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"There is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. . . ."
Those words come, interestingly enough, from what is almost certainly the most successful charitable fundraising speech ever delivered. It was given over 6,000 times, provided almost 1,700 young people with the opportunity to go to college, and played a significant role in assisting 91,000 more to reach their educational goals. If the man who gave this speech had kept and invested the proceeds, an editor of the time observed, he would have had around $8 million (and this was back in 1917, when $8 million was still a lot of money). Virtually all the money was in fact used to provide a first-class education for people who would not otherwise have been able to afford it.
The author of the speech had been a poor kid himself. He could remember being embarrassed, during his year at Yale, that he had to wear such cheap, shabby clothes. Looking back even further, he remembered that the diet of his youth had consisted almost entirely of Indian pudding and baked potatoes, supplemented occasionally by salt pork and cider-apple sauce. It took his father 12 years to pay off the $1,200 mortgage on their farm and another year to come up with enough for an Estey melodeon (a small reed organ). Rather than money each of the three children had been given a hen to feed; a cackle from the chicken house meant a toy or a piece of candy. And yet there was always an empty plate on the table, just in case anyone (even a tramp) stopped by.
This is not the background or the record of a man who would harbor a grudge against the unfortunate. To read his words about the nature of poverty as an attack on the poor is to read them wrongly His speech was addressed to struggling entrepreneurs and people who were down on their luck, and he wanted them to know that it was well within their power to vastly improve on their present circumstances. More important, and in sharp contrast with the "leading intellectuals" of his time, he insisted that becoming wealthy was one of the most...