The Sand Bar

I was born pretty much immediately after the collapse of yuppie-dom in a sort of aftermath of the suburbanite cookie-cutter culture of the mid-20th century, so unfortunately I don’t have much to say about that… delicate period in American history. Driven by an obsessive desire for self-improvement spawned from the prosperous comfort of the 50’s and 60’s, the rise of the original yuppies was fueled by the consumption of the baby-boomer generation in an effort to escape the confines of Madison Avenue. But the crash in the late 80’s and the recession in the early 90’s triggered a contingency of doom and gloom for the yuppies of old, and the electing of George H. W. Bush into the White House appeared to be the final blow, landing Old Money as the clear and tested winner.

Well, that was then; this is now. The financial collapses of the late-20th century created a confusion that left the American identity struggling to figure out how to reconcile its modernist life quest with the value system of old, previously consummated by materialism and hedonistic consumerism. But after the dust had settled, a new void had appeared, replacing the old quest for Middle America with a free-floating search for a post-modernist value system.

It was clear that the suburbanite lifestyle once yearned for was not going to carry us into the 21st century, and as a result, a new era of consumerist, capitalist America was born. The internet eruption throughout the 90’s set the stage for a new form of value system set in cyberspace. The migration, or rather infiltration, of businesses into the internet world triggered a massive shift in American consumerist ideology, spawning waves of change in the traditional consumerist lifestyle. This change was what filled the void left by Middle America. The elite urban societies, what once traded comments about Italian suits and Chardonnay became hubs for the latest Blackberry and BMW. Cities transformed seemingly overnight into technological lightning rods. College graduates were not seeking the Plain Jane lifestyles of their parents, but instead were longing for duplexes in San Diego or an apartment in New York City, equipped with steel walls and metal floors and shiny appliances that saved the environment as they cooked and cleaned their organic foods and organic fabrics.

The new decade, though it is still a year and one day away, will bring to light the rebirth of the yuppie. Whether this time, yuppie-dom and its ensuing post-post-modern materialism and consumerism will thrive and survive credit-driving businesses and somehow subvert a financial meltdown, that is hard to say. Despite this uncertainty, it is clear that until the traditional American value system is reconciled with the values of the post-baby-boomer generation, the yuppie will never truly be dead.

I thought this was a great story to pass along, and I hope you will take the time to read it, and perhaps it will change how you feel about the holiday season.

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IN the weeks just before Christmas of 1933 — 75 years ago — a mysterious offer appeared in The Repository, the daily newspaper here. It was addressed to all who were suffering in that other winter of discontent known as the Great Depression. The bleakest of holiday seasons was upon them, and the offer promised modest relief to those willing to write in and speak of their struggles. In return, the donor, a “Mr. B. Virdot,” pledged to provide a check to the neediest to tide them over the holidays.

Not surprisingly, hundreds of letters for Mr. B. Virdot poured into general delivery in Canton — even though there was no person of that name in the city of 105,000. A week later, checks, most for as little as $5, started to arrive at homes around Canton. They were signed by “B. Virdot.”

The gift made The Repository’s front page on Dec. 18, 1933. The headline read: “Man Who Felt Depression’s Sting to Help 75 Unfortunate Families: Anonymous Giver, Known Only as ‘B. Virdot,’ Posts $750 to Spread Christmas Cheer.” The story said the faceless donor was “a Canton man who was toppled from a large fortune to practically nothing” but who had returned to prosperity and now wanted to give a Christmas present to “75 deserving fellow townsmen.” The gifts were to go to men and women who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.”

Whether the paper spoke to Mr. B. Virdot directly or through an intermediary or whether it received something in writing from him is not known.

Down through the decades, the identity of the benefactor remained a mystery. Three prosperous generations later, the whole affair was consigned to a footnote in Canton’s history. But to me, the story had always served as an example of how selfless Americans reach out to one another in hard times. I can’t even remember the first time I heard about Mr. B. Virdot, but I knew the tale well.

Then, this past summer, my mother handed me a battered old black suitcase that had been gathering dust in her attic. I flipped open the twin latches and found a mass of letters, all dated December 1933. There were also 150 canceled checks signed by “B. Virdot,” and a tiny black bank book with $760 in deposits.

My mother, Virginia, had always known the secret: the donor was her father, Samuel J. Stone. The fictitious moniker was a blend of his daughters’ names — Barbara, Virginia and Dorothy. But Mother had never told me, and when she handed me the suitcase she had no idea what was in it — “some old papers,” she said. The suitcase had passed into her possession shortly after the death of my grandmother Minna in 2005.

