A life made rich by hard work and self-reliance

Among the less illustrious American presidents of the 20th century -- a surprisingly large company -- the names Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover will almost always figure.

Yet it was Harding, the most insubstantial of the three, who appointed the millionaire banker Andrew W. Mellon to be his secretary of the Treasury, a post he retained from 1921 to 1932.

David Cannadine has done readers on both sides of the Atlantic a great service in writing an erudite and compelling biography of a man immensely prominent in his day, virtually forgotten now, who believed, as his father did, that the “serious business of life was business.”

Although Cannadine correctly designates Andrew Mellon’s “an American life,” readers may see it also as a Scottish-Irish Presbyterian life, committed to the Calvinist capitalist values memorably described by Max Weber.

The introductory chapters on Mellon’s father, Thomas, are integral to the story of how the American Civil War increased his fortune and why Pittsburgh, unlike the cities of the devastated South, prospered as a consequence of that war.

The severe economic depression of 1873 threatened the Mellon Bank, as it did Pittsburgh’s other growing commercial and industrial enterprises, including Carnegie steel, Heinz food and Frick coke, but all four survived to give that city its economic renown.

Andrew Mellon showed many of the same character traits as his acquisitive father, who thought always of family first.

Taciturn and grim, rarely feeling the need to smile, let alone laugh, he believed that the key to business success was hard work and self-reliance.

Andrew was ambitious and aggressive, the most talented of Thomas’ sons, and showed a business acumen that quickly made him one of the nation’s richest men.

In addition to banking, he knew how to seize and exploit investment opportunities in coal, oil and railroads.

However, his astuteness did not carry over into his personal life. Andrew Mellon made a disastrous marriage: At the age of 43 he fell in love with Nora McMullen, a beautiful Englishwoman almost half his age, whom he met on one of his many transatlantic crossings. His father warned him against marrying her, purportedly saying, “Don’t marry an Englishwoman, Andy. Their manner of life is different from ours.”

McMullen, the youngest of nine children -- and the only girl -- was initially reluctant to marry a man so much older but in the end capitulated to his importuning letters.

The McMullens, Scottish-Irish in origin like the Mellons, resembled them in no other way. Spontaneous and fun-loving, prudence was never their prime virtue. Nora McMullen disliked Pittsburgh from the beginning and resented what she interpreted as her husband’s indifference. His mind was always on business.

Though she bore him two children, a daughter and a son, she began a liaison very early with Alfred Curphey, an Englishman described by Cannadine as “a villain straight out of a 19th-century melodrama.”

In Cannadine’s felicitous and scarcely exaggerated words, Curphey was “a cad and a confidence man who seduced the wives of unsuspecting husbands; a predator of unhappy women of means, whom he cast ruthlessly aside after taking their money.”

Mellon belatedly learned of his wife’s infidelity and sought a divorce, but badly advised by lawyers, the dissolution of the marriage proved to be difficult and fraught.

Always generous with his children, and in time able to forgive McMullen, he helped her and her wayward brothers financially, finding himself in ever more venturesome financial exploits. Mellon was a man made to make money.

It is scarcely surprising that Harding chose Mellon to be his secretary of the Treasury or that Coolidge retained him in that post.

During those years, Mellon’s reputation for innovative tax legislation, mostly profiting men of his own class, accompanied by a substantial reduction of the national debt and a settlement of the Allied war debts, gave him a considerable reputation at home and abroad.

He knew Hoover well, having observed him in the Harding and Coolidge cabinets, and doubted that he would be an effective president. Always an ardent Republican, Mellon sought a more promising candidate but found none able to deny Hoover the presidential nomination he so eagerly sought -- a situation that may remind many of other, more recent presidential campaigns.

Many thought Mellon the greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton in the 18th century. Hoover sent him to virtual exile in London as ambassador only after the world economic depression had served to deflate both their reputations for economic sagacity.

Not everyone will wholly accept Cannadine’s views on the role of Franklin D. Roosevelt in causing his government to pursue Mellon for income tax evasion -- a trial that in the end exonerated Mellon.

But no one will doubt that Cannadine shows exceptional skill in describing how, late in life, Mellon became a serious collector of art, and the lasting contribution he made to American culture in creating the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Cannadine dedicates his book to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the philanthropic body that drew on the ample resources of Ailsa and Paul, Mellon’s children, for whom he showed a sincere and unflagging devotion. The gallery and the foundation are Mellon’s principal legacy. All the fame and the glory have long disappeared.

A curious relic of a lost world, Mellon was the heir to religious and moral principles still extant today but only as faded replicas of something once vigorous, however flawed and self-serving.

*

Stephen Graubard, professor emeritus of history at Brown University, is the author of several books including “Command of Office: How War, Secrecy, and Deception Transformed the Presidency, From Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush” (Basic Books). This review first appeared in the Financial Times.

*

Capitalist ideal

* Mellon: An American Life

* By David Cannadine

* Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 800 pages