If I Were King

We don’t write many letters these days. We don’t want to spend the time writing them, we don’t want to spend the time reading them, and we certainly don’t want to wait for them to be carried physically to distant places. We want it short, and we want it now. The era of Twitter.

I’ve recently been immersed in a project involving letters, about 700 of them. Obviously artifacts of another era. Specifically, they were written during the Great Depression. A man named James Linsley, a street-car operator at Minneapolis, Minnesota, longed to return to farming, and wanted his son to learn the ways of the farmer. With his wife Martha, he bought a small farm at Nevis, Minnesota, but there was no way to give up his paycheck. So in the summer of 1932, Martha and their two children, John and Ruth, decamped for Nevis, while James stayed in town.

It didn’t work. Two years later they had lost the farm and all were back in the city. But while they were giving it their best shot, the letters flew back and forth. On some days, all three of the Nevis group wrote to James, and James sometimes wrote to all three of them on the same day as well.

Many years later, when little Ruth was in her 80s, she bought a manual typewriter and transcribed the text of all the letters, and wrote a charming narrative about the experience. The letters are full of marvelous details about, both letters and narrative present a close-up look at life in that time and place.

Ruth’s daughter took the typescript to a friend of mine to be converted to text, and started editing the files. I was hired to build a website. I’m pretty proud of it right now, and when all the navigation is finished in a few days, I’ll be unbearable. Fifteen of the forty chapters are now up, along with about 170 of the letters. The DearDaddy.com home page is up, but if you want to dig into the content now you’ll need this link to the Our Story page.

Now that we are in the hardest economic times since the Linsley’s tried their hands at farming three quarters of a century ago, there may be some value in taking a look at those letters. Just don’t expect it to be as quick as digesting the 140 characters of a tweet.

The next president and the new Congress are getting ready to launch the largest economic stimulus package of all time, while being nervous about the resulting debt burden. After all, the reason we’re in this mess is because the US, and in fact most modern nations, have been piling up the debt for years. Understanding the risk of more, there is a sudden commitment to make this all as efficient as possible. President-elect Obama has said that a close look at Social Security and Medicare would be a “central part” of his efforts to contain federal spending. He has named Nancy Killefer to the new office of White House Chief Performance Officer, her job is to “scour this budget, line by line, eliminating what we don’t need, or what doesn’t work, and improving the things that do.”.

Hello? What difference is that going to make? The point at this moment is to get money back into circulation as quickly as possible, and it makes no difference at all whether that results from careful intentional spending or money falling through the cracks. In fact, the fastest thing they could do is drive their limousines down Skid Row and occasionally toss handfuls of C-notes out the windows. The homeless that snatch up those bills are going to spend them instantly. And they’re not going to spend their money on fancy Scotch or French wines, they’ll be going for the all-American Mogen David 20/20.

One thing that might make sense is to look at which areas of the country are most in need of the boost, and make sure that there is plenty of government spending wasted in them. If the community is broke, residents aren’t going to stuff the federal booty in a mattress.

There are only two places where the waste should be avoided. The first is imports. It doesn’t do this country much good to hand a bunch of cash to those who are going to buy new BMWs or Rolexes with it. The second is banks. The last thing we can afford to do is to hand over billions of dollars to banks who are just going to sit on it. Uh, wait. Isn’t that what the outgoing administration spent the first third of a trillion bucks on?

If I were king, I’d understand that there was a time for prudence, and a time for profligacy, and I’d dispatch with the Puritanical concept of prudent prodigality that seems to be the current rage.