Forgotten Man, The (39 page)

In September, Roosevelt spoke at Harvard, Felix’s home, his own alma mater, but also the institution of a man Roosevelt disliked—A. Lawrence Lowell, president emeritus, the man who had opposed Frankfurter on Sacco and Vanzetti. Bolder than ever, Roosevelt chose to omit the traditional acknowledgment of the host in his salutation. The audience was shocked, but Roosevelt enjoyed himself. Frankfurter telegrammed the president,
IT WAS REALLY A GREAT TRIUMPH. YOU FURNISHED A STRIKING EXAMPLE OF THE CIVILIZED GENTLEMAN AND ALSO OF THE IMPORTANCE OF WISE SAUCINESS
. Roosevelt, anxious for praise from his adviser, wrote back, “Did you really and truly like it—more important still, did Marion really and truly like it? Your expression of the ‘importance of wise sauciness’ is perhaps better than mine. I told the boys afterwards that I had stuck my chin out and said ‘hit me’—and nobody dared!” Even as Roosevelt drew closer to Frankfurter, he distanced himself from the others. Though Tugwell and Moley were doing productive things—Tugwell was at a high point—the change cast a shadow. Moley later wrote of Roosevelt: “He closed, one by one, the windows of his mind.” Perhaps, Moley went on, “this is a disease that haunts the White House. In any case, Roosevelt developed pernicious attacks of it, and this lessened his capacity as a political leader and statesman.”

That month,
Migrant Mother
was published for the first time. At the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur Morgan was still seeking a territorial truce with the private companies. To him the war with them was a distraction, perhaps even unnecessary. In August, however, the other two members of the TVA board had moved against him, resolving that “in future contracts the Authority will not agree to territorial restrictions on the sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority power to public agencies.” It was a public victory for Lilienthal. Roosevelt seemed to side with Morgan—at least until the election. Repeating his “breathing spell” action of a year earlier, he invited Willkie, the TVA, and a few others, including Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan, to a conference to talk about a power pool grid system.

Willkie, though suspicious, felt he had to go along with the administration, at least this last time. Whatever the status of corporate stock, there was plenty of hope for operating utilities companies. Commonwealth and Southern net earnings had headed up from 1935 to 1936 and they would be even higher in 1937. Roosevelt wanted his own breathing spell; he wanted the utilities businesses to end their interminable lawsuits. The utilities knew they could not win if the government continued to buy off towns by helping them to build their own distribution plants for TVA power. Perhaps Roosevelt would, after all, allow competition to challenge the TVA. Willkie felt, the
New York Times
wrote on October 11, that the White House willingness to talk about power pools was “an act of political statesmanship calling for an equal degree of business statesmanship on his part.” In that original first meeting, Roosevelt may not have charmed Willkie. But this time it seems the president succeeded. And it was a ruse, if Robert Jackson, the attorney, is to be believed. For, as Jackson later recalled in a memorandum in his papers, Roosevelt around that period “had a profound dislike for Willkie.”

Other utility executives, like Ferguson, did not even try to be agreeable. They had tired of Roosevelt’s cynicism, which was in evidence even in the context of the power pool negotiations: as his representative for these government-to-utility talks Roosevelt had chosen Louis Wehle, the nephew of Louis Brandeis, author of
The Curse of Bigness.
What’s more, Harold Ickes at the Department of the Interior was continuing to subsidize municipalities to build city-owned utilities to take power directly from the TVA—in October 1936 he announced a $3 million grant to the city of Memphis for precisely this purpose. This they regarded as a bribe. And of course, this was not all that Ickes was giving the towns; there were yet more pillared town halls and libraries. When it came to convincing towns that the federal government or the TVA belonged in their town, Ickes’s helpful buildings had more authority than any politician.

A speech that the president delivered just weeks later seemed to validate these executives’ fears—and reveal Willkie as naive. At Madison Square Garden, where Coughlin had stood, it was now Roose
velt’s turn to let the invective fly. “I should like to have it said of my first administration,” he told the crowds, “that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

Now Wall Streeters had indeed become like the plutocrats featured in
New Yorker
cartoons—a few small men, isolated in an outsize ballroom. They knew that their fewness worked against them, especially as Roosevelt courted great swaths of society. Roosevelt had not pushed the antilynching legislation that Father Divine hoped for—it was the sort that southern lawmakers would filibuster. But that election autumn he dedicated one of three new buildings—“with more to come”—at Howard University in Washington, telling an audience there were “no forgotten men and no forgotten races.” Blacks were moving into Roosevelt’s fold. Father Divine would not be a power behind the presidency.

That autumn as well, something good was happening across the nation: Social Security was beginning to seem real. Sometime in the months before the 1936 election, millions of Americans found in their hands a small but riveting document known as an ISC 9. “There is now a law in this country,” the pamphlet from a new office in Washington, the Social Security Board, instructed, “which will give about 26 million working people something to live on when they are old and have stopped working.” The government would, it told the reader, “set up a Social Security Account for you, if you are eligible,” and into this account “You and your employer will each pay three cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year.” That amount, the circular added, “is the most you will ever have to pay.” Last came the promise: “From the time you are old and stop working, you will get a government check every month of your life. This check will come to you as your right.”

The message could not be clearer: people who opposed Roosevelt might stand in the way of American rights. Landon was fading as a candidate. Jobs seemed to be materializing at a heartening rate. Data compiled later would show that in November 1936, unemployment
hit 13.9 percent, the lowest level since 1931. But while yet more hiring might materialize at some point, voters believed that at this moment their choice was between the gifts at hand and the uncertain possibility of prosperity.

There were those who still questioned the terms of that choice. In Harlem, at his headquarters at 20 West 115th Street, Father Divine issued a message in his typically meandering prose: “Not one of the major parties, officially and nationally, or conventionally, has come to me and accepted of my righteous government platform.” Father Divine therefore ordered his flock to “stay our hands,” not to vote, and reporters noted that the polls of Harlem were deserted. Father Divine told his followers the movement would wait until 1940, when, presumably, they would be even greater in number. But his boycott amounted to a footnote in the 1936 story.

On the eve of the election, Frankfurter wrote to Roosevelt of his campaign “the Nation will crown it with victory.” Many of the president’s opponents voted for him. In an era where nothing was easy, the helmsman who tacked left, and then right, and then left still seemed the better choice. Roosevelt took forty-six of forty-eight states. His was the wager of the century, and he had won it.

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 pur
chase 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 gov
ernment 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.