-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Mellon's Millions
Harvey O'Conner�1933
Blue Ribbon Books
New York, N.Y.
--[17b]--
He was a lucky investor whose faith in the Mellon brothers as investment
bankers rewarded him with securities worth 50 cents on the dollar. But then
the head of the House of Mellon was certain that the storm would blow over,
that stocks and bonds would return to "normalcy" along with the rest of the
country, that investors would find their faith and patience rewarded. Except
perhaps in Kreuger & Toll Secured Gold Debentures.
As the crisis wore into a groove, many Pittsburghers felt that the local
Croesus did poorly in the communal effort to alleviate starvation. It did not
add to his popularity. In the first bad winter Of 1930-31, Mellon executives
and others evolved the Pittsburgh Plan to relieve destitution by the good old
principles of self-help, avoiding the peril of pauperization. Firms donated a
sum equal to a day's payroll in the good old days, workers donated a day's
pay, and the unattached wealthy also gave. The $2,000,000 fund was to be
spent in paying wages on public improvements, for which the municipalities of
Allegheny County provided materials.
Three days' work a week, netting $12, was to save families from hunger.
"I am deeply interested by the Pittsburgh Plan," said Mellon in his
indorsement. "It seems to be a workable plan and one that is based on sound
principles. I am convinced that the plan which has been evolved will prove
adequate to meeting the situation and also that it offers a constructive
suggestion for the solution of similar difficulties which confront other
communities throughout the country."
The Pittsburgh Plan nevertheless broke down in the even harsher winter of
1931-32. Mills and factories whose production and payrolls ran from 10 to 50
per cent of normal could no longer afford to give large sums. It became
evident that either Pittsburgh's rich would have to support Pittsburgh's poor
directly, or as in all the past, the poor would have to share each other's
misfortunes.
The Welfare Fund grappled with the problem. It set the objective for the
1931-32 drive at $6,000,000, to be distributed among 150,000 of unemployed
and their dependents. Privately the Fund's officials admitted the sum was
grossly inadequate, but they knew their city to be tight-fisted. $6,000,000
was a liberal estimate of its generosity in such a time.
The campaign lagged. The rich gave $1,000 to $5,000 apiece. A few ventured as
high as $25,000. Time came when the city waited for the psychological moment
when the Mellons would release the jam in the pockets of the wealthy by
announcing, their own gift. How much would it be? Guesses varied, but it was
agreed that nothing less than $1,000,000 would become the wealthiest family
in America.
On November 19, 1931, the Fund announced that A. W. and R. B. Mellon had
given $300,000. W. L. Mellon threw in another $40,000. It was estimated
roughly that this represented 1 per cent of their income in a good year. Some
shrugged their shoulders, others were indignant at the size of the Mellon
gift. The drive lagged, the wealthy scaled their gifts in accordance with the
Mellons'. The Welfare Fund directors consulted with the editors of the three
dailies and jointly they drew up headlines: Mobs Plunder Downtown Section;
Hungry Crowds Fight for Food as Relief Fails. Disease Spreads to Suburbs.
Appalling Poverty Cited as Cause of Lawlessness. These were reproduced in the
composing rooms of the dailies, photographed and arranged in a layout. "What
if you should read this tomorrow?" asked the folder sent to a selected list
of the more prosperous. Even that didn't faze Pittsburgh's moguls: they
believed either that tales of destitution were exaggerated, or that it would
be time enough to act when the poor really rioted. The drive inched past the
half way mark, and up to $4,000,000.
Was the city going to ignore Andrew Mellon's eloquent appeal which started
the campaign off? "It is an opportunity for service," he had said, "such as
may not come to us again in our lifetime. . . . The men and women who
temporarily find themselves in difficulties because they are deprived of
their usual means of livelihood are not strangers but our own people who work
in our shops and our industries." Pointing out that part of the $6,000,000
would be spent to provide work, he asserted that such a plan "helps to
maintain the self-respect which is so essential if people who are able and
willing to work are to be spared the bitter experience of receiving money for
which no compensating labor has been given in return." His remarks were
subjected to an astonishing variety of interpretations.
