History of American Business Blog

My Own Private Idaho

After such a spirited discussion regarding corporations and those who run them / profit from them I drove home (30 minutes back to Arlington) and was thinking about a comment made by Mike O'Malley in class one evening.  Someone asked a question as to his view on some topic and he replied "Well, you must understand my personal narrative".  Mike is very quotable sometimes.  ;-)

So I began to think of my narrative as relates to these issues and came up with several stories regarding interactions with corporate executives, both at the small, medium and mega-corp level.  Now, I don't think all corporate execs are bad or even evil or even amoral.  In fact, I would be hard pressed to find more than one or two that would be Cowperwood's.  My basically positive view of life (believe it or not I do have a pretty positive outlook generally) allows me to see some good even in people that have worked long and hard to destroy me and the people I work with.  After all, it's just business.  But one story still stands out, for some pretty obvious reasons.

Many years ago I worked for a medium size defense firm here in DC.  I won't say the name of the company but its name is really close to C@CI.  I was a Director, a mid-level line manager.  After several years of frustration a friend and I decided to start our own company, with our business goal being to make enough money to pay our bills but to have the freedom to not work for bozos. 

My partner and I had made all the plans to quit and start up on July 1.  My wife had been sick for some time and in late June she was severally injured and in a coma (I remember the date because she was in ICU next to John Wayne Bobbitt.)  My partner and I decided to resign anyway, we had started down the path and couldn't turn back.  The President of the division of C@CI that I worked for (he was employee number 2 and the largest stockholder of the company at the time) called me on 2 July. 

The conversation was interesting.  Now, this guy wasn't a bad person, just a really confused (I think) person.  Simply put he said "Wayne, this is a really tough time for you."  I replied, "I guess that this should tell you how bad things are here that I would feel it necessary to quit under these circumstances."  He replied "Starting a business is really hard."  My response - "Joe, I'll tell you what is hard.  Holding your wife's hand on your 9th anniversary while a doctor tells you she is brain dead.  That's hard.  Business ain't shit."  He hung up the phone.  My partner looked at me and said "He'll never forgive you.  This company is the proudest achievement of his life."  He never did. 

To prove his point he threatened litigation and legal blackmail for over a year, forcing us to team so his firm wouldn't lose contracts, etc.  Luckily, my wife wasn't brain dead, although she never recovered.  And our business was a success and we drove them out of the market we were in.  Revenge can be sweet!!

So yes, I do have a bit of an agenda.  And this guy wasn't nearly as bad as some folks I worked for in a much larger firm about a decade later, who I can't discuss due to legal agreements. (But you will note that I work for a firm of which I am a founder, started after leaving unmentioned firm, and we've done quite well.  So being right can actually work in this world, even when faced off against a multi-billion dollar firm.)  But I have always thought that if your job is one of the ten most important things in your life, you need a new life.  And most of the execs I have met need new lives.

History as Fiction – Fiction as History

OK, I promise this isn’t a post about objectivity / subjectivity, that I won’t go on discussing that all history is fiction, and, in fact, other than in this sentence I promise not to mention Foucault, or any other of the folks that spend a lot of time arguing over the meaning of the word “is”.  This is not a post-modern screed, primarily because I consider a large part of that discussion to be most appropriate to sitting around with far too much alcohol and no real substance to discuss.

Discussions in class last week suggested that Dreiser’s “Financier” was a much more difficult read than Liss’s “Whiskey Rebels”.  I disagree.  While the style is a bit anachronistic, Dreiser is doing social commentary on the world he lived in.  Not dissimilar to Sinclair’s “Jungle”.  Of course, we read it as a period piece, perhaps as a way to understand some of the turn-of-the-century populist views of capitalists.  In this sense we read Dreiser as history, as a window into how a person of that time viewed the world he lived in.  Putting myself in the period, the style works.  A more modern style would have defeated the purpose of using this book as an image of the worst of the capitalist bogey-men, as seen through early 20^th century eyes. Dreiser is fiction as history, using the art of the time to understand the time.

Liss, on the other hand, seeks to take us back to the origins of the country, creating a story that is similar to the standard historical fiction methods popular on any Barnes & Noble book shelf, sliding historical characters in and out of the fictional characters lives, etc.  As social commentary it can be said that Liss is commenting on a 21^st century view of what is important from that period. Liss is history as fiction similar to Michener, Uris, et al.  The primary difference being that Michener and Uris, at least early Michener and Uris, were much better writers.

So what is the difference between the two?  Well, personally I somewhat despise history as fiction.  It leads to confusion and can create serious issues regarding what we can reasonably consider to be known about an event. 

For example, a famous scene in the movie Jaws occurs when the three protagonists (OK, the shark is clearly a fourth, but it isn’t on the boat at the time of the scene I am describing) are in the galley of the boat, drinking, trading stories about the origin of body scars, etc.  The scene ends with The Salty Dog recounting his experience on the Tennessee, a ship sunk in World War II.  His story recounts a large number of deaths, most by shark attack.  A few years ago a documentary was made of the Tennessee and shown on the History Channel, documenting how most of the crew was actually rescued and those that died mostly died of exposure, not shark attacks.  The phones rang off the hook as people called in to tell them how wrong they had the story of the Tennessee, that a huge number of folks died from shark attacks, etc.  This is an example of history as fiction, an intentionally skewed account of an event for dramatic purpose.  Sometimes fun, certainly useful for dramatic, or even humorous, objectives, but most certainly bound to blur the line between what facts we may know and facts we certainly know do not exist.

So I promised not to get into a debate over the subtler points of my argument.  So I won’t.  For entertainment value, neither book was terribly engaging. For historical value, Dreiser remains well known, and its value is recognized by the fact that it remains in print almost a century after it was written.  I would suggest that in 20 years we will be hard pressed to find Whiskey Rebels available in even the most derelict used book store.