy in their demand for a Government run
on the profit lines of a private business. Fearful politicians about him
might cringe when hostile Senators unloosed blasts calculated to send him
down the Salt River.
Others might waver and compromise, as when Republican leaders in the House
sacrificed the Mellon Plan in 1924. To Mellon that was weakness,
equivocation, mere temporizing with unsound ideas of public policy. He
detested such turncoats. He had more political sagacity than the politicians;
for the defeated Mellon Plan and its promise of blessings to come swept the
Administration to victory in 1924 by an unparalleled plurality.
Back of the Secretary was a propaganda machine which profited by every lesson
of the World War and the new advertising.
Indefatigably it worked night and day, sending out from the Chamber of
Commerce of the United States, from a hundred trade organizations whose
affiliates included the smallest retailer at the country crossroads, from
financial and industrial institutes, an unending deluge of argument whose one
intent was to marshal support for the Mellon Plan. Hardly a business man,
professional man, home owner or taxpayer was ignored. Local Chamber of
Commerce and luncheon clubs resounded with his praises. Once the Mellon Plan
was passed, its author remained the personal leader of these men, now
numbering millions.
A private telephone wire connected wise Calvin Coolidge with his Secretary,
whose advice was sought not merely on matters of public finance but on
appointments to federal posts—judicial, administrative and diplomatic-and on
questions of moment in national and world affairs. On such subjects the
President claimed only that wisdom which came to a Yankee who had passed his
life in Bay State politics. He preferred to have the judgment of a man whose
affairs reached into London and Paris banking houses and touched industry and
commerce on all the continents. Younger advisers gave way occasionally to
their enthusiasms, but his minister of finance was always sagacious, cautious
and moderate. The two men liked each other.
A crowning glory of the Secretary's regime was the supervision of the
nation's most grandiose architectural venture, the $190,000,000 public
building program for the District of Columbia. It was an inheritance that had
been accumulating since Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant laid out the original
plan for the public buildings for Washington in 1791 and recommended: "It
will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave
room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the
wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote."
The first large scale move to "aggrandize and embellish" governmental
Washington was ostensibly made by President Coolidge.
"Such," says the National Commission of Fine Arts, "was the beginning of the
building program for the District of Columbia.The two controlling forces were
Congress and the Secretary of the Treasury."
Mellon did most of the controlling. It was his hobby. He appointed an
architectural advisor who laid out plans for the more important buildings
under his own direction. The advisor submitted these plans to the Public
Buildings Commission which in turn urged them upon Mellon. Unusual peace and
harmony prevailed and was a distinguishing feature even during the work of a
board of five architectural consultants next selected by Mellon. The
detailing of the plans for aggrandizing Washington proceeded in the midst of
a patriarchal calm.
According to the numerous reports of the various commissions, the major
architectural principles followed were such as to produce "harmony of design
and uniformity of cornice line." In this effort the architects were
successful. All the structures look like the Mellon National Bank in
Pittsburgh except that they cover more ground and are consequently more
depressing. Even the independently designed structures such as those under
the control of the architect of The Capitol and of The Supreme Court have,
through the Fine Arts Commission, taken their tone from the Mellon motif.
The buildings themselves are of up-to-date steel frame construction. Actual
production and construction methods have been based on modern technique. But
all this has been hidden away behind a mask of miscellaneous and expensive
architectural embellishment.
The sturdy steel frame work is hidden by skimpy, curtain wall stone work,
designed, however, to create the impression of massive strength. In reality,
the stone is simply tied or "anchored" onto the steel framing and carries
none of the weight or thrust of the other structural members. This method of
evading reality is quite generally followed in all current architectural
practice. Washington's federal buildings differ only in that the pretense at
strength and massiveness is carried to greater lengths.
To aid in lending the appearance of power and majesty to the curtain walls,
the Roman arch has been widely imitated. Such arches dominate the lower
portions of the facades of most of the buildings. There they stand framing
entrances, empty and lifeless, like aged athletes posing rubber dumb-bells
above them. They carry no loads of course. This work is done by the hidden
steel.