When the drive finally seemed bogged in the apathy of the better classes, the
city began to growl. An editorial commented on the coldness of certain rich
men. It was openly hinted that donations to the Welfare Fund were riot, if
not revolution insurance. The Mellon family took counsel. They announced that
if other Pittsburghers would give $750,000, the Mellons, their associates and
companies would match that sum and fill the Fund's quota. The drive leaders
cheered on their wavering cohorts, but the $750,000 was not to be found. The
Mellons nevertheless decided it was wiser not to insist on the terms of the
contract, but gave their $750,000. The following winter they gave $200,000,
which was one-sixth of their personal income from the annual dividend of only
one of their many banks.
Governor Gifford Pinchot in the dire winter of 1931-32 dropped down to
Washington to see Pennsylvania's most distinguished citizen in his office at
the Treasury. He was unannounced. The astonished David Finley hurried into
the inner sanctum, returned with the announcement that the Secretary would be
glad to see the Governor in a few minutes. While waiting, wouldn't Mr.
Pinchot like to see Mr. Mellon's latest purchases�some gems from the
Hermitage art gallery in Leningrad, which cost the Secretary $1,700,000? The
Governor was deeply interested.
Then he was ushered into the Mellon office. After a few pleasantries, Pinchot
broached the subject of his visit. Nearly a million wage earners in
Pennsylvania were jobless, in many cases their families were destitute. The
Governor was deeply concerned, and he was sure the Secretary was too.
Constitutional limitations forbade dispensing state money in direct relief.
He proposed therefore that the wealthy of Pennsylvania lend the state
$35,000,000 for poor relief. They would be repaid after a constitutional
amendment had been voted authorizing the loan. Would Mr. Mellon care to lend
$1,000,000 at 4 per cent to his state for this humanitarian purpose?
What Secretary Mellon said is known only to the two. But Governor Pinchot
emerged from his interview with his face flushed with anger. He told
reporters later that the Secretary had promised to take his plan under
advisement. Mellon announced however that he declined the privilege, and no
one else volunteered to lend Pennsylvania funds for its destitute.
Unimpeded by outside pressure, the Mellon doctrine of selfhelp during the
crisis found its fullest expression in industrial communities dominated by
their mills and factories. New Kensington, industrial suburb of Pittsburgh
and seat of important Aluminum Company mills, was an excellent example. As
the crisis deepened in 1932, half of Aluminum's normal working force Of 4,000
was entirely unemployed. The remainder, for the most part, worked two, three
and four days a week. The worker whose pay envelope contained $12 blessed his
good fortune. In addition there had been two 10 per cent wage cuts, the first
in October, 1931, the second in June, 1932. All bonuses had been abolished
along with the 12-hour night shift.
The Welfare Council's roll of destitute expanded to 1,200 families early in
1932. A community welfare fund drive was launched for $50,000. The Mellon
company cooperated graciously by giving space in one of its auxiliary
buildings and by sponsoring a drive among its employees still at work. This
netted $27,000 which the company turned over to the Welfare Council without
any deduction for the expense of collection. The company gave nothing. A
Welfare Council worker declared rather bitterly that many Aluminum employees
who were already receiving relief because they could not support large
families on the proceeds of one or two days' work a week, had been forced to
give a day's pay.
On behalf of Aluminum, it could be said that it gave $2,000 to the Red Cross
and the Salvation Army. It did not believe however in the policy of General
Electric and American Sheet & Tinplate, whose smaller mills in New Kensington
maintained their own relief agencies for furloughed workers.
The Communist Party found the Mellon community a lush field for its
activities in organizing an Unemployed Council and demanding relief from the
borough authorities. The borough -pleaded lack of funds. Aluminum Company,
the principal taxpayer, it developed, paid taxes on only 35 per cent of the
assessed valuation of its plants, by special agreement with New Kensington.
The destitute citizens of the borough, under the leadership of the Unemployed
Council, called forth the best efforts of the New Kensington police force by
repeated marches on the borough hall to demand relief. A riot, when desperate
men crowding into the Aluminum employment office threatened to tear the
office to pieces, brought the police roaring down the street in truckloads.
