Andrew Mellon

From the Pittsburgh public schools Andrew went to the Western University of Pennsylvania. He studied four years with the class of 1872, but left three months before graduating to start a lumber and building business in nearby Mansfield. He was reserved, self-sufficient, and strongly self-controlled, with a keen analytical mind and a gift for quiet leadership. Thomas Mellon was engaged primarily in real estate operations, but he extended credit to Andrew Carnegie [q.v.] and in 1871 had loaned Henry Clay Frick [q.v.] his first $10,000. Young Mellon saw something of these two men and of Republican politicians of the Cameron-Quay machine who visited his father. Later, in 1880, he and Frick made a European tour which is supposed to have kindled his initial taste for art. Having proved his abilities in the lumber business, the young man in 1874 entered the family bank. It soon became plain to Judge Mellon that Andrew possessed not only the best business brains of the family but a touch of financial genius, and in January 1882 he transferred ownership of T. Mellon & Sons to his twenty-seven-year-old son.

Pittsburgh was at this time the center of a growing industrial area, and Mellon was quick to grasp the important role a bank could play in supplying capital for its expanding industries. He at once began applying his special talents: foresight in gauging the ability of small firms to grow into large ones, acumen in estimating the qualities of would-be borrowers, and shrewdness in applying the family rule of constantly reinvesting profits in the businesses which made them. He had a particular genius for assessing the worth of new ideas. Some instances of his support of promising young men in apparently risky ventures are striking. One small undertaking to which he gave crucial assistance, started by the chemist Charles M. Hall [q.v.] and some associates on the basis of Hall's epochal patent of 1889 for the electrolytic manufacture of aluminum, grew into the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), with the Mellons as principal holders. Andrew Mellon bought his first stock in January 1890, became a director a year later, and soon was briefly treasurer. Shortly afterward he gave similar support to the inventor Edward Goodrich Acheson [q.v.] in placing the Carborundum Company on a sound basis, Mellon becoming Acheson's partner in 1896. By 1898 he had stock control.

Other great undertakings accompanied or followed these. In the early 1890's Mellon organized large oil properties, including wells in western Pennsylvania, pipelines, and refineries at Marcus Hook, Pa. His activities at one time brought him into conflict with John D. Rockefeller [q.v.], to whose Standard Oil Company Mellon disposed of these properties in 1895. Six years later he took an important part in founding what became the Gulf Oil Corporation, which presently sprang to great wealth with the development of oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma. He also helped to establish the Union Steel Company, with mills on the Monongahela, later merged into United States Steel. He could claim to be the chief creator of the Standard Steel Car Company and the New York Shipbuilding Company, both powerful corporations. It was he who converted the small American organization of Heinrich Koppers, German inventor of by-product coke ovens, into a rich and important corporation, which saved vast quantities of gas, sulfur, coal-tar, and other substances formerly wasted. His partnership with two young Lehigh graduates, Howard H. McClintic and Charles D. Marshall, enabled their firm to become world famous for construction work, building the Panama Canal locks, the Hell Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and many other notable structures. Mellon was also active in public utilities in the Pittsburgh area and in many companies of moderate size. At one time he was a director or officer of more than sixty corporations.

The core of his interests, however, remained banking. In 1890 Judge Mellon made over to Andrew substantially all of his property, to be controlled for the benefit of the family. A year earlier Andrew had become the first president of the Union Trust Company of Pittsburgh, of which he and Henry Clay Frick were the principal organizers. In 1902 T. Mellon & Sons was incorporated as the Mellon National Bank, with Andrew as president. Most of its capital stock was placed in the hands of the Union Trust Company, control of which was shared by Mellon, Frick, and Mellon's younger brother Richard Beatty, whom he had taken in as his co-partner in T. Mellon & Sons in 1887 and who thereafter remained as his close associate. Other Pittsburgh banking institutions soon joined the Mellon ranks; together they constituted one of the great financial powers of the nation.

