The Mellon Family

In eighteen sixty-nine, a Scots-Irish judge named Thomas Mellon opened a private bank in Pittsburgh called T. Mellon and Sons. He had studied Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and concluded, as he wrote in his own memoir, that getting rich was essentially a matter of habits and compounding. His son Andrew would test that theory at a scale Thomas could not have imagined.

Andrew Mellon joined the bank in the early eighteen seventies and within a decade had taken it over and begun expanding far beyond banking. He financed Alcoa, the aluminum company, acquiring a stake when it was a tiny operation in Pittsburgh in eighteen eighty-nine. He backed Gulf Oil, Union Steel, and dozens of other industrial ventures, extending loans to companies that would then remain in his financial orbit. By the time he was fifty, Andrew Mellon had more control over Pittsburgh's industrial economy than almost anyone except Carnegie.

He renamed his institution Mellon National Bank, opened Union Trust Company in eighteen eighty-nine, and held deposits that by nineteen thirteen were the largest of any bank in Pittsburgh.

Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all appointed him Secretary of the Treasury. He served from nineteen twenty-one to nineteen thirty-two, presiding over the nineteen twenties boom, the nineteen twenty-nine crash, and the beginning of the Depression. His tax policies, which dramatically cut rates on the highest incomes, were popular during the boom and deeply criticized after the crash.

He gave his art collection to the United States government, donating fifteen million dollars to build the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which opened in nineteen forty-one. The gallery houses dozens of Rembrandt paintings and what had been Mellon's personal Raphael, the Alba Madonna. Pittsburgh gave that art collection to the world because a judge opened a small bank on a Pittsburgh street in eighteen sixty-nine.