If, like me, you played too much Monopoly when you were young, you already know the man pictured on today’s #stampoftheday because Andrew W. Mellon supposedly was the model for the white-mustached man in a black top hat and tails who is an integral part of the game’s logo.
A banker, industrialists, art collector, and philanthropist who served as U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1921 until 1932, Mellon is pictured on 3-cent stamp issued on December 20, 1955.
In some ways, Mellon is well known. He is the “Mellon” in Carnegie-Mellon University, which was created in 1965 via the merger of once-separate entities created by Mellon and Andrew Carnegie, his long-time business partner in Pittsburgh, where both men were based. He is the namesake of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has a more $6 billion endowment and is the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the United States. You might even know Mellon as the man who spurred the establishment of the National Gallery of Art, which owns 121 paintings and 21 sculptures that had been purchased by Mellon.
And yet in many ways may well have been “the most unknown plutocrat in the US,” according to historian David Cannandine, who wrote a biography of Mellon in 2006. That’s quite amazing given that Mellon had played a major role in the creation of what at one time were five different Fortune 500 companies (Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank, Carborundum, and Koppers). In addition, Mellon controlled a network of 99 banks and had interests in coal, steel, chemicals, oil, sleeping cars, railroads, building construction, utilities, magnesium, and airplanes.
His network was so wide that President Warren G. Harding couldn’t find a company that involved government business that wasn’t somehow connected to his treasury secretary. Finally, one day day in a meeting, discussion turned to the Chinese Eastern Railway. “Now we’ve got him,” the president supposedly whispered to his attorney general. “Surely he wasn’t in on this.” Harding then asked if Mellon had any interest in the railroad. “Oh yes,” he supposedly replied. “We had a million or a million and a half of the bonds.” Harding supposedly gave up, saying Mellon was “the ubiquitous financier of the universe.”
As Treasury Secretary from 1921 until 1933 (under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover), Mellon led efforts to cut taxes and reduce the federal debt. William Allen White, one of the era’s leading journalists wrote that “So completely did Andrew Mellon dominate the White House in the days when the Coolidge administration was at its zenith that it would be fair to call the administration the reign of Coolidge and Mellon.”
Hailed as an architect of the booming economy (for some) during the 1920s, Mellon’s reputation was greatly diminished by the Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. He participated in the Hoover Administration’s various efforts by the to revive the economy and maintain the international economic order, but, like the president, he opposed direct government intervention in the economy.
He left office under a cloud, resigning when the House launched impeachment proceedings against him in 1932. The Roosevelt Administration went after him, indicting him for income tax evasion in a case that Mellon won after a several year battle. And in 1937, not long before he died, he finalized the gift that provided funding for building a new National Gallery of Art and donating the artwork that became the basis of the museum’s collection, a set of paintings that included more than 20 paintings purchased from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s when that country sold off some of the Hermitage’s holdings to finance efforts to rapidly industrialize. (These included works by Botticelli, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian and others.)
For all his influence and impact, he was a famously taciturn figure. He and Coolidge, who also was famously un-loquacious, were said “to have conversed in pauses.” And Mellon was so laid back for Black Thursday merely observed: “Stock market crash in New York. Dinner Belgium Embassy.”
Moreover, he was, in the words of New York Times review of Cannandine’s book, “a dour and lonely financier who was wounded in love, disappointed in his children and, tragically, ill-rewarded by his government.” Cannandine described him as “a hollow man” and “a dried up dollar bill that the wind might whisk away.” This was, in part, due to his upbringing, which was dominated by his father, a successful banker who, according to one review of Cannandine’s book, “delighted in the hand-rubbingly Scrooge-like pronouncement that he ‘hated extravagance, display, waste and ostentation, feared the corrupting allure of ease and luxury, and disapproved of those possessed of festive dispositions’ – adding, for good measure, that ‘novel-reading and light literature unhinges the mind entirely for manly employment'”.
Given his complex history and popular image, I was puzzled by the fact that he appeared on a stamp, particularly because, as best I can tell, at the time, he was only the second Treasury Secretary to be pictured on a postage stamp. The first, of course, was Hamilton. Presumably this had more than a little to do with the fact that the stamp was issued during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose Defense Secretary, Charles E. Wilson, the former president and CEO of General Motors, famously said at his confirmation hearing, ” for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”
I believe Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary who appeared on a 1967 stamp, is the only other treasury secretary to appear on a stamp. And that makes me wonder if any recent treasury secretaries will ever grace a stamp. I can’t, for example, imagine a stamp will depict Steve Mnuchin, who has held the post for the last four years. I also doubt we’ll ever see a stamp honoring Tim Geitner, Hank Paulson, Larry Summers, or Don Regan (to name a few people who held the post since 1980) I suppose you could make a case for James Baker and perhaps George Schultz but even that’s hard to imagine.
So the dour man who shaped so much of 20th century America and lives on in popular memory as an avatar for a game is likely to be in select company for some time to come.
Be well, stay safe, don’t cheat at Monopoly, fight for justice, and work for peace.