In large part, Mellon left the management of the industrial enterprises in which he invested to trusted subordinates. But he took a keen personal interest in the development of the Aluminum Company of America, Gulf Oil, the Carborundum Company, and Marshall-McClintic. Like other industrial leaders, he did not escape controversy and sharp criticism. Alcoa, protected at first by patents and later by tariffs, was constantly accused of monopolistic sins. Acheson, who developed carborundum, became Mellon's enemy, accusing him of injustice; the purchase by Mellon and three others of Heinrich Kopper's American assets from the Alien Property Custodian in 1918 for little over $300,000 aroused criticism. Mellon also became interested in oil investments in Mexico; and after the Madero revolution his executives, like other American holders, resisted Mexican land laws and suffered heavily.

Few financiers of comparable wealth and power have been as little known as Mellon was down to 1921. A man of moderate height, slender build, long narrow head, chilly gray-blue eyes, and tightly closed lips masked by a mustache, he possessed a quiet elegance of presence but lacked magnetism. He was reticent, soft-voiced, diffident in manner, and extremely reluctant to speak in public, a slight stammer indicating nervousness. To a small circle of friends he was devoted; he played poker regularly with Frick, George Westinghouse, and Philander C. Knox [qq.v.]. Sometimes he took a vacation with boon companions in camping and fishing or hunting. He was too busy, however, to give much time to society. Till 1900 he lived modestly with his parents on Negley Avenue, and he seldom entertained. He took some interest in public institutions, becoming vice-president and treasurer of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and a director of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Pittsburgh Maternity Hospital. He was also chosen a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh. On its campus, in 1913, he established, with his brother Richard, the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, to carry forward the program of Robert Kennedy Duncan [q.v.] for bridging the gap between science and industry.

Until 1900 Mellon seemed a confirmed bachelor. But Frick in 1898 had introduced him on a transatlantic liner to Mr. and Mrs. Alexander P. McMullen, of an established brewing family in Hertfordshire, the lessees of Hertford Castle. Their twenty-year-old daughter Nora Mary, a beautiful, high-spirited girl, attracted Andrew. He followed her to England, fell in love with her, and though at first rebuffed, persisted until he married her in Hertford on Sept. 12, 1900. On his return home he took a twelve-room house of plain style on Forbes Street, distinguished only by some of the fine paintings which he had begun to buy. Two children were born, Paul and Ailsa. Unfortunately, the marriage did not prove happy. Mrs. Mellon did not like life in industrial Pittsburgh, resented her husband's absorption in business, and probably felt the disparity in their ages. Every summer but one from 1901 to 1909 Mellon joined his wife for long vacations in England, twice of five months' duration, but at other times they were much apart. The alienation grew in 1909 into a separation, and in 1910 he filed a divorce suit, the decree being granted in July 1912. After the divorce Pittsburgh found him more completely devoted to business than ever, seldom giving a dinner or accepting an invitation.

By 1910 Mellon had become an important if retiring figure in Pennsylvania politics, aiding generously the Republican machine dominated first by Matthew S. Quay and then by Boies Penrose [qq.v.]. It was said that Penrose counted on him for some of his largest financial contributions. A much more congenial figure to him was Philander C. Knox, with whom he regularly lunched at the Duquesne Club and who was a close friend as well as legal counsel. Mellon's Republicanism was of the orthodox conservative, high-tariff, nationalistic variety, with principles dating from Harrison-McKinley days. Opposed to Woodrow Wilson, he gave money in 1916 to the campaign against him, and in 1918-19 he contributed $10,000 (the same sum as Frick) to a propagandist committee to assist Knox in resisting the League of Nations. In 1920 Mellon advocated Knox for the presidential nomination. It was natural for Knox to wish to make Mellon an active force in national affairs. When Warren G. Harding was nominated and elected president in 1920, he owed a debt to both Knox and Penrose. In his erratic search for cabinet members, he accepted Knox's advice that the Treasury post be given to Mellon, whom Knox described as "one of the greatest constructive economists of the century." Mellon was reluctant to accept, but finally did so.

