THE PATRIARCH PRESIDES
Father and Sons, 1855--73

Make your child a partner in your joys and sorrows, your hopes and fears; impart your plans and purposes; stand not on your dignity, but let yourself down to his capacity, if need be, and show your trust in him. You will be surprised to find how much a five or ten year old boy can understand of the ways of men, and how readily he will enter into your views. . . . I experienced the benefit of such training myself, and applied it in raising my own family with the most satisfactory results.
Thomas Mellon and His Times, p. 29

1

A THRIVING CAREER

Andrew Mellon was the sixth child of Thomas and Sarah Jane Mellon, but he was only the fourth to survive infancy. His two sisters were already dead, and although he would not long remain the youngest son, he grew up among brothers only, in what Burton Hendrick called a "eugenic" family.1 Only the fittest would survive. At the time of Andrew's birth, his eldest brother, Thomas Alexander was eleven: the next, James Ross, was nine: and Samuel Selwyn was two. The two elder boys were close in age and interests: Andrew and Selwyn soon became a second pair, as would Richard Beatty ("Dick" or "RB"), who was born in 1858 and named for one of his father's oldest friends, and George Negley, who arrived two years later and was named for his mother's uncle. Even depleted by two early and wrenching deaths, this was a large bourgeois family by the standards of the time. But it was very much a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian household, and while Andrew Mellon knew far more comfort and security than most Pittsburghers, the atmosphere was intense and serious, rather than joyful or easy. Although surrounded by a lush and bountiful garden, the house at 401 Negley was gloomy and forbidding inside. For Thomas Mellon disdained the vulgar ostentation which he feared was "common among those grown suddenly rich," whom he dismissed as the "shoddyocracy," and his house was devoid of the elaborate ornamentation, both inside and out, that would became popular among the local plutocracy in subsequent decades. The blinds were often drawn, and the interior was a drab amalgam of Brussels carpets, heavy draperies, and somberly papered walls, with no pictures of any artistic merit.2

This was the morose world of Andrew Mellon's boyhood, but unlike his surviving siblings, he would continue to inhabit it as an ever more solitary son until he was in his mid-forties. Sarah Jane Mellon was the presiding matriarch, and although Thomas Mellon wrote little about her in his autobiography, she was clearly a redoubtable woman for her time. She was not only rich but tough, having survived eight pregnancies between 1844 and 1860. More conventionally religious than her husband, she was responsible for getting the family to East Liberty Presbyterian Church on Sundays. She also oversaw the household, baking the bread and cooking many of the meals herself. There was a domestic staff of three, including an intimidating housekeeper, Mrs. Cox. On the day of Andrew Mellon's birth, the housekeeper instructed James Ross Mellon to convey the news to his grandmother, Barbara Anna Negley, who lived nearby, and she soon appeared bearing a willow basket full of yellow apples which perfumed the birth room.3 Andrew Mellon's earliest recorded recollection was another scene of purposeful feminine domesticity--which he disrupted. When two years old, he crawled beneath a table at which his mother and her sister were sewing, and began cutting the edges of the table cloth with a pair of scissors which had fallen to the floor. Given his father's "high opinion of the strict exercise of parental authority," it is...

 

"A fascinating biography . . . A compelling portrait of a dour and lonely financier who was wounded in love, disappointed in his children and, tragically, ill-rewarded by his government . . . Mr. Canndine paints a vivid picture of 19th-century Pittsburgh as a crucible of the Industrial Revolution. Among Mellon's customers or business partners were a Who's Who of American tycoons . . . A sprawling work for a sprawling life."

 

"Absorbing . . . Cannadine writes like a storyteller, and the book often reads as compulsively as one of those immense fictional sagas that weigh down the best-seller lists. Sin and redemption are always close to the center of those family tales, and so they are in Mellon . . . Cannadine has the gifted writer's eye for a good story. He is a rarity among modern academics: a historian who writes well and has the storyteller's instinct for exploring personality and its effect on events . . . He dares to write history as if he wants his readers to enjoy reading it . . . An interesting exploration of a man who, at first glance, seemed to exist only to be disliked."

 

"Fascinating . . . David Cannadine has spent the past twelve years on this brilliant and reclusive figure . . . There is no easy way to sum up a figure so complex, influential, ruthless and benevolent, whose faults and virtues loom equally large . . . Cannadine has accomplished the rare feat of describing in meticulous detail the personality of someone one can admire and even feel sympathy for, who is nevertheless not very likable."

 

"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' . . . Shows exceptional skill in describing how, late in life, Mellon became a serious collector of art."

 

"The rehabilitation . . . [of] the Alan Greenspan of his time . . . Cannadine . . . a distinguished historian . . . enjoyed luxurious access to Mellon's records . . . The outcome: a book that delivers on the dignity and the achievements of Mellon . . . A complete biography, containing also--how could I forget to mention it? --details of Nora Mellon's adultery, Ailsa's self-absorption, and Paul Mellon's education in philanthropy. It introduces us to a man we need to know, and all there is to say is: Welcome, Andy."

 

"That Mellon--a painfully shy man who made Calvin Coolidge look like a jovial backslapper (the joke was that the two conversed in pauses)--could become the 1920s equivalent of a rock star is astonishing . . . Though scarcely known today, Andrew W. Mellon was a colossus in late 19th century and early 20th century America . . . David Cannadine, the distinguished British historian [gives us] a well-written, richly detailed chronicle."

 

"David Cannadine, our foremost historian of the British aristocracy, has painted a rich, full-length portrait, warts and all, of one of the most important plutocrats America has ever produced. It turns out the taciturn old conservative and master collector Mellon had an inner life as well as an amazing career, which Cannadine recreates with his usual thoroughness, humaneness, and wit."

 

"A commanding biography, unsparing in revelation, lively in its writing, rigorous in its scholarship, astute in its judgments, and altogether a major contribution to American history."