THE CABINET: Death of Mellon

Last week, in Southampton, L. I., Andrew William Mellon, long one of his country’s richest men, Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932, died of uremia, broncho-pneumonia and old age.

Successor to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick as overlord of the feudal financial system of the unique U. S. city of Pittsburgh, Andrew Mellon was an officer or director of 160 corporations and worth no one knew how much more than $500,000,000 in 1921 when Harry M. Daugherty is said to have suggested to Warren Gamaliel Harding that he would make a good Secretary of the Treasury. President-elect Harding answered: “I never heard of him,” and in so doing expressed not only his own ignorance but that of the U. S. public.

The facts about Andrew Mellon, other than his fortune, were exceedingly simple. Born at Pittsburgh in 1855, he was the son of a hard-headed Tyrone County Scotch-Irishman who -“ounded the banking house of T. Mellon & Sons. At 18, Andrew quit Western University of Pennsylvania to start a lumber business with his 15-year-old brother, Dick. When the lumber business succeeded, first Andrew and then Brother Richard joined the bank, which they built into the $380,000,000 Mellon National Bank. In the next 40-some years, Andrew Mellon multiplied the Mellon capital of $1,000,000 or so by hundreds, built up half a dozen major U. S. industries including the Aluminum Company of America, Koppers, Gulf Oil Corp. of Pa., McClintic Marshall Corp. (bridges).

Thus, when Andrew Mellon stepped into the Cabinet he was beyond question one of the great men of U. S. industry and finance. Many great lawyers have been members of the Cabinet but he was the first great financier-industrialist ever to hold such a post. Hence a sentimental public, once it knew who he was, fostered the legend that he was “the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.”

Certainly Andrew Mellon aspired to be. Multimillionaire although he was, he gave his years from 66 to 77 to a task in which there was no other glory for a man who had as small ability as he for arousing public adulation. He handled the financial affairs of the U. S. as he handled his own, reduced the national debt from $24,000,000,000 to $16,000,000,000. This great achievement remains untarnished. Not so his other major work: the reduction of income taxes.

The Great Depression of 1929 caused men to doubt the merit of all Andrew Mellon’s fiscal works and most of all his tax policy in which the reduction of high surtaxes on big incomes was a prime tenet. To the Mellon mind taxation was simply a device for raising revenue. As a businessman he knew it unwise to charge more than the traffic would bear and it was his theory that high surtaxes reduce revenue by driving capital to take refuge in tax-exempt bonds and other devices for avoiding taxes.

This reasoning, so clear to Andrew Mellon, became anathema to a post-Depression generation who felt that one of the major purposes of taxation should be to prevent the growth of large fortunes, and took to its bosom another theory, that saving money is what causes depressions. To them Andrew Mellon like Herbert Hoover was the Cause of Depression incarnate. The New Deal accused him of evading $3,000,000 of income taxes on his 1931 income but a grand jury refused to indict him. An action before the Board of Tax Appeals—in which he entered a counter claim of $139,000 for overpayment of tax—after dragging on for over two years has not yet been decided.

To defend his tax returns Andrew Mellon appeared in the public eye once more, when he donated $9,000,000 for a museum to house a national art gallery in Washington, of which the nucleus was to be his own collection valued at $19,000,000. The gift was announced during the tax appeal board hearings. In poor health for the past two years, Andrew Mellon spent last spring going over architects’ plans in Washington.

In 1900, Andrew Mellon married Nora McMullen, a granddaughter of Brewer Peter Guinness, whom he divorced for desertion in 1912, after she had borne him two children, Ailsa and Paul. When Andrew Mellon went to Washington in 1921, Ailsa Mellon was his hostess. When she married David K. E. Bruce, son of Maryland’s Senator, Andrew Mellon gave them his summer house, Bonnie Dune, at Southampton. It was at Bonnie Dune, where he had visited his daughter almost every year, that Andrew Mellon died last week.

Shy, frail, aloof, kindly, shrewd and delicate, Andrew Mellon was weak only in his last illness. Before that, he had been a character whose apparent fragility concealed an interior power. But History will have to decide between two conflicting theories of Government fiscal policy before it can make up its mind whether he was the national villain or the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton. In either event History may call him great, for one test of greatness is the extent to which a man fulfills the ideas and the ideals of his time and place. His time was the era of fortune building, his place hardshelled industrial Pittsburgh. A vast force both in making the U. S. what it then was and in causing it to want to become something else, Andrew Mellon never expressed his philosophy better than when he was asked why his faction had spent $2,000,000 to try to get George Wharton Pepper candidate of all the “right people” of Pennsylvania, nominated as U. S. Senator in 1926. Said he: ‘Tt was like giving money to a church.”

Last week after he had been buried in Pittsburgh, his lawyer made public the terms of his will: his children having been already provided for, he left $180,000 in bequests to employes, the rest of “a very large estate” to an educational and charitable trust. From his standpoint he had left his money to philanthropy. From the standpoint of the New Deal he had made a final attempt to dodge taxes, for bequests to charity are not subject to inheritance tax.