R.K. and the Rise of the Rich Resistance - Meet the Mellons. (Part III)
In Part III, you’ll meet the Mellon who took the family underground, rebuilt and disciplined them to drag America backwards, to its exploitative, industrialist days.
In the last installment, Meet the Mellons, Part II, we learned how Andrew Mellon’s crushing grip on the American experiment, for twelve years, ushered in the Great Depression. The infamy caused the family retreated to the shadows, and reorganize.
Chapter III, of “Meet the Mellons,” is the story of the Great Restructuring of both the family, and of the United States.
The Mellon vision of America for the few, and the aspirations of hundreds of millions, have been the tectonic struggle of America’s modern history.
The Great Restructuring of America Begins
Andrew Mellon, the very public-facing, three-time Secretary of Treasury, and Republican power broker, departed the spotlight. Andrew became: the poster boy for the New Deal; FDR’s whipping boy; the very visible architect of both failed fiscal policy, and oppression.
The family needed a new leader. It got that, from the most ideal candidate for the job: Richard King “R.K.” Mellon.
Richard King “R.K.” Mellon (1899–1970)
Richard King Mellon (R.K.) was the son of Richard Mellon, and the nephew of Andrew. He was brought up in a household where talk of Social Darwinism, racism, and eugenics flowed. He was no fan of the New Deal. He did not take FDR’s public humiliation of the Mellon name, as the poster-family of rapacious industrialist exploiters that they indeed were, lightly.
The Place
The Mellons were based in Pittsburgh. What better place, then, to build an ideological fortress? Begin, from there.
The Challenge
R.K. inherited the burden of restoring the Mellon family's reputation, and business discipline, after the twin blows of Andrew's public disgrace, in the Great Crash, and the blame for the subsequent economic collapse of the Great Depression, that undermined the Mellon empire’s public, and business standing.
The Tools
A military man, R.K. Mellon excelled at logistics, and making tough decisions, under pressure. He served in both World Wars, as: a lieutenant colonel, in World War I; a major general, in the Army Reserve, by World War II.
His second tour of duty included significant responsibilities, for the War Department’s logistics, procurement, and industrial mobilization. Mellon was praised for his organizational rigor, hierarchical command structure, and ability to streamline decision-making under pressure.
He was the perfect man for the job, in the heat of the crisis that the family was facing.
The Business Restructuring
R.K. served as president, and chairman, of Mellon Bank. He oversaw family holdings in Gulf Oil, and Alcoa (Aluminum), amongst others.
R.K. centralized management, across Mellon-controlled businesses. He streamlined operations, reduced the inefficiencies of nepotism, and pushed for executive accountability.
Unlike earlier Mellon patriarchs, who relied on informal influence networks, he enforced hierarchy, and modern corporate governance. He took a strict approach to cost control. Under his leadership, unprofitable units were sold, or restructured. The family prospered.
The Family Restructuring
A lifelong Republican, after Andrew’s stunning repudiation, by the American public, R.K. shunned the individual spotlight, both for himself, and the family.
R.K.’s control of the family was equally military in discipline, centralized in command, and hierarchical in structure. It paired well with his distaste for disorder, excess, or ideological deviation. It shaped how he managed the Mellon legacy, in the post–New Deal era.
Succession, the TV show, this was not. He enforced a strict discipline, in how the entire family interacted with the public, and when it needed to do so.
To restore their name, the Mellons leaned heavily on philanthropic projects, delivered by more sympathetic and a-political family members, to reverse the family's well-earned public image, as symbols of greed. .
The National Restructuring
R.K. made an important decision: to carry forward his family’s world view of America, instead of adapting to the times.The Mellons supported anti-union, and ‘anti-communist’ (e.g. pro-worker’s rights) measures within Mellon-owned firms, and beyond.
The New Deal may have beaten back many of the excesses of Guilded Age capitalism, but that didn’t stop them from trying to take back power.
Philanthropy as Political Weapon
To build his ideological stronghold, R.K. started several “charitable” foundations. The Richard King Mellon Foundation, and other Mellon family foundation vehicles. They avoided overt political entanglement.
R.K. viewed federal intervention in urban and economic affairs as inefficient, preferring private capital and elite stewardship. As we can see, these have become key tenet of GOP ideology, from Goldwater, through Trump.
Recalling that the Mellons believe poverty to be a “character flaw,” in print, and a genetic flaw, in private, R.K. deepened the family's commitment to anti-welfare conservatism.
Thus, their grant-making aligned heavily with corporate, anti-labor, and pro-military causes, especially in the Cold War years.
In the name of “modernization,” in Pittsburgh, their home town, they funded medical institutions, Catholic universities, and civic redevelopment projects. These often were located to displace, or exclude, dissenting blue collar, pro-labor, and marginalized black populations.
The hospitals and universities that they built favored private, over public, solutions to health and educational access.
