I bring to your attention Mr. Andrew William Mellon, a scarecrow of a man whose life reads like a Balzac novel. He is virtually forgotten today, but he should be remembered. First, he is one of the men who brought you the Great Depression; second, he is the man who invented “trickle down economics”, which may yet bring you the next depression; third, his name has appeared on more dollar bills than anybody, with the possible exception of George Washington; and fourth his obsession with money was so great that its poison has leached into our own time, for Andrew William Mellon was the 'prater profectio' of the “vast right wing conspiracy.” Suffice it to say that if Freud had ever met Andrew Mellon, psychiatry would be a recognized science today. 
Andrew was lucky enough to be born at a time and a place (Industrializing Pittsburg – “hell with the lid off”) and to a Scrooge-like father (who “…disapproved of those possessed of festive dispositions”) both of which characteristics gave Andrew an advantage over the rest of humanity. His father was a successful banker, and when Andrew was 17 he loaned the boy enough cash - at reasonable interest rates - so that he could found his own lumber company, following the mantra, “What would father do?” After paying daddy back and making a small fortune of his own, Andrew sold out because he felt the market was about to take a downturn – which it promptly did. Andrew then joined with his father and brother in founding a bank, T. Mellon & Sons. In 1882 Andrew became the President and primary shareholder. Using it as a base, and his connections with the Pittsburg elite of Carnegie and Rockefeller, Andrew helped form ALCOA, B.F. Goodrich, Gulf Oil, Heinz Foods and dozens of other corporate giants in the dawning 20th century. He was, by 1899, the fourth richest man in America. But he was still living with his parents and eating porridge for dinner. Surly life had something warmer to offer Andrew than an “Oedipal competition” with his father that he could never win.
It did. But Andrew screwed it up. In 1900 the 45 year old Andrew tried to escape his desolate fate by marrying the vivacious 19 year old Nora Mary McMullen, of the Scottish Guinness Brewing fortune McMullen’s. But instead of Nora providing Andrew with a way out, he dragged her into his miserable life. She tried to make dirty, foul Pittsburg a home. Nora had a daughter in 1901 and a son in 1907, but she also had occasional liaisons with an old boyfriend, the debonair and dashing Captain George Alfred Curphey. It was obvious that Nora was even more desperately miserable in Pittsburg than Andrew had been. But even after Andrew bought Curphey off for $20,000, Nora eventually ran away to England with him. In the end, after having refused Nora’s desolate pleas for a divorce for a decade, in 1912 Andrew charged her with adultery and fought her in court for custody of their children. He won, but that just meant that now he and the children were all miserable. 
Andrew was lucky enough to be born at a time and a place (Industrializing Pittsburg – “hell with the lid off”) and to a Scrooge-like father (who “…disapproved of those possessed of festive dispositions”) both of which characteristics gave Andrew an advantage over the rest of humanity. His father was a successful banker, and when Andrew was 17 he loaned the boy enough cash - at reasonable interest rates - so that he could found his own lumber company, following the mantra, “What would father do?” After paying daddy back and making a small fortune of his own, Andrew sold out because he felt the market was about to take a downturn – which it promptly did. Andrew then joined with his father and brother in founding a bank, T. Mellon & Sons. In 1882 Andrew became the President and primary shareholder. Using it as a base, and his connections with the Pittsburg elite of Carnegie and Rockefeller, Andrew helped form ALCOA, B.F. Goodrich, Gulf Oil, Heinz Foods and dozens of other corporate giants in the dawning 20th century. He was, by 1899, the fourth richest man in America. But he was still living with his parents and eating porridge for dinner. Surly life had something warmer to offer Andrew than an “Oedipal competition” with his father that he could never win.It did. But Andrew screwed it up. In 1900 the 45 year old Andrew tried to escape his desolate fate by marrying the vivacious 19 year old Nora Mary McMullen, of the Scottish Guinness Brewing fortune McMullen’s. But instead of Nora providing Andrew with a way out, he dragged her into his miserable life. She tried to make dirty, foul Pittsburg a home. Nora had a daughter in 1901 and a son in 1907, but she also had occasional liaisons with an old boyfriend, the debonair and dashing Captain George Alfred Curphey. It was obvious that Nora was even more desperately miserable in Pittsburg than Andrew had been. But even after Andrew bought Curphey off for $20,000, Nora eventually ran away to England with him. In the end, after having refused Nora’s desolate pleas for a divorce for a decade, in 1912 Andrew charged her with adultery and fought her in court for custody of their children. He won, but that just meant that now he and the children were all miserable. By 1920 Andrew had become so brittle that one biographer has described him as a “dried-up dollar bill waiting to be blown away”. And this was the man the new President, Warren G. Harding, named as his Secretary of the Treasury. And why not: if you believed in the power of unfettered capitalism then why not place its future in the hands of one of its most successful capitalists? After resigning from the sixty boards of company directors he sat upon, Andrew accepted the post. Of course he still maintained close contact with the family bank, now under the stewardship of his brother. 
