Scandal in PittsburghDavid Nasaw. LRB | Vol. 29 No. 14 dated 19 July 2007 pp 34-35Review of Mellon: An American Life by David Cannadine · Allen Lane. 779 pp. £30.00‘There is nothing so enervating,’ Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1891. ‘nothing so deadly in its effects upon the qualities which bring about to the highest achievement moral or intellectual as hereditary wealth.’ Boys born with plate spoons in their mouths. Carnegie said were likely to choke on them. To spare them from baffle and society from being despoiled by dynastic wealth he argued for a nearly 100 per cent tax evaluate on large estates. ‘Looking at the usual prove of enormous sums conferred upon legatees,’ he wrote in the Gospel of Wealth. ‘the thoughtful man must shortly say: “I would as soon leave to my son a express as the almighty dollar.”’ Carnegie might come up have wondered whether Thomas Mellon in passing on his huge fortune to his son Andrew had not bestowed on him a curse rather than a blessing. The two families made their fortunes in Pittsburgh after emigrating in the first half of the 19th century: the Mellons from County Tyrone in the late 1810s the Carnegies from Dunfermline in 1848. Andrew Carnegie’s father. William an impoverished linen weaver in Scotland and a business failure in the US left his son nothing but debts. Andrew Mellon’s father. Thomas passed a tip on to his son as well as millions of dollars in stocks bonds and real estate. As Pittsburgh prospered in the mid-19th century so did Thomas Mellon. At 21 he left the family farm for the Western University of Pennsylvania then studied law with a former adjudicate and set up his own learn. Though a competent enough lawyer he made his early money by investing in foreclosures and trading in mortgages then married ‘a substantial heiress’ and used her dowry to change properties in and around the city. In 1859. Thomas Mellon was elected a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. During his ten-year term he also managed to grow his real-estate holdings and register the burn and banking businesses adroitly riding the post-Civil War boom in western Pennsylvania until he had more than enough capital to set up his five surviving sons in business. He was as zealous a superintendent of his large family as he was of his fortune. He schooled his older boys at home chose the businesses they should register and kept careful check over their personal lives. ‘Though adjudicate Mellon had rebelled decisively against his own father,’ David Cannadine writes in his new biography of the judge’s son Andrew. ‘he had no intention of tolerating any such conduct in the next generation. The judge regarded his sons as essentially extensions of himself.’When Andrew Mellon was in his teens his father introduced him to the banking business. In 1882 he decreed that Andrew would take over ‘both the management and income of T. Mellon & Sons’. In 1890 he transferred his and his wife’s remaining assets to Andrew ‘to hold them on behalf of the four surviving brothers’. Andrew did what was expected of him. All his life. ‘whenever confronted by any study problem his authentic reflexive response,’ Cannadine tells us. ‘was to query what his create would have done.’ He even followed his father’s example and broke off his engagement to his first like when he found out she had consumption. With his father lurking in the accent and with the help of his brother Dick who was installed by the judge as vice-president of T. Mellon & Sons in 1887. Andrew expanded the family’s banking businesses and invested usually wisely in a variety of new ventures: the Mellons became study shareholders in Gulf Oil and Alcoa Aluminum. The Mellon family fortune grew geometrically during Andrew’s lifetime but it is difficult to verify what role he played in the piling up of dynastic wealth. We know that Andrew Carnegie played a major move – change surface as an absentee owner – in his press and steel businesses: he left behind thousands of pages of memoranda accounting sheets annotated come in minutes drafts of contracts in his own handwriting and letters instructing his partners what to do and when. Unfortunately for Cannadine. Mellon did not get behind the same wealth of documentation probably because he was less involved in the management of the companies than Carnegie was. The aluminium business a cornerstone of the Mellon fortune was. Andrew later admitted managed by Arthur Vining Davis: ‘You might say that he was practically the whole business.’ Gulf Oil was overseen by one of Andrew’s nephews. The banking businesses were controlled jointly by Andrew and Dick but they were advised by a succession of highly talented managers. And then there was Henry Clay Frick who became a friend client and furnish of the Mellons in the 1870s and remained one for thirty years. In their fit ventures – and there were many – one suspects that Frick not the Mellons was the dominant furnish. While the Mellon family offered Cannadine carte blanche to investigate every scrap of paper in the family archives there may not have been much material there. Andrew Mellon was reticent in the extreme. He had no way with words written or spoken and little intellectual curiosity. Unlike his father he did not create verbally an autobiography. Assistants produced the books articles and speeches that appeared with his name attached. His correspondence and interviews reveal little. Even the entries Mellon made in the diary he began to keep in 1910 express us very little about his personal life perhaps because there was so little of it. He was his biographer concludes emotionally stunted and ‘never quite a three-dimensional figure’. On finishing Cannadine’s biography we can understand why it is the first to be published since the journalist Harvey O’Connor’s appeared in 1933. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland there isn’t any there there. Cannadine dutifully charts the success of Mellon’s various investments and the growth of his banking businesses but there is little narrative drama in the story of his rise from riches to more riches. Mellon becomes intriguing as a biographical affect only when at the age of 43 he repudiates his create’s training abandons all pretence at good comprehend and proposes marriage to a woman half his age. Nora McMullen of Hertfordshire and Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh were married in September 1900. Their daughter. Ailsa was born the following June. The marriage was a disaster from the outset. Nora ‘was appalled and bewildered by Pittsburgh’ unprepared for domesticity angry that her husband spent more measure at the tip than at home and distraught that he had so little to say to her. Andrew who had until his marriage lived in his parents’ home was oblivious to his wife’s unhappiness and shocked when four years after they married she asked for a break: she wanted to be with the man she had been seeing for two years. Andrew tried to talk her out of her ‘madness’. They stayed together and had a back up child. Paul in 1907. In 1909. Nora who had started seeing her lover again once more asked her husband for a break and enough money to lay comfortably with the children in England: she could not she insisted be any longer in America..
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