Lessons from Anne Frank
Practice gratitude: What could Anne Frank have been grateful for? For two years the teenager hid in a secret annex, knowing that at any moment the Nazis could find her and send her to a concentration camp (as eventually happened). Yet her diary inspires us with its optimism and gratitude for the good she saw even amid the evils of the Holocaust. Scientific research has shown that gratitude “protects a person from the destructive impulses of envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness.”
If you want to make a better world, start by making a better self: Anne Frank was not blind to the horrors of the Holocaust. But her diary offers us a sustained reminder that our own attitude is the one thing we have considerable control over in almost any situation.
28
Althea Gibson
A Winning Attitude
Baseless prejudice sooner or later meets its match when it runs into indomitable will and exceptional talent. Jackie Robinson proved it in baseball, as did Jesse Owens in track (see chapter 24) and Joe Louis in boxing (see chapter 31).
In the world of tennis, the biggest winner of note was a black woman named Althea Gibson.
Life’s victories don’t always go to the stronger or faster woman; Gibson demonstrated that eventually the woman who wins is the one who believes she can.
Proving It
Althea Gibson was three years old when, in 1930, her family moved from a sharecropper’s shack on a South Carolina cotton farm to New York City’s Harlem in search of a better life. In elementary school, playing hooky was her first love. “School was too confining and boring to be worthy of more than cameo appearances,” according to her biographers Francis Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb in Born to Win.
When she wasn’t fidgeting in the classroom, Gibson was exploring the Big Apple—riding the subway, shooting hoops, sneaking into movie theaters, and beating anybody who dared play her at Ping-Pong. At the age of twelve, in 1939, she was New York City’s female table tennis champion, and tennis on the big courts beckoned. Her Harlem neighbors went door to door, raising donations in mostly dimes and quarters to pay for her membership and tennis lessons at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club. Within a year she won her first tournament, the New York State Championship of the American Tennis Association (ATA).
All through the 1940s, Gibson won title after title. “I knew that I was an unusual, talented girl, through the grace of God,” she later wrote. “I didn’t need to prove that to myself. I only wanted to prove it to my opponents.” Off the court, she was both confident and gracious, never overbearing or condescending. On the court, she was fiercely competitive. Her determination and her athletic, five-foot-eleven frame intimidated opponents right from the start of a match.
Gibson was so skilled at tennis that she earned a full athletic scholarship to attend Florida A&M University. But she was denied the opportunity to display her talents against white players. Tennis was a segregated sport at the time; the ATA was organized expressly in response to the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association’s policy banning blacks from its tournaments.
Gibson’s situation changed in 1950, largely owing to the courage of another woman, Alice Marble.
The Jackie Robinson of Tennis
Words of Wisdom from Althea Gibson
“The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program. The loser says it may be possible, but it’s difficult; the winner says it may be difficult, but it’s possible.”
Alice Marble had been the world’s number one female tennis player, winner of eighteen Grand Slam championships. Her opinion on anything could make headlines. In 1950 she wrote an open letter published in American Lawn Tennis magazine challenging the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association for its discriminatory practices. Specifically, she condemned the tennis community for not allowing Althea Gibson to play at the U.S. National Championship (now the U.S. Open):
If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites. . . . If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it’s only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts. . . . She is not being judged by the yardstick of ability but by the fact that her pigmentation is somewhat different.… She is a fellow human being to whom equal privileges ought to be extended.
If Gibson were not given the opportunity to compete, Marble wrote, “then there is an ineradicable mark against a game to which I have devoted most of my life, and I would be bitterly ashamed.”
Marble’s letter made an immediate impact. “All of a sudden, the dam broke,” Gibson later wrote. She soon received invitations to play in tournaments, including the U.S. National Championship. On her twenty-third birthday, she became the first black player, male or female, to play in the sport’s national championship.
Gibson’s matches attracted huge crowds, and she endured heckling and racial slurs. But she was unflappable. She later said, “I made a vow to myself: ‘Althea, you’re not going to look around. You’re not going to listen to any calls or remarks. All you are going to do is watch the tennis ball.’” Gibson advanced to the tournament’s second round, losing a hard-fought match to Louise Brough, who had won two Grand Slam titles that year.
One journalist, Lester Rodney, captured the importance of her breakthrough when he wrote: “No Negro player, man or woman, has ever set foot on one of these courts. In many ways, it’s even a tougher personal Jim Crow–busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s when he first stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.”
Number One
Gibson drove herself to heights of excellence. The Grand Slam titles did not come right away. In 1951, the year she became the first black player at Wimbledon, she won her first title, the Caribbean Championship. The following year she reached number seven in the national rankings.
But by the mid-1950s she was considering giving up the game. After graduating from Florida A&M in 1953, she began teaching physical education at Lincoln University in Missouri. Major tennis in those days was an amateur sport, which meant no tournament prize money and no endorsements. Needing more money to support herself, she came close to joining the military. Then, in 1955, she joined a State Department goodwill tour of Asia. Playing exhibitions with and against other top players, men and women, boosted her confidence and inspired her to push on with her tennis career.
It was a good decision. In 1956 she won the French Open, becoming the first black tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles championship. Before the year was out she had also won the Wimbledon doubles championship, the Italian national championship, and the Asian championship.
The next year, 1957, she defended her doubles title at Wimbledon and also claimed the singles championship, the first black competitor to take the title in the tournament’s eight-decade history. Queen Elizabeth personally presented the trophy to an awestruck Gibson. “Shaking hands with the Queen of England,” she said, “was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus.”
When she returned to America, Gibson became the second black American (the first being Jesse Owens) honored by a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City. More than a hundred thousand people cheered their approval.
Later in 1957, Gibson won the Nationals. In 1958 she successfully defended her Wimbledon and U.S. titles while also winning the Australian Open, giving her three of the four Grand Slam titles that year. In 1957 and in 1958, Althea Gibson was the number-one-ranked woman tennis player in the world. Honored as the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in both years, she also became the first black woman to appear on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time.
Here she was, the world’s greatest tennis player, and the financial constraints imposed by amateur sports prevented her from supporting herself. “Being a champ is all well and good,” she said, “but you can’t eat a crown.”
At the top of her game, Gibson retired.
But she wasn’t finished ach
ieving athletic excellence or breaking down racial barriers. In 1964 she achieved another milestone when she became the first black woman to golf professionally. Back in college she had been good enough to play on the men’s golf team, and now, at the age of thirty-seven, she joined the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Gibson encountered discrimination in the golfing world just as she had in tennis. Some tournament organizers took to calling their competitions “invitationals” so they could invite whomever they wanted—and, more important, not invite Gibson. Even when she was allowed to compete, she might be refused access to a course’s clubhouse or bathrooms. She took it in stride. “I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted,” she said. “I’m trying to be a good golfer, I have enough problems as it is.”
“I Always Wanted to Be Somebody”
“I always wanted to be somebody,” Gibson wrote in her autobiography. “If I made it, it’s half because I was game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way and half because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help me.”
But there was more to it than that. Althea Gibson had drive, determination, and a winning attitude. She summed up that lifelong attitude with these words: “The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program. The loser says it may be possible, but it’s difficult; the winner says it may be difficult, but it’s possible.”
Lessons from Althea Gibson
Have the drive to overcome adversity: Like elite performers in other fields, Althea Gibson didn’t make it to the top on talent alone. With her indomitable will, she overcame racial discrimination, financial hardship, and other obstacles to become the best tennis player in the world. As she put it, she was “game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way.”
Have a winning attitude: As Gibson put it, “The loser always has an excuse; the winner always has a program.” She blocked out racial taunts to remain focused on her objectives. Part of her winning attitude was her graciousness; she understood that she reached such heights “because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help.”
29
Ludwig Erhard
Architect of a Miracle
How rare and refreshing it is for the powerful to understand the limitations of power and actually repudiate its use, in effect giving it back to the individuals who make up society.
George Washington was such a leader. Cicero (see chapter 1) was another. So was Ludwig Erhard, who did more than any other person to denazify the German economy after World War II.
“In my eyes,” Erhard confided in January 1962, “power is always dull, it is dangerous, it is brutal and ultimately even dumb.”
By every measure, Germany was a disaster in 1945—defeated, devastated, divided, and demoralized—and not only because of the war. The Nazis, of course, were socialist (the name derives from National Socialist German Workers Party), so for more than a decade the German economy had been “planned” from the top. It was tormented with price controls, rationing, bureaucracy, inflation, cronyism, cartels, misdirection of resources, and government command of important industries. Producers made what the planners ordered them to. Service to the state was the highest value.
Ludwig Erhard reversed those practices, and in doing so he gave birth to a miraculous economic recovery.
Classical Liberal
Born in Bavaria in 1897, Ludwig Erhard was the son of a clothing and dry goods entrepreneur. Erhard’s father was, in the words of biographer Alfred C. Mierzejewski, “by no means wealthy” but “a member of the solid middle class that made its living through hard work and satisfying the burgeoning consumer demand of the period, rather than by lobbying for government subsidies or protection.”
As a teenager, Ludwig heard his father argue for classical-liberal values in discussions with fellow businessmen. Young Ludwig resented the burdens that government imposed on honest, independent businessmen like his father. He developed a lifelong passion for free-market competition because he understood what F.A. Hayek would express so well in the 1940s: “The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
The younger Erhard’s classical-liberal values were strengthened by his experience in the bloody and futile First World War. While serving as an artilleryman in the German army, he was severely wounded by an Allied shell in Belgium in 1918. He began studying economics as tumultuous hyperinflation gripped Germany, rendering savings, pensions, and investments worthless and wiping out the German middle class.