When marshals sought to evict a jobless Slav, his sick wife and ten children,
even the city council was obliged to protest against further evictions of the
unemployed. This was the more unusual, as a happy harmony marked relations of
Aluminum and the public authorities of its city. In gratitude for efficient
handling of strikes and labor agitation, Aluminum advised its employees to
vote for Dan Burns, boss of New Kensington, and his slate. Chief of Police
Zeloyle was the head of the law, an efficient officer whose tear gas bombs
and fire hose lines were promptly available when Communists gathered in the
streets or halls to demand employment or relief. Occasionally he closed the
Unemployed Council's headquarters. When high school students, running the
city for a day, suggested a police raid on a joint, Chief Zeloyle demurred.
There might be some complications, he said. Why not raid the offices of the
Communist Party and the Unemployed Council, he asked. This was done.
Such details were of course beneath the attention of the head of the House of
Mellon. The Pittsburgh press reported the incidents, even waxed indignant
over Chief Zeloyle's careless handling of rights supposedly guaranteed
citizens under the Constitution. There the matter dropped. The Ambassador was
not responsible for unemployment, he was under no obligation to care for
former employees, indeed by the tenets of rugged individualism he was to be
praised for Aluminum's magnanimity in giving free office space for the New
Kensington drive and encouraging its employees to donate to the Welfare
Council. Stern foe that he was of paternalism, the proprietor of Aluminum, of
Gulf and Koppers felt that the Government had no business relieving
individual distress in the land. He did not join the camp of latter day
capitalists, as in England, who regarded the dole as a form of insurance
against social unrest-even revolution. The very idea of revolution in America
was too fantastic for him to conceive. The depression after all was a passing
thing, and its victims would come through the storm better disciplined by its
rigors, better qualified for survival. As for the rest, well, Nature was a
stern mistress and achieved the evolution of the species into higher forms
through harsh tests.
Mellon corporations stood the harsh tests of the crisis with every indication
of achieving the higher evolution. His family had weathered the panics of
1819, 1873 and those succeeding, and waxed fat. Unless the crisis of 1930
were different in kind, the result would be the same.
Gulf Oil reflected the dirty weather by turning in a deficit of $23,658,000
in 1931. But in the far worse year of 1932 it had reefed in its sails, to
report net income of $2,743,000, a majestic surplus fund Of $178,42o,ooo and
working capital Of $88,562,000. Aluminum's profits shrank from $10,868,000 in
1930 to $4,595,000 a year later but piled up a deficit of $6,763,000 in 1932,
a figure however which included payment of $4,411,000 in preferred dividends.
With assets of $238,539,000 and working capital Of $44,990,000, the company
caused the Mellons no loss of sleep, especially in view of Aluminium Ltd.'s
further assets of $68,267,000.
Koppers suffered the least: its assets leaped in the two crisis years, 1931
and 1932, from $156,000,000 to $186,079,000. Net income figures for the three
years 1930-32 stood at $3,140,000, $2,458,000, and $2,127,000. Eastern Gas
and Fuel Associates could report net for 1932 Of $4,421,000 and assets of
$200,166,000. Serenely aloof, apparently unmindful of the stresses and
strains imposed on industry by the panic, Union Trust Company reported
profits of $6,208,000 in 1931 and $5,438,000 a year later. By some magic the
keystone of the Mellon financial structure was unaffected by the catastrophic
wave of failures which closed 5,096 banks between January 1, 1930, and
December 31, 1932. Early in 1933 it announced its regular 200 per cent
dividend, which compared favorably with the 100 per cent dividend of First
National, New York's premier dividend-paying bank.
Disastrous economic conditions which found reflection even in the lowered
earnings of Mellon's corporations, helped to drag his political party down to
crushing defeat in 1932. Like his industrial predictions of 1929 and 1930,
his prophecy from London that Herbert Hoover would be reelected failed of
confirmation. Nevertheless his electioneering in public speeches in England
for the Republican cause awakened mild protests among the judicious at home
who feared that stump speeches were no part of an ambassador's job.
