Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business men, yet what the public knows about him is nothing. He was the president of a great bank and amassed wealth. An old financial journalist, he has gift of speech and writing, unusual in the business world. His agreeable personality made him liked by editors. He achieved unusual publicity. Was his reputation solidly based or was it newspaper made? The public does not know, cannot know. I use his case by way of illustration. Perhaps he ought to be President of the United States. But choosing a man for office on the basis of his business success, even so well known a man as Mr. Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind gambling.
We have in office now one of the great business men of the country. Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is posed somewhat uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile of wealth any one has ever heaped up, except Mr. John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat uneasily" because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from a Congressional hearing at the Capitol, flustered and uncomfortable, turning to a subordinate and asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good impression?" What could a subordinate reply except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon, you did very well."?
But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression on the witness stand. If he were unjustly accused of a crime he would hang himself by appearing in his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his stammering hesitancy not guilt but an honest inability to express himself.
Mr. Mellon is the shyest and most awkward man who ever rose to power. He is unhappy before Congressional committees, before reporters in the dreadful conferences which are the outward and visible evidence of our democracy, at Cabinet meetings, where the fluent Mr. Hughes casts him terribly in the shade.
At one such meeting the President dragged him forth from silence by turning to him and asking him, "What has the Sphinx here got to say on the subject." Thus impelled, the Secretary of the Treasury replied, unconsciously in the words of Sir Roger de Coverley, "Well, Mr. President, I think there is a good deal to be said on both sides."
If we may believe the psychologists, the great object of acquiring wealth and power is the achievement of self-complacency. If it is, Mr. Mellon has somehow missed it. You can not imagine him writing himself down beside the others in the great American copy book and saying seriously to the youth of the land, "Look at me, I worked always fifteen minutes after the whistle blew and behold the result. Follow my footsteps." No golden words issue from his mouth. Some unforgetable personal measure of his own deserts, some standard peculiar to himself, perhaps, refuses to be buried under the vast accumulations.
Were ever great abilities so tongue-tied as this? I ask this question not to answer it. I merely hold Mr. Mellon up as the usually insoluble riddle, the why of great business success. But granting that the real Mr. Mellon is shown in the enormous fortune and not in the timid asking of a subordinate, "Did I make a good impression?" does such shrinking, such ill adaptation, on the stage of public life make a contribution to the unending drama of self-government?
