The Great Redistribution

ACT I

The crash came in October, but Marcus Chen had known it was coming since March. He had known it because his father, William Chen, sat at the breakfast table every morning reading the Wall Street Journal with the expression of a man watching a train accident in slow motion.

"Anything?" Marcus would ask, pouring himself coffee from the silver percolator.

"Everything," his father would reply, and turn the paper so Marcus could see the headlines: INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION DIPS, STEEL INVENTORY RISING, BANK CALLS IN LOANS.

The Chen family lived on the Upper East Side, in a apartment on the eighteenth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue that had been built for a family whose name had disappeared from society by 1925. The apartment contained paintings that Marcus's mother, Eleanor, had acquired during her season - a Whistler that hung in the dining room, a Sargent portrait of her cousin that dominated the drawing room, and a small Homer seascape in Marcus's own room that he had always liked for reasons he couldn't explain.

Marcus was twenty-six years old and already bored with the life he had inherited. Not bored in the way that wealthy young men are bored - restless, seeking stimulation, turning to opium and race tracks and women who smoke in public. He was bored in the deeper sense. He looked at the world and saw a machine that was functioning perfectly and producing exactly the wrong result.

His father's fortune came from shipping and banking. William Chen had built his empire on the back of Chinese laborers who had come to America during the railroad boom and then been discarded when the tracks were finished. His father had bought their debt, foreclosed on their towns, and lent money to the companies that employed them at wages that kept them working but never allowed them to leave. It was, his father said, the free market at work.

Marcus wanted to believe him. He really did. But every spring, when the weather turned warm and the cherry trees bloomed along the East River, he walked down to the Lower East Side and saw the tenements and understood that the free market was a machine that produced tenements as its natural output.

That was where he met Belle Duval.

She was teaching a class in a settlement house on Orchard Street, teaching immigrant children to read English while simultaneously teaching them that reading English did not mean they had to become American in the way their employers wanted them to become American. Belle was Creole from New Orleans, twenty-four, with dark skin and darker eyes and a voice that could make you feel like the most important person in the world or the most foolish, depending on the inflection.

Marcus attended her class once, pretending to be there to observe. He stayed for three months.

"Belle," he said one evening after the children had left, "what would you do if you had a million dollars?"

She looked at him over the top of her chalkboard, her expression carefully neutral. "I would spend it on the things that matter. Books. Heat. Food. Rent."

"What if you had ten million?"

She set down her chalk. "Then I would spend it on the things that matter for other people."

ACT II

The Council for Equitable Distribution met in a room on the forty-second floor of a building on Broadway. There were thirteen members, all men, all wealthy, all of them fathers and grandfathers who had watched the world they were building turn into something they did not recognize.

William Chen sat at the head of the table, his hands folded on the polished mahogany. Around him sat Cornelius Vanderbilt III, whose family owned railroads from New York to California. James Roosevelt, whose distant cousin was a senator. Henry Morganthau, whose family owned banks. And nine others, each of whom controlled enough capital to influence the fate of small nations.

"The numbers are clear," William said. "The crash is coming. It may be six months. It may be eighteen months. But it is coming, and when it comes, the concentration of wealth that exists today will not save us. It will destroy us."

"The distribution program is ready?" Cornelius asked.

"Seventy percent complete. We have identified the ten thousand families who will receive the initial allocations. The trusts are established. The legal framework is in place. What remains is the moral question."

James Roosevelt leaned forward. "The moral question is whether we can convince the next generation to actually do this. Inheritance is one thing. Voluntary redistribution is another."

That was why they were here. That was why the Council existed. Not to plan the redistribution - the planning was a mathematical problem, and mathematicians had solved it. The problem was psychological. How do you convince the children of the wealthy that their inheritance is not a right but a responsibility that can be voluntarily released?

Marcus Chen had been invited to the Council's annual dinner three times. Each time, he had declined. On the fourth time, his father called him into the study and said, "They want to talk to you about something."

"What?"

"About the future."

The meeting took place on a Tuesday in June. Marcus sat across from the thirteen men and listened as they explained their plan. It was elaborate and detailed and legally sound. They had created a network of trusts and foundations that would transfer approximately forty percent of their combined wealth to approximately fifty thousand families over a period of five years. The money would go to housing, education, small business loans, and community development. It would be distributed through organizations already operating on the Lower East Side, organizations run by people like Belle Duval.

Marcus listened to the entire presentation and then asked one question.

"Why?"

The men looked at each other. William Chen spoke for them all. "Because it is the right thing to do. Because we have more than we need. Because if we do not distribute this wealth voluntarily, history will distribute it for us, and history is much less careful than we are."

