Posterity (3 page)

“. . . it is not too early for you to begin preparing and
training your children to bear their share
in these responsibilities . . .”

With commitment, originality, and principle, John D. Rockfeller, Jr.—the son of Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—made philanthropy his life's work. He distributed more than half a billion dollars for the public good over the course of his career. With utmost respect and admiration for his father's accomplishments, he perceived himself as the steward—not the owner—of the vast Rockefeller fortune. For future generations of the family, wherever money and social conscience were involved, he never missed an opportunity to instruct. “To whom much is given, much is expected” was his motto.

Here, in a typically straightforward and controlled manner, he writes to his five sons, John, Nelson, Laurence, Winthrop, and David, who ranged in age from thirty-seven to twenty-eight years old.

Rockefeller Center
New York
Room 5600
30 Rockefeller Plaza
December 21, 1943

Dear Boys:

From the time Grandfather Rockefeller, a lad of about sixteen, got his first position, his “Ledger A” records the fact that he was making current contributions to worthy causes and needy people although the amounts were sometimes not more than three or five cents. This practice he continued all his life, increasing the amounts thus devoted to the betterment of his fellow men as his own resources increased. One of the earliest recollections of my childhood is Grandfather's reading to us at the table letters of appeal which he had received from individuals or on behalf of causes and discussing with us their merits and what answers should be made. He began to teach us to give and to save regularly when our allowances or the money we earned by doing various family chores amounted to not more than ten cents a week. With this inheritance and early training it was natural that we children should have commenced to give away money for the benefit of other people and causes in our early youth and that our gifts should have increased as Grandfather's did with increasing resources.

After I had worked with Grandfather and his other associates for a few years in developing and organizing his philanthropic gifts on an ever-broadening scale, and it had become apparent to him that I was seeking with what means I then had to be helpful to my fellow men as he had always been, Grandfather gave me, from time to time, increasingly large sums. These gifts he made, as he said in making them, because he felt confident he could count upon my continuing to do for my fellow men as he had done, thus adding to the extent and diversity of the gifts for public purposes which he had been making.

These monies received from Grandfather, I have always regarded as a trust. As he sought to develop in his children the desire and ability to conserve their funds and to use them for the benefit of mankind, so, from an early age, I have sought to do the same with you children and have added, from time to time, to your resources as I have noted the wisdom as well as the generosity with which you have used a substantial portion of them for the betterment of your fellow men.

Some years have passed since I set up trust funds for you. The full income as well as the principal of these funds became available for each of you as you reached 30, and will be available for David when he is 30. I have observed with profound satisfaction that by and large you have not let these larger resources affect the simplicity of your living, although your growing families have of necessity increased your living expenses, but that on the other hand you have drawn upon them in ever larger amounts for the benefit of the worthy causes to which you have individually related yourselves. In other words, you have shown the same sense of stewardship and the same sense of responsibility that Grandfather, by his example, inspired in me. It is, therefore, with confidence and satisfaction that I am planning to share with you still further, from time to time, this trusteeship reposed in me by Grandfather. The wise course you are all pursuing in the use of your resources and your deep and earnest desire to make your lives and your means count as fully as possible for the betterment of humanity would, I know, give Grandfather as great satisfaction as it gives me.

In the meantime, it is not too early for you to begin preparing and training your children to bear their share in these responsibilities. In the hope that it will be helpful to that end, I am setting up a trust for each of your children with the securities listed in the accompanying memorandum. I have chosen this time to set up these trusts because it is the spirit of Him Whose birth the world is about to celebrate, that inspires all worthy living and generous giving.

Affectionately,
Father.

A
NSEL
A
DAMS TO
M
ICHAEL
A
DAMS

“I am wondering, in the afternoon of my own life,
just what your day will be.”

Photographer and environmentalist, Ansel Adams had a vision of America that was precise and certain. He was an artist and masterful technician who combined, in his words, “machine, mind and spirit” to create powerful, unforgettable images of the American landscape. His photographs are so widely known and appreciated that, in a sense, his vision has become our national view of America's natural beauty.

Thoroughly committed to his work, Adams often put in eighteen-hour days for weeks on end. He was a gregarious fellow, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. An exuberant correspondent (his letters are filled with exclamation points), it's estimated that over the course of his life he wrote in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand letters and cards.

Michael, Adams's son, was raised in Yosemite National Park in a house teeming with artists and creative people. As a boy, he often traveled with his father, and in 1941 he was there when Ansel Adams made what was to become his most well-known photograph,
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.
Here at the end of 1953, during the Korean War, Ansel Adams writes to twenty-year-old Michael, who had just joined the Air Force.

Yosemite National Park
Christmas 1953

Dear Mike—

I began this letter in San Francisco but am just finishing it up today in Yosemite. I never wrote a letter of this kind before, because I never had a son joining the Air Force before! The idea of Christmas is very strange to me at this time, but we have to keep up the illusion. I want to give you everything—but I can't think of a single thing you really need! That telephoto lens sounds good to me!

You are now a man, joining up with a very important part of our national defense. What is more important, you are taking your place in the pattern of our time (which exists whether we like it or not). I never joined up with anything; I have missed the peaks of such experience, and I envy you considerably. Now you are quite far from the little boy in
Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley
—and yet I wonder how far you can get—or really want to get—from that particular kind of reality. I doubt if you can ever realize the advantages of being raised in Yosemite—only outsiders could grasp the potentials. But such a life would have value only if it instilled in you some awareness of intangible qualities beyond the ordinary. I think it has done this for you, and that you will fully appreciate them in the future.