Erhard earned his PhD in 1925, took charge of the family business, and eventually headed a marketing research institute, which gave him opportunities to write and speak about economic issues.
Words of Wisdom from Ludwig Erhard
“It is much easier to give everyone a bigger piece from an ever growing cake than to gain more from a struggle over the division of a small cake, because in such a process every advantage for one is a disadvantage for another.”
Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s deeply disturbed Erhard. He refused to have anything to do with Nazism or the Nazi Party and quietly supported resistance to the regime. The Nazis saw to it that he lost his job in 1942, when he wrote a paper outlining his ideas for a free postwar economy. He spent the next few years as a business consultant.
Erhard’s ideas received a new hearing after the Allies defeated the Nazis. In 1947 he became chair of an important monetary commission. It proved to be a vital stepping-stone to the position of director of economics for the Bizonal Economic Council, a creation of the American and British occupying authorities. There he could finally put his views into practice and transform his country in the process.
Turnaround Artist
Erhard’s beliefs had by this time solidified into convictions. Currency must be sound and stable. Collectivism was deadly nonsense that choked the creative individual. Central planning was a ruse and a delusion. State enterprises could never be an acceptable substitute for the dynamism of competitive, entrepreneurial markets. Envy and wealth redistribution were evils.
“It is much easier to give everyone a bigger piece from an ever growing cake,” he said, “than to gain more from a struggle over the division of a small cake, because in such a process every advantage for one is a disadvantage for another.”
Erhard advocated a fair field and no favors. His prescription for recovery? The state would set the rules of the game and otherwise leave people alone to restart the German economy. In June 1948 he “unilaterally and bravely issued a decree wiping out rationing and wage-price controls and introducing a new hard currency, the Deutsche-mark,” in the words of the economist William H. Peterson. Erhard did so “without the knowledge or approval of the Allied military occupation authorities” and made the decree “effective immediately.” Peterson continues:
The American, British, and French authorities, who had appointed Erhard to his post, were aghast. Some charged that he had exceeded his defined powers, that he should be removed. But the deed was done. Said U.S. Commanding General Lucius Clay: “Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me you’re making a terrible mistake.” “Don’t listen to them, General,” Erhard replied, “my advisers tell me the same thing.”
General Clay protested that Erhard had “altered” the Allied price-control program, but Erhard insisted he hadn’t altered price controls at all. He had simply abolished them.
In 1949 Erhard won a seat in the Bundestag (the German parliament) in the first free elections since 1933. In the subsequent government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he was appointed the first economics minister of the newly constituted West German republic, a role he would hold until 1963.
In that position he issued a blizzard of deregulatory orders. He slashed tariffs. He raised consumption taxes, but more than offset them with a 15 percent cut in income taxes. By removing disincentives to save, he prompted one of the highest saving rates of any Western industrialized country. West Germany was awash in capital and growth, while communist East Germany langui
shed. Economist David Henderson writes that Erhard’s motto could have been “Don’t just sit there; undo something.”
The results were stunning. Writing in the December 1988 issue of The Freeman, Robert A. Peterson (not to be confused with the aforementioned William H. Peterson) explained:
Almost immediately, the German economy sprang to life. The unemployed went back to work, food reappeared on store shelves, and the legendary productivity of the German people was unleashed. Within two years, industrial output tripled. By the early 1960s, Germany was the third greatest economic power in the world. And all of this occurred while West Germany was assimilating hundreds of thousands of East German refugees.
The pace of growth dwarfed that of European countries that received far more Marshall Plan aid than Germany ever did.
The Principles of Liberty
The incredible turnaround of the 1950s became widely known as the “German economic miracle,” but Erhard never thought of it as such. In his 1958 book, Prosperity through Competition, he wrote: “What has taken place in Germany … is anything but a miracle. It is the result of the honest efforts of a whole people who, in keeping with the principles of liberty, were given the opportunity of using personal initiative and human energy.”
The temptations of the welfare state in the 1960s derailed some of Erhard’s reforms. His three years as chancellor (1963–66) were less successful than his tenure as economics minister. But his legacy was forged in that decade and a half after the war’s end. He forever answered the question “What do you do with an economy in ruins?” with the simple, proven recipe: “Free it.”
Lessons from Ludwig Erhard
Want a strong economy? Free it: After years of National Socialism followed by stifling government controls under Allied occupation, Germany in the late 1940s was impoverished. Ludwig Erhard knew the solution was not more government planning but freedom and free markets. He ended price controls, rationing, and other hallmarks of central planning. Freed of all that, Germans went to work and produced an “economic miracle.”
Real Heroes Page 18