The President and the Oligarch: Greg Steinmetz on FDR’s Vendetta Against Andrew Mellon

The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, was about the sixteenth-century Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger. The second, American Rascal, was about the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. The third, The President and the Oligarch, came out this week, and this time the rich man has a president as a co-star. It’s a book about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Andrew W. Mellon.

Mellon was the third richest American of his age, behind Rockefeller and Ford. He was, above all, a banker, installed as president of his father’s small-town Pennsylvania bank while still in his twenties, and building it into one of the largest banks in the country. Warren Harding, reasoning that anyone that rich must know something about money, made him Treasury Secretary. He served Coolidge and Hoover too, eleven years in all, the second longest tenure in the department’s history.

And then, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt came for him. Steinmetz’s revisionist argument is that FDR’s pursuit of Mellon was pure politics. Mellon, who by then was in his late seventies and out of office, had done nothing to him. His supposed crime was taking a tax write-off on art he had donated to a foundation, the sort of thing, Steinmetz claims, (rich) people do every day. Roosevelt’s own attorney general told him there was no case and a grand jury threw it out. Roosevelt pursued him in tax court anyway, until an unloved Mellon died with the matter unresolved.

Steinmetz suggests this is where the modern American fashion of deploying the tax code against political enemies begins. The irony is that Mellon’s paintings that triggered the persecution morphed into the National Gallery of Art — for which Roosevelt took the credit. Poor persecuted Andrew W. Mellon. Or, more accurately, rich persecuted Mellon. Unlike Steinmetz, I find it hard to feel sorry for such a miserable old sod who didn’t even have any fun with his wealth. Maybe Steinmetz’s next book should be about persecuted poor people. He’d find no shortage of subjects.

FURTHER READING

•   Greg Steinmetz, The President and the Oligarch: Roosevelt, Mellon, and the Triumph of Big Government (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

•   Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

•   Greg Steinmetz, American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

•   William Hitchcock on A Shadow Over the World — the companion revisionist case on FDR and the 1930s: listen to that episode

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The man who had no fun. Mellon was the third wealthiest American of his era, behind only Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and he appears to have enjoyed almost none of it. One contemporary journalist wrote that he looked like an accountant who had just lost his job. His English wife, brought over from horse country outside London, took one look at the smokestacks of Pittsburgh and within three years had taken up with an Englishman. Steinmetz describes a man who was never happier than when he was alone in the bank with a balance sheet, and l