Let's say you were born into a legacy that you believed would destroy the world. What can you do? You can become paralyzed with guilt. You can run away from your heritage, turn inward and cultivate your own garden. If you have a lot of money, spend it a little at a time, enough to soothe your conscience and ease your annual tax burden, but not so much that it interferes with your lifestyle, and spend it on causes (libraries, museums, You can also donate only to museums, etc. or both political parties), will not offend those close to you too much. Or you can surrender everything to blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk. That's admirable. It is a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But if you believe the world is ruined by structural causes, you're doing little to counter those structures.
When Leah Hunt-Hendricks was an undergraduate at Duke University, still in her early 2000s, she didn't quite know what to do with her privilege. She grew up in a Fifth Avenue apartment and spent most of her summers in Dallas with her wealthy church-going grandmother. One afternoon, she wandered into a lecture by seminary professor Stanley Hauerwas. time He had just been named America's “best” theologian. Hauerwas also happened to be from Dallas. The son of a bricklayer, he could speak in the academic slang of a virtue ethicist or the harsh delivery of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He rejected the “ahistorical approach of liberal theory,” the assumption that each individual is an autonomous economic unit with a point of view from nowhere. Rather, as Hunt-Hendricks later put it, “We are born into traditions, and it is through those traditions that our mission is to continue to understand and improve the world.'' ” Inequality is perhaps the defining fact of modern American life, and Hunt-Hendricks felt it was a pressing and intolerable wrong. Hauerwas encouraged students to consider the forces that shaped their lives, even those that began long before they were born.
One summer, Hunt-Hendrix studied Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics one-on-one with Hauerwas. The following summer, she returned to Dallas. That fall, Hauerwas saw her sitting on a bench on campus and she stopped to ask about her break. “She was shyly muttering something about interning at her family business,” he recalled. “At that moment, it hit me and I blurted out, 'Well, damn, you hunt! “”
At a place like Duke, about 20 percent of the students are from the 1 percent, so it's not surprising to meet rich kids. Only in exceptional cases (Rockefeller, Murdoch) the surname is immediately obvious by itself. Hunt is a common name, but to Dallas kids of Hauerwas's generation, it was an unmistakable name. “I can't believe it took this long to put together,” he told her that day on campus. “My father must have laid a brick for your grandfather.”
Leah's maternal grandfather, H.L. Hunt, was an oilman in Dallas. In the 1930s, he built wells throughout the East Texas oil fields. Later, this oil field turned out to be one of the most amazing reservoirs of oil in the United States. In 1948, luck He was estimated to be the richest person in America. In 1967, esquire “There is absolutely no question that the Hunt family is the richest family in this country,'' a source was quoted as saying. Hunt supported conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater and racist Alabama governor George Wallace. (When term limits prohibited Wallace from seeking re-election, Hunt encouraged Wallace to let his wife Lurleen run in his place.) It supported the anti-communist John Birch Society and reportedly even the Nation of the Nation. Islam promoted racial separatism. William F. Buckley Jr. once wrote that Hunt's “Yahoo bigotry” “almost gave capitalism a bad name.”
If Leah Hunt-Hendricks had accepted the idea that she was simply an atomized individual, unencumbered by history, all of this might have seemed like mere coincidence. Her grandfather had died before she was born. Why should she atone for his sins? But no matter how many times she told herself this argument, she was never convinced. She looked a little like her grandfather. Fair skin, apple-like cheeks, and a round face. When Hunt began making his fortune, it wasn't widely understood that overuse of fossil fuels could destroy the planet. However, this was known by 1987, when Hunt Oil completed construction of a pipeline through the North Yemen desert. Then, in 2007, Hunt Oil signed an exploration contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government (a deal that the Bush administration publicly disavowed but privately celebrated). And in 2017, Rex Tillerson, who had worked closely with Hunt Oil in the Middle East, became Donald Trump's secretary of state. Hunt Oil remains family-owned and one of the largest private oil and gas companies in the United States. It is now one of several family-owned companies that are part of Hunt Consolidated, including Hunt Energy, Hunt Refining, Hunt Realty and Hunt Power. . Hunt Consolidated's headquarters in downtown Dallas is his 14-story steel and glass tower.The air conditioning bill should be huge, but for some reason this building is lead-Authenticated.
According to Balzac's maxim, behind every great wealth lurks a great crime. But unlike money, crime is not fungible. Some happened generations ago, and some are still going on today. Some afflict only a few people, while others afflict the entire world. Hunt-Hendricks joined a Christian fellowship group on campus and volunteered as a community organizer in downtown Durham. She wanted to dedicate her life to correcting the imbalance of wealth and power in society, but none of the usual options offered her a professorship. Does she work in a soup kitchen?—she seems to have gotten to the root of the problem. “Most of us spend our lives either accepting or just abandoning where we come from,” Hauerwas told me. “Leah wanted to do the adult thing, which is really hard to look at everything head on and find a way to actually make yourself useful.”
