Millionaires, Mansions & Moonshine: Andrew Mellon
The McCormick Apartments was once the ritziest apartment building in Washington, DC.
Historic America is excited to relaunch its Millionaires, Mansions, & Moonshine tour this upcoming weekend. The tour is a journey through the splashy scandals and outrageous misbehavior of DC’s uber wealthy from the Gilded Age through Prohibition. It’s centered in DuPont Circle; a millionare’s enclave filled with amazing mansions of a bygone era. One of our favorite characters on the tour is Andrew Mellon - the famous art collector, businessman, and US Treasury Secretary who loomed large on the DC scene.
We thought it would be fun to give our loyal readers a taste of the tour in today’s Historic America Journal entry. What follows is the story outline our very own guides use from our Andrew Mellon tour stop at the McCormick Apartments!
The enforcement of Prohibition was the responsibility of the Prohibition Bureau - an arm of the Treasury Department. The Treasury agents who served the Prohibition Bureau were underpaid and overworked - they were ripe targets for bribery. Of the 17,816 agents who served from 1920-30, 11,926 were forced out on suspicion of corruption. Honest men (like Eliot Ness & his ‘untouchables’) were the exception.
They were led by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon - a wealthy banker and philanthropist who despised Prohibition. He served as Treasury Secretary under three consecutive presidents (Harding, Coolidge & Hoover) and he rented the entire top floor of the McCormick Apartments for his living quarters; a palatial existence. Each apartment took up an entire floor - 11,000 feet! This was the city’s most expensive apartment building, and Mellon paid an astounding yearly rental fee of $17,000. A keen art collector, he filled his apartment with priceless works by the Dutch Masters (he donated $15 million to create the National Gallery of Art - and offered his collection of paintings and sculptures valued at over $25 million to help fill the gallery).
Since Mellon did not believe in Prohibition, he stonewalled its enforcement. His resistance to Prohibition took many forms and spilled into public as he fought with Congress over the presence of liquor in DC embassies.
Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not believe in Prohibition
The Story: Foreign embassies were not subject to abide by the nation’s Prohibition laws. Located on foreign soil, they could provide alcohol to dinner guests. Congress attempted to close this loophole. In 1923 the House demanded to know how much liquor the embassies were importing. Mellon was told to deliver a report but he refused on the grounds that such a disclosure would violate diplomatic immunity, stating that the congressional request was, “…incompatible with the public interest.”
He also had a conflict of interest. Before Prohibition, Mellon gained a large interest in the Old Overholt Whiskey Distillery which he bought from his friend, steel tycoon Henry Frick (Abraham Overholt’s grandson). In 1919, mere months before the adoption of the 18th Amendment, Frick died and Mellon was named the executor of his estate, which meant Mellon now had a controlling interest. As Treasury Secretary, Mellon would grant the company a license to sell medicinal whiskey from its existing booze stockpile. As Prohibition wound down, Mellon sold Overholt’s medicinal whiskey license for a tidy profit.
Fun Fact: That’s right - Americans could buy a pint of liquor every ten days with a medical prescription from a doctor. Pharmacy’s became booze dispensaries - the perfect front for bootleggers. As a result, the number of registered pharmacists in New York State (for instance) tripled during the Prohibition era. Tax stamps appeared on the medicinal bottles, as well as “dosage cups” with instructions “to pour and drink.”
Fun Fact: Christie’s recently auctioned off the last 50-odd cases of Old Overholt from Mellon’s personal cellar for roughly $18,000 a case. Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey is still sold today. It is made and owned by Jim Beam. It remains one of the nations’ oldest distilleries.