The Tartan

By Kyle Hynes

As a recent dropout of what is now the University of Pittsburgh, the ambitious Andrew Mellon loaned his uncle 3,000 of what we can only assume were his father’s dollars. In 1879, Uncle Samuel defaulted on the loan, but he had a decent excuse — he was dead at 54. Instead of mourning, young Andrew — who had only gotten 1,000 bucks back — harangued Samuel’s bereaved widow for the rest of the money before Samuel was even in the ground. Priorities.

A few years later, Andrew took up with a young woman four years his junior, Fannie Larimer Jones. It was a classic love story until, in 1882, Fannie was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Upon hearing his young bride was terminally ill, Andrew broke the engagement, cut her off, and cast his eyes elsewhere. For the last months of her 24 years, scorned by her father and abandoned by her fiancé, she lived a lonely life, until one day in late October, she died.

The fact that he was a cowardly, heartless weasel is not the only indictment against the legacy of Andrew W. Mellon, the man who lives on in the name of our beloved university, and whose name will almost certainly have a spot on our diplomas. A good businessman who burned it to the top and left a trail of destruction in his wake, his real damage was as Secretary of the Treasury, where he served from 1921 to 1932.

Did Mellon win that spot on talent, due to an unusual knowledge of the economy? No. Having inherited his father’s fortune and the Mellon Bank, in 1920 he became the largest donor for Warren Harding’s presidential campaign. When Harding entered the White House, he rewarded Mellon with a cabinet post. Taking over the Treasury on the downswing of the First Red Scare, he argued for a hands-off approach, gutting social welfare programs through massive cuts in taxes. 

In 1925, he pushed the “Mellon Plan” through Congress. This abolished the gift tax, halved the estate tax, and cut the top rate of income tax from 46 percent to 25 percent. Whether he knew it or not, he was reshaping the federal tax regime for a century to come. All the while, his personal wealth was exploding and his Treasury spent those few dollars it was still bringing in on refunding taxes that had been paid by rich businessmen between 1917 and 1925, including $7 million — nearly $127 million today — to Mellon’s own pocket. (Yes, really.) 

By that time, he’d already assured his half of our university’s name. Thirteen years after Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Institute of Technology at the top of Schenley Park, Mellon and his brother set up a research institute in their father’s name at the University of Pittsburgh, an institute whose allegiance would hop over Junction Hollow in 1967 as it merged into Carnegie Tech to form Carnegie Mellon. (You might wonder: Is the “Mellon” for his father, and not for Andrew? No, but even if it were, that wouldn’t be much better. Thomas Mellon was an avowed racist, who as a judge refused to admit African-Americans to the bar on the grounds that they were a nuisance.)

In 1929, at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, the house of cards Mellon had so recklessly built came crashing down as the stock market suffered its worst-ever day. Months later, as the economic damage trickled down, the unemployment rate crept up. By the summer of 1931, it was over 20 percent. Mellon did nothing. Believing that government intervention in the economy was morally wrong, and that semi-frequent recessions were necessary to purge the economy, he urged President Herbert Hoover to stand by and let the economy collapse. Hoover listened to him, and the problem got worse. 

By 1932, the unemployment rate was pushing 25 percent, and Americans from coast to coast were in extreme poverty. Giving up on his cruelty, Mellon pushed to repeal his own tax cuts, but the damage was done, and impeachment proceedings began in earnest. Facing the near-certainty of being the first-ever cabinet secretary to be impeached by the House of Representatives, Mellon resigned in disgrace and failed upwards to a cushy job as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. 

When Franklin D. Roosevelt swept Hoover’s inept administration out of office the next spring, Mellon left London for Pittsburgh, but found a city unrecognizable to the one he’d left all those years ago. Unemployed men were everywhere — some tried to pick up side gigs to squeeze by, and some resorted to panhandling. The town he and his father had helped put on the map was up in arms, and the people’s anger was directed at the man who fashioned himself their idol. Chased out of town, he spent a fitful retirement in Washington, most of which was spent defending himself against charges of tax fraud.

Andrew Mellon died in 1937; he never lived to see the recovery of the country he had nearly destroyed. Whether he was evil, incompetent, or merely negligent, his chapter in American history has gone down as a black eye in every town in this country save one: his hometown, where his reputation has recovered as people forget the damage he did and see his name emblazoned across the downtown skyline and western Pennsylvania’s finest university.

Something to add — this is not the case of a supposedly enlightened liberal ragging a great man for being a conservative. Indeed, as many of my friends will tell you, on occasion, my politics veer frustratingly away from the left. I would vote against renaming our nation’s capital; hell, I’d vote against stripping the name Carnegie here at home. I haven’t read “Pravda on the Potomac” in years and I think the Pax Americana has been a success that we’re fools to dismantle. No, this is a case of a man who, in what could have been his finest hour, screwed up. A man who spent all his life so high on a pedestal that he could barely see the thronged masses below, and on the occasions when he could, cared nothing for them. A man who never paused to consider how his actions impacted others, a single-minded seeker of what he wanted, who never exhibited a whit of empathy or remorse for the damage he wrought.

In 16 months, I’ll walk across the stage at graduation, in a cap and down, diploma in hand, surrounded by people I’m privileged to call my friends; people who are smart, sure, but who are above all compassionate. In the audience will be many more who have made these four years possible and so wonderful — my parents, my little brother, professors, and friends who still haven’t gotten out of dodge. The names in my head that day, and the names in yours, will all be good ones. I don’t want the name of Andrew Mellon — a greedy, selfish man who ignored the Great Depression and reshaped the American economy for the worse — to sully that day.

They put him in the ground 87 years ago. There, in the name of God, we should let him stay. Hail to Carnegie Tech.