My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #36, April 12, 1999

REAL TINSEL

Lots of well off older people,
not so many young.
Shall we help them climb the ladder?
Let's remove the bottom rung.
Martin Newell

We are, some have said, in the middle of a new Gilded Age. There are thousands of gaudy new millionaires, gleefully counting their capital gains and their stock options. It's been a grand time for conspicuous consumption--the mansion Bill Gates and his family must need maps to find their way in comes to mind.

When you think of the late 1800's, you think of "malefactors of great wealth"--men who made their fortunes bribing congress for free land and railroad rights, who broke strikes and workers' heads, who ruthlessly consolidated their power and drove competitors into beggary. You think of them outdoing each other in lavish spending, on 56 room "cottages" in Newport, on mansions and private pullman cars and debutante parties that ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars. There does seem to be an eerie parallel.

The difference, though, is that in the 1800's, the values of the newly wealthy were not widely respected. Money by itself was not enough to garner social acceptance.

The difference between "old money" and "new money" then was a difference in class and values. The eminent historian Stow Persons called the old money people the "gentry elite," old families with deep roots in American history, like the Adams family, the Alcotts, the Cabots, the Lowells.

Their shared gentility of course included culture--these were people who valued education, who read and wrote books as a matter of routine, who even edited and published them. They revered a genteel God, who smiled upon good works. But they also understood that they had been unusually blessed by God and society, and had an obligation to give something back.

So they participated in their governments, local, state and national, until a new class of bosses and moneygrubbers made politics a vulgar trade, unfit for gentlemen. Some of them were abolitionists, and some crusaded against government corruption. They served in their churches, founded orphanages and hospitals, and worked to ameliorate the condition of the poor.

But the gentry were also true democrats who believed that seeds of genius could spring up in unlikely places and die unheeded unless the fortunate made a point of discovering and cultivating them. That's why the gentry led the battle to establish free public education and free public libraries, from which nobody who wished to learn would be turned away.

This was not entirely a selfless act of charity--it was also a way of perpetuating their values, and spreading them farther afield. They had a deep fear of inbreeding and decline (Henry Adams spent his life worrying about his family, which had begun with two presidents and dwindled down to only him). The gentry needed fresh blood, and the schools were recruiting tools, a way of identifying bright young men who could bring new energy into their ranks

In their schools and libraries, they offered their culture and values to all the children of America: to the children of immigrants, the merchant class, the dispossessed. Some of them even went south to set up schools for newly liberated slaves.

For children who loved learning and accepted gentry values, there would be more opportunities for advancement. There would be scholarships, apprenticeships, mentors, and jobs. At every stage, as these young men demonstrated their fitness, they would be welcomed into polite society as potential husbands for the gentry's daughters.

For these children, the American dream would come true: work hard and play by the rules and you will succeed, no matter who your parents were, no matter how poor you were. In a sense, the gentry saw themselves as keepers of the flame of the American dream.

The gentry rejected the crassly rich who thought they could simply spend their way into society. They demanded that the newly wealthy go through a laundering process in which they learned what their obligations to society were. The gentry did not admit Carnegie and Rockefeller to their ranks on account of their wealth, but on account of their gospel of wealth: it was their duty to use it to make society better. And they did, founding schools, colleges and libraries, each one of which increased yet again the opportunities for raw young talent.

In our new gilded age, though, money is all, enough to make heroes of Mike Tyson, Donald Trump, and Phil Knight, whose Nike millions come from paying Vietnamese workers less than 20 cents an hour. Lavish consumption inspires not so much disgust as the desire to go and do likewise.

Bill Gates, to do him justice, spreads his ill-gotten anti-competitive gains around, giving kids who'd otherwise never have a chance at them access to computers in schools and libraries. Like the gentry elite before him, he's offering these kids a ticket out, an opportunity for advancement if they only have the will and imagination to seize it.

But there is no prevailing individual or corporate ethic of giving back to the community, in part, perhaps, because in international business, there IS no community; there is only the dollar, the mark, the yen. In the last big industrial exposition held abroad, American exhibits were puny and pathetic because so few global corporations wished to identify themselves as being merely American.

Now our rich people and our corporations apparently believe they did it all themselves, in spite of government, in spite of society. They fail to understand their indebtedness to an infrastructure provided by government and common social values, of law and law-abidingness. They refuse to acknowledge the public costs of what they do, whether it's befouling our water or abandoning communities where they have provided jobs for generations.

They say, "leave us alone, let us do what we want and don't tax us; trust us, it'll be good for you." They believe in the theory of unrestrained capitalism: let the horse eat all the hay it wants and the dung beetles can feast on all the additional food coming out the other end.

Since they feel no sense of obligation to their community, they see no point in supporting it. They begrudge every cent of taxes for schools for other people's kids, because their own kids are going to private schools. Worse, they are starting to believe that lesser taxpayers should help them pay for those private schools. They see no need to support public libraries because a Borders meets their own needs nicely and provides latte besides. They want to guarantee their own kids' success, with private tutoring and prep schools and Harvard admission, and they fight like hell against anything like affirmative action that gives the other sort a chance to compete.

These are folks who, having made it to the top, pull the ladder up behind them so that nobody else can climb up. Worse yet, their selfishness and meanspiritedness are declared virtues by Steve Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and Rush Limbaugh. They, and all the other cheerleaders for no-holds-barred capitalism, have even sneered at the notion of volunteerism.

The Gilded Age may have been colorful and crass and corrupt, but its worst impulses were moderated by the gentry, those genteel keepers of the American dream. Because of this, there was hope at the bottom of society; its direst victims of poverty still believed that with pluck and luck, they would be given a hand up, and would make their way out. That optimism has been a strong conservative force in our country, staving off demands for revolution.

No such luck for this era, though. There is a sourness in the atmosphere now, a sense that we have been let down and abandoned by the fortunate. The selfish genes have taken over, there is no hand up, and the children of the poor are on their own. There is no gilding upon this age, but something tawdrier--shiny, gaudy, flimsy gift wrap on an empty package. As someone once said about Hollywood, it's nothing but tinsel--though at least it's real tinsel.