The tragedy of all this masking lies in the fact that it cannot quite come
off. One of the reasons is because there is a demand for windows, modern
windows, with steel or bronze sash, with machine-made glass. Windows that may
be opened or shut by a child or a stenographer. There are thousands of
windows in a federal office building. They shatter the illusion that the wall
really has strength. Their lintels or pediments just cannot be made to look
as if they have a real structural service to perform.
And then there is the standing glory of the Washington that is taking form,
the massive Grecian columns, row after row, cluster after cluster of them.
They are real, solid stone. The best that money can buy in limestone. They
are not the hollow shells of movie palaces and cheap pretentious structures.
They are sound and genuine to the core.
Some are reminiscent of the manliness of old Sparta. Doric columns. On others
the virtues of Athens and the Ionian Isles are proclaimed. Ionic columns. On
still others the column motif is that of the ornate Corinth. Columns cost all
the way from $5,000 to $12,000 apiece. Aggrandizement! Embellishment!
The columns rest firmly on bases that are supported by the structural steel.
They tower from the third floor levels to above the tops of the fifth floors.
They stretch along the facades of the nation's administrative and executive
domiciles as their dominant feature. And not one of them carries an ounce of
weight. Their own weight is carried on steel. Their capitals are anchored to
the cantilevered steel which also carries the imposing structure above them.
Should a modern Samson topple them over into the streets one after another,
the only effect on the structures which they appear to support would be to
allow light and air to enter the windows now shadowed behind them.
Not all the columns arising in Washington are exactly like those which were
so pleasing to Mellon. The Supreme Court building will have none in its main
entrance that are not put to work. Here under a classic Grecian pediment are
to be sixteen solid marble Corinthian columns, fluted and polished. They at
least will actually carry the loads above them without the aid of plebeian
steel. They will cost about $36,000 apiece, altogether somewhat in excess of
$500,000.
And then the cornice! With its uniformity of line. What would embellishment
and aggrandizement do without it? On Mellon's buildings the sole practical
purpose of the cornice is to serve as a gutter and to house the downspouts.
This ignoble function is not revealed in line or decoration. Like their
Grecian forebears they are of massive stone, some pieces weighing up to 50
tons. Unlike their prototypes, these stones do not aid the anchorage of wall
or roof. They are not nicely balanced for that equilibrium which once made
them essential as a structural unit. The cornice stones of the buildings of
the nation's capital are anchored back in the structural frame and in general
are supported on the same steel columns which carry the curtain walls. Where
particularly massive stones are used special supports of structural steel
have to be provided. But the result is a uniform cornice line that is the
most impressive that money can buy.
And finally those roofs! Red tile roofs, slanting at an angle, not exactly
Moorish or Spanish and not exactly Mansard in design. Rather they incorporate
the best features of each. They provide the crowning touch that welds the
curtain walls, the Roman arches, the Greek columns and the uniform cornices
into an architectural whole. They subdue the occasional variations injected
into the scheme by the sharper peaks of Grecian temple pediments or by the
noble dome of the Capitol itself. They top it all off to a nicety.
Whether Mellon has been thoroughly pleased with the results of his efforts is
not known. To an unusual extent, architectural critics have refrained from
public criticism or praise of the output. Some talk among themselves, some
comment caustically to outsiders, but their voices are not raised above a
whisper. The attitude of the critical is that monumental public building is
always uniformly bad and that Mellon's efforts are not much if any worse than
those of his peers. They say, "If 'architecture is the expression of the
dominant aspirations of a people,' as Ruskin claimed, perhaps Mellon's ideas
are good architecture. Pretentious hooey is certainly not lacking among those
who dominate the American scene."
Contractors, subcontractors and engineers comment more caustically in
private. They make no pretense toward artistic understanding but are quick to
see the structural falsification in the designs. But they have become so used
to hoisting senseless gee-gaws into place that they take it all as a matter
of course.
Despite this silence, the first products of the process of aggrandizement can
be little else than disappointing. The $17,000,000 Department of Commerce
building looks like an embellished prison. Even the $5,000 bronze gates that
swing in the Roman arches add to the penitentiary appearance.
The building for the Bureau of Internal Revenue raises a different emotion.