Hoover's defeat ended Mellon's brief excursion into the fields of
international diplomacy. The English graciously waved him adieu, the Prince
of Wales and 60 other notables attending a farewell. dinner in his honor at
Claridge's on March 3, 1933, and a distinguished crowd seeing him off on the
boat train. Accompanied by the indispensable Finley he left Southampton on
the Leviathan March 17. Asked by the ship reporters in New York whether he
intended to rest after his many years of public activity, Mellon, now a
private citizen for the first time in 12 years, replied characteristically:
"Well, I don't know about a rest Nobody rests. But I will be free, and I
think I have reached an age when I am entitled to be free." Asked whether the
United States was technically off the gold standard, he retorted: "Why should
that question be raised? It is not within the realm of possibility, and I do
not see why the matter should have been brought up." A few weeks later the
"unthinkable" had happened, confirmed officially by President Roosevelt.
Loyal as ever to his native Pittsburgh, Mellon was home the day after
landing. He went down to his office in the Mellon National Bank occasionally,
but passed much more of his time at home than in those busy years before
1921. Neighbors noted that now he had time to play with squirrels in his
Woodland Avenue estate. The former Secretary maintained his apartment in
Washington and split his time between the two cities. At least one reason why
he frequented his Massachusettes Avenue residence after the return from
London was the renewed sniping at his old gray head from the direction of
Capitol Hill. Now it was the former Republican head of the House banking
committee, Louis T. McFadden, who was airing the researches of David B.
Olson, a young Washington attorney who had for a time been counsel to the
Senate banking committee in its investigation of Wall Street's wild spree of
recent memory. McFadden, a small town banker in Mellon's home state, whose
warnings against the supposed misdeeds of the "international bankers" and the
Federal Reserve Board had created a widening breech with the Republican
regulars, finally committed sacrilege by daring to seek President Hoover's
impeachment in 1932. He was read out of his party. That did not daunt his
spirit or tame his voice, particularly when he was swept back into Congress
by a majority of 64,000. The nub of the McFadden-Olson attack lay in the
compromise entered into by the Treasury and foreign shipping companies in
1927 on their war-time taxes. By that deal the Government not only lost
$100,000,000 in due taxes they charged, but was forced to make refunds of
$10,000,000. The chairman of the House banking committee had a lengthy
correspondence with Secretary Mellon, beginning in November, 1931, and
conferred with his successor, Ogden Mills, concerning these cases. Impatient
of delay, McFadden finally decided to take his case before the House, in a
speech of June 4, 1932. The Rules Committee, after hearings on July 9 and 11,
defeated his demand for a Congressional investigation.
On March 16, 1933, Olson, who had supplied McFadden with his ammunition,
filed suit against Mellon, Mills and three subordinates in the Treasury
Department for $220,000,000, the largest ever filed in District of Columbia
Supreme Court. He sought to recover for the Treasury double $100,000,000 of
back taxes and $10,000,000 in tax refunds.
Foreign steamship companies made fabulous profits during the war and up to
1920 carrying munitions and other freight in and out of American ports, and
as such were subject to income and excess profits taxation. The Bureau of
Internal Revenue objected to their tax returns, assessed additional taxes,
was upheld by the Attorney-General in 1920, was sustained even by
Attorney-General Daugherty in 1924, by the Board of Tax Appeals and by the
courts of last resort. The final decision, in November, 1926, closed all
judicial channels of appeal to the steamship companies.
The steamship companies and Price, Waterhouse & Company, according to Olson,
were nothing daunted. Olson, a former Price, Waterhouse & Company employee,
charged that the firm arranged for P. A. S. Franklin, president of the
International Mercantile Marine Company, to take passage on the same ship
that was to bear Mellon to Europe in March, 1927. Franklin was armed with a
brief suggesting a way out of the tax impasse: the companies were to be taxed
on their 1917-1920 profits in accordance with the revenue law of 1921.
Olson was unable to state whether Franklin established contact with Mellon on
his transatlantic trip, but in any event by July 7, 1927, the Treasury
obtained a ruling from AttorneyGeneral Sargent's office nullifying the
rulings of previous Attorneys-General and permitting the Bureau to settle the
cases under the statute of 1921. The next day Commissioner Blair of the
Bureau of Internal Revenue, A. W. Gregg, the Bureau's counsel, and the
steamship companies' representatives got together and by July 10 the
companies had filed amended tax returns which not only wiped out $100,000,000
in back taxes but actually obligated the Government to return $10,000,000 in
refunds.
