From the "Rich and the Super-rich"....by Ferdinand Lundberg copyright 1968...available for free down-load due to it's copyright expiration from The Soil and Health Library
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.htmlINHERITED WEALTH-HOLDERS, 1957
Stated Net
Worth in Financial Age in Living
millions Activity 1957 Schooling Children
1. J. Paul Getty $700-$1,000 Executive 65 Oxford (B.A.) 5
London Getty Oil Co.
2. Mrs. Mellon Bruce $400-$700 Rentier
(Ailsa Mellon)
New York
3. Paul Mellon $400-$700 Director 50 Yale (A.B.) 2
Upperville, Virginia Mellon National Bank, Cambridge (A.B.)
etc.
4. Richard K. Mellon $400-$700 Executive 58 Attended 4
Pittsburgh Alcoa, Princeton
Gulf Oil, etc.
5. Mrs. Alan M. Scaife* $400-$700 Rentier 54 2
(Sarah Mellon)
(Died, 1965)
The Mellons
Four leading Mellons on the Fortune list are given a minimal combined worth of $1.6 billion and a maximum of $2.8 billion. As market values up to this writing have risen sharply, these figures now embody considerable understatement.
The Mellons are another close family group, with holdings concentrated as shown in the TNEC study in a broad group of leading companies: Aluminum Corporation of America, Gulf Oil Company, the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the General American Transportation Corporation, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, Koppers United Company, Lone Star Gas Corporation, Niagara Hudson Power Corporation, Pittsburgh Coal Company, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, The Virginian Railway Company, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company and various others. Of this group the Mellons controlled Aluminum Corporation, Koppers United and Gulf Oil. Five Mellons held these interests directly and through two family holding companies, three closely held insurance and securities companies, six trust funds, one estate and one foundation. 34
In Aluminum Corporation common stock the Mellons held 33.85 per cent; in the contingent voting preferred stock the family and its foundation held 24.98 per cent. In Gulf Oil Company the Mellon family and its personal companies owned 70.24 per cent of the common stock, an unusually large single family stake in so large an enterprise. The Mellons held 52.42 per cent of the common stock of Koppers United and 1.52 per cent of the contingent voting preferred. 35
Applying the TNEC percentages of ownership at closing 1964 market prices the value of the Mellon holdings in the three leading companies alone would be:
7,127,725 shares of Aluminum Company common
(33 per cent of outstanding 21,413,177 shares)
at 61-1/2 $438,970,087
164,477 shares Aluminum Company
preferred (25 per cent of outstanding
659,909 shares) at median price
of 85-1/2 (1964 price range 83-88) $9,128,468
72,579,487 shares Gulf Oil Corporation
(70 per cent of outstanding 103,684,981
shares) at 58-5/8 $4,254,972,426
1,166,567 common shares Koppers (52-1/2 per cent
of 2,222,032 outstanding shares) at 55-3/8 $64,599,968
Other companies ?
_______________
Total $4,767,669,949
This computation is made without considering the Mellon holding in the Mellon National Bank of Pittsburgh, not included in the TNEC study, and in various other banks and in many companies with Mellon participation as reported in the TNEC study. But although the preceding table shows the pattern of the family holdings in general, there have been shifts in Mellon holdings since the TNEC study, notably through the establishment of a series of foundations in the 1940's.
These foundations, whose holdings should not be necessarily considered as additions to those already indicated, are as follows:
Date Founded 1962 Assets
The A. W. Mellon Educational and 1930 $24,197,042
Charitable Trust
(included in TNEC study)
Avalon Foundation, N.Y. 1940 $99,182,784
(Mrs. Ailsa Mellon Bruce)
Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation 1941 $20,098,157
Old Dominion Foundation, N.Y. 1941 $65,082,139
(Paul Mellon)
Bollingen Foundation, N.Y. 1945 $6,013,881
(Paul Mellon)
The (Richard K.) Mellon Foundation 1947 $82,028,250
The (Matthew T.) Mellon Foundation 1946 $160,775
(as of 1960)
____________
Foundation Total $296,763,028
Although the income and any capital distribution from these foundations must be used for legally prescribed public purposes, the capital investments, as long as they remain undistributed, represent Mellon voting power in industry. But the foundations established since 1940 do not, as comparison with the first tabulation shows, diminish by much the personal Mellon holdings of today when computed according to the TNEC pattern. The family, all lovers of the old-time capitalism will be cheered to note, does not appear to be dissipating its fortune in riotous charity.
Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) was himself an inheritor, the son of Thomas Mellon, a rich Pittsburgh private banker and the pre-Civil War Horatio Alger source of the family fortune. From his father's bank Andrew and his brother, Richard B., began branching out and initially acquired a commercial bank and an insurance company. It was a small beginning, with far greater deeds of financial derring-do to come.
The first really big Mellon opportunity came, however, when two metallurgists told Andrew in 1989 of a successful new process for smelting aluminum discovered by Charles M. Hall. In return for $250,000 credit with T. Mellon & Sons, the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, owner of the process, gave Mellon control of the company. it was common at the time for banks to demand a "piece of the action" in any promising enterprise that applied for loans, which is how Mellon and other bankers turned up with toothsome participations in so many burgeoning enterprises. 36 For these participations in many if not most cases, they paid nothing whatever but sat in their money-nets like intent spiders and let the flies walk in one by one.