It doesn't horrify, it simply bores.
Only the building for the Department of Agriculture really looks like an
imitation of a Greek temple. It sometimes startles one on getting a sudden
glimpse of it through the irregular leafage of the Mall. The independently
designed Shakespearean Library also succeeds in putting it over.
The other structures don't quite produce the effect.
The fiction arose that the Secretary enjoyed no social life. That had been
true in Pittsburgh, city of unending labor. But in Washington the days passed
without tension of a thousand details. Experts lent by the New York banking
houses—S. Parker Gilbert, Garrard Winston, Ogden Mills—dealt with the
intricacies of. Treasury problems. There was time in the evenings for
relaxation unclouded by worries of the past day or apprehension for the next.
The Mellon apartment on Massachusetts Avenue was noted for intimate parties.
If its master did not partake of the exquisite foods, he listened to the
sparkling conversation of young financiers and diplomats, occasionally
throwing in a sage observation or anecdote. The Pennsylvania Senators, Reed
and Pepper, a few of the Congressmen, General Atterbury of the Pennsylvania,
Pierre Du Pont, Myron H. Taylor, Howard Heinz, were among the intimates.
Political leaders of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh dropped in to report and
consult. The heads of his many firms asked his guidance on matters of
expansion and new financing. Senators Robinson and Swanson and
Representatives Garrett and Garner, Democratic leaders, were his flattered
guests.
His older brother, James Ross, went down to Washington to see how the
family's prodigy was getting along. "Mighty nice apartment you've got here,
Andy," remarked James. "How much are you paying for it?" "Twenty thousand
dollars," answered Andrew. "And how much do you make from the Government?"
"Fifteen thousand dollars a year." "Hmm," sighed James Ross, "what would
Father have said about that?"
At the Secretary's right hand in arranging important social and political
affairs was David E. Finley. For the lower ranks of politicians, bankers and
others from whom support was being solicited for whatever measure was then
uppermost in the Secretary's mind, there stood the mysterious Arthur D.
Sixsmith, who breakfasted with his superior and then went off on his social
duties for the day. The relationship was in the nature of the Harry
Daugherty-Jess Smith friendship, even to Sixsmith's position as personal
treasurer for household and other accounts. Fine old Overholt whisky was a
part of the properties by which Sixsmith achieved his results. Guests
declared the young women present were attractive and vivacious. Gossipy
Washington found it difficult to reconcile the austere, patrician Mellon with
the good fellow Sixsmith, and their close association remained one of the
mysteries of the capital.
Sixsmith kept out of the news as much as possible. But when he insisted that
the chauffeur of a Mellon limousine dash down Connecticut Avenue at 45 miles
an hour, demolishing a truckload of building material, injuring two
pedestrians and tearing up fourteen feet of curbstone before the swaying auto
finally was halted, the reporters gathered. "Lynch him," yelled an infuriated
crowd who had seen the Mellon car roaring down the avenue like a fire engine.
"Really," commented Sixsmith later, "they seem to be making a lot of fuss
over nothing. There wasn't much damage done—two men were only slightly hurt,
I believe."
The spirited dowagers who adorn the national capital angled unceasingly to
draw the fabulously wealthy and politically all-powerful Secretary—father
incidentally, of two children of marriageable age—to their choicer functions.
Under their smiles, his pinched spirit expanded. Before the end of his first
term, the Pittsburgh banker found the new ways of life inviting and
pleasurable, and he abandoned any idea of going back to live in his dull,
smoke-palled native city.
Occasionally he returned to Pittsburgh on flying visits to oversee some deal
hatching in Union Trust or one of his industrial corporations. There he was
feted by admiring coteries of fellow-millionaires whom he had left in the
obscurity that had previously shrouded his own life. On one of his trips, the
story goes, he telephoned a Pittsburgh daily's news room to deny a story of
Paul's illness. "This is A. W. Mellon speaking," he announced. "Hello, you
old son of a bitch," came the answer over the wire, "how about lending me
$5." The august Secretary enjoyed recounting the reporter's discomfiture when
he learned that he was not being hoaxed. On another occasion he was guest at
a press banquet. Through a confusion in names he was called to the telephone.
