Great Things

May 4, 2020

I sat in the backyard thinking about Cornelius Vanderbilt, the warrior tycoon. With no education, he became the richest man in America. He controlled railroads and steamship lines that transformed America into an industrial power and created jobs for millions.

It was sunny and pleasant, and the hostas around me were in lush, full bloom, thanks to all the rain. But I wasn’t looking at the plants. I was thinking about leadership: character, integrity, humanity. Political leadership is only a narrow strain, but demands those qualities, which enable great things.

Like most people, we spent part of the week absorbing the disinfectant-as-cure story and a related one, about 30 states reopening businesses without meeting the federal criterion of a “downward trajectory” of covid-19 cases for 14 days. Like everyone else, we then tried to refocus on our own lives. For upwards of 30 million, that means unemployment, which means two things: obtaining, then living on government assistance, and waiting in lines at food banks.

“Refocusing” doesn’t allow minding our own business. Everyone’s business now is everyone else’s business. We now think first about our interactions with others when we leave the house.

Suddenly, contact can be dangerous. Social distancing means staying home and reminding others to stay away. We all know people who ignore it. In public, some wear masks, many don’t. Some step to the side to maintain six feet when others pass, some are oblivious. A few days ago I fumbled to get my mask on properly before going into a Stop-N-Go; no one else was wearing one or standing even three feet apart. Oh well. “It’s only ‘guidance,’” Trump says.

Paying attention to how we get along matters because our connections make us human. They define us as persons, members of families, clubs, churches, a nation. Those connections impel us to respect each other, subordinate our preferences and priorities to others’ welfare, others’ rights.

Or so we thought. Early on, the pandemic sensitized Americans acutely to the courage of health-care workers, first responders, and others who raise our spirits as they work in swamps of contagion. The spontaneous serenades and applause outside hospitals evoke joy and hope.

Those demonstrations competed with outbreaks of selfishness and failure: the fundamentalist ministers who brought crowds into their churches; the partygoers who set off conflagrations of infection; Vice President Pence, declining to wear a mask when visiting the Mayo Clinic. Pence’s failure was more egregious: not ignorance but obtuseness.

It appears now that the disease and the following economic cataclysm is ripping away the layer of civility that had people cheering the docs and nurses and practicing social distancing. The debate over when and how to reopen has been coopted in many places by gangs carrying automatic weapons and Confederate flags.

In some dark minds there’s a reason for carrying AK-47s to the state house, and it’s not unemployment. Trump is tweeting about the “good people,” and he’s not referring to the health-care workers. He’ll need votes in November, and right now he can find them wearing camouflage gear.

He and the rest of us are facing Depression-type conditions, maybe past the election. But this isn’t the Depression. We’re fighting a pandemic, not a replay of the 1929 Crash and world economic collapse. We can debate the role of the Federal Reserve in financing trillions in coronavirus impact, but the Fed is in deep water: the enemy is a disease, not high interest rates. The crowds marching on state houses are not the people who get to work from home, but they are among the ones who get sick. Reports are showing up about virus deniers now among the dead.

We’re watching nervously as those close-contact businesses reopen, especially as the unfit, the seniors, and immune-compromised among us crowd into restaurants and barbershops.

Trump is clear about one thing: this isn’t what he signed up for. We can’t be sure how prepared FDR was when he took office in 1933. Historians still debate whether his policies really eased the Depression. But for all the quibbling, he was a leader.

Back to Vanderbilt. I had just set down The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles’ monumental, meticulously detailed biography, as I try to make good use of my stay-in-the-house time.

Vanderbilt (1794-1877) started working at age 11 on his father’s two-masted sailboat. Before reaching 50 he controlled rail and steamship transport between New York and New England. After the 1848 Gold Rush he created steamship lines to California through Central America. In the 1860s he seized control of all rail links between New York and the rest of the country.

At 80 Vanderbilt nearly singlehandedly ended the Panic of 1873, which led to more than five years of economic contraction that cast hundreds of thousands of Americans onto bread lines. While his fellow millionaires were going bankrupt, Vanderbilt covered the debts of railroads linked to his own, and purchased thousands of shares of stock to bring industry back to life. When he died his estate was calculated at more than $100 million in then-year dollars.

Vanderbilt was a hard-edged man who fought his way to the top, putting dozens of competitors out of business. His railroads opened Eastern and foreign markets to Midwestern farmers and Western cattlemen, and moved oil from Cleveland’s refineries and steel from Pittsburgh’s mills to Eastern cities and ports. While other Gilded Age millionaires built monuments of luxury, in his later years he donated huge sums to charity, including $1 million to establish a university to help the South off its knees during Reconstruction, Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

He never gave speeches. His social life revolved around his wife of 55 years and his 13 children. He indulged in horseracing, but lived simply. He never held grudges, and built friendships with his bitterest competitors.

To say he “cared about others” would reduce his life to a smarmy cliché. Vanderbilt cared about people by doing great things for the nation. In the time of the pandemic, we could use leaders who seek to do great things. We could use another Vanderbilt.