When I
heard the learned astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were
ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer
where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How
soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding
out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air,
and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
~ Walt Whitman, When
I Heard the Learned Astronomer
My wife and
I recently took a trip to northwest Arkansas to visit relatives.
While there, we went to the Crystal Bridges art museum in Bentonville.
Focusing its collection on American artists – from the colonial
period to the present – this museum is the creation of Alice Walton,
the daughter of Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton. Works by such artists as
Winslow Homer, Gilbert Stuart, Asher Durand, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton (for whom Bentonville was named in
1841), Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Norman Rockwell, Jackson
Pollock, and Thomas Eakins, among numerous others, provided more
than 400 paintings and sculptures that occupy the museum’s 50,000
square feet of galleries.
Ms. Walton’s
project bringing great works of art to the Ozarks has received
universal praise, right? No? While it seems to be greatly valued
by local residents, the aesthetic wing of the institutional establishment
has managed to get its designer fabrics into a twisted knot and
to find a troublesome pebble in their Jimmy Choo’s. Jeffrey Goldberg
– writing on Bloomberg.com – characterized Crystal Bridges as
a "moral blight" and a "moral tragedy." Other
critics complained that Alice Walton was using her money to buy
paintings that should be kept in their home (i.e., eastern establishment)
cities, rather than being taken to (gasp!) the backwoods of Arkansas.
In speaking of Crystal Bridge’s $35 million purchase of Asher
Durand’s "Kindred Spirits," the New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman, treated the sale as
akin to demolishing Penn Station! I can imagine some members of
the art establishment comparing all of this to the Burt Lancaster
film, The
Train, in which World War II Nazi generals try to steal
European paintings.
Jeffrey Goldberg
wastes little ink outlining the basis for his moral outrage. His
indictment is laid at the feet of Alice’s father, Sam Walton,
a more recent entry into that vaguely defined category identified
in Matthew Josephson’s 1934 book The
Robber Barons. A close reading of this work reveals Sam
Walton to have committed the same "sins" as his predecessors:
beginning as a small five-and-dime retailer in a small town, he
managed to turn his company into a multi-billion dollar enterprise
and, worse yet, to insist upon controlling his own wealth. That’s
it! Such is the "wrongdoing" of which the anti-capitalists
have railed against the successful for centuries! Where the "robbery"
occurred in all of this is rarely identified. While some of these
men employed the powers of the state when it was advantageous
to them to do so, the bulk of their great fortunes arose in the
marketplace rather than through the ministrations of the state.
Like the modern anti-capitalists who urge successful business
people to "give back" to the community – implying that
their wealth has been wrongfully taken from others – it is enough
that the wealthy have sizeable sums of money and can be forced
to disgorge it on behalf of purposes favored by the anti-capitalists!
One cannot
understand the anti-Wal-Mart hysteria without addressing the two
major themes of the attack: [1] as I mentioned above, Sam Walton
personifies the capacity of creative men and women to become very
successful in a free market economy. What Wal-Mart critics are
fearful of acknowledging is that this company’s success has been
due to customers, suppliers, and employees engaging in voluntary
transactions with one another for their mutual self-interests.
Such behavior underlies what used to be thought of as "the
American dream," a state of mind that has since been redefined
as a "government entitlement," and/or a "winning
lottery ticket." Sam Walton represented how individuals can mobilize their own energies to serve their own purposes. Collectivists cannot live with that image.