The Mellon participation in Gulf Oil came about similarly. Anthony F. Luchich, a Yugoslav prospector, brought in the great Spindletop gusher in Texas in 1901, which quickly led to more oil than all the Pennsylvania fields had since 1859. Money was now needed to handle the flow and build pipelines, and Pittsburgh interests were appealed to. Among these were William Larimer Mellon, nephew of Andrew and himself an heir of Thomas Mellon. In the upshot there was formed the J. M. Gulley Petroleum Company, capitalized at $15 million. Andrew W. Mellon bought the prospector's interest for $400,000 and altogether put $4.5 million into the new company, of which Colonel J. M. Guffey, who had an interest in the Spindletop lease, was given the presidency, $1 million and a promise of $500,000 from future dividends. Andrew W. Mellon and his brother, Richard B., took 40 per cent of the stock and sold 60 per cent to six Pittsburgh capitalists. 37 Guffey Petroleum soon was renamed Gulf Oil. Guffey himself was dropped.
Mellon utilized the same technique again and again with other entrepreneurs who came to him for the means necessary to launch or tide over their enterprises.
The Aluminum Company was eventually judicially designated a monopoly but not until it had enjoyed a long charmed life. It repulsed a number of private suits under the Sherman Act early in the century and on a few occasions outmaneuvered the Federal Trade Commission, which could not prove its bone-deep belief that the company was engaging in unfair competition. In 1912, however, the Aluminum Company consented to a practically meaningless decree in an action brought by an unenthusiastic Department of Justice charging unfair trade practices.
Again in 1937 the Department of justice brought suit, holding that the company held a 90 per cent monopoly. In 1945 the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, concluded that the company indeed held prewar monopoly control of ingot production. But the court did not force the company to dispose of any plants pending disposition of government aluminummaking facilities built in wartime 1942-45.
During the war, with aluminum in short supply, Reynolds Metals Company with government encouragement began primary production, the first competitor in the field since 1893. After the war the government, bypassing Aluminum Company, offered its plants to 224 different companies--some of them large--and strangely found no buyers. Surplus Property Administrator W. Stuart Symington then accused Aluminum Company of blocking the surplus plant sale by its patent control. After denying this, Alcoa relinquished to the government its many patents, gobbled up during the years, thus throwing them open to free licensing.
Reynolds Metals now bought or leased various of the government plants created around these patents. Kaiser Aluminum, formed for the purpose, took over other government-built plants. Since then the Anaconda Copper Company and Revere Copper and Brass, Inc., have entered the lucrative field, with still others likely to come. The long Mellon monopoly in aluminum was finally broken, but not before the Mellons made millions from it. And the country is now for the first time well supplied with aluminum.
Who are the Mellons today? There are Paul Mellon, son of Andrew Mellon, director of the Mellon National Bank and various Mellon funds; his children, Timothy and Catherine Conover (Mrs. John W. Warner); Richard King Mellon, Jr., son of Richard Beatty Mellon, nephew of Andrew, director and officer of various leading Mellon enterprises; his children, Richard, Cassandra, Constance and Seward; Ailsa Mellon (Mrs. Mellon Bruce), daughter of Andrew and mother of Audrey Mellon Bruce; Sarah Mellon (Mrs. Alan M. Scaife, died 1965), daughter of Richard Beatty Mellon and mother of Richard Mellon Scaife, who is a director of the Mellon National Bank and of various Mellon funds and trusts; William Larimer Mellon, M.D., and others. By no means as numerous as the Du Ponts, the Mellons nevertheless constitute more than the glittering quartet named by Fortune.
Richard Mellon Scaife has been a key figure in conservative politics since the 1960s. Called by liberal pundit James Carville in 1999 “the archconservative godfather in
heavily funded war against ,” Scaife has helped bankroll the modern conservative movement. The Scaife Foundations include the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, and the Allegheny Foundation. Financing for these foundations is largely drawn from the oil and banking holdings of the Mellon family. Scaife’s personal fortune is estimated by Forbes to be around $800 million. (13)
According to a 1999 Washington Post report, Scaife’s funding work has been central to the success of the conservative agenda in recent years:
Scaife and his family’s charitable entities have given at least $340 million to conservative causes and institutions—about $620 million in current dollars, adjusted for inflation. The total of Scaife’s giving—to conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries—exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much more than any previous estimate.
In the world of big-time philanthropy, there are many bigger givers. The Ford Foundation gave away $491 million in 1998 alone. But by concentrating his giving on a specific ideological objective for nearly 40 years, and making most of his grants with no strings attached, Scaife’s philanthropy has had a disproportionate impact on the rise of the right, perhaps the biggest story in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Whenever the conservative right attacks programs that help working people like Truddy Lowe, listen for the sound of a cash register.
According to a recent report from People for the American Way called "Buying A Movement: Right-Wing Foundations and American Politics," there's a well-organized conservative money machine financing far-right ideas that hurt working families in general and public employees in particular.
The money comes from five big foundations:
The Bradley Foundation,
The Coors Foundation
The Koch Family Foundation
The Olin Foundation
The Scaife Family Foundations have given over $200 million in recent years to right-wing causes. The foundations were created by Richard Mellon Scaife, a member of the Mellon banking and oil family. University of Massachusetts professor Thomas Ferguson credits Scaife as having "as much to do with the Gingrich revolution as Gingrich himself."
http://www.afscme.org/publications/8667.cfm?print=1
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