After graduation, Hunt-Hendricks enrolled in an interdisciplinary doctoral program at Princeton University called Religion, Ethics, and Politics. (“In my mind, these are three ways of saying the same thing,'' she said.) Two of her main advisers were Cornel West. She is one of the most famous intellectuals in this country, and she is always ready to support labor strikes and labor movements. Jeffrey Stout, a socialist candidate and about to publish “Blessed are the Organized: America's Grassroots Democracy.'' (In this book, she argued that the United States appears to be functioning as a “plutocracy” and that the solution is to help organizers build power “from the bottom up.”) In 2009, I took a leave of absence from graduate school and taught English for a year. She spent time in a small city in Egypt and then studied Arabic for another year in Damascus. She said she later met with organizers in Tunisia who “discussed the role of oil companies” (in this case large publicly traded companies) in perpetrating land grabs and “violence against activists who are part of the resistance to fossil fuel extraction.” writing. During her trip to the West Bank, she heard stories of the terrible suffering of the residents and, moved by her compassion and sense of guilt, she asked what she could do. But many people told her: She said, “We don't want your help, we want your unity.”
When she returned to Princeton, she proposed a dissertation on the intellectual history of solidarity. (“It’s a vast, interdisciplinary topic,” Ms. West told me. “We knew she would pull it off, but she exceeded our expectations.”) She is a person in need. She concluded that you can spend your life giving money to others, but philanthropy will only change. something on the edge. We will need to invest in social movements to eradicate structural inequalities.
Hunt-Hendricks, now 40, divides his time between New York and Washington, D.C., where he is a member of the New New Left and is in frequent contact with street organizers and several members of Congress. Several times as Congressman Ro Khanna was leaving a progressive centmillionaires' holiday party in Greenwich Village, he saw someone he recognized as Hunt Hendricks as he passed by. her Teamsters organizer asks her as she attended a rally of her UPS employees in Canarsie. “What are you doing again?'' Each time, she struggled to answer succinctly. Basically she is a philanthropist, but she is reluctant to use that term because she is skeptical of much of what is called philanthropy. She donates to her left-wing social causes and uses her connections to persuade her other wealthy people to do the same. She gave her early funding to Black Lives Matter activists and a long-running primary campaign by members of the Squad. Since 2017, she has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for left-wing populist politicians through her organization Way to Win. It's not as much as Bloomberg or Koch's money, but it's much more than the amount typically associated with the far left.
“I think I'm usually in a bad mood because I have six roommates.”
Cartoon by Charlie Hankin
Max Berger, who worked on Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign, said: “She does politics better than anyone else who is this wealthy, and she raises money for her politics better than anyone else.'' It's also excellent,” he said. “Call my faction, Bernieites, Warrenites, Democratic Socialists, Social Democrats, whatever you want, but if Lear didn't exist, we would have a lot less power.” If this faction had enough power to enact a complete agenda, many of the wealthiest people in this country would likely lose money and influence. At the center of the agenda is the Green New Deal, which, if implemented in a maximalist manner, could put fossil fuel companies, including Hunt Oil, out of business. “Leah was clearly obsessed with how a person of extreme privilege lives responsibly in the world,” Stout told me. “It seems like it was an existential question for her.”
Legend has it that HL Hunt won the first oil field lease in a poker game. According to the book Texas Rich, the legend goes something like this: Hunt actually acquired some of Joyner's most valuable possessions by keeping him in a hotel room for days on end, exhausting him until he gave up his land. Joyner seems to have regretted it for the rest of his life. In 1957, J. Paul Getty said, “When it comes to extraordinary, independent wealth, there is only one man: H. Kennedy.” L. Hunt. ”
In the press, Hunt developed a reputation as a respectable conservative who wore rumpled gabardine suits and carried a packed lunch to work. Thanks to more detailed historical records, it is clear that Hunt was an unusually racist and reactionary figure even by the standards of his time. He sometimes implied that giving up a significant portion of income through taxes and philanthropy was letting the communists win. He financed the nationally syndicated conservative radio show Life Line and an endless stream of far-right propaganda pamphlets and books, many of which he wrote himself. His self-published novel Alpaca, in the vein of Ayn Rand, sketched his vision of a political utopia. It included a system called “graded elections” in which wealthy people received more votes. In the past, Hunt privately advised the “Lifeline” anchor to never support “opposition to white supremacist groups” after she spoke on air against “hate groups.”
