What We Get by Giving

Everybody knows at least one guy who never gives. Well, sure, he'll write a check to the Community Chest to guard against the conspicuous omission of his name from the annual brochure that is scrutinized by his associates. The ethical purist will say that this wasn't really a gift, it was the cost of his defense against social depreciation. The economist will formulate it as, "Jones prefers the loss of one hundred dollars in cash to the loss of esteem he would forfeit if his name didn't appear on the annual roster of the Community Chest as a one-hundred-dollar donor." We know about the Scrooges. They are not numerous, but they are an unhappy breed, and that is because giving is a means of getting pleasure, not merely of dispensing it. If you don't get pleasure in life, you tend to be unhappy and, by the way, boring (find me the entertaining miser).

There is another species, one that doesn't accept gifts, or resists doing so. Senator Paul Douglas, ever on the alert to the dangers of subornation, wouldn't accept any gift worth more than a trade book. But the generality holds: It is graceless to refuse a gift, even as it is graceless to refuse to give.

Probably the best-known story about the potential irony of gift-giving is O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi. It tells of an indigent young couple madly in love who despair over how, in their penury, they might come up with Christmas gifts suggesting their devotion to each other. The husband covets fine tortoise-shell combs with jeweled rims to pin on her full head of brown hair, she a platinum watch chain for his beloved time-piece. To which ends she goes one day to the wigmaker and sells her long varnished locks for the six florins needed to buy the chain for her lover's watch; and he, on the same morning, goes to the pawnbroker and surrenders his watch for the money with which to buy the combs, the more resplendently to display her hair.

A charming story, the more so because it lets the reader in on the dismay the couple feels on discovering the irrelevance of their gifts. The reader nevertheless senses the absolute disposition to sacrifice, motivated by love.

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Gift-giving can, of course, be routinized. For some it is a minor industry. David Niven would tell of the Christmas when he, a recent widower, and Errol Flynn, then recently divorced, shared an apartment. Several days before Christmas they dragged out the sacks of unopened presents they had been sent and busied themselves removing the labels addressed to them, affixing labels to their friends, removing the cards of the donors and substituting their own. A tidy operation, except that L. B. Mayer received from Flynn a silver cigarette case on which was engraved, to David Niven, from his dear friend, L. B. Mayer.

Every child, and most wives, have experienced the gift obviously purchased at the airport, in spastic response to the sudden memory of a birthday or an anniversary. There is that to watch out for.

On the other hand, giving can be a sport. I remember a few personal experiences. I am an impulsive type, my enthusiasms are pronounced and I need to share them, like good jokes. About a dozen years ago, I bought a pair of sport shoes. I was so captivated by them (they were by Timberland and featured craggy rubber soles that never wear out) that I sent a memo to a dozen friends demanding to know the length and width of their feet. I then sent each a pair of my beloved Timberlands. I had fun with this when, two years later, I was vacationing in Barbados with the President of the United States, who walked along the beach, stopped suddenly, pointed to his shoes and said, "Bill, you ought to get a pair of these!" I reminded him that he was wearing the shoes I had sent him two years earlier. That was when he learned the meaning of supply-side economics.

Another enthusiasm I once had was for a machine that makes bread. The catalog expressed in language more active than any yeast the utter, unparalleled simplicity of making your own bread, and any kind of bread. I sent away for it, bought the ingredients and, for the first time since I was 14 (when I had specialized in making fudge), took over the kitchen. I was wild with delight when I beheld a perfectly crafted mound of bread, tasted it and even got an enthusiastic reaction from my super-cook wife. If there is a woman known to me between the ages of 18 and 70 who did not receive a loaf of bread for Christmas that year, she can deduce that I loathe her.

There was a fascinating catalog eight or ten years ago that collected mom-and-pop products each regionally famous but not merchandised nationally. Only in Wilton, Connecticut, did they make this particular macadamia-nut brittle. Only in a little town in Washington, a redwood-flavored salt. It was in that catalog that I discovered Goo Goo bars, made in Nashville. Such is the pride of the manufacturer in its product--which contains chocolate, peanuts, corn syrup, sugar, coconut, milk, whey, starch, butter, salt, gelatin, egg whites, hydrogenated vegetable oil and artificial flavoring--that every Goo Goo bar carries the notice, guarantee of satisfaction: your Goo Goo cluster should be fresh and in good condition. If not, we will replace it. Just return the unused portion and tell us where and when you bought it.

But wait. In respect of gift-giving, I had a huge treat in store for me. I selected no fewer than 26 items from the catalog and sent them to a dozen worthies. On or about December 15, the mustard came in, and my friends wondered why dear old Bill thought mustard, however exotic, was such a necessity. The next day, a plum pudding. The next day, Red Wing peanut butter. Followed the next day by two items, the next by four, the next by five, with an explosion of a half dozen a day or two before Christmas. I began to receive telegrams every day, some in verse, describing that day's catch. I hadn't had such fun since The New York Times came out against rent control.

