Jay Parini: Warren Buffett and the American Dream
[Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, was published by Doubleday last month.]
Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, is a modern business legend. In addition to being one of the richest men in America (even with recent losses, he is still worth tens of billions), he's an investment guru whose conversational asides can roil, or arouse, global markets. He is also something of a folk hero: the mild-mannered, relentless genius from nowhere who built a financial empire from nothing (more or less). His extraordinary life is the subject of a recent exhaustive and engaging biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam Books), by Alice Schroeder, herself a financial analyst who understands investing and can explain it. In the latest downturn, Buffett has made headlines for making huge investments in General Electric and Goldman Sachs, just when everyone else was selling.
That he should attract such interest should surprise no one. As Calvin Coolidge once reminded us: "The business of America is business." Anyone who thinks otherwise is looking at some other country. For that reason, Americans have always had a certain fascination with successful figures in the world of finance and commerce, especially those who manage to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, emulating the saga that turned Horatio Alger into a best-selling author in the late 19th century. That was a period when the so-called robber barons — men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan — loomed large in the popular imagination. (Alger published more than a hundred "dime novels" that told the same story again and again, like Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York With the Boot-Blacks, published in 1868.
Yet Buffett — despite his vast wealth and power — hardly seems like a robber baron. He is far too modest for such a characterization, and his politics too generous. Howard Buffett, his father, was a right-wing politician in Nebraska, a member of the John Birch Society, and something of an an embarrassment to his son, who opted for the Democrats in the 60s because of their commitment to civil rights. Warren Buffett is now an adviser on the economy to Barack Obama, who consistently invoked his name during the election, as if to assure nervous voters that he was, after all, a guy with solid connections in the world of capitalism.
The figure Buffett harks back to is Benjamin Franklin, the most congenial of our Founding Fathers. Franklin was the simple man of business, a genius in a leather apron. He gave a good name to capitalism, founding a library, a hospital, and a university. He organized a fire department and thought about public sanitation. He put his mind to a thousand tasks and generally improved whatever interested him, inventing bifocals and the Franklin stove when he wasn't experimenting with electricity or helping write the U.S. Constitution. In his Autobiography (which lay unfinished at the time of his death and was first published in English in 1793), he comes across as a boy from a Boston family of modest means who runs away from home at 17 and fetches up in Philadelphia with few assets, little money, and three loaves of bread (giving two of them away to a hungry young woman and her child). Already he thinks of himself as someone who will give away what he has to those in need....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, is a modern business legend. In addition to being one of the richest men in America (even with recent losses, he is still worth tens of billions), he's an investment guru whose conversational asides can roil, or arouse, global markets. He is also something of a folk hero: the mild-mannered, relentless genius from nowhere who built a financial empire from nothing (more or less). His extraordinary life is the subject of a recent exhaustive and engaging biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam Books), by Alice Schroeder, herself a financial analyst who understands investing and can explain it. In the latest downturn, Buffett has made headlines for making huge investments in General Electric and Goldman Sachs, just when everyone else was selling.
That he should attract such interest should surprise no one. As Calvin Coolidge once reminded us: "The business of America is business." Anyone who thinks otherwise is looking at some other country. For that reason, Americans have always had a certain fascination with successful figures in the world of finance and commerce, especially those who manage to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, emulating the saga that turned Horatio Alger into a best-selling author in the late 19th century. That was a period when the so-called robber barons — men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan — loomed large in the popular imagination. (Alger published more than a hundred "dime novels" that told the same story again and again, like Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York With the Boot-Blacks, published in 1868.
Yet Buffett — despite his vast wealth and power — hardly seems like a robber baron. He is far too modest for such a characterization, and his politics too generous. Howard Buffett, his father, was a right-wing politician in Nebraska, a member of the John Birch Society, and something of an an embarrassment to his son, who opted for the Democrats in the 60s because of their commitment to civil rights. Warren Buffett is now an adviser on the economy to Barack Obama, who consistently invoked his name during the election, as if to assure nervous voters that he was, after all, a guy with solid connections in the world of capitalism.
The figure Buffett harks back to is Benjamin Franklin, the most congenial of our Founding Fathers. Franklin was the simple man of business, a genius in a leather apron. He gave a good name to capitalism, founding a library, a hospital, and a university. He organized a fire department and thought about public sanitation. He put his mind to a thousand tasks and generally improved whatever interested him, inventing bifocals and the Franklin stove when he wasn't experimenting with electricity or helping write the U.S. Constitution. In his Autobiography (which lay unfinished at the time of his death and was first published in English in 1793), he comes across as a boy from a Boston family of modest means who runs away from home at 17 and fetches up in Philadelphia with few assets, little money, and three loaves of bread (giving two of them away to a hungry young woman and her child). Already he thinks of himself as someone who will give away what he has to those in need....