"This you, George? . . . Well, will you take a message for him?" Followed
three pages of notes for George, including data on the liquor needs of a
party to be held later in the evening. Mellon turned the notes over to George
with an apology.
In Washington he got along better with the newspaper men as his term
advanced. At his semi-weekly press conferences, there was an occasional gleam
of humor. Questions affecting policy he usually waved aside, or referred to
Gilbert, Winston or Mills, who invariably stood by his side to parry
difficult or embarrassing thrusts. Long before John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
made it fashionable for the mighty to denounce the Eighteenth Amendment, he:
frankly revealed his views to a Saturday Evening Post writer. The astonished
editor sent the manuscript to Mellon to make sure that a high public official
had not only dared to be frankbut to be quoted. He certified the article, but
the Post, semi-official organ of the Administration, never saw fit to publish
it.
Mellon was plagued throughout his tenure of the Treasury by the issue of
prohibition. Where his father had been almost severely abstemious, he was
discreetly moist, a connoisseur of wines, a patron of Andre Mellon, vintner
of Bordeaux, whom he discovered while sojourning in the south of France. He
had foreseen trouble writ with a capital T when he was offered the Treasury.
His fears had been mollified by assurances that the prohibition bureau would
be transferred to the Department of Justice. But soon Daugherty had his
department under such a cross-fire that the Drys then in charge of the
Administration's liquor policy would not risk a shift.
The Secretary didn't mind attacks on his fiscal policy. He knew finance and
could parry his opponents' blows. But to be embroiled in the unending
squabble of the Wets and the Drys over an issue which was merely moral
annoyed him. His troubles started early. As soon as his name was bruited for
the Treasury, the Philadelphia Federation of Churches and the Anti-Saloon
League voiced objections to a distiller heading the Bureau which enforced the
Volstead Act.
Distilling was an old trade to the Mellons. Thomas Mellon had made whisky on
his father's farm. Andrew Mellon became a distiller through his business
partnership with Henry Clay Frick, owner of the Overholt distillery. Frick's
mother was an Overholt, a family greatly renowned in that part of
Pennsylvania for its solid virtues and success in distilling a fine whisky.
In one of their many deals, young Mellon accepted a third interest in
Overholt from Frick. When Frick died in 1919, Mellon became trustee for
another third. Upon becoming Secretary, be turned over his shares to Union
Trust., as trustee, to dispose of the property and stock.
Governor Pinchot, Mellon's Nemesis in Keystone politics, got in the habit of
writing politely worded but poisonous letters, to the Secretary, pointing
out the "demoralization" in enforcement in his own state, brought about,
Pinchot said, by permitting suspected breweries and distilleries to continue
operation. The indefatigable Methodist board of temperance asserted that
"neither by conviction nor by inclination is he [Mellon] fit for the
responsibility" of prohibition enforcement. Mellon answered that with more
men and more money he could afford better protection against the flow of
liquor.
Gaston Means, who seemed to bob up as the scum in every dirty political mess,
told a Senate committee that the Secretary had profited by withdrawing bonded
liquors from the Overholt distillery. He had been set by Harding, he related,
to spy on Mellon and his enforcement of the prohibition law. He had
investigated certain hotels and roadhouses owned by "Mellon" or "Mellon
interests," and had found them wide open and avoided by prohibition officers.
"It is merely vicious piffle," commented Mellon.
Captain H. L. Scaife testified that he had had a hand in the investigation,
and he had presented Mellon with a list of fifteen questions. One dealt with
a plan to issue withdrawal permits which would help the Republican National
Committee to pay off its deficit. Mellon insisted, according to testimony,
that the permits were to go only to responsible, reputable firms. But the
practice opened the door to "illegal abuses" and he stopped it, be said. As
for the faked permits for 2,950 cases of Old Overholt found in the Union
Trust Company files, that was merely routine, the Secretary explained. Liquor
had been withdrawn illegally from his distillery, he admitted, but the
superintendent had been summarily discharged. Nevertheless Governor Pinchot
could say, in 1924, that Mellon was still the owner of thousands of barrels
of whisky, that 42,000 gallons had been withdrawn from the Overholt
distillery, that indictments against those concerned had been quashed and the
guilty parties never punished.
As age crept on, the Secretary abandoned his horses and his golf. A brisk
walk between his apartment and the Treasury four times a day kept his lean
frame fit. His diet was always carefully restricted, but he would not deny
himself the pleasure of a light French wine, nor could he be restrained from
smoking great quantities of little black cigars. Nervously, as one expired,
he reached for another. Boss Vare of Philadelphia, ushered into his presence,
was offered one. Contemptuously he scooped a half dozen into his paw, tied a
rubber band around them and grunted, "A fair smoke, Mr. Secretary."
Mellon's parents did not endow him with a robust physique. Like his father,
he ate sparingly, was regular in his hours and eschewed excesses of all
kinds—except nicotine. A leading member of the Pittsburgh bar vouches for
this story about his abstemiousness. Some thirty years ago he had occasion to
be seated at the banker's side at a dinner. Of each dish set before him,
Mellon took only a taste. When the coffee was being served, he broke his
hour-long silence to lean over to the attorney and whisper: "You know, I
never eat at public affairs. I always have something at home before coming. I
have to be careful."
Sometime in 1930, the Secretary of the Treasury was seated beside the sister
of a great inventor at a public dinner. She recounted his curious regimen to
her friend, the Pittsburgh attorney. "He hardly touched the various courses,"
she said. "When the dinner was over, he leaned over to me and said, 'You
know, I never eat at public dinners like this. I always have something at
home before I come. I have to be careful.' Then he relapsed into silence."
Inclement weather found one of the world's few nameless automobiles alongside
the Secretary's entrance to the Treasury. It was made to specifications of
the proprietor of the Aluminum Company of America.
Accompanied by the indispensable Finley, the discreet Flore, his valet, the
Secretary sought relaxation on the Riviera, or at Aix-les-Bains, or in
Normandy. At Easter he jaunted to Bermuda with Paul and Ailsa. Forced to stay
in the United States in the summer, he retreated to Southampton, Long Island.
It was inevitable that the financier should place a luster on a great fortune
by the acquisition of old masters. His taste had been guided in early years
by Frick, beneath whose implacable exterior lurked a genuine and passionate
love of pictures. For that he is remembered at greater length in the records
of his life than for the steel and coke companies he reared. He and Mellon
traded pictures and the banker boasted that on one occasion he got $100,000
from his partner for a $54,000 Turner.
Andrew Mellon's art treasures were carefully guarded from the prying eyes of
the general public. Accounts of new acquisitions were invariably denied. The
collection, while small, connoisseurs reported to be exquisite. Among his
trophies are Rembrandts, Vermeers, Titians, a Holbein, an El Greco, and an
admirable collection of Chinese ceramics and paintings on silk. His reported
purchase from the Hermitage gallery in Leningrad of some of its treasures for
$6,400,000 came at an awkward time in, the fall of 1931 when the Pittsburgh
charity drive was falling far short of its $6,000,000 goal, with only a
$300,000 contribution from the Mellon brothers.
The Smithfield Street Medici was vested with that other token of
magnificence—doctor's degrees. University of Pittsburgh discovered the hidden
talent in its own city after Mellon was called to Washington, and hastily
conferred a Doctor of Laws upon him in 1921. Dartmouth followed in 1922; at
Rutgers he was acclaimed "the man who had given the nation the highest
example of sound public finance." A few days later Princeton proclaimed that
"his name bids fair to stand with the greatest masters of finance in modem
times." In following years Columbia, Kenyon, Amherst, Harvard and Yale
decorated his lean figure with the tokens of esteem. "A first class business
man," said Yale. Perhaps more valued than any other was the doctorate
conferred by Cambridge in 1931, while Paul was receiving his baccalaureate
degree. Solemnly vested in a scarlet robe and a round black velvet doctor's
bonnet, he sat beside his son and listened to a learned oration in Latin.
Occasionally he graced a great affair, as when he spoke with Morgan at a
testimonial dinner in honor of George F. Baker's eighty-fourth birthday, or
when he was the guest of honor at the aristocratic New York State Chamber of
Commerce annual dinner, where a De Laszlo portrait was unveiled, to be hung
in the Chamber's Great Hall for aye. In welcoming the honor guest, James
Speyer assured him that in England he would long since have been a peer of
the realm. In graceful reply, Mellon told the Chamber members that "you
gentlemen are the source of all the important affairs of the country." Former
Ambassador Gerard, in his list of the "fifty-nine men who rule the United
States," placed the Secretary second only to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and
above Morgan.
His European trips were considered matters of moment in Foreign Offices. In
the summer of 1924 he conferred with Premier MacDonald on the Dawes Plan, and
later officially blessed that short-lived experiment. While in London he sat
for Sir William Orpen.
In 1927 he was in Geneva twice on trips from the Riviera. On the second
journey he visited the League's headquarters informally, after his avoidance
of its halls on his first trip had been commented on widely. Later he met
Mussolini and Volpi, the Fascist finance minister. He reported he was
favorably impressed by Fascism's accomplishments.
Ailsa, just turned eighteen when her father transferred his main concern from
private to public finance, inspired her share of Washington society's
interminable buzzing. How many a young diplomat or banker who showed up at
the Massachusetts Avenue apartment had secret ambitions of interesting
Secretary Mellon's daughter in himself could not be known; but gossip elected
dozens and one newspaper was impressed enough to couple her name with that of
S. Parker Gilbert, Under-Secretary of the Treasury and soon to be Agent
General for German reparations under the Dawes Plan. The embarrassed Gilbert
presented himself to his chief. "You must not think," he pleaded, "that I
have said I was going to be your son-in-law." "Well," replied Ailsa's father,
"I don't know but I'd just as soon have you for one." But the fancy of the
gay and somewhat imperious young heiress fell elsewhere.
In the winter of 1925-26, David K. E. Bruce, son of the Maryland Senator, a
so-called Coolidge Democrat, entered the State Department's foreign service
school to apply himself to apprenticeship for the diplomat's trade. A gay,
rollicking young blade, he had proved his aptitude for practical jokes by
taking out a license in Baltimore in January, 1925, to wed a Miss Regina
Mellon of Philadelphia. Senator Bruce said it was all a mistake. Mrs. Bruce
passed it off as one of her son's pranks. But a Mellon it would be, the young
man persisted, and his next license named Ailsa Mellon. Secretary Mellon
confirmed the engagement after the news leaked out in the papers.
The wedding was in the grand manner, becoming to the only daughter of the
lord of aluminum, oil, coal and steel. The New York Times described it as
"the most notable wedding Washington has ever seen . . . equaled only by
Alice Roosevelt's wedding twenty years ago." Clad in a lacy gown whose train
trailed three yards from the shoulder, the bride advanced to the altar of
Bethlehem chapel of the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul in Washington. Bishop
Freeman officiated before a distinguished gathering which included President
and Mrs. Coolidge, members of the Cabinet and the diplomatic corps, and the
Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Sweden.
The reception was held in the spacious halls of the Pan-American Union,
itself the gift of another Pittsburgher, Andrew Carnegie. There the justices
of the Supreme Court, the U. S. Marine Band and 2,000 guests did honor to the
newly-weds. Each guest received a portion of the wedding cake in a box on
which the monograms of the bride and groom were embossed in silver. Cabinet
members gave Ailsa and Bruce a huge silver tray, the Pennsylvania
Congressional delegation presented another piece of silver. Sir Esme Howard
sent 100 exquisitely bound volumes.
Described as a "million dollar wedding," its splendors rolled on the tongues
of High Society the country over and recalled the feudal fetes in smoky
Pittsburgh which signalized the weddings of other Mellon girls. Cognoscenti
valued at $100,000 the pearl necklace that clasped Ailsa's throat. Her father
was reported to have settled $10,000,000 on her.
Bruce was assigned to Rome. Young service diplomats who were obliged to
pass years in Guatemala City, Colon, Quito and Sofia awaiting such a plum,
cursed their luck.
Next spring Secretary Mellon hastened to Paris to be near his daughter,
convalescent from an appendectomy. Young Bruce resigned the vice-consulship
he had so briefly adorned, and the couple returned to America, to a $200,000
estate at Syosset. It was an Italian stucco mansion covered with vines and
set amid sunken gardens. Young Bruce elected now to turn banker, and entered
the bond department of Bankers Trust. Profiting from his training in
diplomacy and bonds, Mellon's son-in-law advanced rapidly. Within a few years
he was director of Aluminum, Westinghouse, Worthington Pump & Machinery,
Union Pacific and other corporations.
Quite different was the marriage of William Larimer Mellon, Jr. Dames and
debs of Pittsburgh society were all a-flutter over the ceremony, scheduled
for November 19, 1930. Plans were prepared for a wedding in the baronial
manner. A Presbyterian minister of Wellsburg, W. Va., Pittsburgh's Gretna
Green, read the detailed stories in the Pittsburgh social columns with keen
interest, and confided in a reporter that the lovers had been united in holy
wedlock a year before. "They didn't seem like runaways," said the Reverend
Milton M. Allison. "They came to the- manse unaccompanied and to the best of
my recollection the ceremony was witnessed by my wife. They are as much
married now as they ever will be."
The second wedding was hastily canceled and Mr. and Mrs. William Larimer
Mellon, Jr., disappeared on a belated honeymoon. Society simpered that the
bride's father was a manufacturer of artificial legs. How old Judge Mellon
would have abominated their snobbishness!
Alan Magee Scaife, scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh steel family, was ushered
into the Mellon family in the most splendid wedding that the steel and coal
barons of the region could recall. The bride was Sarah Cordelia Mellon,
daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard B. Mellon. The ceremony was performed in
flowerbedecked East Liberty Presbyterian Church, rich with memories of the
earlier Mellons and Negleys.
That evening a thousand guests, the elite of the Iron City, with contingents
from Philadelphia and New York, were entertained at dinner on the Mellon
grounds in a marquee specially built for the feast at a cost of $100,000. It
was all, appropriately, like a medieval castle, with rich tapestries,
decorations in silver and crystal, and china cockatoos swinging in gilded
cages hung as lights. Nobility, in the person of Princess Lebkowitz, graced
the occasion. The Pittsburgh press was ecstatic.
"In providing a scene rivaling the beauty of a fairyland bower," read the
story, "the Mellons challenged the elements. Although there was no moon
tonight, there was synthetic moonlight serene and mellow, from all four sides
of the pavilion.
"Looking from the windows, the guests gazed out on classic gardens where the
synthetic moonlight illuminated the marble images of Venus, Psyche and Diana.
With the color and extravagance within, the windows opened on tropic scenes.
"All the skill of the stagemaster's craft was employed in arranging for this
semblance of a summer moon. Huge lenses were hung high under the eaves of the
pavilion roof, and myriad electric bulbs cast their glow, changing hues as
though by the passing of clouds."
In the vestibule "rugs from Irak[sic] formed cushions underfoot. Tapestries
from Iran and the mountains of the Caspian were suspended from the walls amid
hangings of silk. In broad panels between were glistening mirrors that caught
up the designs of carpets and hangings and mingled them with the glow of
gold, simulating the supporting arches of a Hindu temple, each pillar
surmounted by a mystic light."
The story was bitter reading for the score of Pittsburgh Coal Company miners
and their families evicted that day because they had struck for union
recognition. The same day an emergency convention of the American Federation
of Labor was meeting in Pittsburgh to ask President Coolidge's intervention
in behalf of the strikers, and to summon relief from workers throughout the
country in their behalf.
Nor did the happy laughter that rang through the medieval castle lighten the
sorrow of the widows and children of fourteen workers of the Mellons'
Riter-Conley Company, who had been blown and burned to death two days before
in an explosion while repairing a gas tank. In all twenty-six were killed and
500 injured when a torch in the hands of a repair man ignited 5,000,000 cubic
feet of gas and shook Pittsburgh as by an earthquake. Foreman Elwood Carroll
of the repair gang had intimation of approaching death. That morning he had
told his father: "That job is the worst I have ever been ordered out on. It
is practically suicide to work on that tank with electric torches."
