It was time to demonstrate that private compounding would, in the end, benefit the public better than immediate federal outlays. The gallery would be a monument to this conviction. In the s, while President Franklin Roosevelt was assigning the private sector more blame than praise, Mellon offered the nation a gift from the fruits of private enterprise: a stunning assemblage of works, with an offer to build a museum on the Mall worthy to house them.
Few other expenses were spared at the gallery, whose architectural details gave much thought to citizen comfort. Understanding that some tourists would have difficulty handling stairs, for instance, Mellon kept his structure as horizontal as possible. Lenin and the communists stole the art from the Russian people, Mellon believed, so preserving and displaying the art for people in the United States was both wise and fair.
Behrman quoted a Mellon friend as saying. Mellon wagered that if he gave samples of the highest quality work from many periods, he would provide the seeds for a full collection. His gift would draw other gifts. And he was right. By the time President Roosevelt dedicated the gallery in , several other great business leaders—Samuel Kress, Joseph Widener, and Lessing Rosenwald—had likewise made major contributions. Indeed, his example eventually drew that one donor whom all philanthropists hope will follow them: his own son.
The National Gallery was an immediate success, on its own terms. Ready by wartime, it provided a welcome refuge to soldiers on leave, and a haven to many seeking beauty and peace in a world lacking both.
However, there is no definitive proof that this is a true story. In , he sold oil operations to Standard Oil; Mellon used profit to invest in Carborundum Company, which made electric generating wire; Mellon became a director. In addition to the fellow club member's with whom Andrew had business connections with listed above, he was also a friend of Club member Benjamin Franklin Jones.
The Mellon family publicly supported H. Frick in the Battle of Homestead. By this time in his life"…as the century neared its end, Andrew Mellon could not have afforded to emulate those East Coast 'robber barons' with their palatial chateaux on New York's Fifth Avenue, their ornamented 'cottages' in Newport, their extravagant parties, their oceangoing yachts, their retinues of servants, and their arranged marriages to impoverished but titled European aristocrats.
Nor did he wish to do so. He liked travelling, but the vulgar ostentatious world of the American's Cup of East Coast high society and transatlantic cosmopolitanism, as depicted and dissected by Henry James and Edith Wharton was decidedly not to his taste.
He was amazed when his nephew, W. For Mellon, New York was a place to do occasional business, and from which to board the ship to Europe; unlike Carnegie and Frick, he had no ambitions to own a home there, nor any wish to build himself a place in the country or a cottage on the coast.
He thought such living self-indulgent, wasteful and unpatriotic; he did not like big houses, whether urban or rural; he was wholly uninterested in birds or flowers or trees or landscape; and although he could ride, he was not very good at it, and did not enjoy it. Nor did he have any fancy for the symphony or the opera or the ballet: indeed years later Paul Mellon remained doubtful whether his father could have told Chopin from Cole Porter.
The limits of his indulgence were cigars and whisky [sic] at the Duquesne Club, and low stakes poker with Frick and other friends. Donner, formerly of Cambria Iron Company.
Thanks especially to his friendship to Frick and the business interests they entered together: "In scarcely twenty-four months, then, Andrew Mellon had amassed an unrivaled portfolio of interests across the Pittsburgh region and beyond. No longer just a small-scale, private banker, he was now a major financier and businessman, hungry for action and eager to intervene.
During the same period, he was also involved in the creative organization of the local coal industry in a manner far beyond anything his father had achieved or envisaged. By orchestrating a bold consolidation of Pittsburgh's coal production, he believed he could increase profits. His plan was to combine hundreds of small companies many previously owned by the Judge into two large enterprises according to how they distributed their coal, which was either by rail or by river.
This was easy to do, because most used one means or the other and had either railroad spurs or river coal tipples. But very few had access to both.
Accordingly, Mellon resolved to create two new, consolidating companies, Monongahela River Coal for those using the water and Pittsburgh Coal for those dependent on the railroad. Ostensibly they were separately managed businesses.
But Mellon closely coordinated the two firms, devising different funding streams for each, in the determined belief that this would result in increased efficiency, reduced transport costs, and bigger profits. Mellon was always very reserved, but found it easy to open up to Nora. Upon his first request for marriage, she said no. In the spring of , she finally accepted his marriage proposal and he set up their residence at Forbes Street in East Liberty, she still residing in Britain.
Their engagement period was almost entirely by letter, he being in Pittsburgh and she in Britain, they didn't see each other until their wedding day, September 12, The new Mrs.
Nora Mellon, did not see Pittsburgh until after their honeymoon. She hated the dirt, the smoke, and the general attributes of a big city. Upon exiting the train to head to Forbes Street, she exclaimed to Andy: "We don't get off here, do we?
You don't live here? When apart, which was quite frequently during their marriage, Mellon address Nora as "Norchen," and she addressed Andrew as "Fatty.
Nora wanted for nothing, but that was not enough for her as she wanted real, romantic love which Mellon either did not or could not provide. In June , she threatened to divorce him for conman Alfred Curphey. Mellon never understood why, if Nora had every tangible thing she could ever want, she was so unhappy. Nora met Curphey on a trip to Britain to visit family; Mellon paid him off; and the couple returned to Pittsburgh.
The Mellon's traveled to Paris, but, "After Paul Mellon was born in the summer of , relations between Andrew and Nora went rapidly downhill, though Andrew remained sublimely-or naively-oblivious to this. The immediate catalyst was the major financial crisis in October , which necessitated Andrew's worried return from Paris to Pittsburgh. He had good reason to go, but Nora was furious at his once again putting business before marriage. On her way out, Nora told Andrew, almost as an afterthought, that Grace's husband, Thomas, his friend and a New York corporation lawyer, would be paying him a call.
