Rich Are “Odious,” Says Column in Newspaper Owned by Billionaire John Henry

Complains ultrawealthy are insufficiently charitable

John Henry owns the Boston Red Sox (who play at Fenway Park, pictured here) and the Boston Globe. Is he disgusting too? Photo: The Editors.

One of the pleasures of living in Boston is the opportunity occasionally to grab a lunch or a coffee with Alex Beam, whose book reviews you can sometimes read in the Wall Street Journal. He’s gracious, good company and a stylish writer, and he can also write funny, usually intentionally, but sometimes, as in this instance I’m about to tackle, maybe not so intentionally.

I speak of Beam’s latest, which appears in the Boston Globe under the headline, “In the Gilded Age 2.0, the rich aren’t just different — they’re intolerable.” The subheadline is “The ultrawealthy used to leave legacies. Now they leave middle fingers.”

The column begins, “The rich are different from you and me. They are far more odious. In our lifetimes we have seen moneyed Americans retreat to gated communities, plant their fannies in private jets to avoid the indignity of airport lines…”

It goes on, “There was a time when the ultra-wealthy burnished their legacies with extravagant museum donations (e.g. Frick, Whitney, Guggenheim), university endowments, or massive gifts of land. Did you enjoy bicycling along the carriageways in Acadia National Park last summer? Don’t forget to thank the Standard Oil monopoly and its inheritor, John D. Rockefeller Jr., for his gift to the nation….I see that the Trump family’s collective net worth has topped $10 billion. So far, their legacy to the nation has been an oligarch-funded ballroom and the raised middle finger.”

What made me chuckle is that the wealthy, odious or not, include the owner of the newspaper that published Beam’s column and paid him to write it, John Henry. Does Beam think Henry, who controls both the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Globe, is flying commercial or doesn’t have a gate on his own estate (for entirely legitimate and justified security reasons) or at the end of the wharf at which his yacht is docked? What makes John Henry any less “intolerable” than Donald Trump? Forbes puts Henry’s fortune at $5.7 billion. Those Forbes estimates can be unreliable, but even so, it’s worth considering.

Also, it’s simply not accurate that the wealthy are no longer giving big gifts to museums and universities. Eli Broad gave Los Angeles a whole new museum. Leonard Lauder gave a billion dollars worth of cubist art to the Met. Alice Walton built the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Michael Bloomberg has given $3.5 billion to Johns Hopkins University. Ruth Gottesman gave $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

As for large gifts of land, Donald Trump donated 436 acres in New York in 2006 for a state park. Douglas Tompkins and Kris Tompkins, who ran North Face, Esprit, and Patagonia, spent $345 million creating hundreds of thousands of acres of national parks in Chile and Argentina.

Where were the editors?

And while Trump’s family is cashing in, the president himself has put his own life and liberty at risk—barely missing being assassinated, and suffering similar close calls against political prosecutions—to serve the country. I realize a lot of Boston Globe readers (and some Editors readers, too) can’t stand Trump. A full judgment on his presidency will have to wait. As far as a national legacy, though, Operation Warp Speed that produced the Covid vaccine, the obliteration of the Iranian nuclear program, getting control over the Southern border, the tax-reduction bills of the first and second terms, and a conservative Supreme Court that reshaped jurisprudence on reproductive rights, regulation, and religious freedom are not nothing.

I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” and one sentence in it that is pretty good is this one: “And when it comes to our media and our daily discourse, how can we create news outlets, social media platforms, civil discussions, personal conversations, algorithms, and chatbots that seek to connect us to our common ground rather than inflaming our resentments, engaging us through enraging us, and harvesting clicks through sensationalism?”

That question comes to mind here. Odious means “disgusting.” Beam and his readers at the Globe may think the rich are disgusting. He’s figured out how to get John Henry to pay him to write that. (I guess Henry and his Globe CEO and co-owner wife, Linda Henry, are not so disgusting that Beam won’t deposit his columnist fees). I think the class warfare is disgusting. Maybe after Thanksgiving I will try to invite Beam on a “Substack live” for a civil discussion about it. Or at least for coffee. It’s all funny until enough people read enough the falsehoods about disgusting rich people that they start believing the stuff and sharpening the guillotines.

Correction: An earlier version of this column said odious means “smelly.” After publication I looked it up in my Webster’s Second, and a correct definition is “disgusting.”

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