Mellon: An American Life (Vintage)
by David Cannadine
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Book Summary Information
Author: David CannadineEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-12
ISBN: 0307386791
Number of pages: 832
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Mellon: An American Life (Vintage)
Book Review: The Last Tycoon
Summary: 5 Stars
An exhaustive, scholarly and very readable biography of one of America's old school business tycoons. David Cannadine mines little-known personality nuances of the 20th century's most famous secretary of the Treasury judiciously and skillfully.
The book gives us respect for Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937) and the civilization he helped create. At the same time, we come to understand why V.I. Lenin wanted to exterminate people like Mellon as a class.
The Leninist impulse (although not Leninist action) is justified in reckoning this constant bargaining and seeking one's own financial advantage. It's maddening yet compassion should be aroused when we realize that Mellon and his Scotch-Irish circle believed in Adam Smith's invisible hand to a fault. Scotsman Smith taught that society is made better off when people seek their own advantage as opposed to acting through altruism. This is true although it takes time, sometimes a long time, for the tide to lift all boats.
Paradoxically, Mellon's strengthening of industrialism, creating an easier physical life for most people thus raising their expectations, eroded patience in the invisible hand. Assembly-line industrialism breeds an attitude of "I want it and I want it now." Agrarianism, by contrast, grows patience. Increased and more far-flung immigration further watered down the cultural consensus (although Cannadine doesn't get into this). End result: The American mindset evolved to a point where it was unwilling to wait out the Great Depression. The Great Demagogue (FDR) convinced them of that, bellowing the siren song of government shortcuts.
Cannadine ties a handsome bow around Mellon's life when he quotes Karl Marx's saying that people make their own futures but in circumstances not of their choosing. Mellon himself speaks to this truism when he's grouped with fellow titans Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford, and opines - if we didn't do it other people would have.
Mellon was the archetype of John Galsworthy's Man of Property (read "The Forsyte Saga") and that was good and bad for those closest to him and the country at large. The man of property is conspicuous by his ability and desire to hold on to things. But that characteristic caused Mellon to stay around too long. He should have exited government with President Coolidge after the seven fat years. Instead, the aging tycoon was unfairly maligned and subject to a New Deal tax show trial.
The only thing Mellon should have done differently to ward off the Depression was to engineer a tax increase in 1927, causing a mild recession and - perhaps - cooling Wall Street speculation. Unlike many of today's Republicans, Mellon knew a bubble when he saw one and was not averse to taxation. He admirably paid more in personal taxes than he legally needed to. His notions of duty and balanced budgets should gain currency again alongside his great work in cutting taxes.
Economists and business historians will take choice fruits from Cannadine's research. One I got was Mellon's warning about speculative excesses after a war. Recession is likely just after a war but with the money supply inflated the opposite danger also exists. It was a danger in Mellon's gold standard era and it's much more so under the fiat money regime. Just ask George W. Bush and Ben Bernanke. Another superb idea for us devotees of the Wesley Mitchell school of business cycle research to drop into the hopper.
Mellon's penchant for bigness (he had to resign from 60 directorships when he joined Treasury) set the stage for the Eisenhower Cycle, swelling business and government beyond human scale. Count that a negative.
Although Cannadine does excellent work in vetting Mellon's public life, it's the private stuff that's the meat of the book. Here we view the man in full - up-and-down relationships with his wife and children, devotion to his brothers especially Dick Mellon, loyalty to subordinates, lack of tenderness. Mellon's great art collection seems to have grown in proportion to his distance from his offspring. The author presents no diary entries saying "Fought with daughter then bought painting" but the pattern is unmistakable.
"Mellon: An American Life" ranges well beyond the tycoon's lifetime. The chapters are headed with clips from father Thomas ("The Judge") Mellon's punchy autobiography. We're brought through the family tree - although I was surprised no mention was made of Richard Mellon Scaife, surely the most well-known of today's Mellons because of his involvement with Pittsburgh's newspapers, The American Spectator magazine and exposure of President Clinton's flaws real and imagined. Oh, well. Nobody and no biography is perfect. The book ends pleasantly with AWM's son Paul (breeder of 1971 Epsom Derby and Arc D'Triomphe winner Mill Reef) at peace with himself and his past. Paul even has his grandfather's autobiography reprinted. Unlikely you might think until you realize that both men valued wisdom above all else and it was Andrew's foresight (Forsyte) that bound them together.
Summary of Mellon: An American Life (Vintage)
A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each.Andrew Mellon, one of America?s greatest financiers, built a legendary personal fortune from banking to oil to aluminum manufacture, tracking America?s course to global economic supremacy. As treasury secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, Mellon made the federal government run like a business?prefiguring the public official as CEO. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol. Collecting art was his only nonprofessional gratification and his great gift to the American people, The National Gallery of Art, remains his most tangible legacy.
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