The entire modern Republican economic game plan was on display while Andrew Mellon ran Treasury through the terms of Presidents Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Through the entire decade of the 1920’s the economy grew at 7% per year, while unemployment remained between just three and four percent.(Sound familar?) Mellon moved to quickly retire much of the World War One debt, cutting it by $10 billion. He also pushed hard to cut the upper income tax rate from 77% to 24%, and cut taxes for middle class Americans at the same time, although by not nearly as much. He also reduced the Estate Tax, (known in current Republican circles as the “Death Tax”). But more importantly he moved to improve the “efficiency” of government. Remember this was when the largest civilian department in the government was the Post Office. In 1920 federal spending was $1,329.77 per person. By 1927, after seven years of Andrew Mellon efficency at Treasury, that spending had fallen to $180.57 per citizen - for the Post Office, the Navy, the Army, everything. 
So if Mellon was getting everything he wanted in 1929, what went wrong? As one historian has explained, “Between 1923 and 1929 manufacturing output per person-hour increased by 32 percent, but workers’ wages grew by only 8 percent. Corporate profits shot up by 65 percent" (Sound familar?)"… In 1929 60% of families were living on less than $1,500 a year….” And then, the Revenue Act of 1926 cut the taxes of those making $1 million or more by more than 2/3rd . As a result by 1929 the top 1/10th of 1% had an income equal to that of the bottom 42%. Another historian observed that, "The Mellon tax policy, placing its emphasis on relief for millionaires…made the mal-distribution of income…even worse." The middle class of Americans had been squeezed out of existence by 1929. And since Federal budgets had been progressively cut year after year, the economic health of the nation became dependent solely on the swing of business cycles, until the money in circulation contracted past the point where the economy could recover from the next stumble. The market fell from a high of 294 points in early October 1929, to 230.07 points on October 29th. Without cash moving through the system “Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between the years 1929 and 1932. Home-building dropped by 80%...” Does any of this sound familiar? 
One wag put it to verse; “Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signal, And the country went to hell.” Mellon saw what was happening, but favored what he called a “liquidationist” approach to the problem. (Sound familar, again?) As was recently tried again in the case of Lehman Brothers, Mellon believed that weak banks then (and weak brokerage firms now) should be allowed to fail. Mellon called it “weeding out”. What that strategy produced, in 1929 and in 2008, was panic selling, when confident investors realized they could be the next loser if their bank failed, and acted accordingly. 
In the public’s mind Mellon, who was by then 70 years old, had become the face of the “old system”. During 1930 and 1931 Hoover saw to it that Andrew Mellon spent much of his time in Europe with the thankless job of trying to get ex-allies to repay wartime debts. It was during this time that the Hoover administration, still following Andrew Mellon’s approaches, drove the economy from recession into depression, eventually dropping the market, on July 8 1932, to an all time low of just 41.22 points. And rightly or wrongly, in the public’s mind, Andrew Mellon bore most of the responsibility for the disaster. It was his business philosophy that had led to the crash, even if it wasn’t his philosophy alone. Finally, in February of 1932, Andrew agreed to step down from Treasury, and accept the post of Ambassador to England. He served for just one year and then resigned. 
In 1937 the Roosevelt administration opened “The Mellon Tax Case”, investigating Andrew and his ties to the family bank. Eventually the Mellon Bank settled for $668,000 (equivalent to $9,552,000 in 2007). But by then, Andrew was dead, on August 27, 1937. And though his estate had been hurt by the massive tax settlement, and even though Andrew had spent the last years of his life giving away much of the wealth he had accumulated, Andrew still managed to hold on to enough so that in 2007 the various trusts that Andrew created saw that his grandson, 75 year old Richard Mellon-Scaife, was still collecting about $45 million a year, some of which was used to finance the impeachment campaing agaisnt President Bill Clinton in 1998. 