I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand the obligations of a parent! The conventional idea of a parent is very obnoxious to me. We gave you considerable freedom of being—it was a pet theory of ours. I think it worked out quite well; I see nothing about you that I am not proud of!

If you are man enough to join the Air Force, you are man enough to comprehend the problems surrounding us. I have never talked much about “morality” because I trusted your innate sense of values to carry you through and I distrust words written or spoken about wordless things. I have had quite a lot to do with the external world—and quite a lot with the internal world, too. I am wondering, in the afternoon of my own life, just what your day will be. It will take much effort, devotion and compassion—something beyond the thin skin of morality—to bring you to a full realization of what it is to be a man in the face of the world as it now is and in the face of a perplexing future. You cannot be misled by the obvious “easy” way—there isn't any!

When you go to Fresno on the 28th you take on a whole new world of experience—and you carry a lot of the experience of your mother and father with you—which is there to help you if you need it. You are entering a bright new world of your own. The skies are the new land—I envy you, and if I were younger I would like to be up there, too.

We cannot grasp the full meaning of your new life to you, but we would like to share just a little of it with you. Please make a special effort to write us often—to your mother especially. I don't think this is too much to ask.

Good luck—all our love!!!
Ansel

H
ENRY
L
OUIS
G
ATES,
J
R., TO
M
AGGIE AND
L
IZA
G
ATES

“I hope that it brings you even a small measure of
understanding, at long last, of why we see
the world with such different eyes . . .”

With a rare combination of intellect and entrepreneurial spirit, Henry Louis Gates, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor at Harvard, has worked tirelessly and successfully to elevate African-American studies to the scholarly level of an independent academic discipline. He is a writer, a teacher, a literary critic, an outspoken educational reformer, and through his scholarship we now have the earliest known literary works by African-American women—two novels written in the 1850s—Hannah Crafts's
The Bondswoman's Narrative
and Harriet Wilson's
Our Nig.

We study literature, culture, and history so that we may better understand. In 1994 Gates published a book about his growing-up years in the 1950s and 1960s in West Virginia. The book began as a series of letters to his two young daughters—letters written so they might better understand from where and from whom they had come. The following letter to Maggie and Liza Gates is also the introduction to Gates's memoir,
Colored People.

Dear Maggie and Liza:

I have written to you because a world into which I was born, a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared. My darkest fear is that Piedmont, West Virginia, will cease to exist, if some executives on Park Avenue decide that it is more profitable to build a completely new paper mill elsewhere than to overhaul one a century old. Then they would close it, just as they did in Cumberland with Celanese, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass, and the Kelly-Springfield Tire Company. The town will die, but our people will not move. They will not
be
moved. Because for them, Piedmont—snuggled between the Allegheny Mountains and the Potomac River Valley—is life itself.

I have written to you because of the day when we were driving home and you asked your mother and me just exactly what the civil rights movement had been all about and I pointed to a motel on Route 2 and said that at one time I could not have stayed there. Your mother could have stayed there, but your mother couldn't have stayed there with me. And you kids looked at us like we were telling you the biggest lie you had ever heard. So I thought about writing to you.

I have written for another reason, as well. I remember that once we were walking in Washington, D.C., heading for the National Zoo, and you asked me if I had known the man to whom I had just spoken. I said no. And, Liza, you volunteered that you found it embarrassing that I would speak to a complete stranger on the street. It called to mind a trip I'd made to Pittsburgh with my father. On the way from his friend Mr. Ozzie Washington's sister's house, I heard Daddy speak to a colored man, then saw him tip his hat to the man's wife. (Daddy liked nice hats: Caterpillar hats for work, Dobbs hats for Sunday.) It's just something that you do, he said, when I asked him if he had known those people and why had he spoken to them.

Last summer, I sat at a sidewalk café in Italy, and three or four “black” Italians walked casually by, as well as a dozen or more blacker Africans. Each spoke to me, rather, each nodded his head slightly or acknowledged me by a glance, ever so subtly. When I was growing up, we always did this with each other, passing boats in a sea of white folk.

Yet there were certain Negroes who would avoid acknowledging you in this way in an integrated setting, especially if the two of you were the ones doing the integrating. Don't go over there with those white people if all you're going to do is Jim Crow yourselves—Daddy must have said that to me a thousand times. And by that I think he meant we shouldn't cling to each other out of habit or fear, or use protective coloration to evade the risks of living like any other human being, or use clannishness as a cop-out for exploring ourselves and possibly making new selves, forged in the crucible of integration. Your black ass, he'd laugh, is integrated already.

But there are other reasons that people distrust the reflex—the nod, the glance, the murmured greeting.

One reason is a resentment at being lumped together with thirty million African Americans whom you don't know and most of whom you will never know. Completely by the accident of racism, we have been bound together with people with whom we may or may not have something in common, just because we are “black.” Thirty million Americans are black, and thirty million is a lot of people. One day you wonder: What do the misdeeds of a Mike Tyson have to do with me? So why do I feel implicated? And how can I not feel racial recrimination when I can feel racial pride?

Then, too, there were Negroes who were embarrassed about
being
Negroes, who didn't want to be bothered with race and with other black people. One of the more painful things about being colored was being colored in public around other colored people, who were embarrassed to be colored and embarrassed that we
both
were colored and in public together. As if to say: “Negro, will you
pul-lease
disappear so that I can get my own white people?” As if to say: “I'm not a Negro like other Negroes.” As if to say: “I am a human being—let me be!”