Chadbourne indeed appeared, and after much prevarication and circumlocution, and without evident embarrassment and concern, he finally informed Andrew that his wife had made an irrevocable decision to leave him and to obtain a divorce.
She had, Chadbourne reported, been unhappy for the last two years, and could not continue as she had been doing. No mention was made of another man, only of Nora's wish to go back to live in England. For unsuspecting Andrew, 'it was a bolt out of a clear sky.
Mellon was not going to give up on her so easy, "His back against the wall, Andrew at once hired a detective dispatching him to Europe with letters of introduction from the chief of detectives in Allegheny County to the head of Scotland Yard, and also from the acting U.
His mission was to find out the truth of Nora's activities in Paris, in London and on the high seas. But as Nora had calculated, it was too late: while the investigations were proceeding, Andrew would have to come to terms, if scandal was to be avoided. A legal separation was agreed in the summer of , preliminary to the dissolution of their marriage, on grounds of desertion, after two further years. It was further agreed that Andrew and Nora would have joint custody of the children on an equal and alternating basis, several months at a time with either parent, and that Nora would promptly leave for Europe to commence the two-year period required for divorce on the basis of desertion.
She also gave an oral undertaking to Andrew who failed to get it in writing that when Paul and Ailsa were with her in Europe, she would not bring them into contact with Curphey. Upon their divorce, things could have turned nasty between Andrew and Nora and thus, trickled down to their children, but Andrew refused to let things get this low. On his daily visits to them in the morning and evening, on his way to and from work, Ailsa seemed much colder, Paul once hit him with a stick, and Nora would always remain in the room, offering caustic and belittling remarks about him.
Though hurt and mortified, Andrew refused to respond in kind and he never spoke ill of his wife in his children's presence, then or thereafter.
Andrew, then, had authority over the children; Nora could see them, but Andrew had to give permissions. In the early twentieth century, male millionaires indeed males in general were not closely involved with child-rearing, but Mellon's diary from to shows that he devoted much effort and thought to the task, spending a great deal of time with Ailsa and Paul and genuinely delighting in their company.
He rode and drove with them in the summer, he went sledding with them in the winter, he bought them dogs and ponies and birds, and he played hide-and-seek in the evenings. On Sundays, he took them to East Liberty Presbyterian Church, on other days to the zoo and the circus, and there were trips to New York and to Atlantic City, which was a rather more wholesome and exclusive seaside resort than it is now. On birthdays and at Christmas, he lavished them with presents-a ring, a watch, a camera, and perfume for Ailsa; a train set, a bicycle, a toy gun, and a typewriter for Paul-and he was unfailingly attentive to such Yuletide rituals as trimming the tree and filling their stockings.
Mellon recalled, Andrew 'entered wholeheartedly and with touching delight into every compartment of their lives. Now that all four of them were away from the tainted Pittsburgh environment, relations between Andrew and Nora became much easier.
Andrew Mellon in Business and Pittsburgh in the 20 th Century : From , during a time of economic downturn that hit Pittsburgh particularly hard, Mellon National Bank grew fivefold-a complete vindication of Andrew's decision to restructure the business.
Koppers Company. Mellon had holdings in McClintic-Marshall, the firm who won the contract to construct the Panama Canal. Mellon was the founder of Donora, PA. Donora is an amalgamation of the name of the founder of Union Steel, William Donner and the name of his wife, Nora. Well before the U. These loans were formally orchestrated by J. Morgan and Company, which mounted an intense effort to involve as many American banks and finance houses as possible, and Andrew Mellon was willing and able to join in.
This was a substantial sum, and few East Coast institutions took bigger shares. By this time, Mellon was also chairing the Red Cross War Council appeal in western Pennsylvania, launched with a dinner at which former President Taft spoke.
The rest was stock, most of it held in the great Mellon enterprises…. In regards to Mellon's income, "There are many other examples of such under valuations, which simply signifies that Mellon was so rich that he had no idea precisely how wealthy he was.
It had been a long lifetime of 'acquisition and accumulation. In support of Warren G. Obviously up to this point, , Mellon was very successful in business and banking, "But Mellon was still almost unknown outside Pittsburgh, and it was only his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury in by Warren Harding which turned him into a national figure. He had long been active in Republican politics in Pennsylvania, he was strongly opposed to the League of Nations, and he delighted in bringing business practices into the government.
Despite a statute stating that those involved in industry could not be Secretary of the Treasury, loopholes were found, and, reluctantly, on February 1, , he accepted the nomination of the Secretary of the Treasury. He left Pittsburgh on March 3, , was sworn in to office on March 4, and he reported for work on March 5.
Such a thing had never happened in the memory of any of the treasury's night watchmen. His [Mellon as Secretary of Treasury] was to ensure that the nation's finances were prudently managed, which, as for any responsible individual , meant living within income, firmly controlling expenditure, paying off accumulated debts, borrowing only on the soundest terms, and providing carefully for the future by building a surplus.
In short, Mellon aimed to run the Treasury, and to oversee the national finances, just as he had run the family bank, with few notions beyond such stewardship as to what he should be doing. And insofar as he was concerned with international economic affairs, his efforts would be focused on the matter of settling the debts which European nations owed the United States, which took precedence over all other continental considerations.
With the president's support, Mellon had fended off congressional demands for 'the bonus,' [due WWI veterans] and government spending had fallen by almost 50 percent helped by the belated transition from war to peace. But there was still plenty undone and still to be done. Crow and, upon his departure, Mellon successfully supported the Senate candidacy of David A. Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury, under Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, but enjoyed the best relationship with President Calvin Coolidge, who famously said, "The business of America is business.
Green, acting chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, outlining a 'scientific tax plan,' whose details had been completed by Parker Gilbert before he departed. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W.
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