Caught in the Larousse Trap

America upsets people for various reasons today, though it's hard to resist the music, movies, and much else.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

However, you can't help but approve of the American work ethic that made peanut farmers into Presidents (Jimmy Carter) and dirt-poor secretaries into glamorous magazine editors who defined a new way for working girls (Helen Gurley Brown). That's just two historical examples.

Moreover, if you examine their upper class, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), those 'Boston Brahmin' values were pretty sound, really. You had to study; you had to have accomplishments (in music, ballet, or foreign languages), and you had to be outdoorsy for body-mind balance. Besides wealth creation, you had to work on something that added to the sum of human knowledge; you had to support museums, universities, and good causes, grow gardens, and practice serious philanthropy. Most appealing, you had to practice thrift: use money for acquiring graces, not for showing off.

An Austrian Jew who embodied these values was Justice Felix Frankfurter, a star of Harvard Law School, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a Supreme Court judge. I love his 'Advice to a Young Man Interested in Going to Law'; it's a life-bestowing mantra: