-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner�1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
--[13b]--
Judge Mellon's benefactions were mainly among dependents of old friends and
clients whose ways had been overtaken by adversity. Neither the medieval nor
the Twentieth Century American notions of charity fitted in with his hard
Knoxian theology, in which every man stood on his own two legs, asking no
charity and giving little.
The principle appealed to his sons. Andrew Mellon's earliest recorded gift
was for $2,000, made jointly with H. C. Frick and J. M. Guffey in 1889 for
the Johnstown flood relief. Their philanthropic habits were reflected in the
financial statements of Kingsley House, a settlement house for the families
of sweated steel workers in Pittsburgh. In 1903 Richard gave $100 for life
membership, while Andrew gave his customary $5. In 1907 he became a $1,000
life member. In 1902 the Y.M.C.A. conducted a campaign for a new building,
and hundreds gave $250 apiece. The Mellons were not represented, nor were
they in succeeding years listed as donors. In 1909 Andrew Mellon gave $500 to
the Y.W.C.A.
That was in the Pittsburgh manner of Presbyterian iron and coal masters who
believed charity weakened the moral fiber of the recipients and added little
luster to the donors. If the wealthy invested their money in new mills to
give added employment, and in new houses to furnish shelter, they were doing
the most real service to the poor. It was better to give jobs than money. The
country heard the same doctrines expounded with no little vehemence in White
House statements as the crisis of 1929 deepened in succeeding years.
It was Andrew Carnegie who upset these traditions by astounding his fellow
Pittsburgh millionaires with the new theory that it was a crime to die rich.
Each time he came to Pittsburgh, it seemed he tossed away a million dollars.
Ile library, the art museum, the music hall and institute of technology named
for him grew in successive years as he added gifts which totaled $27,000,000.
After his death in 1919, the Carnegie Foundation announced that Pittsburgh
had shared generously enough in the steel magnate's wealth.
Soon afterward the nation discovered the new Dives in the Smoky City and
summoned Mellon to Washington. All Pittsburgh looked expectantly at
Mellon-would he be Carnegie's successor, tossing away millions for the pure
joy of public honors and private satisfaction?
The test came on Founder's Day at Carnegie Tech, when Secretary Mellon was to
be the featured speaker. Tech was strapped for money. The Foundation had
agreed to give only on a contingent basis of $2 for every $1 donation. The
city's elite turned out for the celebration. Mellon, so the gossip ran, was
to announce a splendid gift that would solve the school's financial problems.
The honored guest, introduced as Pittsburgh's most illustrious citizen, began
reading his speech in a voice hardly audible beyond the first row. Midway, he
was seen to fumble among the pages. He had lost the continuity. Nervously he
fingered through the manuscript prepared by the faithful Finley, lost his
patience, announced abruptly, "That's all," and retired to his seat. Next
morning the audience found out that he had been speaking about the monumental
building plan for Washington. There was no announcement of, a gift.
If Andrew Mellon declined the role of Carnegie, he and Brother Richard
honored their father's memory by a gift to education which would have brought
his unstinted praise. That was the founding, in 1913, of the Mellon Institute
of Industrial Research. Its main purpose was to benefit American
manufacturers through the practical cooperation of science and industry. The
Mellons furnished the building and basic equipment, the manufacturer paid the
industrial fellow and his expenses. By 1930, industry was paying $800,000 a
year, which equaled the Institute's budget.
The Institute solved admirably the research problems of the Mellon
corporations. Laboratories for Gulf Oil, Koppers and other Mellon enterprises
are maintained there, and research goes on endlessly in the problems of
petroleum, coal and coke and their by-products, aluminum, steel, paints and
varnishes. Manufacturers wait their turn for access to its facilities.
Mellon explained the Institute's operation to C. W. Barron. "My company, Gulf
Oil, for instance, bought the rights to results from research in oil and
natural gas," he said. "We are not largely in the natural gas business but
when we found a new gas of greater intensity than had yet been discovered, we
sold it to Mr. Trees of Benedum-Trees. He incorporated a company and I
believe has made considerable money out of it. We stumbled on something that
was the basis for the cure of epilepsy, and we turned that over to somebody
else."
Probably the Institute's outstanding achievement in tying together science
and business was the discovery in its laboratories by Ward Baking Company
fellows that the amount of yeast and sugar needed for bread could be halved.
This formula, declared Dr. M. A. Rosanoff of the Mellon Institute, enabled
Ward to profit $1,000,000 a year.
The secret, patented for fifteen years was a bacillus in salt water bread
that effected a saving of 65 per cent in the consumption of yeast. While Dr.
Rosanoff took justifiable pride in the discovery, and Ward stockholders
rejoiced, nutrition experts shook their heads. White bread, they declared,
depends on yeast for its vitamin content. If bakers' bread is tasteless and
lacking in nutrition, it is due partly to science's contribution in making
available the use of cheaper grades of flour and savings in other
constituents in the staff of life. They were reminded of Vernon Parrington's
remark that science had become the "drab and slut of industrialism." In 1924
the Institute announced that research carried on in its laboratories proved
that it is "safer to drink nothing but highly carbonated water and beverages."
A project for the "aid of all mankind in the comforts of beds and bedding"
was started at the Institute in 1925, and scheduled to List for three years.
Dr. H. M. Johnson, in charge of the project, pointed out the absence of
definite knowledge of what sleep is, what conditions improve it, how it can
be measured, how much is required, and what kind of bedding paraphernalia is
best fitted to produce healthful rest. To aid this beneficial if tardy
research into a primal necessity, twelve students were paid to sleep
connected with instruments and under constant observation as they lay on
varying mattresses and springs. The fellowship was paid by a prominent bed,
springs and mattress manufacturer.
After the research job had been completed, the head of the company approached
a well-known magazine writer with an offer to furnish him with material for
several articles on sleep. He waxed eloquent over the fascinating results of
three years' research in a problem which somehow had slipped human cognizance
through the centuries. He assured the writer that soporific as the subject
might seem at first blush, few themes would elicit wider interest. The writer
was interested and said he would be glad to look over the material. Thereupon
the manufacturer suggested that he himself would be glad to help pay him for
giving the public access to such invaluable information. Indignantly the
proffer was rejected. Nevertheless articles subsequently appeared in various
magazines explaining the results of the Mellon Institute's applied research
into sleep, and soon advertisements followed, quoting from the magazine
articles and assuring readers that "science proves" that Blank's mattresses
are most restful to the human form.
The Aluminum Company of America, which maintains its own laboratory at New
Kensington, financed in 1931 a study at Mellon Institute of the "occurrence
and determination of aluminum in foods." The research, carried on by three
Mellon Institute workers, aided by an Aluminum Company expert, completely
absolved aluminum cooking utensils of causing deleterious effects upon the
human body.
Such suspicions had been given currency by Dr. C. T. Betts, a Toledo dentist,
and director of the Anti-Cancer Club of America. He based his claims in part
on Federal Trade Commission Docket 540, relating to alum baking powders, in
part on his own studies and reports of medical practitioners friendly to his
conclusions. Aluminum salts, he maintained, were a factor in cancer, nervous
indigestion, gastritis and stomach ulcers. The sale of alum baking powders,
containing sodium aluminum sulfate, have been forbidden in many European
countries, he reported. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the
American Medical Association, attacked his conclusions vehemently. German
investigators, troubled by the same problem, had decided that the amount of
aluminum dissolved in a pot in the course of cooking was not harmful.
The Aluminum Company of America decided to settle the controversy once and
for all. Its Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company, leading maker of aluminum
utensils in the United States, had sales of $15,000,000 in 1929. The report
of its inquiry at Mellon Institute was published in 1932 in Industrial and
Engineering Chemistry and thousands of reprints of the article were sent to
the medical fraternity and others. Later it formed the basis of an
advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled
Etiologic Aspects of Aluminum. The favorable result of the research was
hailed in a Pittsburgh daily as the "vindication of a local product."
A similar project, conducted at Mellon Institute in 1930, dealt with the
effect of certain metals upon the vitamin C content of pasteurized milk.
Aluminum, it was found, is "as satisfactory a material" as dairymen can use,
and superior to copper and tin.
In recognition of the "vision, foresight and will" of the Mellon brothers in
the field of scientific research, the American Institute of Chemists in 1931
presented them with medals. "We feel privileged to have been given this
opportunity for service," responded Andrew Mellon. "We have found the
chemist," he added, "to be a valuable guide in the world of business."
The Mellon Institute was as near a dream as Andrew Mellon ever harbored in
his practical life. The fact that research and invention had been reduced
from a hit and miss avocation of erratic geniuses to a cold mixture of
laboratory apparatus, doctors of philosophy and business men with a practical
job in hand, and made to sustain itself, vindicated his sober judgment of
1913, when "chemistry was regarded by most industrialists as a stepchild
rather than a blood relation." The long waiting list of corporations which
could not be served, even though they were willing to pay, inspired in him
another dream-that of a replica of the Parthenon arising in his native
Pittsburgh. Plans were announced for an $8,000,000 building and the Mellon
Institute looked ahead toward further usefulness as a handmaiden to business.
Two years after he founded the Institute, Andrew Mellon turned his attention
to his alma mater�his father's too-the neglected and run-down University of
Pittsburgh. Ile institution was little more than a collection of disjointed
schools and colleges ranging over Pittsburgh's territorial expanses. His
dream of selfsustaining education, an expansion of the Institute, envisioned
Pittsburgh corporations endowing the University of Pittsburgh to cope with
their scientific problems. In return they would give a fraction of their
savings as a royalty to the university.
He turned to his old friend and adviser, Dr. William Charles White, medical
director of the Tuberculosis League of Pittsburgh. He was commissioned to
conduct a survey of the University of Pittsburgh, to be financed by Mellon.
To members of the Survey the impression prevailed that he contemplated a gift
in a princely sum, perhaps $10,000,000, to put the university on its feet.
The survey not only confirmed the obvious impression that the school was
inefficient, but developed surprising information that many trustees profited
by their positions and that the purchasing agent was a seventeen-year-old
boy. When the survey tried to inspect the actions of the trustees themselves,
it was given peremptory orders to "get out."
Mellon was disgusted. Finding the institution a poor investment, he gave up
his dream of a university financed by business and solving its problems.
Eventually the University of Pittsburgh improved. A new chancellor brought
order out of chaos, coordinated the schools and concocted a plan for a
52-story Cathedral of Learning 680 feet high, to cost $10,000,000. Its
architectural details were born during a phonograph rendition of Die Walkure,
"climax rising on climax, when you felt that each was the top of human
achievement."
Dr. Mellon declared that "it seems to me appropriate that the University of
Pittsburgh should be the first to adapt science and architecture to the need
of modern conditions in the educational world." During the progress of the
building, the Mellon banks floated a bond issue for a stadium to seat 60,000,
in token of the university's growing athletic prowess. Pittsburgh, true to
its Presbyterianism, refused to finance the 52-story cathedral, and it was
scaled down considerably. When the panic came in 1929, funds ceased coming in
altogether, and the giant structure became one of the world's wonders. The
masonry, completed on the upper stories, ended at the fourth, and the steel
work of the first three stories stood gaunt and naked, giving the impression
on moonlight nights of a vast structure floating in air. Pittsburghers passed
it and sighed, reflecting how easily "Uncle Andy" could have clad the bare
shanks and given life to the unfinished, deserted structure.
Nevertheless the irreverent called the institution the Mellon University�a
name Andrew Mellon was credited with preferring when he dreamed of its
rejuvenation in 1915. Of its twenty-nine directors, twelve served as
directors in Mellon banks and corporations. Only three were not directors of
banks and corporations, and of these, one was A. W. Mellon himself, the
second William Watson Smith, counsel for Aluminum Company of America, and the
third a learned man.
Chancellor John G. Bowman, writer of children's verse, defender of academic
freedom at the University of Iowa, planner of the Cathedral of Learning,
faced a hard choice when inquiring students and younger instructors, in 1927,
formed a Liberal Club for the discussion of topics which by no stretch of
imagination could find favor with a board of trustees in whose hands rested
the ultimate destiny of the $10,000,000 skyscraper. The Chancellor himself
had demanded "kinetic and exalted thinking on the part of students and
faculty." "The student," he explained, "is to think hard, to think justly, to
think to a purpose with his brain and with all his energy." So the Liberal
Club students began thinking about the war of extermination declared on the
mine workers' union by Pittsburgh Coal and other companies; an instructor
described the technique of the $2,500,000 Pennsylvania primaries conducted by
Mellon and Vare machines in 1926; Scott Nearing, Arthur Garfield Hays, Norman
Thomas and Harry Elmer Barnes were invited to address campus club meetings.
The inquiring students were informed that such partisan points of view could
not be permitted on the University's campus, and a professor was obliged to
cancel his series of articles on the coal industry in a Pittsburgh daily. A
dozen instructors joined the local branch of the American Civil Liberties
Union, whose main concern was defending the striking miners in the coal
fields. The title of a talk by Director Roger Baldwin of the American Civil
Liberties Union, "The Denial of Civil Liberties in Western Pennsylvania" was
blue-penciled to read "Civil Liberties." The Liberal Club protested the
sending of fifty students to break a strike of stuffers at a newspaper plant.
Then it announced that Harry Elmer Barnes would speak on the MooneyBillings
case.
University authorities had reached the end of their patience. The meeting was
canceled, the speaker and Liberal Club members directed to get off the
campus, and later the club was disbanded and two of its leaders expelled. A
graduate assistant in philosophy, was dismissed. A few days after his
dismissal, Governor Fisher signed the $1,200,000 state appropriation bill for
the University of Pittsburgh. The Chancellor declared "no issue of freedom
-of speech was involved," but the Pittsburgh dailies thought differently, and
the University's skeletons were dragged out of the closet and displayed to
the public in flaring headlines.
An investigation into the affair by a committee of the American Association
of University Professors brought forth these comments: "It is generally
agreed by all the members of the Pittsburgh faculty with whom we have
conversed that there exists in the faculty of that institution a widespread
feeling of insecurity and timidity. . . . They state that over a period of
several years there has existed the conviction that a teacher must be
extremely cautious in taking part in public discussion, especially if his
convictions are enlisted on the side of unpopular causes. . . . This feeling
applies to the public discussion of controversial, social, and economic
questions, such as the relations of labor and capital, government regulation
of industry, and the domination of government by financial and industrial
interests."
Instructors whose investigations in the coal and iron police system brought
notoriety to the University were informed, indirectly, that they would be
happier elsewhere. Impatient at the close control exercised by the trustees
and their president, George Hubbard Clapp, director of Aluminum Company of
America, they accepted offers from Wisconsin and Amherst.
When students in 1931 applied for permission to organize a liberal
discussion group, they were told that none could be tolerated until all
former members of the disbanded Liberal Club had left the University. A group
announced its intention to go to Harlan County, Kentucky, to look into the
coal strike there. Chancellor Bowman declared that "I do not think it is the
concern of the students how the mines are operated. The University is not
officially interested and will not sanction such movements as this." Later he
modified his statement.
Police arrested students in a class room for their protest against the
invitation extended to General MacArthur, chief of the U. S. Army staff, to
deliver the Commencement address in 1932, Professors who also deprecated the
general's lumping of pacifists with Bolsheviks in his speech, recounted
privately their protests a few years before to the Chancellor against the
University's refusal to permit the faculty to help make the choice of
Commencement speakers. Chancellor Bowman explained to a spokesman for the
faculty members that the board of trustees insisted that that was their
concern, and nobody's else. He requested the spokesman to take back the
letter of protest, so it would not appear in the University's files.
Such was the status of the higher learning in the University whose board was
graced by two Mellons and eleven of their business and financial associates.
Despite their presence on the board, it languished. Its total endowment
amounted, after nearly a century's existence, to but $1,838,000. Although it
tried to keep up with the educational times by giving credit for horsemanship
and by playing Notre Dame and Army, it could claim no library and practically
no original social research in Pittsburgh, that vast laboratory of human
relationships in the machine age.
Honored by doctorates and academic acclaim, the Pittsburgh Midas
sprinkled money on colleges and schools. The Forbes Street residence, of
unhappy memory, went to Carnegie Tech to serve as a dormitory for the girls
at Margaret Morrison College. The preparatory schools at which Paul studied
received cash gifts, and Choate a $200,000 library building. Mellon became an
Associate of the Harvard Business School, at $1,000 a year. With his brother
he gave $30,000 for a fellowship at Wilmer Opthalmological Institute, and
they assumed the deficit one year of the Carnegie International Exhibit at
Pittsburgh. He headed a list of donors for the Soldiers and Sailors Club in
New York, lent a Holbein to help a building fund for the Museum of the City
of New York and served as treasurer on Will Hays' $15,000,000 pension fund
drive for Presbyterian ministers. Each Christmas he gave $25 to $50 to each
Treasury employee who had served him personally during the year. Cases of
personal distress among Treasury employees met a generous response.
In church affairs, Andrew William acknowledged the superior piety of his
brothers, James Ross and Richard Beatty. He retained membership in the church
of his ancestors, the East Liberty Presbyterian, served as treasurer for a
new building fund of $115,000 in 1887, but gladly yielded the honors of
official position to James Ross, who became more devout as the years passed,
and was elected chairman of the board of trustees in 1919.
Although he joined his brother Richard in giving a $450,000 plot of land to
the East Liberty church in 1925, Andrew did not share in the $3,000,000 gift
which Richard announced on May 3, 1930. The cathedral, read the announcement,
was to do "its part to reassure those who fear that the country is doomed to
become engulfed in materialism." The youngest of the Mellon brothers honored
himself by his filial devotion, because the original East Liberty church had
been built by his grandparents, Jacob and Sarah Negley, and the plot on which
the grand new edifice was to rise had descended in the Mellon-Negley family
from the original East Liberty Valley homestead.
Ralph Adams Cram, architect of St. John the Divine and the Washington
Cathedral, was to design the "most imposing Presbyterian church in the
world," somewhat to the distaste perhaps of old-line Knoxists who decried
fine church buildings, stained glass windows and organs as smacking of
popery. The new church nevertheless was to symbolize Pittsburgh's preeminence
in American Presbyterianism. That denomination claimed 256 churches in
Allegheny County, three theological seminaries and 109,000 church members.
The cathedral, cruciform, was to be Gothic in style. If the poor found the
main structure for worship too imposing for their tastes, there was to be a
side chapel for them, open at all hours of day and night. The plans recalled
the munificence of the Medicis, for here were to be found food and clothing
for the needy, as well as spiritual comfort, and showers and a dormitory, to
give rest and comfort to the weary and worn.
Nevertheless there were those irreverent enough to describe the magnificent
cathedral as the "Mellon fire escape."
Pps. 227-255
--[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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