Semper Ideologia
Although not directly connected to political candidates, Mellon money flowed to institutions that advanced elite capitalist ideology, suppressed unionization, and legitimized surveillance in the name of civic order.
This ideological stance framed the family's resurgence, as part of a pro-industrialist, anti-radical order.
It dovetailed with the rise of the infamous first director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
They shared an idelogical class hatred: anti-union; pro-corporate; socially conservative; and hostile to any form of economic redistribution, or political dissent.
The Money (and Control) Spigot
Mellon philanthropic money, particularly through institutions like the Mellon Institute (later Carnegie-Mellon University) supported the same highly conservative civic, and institutional, ecosystem that notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover depended upon for legitimacy: conservative universities, law enforcement training centers, and Cold War-era scientific institutes.
Use of Philanthropy as Repression Mechanism
The Mellon Institute, prior to its 1967 merger, with Carnegie Tech, had military and surveillance research contracts that overlapped with FBI interests, particularly during the 1940s and 50s.
While the Mellon Institute never operated as an official arm of the FBI, or vice-versa, it was the precursor to the modern foundational “think tank.” It functioned as a parallel intelligence-gathering, and ideological production hub, for the American corporate state. It reinforced the FBI’s anti-communist agenda by:
Arming corporations with tools to monitor, discredit, and fire suspected subversives.
Legitimizing anti-labor, and anti-leftist, policy through ‘objective’ industrial science.
Cultivating a security-conscious research culture compatible with Hoover’s domestic containment goals.
Mellon companies, including Gulf Oil, and Pittsburgh Coal, maintained private security forces. They shared intelligence on “subversive” workers, tactics not uncommon for large firms during the McCarthy era and frequently coordinated with the FBI and local law enforcement.
The Results
Anti-1% Sentiment was high
FDR had thoroughly, justifiably demonized wealthy elites, after the Great Depression. Well before America was drawn into WWII, the American public had deeply turned against unregulated capitalism. The majority of Americans lived experience of mass unemployment, bank failures, and corporate abuses.
The Hollywood Factor
The largest social influencer from the 1920s, through the 1970s were not newspapers, or politicians. It was the movies. Many of the studio heads, producers, and creative leaders in early Hollywood were immigrants, first-generation Americans, or from working-class backgrounds.
Jewish studio moguls, like Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), Carl Laemmle (Universal), and the Warner brothers built Hollywood’s foundations. Rich as they were, though, they were systematically excluded from the elite WASP social clubs, Ivy League circles, and the intermarried financial dynasties like the Mellons.
They remained outsiders, in the eyes of old-money American aristocracy.
R.K. Mellon, and his wealthy friends, began to systematically invest in media control, public relations, and post WWII, think tank–driven narrative engineering.
Between the lived wounds of the Depression, and the pro-union sentiment both before, and after WWII, America was not ready for any kind of aggressive retaking of power. Any open assault, on New Deal protections, would have been politically and socially suicidal, for the .1%, in the 1930s, and 1940s.
Even many Republicans, of the time, accepted the need for Social Security, banking regulations, and labor protections. That made them politically untouchable, for decades.
While R.K., himself, was more reserved, and focused on Pittsburgh’s urban redevelopment, military strategy, and banking, his cousin, Richard Mellon Scaife, would later fully weaponize this platform in the 1970s and 1980s to attack liberal policies and promote conservative ideologies. More on him, later in our story.
By the 1950s, R.K. was one of the richest individuals in America.1 In 1957, Fortune estimated that R.K., his sister Sarah, and cousins Paul and Ailsa, were each among the eight wealthiest Americans, with fortunes of $400–700M ($5.18B - $8.1B in 2025 dollars) apiece.2 The family wealth was approximately $2.4B to $4.2B in 1957.
The Mellon family empire ran like a tight, ongoing generational power structure, not a loose confederation of hobbyists. Even though R.K. kept a very “clean hands” profile, nothing done by the rest of the family happened without his approval. He understood how to move civic, and political machinery, without front-page headlines.
As the family moved to pull political influence out from under the Democrats’ control, he quietly backed Republican presidential candidates, and causes.
He was known to be a friend and supporter of Dwight Eisenhower. He also backed Richard Nixon, who had stronger connections to his nephew, Dickie. He helped reportedly fund GOP campaigns in Pennsylvania.
The Richard King Mellon Foundation, as of 2023, holds over $2.6 billion in assets. It has preserved over 120,000 acres of wilderness, and supported home-town universities, with major gifts to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. 3
R.K. died, in 1970. He left behind a restored family image, and a new generation of extremist, regressive warriors, to execute on the family’s continued ambitions to shatter New Deal America, and restore the American road map to one of their rather myopic vision.
In the next installment of “Meet the Mellons” you’ll meet the dark genius who put into motion the think tanks, and the radicalization of the right, from Goldwater to to Romney. If you found this article, start on Chapter I: Meet the Mellons.