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Giving, then, should be fun. And fun is the enemy of those who wish to socialize pleasure. In Sweden, an aging landholder announced his intention to bequeath to his village the large forest he owned. The town elders responded that they did not want to receive a forest as a gift from one of their townspeople; if they wanted a forest, they would appropriate one--taxing the citizenry for whatever compensation was owed to the man whose forest had been socialized. They deemed it undignified to receive a gift from someone who egotistically decided to make such a gift.

Merely to relate the experience leaves the taste of ashes in the mouth, and yet the story, in its Teutonic grimness, serves as the last word in socialist reasoning. Everything belongs to everybody, so why should we accept a "gift"? Indeed, what is a gift?

When I was a schoolboy, we were assigned to read a book by S. I. Hayakawa, a philologist who 31 years later was elected to the United States Senate. Language in Action began by illustrating a problem semantic in nature. We read an exchange between Advertising Man and Social Worker. They are discussing the means by which the leaders of a small town handled the problem of the unemployed during the Great Depression. The town council had decided to consider the unemployed as insurance policyholders, entitled when unemployed to weekly checks. The experiment was much acclaimed, and Advertising Man says how wonderful it is what you can do with language, calling relief insurance.

"What do you mean, 'calling' it insurance?" asked Social Worker. It was insurance. Before long, they refuse to speak to each other, and Advertising Man threatens to disinherit his son if he doesn't break his engagement with the daughter of Social Worker. As the argument develops, under the skilled direction of Hayakawa, the philosophical differences between the two antagonists are at first limned, but soon they are incandescent: We are talking about different political philosophies. As to which is the "correct" one, Hayakawa does not declare. His design is merely that the reader begin to learn about the uses of language in action and, by extension, know when a political operation begins to transmute what was once clearly a gift into an entitlement. In America, no one thinks to thank the elderly neighbor for paying the costs of his children's schooling--schooling is free in America; which is fine, except, of course, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If a community votes to tax itself for the benefit of the have-nots, it starts by conferring a withdrawable gift. That is to say, if the following year the majority votes not to reimpose the burden on itself, it has only to direct its legislators to end the tax.

But even as an easement acquires a life of its own when treated in a certain way, so does legislation. Once a year, Rockefeller Center closes its plaza to traffic. Why? To refresh its franchise by exercising it. Otherwise, what the lawyers call laches sets in. By neglecting to exercise its authority to close off traffic, the owner gradually forfeits that authority.

By the same token, as year after year, decade after decade, a class of citizens receives free education, free food stamps, free medicine and free unemployment insurance, these goods and services, once thought to be the bounty of caring neighbors, become in some mysterious way communal property. They become "rights," to use the modern word. Frédéric Bastiat once pronounced it wrong for any legislation to take from A for the benefit of B something that A, in the absence of law, would not voluntarily give to B. The quickening of the spirit that happens when Alice gives Bill a basket of fruit doesn't happen when a faceless token dispenser forks out every week the coupons Alice, Inc., turns over to Bill, Inc.

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The Government's presence in the picture takes the glamour out of giving. A gift becomes tax-deductible, and for that reason alone, there is an alloy there. When you write a check to the Red Cross or to your local church, a dollar's sacrifice costs you 67 cents. It was greatly feared, after the 1986 tax law that reduced the top tax level to 33 percent, that the seductiveness of charitable gifts would be diluted. In fact, that did not happen. In 1985, two percent of the gross national product was given by private philanthropy. There wasn't much difference in succeeding years. And then, of course, the Government, with its corpus of regulations, can actively estop a gift. I have an example in mind.

It was 15 years ago that I espied our aging, tough, no-nonsense Cuban cook quietly weeping in the corner of the kitchen. It required much perseverance to extract her story, but it was this: She had heard on the telephone that afternoon from her cousin in Cuba. The cook's sister, dying of cancer, was suffering great pain because Castro's Cuba had run out of morphine or else out of morphine it was willing to dispense to old women dying of cancer. The cousin had called desperately to ask if our cook, living in Stamford, Connecticut, could somehow get some morphine to her sister.

So I called my doctor, only to find that he was out of town and would be for ten days. But he had left me a prescription for a sinus remedy, which I hadn't yet filled. I did some quick reading and, imitating the doctor's script, added to the form a prescription for a 60-days supply of morphine. I called my brother, living in Spain, and asked if he knew anyone flying the Madrid-Havana route. Indeed, he did. I explained the problem.

My local druggist was rather surprised by the prescription but faithfully handed over a supply of morphine, which, he told me with a little wink, was "worth about fifty thousand dollars on the black market." Interesting, was the only comment I felt safe to make. That afternoon the little bundle was in the hands of an airline pilot bound for Madrid, who turned it over to a fellow pilot bound that morning for Havana; and late that afternoon the cousin was on the telephone to our cook to say that her sister was resting in blissful, painless sleep. A gift, in our complex world, can consist of a rifle bullet fired through bureaucratic gristle. A gift--the expression of one person's concern for the pleasure of someone else--can consist (concluded on page 200)Giving(continued from page 154) of the postman's making a special early delivery of that fat envelope postmarked West Point, because he knows that Junior has been biting his nails waiting to know if his application has been approved.

There is a third dimension, and I find it the most difficult. To give gives pleasure to the giver in all cases, save to the pathologically stingy; to receive gives pleasure, save to those who fear that to accept a gift would be to accept a reciprocal obligation. We dwell now on those who engage, many of them professionally, in getting other people to give.

There is, for instance, the class secretary. He or she writes or calls you up, asks you to give something to your alma mater or asks you, maybe, to give something more to your alma mater than the usual 50 bucks.

Such is my dislike for the exercise, I know that my time in purgatory will be used to ask my neighbors to give money. What astonishes is that there is a class of people who not only don't detest such activity but are actually happy when engaging in it.

I was driving to the airport with a professional fund raiser. I had just spoken in a luxurious modern college auditorium that seated about 1000 people, the brand-new Madeleine Burns Auditorium. My companion soon disclosed the nature of his work for the college and went on to discuss the new auditorium. I was not, of course, surprised to learn that it had been made possible primarily by a gift from Mrs. Madeleine Burns. "It must be hell," I said abstractly, "going around, trying to raise money all the time."

He turned to me, his eyes blazing. "You do not know such pleasure as is experienced by the woman--or the man--who decides to make a gift of five million dollars." Indeed, I did not. "There is nothing to match it. I get gifts routinely--every day--two thousand, five thousand, even ten, twenty thousand. But then"--his excitement was genuine--"you make the big jump. Suddenly, the woman you are talking to, like Mrs. Burns, two, three years ago, says--her voice may be perfectly calm, just like mine--says, 'I'll give the five million you're looking for, Mr. Henningsen. You don't need to go any further. I am glad to make that gift in memory of my husband, for whom the college did so much.'" He described the sheer happiness of the donor. That she would thenceforward be without $5,000,000 in cash and securities was nothing at all. That she would be the woman who made possible the realization of the dream of a fine new auditorium meant more to her than $5,000,000. "As a professional fund raiser," he said, "I make more people happy than I make sad."

If it were that easy, one would not need professional fund raisers; all philanthropy would be self-starting. I think I was dealing with an artist whose success lies in his ability to sense latent appetites that have not been satisfied by conventional stimulations. That fund raiser disposes of spiritually evocative powers, even as does the minister who, after talking with a parishioner, convinces him that he would be happier living a life less sinful. There are thousands of men and women who would be happier if they were led to realize the pleasures they might get from the act of giving. It is the ultimate tribute to the free-market system that at one and the same time, the students can get an auditorium and Mrs. Burns can be made happy. In that limited sense, there is such a thing as a free lunch.

It does not surprise, nor, really, disappoint, to know that much of the money-collecting business is done mechanically, with generous doses of genteel misrepresentation. In a convivial moment, the provost of a university told me how he would handle an alumnus who had telephoned that morning to stammer out that a recent bout of good luck had left him with a few dollars, some of which he wished to give to his alma mater. "I'd say to him, 'Mr. Axelrod, might I call you back? We're just this minute beginning a trustees' meeting.... ' Then I would telephone Miss Abigail--she keeps the university morgue--and I would say to her, 'Miss Abigail, find out everything Mr. Roger Axelrod ever did when he was an undergraduate.' She would bring out the scrapbooks, carefully kept each year, and report after an hour or two that Mr. Axelrod had been a very quiet student--no athletics, no debate teams, no drama or journalism, that his name appeared in the student paper only in connection with musical events--he was in the glee club and one of the other singing groups."

That afternoon, the provost calls back Roger Axelrod, who asks, "Is there any particular need of the university to which I might send my little gift?"

"As a matter of fact, Mr. Axelrod, what we really need most is a substantial addition to the music library. It is in embarrassing shape."

"The music library! Why, as it happens, I feel very strongly about music in college."

"The long and short of it," the provost says, smiling, "is that we get one hundred thousand dollars from someone who was thinking in terms of ten thousand dollars."

I don't think you can really get mad at somebody who uses such stratagems for such purposes. At least I don't.

"Such is my dislike for the exercise, my time in purgatory will be used to ask my neighbors to give money."