Meet the Mellons. (Part I)
The “shadow warrior” family of the Far Right, the Mellons, and Scaifes, are America’s puppet masters, manipulating America rightward, and backward, since the Great Depression.
Who’s Responsible for Our Slide into Fascism?
We’ve been watching the puppets, in the sidewalk show. We blame them, as we’re supposed to, as good little sheep.
Trump!
Musk!
Few, if any, utter their name, though.
Until now.
The puppets, who say out loud what the real Funders want said. They are the broad bogeymen, of the show. The ones who make the heat; whose network puts out the “flack” that keeps the media, and the public, distracted, and divided.
They’re both symptoms of the power, that has colored the Republican Party, since the Guilded/Industrial Age, of the 19th century.
The Funders?
When FDR turned the direction of the country towards progressive policy, there were a number of very powerful, very wealthy families that were not at all happy about losing their plutocratic1 power over the United States.
The family who is most responsible for our slide back into plutocracy?
Yes, BACK.
Meet the Mellons.
Of that group, the apex sociopolitical predators, are one particular family. The bankers who not only shepherded the titanic fortunes of dynasties like the Carnegies, and Rockefellers. Beyond their staggering wealth, this family, with oil ties to other bad actors, in Russia has been America’s worst family.
In 2025, the Mellon, and Scaife, families remain amongst the United States’ most influential, albeit shadowy dynasties. They gave more money than Elon Musk to the Trump 2024 campaign, yet their names never appear in the news, or on an angry protest sign.
Shows like Succession, and Billions, lampoon miserable rich people, and their silver spoon heirs, climbing over one another to get to the top of the family pile.
The Mellons are anything but that. They work in a very coordinated manner, like a hive. Everyone has their role.
They move slowly, with great patience, over a long period of time. It’s taken a century to bring them to visualize their darkest plans for a fascist America, of automation’s Second Industrial Revolution.
Their fortunes originated in the first Industrial Age, in banking in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Their rich clients, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and others, later cut them into deals, in oil, and industry, that made them fantastically wealthy.
In fact, their total lack of desire to take the limelight, for their handiwork, is a staple of the family’s operational M.O.
From the Great Depression, to today, members of these intertwined families have quietly played outsized roles in American politics, philanthropy, and policy.
They keep improving upon the model, of the Rubber Stamp president: A useful idiot who will do their bidding.
One family member, in particular, may be the worst person in American history. Benedict Arnold, on steroids. Richard “Dickie” Mellon-Scaife unleashed the Far Right think-tanks, terraforming of America that has brought this nation down. Under Nixon, where he funded the Watergate burglaries, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and (twice) Donald J. Trump. More on him, later, in our series.
Answer to the “Why’s” of the Mad King’s Craziest Actions.
As we all, in the second Trump Administration, ask repeated “whys” to this side-show carny’s seeming madness, why Republicans seem to be trying to kill so many of us off, the method lies largely with the Mellons.
Trump is finally saying, out loud, what has been their agenda for almost a century: People who are rich are genetically blessed, and have a purpose on this Earth. The unnecessary?
Better we die, than pay UBI (Universal Basic Income).
The Mellons have been, without question, the most corrosive influence on American democracy’s fulfillment of its pledge that “We, the People” means ALL of the people. From Race to Class to Gender, their toxic hand has been felt in virtually every dark day of American history, since the Guilded Age of early industrialism.
Republican policies and ideas ARE theirs.
Lighting up the Shadows
This report profiles Mellon, and Scaife, family members, living, and deceased. It details their biographies, political donations, advocacy roles, and collective initiatives that have clawed the United States back into their regressive, 19th century white power economic theory, politics, and social agenda.
It also examines how their wealth has been deployed in U.S. and global political alliances, with other like-minded oil interests, through direct contributions, think-tank funding, media ownership, and power-play “philanthropic” ventures.
The Mellon Family: Origins and Key Figures
Thomas Mellon
Thomas Mellon (1813–1908), the immigrant son of Scotch-Irish farmers, became a lawyer, judge, and then financier, and founder of the Mellon dynasty.
Educated at the Western University of Pennsylvania ( Now University of Pittsburgh), Mellon was admitted to the bar, in 1839. He was elected to the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, in 1859. He served until 1869.
Thomas Mellon’s Judicial Tenure and Extremist Social Philosophy
During his judgeship, Mellon was known for rulings that emphasized property rights, male authority, and social hierarchy. They define not only his worldview, practiced habits, and temperament, during his own life. They also have infused, into American politics, and culture, the antiquated pathways of racial, and gender bias that he, and has family, have promoted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Gender
In one widely criticized case, Mellon displayed his misogynist patriarchal tendences. He barred an abused wife from returning to her home. He sided with the husband, reflecting his belief in patriarchal household order.
Race
Mellon believed that true self-respect for the colored race could only be achieved through separation from the white race. He considered social equality between the races impossible.
George Boyer Vashon, a Black lawyer, Oberlin graduate, and abolitionist, was twice denied admission to the Pennsylvania bar, first in 1847 and again in 1868. Vashon’s rejection was explicitly racial, despite his credentials.
Mellon vocally, and vociferously supported the principle of racial separation. He viewed legal equality across racial lines as unworkable and undesirable.
In a public statement, he wrote that Black men should be allowed to practice law, vote, and serve in courts, but only in regions where white men would be under the same social disadvantages. He opposed their presence in white institutions.