What would judge Mellon have said of million dollar weddings, of the antics
and gayeties of the various offshoots of his union with Sarah Jane Negley?
What would he have said of the merry frolickings at the Rolling Rock Club, an
old family possession which had been turned into a private resort for the
younger Mellons and their spirited friends, of the hilarious early morning
parties in which the principals greeted the dawn with drums and horns, of the
colorful fox hunts when his descendants tricked themselves out in Eighteenth
Century costumes of English squires?
What, particularly, would he have thought of a grandson of his who boasted
the proud title of master of hounds at Rolling Rock? Certainly all of his
patriarchal warnings against frivolous gayety and the waste of time in female
company fell on deaf ears so far as Richard King Mellon, son of Richard B.,
was concerned. He was never so happy as when his blooded horses were winning
an international steeplechase at Grassland Downs in Tennessee, or competing
in the Grand National steeplechase in old England itself. Old Thomas Mellon,
who detested the feudal aristocracy of Europe, would have had little liking
for the dinners given at the smart restaurants on the Rue du Faubourg St
Honore by his grandson in honor of French counts and barons. Or the spectacle
of Mellon women clustering about the former Grand Duchess Marie of the
Romanovs, when she visited Pittsburgh. The judge would even have viewed more
sympathetically young Matthew T. Mellon, another of William Larimer Mellon's
sons, who boldly turned his back on the realm of coal and steel, to lecture
on American literature at Freiburg, to climb the Alps, perfect his
photography and wed the daughter of a German professor.
At least three of the Founder's descendants violated family traditions by
participating in the World War. Thomas Mellon, Jr., published a diary
recounting his adventures as a Y.M.C.A. secretary. He served on the
Washington front, guarding fellowsoldiers against the insidious advances of
vice. Assigned to action at Liberty Hut on September 24, 1918, he distributed
mail, sold chocolates, made out pool checks, repaired pool tables and cues.
In off hours he listened to patriotic speeches and recorded the deep
impression made upon him by Vice President Marshall, who announced that "I
will take the same text that Billy Sunday took here a year ago, 'To Hell with
the Kaiser.'"
Thomas Mellon, Jr., was advanced to position of greeter at the Union Station.
Becoming dissatisfied with the hardships of a soldier's life at Liberty Hut,
he moved to the Willard. On October 10, he was transferred to Camp Humphreys,
where he notes he took a bath, painted signs, and became sick. "Out of humor
when I have to go for the mail in the rain," he decided to knock off, and
returned to Pittsburgh November 2. Again on November 18 he was back in
Pittsburgh to take two Royal Arch degrees. Among his last duties in service
was to fetch a drink for Evangeline Booth. On December 13, he was mustered
out.
Their war records reflected honor on the sons of Judge Mellon. When
the Liberty Bond drive fell $20,000,000 short of its goal in Pittsburgh, the
Mellon brothers made up the quota. It was said that Union Trust, Mellon
National and allied banks bought more Liberty and Allied bonds than any other
bank in the country. Andrew Mellon, himself, after demurring, led personally
a seven-mile parade through the streets of Pittsburgh to open a bond
campaign. He also joined the Four-Minute speakers, to make his first
addresses before audiences composed of the generality of his fellow citizens.
Despite their war-time generosity in subscribing to patriotic bond issues,
the Mellons did not follow in the footsteps of their fellow-townsman and
lavish donor of millions-Andrew Carnegie. Only two gifts in the grand manner
were attributable to the Mellon brothers. Richard B. Mellon and his devout
wife, Jennie King, gave $3,000,000 to the family church. And Andrew and
Richard gave a plot of land valued at $600,000 to the University of
Pittsburgh as a site for its 52-story Cathedral of Learning.
Certainly Judge Mellon would have approved of neither the grand $3,000,000
cathedral-like East Liberty Presbyterian Church, nor the $10,000,000
Cathedral of Learning. "Apart," he wrote, "from the egregious folly of
wasting large amounts of' money on costly buildings of pretentious appearance
in a country where the style and the surroundings of buildings change so
frequently . . . I have always thought it unwise and in bad taste to make an
ostentatious display of wealth in this way."
--[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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