The Future

Butch and Sundance

The movie begins in sepia tones, with a scratchy, mock newsreel of the Hole in the Wall Gang robbing a train. “They’re all dead now,” we’re informed in a narration rectangle, “but once they ruled the West.” When the clicking newsreel finishes, the grainy quality of the video disappears, but the sepia remains. Now we see Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) casing a fortress-like bank. Entering moments before it’s due to close, Butch registers all the changes that have been introduced since the last time he was there: armed guards, buzzers, alarms, bars on all the windows, an imposing new vault. Butch is clearly the Hole in the Wall Gang’s planner and detail man, the brains of the outfit. Indeed, he believes himself to be a man of “vision” and what he sees there in the bank is that “everything’s changed.” Robberies will require more planning now. As they make their way back to Hole in the Wall, Butch explains to the Sundance Kid that the future isn’t in America, where the gold rush is over, but rather in Bolivia, where gold, silver, and tin are everywhere being extracted from the earth and the payrolls are so heavy they’d “strain themselves stealing ’em.” Sundance, the gang’s enforcer by virtual of his steely gaze and lightning-quick draw, has his doubts, perhaps because Butch seems none too sure where Bolivia actually is, and he gently mocks his friend’s smarts, as well as, we suspect, the value of intelligence in general. “You just keep thinkin’, Butch,” he chortles. “That’s what you’re good at.”

Everything’s Changed

Or anyway that’s what it felt like. First the pandemic, then a string of other disruptions—the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter protests, Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn a free and fair election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. All of this would change us, because how could it not? When lockdown ended and we regarded ourselves in the mirror, who exactly would be staring back at us?

In retrospect, that seems to be the one thing we needn’t have worried about. Yes, many of those on the front lines—doctors and nurses in hospitals, police on the steps of the Capitol—emerged as if from a war zone: shell-shocked, dazed, traumatized. But most of us stayed pretty much in character throughout the ordeal. Kind people remained kind, angry people angry. If anything, we became more ourselves, not less. That was certainly true in my own case. Sidelined by my age (early ’70s) and occupation (it’s hard to argue that writers are essential workers), I basically read and wrote myself through the pandemic, though as Butch observed, everything required more planning now. I shopped early in the morning with people my own age, planned meals four or five days in advance to eliminate unnecessary trips to the store. I tried to be safe, to keep others safe. In the end, lockdown had a clarifying effect. Like a lot of people, I discovered what was essential to my happiness and sense of purpose, as well as what I could easily live without. When the various disruptions came to an end, I would make some changes. Less self-promotion. Fewer personal appearances. More attention to family and friends. If outside forces could so disrupt our lives, why not disrupt those lives ourselves, change their trajectory for the better? But, of course, that’s pretty much what Butch and Sundance tried to do by moving their operation to Bolivia. Apparently making changes is not the same as changing. Maybe that’s the scariest thing about major disruptions—everything changes but us.

Escape

Unlike many people, I watched relatively little TV during the pandemic for the simple reason that it didn’t distract me from reality as thoroughly as I might’ve hoped. The more realistic the show was, the more it would remind me of the realities I was seeking distraction from. What I had in mind was something reassuring. My wife, too, was in search of comfort, which, for her, was to be found in sitcoms that dated back to the early years of our marriage—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, both Bob Newhart shows, Carol Burnett. She’d fall asleep midepisode, her iPad dutifully churning ’80s dialogue into the fabric of her dreams. For reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, I dove into an even deeper past, streaming the old Saturday afternoon matinees of my adolescence, as if in search of the boy I’d been. That boy had yearned for a life of adventure in a time machine or in the land of the cyclops or at the center of the earth, anyplace that was not the decaying mill town in upstate New York where he spent his days. How, I wondered, had that boy become me, an aging writer who’s spent most of his adult life writing stories set in the very place that boy was trying to escape? His life, I reflected, had been disrupted by education. My mother made clear from a very young age that I would go to college, and so I did, earning not just an undergraduate degree but several graduate ones. Had I not done this, I likely would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam (speaking of disruptions).

It was when I expanded my search for comfort that I came upon Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie I’d seen so many times that I’d be able to speak many of its famous lines (“Who are those guys?”) before the characters did. And yes, it was comforting . . . for about 20 minutes. Then it dawned on me what this movie I knew so well was actually about. I sat up straight.

Horses

Though Butch’s “vision” doesn’t allow him to see into the future, he has a pretty good read on the present. Yes, things are different now, but the inference he draws from this—that robbing trains and banks just requires more careful planning and a few extra sticks of dynamite—is not unreasonable, nor does his optimism appear unwarranted. After all, the Hole in the Wall Gang have had things pretty much their own way (they once ruled the West) and local law enforcement appears beyond clueless. Seated on the balcony of a brothel, pleasantly drunk, their feet up on the railing, Butch and Sundance revel in the street scene below, where the town’s oblivious marshal tries in vain to raise a posse to pursue them. Who wouldn’t be confident? Ironically, it’s in this same scene that the real existential threat is introduced when the sheriff is joined by a traveling salesman hawking what he claims is “the future”: a bicycle. “The horse,” he declares, “is dead.”

And there is the disruption in a nutshell: The horse is being replaced by the wheel. Butch may be right about the American gold rush being over, but in the grand scheme of things that’s far less consequential than the fact that the entire West is being crisscrossed by railroads, and horses, as transportation, are everywhere being replaced by wheels. In cities back East roads are already paved, and before long they will be in the West as well. In less than two decades horse-drawn carriages will be outnumbered by automobiles, which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the next generation of bank robbers, will use to flee the police. Can we blame Butch and Sundance for being unable to foresee such changes? As Ezra Klein has written, there is no more profound human bias than the expectation that tomorrow will be like today. It’s also interesting to note that if the task at hand is to imagine a world where wheels are everywhere and horses nowhere (or nowhere that matters to men like them), imagining something out of existence proves the more difficult task. In the movie’s final act, Butch and Sundance’s bloody end is heralded by a mule, whose branded flank identifies its owner as the nearby mine whose payroll they’ve just robbed. Badly wounded and surrounded by an entire regiment of the Bolivian army, Butch tells Sundance that they should go next to Australia. Why? Well, for one thing, English is spoken there. They wouldn’t be immediately recognizable as foreigners. The banks are ripe and luscious. But best of all: They’ve got horses.

Give Butch this much credit, though. He may be blind to the real threat, but he does seem to sense its proximity, and he responds by suggesting to Sundance that maybe the time has come for them to try something different: They could join the army and fight the Spanish. In other words, faced with a disruption they don’t understand, they could opt to disrupt their own lives. After all, their particular skill set might dovetail nicely with what a war would demand, and for once they wouldn’t be at odds with the law. The idea appeals to Butch for personal reasons, as well. There on the balcony of the brothel, he confesses that when he was younger he always thought he might grow up to be some sort of hero. “Too late for that,” Sundance scoffs, but the scene turns poignant, with both men revealing, apparently for the first time, their real names (Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh), and just how far they’ve strayed from the path they meant to follow. It’s a sad, lovely moment, a reckoning, of sorts. Whatever happens to them, they’re complicit in their destiny.

The moment can’t last, of course. “You just keep thinkin’, Butch,” Sundance mocks, good-naturedly. “That’s what you’re good at.”

Planning

My parents knew something about disruption. Seeing one on the horizon, they made a plan. My father would enlist in the army early in the hopes of completing his military service before America entered the war. My mother, anxious to travel, would become a camp follower, have some fun down south, and when my father mustered out, they’d get married, return home to upstate New York and start a family. The only part of the plan that came to fruition was that they got married right before he shipped overseas. By the time he returned, a bona fide war hero, he was a changed man. Given how spectacularly the last one had failed, he was all done making plans. My mother, a natural planner, was not. They would buy a small starter home, she decided, take advantage of the GI Bill, build a future. Yes, their lives had been brutally disrupted by the war and much had changed, but to her way of thinking, most of those changes were for the better. The America she envisioned would be more open to those with aspirations, and she was nothing if not aspirational. She and my father would take charge of their lives, reassert their agency.