Marcus thought about Belle's voice. I would spend it on the things that matter for other people.

"I want to see the families," he said. "Before I decide anything."

ACT III

They called it the Festival of Redistribution, though no one used that name in public. In private, it was called the Grand Central Gathering, and it was scheduled for the last weekend of September, one month before the crash.

Marcus had organized it in secret, working through Belle's network of settlement houses and labor organizations. He had convinced twelve other young heirs to stand with him, men and women who had grown up in penthouses and country houses and Palm Beach estates and had come to the same conclusion: their inheritance was a mistake that could be corrected while they still had the power to correct it.

The location was Grand Central Terminal, because Grand Central was the great cathedral of the American people, and the crash would make everyone remember what September 1929 looked like from the bottom. Marcus wanted them to remember September 1929 from the top, with the children of the wealthy standing on stage and giving their fortune back to the workers.

The night of the Festival, three thousand people packed Grand Central's main concourse. Workers and immigrants and their children filled the benches and stood in the aisles and pressed against the railings. They had come because someone told them that the children of the rich were going to do something, and they wanted to see what it was.

Marcus stood behind the curtain at the edge of the concourse, watching the crowd through a gap in the drapes. Belle stood beside him.

"This is either the bravest thing I have ever seen or the stupidest," she said.

"Probably both."

The curtain rose.

Marcus walked to the center of the stage, which had been set up beneath the great clock. He was wearing a dark suit that his father had bought him for his confirmation, and he felt absurdly self-conscious. Three thousand faces looked up at him from the darkness below.

"My name is Marcus Chen," he said, and his voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling. "My father is William Chen, and you probably know his name. He owns the Chen Shipping Company, and he has made a great deal of money from the labor of Chinese immigrants who came to this country and built things that he then owned."

A murmur ran through the crowd. Marcus continued.

"I have spent twenty-six years of my life benefiting from that ownership. I have never worked for a dollar in my life. I have eaten food that was grown by people I will never meet, in fields that I own, watered by irrigation systems that I paid for, harvested by machines that I designed."

He paused. The silence was absolute.

"And I am here tonight to tell you that it is wrong. Not because I am poor - I am not poor. I am wealthier than I can meaningfully spend in ten lifetimes. But because wealth that is not shared is not wealth. It is hoarding. It is the medieval lord sitting on his gold while the village starves."

Behind him, on a long table, twelve other young people were standing. Cornelius Vanderbilt's grandson. James Roosevelt's nephew. Henry Morganthau's daughter. Each of them held a folder containing the legal documents that would transfer their fortune to the trusts the Council had established.

One by one, they came forward and burned their stock certificates in a brass brazier that had been placed at the center of the stage. The flames rose high, golden and bright, and the ash drifted down over the crowd like snow.

Marcus was last. He took his folder, opened it, removed the certificates that represented his share of the Chen fortune, and dropped them into the fire.

He watched them burn.

ACT IV

The crash came in October, as everyone knew it would. The market fell forty percent in two months. Banks closed. Factories laid off workers. The tenements filled with men who had jobs six months ago and homelessness today.

But something else happened too.

The trusts established by the Council began distributing money. Housing was provided for fifteen thousand families. Small business loans kept three hundred factories running. Schools and clinics were built in neighborhoods that had never had them. The fifty thousand families identified by the Council received monthly stipends that kept them above the poverty line while the crash ran its course.

It was not enough to prevent suffering. The crash was too deep and too fast. But it was enough to prevent starvation. Enough to prevent the worst of the despair. Enough to show that when the wealthy choose to share, the sharing actually works.

Marcus and Belle married in the spring of 1930, in a small ceremony at the settlement house on Orchard Street. There were forty guests. The cake was made from recipes Belle's grandmother had brought from New Orleans. The rings were simple bands of gold that Marcus had bought for twelve dollars each.

After the ceremony, they walked through Central Park at dawn. The cherry trees were in bloom, white and pink against the gray sky, and the park was empty except for a few early joggers and a dog walker with three very enthusiastic terriers.

"What will you do now?" Belle asked.

Marcus thought about it. He was twenty-seven years old. He had given away his inheritance. He had a wife and a settlement house and a world that was breaking apart around them.

"I think," he said, "that I will learn how to work for a living."

Belle took his hand. "That sounds terrifying."

"It is. But it's also the first thing I've ever done that felt like mine."

They walked on, through the cherry blossoms and the morning light, into a world that was uncertain and difficult and theirs.

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