Forgotten Man, The

by Amity Shlaes

  10

  mellon’s gift

  December 1936

  Unemployment (December): 15.3 percent

  Dow Jones Industrial Average: 182

  ONE DAY SEVEN WEEKS AFTER THE ELECTION, Andrew Mellon wrote to the White House. The octogenarian’s letter was not about taxes, or his troubles with the treasury prosecutor, Robert Jackson, nor even deposit insurance for banks, the topic of his preinaugural conversation with Roosevelt four years and so many days in court earlier. Mellon wanted to tell Roosevelt a secret—a secret about his paintings.

  My dear Mr. President,

  Over a period of many years I have been acquiring important and rare paintings and sculpture with the idea that ultimately they would become the property of the people of the United States…

  Mellon wondered if such a gift, and a building to go along with it, might meet presidential approval.

  By this time the gallery idea was not truly a secret. Roosevelt had been at a Gridiron dinner at which Mellon’s gallery had been spoofed in a skit earlier in the year. Treasury’s lawyers had forced Mellon’s attorneys to detail his holdings. And Mellon’s critics had long ago begun to suggest that the gallery offer was an open effort to bribe the White House into desisting in its tax war against him. After all, some of the fiercest of Republicans were now seeking to smooth things over with Roosevelt. Even Hoover, who had been so ferocious during the campaign, was coming up with praise for the president: “The President is right,” he would write from Palo Alto, California, in a January statement supporting the president’s effort to see ratified a constitutional amendment banning child labor.

  But what was new was something that Mellon was only now revealing—what had been on his mind all these years, the philosophy behind the donation of the collection. Mellon was not trying to bribe the government, or even placate it. He was trying to outclass it. For years he had tried to show, through business, that the private sector could give to the people, just as government could, and sometimes more. Then he had tried to demonstrate the same thing from his post at Treasury, through his tax cuts. Now, pleased but still not satisfied with his work through the first two methods, he was trying a third: charity.

  In Mellon’s head, the plan was entirely clear. By giving largely, generously, completely, and entirely, he would demonstrate that the private man could be as good a servant to the public as the government official was—certainly, he was ahead of Morgenthau. What’s more, he would make his gift selflessly. It would not bear his name: “It shall be known as the National Gallery of Art or by such other name as may appropriately identify it…” Even the display of the paintings would be unselfish—they would be arranged by period and style, not by collector or collection.

  Mellon’s paintings must be spared the fate of those of his old collecting companion, Frick. Mellon’s collection would not be eroded by taxes or prosecutions, as long as he could defend it. Mellon’s gift would show the value of leaving art—or capital—to accumulate and compound in the shadows, untaxed. The National Gallery would be an object lesson that the high taxers could not forget.

  The critics, even Robert Jackson, might say what they liked about the timing of his gift, but the whole idea was one that had come to Mellon years ago, while he was still at the Treasury. The Office of the Supervising Architect for the Capitol had reported to the treasury secretary; Hoover and Mellon had discussed and planned the development of the Federal Triangle together. David Edward Finley, Mellon’s aide and a connoisseur of art himself, later recalled that “he had been embarrassed when representatives of foreign countries had come to the Treasury in Washington for debt settlements and other matters and had asked to be taken to ‘the National Gallery’ where they could see some of the great paintings they knew were in this country. Mr. Mellon would reply that there was no such National Gallery of Old Masters, but that he had a few paintings in his apartment which he would be glad to show his visitors.”

  By 1927, Finley later remembered, “Mr. Mellon was revolving in his mind plans for a National Gallery of Art, which he felt to be a necessity in the capital of a great country such as America.” Never mind that a subsection of the National History Building of the Smithsonian was called the “National Gallery”; the new building would supplant it, and he would clear any legislative or bureaucratic obstacles that stood in the way of his plan. Andrew had not been the only Mellon dreaming of buildings. At Yale, well before his escape from the tax prosecutors, Paul had written a poem:

  I built a temple in my inmost mind

  Of pure white marble;

  Its stern symmetry

  Became the symbol of tranquillity.