I took the suitcase with me to our log cabin in the woods of Maine, and there, one night, began to read letter after letter. They had come from all over Canton, from out-of-work upholsterers, painters, bricklayers, day laborers, insurance salesmen and, yes, former executives — some of whom, I later learned, my grandfather had known personally.

One, written Dec. 19, 1933, begins, “I hate to write this letter … it seems too much like begging. Anyway, here goes. I will be honest, my husband doesn’t know I’m writing this letter… . He is working but not making enough to hardly feed his family. We are going to do everything in our power to hold on to our house.” Three years behind in taxes and out of credit at the grocery store, the writer closed with, “Even if you don’t think we’re worthy of help, I hope you receive a great blessing for your kindness.”

Another letter came from a 38-year-old steel worker, out of a job and stricken with tuberculosis, who wrote of his inability to pay the hospital bills for his son, whose skull had been fractured after he was struck by a car.

One man wrote: “For one like me who for a lifetime has earned a fine living, charity by force of distressed circumstances is an abomination and a headache. However, your offer carries with it a spirit so far removed from those who offer help for their own glorification, you remove so much of the sting and pain of forced charity that I venture to tell you my story.”

The writer, once a prominent businessman, was now 65 and destitute, his life insurance policy cashed in and gone, his furniture “mortgaged,” his clothes threadbare, his hope of paying the electric and gas bills pinned to the intervention of his children.

A mother of four wrote, “My husband hasn’t had steady work in four years … . The people who are lucky enough to have no worry where the next meal is coming from don’t realize how it is to be like we are and a lot of others… . I only wish I could do what you are doing.”

Another letter was from the wife of an out-of-work bricklayer. “Mr. Virdot, we are in desperate circumstances,” she wrote. They had taken in her husband’s mother and father and a 10-year-old boy. Now the landlord had given them three days to pay up. “It is awful,” she wrote. “No one knows, only those who go through it. It does seem so much like begging. ”

Children, too, wrote in. The youngest was 12-year-old Mary Uebing. “There are six in our family,” she wrote, “and my father is dead … my baby sister is sick. Last Christmas our dinner was slim and this Christmas it will be slimmer… . Any way you could help us would be appreciated in this fatherless and worrisome home.”

The wife of an out-of-work insurance salesman added a postscript to her letter, one not intended for her husband’s eyes: She had just pawned her engagement ring for $5.

Also in the suitcase were thank-you letters from people who had received Mr. Virdot’s checks. A father wrote: “It was put to good use paying for two pairs of shoes for my girls and other little necessities. I hope some day I have the pleasure of knowing to whom we are indebted for this very generous gift.”

That was from George W. Monnot, who had once owned a successful Ford dealership but whose reluctance to lay off his salesmen hastened his own financial collapse, his granddaughter told me.

Of course, the checks could not reverse the fortunes of an entire family, much less a community. A few months after one man, Roy Teis, wrote to B. Virdot, his family splintered apart. His eight children, including a 4-year-old daughter, were scattered among nearly as many foster homes, and there they remained for years to come.

So why had my grandfather done this? Because he had known what it was to be down and out. In 1902, when he was 15, he and his family had fled Romania, where they had been persecuted and stripped of the right to work because they were Jews. They settled into an immigrant ghetto in Pittsburgh. His father forced him to roll cigars with his six other siblings in the attic, hiding his shoes so he could not go to school.

My grandfather later worked on a barge and in a coal mine, swabbed out dirty soda bottles until the acid ate at his fingers and was even duped into being a strike breaker, an episode that left him bloodied by nightsticks. He had been robbed at night and swindled in daylight. Midlife, he had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, almost losing his clothing store and his home.

By the time the Depression hit, he had worked his way out of poverty, owning a small chain of clothing stores and living in comfort. But his good fortune carried with it a weight when so many around him had so little.

His yuletide gift was not to be his only such gesture. In the same black suitcase were receipts hinting at other anonymous acts of kindness. The year before the United States entered World War II, for instance, he sent hundreds of wool overcoats to British soldiers. In the pocket of each was a handwritten note, unsigned, urging them not to give in to despair and expressing America’s support.

Like many in his generation, my grandfather believed in hard work, and disdained handouts. In 1981, at age 93, he died driving himself to the office, crashing while trying to beat a rising drawbridge. But he could never ignore the brutal reality of times when work was simply not to be had and self-reliance reached its limits. He sought no credit for acts of conscience. He saw them as the debt we owe one another and ourselves.

For many Americans, this Christmas will be grim. Here, in Ohio, food banks and shelters are trying to cope with the fallout from plant closings, layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The family across the street lost their home. From our breakfast table, we look out on their house, dark and vacant. Multibillion-dollar bailouts to banks and Wall Street have yet to bring relief to those humbled by need and overwhelmed by debt. Already, the B. Virdot in me — in each of us — can hear the words of our neighbors.