The entire modern Republican economic game plan was on display while Andrew Mellon ran Treasury through the terms of Presidents Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Through the entire decade of the 1920’s the economy grew at 7% per year, while unemployment remained between just three and four percent.(Sound familar?) Mellon moved to quickly retire much of the World War One debt, cutting it by $10 billion. He also pushed hard to cut the upper income tax rate from 77% to 24%, and cut taxes for middle class Americans at the same time, although by not nearly as much. He also reduced the Estate Tax, (known in current Republican circles as the “Death Tax”). But more importantly he moved to improve the “efficiency” of government. Remember this was when the largest civilian department in the government was the Post Office. In 1920 federal spending was $1,329.77 per person. By 1927, after seven years of Andrew Mellon efficency at Treasury, that spending had fallen to $180.57 per citizen - for the Post Office, the Navy, the Army, everything. So if Mellon was getting everything he wanted in 1929, what went wrong? As one historian has explained, “Between 1923 and 1929 manufacturing output per person-hour increased by 32 percent, but workers’ wages grew by only 8 percent. Corporate profits shot up by 65 percent" (Sound familar?)"… In 1929 60% of families were living on less than $1,500 a year….” And then, the Revenue Act of 1926 cut the taxes of those making $1 million or more by more than 2/3rd . As a result by 1929 the top 1/10th of 1% had an income equal to that of the bottom 42%. Another historian observed that, "The Mellon tax policy, placing its emphasis on relief for millionaires…made the mal-distribution of income…even worse." The middle class of Americans had been squeezed out of existence by 1929. And since Federal budgets had been progressively cut year after year, the economic health of the nation became dependent solely on the swing of business cycles, until the money in circulation contracted past the point where the economy could recover from the next stumble. The market fell from a high of 294 points in early October 1929, to 230.07 points on October 29th. Without cash moving through the system “Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between the years 1929 and 1932. Home-building dropped by 80%...” Does any of this sound familiar? One wag put it to verse; “Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signal, And the country went to hell.” Mellon saw what was happening, but favored what he called a “liquidationist” approach to the problem. (Sound familar, again?) As was recently tried again in the case of Lehman Brothers, Mellon believed that weak banks then (and weak brokerage firms now) should be allowed to fail. Mellon called it “weeding out”. What that strategy produced, in 1929 and in 2008, was panic selling, when confident investors realized they could be the next loser if their bank failed, and acted accordingly. In the public’s mind Mellon, who was by then 70 years old, had become the face of the “old system”. During 1930 and 1931 Hoover saw to it that Andrew Mellon spent much of his time in Europe with the thankless job of trying to get ex-allies to repay wartime debts. It was during this time that the Hoover administration, still following Andrew Mellon’s approaches, drove the economy from recession into depression, eventually dropping the market, on July 8 1932, to an all time low of just 41.22 points. And rightly or wrongly, in the public’s mind, Andrew Mellon bore most of the responsibility for the disaster. It was his business philosophy that had led to the crash, even if it wasn’t his philosophy alone. Finally, in February of 1932, Andrew agreed to step down from Treasury, and accept the post of Ambassador to England. He served for just one year and then resigned. In 1937 the Roosevelt administration opened “The Mellon Tax Case”, investigating Andrew and his ties to the family bank. Eventually the Mellon Bank settled for $668,000 (equivalent to $9,552,000 in 2007). But by then, Andrew was dead, on August 27, 1937. And though his estate had been hurt by the massive tax settlement, and even though Andrew had spent the last years of his life giving away much of the wealth he had accumulated, Andrew still managed to hold on to enough so that in 2007 the various trusts that Andrew created saw that his grandson, 75 year old Richard Mellon-Scaife, was still collecting about $45 million a year, some of which was used to finance the impeachment campaing agaisnt President Bill Clinton in 1998. As Honor de Balzac wrote in his novel, “Father Goriot”, “Behind every great fortune…is a crime that has yet to be discovered.”
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At its southern end is “The Narrows”, which closes to a little under a mile wide. In 1917 the town of Halifax, home to 50,000, rose on the steep hills along the west side of the Narrows, while the suburb of Dartmouth, with a population of 6,500, occupied the east shore.And beyond the bottleneck of The Narrows was Halifax Harbor, which opened to the North Atlantic. The ocean here is warmed by the nearby Gulf Stream Current, and the Great Circle commercial route is just one hour sailing time out to sea. That combination, the harbor and the nearby Great Circle Route, made Halifax a convenient place to rest and load coal before challenging the North Atlantic, or to recover after a harrowing voyage to the new world. And during World War One the Bedford Basin was the logical place for allied convoys to form up in hidden safety.
