Biography:Mellons moved from Scotland to Ireland in the 17th century. Early in the 19th, like so many of Ulster's Scotch Irish, the Omagh branch emigrated to America, among them the five-year-old Thomas Mellon.
He grew up in Pennsylvania, established himself as an attorney in Pittsburgh, then branched out into coal, real estate and banking. In middle age he married Sarah, who gave him eight children. Andrew, the fourth son, born 1855, is the subject of this biography.
Andrew's life came in four acts. In the first, his father moulded him, then gave him most of his business assets to manage. In the second, from the 1880s to the end of the Great War, Andrew, expanded into iron, coke, steel, transportation, ship-building, silver mining, oil (Gulf Oil was his creation) and aviation. He was a ruthless businessman, who bought vulnerable companies cheap in hard times and sold them on in good ones, as well as an implacable enemy of labour. He never hesitated to use the law to get his way and he knew how to protect his interests too. He kept his companies private for the most part, only ever distributing shares between family and a few trusted associates who were of Scotch-Irish descent like himself,
Act three, the 1920s, were Mellon's glory years. He became very rich, he bought a lot of paintings and he served three Republican presidents, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, as secretary to the treasury, lowering taxes, rescheduling European debt repayments and steering the US economy back from a wartime to a peacetime footing.
In the last act, Mellon fell from grace: but then, as the curtain was about to close, he redeemed himself. The Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression. Mellon, a laissez-faire plutocrat to his fingertips, advised that this calamity was just another bust that would, in turn, be followed by another boom, as had happened throughout his career. But Mellon, who was in his mid-70s when he made this pronouncement, was out of touch. The American public did not see this as another common-or-garden bust; they saw this as a cataclysm caused by hard-hearted, selfish men like him.
Roosevelt and the Democratic Party triumphed in 1932, and Mellon immediately became a target. His companies were indicted for business malpractice and he was charged with tax evasion. The onslaught would have crushed a lesser man but not Mellon (who believed he was innocent, as was eventually accepted after his death) and, even as the trials were progressing, he was buying more paintings and setting in motion his long cherished plan for a National Gallery of Art in Washington to house his collection. Roosevelt approved this shortly before Mellon's death from cancer in 1937, and on March 17th, 1941, at the opening of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the president formally accepted Mellon's gift on behalf of the American people
LYING INSIDE THIS public narrative, like a little Matryoshka doll snug inside its mother, is the story of Mellon's private life. Until his 40s he was a professional bachelor; then he fell for an English girl of 21, Nora McMullen. The couple married in 1900 and quickly became miserable despite the birth of two children, Ailsa and Paul. Nora took up with an English conman, Alfred Curphey, and a divorce of extraordinary acrimony followed. Of course, no sooner was his mistress single but Curphey vanished and Nora realised she'd made a terrible mistake. She begged Mellon to take her back but he wouldn't.
Spurred by loneliness, Nora found another lover, an English antiques dealer called Harry Lee. The night before their wedding, Mellon asked her to come back. She decided, since she'd promised Lee, she'd better go through with it. Eight years later, Nora was single once more and again she asked Mellon to take her back, and now he declined. But they remained in touch, writing endless affectionate letters, and she never quite abandoned the hope that Mellon would have her back. It was an extraordinarily unexpected outcome to their marital calamity. Alas, the same can't be said of Andrew's relations with his children; there was no happy ending there: Ailsa, damaged by the divorce, became a father-fixated hypochondriac, while Paul, always believing he had disappointed his father, took several decades to find his path in life.
David Cannadine's life of Mellon is a big book and he marshals his material, much of it statistical and numerical, with great deftness and without a single footnote. The result is an absorbing read, though I would have been happy with less (actually quite a lot less) of Mellon's financial and business life and rather more on his fascinating and tragi-comic private life. Despite this caveat, this is a book many will want to read not only for the story it tells but also for the comfort it will offer to those who look at the US today and weep at the ghastly alliance between big business and the Republican Party and the mess they have made since President Bush came to power. Mellon, though more restrained and less venal, was the spiritual ancestor of Cheney and the other Halliburton Corporation executives who have done so well from the current administration; but, as Cannadine reminds us with this life, nothing lasts. Mellon was great but then the wheel turned and he fell, and so will they.
Carlo Gébler is currently writing a book about Patrick Maguire, convicted in 1976, aged 14, of nitroglycerine possession and subsequently exonerated
Mellon: An American Life By David Cannadine Allen Lane/ Penguin, 779pp. £30