The choice, though generally applauded, astonished the country, for hardly one citizen in a thousand had heard of Mellon. The news that he had spent a lifetime in banking--he was sixty-five--and was one of the richest men in the world, and that he belonged to the most conservative wing of Republicanism in a conservative state, was accepted as one of many evidences that Harding would turn back to preprogressive policies. The New York World attacked the appointment on the ground of Mellon's wealth, widespread banking activities, and industrial holdings. Since his department would enforce prohibition, an outcry was also raised over his stock ownership in the Overholt distillery--though this was only a $25,000 holding in a concern which had gone bankrupt five years earlier.

In the next eight years Mellon made himself the dominant figure in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. For one reason, he had to deal with some of their most difficult problems: reduction of the national debt, readjustment of taxation, financial settlements with a long list of nations, and the sudden change from boom to depression. For another, his real ability and immense experience and expertness in finance impressed a nation embarking on perhaps the most materialistic period in its history. His scheme of tax reform in particular became famous as the "Mellon Plan," though some of its reductions had been proposed by President Wilson and Secretary of the Treasury David F. Houston [q.v.] in recommendations after the war closed. Even Mellon's insistence on economy delighted people, for national economy meant more money for business and personal expenditure. Most important of all, his personality lent itself to a tremendous campaign of publicity. The contrast between his immense wealth and retiring life, the apparent ease with which he handled intricate problems involving billions, his intense belief in business as the mainspring of national well-being and hence the dominant concern of the government, the suddenness with which he had appeared on the national stage--all this made it easy to present him as a Merlin, a wizard who turned everything he touched into prosperity. He held himself coldly aloof from the raffish figures and disreputable episodes of the Harding administration. Men not only called him the greatest head of the Treasury since Hamilton, but believed what they said.

The fiscal difficulties he faced on taking office on Mar. 4, 1921, were serious: a national debt of just over $24,000,000,000, expenditures which reached five billions in the fiscal year 1921 and were expected to total four billions in that of 1922, a heavy and ill-adjusted tax system, and an urgent public demand for a return to peacetime budgets and tax-levies. It was easy to institute the reductions of expenditure promised by Harding. Charles G. Dawes, the first Director of the Budget, worked harmoniously with Mellon to this end. While the government reduced expenditures, Mellon turned to a drastic revision of taxes. This was based on his conviction that business was above all others the activity of the country which counted, that it would prosper in proportion to the lightening of its tax-load, and that a prosperity which initially benefited the rich would filter down to workingmen and farmers. In dealing with taxes he characteristically spoke of their effect on "business and industry," not on the people. Holding the principles of Herbert Spencer, he abhorred any idea of taxation as a social force, useful for equalizing wealth. "I have never viewed taxation," he remarked, "as a means of rewarding one class of taxpayers or punishing another."

The tax program Mellon laid before Congress in December 1921 therefore aroused violent controversy. He urged complete repeal of the wartime Excess Profits Act, which taxed all corporate gains above eight per cent, as tending to chill enterprise and restrict investment. He also asked that the income tax and surtax be cut from their maximum of 65 per cent to 40 per cent immediately and 33 per cent shortly. These personal reductions should apply to the rich alone, however, not affecting incomes below $66,000. To maintain government revenues, he asked for more stamp taxes, a bank-check tax, a motor vehicle tax, and higher postage. Democrats under Senator James Reed and progressive Republicans under Robert M. La Follette [q.v.] assailed this plan as flagrant class legislation. "He favors a system that will let wealth escape," declared La Follette. Hostility was accentuated by Mellon's opposition to Senator George Norris's bill to meet the farm depression by creating a federally financed corporation to buy surplus commodities and send them to starving populations abroad on Shipping Board vessels. Critics alleged that under Mellon's tax plan his own interests would save nearly a million annually. His program was warmly defended, on the other hand, by such experts as Alexander Dana Noyes. In the end the excess profits tax was mainly repealed. But the corporation tax was raised from 10 to 12.5 per cent, the maximum surtax on incomes was fixed at 50 per cent, and taxes were lowered on incomes as low as $6,000.

