On television this week, America was introduced to Richard Fuld Jr., the CEO and chairman of Lehman Brothers, who took his money and ran. Unfortunately for America, it is too late to introduce Fuld to Nancy Elizabeth Garrett of Baltimore, who took her money and tried to save lives.
Fuld is merely trying to save himself. His firm is now shot to hell, even if Fuld’s bank account is not. Maybe you caught some of the congressional questioning of Fuld Monday by Baltimore Rep. Elijah Cummings and California Rep. Henry Waxman, as it relates to the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
The congressmen wanted to know how much money Fuld had taken home while Lehman Brothers was coming undone. Fuld attempted to minimize it. Since 2000, he said, it was only about $60 million in cash and another $250 million in benefits and options.
He made it sound as if he felt slightly cheated.
“You have a $14 million ocean-front home in Florida, you have a summer vacation home in Sun Valley, Idaho, and you and your wife have an art collection filled with million-dollar paintings,” Waxman said. “Your former president, Joe Gregory, used to travel to work in his own private helicopter.”
Fuld said nothing in direct response to this, for what was there to say, beyond his own desire to grab with both hands, even, as Waxman said, while Fuld “and other Lehman executives were getting rich, (and) they were steering Lehman Brothers and our country toward a precipice.”
All of which brings us to a question to ponder in the current economic mess: When is enough money enough? When do those such as Fuld declare to themselves, “I’ve made enough for several lifetimes. It’s time to give something back”?
Because it’s not just Fuld, of course. On Tuesday, the New York Times listed ten Wall Street executive whose combined pay, from 2003 to 2007, topped $1 billion. That’s an average of $20 million a year – per man.
They should all know about Nancy Elizabeth Garrett of Baltimore, who unfortunately died in 1915 – but not before taking her money and putting it where it would help millions of people for generations to come.
In her brand new book, “Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age,” Kathleen Waters Sander writes, “In an era of unbridled runaway capitalism, extremes of great wealth and abject poverty, and unparalleled greed and guile…”
Halfway through that sentence, let us pause for a moment. Sander is writing about a century ago. It only sounds like our own time.
But, in this remarkable biography, Sander shows us the difference one person can make.
Garrett was the daughter of B&O Railroad mogul John Work Garrett, in a time when Baltimore was the country’s third largest city and a national leader in what looked like the future of transportation. She inherited millions – roughly $100 million in today’s currency – and then she spread it around.
Mr. Fuld, meet Ms. Garrett.
She gave the money to establish the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a gift, Sander writes, that “created a new, elevated academic model bridging American medicine from a backward 19th century profession to the modern age of scientific enlightenment.” And she insisted that women be admitted “on the same terms as men.”
She helped found and sustain the prestigious Bryn Mawr prep school here, and gave huge sums to Bryn Mawr College, near Philadelphia. And, as Sander writes, in a time when men “enjoyed opportunities and visible signs of success, while women often were left behind in a society that allowed such disparities,” she gave enormously to women’s rights causes.
“The most progressive woman of wealth our country has produced,” she was called.
“Gives Away A Fortune,” the Baltimore American newspaper headlined when her two-decade struggle to open the nation’s first graduate-level medical school opened.
And she did all this, unlike today’s Wall Street moguls, despite great personal risk.
In the roller-coaster economy of the late 19th century,” Sander writes, “her great fortune ebbed and flowed. She often lived on the financial edge to fulfill her philanthropic commitments.”
Compare that with those Wall Street wonders, with their multiple homes and their private airplanes, and their utter obliviousness to the great income disparities all around them, and the damage that’s been done while they were fattening up.
Sander’s new book is important because Garrett and her selflessness are practically unknown today – and, among the Wall Street types whose greed is now borne by tax payers, all but unimaginable.