Mellon had, in effect, repealed the revenue laws of 1916, 1917 and 1918 for
the foreign steamship companies, stated Olson, although these very laws had
been enforced against all other foreign taxpayers. The 1922 law, he added,
specifically provided that previous laws were to be in full effect for the
years covered.
The Attomey-General's opinion which released the companies from their back
taxes was indeed a curious document. The previous rulings were set aside
because they had "never been acquiesced in by the foreign steamship
companies," because they "stand in the way of your dealing with these cases,"
and because the "outcome of the litigation was doubtful."
Late in May, 1933, the former Secretary was served with a summons in the
case, and the way was cleared for eventual trial. On the basis of the suit,
Senator Wheeler introduced a resolution asking the Attorney-General to
investigate the case with a view to civil and criminal prosecution, if
justified. But even under the "New Deal," the department moved with leaden
feet while the Attorney-General golfed in Virginia. As for the main defendant
in Olson's suit, he merely expressed mild surprise when told Senator
Wheeler's demand for a probe of the "$100,000,000 tax scandal." "Yes," he
murmured, "that's a very large sum. Careless of them [the Bureau] if they
didn't collect it."
Open season on the Mellons followed the filing of Olson's $220,000,000 Suit.
Suits, charges, demands for investigation and statements by Attorney-General
Cummings followed in swift succession in the spring of 1933. Olson's next
suit stated that the Government had been "defrauded" Of $1,478,895 in the tax
returns of W. L. Mellon, head of the Gulf Oil and six other Gulf executives,
filed in 1926, 1927 and 1928. For 1927, for instance, W. L. Mellon, nephew of
the former Secretary, was accused of failing to report income from Gulf on
which a tax of $484,175 was due the Government. A few weeks later Olson, in a
letter to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, asserted that late in 1931
Andrew W. Mellon had "inflicted" upon himself losses of $6,700,000 by the
sale of 60,000 shares of Western Public Service and 123,000 shares of
Pittsburgh Coal stock, which were deducted in his income tax returns. The
stock was sold, he said, through Union Trust and then repurchased 31 days
later, in January, 1932, by the Coalesced Company, owned by the Mellon
family. The striking similarity between this alleged sale and those of
Charles E. Mitchell, former National City Bank chairman, was pointed out to
Attorney-General Cummings, who announced that he would investigate,
especially in view of the fact that he had received letters from many private
citizens asking such an investigation.
McFadden, in a letter to the Attorney-General, gave his version of the
mysterious Coalesced Company:
"I am informed that the Coalesced Company is owned 100 per cent by A. W.
Mellon, that he himself owns all of the preferred stock and that the common
stock is divided equally as issued to his son Paul Mellon and his daughter,
Mrs. David Bruce [Ailsa]. It has been stated that this company is being used
by Mr. Mellon for the purpose of concentrating his wealth and thus, during
his lifetime, effecting a distribution to his legal heirs, principally for
the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes." He added that Richard B. Mellon
had formed a similar corporation, known as the Riscar Company.
Senator McKellar thereupon sought authorization for a Senate inquiry into all
phases of taxation concerning the Mellons and their banks and corporations
from 1917 to 1933. On the same day McFadden revealed that notice of the
dissolution of the Riscar Company had been filed in Pittsburgh, for the
purpose of "destroying the evidence" concerning his charges.
Attorney-General Cummings announced that his department would assign special
representatives to scan all the anti-Mellon charges and President Roosevelt
was reported as interested in having the true facts brought to light. The
public, following the sensational disclosures in the Mitchell tax suit and
the Morgan investigation, was in an ugly mood. Victims were being sought.
Nevertheless neither the Department of justice nor the Bureau of Internal
Revenue were represented when the Riscar Company was dissolved, with no voice
raised in question or opposition.
If his industrial corporations fared better than their mates and Union Trust
achieved new triumphs, it was tribute to the principles of enterprise
tempered by caution taught his sons by judge Mellon, and so faithfully
extended by them into new fields. From his hands they had received the golden
formula for success. Unfortunately he had been unable to give his successor
that more elusive formula to happiness. It cannot be said that the formula
was highly intricate. judge Mellon had set down the ingredients carefully
enough in his autobiography. He set about methodically to seek a wife, of
good practical stock, intelligent, healthy, matter of fact. She gave her
husband sturdy sons who could be molded into smart business men. Under the
eyes of their father they set about industriously to make money. That was
happiness.