The Secretary continued to press his fiscal principles and in the favorable atmosphere of the Harding-Coolidge administrations met increasing success. Prosperity and peace helped him in a steady lowering of the national debt. It was reduced almost eight billions, standing at the end of the fiscal year 1928-29 at $16,185,000,000. His insistence on keeping federal spending well under income was universally approved. Veterans' bonus legislation he consistently opposed, and he guided President Harding's hand in writing the veto message of 1922. Congress, he pointed out, had failed to provide revenue to pay for the bonus, and the proposed increase of the public debt by one sixth to benefit fewer than five million people would undermine confidence in the national credit. In 1924 he aided Coolidge with another veto, but this time the measure, costing about $3,500,000,000, was successfully repassed. Mellon also consistently fought the successive McNary-Haugen bills providing for farm relief by shipping surplus agricultural commodities abroad. He objected to them not only as burdensome to the Treasury but as requiring a large bureaucratic machinery, artificial price-fixing, and assumption by the government of responsibility for the welfare of a large section of the population. The first such bill was defeated in the House in 1924; when the second passed Congress in 1926 he helped to write a veto message that killed it, and he did so again in 1928. He had thus earned the hostility of veterans and the farming population.

Yet he could afford this in view of his positive achievements. He helped to decrease the budget until in the fiscal year 1927 it stood below $3,500,000,000, or about three billions less than in Woodrow Wilson's last year. Short-term obligations were paid off or refunded into long-term obligations at lower interest rates. Mellon boasted in January 1928 that a childless man with a $4,000 income who would have paid a $120 income tax in 1920 now paid only $5.63. He defended excise taxes as giving many persons otherwise practically untaxed a just share in governmental burdens. Naturally the upper- and middle-income groups applauded him. In 1924 he again presented an elaborate tax revision scheme to the country. Declaring that cuts would increase national production, he proposed to reduce surtaxes from 50 to 25 percent, lower taxes on moderate incomes, and eliminate tax-exempt bonds by constitutional amendment. Congress, its liberal members suspicious, insisted on keeping the surtax at 40 per cent on incomes of $500,000 or above, increased the maximum estate taxes from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, established a gift tax, and provided for publicity of income tax returns. Coolidge signed the new law (June 1924) with a public protest that some of the provisions which contravened Mellon's wishes were harmful. But it did effect a general reduction of income tax rates.

Mellon's domestic philosophy of debt reduction, tax reduction, and special care for large capital aggregations in order that benefits might seep from the upper strata down to the lower was easily grasped. But the underlying theory of the Coolidge-Mellon program of debt settlements with foreign nations was less logical. Mellon was chairman of the World War Debt Commission. In 1925 he presided in Washington over meetings with Belgian commissioners which resulted in an agreement for repayment of the Belgian war debt with interest over a period of sixty-two years. Similar agreements with Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries followed, resulting in the funding of more than $11,500,000,000 of foreign war and postwar obligations. In computing terms, "ability to pay" was one ruling factor; though Western Europe could not possibly continue remittances unless German reparations were collected, the United States stubbornly recognized no connection between reparations and debt; and no account was taken of the effect of payments on trade. Ultimately European debtors would have to send the United States many billion dollars' worth of goods--perhaps twenty billion dollars' worth--to finance the payments; yet Mellon, supporting high tariff walls, was unwilling to receive such goods. Before the economic crash of 1930 it became plain that the vaunted debt settlements were workable only while the United States pumped loans (the Dawes Plan and Young Plan loans) into Germany to pay reparations to finance international debts; and in time the debt settlements were engulfed in the Great Depression and the later world war. They reflected the ideas of a large body of cabinet members, congressional leaders, and experts, supported by general American opinion. But Mellon had shown no great imagination or foresight, had lent himself to current fallacies, and even after world skies darkened did nothing to enlighten and lead American opinion.

