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: