FAMILY PROFILE
Our family has a long history and has played a pivotal role in the political and economic fields of the United States, manipulating hundreds of large companies in the financial, aluminum, oil, coal, shipbuilding, steelmaking and other industries. Our family's influence has penetrated widely into the American business, political, financial, philanthropic and art collection circles. Therefore, the Mellon family was the most prominent family in the United States during its heyday. Take the Mellon Banking Corporation as an example. Its assets amounted to 30 billion US dollars, making it one of the 25 most powerful banks in the United States.
Family founder, Thomas Mellon (1813-1908)
He was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated to the United States in 1838.
Founded Mellon Bank, established the foundation of the family fortune.
On October 1, 1818, 5-year-old Thomas Mellon arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, with his parents on a coastal passenger ship from Saint John, New Brunswick, eastern Canada. The family left their hometown of Castletown, England, crossed the Atlantic Ocean from London, passed through Canada, and finally arrived at their destination, the United States, after a three-month arduous journey. In this land, Thomas would become the founder of the Mellon family and an outstanding figure of the same generation as Rockefeller.
Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)
Thomas Mellon, the founder of the Mellon family, was a contemporary of Rockefeller and others. During the time of Andrew Mellon, he served as the US Treasury Secretary and made the family shine. On October 24, 1929, the largest economic crisis in the history of capitalism broke out in the United States. Within a week, Americans lost $10 billion in wealth on the stock exchange. In order to destroy the "surplus" products, farmers poured milk into the Mississippi River. At that time, a children's song was popular in New York: "Mellon blew the whistle, Hoover rang the bell. Wall Street sent a signal, and America rushed to hell!" Today, although the Mellon family shows signs of decline due to various reasons, we are still a major hegemon of the US economy.
Our family's assets far exceed those of the Rockefeller, Ford, and DuPont consortiums, and even more than those of the new rich families such as the Hughes, Getty, and Hunter. Andrew Mellon was the main founder of this prosperous industrial family. From 1921 to 1932, Andrew Mellon served as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under three consecutive presidents. He served in the cabinet of three Republican governments in the 1920s. His ancestors were immigrants of both Scottish and Irish descent who settled in Pennsylvania in 1908. Andrew's father, Thomas Mellon, was good at making money. He married the daughter of a family that was short of cash but had a lot of real estate. This strategic move undoubtedly helped his later career.
He was quite smart in business and successfully completed a real estate business at the age of 15. In 1882, he took over all Mellon's financial power. He, his brother Richard Mellon and his nephew William Larimer created different types of diversified enterprises, using banks as control and coordination centers and using the United Trust and Investment Company to carry out various activities. His several banks together accounted for one-third of all deposits in Pittsburgh.
He was quite smart in business and successfully completed a real estate business at the age of 15. In 1882, he took over all Mellon's financial power. He, his brother Richard Mellon and his nephew William Larimer created different types of diversified enterprises, using banks as control and coordination centers and using the United Trust and Investment Company to carry out various activities. His several banks together accounted for one-third of all deposits in Pittsburgh.
At the 1931 finance conference, Andrew stood on the far left of the front row.
This conglomerate not only owned aluminum, oil, and corundum companies, but also produced railroad cars, coal tar, and other products. Later, Pittsburgh's coal mines, shipbuilding, steelmaking, and public utilities were all monopolized by Mellon's diversified conglomerate. This expanded our family's financial power step by step. He gained control of the market without resorting to stock trading, loan, patent control, tariff protection, and other means, and even proposed to use litigation to resolve competition. During Andrew Mellon's tenure as Secretary of the Treasury, he not only used his power to take advantage of loopholes in the tax law, but also proposed two tax cuts to protect the interests of large business owners. This brought a lot of benefits to the family.
After Andrew died, his son Paul would rather manage the "National Gallery" donated by old Mellon to the government than go into business. This huge corporate empire was then controlled by Paul's cousin Richard. The trend of the times continued to move forward, and when Richard died, there was no one in our family who could serve as the standard-bearer and take up the banner of entrepreneurship. Thus, sorrow and separation inevitably occurred in the Mellon empire.
Paul Mellon，1907–1999
FAMILY EYES
In the book "Thomas Mellon and His Times", Thomas Mellon wrote: Whenever I get money, I always use it in the most powerful place, in the safest and most profitable investment I can find.
When he was still in school, Thomas imitated his idol Franklin and reinvested the little savings he had saved - lending money at the prevailing interest rate of 10% to 15%. Soon, he found that the amount of money in his hands was growing at an unimaginable rate. Investing became a pleasure. In 1869, Thomas Mellon and Son Bank was established. This was Thomas' first official business. Why choose a bank? In Thomas's view, it is easy to engage in banking, "It does not require much knowledge, just learn for a week or two." Facts have proved that banks are indeed a good business. In that era of economic turmoil, interest rates remained at a level of more than 10% all year round, and lending became almost the easiest and fastest way to make money. The Mellon family quickly accumulated a considerable fortune.
Thomas Mellon，1813–1908
Thomas had a total of 9 children, 3 of whom died young. In addition to making money, Thomas was most enthusiastic about cultivating his children's interest in business. In our family, children have known since they can remember that pocket money must be earned by working.
Thomas' favorite son Andrew showed a talent for business since he was a child: when he was less than 10 years old, he bundled the fresh grass on the lawn in front of his house and sold it to the passing carriage driver. At the age of 17, his father asked him to inspect a piece of land. He proposed to keep only one piece of land for the roadbed and sell the rest. Afterwards, the remaining land became a must-go for building the railway, and the amount of compensation surprised his father. At the age of 8, Andrew joined the business founded by his father with great enthusiasm. In 1890, Andrew officially took over the business of old Thomas and became the pillar of the Mellon family. It is estimated that old Thomas left a total of $2.45 million in private property to his several heirs.
Andrew's investment vision is often so good that it is surprising. At the end of the 19th century, oil fields were discovered in Economie near Pittsburgh. At that time, adventurers and speculators of all kinds came to look for "black gold". At this time, Andrew quietly built a tanker port and laid oil pipelines on the coast of North Chester Marcus Hook. When everyone dug out the oil and began to consider transportation issues, Andrew's tanker port and oil pipeline became popular. By the end of 1892, the crude oil transported by Mellon Company accounted for one-tenth of the total US exports.
Alcoa is also a beautiful investment in our family's history. In 1889, several distressed young people came to Andrew, showed him a piece of silver wax metal, and hoped that he could provide an investment. That piece of metal was aluminum. The young chemist Charles Martin Hall and his partners developed a method for refining aluminum, and believed that this metal with many excellent properties would become a star in the future, but they were struggling to find investment. Before meeting Andrew, they had lobbied many entrepreneurs, but none of them succeeded. After listening to them, Andrew pondered for a moment and decisively decided to help them repay their debts and fund the establishment of the Pittsburgh Aluminum Company at the cost of 60% of the shares.
Andrew's vision was proven again. It took only two years for the company to control aluminum production in North America. In 1907, the Pittsburgh Aluminum Company was renamed Alcoa, and its stock value reached 150 million US dollars. Peers all sighed and said: "The Mellon family's eyes seem to be most likely to find things that make them money."
FAMILY MEMBERS
In fact, for the first half century, the members of our family were only keen on business and not very interested in politics. But this situation changed in 1918. In that year, Andrew sent a political donation of $150,000 to politician Penrose through the introduction of a friend. Andrew did not have much hope for a return, but he did not expect Penrose to successfully define the depreciated assets of Mellon as undeveloped assets through behind-the-scenes activities in Congress, so that the company could continue to deduct development costs. This incident made Andrew realize the importance of political power. Since then, through continuous political donations, the Mellon family has been getting closer and closer to the White House.
At the age of 66, Andrew was selected by President Harding to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. In the following 12 years, he successively held financial power in the teams of three presidents, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, so Americans jokingly called "three presidents worked for Mellon." During his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew kept doing one thing: cutting taxes, cutting taxes, and cutting taxes again. In a tax reform plan called the "Mellon Plan" by the media, the US personal income tax rate dropped from 65% to an astonishing 20%. This practice protected the interests of big business owners - of course, our Mellon family also benefited a lot, stimulated corporate production, and created unprecedented prosperity in the US economy.
Although there were news of power-for-money transactions from time to time, before the outbreak of the economic crisis in 1929, Americans still had a favorable impression of Andrew, and they affectionately called him "Uncle Andy". After the economic crisis broke out, the Secretary of the Treasury cleverly diverted attention through charitable donations and saved the crisis of social trust in himself. He donated pianos to students at the music school and provided funds for the deaf and dumb asylum. When Andrew died, the eulogy written by Pittsburgh celebrities included the following sentence: "He is a genius in finance, a philanthropist that no one has ever really understood. He is a rare philanthropist, an ideal public servant, a gentle and loyal parent, a sincere and trustworthy friend, and the most outstanding industrialist."
How to deal with a huge inheritance is a science. Andrew divided his inheritance into two halves, one half was donated to charity, and the other half was left to his children. It doesn't sound special, but the secret is that most of the half of the property left to his children is stocks. When his property was valued, the stock market was in a downturn, and the number of those stocks was not surprising. When the stock market began to prosper again, people realized Andrew's shrewdness: the stocks he left to his children appreciated by nearly 10 times. Although a large inheritance was left, our Mellon family began to decline after Andrew's death. This trend became more obvious after the Gulf Oil Company controlled by the family was involved in the Watergate scandal. In the 1980s, although our family strengthened the production capacity of petrochemicals and ethylene in the traditional oil industry, its scale could only rank third among American chemical companies.
Andrew's son Paul is more interested in spending money than making money. He likes academics and art, and is keen on running various foundations. He would rather manage the "National Gallery" donated by old Mellon to the government than do business. Andrew's nephew, Richard's son, and Paul's cousin Dick (Richard King Mellon) is one of the most outstanding members of the Mellon family's descendants. However, in addition to the family business, he is more interested in the army and the Rolling Stones Club. When Richard died, there was no one in the Mellon family who could serve as the standard bearer. As Paul said at the beginning: The Mellon family is not a hereditary dynasty. Now the family members have their own hobbies, and no one seems to be interested in reviving the past glory.
And now, the descendants of our family are still continuing to develop the family business and maintaining the normal operation of some of the family's work.
Christopher Mellon
Timothy Mellon
Amelia Mellon
Debbie Mellon