Lesser features of Mellon's long Treasury service can be given but cursory mention. Under the Volstead Act he had responsibility for prohibition enforcement, entrusted first to a prohibition unit in the Bureau of Internal Revenue and later to a Bureau of Prohibition under a commissioner. Under successive Agricultural Credits acts of 1921 and 1923 he reorganized and efficiently administered the federal farm loan system, which through various agencies had by 1928 advanced farm interests well over $2,000,000,000. He terminated the complex financial operations of the United States Railroad Administration. In these and other labors of the Treasury he was aided by a devoted group of younger men, among whom may be specially mentioned S. Parker Gilbert, Ogden L. Mills [qq.v.], and David E. Finley. He took a finely creative interest in the beautification of the national capital and in the realization of the Burnham-McKim-Olmsted-Saint-Gaudens plan of 1901. When Congress finally determined on the rescue of Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall, Mellon was entrusted with the acquisition of land and erection of public buildings. It was in no small degree because of his taste and energy that Washington was largely transformed in the years 1921-30. A lesser accomplishment in which he took pride was the introduction of a better-designed and more convenient paper currency, much smaller in size.

Lauded as one of the greatest secretaries of the Treasury, Mellon was at the same time under constant attack from Democrats and progressive Republicans. Senators La Follette, George W. Norris, James Couzens [q.v.], and John Nance Garner became prominent critics of all his policies. His Revenue Act of 1928, reducing the tax burden more than $220,000,000, cutting the corporation income tax from 13.5 per cent to 12 per cent, increasing the credit for earned income, and repealing the excise tax on automobiles, brought the criticism to a head. He was specially assailed for Treasury tax refunds to corporations, which in 1929 included $15,000,000 to United States Steel and over the years of his incumbency included several millions to Mellon companies. Garner alleged that the total of "refunds and secret credits to wealthy taxpayers," including Alcoa, exceeded two billions. It was later revealed, too, that Mellon had secured a memorandum from the Commissioner of Internal Revenue on the various ways in which an individual might legally avoid taxes, and that a tax expert sent by the Commissioner to help prepare the Secretary's income tax return (a common practice in the Treasury Department) subsequently joined Mellon's personal staff and, by means of family corporations and stock sale losses among them, enabled Mellon to reduce his tax payments (Schlesinger, post, p. 63). As for Mellon's public policies, the credit for budget, debt, and tax reduction must unquestionably be divided between his shrewd management and the economic boom of 1921-29. Unquestionably also he remained benevolent toward large business interests. When the depression began it could be questioned whether his policies, favoring rapid capital accumulation and investment, had not stimulated stock market speculation and inflation. No more than Coolidge and others did he foresee the depression or take precautionary measures.

Retained as Hoover's first Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon agreed with him that the depression was part of an inevitable aftermath of the first World War. He had said as late as March 1927 that the stock market was "orderly" and he saw "no evidence of overspeculation." The Treasury surplus was now replaced by deficits, foreign payments first dwindled and then ceased, and federal bonds became increasingly difficult to sell at par. Hoover and Mellon met the depression by emphasizing retrenchment, especially with the army and navy. In 1931 large borrowings became necessary, reaching $150,000,000 a month in the latter half of the year. Mellon for a time issued Treasury notes at intervals of a few weeks and refunded them by bonds after a few months, a generally commended expedient; but in December 1931 rising interest rates forced him to offer $1,300,000,000 in obligations of one year's maturity or less. He capably assisted the National Credit Corporation (for banks), the Home Loan banks, and other relief agencies. In June 1931 he and Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, in Europe on ostensible vacations, sent home warnings on the condition of Germany which led Hoover to issue his proposal of June 20 for a war debt and reparations moratorium of one year. The depression, however, undercut Mellon's prestige and brought him increasingly under criticism; and Hoover, who had never been close to Mellon, turned more and more to Ogden L. Mills, since 1927 Under Secretary of the Treasury. In February 1932 Mellon was prevailed upon to accept the ambassadorship to Great Britain, and Mills was appointed in his place.

