Against All Odds: The Rags to Riches Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker

“You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you, you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”
-–Will Smith, The Pusuit of Happyness

"Success Motivation" seems to have become a cottage industry in this country. It didn't start with Tony Robbins. The list of familiar names in this genre is a long one: Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and the seed corn for many of these -- Horatio Alger. Nowadays with social media we've got a whole new generation of self-empowerment gurus tooting the horn for blogging and social media as the new avenue to bank vaults of revenue.

Whereas it's fairly easy to poke fun of get-rich-quick hucksterism (as P.T. Barnum observed, a sucker is born every minute), in truth this country has from its earliest foundations been built on dreams. The Pilgrims and other early settlers saw America as a New Eden, a land of opportunity and possibilities. The Founding Fathers risked all they had to wrestle this unformed body of people into an independent land of opportunity. If you were a negro slave, however, the American Dream was not quite the same experience.

Horatio Alger published 100 books about poor boys who achieved success and riches through hard work, determination and integrity. Though the later books became caricatures of the foundational narrative (Ragged Dick) the "Horatio Alger story" became so much a part of the American culture for the next century that you never had to read any of the books and you knew the story.

ALL THESE THOUGHTS came to mind at once when I read the PBS account of Grassroots Saleswoman Sarah Breedlove Walker. Born to freed slaves just after the Civil War, she was poor, illiterate and a woman, the most unlikely candidate for a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches adventure that you'd ever encounter. Walker became one of the wealthiest women in America and a major fountain of philanthropic influence. She did this at a time when women could not own property, did not have the right to vote, and women were pretty much prevented from being in management.

Walker began her "career" as a washerwoman, bringing home a buck and a half a day to support her and her daughter. Over time she found inspiration from Booker T. Washington who encouraged blacks to learn skills and lift themselves up by hard work and "emphasizing good character."

The message resonated and Sarah Breedlove Walker pursued her dream. I can imagine that there were ample quantities of nay-sayers telling her that she'd never accomplish what she set out to do, making a small fortune in beauty products. The PBS account states:

By 1910, Walker had moved the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company to the railroad hub of Indianapolis, Indiana. Advertising and marketing became the keys to her success. One of the largest employers of African American women, she carefully screened, groomed, and trained a 3,000-person strong sales force that was motivated by working on commission. In addition to door-to-door sales, Walker sold via mail order, and personally demonstrated her products in churches, schools, and other gathering places. She took lessons in public speaking and penmanship, and cultivated a striking persona, in fine clothing and a chauffeur-driven electric carriage.

Her contributions to African American orphanages and a new fledgling organization called the NAACP made her one of the best known women in America during her lifetime.

What is your dream? Don't listen to the naysayers. Nurture it.

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“The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart, this you will build your life by, and this you will become.” –James Allen

Universal Basic Income: Our Only Hope for a Brighter Future (for All) or Sellout of the American Dream?

There's an interesting article in this month's July/August MIT Technology Review. It's interesting to me anyways because of recent readings about UBI, a.k.a. Universal Basic Income. The buzz in Silicon Valley is that with increased automation there's going to be a need for new thinking about Capitalism. Earlier this month we introduced this idea while reviewing futurist Calum Chace's new book The Economic Singularity. David H. Freedman's article "Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream" pushes back.

For a great starting point toward furthering the discussion, read the editor's column, in which Jason Pontin creates an imaginary dialogue between Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman.

[Aside: I personally enjoy any use of the imagination, especially these kinds of encounters of historical personages. A good example of the form is Peter Kreeft's rewarding Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley. I'd known that Lewis died the same day Kennedy was shot, so news of his death was lost in the greater noise of the time. I had not known that Huxley also died the same day, so the collision of these three very different and influential men's ideas in a lengthy dialogue made for some illuminating reading. I myself used the device once to interview an uncle who had lost his eyesight during the Civil War and became a poet and newspaper editor.]

Freedman's article is a good read on an important topic. He suggests that there are many reasons the concept of UBI resonates is because many Americans are struggling economically. He points out that the wealth being created in Silicon Valley exacerbates the guilt of being rich in a land where .01 percent of the people "account for more than 20 percent of the country's wealth." The author suggests that the idea of UBI might be a result of this awareness of this growing wealth disparity.

Freedman notes, however, that just doling out dough on a scale being proposed will be far more expensive than we realize. In one of the article's callouts he states, "How much would a basic income cost? The simple answer is: a lot."

The article's section subheads spell out his view fairly strongly. "Sticker shock" and "Risky bet" stand out. In the latter part of the article he dismisses the call for UBI as unnecessary. He writes:

"It’s not just that a basic income would be a risky bet based on murky data. The bigger objection is that it’s an unnecessary bet. Existing safety-net programs could be expanded and tuned to eliminate poverty about as effectively but much less expensively, and they could continue to focus on providing jobs and the incentives to take them."

Is the real battle between proponents and opponents both wearing rose-colored glasses? People like Freedman believe that the information age will create more jobs to replace the ones automation is going to take and that UBI is unnecessary. Tech optimists see the possibility of a world where most needs (and job tasks) will be satisfied by technology so we'd better think of ways to make sure the unemployed are taken care of. It won't be enough to quote Jesus and say, "The poor you will always have with you."

Freedman concludes, "We aren’t yet close to running out of jobs, so why go through so much expense to make it easy for people to opt out of the workforce?"   He may be right for now, but since I don't possess a reliable crystal ball it feels comforting to know that there are people out there at least addressing the scenario.

Read the full article here.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Think about it.