The President and the Oligarch: Greg Steinmetz on FDR’s Vendetta Against Andrew Mellon

Greg Steinmetz (0:00)

Hello.

Andrew Keen (0:01)

My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, October the 5th, 2026

My guest today, Greg Steinmetz, is an interesting fellow, unusual in many ways. And he isn't just a best-selling writer, but he's a Wall Street Journal journalist. He worked on several desks there. And what's particularly interesting about him, at least in my mind, is he's also had a career as a successful investor. So he knows all sorts of things. Money, investment, writing, journalism. And perhaps that explains why he's written three books about very rich men. The first of it, the first book, which did rather well, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger, who was perhaps the original rich man in the world, not an American, a kind of proto-American. And he wrote a book about a very rich 19th century American called Jay Gould. He called it appropriately enough, American Rascal. And his new book, which is out today, is called The President and the Oligarch. It's not just about FDR, it's about Mellon and the triumph of big government. I was gonna call him Jay, but Greg is joining us today from his home in just north of New York City. Greg, congratulations on the new book. Have you always had an obsession with wealthy men? Did you aspire as an investment person to become very wealthy yourself?

Greg Steinmetz (2:09)

One of my first jobs out of college was with an investment firm, and that got me reading the Wall Street Journal, which at the time was probably the best written newspaper around.

That got me excited about journalism. And I ended up working on the Forbes Rich List, which you probably know about, where we ranked the richest Americans. And yeah, I guess that's sort of a character flaw in me. I actually admire rich people. I think of them as being in a way like artists, in that they have to be creative. They're people who want to work for themselves. They believe in their vision. They have a lot of confidence in themselves.

So I'm very intrigued by how people get wealthy.

Andrew Keen (2:56)

Yeah, I'm not sure it's a, I mean, some people might consider it a character flaw. I can certainly think of worse character flaws. Rich men, Musk, of course, comes to mind, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen. They don't get a great press in the US these days. Tell me a little bit about the rich man in your new book, Andrew W. Mellon. He was, again, I guess, would you call him the Elon Musk of his age?

Greg Steinmetz (3:26)

Well, he was the third richest person behind Rockefeller. Rockefeller was still around, as was Henry Ford.

Mellon made his money by very pressently investing in Gulf Oil and Alcoa. Alcoa went on to have a global monopoly in aluminum. Gulf Oil became one of the giant oil companies. He also owned 58 other businesses. He was primarily a banker, but he had a good nose for risk, and just thought about money all the time, to the exclusion of just about anything else.

And he ended up being very wealthy. And because of his wealth, Warren Harding thought, well, anyone who's that rich has the qualifications to make a first-rate treasury secretary. And Harding made him treasury secretary, and he survived the Harding scandals, went on to become treasury secretary for Calvin Coolidge, and then for Herbert Hoover. So he actually served 11 years, which is the second longest anyone's ever held that position.

Andrew Keen (4:35)

He, of course, is a member of the Mellon family.

His great-grandfather or his grandfather was a banker. I don't want to turn this into another boring conversation on Donald Trump, but a lot of people criticize Trump because they say he didn't really make his money himself. He inherited it from his father. Did Andrew Mellon have an entrepreneurial quality, or was he just a wealthy white guy who used his family fortune to make more money?

Greg Steinmetz (5:05)

Well, it was his father. His grandfather was a farmer, came from Ireland, had a farm in Pennsylvania.

Andrew's father, yeah, he had a nest egg, but it wasn't that big. He was a small-town banker, and he recognized that Andrew really had a gift for business. He wanted all his children to go into business. He had six boys. He recognized that Andrew had a talent, and at a very young age, he made Andrew president of the bank. And in his 20s already, Andrew was making all the key decisions for the bank, and he made very good ones and piled up his enormous fortune.