Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer Page B

with scorn. “My father—he was suckin’ hind tit,” Scaife told Burton Hersh, who wrote a biography of the family in 1978. In his memoir, Scaife writes that his uncle, who was his closest Mellon relative and whom he and his sister dubbed Uncle Piggy, “treated my father like an errand-boy.” Alan Scaife was given ceremonial titles in the various Mellon business concerns but no real power, other than to oversee his wife’s enormous inheritance.
    Alan Scaife briefly cut a dashing figure during World War II, when he enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as an army major. But while his tailor-made uniforms made a memorable impression, this was less true of his job performance. Richard Helms, who later became director of the CIA, recalled Scaife, who had been a colleague, as “a lightweight.”
    The family brush with the spy service, however, ignited Richard Scaife’s lifelong infatuation with intelligence intrigue, conspiracy theories, and international affairs. Scaife writes that it also gave rise to his strongly anti-Communist views. In his memoir, he recalls his father admonishing the family while on furlough from the war that the scourge of Communism loomed large, not just abroad, but at home in America. “My political conservatism which eventually unmasked me as the villain behind the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ of Hillary Clinton’s imagination—but only her imagination,” he writes, began “before I had reached my twelfth birthday” over a lunch with his father at New York’s Colony Club in 1944. Alan Scaife warned the family that wealthy capitalists like themselves were under attack. He invoked images of labor riots and class warfare. “He was concerned for the security of the country and gave us the feeling around the table that our entire future was at stake,” Scaife writes. A local newspaper editor, William Block of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, had similar recollections. He remembered Alan Scaife as overwrought during the 1940s about what he regarded as the growing threat that leftists posed to the rich. “Alan Scaife was terribly worried about inherited wealth,” he later recalled.
    The family’s preoccupation with preserving its wealth was shared by previous generations. Scaife was heir not just to one of the country’s greatest industrial fortunes but also to a distinctly reactionary political outlook rooted in the age of the robber barons. His great-uncle the Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon, who served as Treasury secretary under Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, was a leading figure in the counterrevolution against the Progressive movement, and in particular he was an implacable foe of the income tax.
    Before Congress instituted the federal income tax in 1913, following the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, America’s tax burden fell disproportionately on the poor. High taxes were levied on widely consumed products such as alcohol and tobacco. Urban property was taxed at a higher rate than farms and estates. “From top to bottom, American society before the income tax was a picture of inequality, and taxes made it worse,” writes Isaac William Martin, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego.
    In his history,
Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent
, Martin notes that the passage of the income tax in 1913 was regarded as calamitous by many wealthy citizens, setting off a century-long tug-of-war in which they fought repeatedly to repeal or roll back progressive forms of taxation. Over the next century, wealthy conservatives developed many sophisticated and appealing ways to wrap their antitax views in public-spirited rationales. As they waged this battle, they rarely mentioned self-interest, but they consistently opposed high taxes that fell most heavily on themselves. And no figure was more