  After a cabinet meeting, Hoover for his part recalled, “he came to me and asked that that particular site [the gallery site] be kept vacant. He disclosed to me his purpose to build a great national art gallery in Washington, to present to it his own collection which was to include the large number of old masters he was then purchasing from the Soviet Government.” Mellon, Hoover also remembered, “said he would amply endow it and thought it might altogether amount to $75,000,000. I urged that he announce it at once, and have the pleasure of seeing it built in his lifetime.” But Mellon demurred. “He asked me to keep it in confidence,” Hoover remembered, regretfully. “Had he made this magnificent benefaction public at that time, public opinion would have protected him.” Still, Mellon had kept silent.

  In 1930, while still at Hoover’s Treasury, Mellon had established the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, and transferred his whole collection to it the following year, with the idea that the art would go into the National Gallery. Paul had been nonetheless surprised at the sweep of the gift, and was concerned about what it meant for him and his sister. A Joshua Reynolds painting, Lady Caroline Howard, had always hung in his sister Ailsa’s bedroom at the Mellon apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. Yet, wrote Paul Mellon later, “we suddenly found he had put everything into the trust…. Father even put the Reynolds of Lady Caroline Howard, which I am sure he knew Ailsa loved, into the trust.” Mellon the father “was terribly surprised when we said that we would have liked just one picture, one favorite picture. But it was too late.” Secrecy was important, but so was the discipline of family philanthropy.

  There had also been that letter to Paul in 1931, who by then had moved from Harvard to Cambridge for study in Britain. “I hope you are having some time to spend at the National Gallery.” In the letter Mellon added: “I have gone deeper into the Russian purchases—perhaps further than I should in view of the hard times and shrinkage of values, but as such an opportunity is not likely to again occur and I feel so interested in the ultimate purpose I have made quite a large investment…The whole affair is being conducted privately.”

  As the Depression deepened, and Mellon moved over to London and back again, his purchasing had not ceased. Some of his paintings he put in a storeroom at the Corcoran Gallery, visiting them from time to time. But the secrecy remained important. Mellon savored it, confident that the full drama of his message would become clear only if the scale of his gift emerged suddenly, all at once. That was what the hideaway room at the Corcoran had been about. Not selfishness—unless the enthusiasm of the giver arranging his surprise could be called selfishness. Hence Mellon’s irritation when anyone in his family, even his children, talked about his collection.

  And hence his impatience at Jackson’s tax prosecutions. Jackson had believed that through reference to Mellon’s paintings he was exposing Mellon’s wealth and vulnerability; what Mellon especially resented, though, was that Jackson was eroding his surprise. The etiolated Mellon rarely complained in public, but at the tax prosecutions he complained. He even rambled about “accursed publicity.”

  Mellon’s unhappiness had only grown when Jackson forced him to tip his hand more formally in the spring of 1935. By claiming that Mellon had failed to declare certain income, Jackson was charging that Mellon had failed to pay sufficient taxes. Since the prosecution
was a criminal one, Mellon’s only recourse had been to find all means to defend himself. Logically enough, therefore, he and his lawyers pointed out that it was fine for the Treasury to allege that he had had larger income in 1931 than declared. But he had also had larger deductions than declared. And those deductions would include, of course, the paintings that he had purchased for the trust or the gallery.

  What Jackson expected was that this would embarrass Mellon by betraying his wealth, by showing, as he put it, that there was something to “doubt” in Mellon’s $200 million net worth. Instead, however, the very wonder of the list was itself a distraction. The gift collection as then planned did not contain very many paintings, only seventy, but the collection was so broad and of such high quality that it truly could claim to be America’s foremost. It started with that Pocahontas, the only known one, painted from life during her visit to Britain in 1616, shortly before her death. And it moved forward through van Eyck, Botticelli, and Raphael’s Madonna of the House of Alba—the last called the “million dollar picture,” as Mellon’s purchase had made it the first known seven-figure portrait purchase. And there was Rembrandt’s brooding self-portrait, completed in his early fifties, the face of a genius whose lack of luck had made him look like a failure.

