Over the past couple of months, I have been going through the papers of my husband's family: letters, photographs, recipe clippings, greeting cards, cancelled checks, and all the ephemera of everyday life left behind by folks who disposed of very little. Their paper detritus suggests their unwillingness to leave this world. Hundreds of letters are stacked in boxes and an old steamer trunk, whispering in the darkness, trying to tell their tales. And I am now trying to make some sense out of the chaos and to channel those voices. I have learned a lot about writers of the family letters; the people are just as ambiguous and conflicted as any today. But in those letters are revealed values that at times seem to shout and echo in the moral hollowness of today's business world--whether it's political business on Capitol Hill or financial business on Wall Street or the daily business of a national non-profit.
I just turned to a letter dated January 12, 1886, a letter written from a father, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., to his young adult son, Baker White Armstrong (later Sr.; my husband's great-grandfather). The son has left the family home in Virginia to find better prospects in Texas. Baker had evidently received an offer of business from one man to take on a partnership. The father offers his son this advice:
I want you to be very careful that in advancing your own interests that you do no injustice to others.
What a world it would be if people took that advice to heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment