Opinion: From Notorious Ball to Notorious Bailout

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The first prize for rich American tone-deaf chutzpah this year certainly belongs to the corporate beggars’ banquet held at a five-star retreat even as taxpayers were bailing out the company, and aboard private jets en route to beg taxpayers to do the same.

The clueless, flaunt-it conduct of businesses -- defending executive perks while Wall Street burns and lolling at that five-star Dana Point resort -- eclipses the couple who used to hold the chutzpah record.

In 1897, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin decided patriotically to help battle hard times by throwing a fancy-dress costume ball for New York’s elite. The logic was that they’d give the gala on such short notice that their guests wouldn’t have time to order costumes from Paris, as usually happened -- they’d have to ‘’buy local,’’ and thus boost the local economy.

The Bradley Martin ball probably affected small niches of New York trade. Expensive silks and laces that had sat unsold on shop shelves for decades got bought up; florists’ shops were emptied of thousands of flowers for the Waldorf Astoria, where dozens of elaborate, gout-generating dishes awaited the select guests. It was trickle-down economics in a curiously narrow incarnation -- like suggesting that today’s CEOs all buy G5 jets to help the economy.

But at least the Bradley Martins were spending their own dough, and weren’t asking for a federal bailout for their party. This year, Insurance giant AIG had just received about $85 billion in taxpayer bailout bucks when it took its retreat in Dana Point, where the tab for more than $400,000 included spa treatments, golf, banquets and cocktails. And then the Big 3 automakers delivered the capper, jetting separately and unequally from the rest of us from Detroit to D.C. to plead for their own bailout billions.

If CEOs haven’t gotten the word, at least their PR people and lawyers have. Some Wall Street aristos, like Goldman Sachs’ upper ranks, are forgoing big bonuses this year. They probably think they still deserve them, but someone is putting the word in their ears that, for appearance’s sake, they’d better zip it and manage to get by on last year’s yacht.

The Bradley Martin ball, with its thousands of jewels and roses and orchids and acres of silk, cost about $10 million in current dollars. It became a notorious bit of shorthand for the excesses of the Gilded Age. The angry outcry was tremendous, from men of the cloth to men on the street.

Now we have our own Bradley Martin money minuet, with a lot more flagrant conduct and misconduct. The underlying promise of taxpayer money pushes the stakes from the privately tasteless to the publicly outrageous.

The theme of the Bradley Martin ball was kings and queens of ages past. I think it’d be swell if we made all the millionaire recipients of taxpayer bailout bucks go to work in silk britches and powdered wigs. Given that most of them will probably never have to wear law enforcement ankle monitor bracelets, at least this way we can keep an eye on ‘em.

Illustration from Harpers, courtesy of Wikipedia.