  In October 1935 the story had even become semiofficial when Mellon filed a deed revealing that he had set aside $10 million for the construction of “a national public art gallery” in Washington. Two art experts—although one was Mellon’s own broker, Lord Duveen—put the value of the Mellon collection now at $40 million.

  Jackson’s interrogation of Duveen in court had underscored the problem with the direction of the government’s prosecution. Jackson sought to show Duveen as the rich man’s servant, which Duveen was. But Duveen was also Baron Duveen of Milbank, a formidable presence of his own and a man who had logged many previous days in court as an expert witness and target himself. At the Bureau of Internal Revenue courtroom in early May 1935, he dismissed Jackson’s assertion that the art was for Mellon’s own uses—Mellon had talked about a gallery “five or six years ago.” When Jackson tried to assail the scale of the deductions, Duveen had been equally scornful. Mellon’s collection was “the finest in the universe” (he knew; he had a part in making it). Mellon’s Alba Madonna was worth all three of the Raphaels in Britain’s National Gallery.

  Jackson, not giving an inch, revealed that he had had a look at Duveen’s tax returns as well as Mellon’s—one of Duveen’s biographers, S. N. Behrman, reports that he then asked Duveen whether it was not true that he himself had lost millions in the early 1930s. Duveen had been undismayed. Jackson also questioned the stated value of van Eyck’s Annunciation panel. “Perhaps you don’t realize that there are only three small van Eycks in America,” Duveen said. “And they cannot compare with Mr. Mellon’s van Eyck.” The New York Times report conveyed not the scene of shame that Jackson intended but rather one of fun and curiosity: “girl clerks” on their break crowding near the hearing room in the hopes of catching Mellon smoking one of his little cigars.

  Duveen’s very disregard for Washington seemed to put the government crowd back in its place—much in the same way that Mellon’s comment about the dark quarter-hour had put the Depression in its place. Duveen cared so little for the Capitol that when interrogators asked where the Mellon gallery was to be situated he had said of the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool—“by the obelisk, near the pond.”

  Mellon’s point, though not entirely articulated, was obvious to many of the observers. The only reason his art collection was so great was that he was supremely wealthy. And the only reason he was so wealthy was that he and his father before him had been allowed to invest and save. He himself had established charitable deductions in the United States for estates in order to ensure that rich people give to the public. His art collection was so large and had so much integrity precisely because it was a private collection.

  As the details of the project seeped out, the argument against the gallery had become harder to make. Over the course of 1935 and 1936, the public learned that Mellon’s gallery would not be a small thing. It would be different from the Corcoran Gallery or the Phillips Collection, already in Washington. Those collections were open to the public, but they were not national galleries. They were shrines to their philanthropic creators, William W. Corcoran, a cofounder of the Riggs Bank, and Duncan Phillips, a neighbor from Pittsburgh and heir to the Laughlin steel fortune.

  Mellon, by contrast, truly was insisting that the fact of his giving—or that of any other donor to the museum—be pushed into the background. The gifts would be bequeathed directly to the people’s representative, the federal government, just as he had planned. There would be no middle ground between public and private—no semiproprietary right that gave Mellon or those he designated a guarantee they could continue to manage the museum. Mellon, or another wealthy man, might give another Vermeer or a Giotto. But that art would be—just as he had conceived—integrated, by school and chronologically, into the general collection. And it would become public property as surely as the Capitol itself was public property, and even the fact that the paintings had once belonged to a captain of industry, say, one from Pittsburgh, would recede.

  In 1936 Mellon, now past eighty, intensified his focus on the gallery. He traveled to Britain with his aide Finley and visited Duveen, who suggested he had many works in New York that might fit in with the gallery. Back in Pittsburgh Finley and Mellon walked the garden of his Woodland Road house, and, Finley later recalled, “his eyes would brighten as he talked about his last great project.” Returning to Washington and down with a cold, Finley received a call from Mellon: he must go to New York and select paintings from Duveen that would suit the gallery. Finley took the midnight train and looked over the works with Lord Duveen in his velvet-lined chambers at 720 Fifth Avenue. “We were there for the greater part of three days,” Finley remembered. Then Finley, thirty paintings, and twenty-one pieces of sculpture all traveled south to Mellon. The sculptures meant that Mellon, after so much study, would in the end be one-upping the British: their National Gallery, as fine as it was, did not have sculpture.

  Some of those involved in the story later told it a different way—as a successful lure by Duveen. Sensing that Mellon was ready to give, Duveen had rented the apartment below that of his most important client on Massachusetts Avenue. He told Mellon, “You and I are getting on. We don’t want to run around. I have some beautiful things for you, things you ought to have. I have gathered them specially for you.” He then gave Mellon a key to his own apartment and invited him to visit the paintings when he was away. The biographer Behrman reports that Mellon, as it turns out, did indeed visit—in dressing gown and slippers. Eventually he bought up the art in the apartment.

  Both accounts are probably true. Mellon always hesitated before he bought—Duveen’s success with him lay in his ability to tolerate lengthy periods of indecision. The purchase when it finally came was in any case a giant one, outdoing the Hermitage acquisition by far. But Mellon, though fading, was still a formidable bargainer. Duveen had showed Finley a painting of Saint Paul. The identity of the painter was uncertain—Bernard Berenson, the critic, had categorized the large figure “as by Giotto.” Duveen insisted it was a Giotto: “I say it is by Giotto and it will be by Giotto.”

  Finley reports countering that if Mellon bought it, it would be at the price of a painting by “A Follower of Giotto.” Mellon, a good boss, backed him up: “I will buy the Saint Paul painting as ‘A Follower of Giotto’ and at a suitable price, not the price of a Giotto, and it will so hang in the National Gallery.” The transactions were concluded December 15.

  The number of artworks that Mellon had to offer was still not so very large. As John Walker, who would become collection curator, would note, in the end Mellon gave 125 paintings and 23 sculptures, nowhere near enough for the building he was beginning to envision. “The Mellon works of art would seem as scattered as sheep
on a Scotch moor.” But Mellon, again true to his old concept of seed capital, was reckoning that other philanthropists would fill a space if he set the model by providing it. It was now mid-December, and he was ready to write Roosevelt.

  The president replied to Mellon’s proposition the same week, on the day after Christmas.

  My dear Mr. Mellon,

  When my uncle handed me your letter of December 22 I was not only completely taken by surprise but was delighted by your very wonderful offer to the people of the United States. This was especially so because for many years I have felt the need of a national gallery of art…

  Within days, Mellon and Roosevelt were taking their tea in the upstairs library on the second floor of the White House. They sat down at five o’clock, but what they said precisely is unknown: “He and Mr. Mellon were deep in conversation for some time,” David Finley would write. The president “tossed” Mellon’s offer to his attorney general for management. Last of all the president’s personal secretary, Missy LeHand, “came in to pour tea, with some of the Roosevelt grandchildren to look on.”

  Roosevelt was in a grateful mood in these postelection days—the same week, mindful of all Cordell Hull’s persistent free trade policy had done for recovery, he also wrote to the acting secretary of state to ask whether he might recommend Hull for the Nobel Peace Prize. Clearly he also wanted to show gratitude to Mellon. But this was still an anxious time for Mellon. There had to be more exchanges of letters and an act of Congress. Paul Mellon and his wife, Mary, were expecting the birth of their first child. But, the papers reported, Mellon was working hard on the art project. The grandchild, Catherine Conover Mellon, was born on the second-to-last day of 1936, but Paul convinced his father to stay in Washington until another round of letters with the White House was concluded. As it turned out, Mellon’s concerns were overdone. The same Congress that would find other questions more challenging—most especially a plan of Roosevelt’s about the Supreme Court—would find it easy to support the National Gallery project later that spring.