As the two ships approached they each signaled by ship's horns their intention to maintain course and speed. Then without warning the Mount Blanc turned to the right, as if moving to dock at a pier on the Halifax shore. Seeing this, the Imo desperatly reversed her engines, intending to slow and give the Mount Blanc room. But the reverse spin on Imo’s propeller pulled her into the center of The Narrows, and directly into the path of the looming Monte Blanc. 
The Canadian Navy tug and mine sweeper "Stella Maris" joined the Imo in attempting to throw water on the fires, and the "Stella Maris" also sent a boat crew to attempt to take the abandoned wreak under tow. 
Out of the tug Stella Maris’ crew of 24, only five survived. On board the Imo, the captain, the harbor pilot and five crew members were killed. The 430 foot long Imo was thrown against the Dartmouth shore like a toy in a bathtub, her bottom ripped out. Every other ship in Halifax harbor suffered casualities and damage.
Slowly rescuers began to move into the devastated square mile, removing the dead, comforting the wounded and searching for survivors in the rubble of their homes and businesses. Then, as darkness began to fall that night, “…almost as if Fate, unconvinced the exploding chemicals…had struck a death blow to Halifax, was now calling upon nature to administer the coup de grace…”. It began to snow. The worst blizzard in ten years buried the shocked port in several feet of snow and condemned untold injured to death by freezing. 
Every year, the city of Halifax donates a Christmas tree to the city Boston, as thanks for the assistance that was rushed to them in the weeks after the explosion. And every year, on December 6th, from 8:50 A.M., to 9:25 A.M., there is a Memorial Service held at Fort Needham in Halifax to remember the victims of the largest man made explosion on earth ... superseded only by the first atomic bomb test in 1945, when there was another war on. 
Nepos was governor of Dalmatia and he got the job as Western Emperor in 474 A.D. because he was married to the niece of Leo I, the Byzantium Emperor, and because he was willing to pay for an army to defeat Glycerius, the guy who had knocked off the previous western Emperor. In fact Nepos is Latin for nephew, and - what a surprise - is also the root of the term “nepotsm”, which tells you almost everything you need to know about this schmuck.
Caesar Augustus (him again) had established the port of Ravenna in the first century B.C. as the home for the Roman fleet. By the fourth century, with the barbarians carrying off half the forum in a fire sale, the capital had been moved first to Milan, and then to the port city because Ravenna was surrounded by swamps and marshes, which offered protection from the invading hordes, of which there were plenty around at the time. But so low had Rome fallen by that time that the next invading hoards didn’t even have to invade, because they were already there. 
Half the army Nepos used to defeat Glyceriys was made up of German barbarians – er, I mean mercenaries, about 30,000 of them, led at this opportune moment by an ambitious German commander, married to a Roman woman. His name was Orestes, and although he had been secretary to Attila the Hun, he does not seem to have been very bright: just ambitious. And that is probably why Nepos figured that Orestes would not catch on when the new Emperor ordered Orestes to march off to Gaul with all of his German mercenaries. 
I suspect it was Orestes wife who explained to him what Nepos was really up to, getting the Germans out of Italy and out of the way. Wives have a way of pointing out to husbands when they are being particularly dense. Anyway, it was probably she who suggested that Orestes should offer the Germans their own villas and farms in Italy, which would be stolen from the Roman patricians who owned them. So he did. 
It’s further proof of the old adage that historians spend centuries struggling to learn from dusty records and scratches on walls what they could have discovered in five minutes by talking to the any guy on any streetcorner in ancient Rome. And one of histories’ greatest mysteries, unexplained by the dusty records, is why, having won such power and wealth so easily, Orestes then went back on the promise to his mercenaries and refused to hand over the patrician’s lands to them. Did he think all 30,000 Germans were not going to notice?
They noticed. And quickly rose up under their new commander, Odoacer. And this time they were joined by a lot of the Roman soldiers, and together, in 476, they all marched on Ravenna. Unlike Nepose, brave, couragous, dull headed slow thinking Orestes didn’t have the common sense to run. He was captured just outside the city, and duly executed. Thus fares most dolts in history. 
The truth is, almost nobody got out of this particular story by natural causes. Poor old Nepos was murdered by his own servants, probably in the pay of Glycerius, on April 25, 480 A.D. Odoacer rushed in to fill the political vacuum, repaying Glycerius by appointing him Archbishop of Milan. And Odoacer settled down to run his little empire.