Andrew Mellon had no luck at all. Disease had claimed his fiancee when he was
a young man. When be made his second attempt, be threw away the good advice
his father had given him and picked a girl with gay laughter in her voice and
restlessness in her spirit.
The future of the Mellon fortune, and his own happiness, now rested on the
shoulders of his only son, Paul. And the young man shrugged his shoulders in
the face of that responsibility, devoted himself to the lighter aspects of
current literature, desired to be a publisher, and snapped his fingers at
banks and petroleum and coking ovens and aluminum ware.
That was the personal tragedy of Andrew Mellon's life. Of what use had it
all been, the unrelenting work, the unending piling up of millions, the
expansion of sleek, efficient corporations into titans of American industry?
Soon he would be gone, and hired men would be directing the fortune whose
basis had been laid by Grandfather Andrew in the harsh struggle against the
western Pennsylvania wilderness in the 1820S, whose outlines had been shaped
by Thomas Mellon in fifty years of uncompromising struggle, whose grandeur he
himself had assured by a long life of unremitting zeal in amassing money.
The Mellon family was sterile, its young men evinced no desire to continue
that work of "well doing" that had gladdened the hearts of ancient Mellons.
Those who didn't waste their time on the boulevards of Paris and the race
tracks of two continents, applied themselves to erudite studies and
occupations of no pecuniary value, or merely dragged out commonplace
existences. Andrew Mellon was denied the deep satisfaction that had come to
his father as he watched his sons growing into profitable manhood, and
rejoiced when mere striplings outwitted their elders in business life. With
deep content he had retired from active participation in business, confident
that his sons would carry the Mellon name and the Mellon fortune forward.
There was no such happiness in Andrew Mellon's life. There had hardly ever
been happiness, merely a never-ending matching of wits. Now that was done.
Gone were the prestige, the public acclaim that had been sweet music in his
ears for a few years. Adversity had overtaken his world. His philosophy stood
questioned in the forums wherever men discussed the purpose and aim of
economic activity. He perceived a new world but shrank from its implications.
Worst of all, his son would not guard the fortune against these new and
insidious doctrines that sapped at sacred initiative, would not lead these
mighty corporations to new conquests, would not stake out new domains.
The scion of the Mellon family was neither a wastrel nor devoid of ambition.
Paul was an open, likable, intelligent young man.
Both Paul and Ailsa had gone through difficult childhoods, suffering the
emotional stress and strain of being shunted back and forth between hostile
parents, the demands made upon them for, allegiance to one or the other, the
sharply contrasting personalities of the cold banker and vivacious
Irishwoman. The woeful story of the divorce was not lost upon them, and Paul,
especially, favored his warm-hearted mother.
Andrew Mellon expressed, in his way, an affection that was genuine and deep.
He was too busy at the bank, though, to spend much time with them when they
were home, and he found intimate contact difficult. He gave Paul every
advantage that money could buy in education�the best private schools in
Pittsburgh and the East, and then Yale and Cambridge.
But Paul was more McMullen than Mellon. Apparently he had no practical bent,
no passion for blacksmith forges, for sharp trading, for gossiping over smart
deals of business. In his freshman year at Yale he was awarded the chief
prize for his excellence in-English literature. He found pleasure in working
on the Yale Daily News, he wrote literary compositions, delved into the
moderns, and brought out a thesis on�of all subjects for a Mellon!�Donn
Byrne. He was the first member of his class to have his poems published. He
accepted Scroll and Key rather than Skull and Bones. He wrote sonnets and
used such esoteric words as "impellancies," which never before had found
place in the Mellon vocabulary of acceptances, discounts, and drafts.
Paul made up his mind about his future while at Cambridge. He would enter the
publishing game�a fascinating life where one talked with writers, dealt in
affairs of the mind, explored the latest ventures in ideas.
