[ More on Pittsburg - sort of... ]
The Judge [Andrew Mellon's father, Thomas Mellon] was a nearly ideal expression of the Scotch-Irish culture which suffused industrial Pittsburgh in the nineteenth century. It was an intensely money-minded culture and deeply Protestant in the cunning with which it had adapted Christianity to justify ruthless pursuit of acquisition and accumulation. In decadent form it survives today as the so-called "Protestant work ethic," but the nineteenth-century Presbyterians of western Pennsylvania observed it with a religious scrupulosity that would seem quaint to today's tycoons. As devout Calvinists they were all too aware of the awkward contradiction between capitalism's love of maximized profit and Christianity's disapproval of moneychangers. To preserve their faith as well as their profits, they had arrived at a workable compromise: the rich would be permitted to enter Heaven without having to pass through the needle's eye provided they refused to take pleasure in their wealth and gave some of it back to society.
The Judge, who had no use for philanthropy, gave back very little, but believed that hard-earned business success enriched the entire nation and so squared his account. He was assiduous, however, in resisting temptations to pleasure. The family environment he created was "predictably stern," Cannadine says. "There was little light or laughter" in his house. Meals were taken in silence, even at Thanksgiving and Christmas. "Displays of emotion were frowned upon: in public, Mellon men never kissed Mellon women; handshakes were as demonstrative as they ever got."***
In the second half of the nineteenth century Pittsburgh became one of the country's most vital industrial centers. Rich in coal and oil, it was the natural frontier of the new industrial America, with rail connections and navigable rivers that made it a transportation center. The steel industry grew up there.
The Scotch-Irish, as Cannadine points out, enriched it with a resourceful people in whom the capitalistic impulse was aggressive, almost religious in its ferocity. They were a people who lived to work and had little tolerance for those who didn't. Presbyterians whose ancestors had been moved from Scotland to stabilize Catholic Ireland for England's Protestant kings, they started leaving for America in the early 1700s and were heavily established in the eastern Piedmont states a century later. Andrew Mellon's father, born in County Tyrone, arrived at Baltimore with his parents in 1818, and they immediately started for western Pennsylvania in a Conestoga wagon. Cannadine provides detailed accounts of how the Mellons went from country farmers to supreme plutocracy in two generations. Readiness to work doggedly was vital of course, but what he repeatedly emphasizes are the diligence with which they investigated before investing and their extraordinary ability to make accurate judgment of other men's talent, ability, and ideas.
Pittsburgh society offered little to satisfy lively minds. Two of its richest citizens, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, were lured by New York and built showoff mansions on Fifth Avenue. Mellon could not be tempted. Though he had loyal, sometimes brilliant retainers, he had few friends. The closest was probably his younger brother Richard, who was also his full-time business partner. Decisions that built the Mellon empire were all made jointly with Richard.***
Andrew also failed to prepare his bride for the ugliness that was Pittsburgh in 1900. As the train carried the newlyweds homeward through a depressing mill-town landscape of bleakness and ruin, Cannadine writes that Nora suddenly realized she was entering an alien world—"the hills seared with outcropping seams of coal, the rivers dark and polluted, the atmosphere thick with soot." When the train finally stopped, "she could scarcely believe that this blighted and benighted place would now be her permanent home. 'We don't get off here, do we?' she asked. You don't live here?'"
Nora's despair seems to have been total. She was "appalled and bewildered." She "loathed the silent formality of dinners at the Judge's house" and considered him "far gone mentally." She thought Pittsburgh society "smug, parochial, and materialistic." She hated her gloomy house. She was "disgusted" by Pittsburgh's squalid, filthy environment. She hated its factories and mills. "Almost immediately, she was lonely, homesick, and disoriented," Cannadine writes.
>From The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 17 · November 2, 2006
Review
The Wealth of Loneliness
By Russell Baker Mellon: An American Life by David Cannadine
Knopf, 779 pp., $35.00