As ambassador, Mellon was warmly welcomed by British society as well as business leaders and statesmen. He had become gracefully efficient in speechmaking, and with his daughter Ailsa as hostess, he offered a pleasing hospitality at the embassy. No official part of his service, which ended with the Hoover administration, was memorable except his work in helping to implement the debt moratorium and to offer advice on international financial problems. He hung on the embassy walls some parts of his costly art collection, the extent of which was then only conjectural, which aroused keen interest. During his residence abroad he added to that collection. Closing his official labors on his seventy-eighth birthday, he returned to Pittsburgh and at once resumed activities at his old desk in the Mellon National Bank. The death of his brother Richard in 1933 was a heavy blow. Another brother, James Ross, died in 1934.

Mellon's later years were marked by an unpleasant tax wrangle, the government asserting that he had underpaid his income tax for 1931 by a figure ultimately set at $2,059,507. The charge, first aired by Congressman Louis T. McFadden [q.v.] of Pennsylvania in 1933, hinged on Mellon's sale of a large block of stock, at a substantial loss, to the Union Trust Company of Pittsburgh, which in turn sold the same stock a few months later to a corporation owned by Mellon's two children. Contending that the transaction had been fraudulently arranged, the Department of Justice in May 1934 sought to obtain Mellon's indictment by a federal grand jury, which, however, found the evidence insufficient. When the Bureau of Internal Revenue levied a deficiency assessment in 1935, Mellon carried the case to the Board of Tax Appeals. Its unanimous decision, rendered a few months after Mellon's death, found the contested stock sale valid; and though on other technical grounds it added $485,809 to Mellon's 1931 income tax, the result was considered a complete vindication.

His last years, however, were occupied mainly with philanthropy, and especially with the founding in Washington of what became the National Gallery of Art. He had acquired over the years one of the greatest private art collections in the world. His personal taste at first ran especially to portraits, but his appreciation broadened. Among his 126 paintings were eight Rembrandts, three Vermeers, three Titians, and valuable works by Velßzquez, Reynolds, Goya, El Greco, Holbein, Dürer, Constable, and Raeburn. His sculptures included splendid works by Donatello, Verrocchio, and Luca della Robbia. The collection as a whole was valued at $35,000,000 or more. In one day in 1923 he paid $500,000 for four paintings, including two Turners. Twenty-one masterpieces from the Hermitage collection of Catherine the Great came into Mellon's hands after the Russian Revolution at a cost of about $10,000,000. For Raphael's "Alba Madonna" alone he paid $1,166,000, reputed to be the highest sum ever given for a work of art. In 1937 Mellon made formal announcement of the gift of his art collection to the federal government, together with securities sufficient to erect a building costing about $15,000,000 and to establish a $5,000,000 endowment. President Roosevelt asked Congress to take favorable action on the "magnificent" offer; and though some critics objected to Mellon's course in naming the original members of a self-perpetuating board of trustees and to restrictions which emphasized classic rather than living American art, Congress did so. Construction of the National Gallery, designed by John Russell Pope [q.v.], began before Mellon's death. He specially stipulated that the building should not bear his name; and he anticipated, as proved true, that other donors would add valuable collections to his.

In the spring of 1937 the government filed suit against the Aluminum Company of America, alleging that it was a monopoly in restraint of interstate trade. Mellon, his son Paul, and twenty-four others were named as defendants; they, through their attorneys, argued that earlier investigations had cleared Alcoa of wrongdoing. The legal battle had hardly begun, in June, when Mellon, living in Washington to direct work for the National Gallery, was seized with a bronchial ailment. Partially recovering, he went next month to the home of his daughter Ailsa at Southampton, Long Island. There he died of bronchial pneumonia and uremia. The body was taken to Pittsburgh for the funeral and burial at Allegheny Cemetery.

