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The Man Who Helped Build Yale
March/April 2007
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith Ann Schiff is chief research archivist at the
Yale University Library. She is curator of one of several exhibits the
university will mount this spring for the centennial of Mellon’s birth.
Paul Mellon '29, born 100 years ago this June, reshaped Yale through philanthropy. The Center for British Art, Morse and Ezra
Stiles colleges, Directed Studies, the residential college deans: these are
only a few of the Yale institutions he created or helped to endow. Mellon was
so fond of Yale that he often gave his horses Yale-inspired names, such as Blue
Banner, Arts and Letters, and Chapel Street. Yet little on the campus bears his
own name, and that was precisely how Mellon wanted it. In a statement following
Mellon’s death in 1999, Yale president Richard Levin characterized him as “wise,
generous, and strikingly modest.”
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When Paul entered Yale, his father was Secretary of the Treasury.
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Paul Mellon was the son of Andrew Mellon, one of the
four richest men in the United States. (The others were Henry Ford, John D.
Rockefeller, and Andrew’s brother Richard.) Through the bank established by his
father, Andrew Mellon had developed some of the leading American industries,
including Gulf Oil, Standard Steel Car Company, and the Aluminum Company of
America. When Paul entered Yale in the fall of 1925 after graduating from
Choate, his father was Secretary of the Treasury.
In college, Paul earned appointments as vice-chair of
the Yale Daily News and to the board of the Yale Literary Magazine. He was also the first man to be
tapped by both Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key; he turned down Bones for
Keys. One of his closest friends was classmate A. Whitney Griswold, who also
wrote for the News (and would serve as Yale’s president from 1950 to 1963). It was the era of
Prohibition, and Mellon enjoyed visiting the speakeasies frequented by
undergraduates in New Haven and New York. In one illegal establishment, he
spent time at the bar with gangster Legs Diamond. These visits had “an irony
some of us thought amusing,” Mellon recalled in his autobiography, Reflections
in a Silver Spoon. “My
father, as Secretary of the Treasury, had overall responsibility for the
enforcement of Prohibition. And there was the Secretary’s son, lapping it up in
speakeasies.”
Paul Mellon attended Clare College at Cambridge for
two years after his graduation. Already an Anglophile—as a child he had
spent several summers in England—he so enjoyed the experience that when
he returned to the United States in 1932, he arranged for the A. W. Mellon
Educational and Charitable Trust to establish the Yale-Clare Fellowships (now
the Paul Mellon Fellowships). One was for a Yale student to study for two years
at Clare College with a summer of travel in the British Isles; the other was
for a graduating member of Clare College to study at Yale with a summer of U.S.
travel.
With the appointment of Whitney Griswold as president
in 1950, Mellon became more closely involved in supporting Yale education. He
wrote in his autobiography, “Whit had strong feelings, which I shared, about
trying to preserve liberal arts education in the face of the postwar tide of
mass education.” This led to his support for Yale’s program in theater studies,
its humanities major, and Directed Studies—which enables a select group
of freshmen to undertake an intensive, year-long study of Western civilization.
Other Mellon gifts helped young faculty and endowed professorships in the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the schools of medicine, divinity, and forestry.
In 1948 he established the university library’s Bollingen Prize for poetry;
Ezra Pound was the first recipient.
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At Yale, Mellon is best known for the buildings he funded.
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Mellon gave Yale many items from his own collections,
along with the funds to purchase other important material; in this way Yale
acquired the Boswell Papers, the Vinland Map, and the Mellon Collection of
Alchemy and the Occult. But at Yale, Mellon is best known for the buildings he
funded. Griswold brought the best modern architects to design for Yale, and
with Mellon’s support selected Eero Saarinen '34BArch to design Morse and Ezra
Stiles colleges. President Kingman Brewster '41 continued this policy and
selected Louis Kahn to design the Mellon Center for British Art. Four years
before the center opened in 1977, Mellon requested that his name be removed,
writing to Brewster: “It is my firm belief that prospective future donors to
the Center for British Art and British Studies will be much more eager to make
donations to an institution to which a University name is attached rather than
to a personal or family name.”
Of course, Mellon’s generosity extended far beyond
Yale. He gave a large collection to the National Gallery of Art founded by his
father. The two of them also gave the building, and Paul, along with his
sister, funded the National Gallery’s East Wing. He also established the Cape
Hatteras National Seashore and London’s Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.
Paul Mellon received both the National Medal of Arts
and the National Medal of Humanities. Yale awarded him a Yale Medal in 1953 and
an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1967. The degree citation reads
in part: “The sophistication of your taste in life and learning, as well as
your collections and benefactions, has spread a civilizing light through the
lives of your fellow men. To the burdens of your trusteeship of a family
fortune, you have brought a modesty and grace which are the highest marks of
liberal learning.”
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