His father had other plans for him. Paul Mellon, it was announced, would
enter the Mellon National Bank after his graduation from Clare College at
Cambridge. Paul compromised with the creed of credit and collateral. After a
short time in the bank, he would enter a prominent publishing firm in the
East. Why should he waste his youth in cold calculations on loans and
mortgages, pipelines and magnesium? So far as he was concerned the Mellon
fortune was large enough. An intelligent person had no need for so much money.
The very fabric of the Mellon ideology was being rent asunder. The scion of
the fortune had turned apostate. Andrew Mellon felt humiliated. What had
entered the Mellon strain, that its young men went in for literature,
foolishness or mediocrity? It was time to take a firm hand with Paul. He had
been dallying long enough at Cambridge. The young man would take a few
lessons in finance in the summer of 1930 from the master himself.
Paul presented himself at the Mellon mansion on Woodland Road in July, after
a slow journey from England. Stiffened by his mother's opposition to banking,
he held forth bravely with the newspaper boys. "The idea of becoming a banker
is not attractive to me," he told them in his frank, engaging manner. "I'd
much rather be in the publishing business."
The Secretary of the Treasury, when he read of this interview, jumped aboard
the night train for the Iron City. No figure in the Old Testament, bewailing
the misfortune of a prodigal son, was more bitter than Andrew Mellon whose
only son had not only gone back on the ancient trade of trafficking in money,
but had spurned it publicly.
The head of the house of Mellon summoned all the passion in his
shrunken body as he exhorted, entreated, lectured the obdurate youth. Was it
for this that Thomas Mellon had endured grinding poverty to win a footing in
the professions, was it for
this that Andrew Mellon had worked unceasingly all his life long, to see his
family relapse into the obscurity from which it had come, to see his fortune
scattered to the four winds?
Paul could find no answer to such bitterness and despair. He climbed into the
limousine with his father and rode downtown to the bank. He entered the
routine of a bond clerk and counted the monotonous days of a sultry summer,
until he could return to Cambridge, his books and his friends. It was
announced that his father was "not enthusiastic" about the publishing
business, and a further note described Paul's entry into the bank as his
"first taste of work."
Paul saw the reporters again. "There's nothing I can say about myself right
now," he told them. "I'm going to be at the bank all this summer and go back
to Cambridge this fall for another year. After that-well, there really isn't
anything definite."
Strange words those from a Mellon. "Nothing definite." Young Thomas Mellon at
the age of nine had decided he wanted wealth -and he got it. Thomas A.
Mellon, James, Andrew, Richard, they had all been definite, practical young
men who knew what they wanted and took it.
Sometime in his last year at college, Paul struck a bargain with his father.
Mrs. Mellon was part of that compromise. The Secretary let it be known that
be had bought the Rokeby race horse farm in Fauquier County, Virginia, in the
heart of the hunting and racing region, for his son. For the summer, Paul
would hunt and ride, bringing with him from England horses and perhaps some
polo ponies. His mother was to grace the place, one of the oldest and most
beautiful in Virginia. There were rumors of a reconciliation between Andrew
Mellon and his divorced wife, but they lacked basis. Nora McMullen had not
the slightest desire to renew an impossible life, and the Secretary himself
probably could have thought of nothing more distasteful.
Paul's part of the bargain he kept. He reported to work, rather tardily to be
sure, at the Mellon National Bank on December 1, 1931, accompanied by his
father. It was at nine o'clock, an early hour for a literary person. The
reporters clustered about Pittsburgh's wealthiest young man. "What are you
going to do?" they asked. "I'm going to learn the banking business," replied
the erstwhile sonnet writer. "In what capacity?" "Whatever they want me to
do." "Under whom will you work?" "I don't know yet." "What about these
earlier reports of your literary ambitions?" "That's all old stuff, and it's
all been explained," be retorted impatiently.
The young banker lived in his father's empty mansion, was driven to work in
the morning, and returned to the house at night in a routine to which he
applied himself, apparently with some success, for within a month or so he
had been elected a director of the First National Bank of Donora. A Broadway
wit observed Paul's rapid progress under the caption: HOME TOWN BOY MAKES
GOOD.
Paul was playing the game. Perhaps in a few years, it would be called off and
he would be free. . . .
pps 324-361
--[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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