Andrew Mellon: Treasury Power, a Tax Trial and Stalin's Hermitage Art

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Andrew Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1855 to Judge Thomas Mellon, who schooled his children privately at home. At 19, during the Panic of 1873, Andrew called in loans and calmly paid out depositors, restoring T. Mellon and Sons, which his father handed him outright in 1882. He then turned banker into industrial investor: a $25,000 loan in 1889 to a struggling aluminum venture grew into Alcoa, and with his brother Richard and Henry Clay Frick he moved into Gulf Oil, shipbuilding and coal companies that at one point supplied 11 percent of America's coal. When the club dam above Johnstown failed in 1889, killing about 2,000 people, lawyer Philander Knox argued an act of God and the corporate veil shielded the members.

After his marriage to Nora McMullen collapsed, Mellon's allies pushed through a Pennsylvania law allowing divorce hearings in private. As Treasury Secretary from 1921 under three presidents, his "scientific taxation" cut the top rate from about 73 percent to 25 percent by 1926 while revenue rose and the national debt fell from $24 billion to $19.6 billion. After the 1929 crash he urged Herbert Hoover to liquidate labor, stocks, farmers and real estate. Facing an impeachment push from Congressman Wright Patman, he was moved to London as ambassador in 1932, then prosecuted for tax fraud under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

• Old Overholt, the distillery Mellon co-owned with Frick, received a rare medicinal permit to keep selling whiskey during Prohibition.
• A journalist dubbed the boom years "the Reign of Coolidge and Mellon."
• Through intermediaries he paid the Soviet government over $6 million for 21 Hermitage paintings, including the Alba Madonna at over $1.1 million.
• In 1936, mid trial, he offered Roosevelt his collection and the money to build the National Gallery of Art.
• Mellon died in August 1937 and was posthumously cleared of the tax fraud charges months later.