“I would have colored men practice as attorneys, sit on juries, hold courts and exercise the right of suffrage—not here, however, but among themselves…,” he wrote. He went on to advocate for their removal from white society. He framed this as a path to self-respect for Black Americans, but insisted that “social equality… seems to me impossible.”2
This was not passive racism. It was active support for legal and geographic segregation. Mellon’s thinking reflected a system of racial control that dovetailed more with Southern white rule. Vashon was systematically erased from Pittsburgh’s legal memory for over a century, as Mellon “sculpted” Pittsburgh in his image.
He His views, along with his great wealth, and power, would extend long beyond his death, continuing to drag segregationist racial injustice deep into the 20th and 21st centuries.
Poverty
Thomas Mellon viewed poverty as a consequence of personal failings, rather than systemic inequalities for opportunity.
In his autobiography, he criticized the notion of providing aid to the poor, stating that such actions encouraged idleness and undermined self-respect. He argued that extending safety and immunity to wrongdoers, or dividing wealth among the poor, was an absurdity, in religious teaching.
Banker to the Billionaires
The family’s wealth dates back to Thomas Mellon’s 19th century Pittsburgh banking empire, Mellon Bank (Merged with the Bank of New York, as BNY Mellon, in 2007).
The foundation of the bank was also the engine of control of his family, and the ultra-conservative viewpoint that has dominated Republican politics, ever since.
Historians note that Mellon was “steeped in social Darwinism.” He admired pseudoscientific thinkers like Herbert Spencer, a discredited 19th-century English philosopher who warped Darwin’s theories. Spencer promoted the idea that social, and economic success, reflected natural superiority.
Mellon embraced this theory, that wealth was a sign of inherent merit. Poverty was a personal failing.
As the banker to the billionaires, Mellon’s views were hugely influential amongst the wealthy.
The Guilded Age’s general notion of “success,” that you “pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps,” another falsehood, was also very much tied to being white, and Christian.
Republicans may have been instrumental in freeing the slaves. Through Mellon, and a handful of other “Robber Baron” industrialists, clients and cronies, like the Carnegies, Rockefellers, etc., the GOP abandoned its fight for socioeconomic equality and freedom. Mellon, and a handful of other Robber Baron elites, used Republican power to entrench economic hierarchy and suppress minority, women’s and workers’ rights.
His views heavily influenced those of Industrialist society, then permeated downwards, into white American culture, and Republican politics. His views not only set the stage for his family, and peers, but the transformation of the Republican Party from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Mellon.
They have continued to permeate the culture, and thinking of Republican politics, to this day. The conditions that moved the party through various terraformings, under their watch, from pro-Nazi Republicans opposing FDR, to the Cold War Republicans of Goldwater, to the Nixon Republicans, then Reagan’s Neocons, the Tea Party, and now, Trump’s MAGA. These are all devolutions that have seen the hand of a long-dead plutocrat, and the family that committed to get back what they rightfully saw as theirs.
As I mentioned, at the head, we like to laugh at the miserable rich in TV shows like “Succession.” and “Billions.” The Mellons are no laughing matter. They are not the satirical backstabbing elites. They are focused. They are patient. When they make mistakes, or see their fortunes reversed, by progressives, they triangulate. They return even more forcefully.
The Mellons take on help from international players. First the Saudis (Bushes I & II/Neocons) and then the Russians/Qataris (Trump).
The Mellon family have waged social cultural warfare in the United States, for almost a century. Their Social Darwinist beliefs, of life for the genetically superior, and death for everyone useless, are the explanation of why Trump is working so feverishly to pull the social safety net out from under us all.
To fix America, is to know what is wrong with it.
The Mellons have been that hidden cancer…
IN PART II…
In Part II of “Meeting the Mellons” we’ll meet Andrew Mellon, the man whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “The mastermind among the malefactors of great wealth.”
As a three-term Secretary of the Treasury, from presidents Harding, to Hoover, he pushed tax cuts for the richest, installed a corporate police state that kept workers in a state of wage slavery, and installed high tariffs, for competing goods that were produced by America’s biggest industrialist families (the Robber Barons). He triggered the 1929 Great Crash, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Sounds familiar? Learn how Trump carries water for the Mellon’s playbook. It’s the tail end of a century of America’s Worst Family, trying to recapture power in America, and subjugate, or eliminate, those less fabulously wealthy.
FOOTNOTES
How does a plutocracy differ from what most media outlets call an oligarchy? A plutocracy is rule by the wealthy. Money is political power. An oligarchy is rule by a small group, which may, or may not, be wealthy. All plutocracies are oligarchies, but not all oligarchies are plutocratic. Elites might hold power through military, religious, or political control. Both concentrate power in the hands of the few, limiting democratic participation.
Mellon, Thomas. Autobiography of Thomas Mellon and Chronicle of the Mellon Family. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. Originally written 1885. Quoted in David Rotenstein, “Thomas Mellon: Pittsburgh’s Forgotten White Supremacist Judge,” Historian for Hire, February 8, 2021.
I always knew the Mellons were big players in the plutocracy, but I did not realize just how big, and how much racism, misogyny and eugenics was ingrained in the family dynasty. How was Lewis Powell, author of the infamous Powell Memo, which has served as the blueprint for the rise of the reactionary right since the 1970s, connected with them?