Ted Gup, a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of “Nation of Secrets.”

The original can be found here, or on page A33 of the NY edition of the NYTimes dated December 22, 2008.

Clifford Levy writes how the Kremlin seems to be “capitalizing on the economic crisis”, using its political power to “exploit the opportunity” to establish more control over weakened industries. While this may be true in the case of the Yukos Oil Company in 2003, which was briefly mentioned as an aside, and in the case of the Uralkali Mining Company, it certainly isn’t as dire and manipulative that Levy makes it out to be.

After all, the American government did the exact same thing with Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and pretty much the entire financial sector, and is considering doing the same thing with the top three automotive industries in the country. The only difference is that here, sentiment toward government bailout of failing companies is not associated with evil conniving political ploys to undermine the honest rights of good citizens. I feel that it is our fear of communism and socialism, which holds its origins in our misunderstanding of both terms, that clouds our ability to objectively rationalize the Kremlin’s moves on this particular matter. It’s easy for we Americans to argue, for example, that the Kremlin is using the economic crisis as leverage to extend its power over private institutions, as Levy does in his article, yet so difficult for us to admit that perhaps the Kremlin is acting in what it feels is in its best capacity to serve and to better its country.

Of course, there still exist widespread corruption penetrating even the highest levels the Kremlin, and the question of whether oligarchs are helpful or harmful to the country is also hard to answer. But we musn’t forget that Russia once was a world superpower, commanding widespread respect and recognition throughout all of Asia and Europe. As a nation that has proven itself capable of handling its people and its identity, we musn’t underestimate their abilities to influence the world, and likewise we musn’t overestimate our own abilities to be the policemen of the world.

As far as my stance on centralization of the economy versus privatization of resource-owning companies, my answer is: it depends. In a place like America where the cultural system is set up to revolve around consumerism and capitalism, a stronger centralized power would be counterproductive to the working class. Profits would fall into the hands of the state, which would in turn distribute those profits equally to the rest of the citizens by purchasing programs like welfare, healthcare, and education. While welfare, healthcare, and education on the cheap sounds like a good bargain, a centralized power also means their is much less potential for any certain individual accumulating significant wealth. On the one hand, this stops corrupt business moguls, and in the case of the Russians, the oligarchs, but on the other hand, it hinders the all-American spirit of working hard to get to good places.

Putting wealth in the power of private industries, then, in addition to being more efficient in running resources than any government would be, provides jobs, opportunities, and potential for growth for the general public.

But in a place like Russia, the democratic reforms that Washington liberals coaxed onto their Eastern counterparts were in my opinion too hard and too fast. Where the infrastructure of big business and commerce was weak, the liberal agendas helped bring about the birth of the oligarch, the business official who exploits those holes in infrastructure to build big profits. Privatization of industries essentially created a business elite class, separate from the general population, hording large amounts of wealth while the public gets none. In fact, Dmitri E. Rybolovlev, the oligarch of Uralkali, just last summer ought a $95 million former Donald J. Trump mansion in Palm Springs, Florida. That money could have been much more wisely spent building apartments for his workers. In addition, the social structure is such that it allows the permeability of widespread corruption, in the following case outlined by “New_oberoton” of Berezniki:

[Translated from a Russian-language blog run by The New York Times]
New_oboroten wrote:

For your information, in my native town of Berezniki, all elections for the ruling party, United Russia, and for Medvedev were financed by Uralkali. They even prevented opposition campaigning and banned advertising for any other parties in the local media (which all belongs to Uralkali). …They did not stop at that and illegally continued campaigning on election day. And so on, and so forth…. In our town of Berezniki, we even found indirect evidence that the election was rigged (the evidence is indirect because for a private citizen it is very difficult to dig out the truth, and all power belongs to Uralkali).

For the city of Berezniki, the United Russia party means Uralkali, even the people and slogans are the same. In Berezniki, as well as the entire Perm region, Uralkali acted on behalf of the authorities, identified itself with the authorities, spread this authority and presented itself as the authority.

When I wrote articles which (to put it mildly) did not praise Uralkali, the URKAs [Uralkali supporters] yelled that I was an enemy of the president and of United Russia. My articles about Putin and the elections were filed in my dossier (kept in Uralkali) as evidence of my anti-state position. Because of all this, presenting Uralkali as a victim of the authorities sounds absurd.

The assumption of private corporations by the Kremlin is not something for we Americans to fear, and is not symbolic of the new-era of Kremlin Terror that we saw before the Cold War. On paper and in practice, Putin is doing what is best for his country, and on this particular issue, I agree with him.