Last week, in Southampton, L. I., Andrew William Mellon, long one of his country's richest men, Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932, died of uremia, broncho-pneumonia and old age.
Successor to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick as overlord of the feudal financial system of the unique U. S. city of Pittsburgh, Andrew Mellon was an officer or director of 160 corporations and worth no one knew how much more than $500,000,000 in 1921 when Harry M. Daugherty is said to have suggested to Warren Gamaliel Harding that he would make a good Secretary of the Treasury. President-elect Harding answered: "I never heard of him," and in so doing expressed not only his own ignorance but that of the U. S. public.
The facts about Andrew Mellon, other than his fortune, were exceedingly simple. Born at Pittsburgh in 1855, he was the son of a hard-headed Tyrone County Scotch-Irishman who -"ounded the banking house of T. Mellon & Sons. At 18, Andrew quit Western University of Pennsylvania to start a lumber business with his 15-year-old brother, Dick. When the lumber business succeeded, first Andrew and then Brother Richard joined the bank, which they built into the $380,000,000 Mellon National Bank. In the next 40-some years, Andrew Mellon multiplied the Mellon capital of $1,000,000 or so by hundreds, built up half a dozen major U. S. industries including the Aluminum Company of America, Koppers, Gulf Oil Corp. of Pa., McClintic Marshall Corp. (bridges).
Thus, when Andrew Mellon stepped into the Cabinet he was beyond question one of the great men of U. S. industry and finance. Many great lawyers have been members of the Cabinet but he was the first great financier-industrialist ever to hold such a post. Hence a sentimental public, once it knew who he was, fostered the legend that he was "the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton."
Certainly Andrew Mellon aspired to be. Multimillionaire although he was, he gave his years from 66 to 77 to a task in which there was no other glory for a man who had as small ability as he for arousing public adulation. He handled the financial affairs of the U. S. as he handled his own, reduced the national debt from $24,000,000,000 to $16,000,000,000. This great achievement remains untarnished. Not so his other major work: the reduction of income taxes.
The Great Depression of 1929 caused men to doubt the merit of all Andrew Mellon's fiscal works and most of all his tax policy in which the reduction of high surtaxes on big incomes was a prime tenet. To the Mellon mind taxation was simply a device for raising revenue. As a businessman he knew it unwise to charge more than the traffic would bear and it was his theory that high surtaxes reduce revenue by driving capital to take refuge in tax-exempt bonds and other devices for avoiding taxes.