Mellon had unquestionably been one of the major figures in the industrial and financial development of the trans-Allegheny region and the most powerful personage of the Harding-Coolidge regimes. His resourcefulness, shrewdness, and foresight had fostered numerous enterprises that others neglected. Charles M. Hall had sought vainly in other quarters for the money to apply his aluminum process before the Mellons came to his aid; the men who opened the Beaumont, Texas, area after the dramatic Spindletop oil-strike found the Mellons readier than others to supply credit. Mellon's large achievements as Treasury head synchronized with an upward sweep of the business cycle, and his failures with its downward fall. His doctrines of the paramount importance of business, the wisdom of distributing wealth from the top downward, and the folly of using taxation as a social instrument were rejected by the New Deal generation which followed him and have been questioned by many economists. It may nevertheless be argued that in postwar America his emphasis on economy and tax-reduction was sound, his technical expertness in complex financial matters was highly valuable, and that his composure, system, and solidity strengthened the nation's confidence. His veiled and reticent personality cloaked an essentially simple, thoughtful, and just nature. With the misfortune of excessive wealth he coped as conscientiously and efficiently as his training and traditions permitted.

text by Allan Nevins, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.

Sources:

[No adequate biog. of Mellon exists. He is grossly overpraised in Philip H. Love's Andrew W. Mellon (1929) and caustically undervalued in Harvey O'Connor's Mellon's Millions (1933). An unpublished biog. by Burton J. Hendrick, based on Mellon's papers and prepared at the request of the family in the early 1940's, is in their possession. There is useful material in Thomas Mellon's privately printed Thomas Mellon and his Times (1885). See also William L. Mellon and Boyden Sparkes, Judge Mellon's Sons (privately printed, 1948), and Frank R. Denton, The Mellons of Pittsburgh (Newcomen Soc., 1948). For Mellon's own views, see his annual reports as Secretary of the Treasury and his Taxation: the People's Business (1924). George Soule's Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 19171929 (1947), in the Econ. Hist. of the U. S. series, is important for the economic background. Political and social histories are of little value for Mellon's work, though such books as Frederick L. Allen's Only Yesterday (1931) paint in the color of the period. Underlying trends are well treated in Recent Econ. Changes in the U. S. (2 vols., 1929), mainly written under the auspices of the Nat. Bureau of Econ. Research. Much of value may be gleaned from Sidney Ratner, Am. Taxation (1942); from William Allen White's A Puritan in Babylon (1939) and Claude M. Fuess's Calvin Coolidge, The Man from Vermont (1940); and from William Starr Myers and Walter H. Newton, The Hoover Administration (1936). The volume by Harold U. Faulkner, From Versailles to the New Deal (Yale Chronicles of America, 1950), is illuminating, as is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order (1957). In large part, however, students of Mellon's career must rely on newspapers, such magazines as Current Hist. and the Nation (strongly anti-Mellon); on the debates in the Cong. Record; and on the successive vols. of the Am. Year Book and the New Internat. Year Book. Mellon's own papers are in the possession of the family. There is some Mellon correspondence in the Calvin Coolidge Papers at the Lib. of Cong. and the Carter Glass Papers at the Univ. of Va. Lib., and other material in the Nat. Archives, esp. Record Group 84.]

CITATION

Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2001. (http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC)

1855-1937

Born: March 24, 1855 in Pennsylvania, United States Died: August 26, 1937 Occupation: Art Collector, Financier, Industrialist, Secretary of Treasury Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.

Table of Contents

Biographical Essay Further Readings Source Citation

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Mellon, Andrew William (Mar. 24, 1855 - Aug. 26, 1937), industrialist, financier, Secretary of the Treasury, and art collector,