Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer Page A
Authors: Jane Mayer
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circulation.” M. Stanton Evans, a leading intellectual on the right, captured conservatives’ sense of marginalization in his 1965 book,
The Liberal Establishment: Who Runs America…and How
. He declared that “the chief point about the Liberal Establishment is that it is in control.” In response, right-wing activists like Evans, who had studied with Ludwig von Mises, militated for a “counter-establishment.” Yet they lacked the wherewithal with which to build it.
Stepping into this void and up to this challenge was, as the engraved brass plate beneath his elephant proclaimed, “Field Marshall Richard Mellon Scaife, the Carthaginian hero of the half century, 1950–2000.” The plaque praised Scaife’s “Audacity, Fidelity and Persistence.” Christopher Ruddy, a conservative reporter and publisher who worked closely with Scaife for many years, sharing some of his political adventures, believes that Scaife was the progenitor of a new form of hard-hitting political philanthropy. “He’s the originator” of the current model, says Ruddy. “I don’t know anyone who did what he did before. He’s a bit like Santa Claus.”
—
I n his early years, few would have expected Scaife to exert major influence on politics, or much else. Certainly he was born into extraordinary wealth.In 1957,
Fortune
ranked his mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, and three other members of the Mellon family among the eight wealthiest people in America. But Scaife wasn’t notably distinguished in any other way. Until his mid-thirties, he had no real career or accomplishments. Even by his own estimation, his life was dissolute. In his memoir, he writes that one of his favorite authors was John O’Hara because no one has better captured the decadence and the disappointment that were rife in his own upper-crust circle. “How beautifully he summed up Pennsylvanians of a certain class,” Scaife writes, “their country club values, the wrecks they made of their lives on too much money and alcohol.”
Scaife’s great-grandfather Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder of the family fortune, had worried about the corrupting influence that inherited wealth might have on future heirs. The son of an Irish farmer who settled in Pennsylvania during the first half of the nineteenth century, Mellon proved an uncannily good businessman. He leveraged real estate investments into a thriving loan business that became Pittsburgh’s stately Mellon Bank. During the Gilded Age, the family acquired huge stakes in a number of burgeoning industrial corporations, including Gulf Oil and Alcoa. Surveying his great fortune, however, in 1885, Mellon fretted that “the normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind.”
By the time his great-grandson Richard Mellon Scaife was born in Pittsburgh in 1932, some of the patriarch’s darkest fears had been realized. Sarah Mellon Scaife, the mother of the boy who was known to his family as Dickie, by all accounts struggled to fight a losing battle with alcoholism. She was “a gutter drunk,” according to her daughter, the late Cordelia Scaife May. “So was Dick,” Cordelia said of her brother. “So was I.”
If they were born with silver spoons, they were also born with chips on their shoulders. In his memoir, Scaife describes himself as fundamentally “anti-establishment,” which may seem puzzling given his heritage, but his place within the Mellon dynasty was tinged with resentment. His mother had married a handsome and well-connected local patrician, Alan Scaife, who rode well to the hounds and had attended all the most elite schools but whose forebears had run the family metalworking company into the ground. As a result, Richard Scaife’s uncle R. K. Mellon, who like his mother had inherited a large part of the vast Mellon fortune, treated the Scaife family
The Liberal Establishment: Who Runs America…and How
. He declared that “the chief point about the Liberal Establishment is that it is in control.” In response, right-wing activists like Evans, who had studied with Ludwig von Mises, militated for a “counter-establishment.” Yet they lacked the wherewithal with which to build it.
Stepping into this void and up to this challenge was, as the engraved brass plate beneath his elephant proclaimed, “Field Marshall Richard Mellon Scaife, the Carthaginian hero of the half century, 1950–2000.” The plaque praised Scaife’s “Audacity, Fidelity and Persistence.” Christopher Ruddy, a conservative reporter and publisher who worked closely with Scaife for many years, sharing some of his political adventures, believes that Scaife was the progenitor of a new form of hard-hitting political philanthropy. “He’s the originator” of the current model, says Ruddy. “I don’t know anyone who did what he did before. He’s a bit like Santa Claus.”
—
I n his early years, few would have expected Scaife to exert major influence on politics, or much else. Certainly he was born into extraordinary wealth.In 1957,
Fortune
ranked his mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, and three other members of the Mellon family among the eight wealthiest people in America. But Scaife wasn’t notably distinguished in any other way. Until his mid-thirties, he had no real career or accomplishments. Even by his own estimation, his life was dissolute. In his memoir, he writes that one of his favorite authors was John O’Hara because no one has better captured the decadence and the disappointment that were rife in his own upper-crust circle. “How beautifully he summed up Pennsylvanians of a certain class,” Scaife writes, “their country club values, the wrecks they made of their lives on too much money and alcohol.”
Scaife’s great-grandfather Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder of the family fortune, had worried about the corrupting influence that inherited wealth might have on future heirs. The son of an Irish farmer who settled in Pennsylvania during the first half of the nineteenth century, Mellon proved an uncannily good businessman. He leveraged real estate investments into a thriving loan business that became Pittsburgh’s stately Mellon Bank. During the Gilded Age, the family acquired huge stakes in a number of burgeoning industrial corporations, including Gulf Oil and Alcoa. Surveying his great fortune, however, in 1885, Mellon fretted that “the normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind.”
By the time his great-grandson Richard Mellon Scaife was born in Pittsburgh in 1932, some of the patriarch’s darkest fears had been realized. Sarah Mellon Scaife, the mother of the boy who was known to his family as Dickie, by all accounts struggled to fight a losing battle with alcoholism. She was “a gutter drunk,” according to her daughter, the late Cordelia Scaife May. “So was Dick,” Cordelia said of her brother. “So was I.”
If they were born with silver spoons, they were also born with chips on their shoulders. In his memoir, Scaife describes himself as fundamentally “anti-establishment,” which may seem puzzling given his heritage, but his place within the Mellon dynasty was tinged with resentment. His mother had married a handsome and well-connected local patrician, Alan Scaife, who rode well to the hounds and had attended all the most elite schools but whose forebears had run the family metalworking company into the ground. As a result, Richard Scaife’s uncle R. K. Mellon, who like his mother had inherited a large part of the vast Mellon fortune, treated the Scaife family
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