My father’s reaction to all this was not unlike the Sundance Kid’s: You just keep thinking, Jean. That’s what you’re good at. You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans. Nor did he share my mother’s optimism about America changing that much after the war. The way he saw it, his name still ended in a vowel, which meant he wouldn’t be standing on one leg awaiting an invitation to join the country club. Nor did he really feel like a war hero. He’d simply been lucky. Somehow, he’d managed not to get killed. But he knew better than to believe that it was because he was a better soldier than all those men who died. His own plan, if you could call it that, was henceforth to stay out of the line of fire. He would keep his head down, find the sort of job that required a strong back and the ability to put one foot in front of the other. That’s how he’d made it from Utah Beach to Berlin, and he figured if the strategy worked there, it stood a reasonable chance of working in Gloversville, New York. At the end of the day there’d be a barstool and he’d settle onto it comfortably and remain right there for last call. All of which is to say that both my parents stayed in character—my mother continuing to make plans that never quite panned out, especially for her (though they often did for me); my father refusing to think about tomorrow until it arrived, if then.

But, of course, having no plan is a plan.

Woodcock

Okay, but what should they have done? Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s not entirely clear. If anything, the film suggests that Butch and Sundance are just fundamentally screwed. That’s the view expressed by Ray Bledsoe, the sheriff they go to see in the hopes that he’ll be able to pull some strings and get them into the army. “Don’t you get that?” Ray asks them in slack-jawed disbelief. “It’s over. Your times is over!” The old man recognizes their strengths—Butch’s charm, Sundance’s quick draw—but he also understands what they don’t, that in their new reality these will be of little use. “You’re gonna die bloody,” Ray predicts. “All you can do is choose where.” The fact that this is indeed what happens makes their destiny appear inevitable, but is it? If Bledsoe can see the future so clearly, why can’t they? When the traveling salesman proclaims that the horse was dead, why doesn’t Butch, who claims to be a man of vision, take that possibility more seriously?

One reason might be that the salesman was, well, selling something, so . . . caveat emptor, especially when he’s so recognizably a huckster and what’s being sold is the future. But again, it’s never easy to imagine a world that’s radically different from the one we presently inhabit. Intellectually, we understand that things will change, but experience teaches us that most change occurs incrementally. We tell ourselves that we’ll have plenty of time to sort things out, to gather and analyze data that will provide the clarity we presently lack. Indeed, it’s because change mostly does happen slowly that we’re so often unprepared for when it unexpectedly picks up speed and gathers momentum, data and clarity lagging in its wake. Suddenly, the time to act is yesterday, not today, because tomorrow is already here. But it’s also worth remembering that Butch does not ignore the bicycle. In fact, he shows up at Etta Place’s house riding one the very next morning, apparently willing to try the future on for size. Despite Burt Bacharach’s ebullient lyrics, the famous “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” montage that follows only confirms what we already know—that for Butch, Sundance, and Etta the future will not be a great fit. Butch’s acrobatic tricks on the bike not only mock its utility but end in accident and minor injury. Still, can we really blame Butch for using the contraption as a goof? More to the point, what good would glimpsing the future actually do? If the Hole in the Wall Gang is fundamentally screwed, what good is prescience? If American workers had recognized that globalization would result in the outsourcing of millions of jobs overseas, what could they have done to stop that from happening? If they’d understood how many jobs would be lost to robotics, both here and abroad, how could those losses have been prevented? Do we really need a crystal ball to predict that artificial intelligence will result in many thousands—maybe even millions—more job losses? That it will significantly, if not totally, reshape society?

The movie also demonstrates that once everything has changed, it does little good to complain. “That’s bad business!” Butch exclaims when the question he asked earlier—“Who are those guys?”—is finally answered. According to the newspapers, Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad has put together an elite posse to hunt down and eradicate the Hole in the Wall Gang. To Butch, this makes no economic sense. The posse has to be costing Harriman more than the gang ever stole to begin with. “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.” Harriman would have no trouble explaining his “business” decision if he were so inclined, but of course he isn’t. Guys like Butch and Sundance (and like American workers whose jobs were outsourced overseas or lost to robotics) never get to meet the men who render their lives irrelevant. Their only contact with men like Harriman is through their minions, like Woodcock, whose unenviable job is to ride inside the boxcar where the safe is housed. Given explicit instructions not to open the door, all Woodcock can provide by way of explanation for his refusal to do so is to repeat that he works for Mr. E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad, who forbids it. Perhaps because they are being ground under the same capitalist boot, Butch and Woodcock seem to like each other. Woodcock assures Butch that if the money were his, there’s nobody he’d rather have steal it. But the money is not his. It belongs to Mr. E. H. Harriman, who “trusts” him not to open the door. “You think he’d get himself killed for you,” Butch asks, not unreasonably, but Woodcock remains resolute. He’s Labor, and if he opens the door, he’ll lose not only his employer’s trust but also his job. He and Butch may be natural allies, but Capital makes sure they’re on opposite sides.

The Face of Change

It’s not just that intimations of the future often come to us coded, like oracles. They can also shape-shift right before our eyes. One of the more significant disruptions of my life as a writer (as well as my daughter’s, as a bookseller) was the emergence of Amazon, which for years was taken about as seriously as Butch takes the bicycle. In the mid-1990s, independent bookstores were far more worried about being put out of business by juggernaut big box stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Amazon wasn’t even a blip on their radar. Year after year the company posted the kind of huge losses that were thought to be unsustainable. It was tempting to treat the online business model as a goof. Okay, the eerie calm of the company’s owner probably should’ve been a tip-off, but again, even if we’d been more prescient, what exactly was to be done? Amazon only captured the attention of writers, publishers, and bookstore owners after e-books, digital readers, and other digital entertainments were introduced, further disruptions that Amazon was perfectly positioned to take advantage of. Just that quickly the company was no longer a goof. What if, as some were claiming, the physical book, like the horse, was dead? What if the time to act was yesterday, because tomorrow was already here?

Well, we thought, at least we finally knew what we were up against. Amazon intended to disrupt the lives of authors, publishers, and booksellers by cornering the book market. Except, no, it soon became apparent that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon meant to corner all of retail, to become “the everything store.” Except, hold on, that didn’t seem quite right either. Maybe, we considered, our heads spinning, their real goal was cloud computing. If true, then maybe their objectives were more closely aligned with other tech giants. What they were really after was information about us so they could sell to us more efficiently. Unless of course what they wanted was the unthinkable—to in some sense own us.

Okay, but no need to hyperventilate, right? After all, the worst didn’t happen. Independent bookstores like my daughter’s in Portland, Maine, not only survived but staged something of a comeback. Data eventually did arrive and with it some helpful analysis. It turned out there was a sweet spot for brick-and-mortar bookstores, the right amount of square footage and stock, a deeper relationship between the store itself and the community it served. Yes, Borders went belly up, but Barnes & Noble survived, its new CEO deftly tinkering with this and mending that. The printed book proved more resilient than expected. People grew weary of screens. Publishers consolidated in the hopes of combatting whatever Amazon hurled at them next and actually benefited from the pandemic, which gave people more time and inclination to read. Writers like me—sent home and told to stay there—not only churned out books and stories and essays, but also movies, TV shows, other “content.” In other words, we adapted. We navigated our new reality and somehow came out . . . well, not on top, exactly, but somehow . . . what? Wiser?

Well, that’s one way to look at it. The other is to recognize that what we did was not so different from what Butch did when he visited that bank and saw how much had changed. Like him, we paid careful attention to those changes, understood that things would be more difficult now and played our cards smarter. Like my father in the Second World War, we somehow managed not to die. We kept our heads down, tried to stay out of the line of fire. We put one foot in front of the other and continued moving forward. We showed character. Surely that counted as some sort of victory, didn’t it?

Unless, of course, we’ve simply been granted a stay of execution. Unless, for reasons of their own, the forces of capitalism have decided that, at least for the moment, we’re worth more alive than dead. Hard to know for sure, though, because really . . . who are these guys?

Beauty

One thing is clear, or should be. When everything changes, the only way out is through. There’s just no going back to the way things were. The task of moving forward is made immeasurably more difficult, however, by those who would convince us otherwise, that it’s possible to turn back the clock and return to a world we understood and preferred. It would be nice if we could, though, wouldn’t it? “What happened to the old bank?” Butch asks one of the armed guards on his way out the door. “It was beautiful.” “People kept robbing it,” he’s told, to which Butch responds, “That’s a small price to pay for beauty.” In previous viewings of the film, I always thought of this as a throwaway line, funny and perfectly in character for a man who robs banks for a living, intended to grab an easy laugh but not to carry the weight of truth. But as we know, comedy can be serious business; only when we take a step back does the movie come into focus as a thoughtful study of disruption, one that raises important questions about technology and capitalism, as well as human nature. Even better, the laughs—and there are a lot of them—make the whole thing feel effortless, which is why we’re likely to gloss over Butch’s seemingly offhanded remark about beauty. But the past can appear beautiful when the present turns grim, especially if you were more prosperous then, if you had fewer worries and were more hopeful about the future, if you could tell yourself that the work you did mattered, if it allowed you to feel like you were part of the fabric of society.

As I’ve written here and elsewhere, my father took pride in the work he did, first as a laborer on road construction crews and later as a union plumber. Like Sully in Nobody’s Fool, he took particular satisfaction in doing the kinds of nasty jobs that made other men queasy. Nobody enjoys standing knee deep in raw sewage in 90-degree heat, and nobody who’s willing to do such work gets rich from it, but that doesn’t make the work any less necessary. And down the road, long after the nauseating experience itself has receded into memory, you can point with pride to the thing you helped build, even if nobody knows the part you played, even if your name isn’t E. H. Harriman and nobody calls you “mister,” even if, when asked, Mr. E. H. Harriman claims he built it. What chafes you worse than the poor pay you get for hard physical labor is the low esteem in which you are sometimes held because you have only a high school education and you work with your hands, and what has to sting even worse than that is to lose your work because somebody on the other side of the globe is willing to do it cheaper, which robs you not only of a paycheck but your sense of self-worth. You also suspect that if Mr. E. H. Harriman regrets anything, it’s probably that he didn’t outsource your ass sooner. So, when somebody tells you they can turn back the clock and you can have your old job back, that coal mining is not dead in West Virginia, that the paper mill that employed half your town will someday reopen, that the glove shop your grandfather helped unionize will return one day, of course you want to believe it. Who wants to be told, as Butch and Sundance were, that “It’s over. Don’t you get that? Your times is done!”

Except it is over, and they are done, whether you get it or not.

The Shape I’m In

How quickly beauty can turn ugly. When the message finally lands that “your times is done,” it’s just human nature to look around for someone to blame. James McMurtry puts this human need to assign blame under a microscope in his 2005 song, “We Can’t Make It Here,” which begins with a Vietnam veteran parked in the left turn lane and holding up a cardboard sign, “the flag on his wheelchair flapping in the breeze.” More like him are on the way, we’re told, thanks to the Mideast war. Up the street, the textile mill that provided the unnamed town’s employment now sits empty: “They turned us out and they closed the doors.” Why? “Because we can’t make it here anymore.” That line, of course, has a powerful dual meaning. It’s no longer possible to make it financially in this town, and others like it all over America, because the things that were once made here are now made elsewhere. The song’s narrator works in the Walmart stacking shirts manufactured in Singapore that were once made “here.” Someone’s to blame, but who? “Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin,” the narrator asks rhetorically, “or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in? Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today? No, I hate the men sent the jobs away.” McMurtry’s narrator imagines those men “all lily white and squeaky clean. They’ve never known want and they’ve never known need. Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed.” And as with Mr. E. H. Harriman, they’re not even around to “look us in the eye.”

Alas, unbridled capitalism is an abstraction, and its victims often prefer to take out their anger on folks close to hand. And as we often see in times of disruption, many are all too willing to hate people for the shade of their skin or the shape of their eyes.

Caveat Emptor

If “buyer beware” is sound advice when someone tries to sell you the future, it’s even better advice when it’s the past they’re selling. Victims of disruption are prone not just to anger but also to nostalgia, convinced that the way out is not through but rather back. Wouldn’t it be better, they reason, to return to, say, the 1950s, when America was simpler? Back then you could spend your whole life working for a company like General Electric, as my mother did until, in her 50s, she headed west in a desperate and ill-advised attempt to start over, to disrupt her own life, alter its trajectory, a quest that would ultimately break her spirit. Who did she fault? For a time, during the first Reagan term, she flirted with blaming others for the shape she was in, and yes, she did long to return to the postwar America that got her hopes up, an America she understood and loved. But in the end she blamed herself, as she’d been taught to do. I suspect it was the Catholicism she imagined having jettisoned long ago that required her to take responsibility for all those plans that never worked out because of the magical thinking required to set them in motion.

The old bank was beautiful? Maybe, but its times, like the Hole in the Wall Gang’s, were done.

The Gilded Age

Why, though? Why must your times be done? Because you don’t have the skills that happen to be in demand? That’s part of it, but Ray Bledsoe has a pithier explanation. “You’re two-bit outlaws!” he reminds Butch and Sundance, which at first glance seems to suggest that, in the end, it all comes down to their being on the wrong side of the law. If they could just get on the right side of it, things might just work out. But just listen to how Ray delivers that venomous line. Two-bit outlaws. The point he’s making isn’t really that Butch and Sundance are on the wrong side of the law or that Ray himself was on the right side. Their problem isn’t that they’re outlaws at all, it’s that they’re cheap. (Is there any doubt that Ray would consider himself a two-bit sheriff compared to the men who make up the elite posse that dogs Butch and Sundance so relentlessly?) Until she goes to Bolivia with Butch and Sundance, Etta Place has been on the right side of the law her whole life, and it does her about as much good as it’s done Woodcock. Isn’t she, too, just fundamentally screwed? Explaining why she’s willing to tag along with Butch and Sundance, she says, “I’m 26 and single and a schoolteacher and that’s the bottom of the pit.” Her problem is the same as theirs. She doesn’t matter.

It may not look like it until all three arrive in New York, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a Gilded Age tale, and it makes abundantly clear that to succeed at thievery, you need to be not robber but a “robber baron.” You need to be like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan, men famous for their ruthlessness and lack of ethics. Economic might, which ensures that the law will be on your side, makes right. There’s no such thing as fair play. Morality has nothing to do with it.

The Money Is Ours

Right and wrong may not matter to robber barons, but it often does matter to the people they rob, even to “two-bit outlaws” like Butch and Sundance. In Bolivia, still not terribly adept at gauging which threats are existential but correctly sensing that the noose around their necks is tightening, Butch catches a glimpse of a man wearing a white skimmer and concludes that Joe Lefors, the sheriff who pursued them back in the States, has followed them to South America. If they continue to steal mining payrolls, Butch reasons, they will eventually get caught. Still a thinker, he quickly devises with a plan. They’ll get on the right side of the law by signing up to guard the very payrolls they’ve been robbing. Unfortunately, they’re not the only bandits on the scene, and when the payroll they’ve been hired to guard is robbed and their employer killed, a showdown with the bandits results. “Tell them the money isn’t ours,” Sundance instructs Butch, who does his best to convey this in his primitive Spanish. The Bolivians couldn’t agree more. The dinero doesn’t belong to Butch and Sundance. The dinero is theirs. Moments later they all lie dead. “Well,” says Sundance, sickened by what they’ve done, “we’ve gone straight.” Both they and we now understand what that means for men who are robbers but not robber barons.

But their circumstance remains unaltered. “Everybody needs money,” Danny DeVito’s character says in the crime thriller Heist. “That’s why they call it money.” It’s a glorious non sequitur that begs to be understood, because it’s at the center of the eternal conflict between capital and labor, as well as the root of income inequality. A slender decade after the events of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, another technological disruption—the industrialization of American textiles—will result in a violent labor dispute in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a strike that will capture the attention of the entire country and beyond. Protected by decades of tariffs in the latter part of the 19th century, Lawrence’s mill owners have become fabulously wealthy. Despite owning mansions up and down the East coast, as well as yachts and too many automobiles to count, they continued to argue that they couldn’t afford to pay workers enough to keep them out of grinding poverty. The owners believed, in essence, that the money was theirs. Was it not their capital investments that built the enormous mills that housed the new power looms that were the envy of the industrialized world and which drew workers from all over the planet? For their part, the workers’ demands were not unreasonable, but underlying them was a deeply held conviction that made owners uncomfortable—that the dinero, or a larger share of it, was rightfully theirs by virtue of the fact that they, not the owners, produced it. If such a principle were ever granted, where would such demands end? Here is the root quarrel that is always exacerbated in times of disruption, and it’s Mr. E. H. Harriman’s justification for shelling out all that money to outfit that posse to deal with a bunch of two-bit outlaws. John Huston’s character, Noah Cross, famously explains the whole deal to Jake Gittes in Chinatown. After Cross admits he has no idea how much he’s worth, Gittes asks the question working stiffs always ask: What’s all that money for? Cross answers without hesitation. “The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.”

The Future

The richest of the Lawrence mill owners was William Wood, whose parents were poor Portuguese immigrants. Their last name was actually Silva, which translates into English as Wood. Only 12 years old when his father died, young William dropped out of school to provide for his mother and younger siblings. Driven to succeed, he became one of the richest men in New England, and he seemed to believe that his success could be replicated by anyone willing to work as hard as he did, a conviction shared by many wealthy men of the period who had a similar acquaintance with childhood poverty. Indeed, Wood’s staggering success may actually have been justification for sharing so little of his wealth with the men and women who worked at his mills. The way he apparently saw it, those mills were providing a valuable opportunity for the right sort of man—one capable overcoming brutal hardship. Making such a man’s life easier, Wood reasoned, did him no favors. A living wage that lifted him out of the slums and filled his belly would actually disincentivize him, encourage him to settle for less than he was capable of. Extreme hardship was where true character was forged. Hunger? Grinding poverty? Now these were incentives.

If such a rationale seems like a convenient excuse for hording wealth, we should remember that such thinking had deep roots in puritan New England, where Calvinists believed not only in an “elect” and a “damned” but that wealth was a sign of God’s approval. It’s also interesting to note that with the exception of J. P. Morgan, the other famous robber barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt) all had humble beginnings, which suggests that their desire for wealth might be evidence of deep-seated and probably unacknowledged fear. Having been poor when they were young, they were determined that no one in their families would ever be poor again. How much money would be required? Well, just how poor had you been? How frightened? What’s most important, any decent therapist would say, is to understand what all this striving is really about. Noah Cross hit the nail on the head. It’s about the future, Mr. Gittes. The future.

Danny DeVito was also right. “Everybody needs money.” Butch and Sundance certainly do throughout the film, but the way they pursue it suggests that money is not an end in itself. The way Sundance explains their always being broke to Etta is that Butch is a “soft touch” who’s always loaning people money and buying drinks. Foolish would be one way to describe such behavior. Generous would be another. Though Butch and Sundance spend their whole lives pursuing money, neither appears to have any desire to be rich. When they rob the Flyer and the take is disappointing, Butch isn’t particularly chagrined. “Just so long as we come out ahead,” he says. Indeed, their “easy come, easy go” attitude toward money kind of makes you wonder what their childhoods were like. The movie offers few clues, but to me they bear a closer resemblance to frat boys who have somehow managed to get disowned by wealthy parents than to guys whose young lives were scarred by poverty.

By contrast, the son of a clergyman in upstate New York, the real-life E. H. Harriman quit school at the age of 14 to become an errand boy on Wall Street, which begs an obvious question: Was it the atmosphere of wealth-in-the-making there that drove him to pursue riches, or was he fleeing the austerity of his clergyman father? Hard to know, but this much is clear: Whatever was driving him made him neither foolish nor generous with money. At the time of his death his estimated worth was between 150 and 200 million dollars, all of which he left to his wife, and it took care of future Harrimans quite nicely (including William Averell Harriman, who became governor of New York, as well as ambassador to both Britain and the Soviet Union). The descendants of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, as we know, also fared well. In time, these families became almost as famous for their public generosity as they’d earlier been for their ruthless business practices, but of course that was long after they’d secured their families’ future.

Driven

In “We Can’t Make It Here” James McMurtry, angry with the men who sent the jobs away, claims “they’ve never known want, never known need.” Similarly, Butch Cassidy, furious with E. H. Harriman for spending all that money on his elite posse, gripes, “I bet he inherited every penny he’s got.” This view of wealth—that greed and privilege always beget more greed and privilege, that families with generational wealth have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor—is particularly satisfying in polarized times like these. But doesn’t it ignore the complicity of two other groups of people—(1) those who are not wealthy but aspire to be and plan to act like capitalists when their ship comes in, and (2) those who are not driven by the pursuit of wealth (and may even view capitalism with suspicion), but still “need money”? Don’t things actually become more interesting and nuanced if we consider the possibility that the relentless pursuit of wealth is as likely to be rooted in the fear of poverty as in inherited wealth and privilege? Wouldn’t that go a long way toward explaining the behavior not just of people like E. H. Harriman but also people like, well, me?

Because unlike Jake Gittes, I understand driven men like Harriman and Noah Cross. Indeed, many people would describe me as driven, and because I’ve made a good living as a writer, they could be forgiven for concluding that making money was what I set out to do. They’d be wrong, but they’re owed an explanation, I think. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I have one. Like my father, I’m stubborn beyond belief and pretty good at putting one foot in front of the other, at continuing to move forward when others, discouraged by failure, might be tempted to quit. And like my mother, I’m an optimist, though my own brand of optimism is more cautious than hers and, I’d like to think, less reliant on magical thinking when it comes to execution. But most of us who choose careers in the arts know all too well that we’re unlikely to strike it rich. Indeed, the word career, when applied to the arts, is pretty misleading. Instead of choosing, we seem to be chosen or “called.” In place of careers we have vocations. We’re no less driven than your average industrialist, just more poorly paid for the long hours we both put in. Most artists require day jobs to support their habit. That’s not to say there’s no money to be made if you’re a writer or a painter or an actor. Obviously, there is, but wealth isn’t what motivates us. The fact that most artists would do what we do for free explains why so many of us do just that.

Here’s the thing, though. The fact that we’re not motivated by money doesn’t mean that we don’t think about it all the time. Artists have no more desire to be poor than anybody else. Everybody needs money, not everybody but artists. It’s because we have more reason to fear poverty than most that we worry about it incessantly, which can make even people like me, who have been better paid for our efforts than we imagined we would be, less generous than we’d like to be. And even if we’re not pursuing wealth, that doesn’t mean we’re immune to anxiety about the future. We too want to protect our loved ones and wonder how much money that will take. We may personally identify with the world’s laborers—its strikers and essential pandemic workers, and even its two-bit outlaws—but we share the same impulses that cause the E. H. Harrimans of the world to withhold generosity until the future of their loved ones is safe and secure. Precisely because we have known want and have known need, we’re inclined to be cautious, to doubt our skill, our talent, our agency. We’re all too aware that the same mechanism that turns a spigot on also turns it off. And often ours is not the hand on the mechanism. We want to be generous and sometimes succeed, but we fear the next disruption, the one that it will render our particular skills obsolete or redundant. We fear becoming Butch and Sundance, facing something we can neither imagine nor outrun.

We fear the future, Mr. Gittes. The future.