For just about two more weeks, if you can get there, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is presenting one of the great exhibitions of my lifetime: “Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry.” (Even if you can’t, there’s a terrific 84-minute video on the Gallery’s website.)
I wonder how many of the people whose lives are being enriched by this scholarly, beautiful and ultimately very moving show know the name of the man who endowed the National Gallery, not only with the core of its iconic painting collection but with the building itself, out of his own pocket.
He was Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), and his was a most extraordinary life and career.
First, from his home base in Pittsburgh, he became perhaps the greatest of all his generation’s venture capitalists, seeding ALCOA, Gulf Oil, Carborundum and Koppers, among others. He then went on to be the longest-serving treasury secretary of the 20th century, at a time when he was also the country’s third largest individual taxpayer after Rockefeller and Ford. In that role, he developed into the original supply sider, slashing marginal tax rates repeatedly and fueling the economic boom of the 1920s. Finally, even as FDR’s myrmidons tried to hound him into prison for tax evasion (he was exonerated), the dying Mellon gave the nation his magnificent art collection and the great building that houses it.
How, then, do we know so little about him, compared to his great industrial and financial contemporaries? Well, part of the reason is that until he was dead nearly 70 years, there was no serious biography of him in print. (His family had first commissioned one, then declined to release it.) Finally, in 2006, the scholar David Cannadine published his massive and to all intents and purposes definitive Mellon: A Life.
It was only one aspect of Mellon’s particular genius that he fastened onto the perception that by cutting marginal tax rates even as the nation leaped forward economically, tax collections would surge. In the event, he presided over three Revenue Acts which reduced the top personal income tax rate from 77% at the end of World War I to 25% (on incomes over $100,000) in 1929.
Nor were these merely “tax cuts for the rich,” as marginal rate cuts were and continue to be demonized. Tax collections from earners up to $10,000 were $264 million (24.5% of the total) in 1920. They fell to $36 million (3.1%) in 1928. Meanwhile, earners over $100,000 went from paying $321 million (29.9% of the total) to $714 million (a whopping 61.3%) over the same period.
Second only perhaps to a spectacularly disastrous marriage to a woman less than half his age, Mellon’s greatest mistake was not leaving town with Coolidge. He stayed to help Hoover, and ended up even more universally hated than the hapless president.
The National Gallery is Mellon’s enduring legacy, his great collection augmented in the early ‘30s by the purchase of 21 priceless canvases (including a brace of Raphaels, Rembrandts and van Dycks) from the Hermitage, at a time when Stalin was hurting badly for hard currency.