Pro Commerce

Glide and Cecil Williams

Glide is in the news these days and I have a unique vantage point.

Glide is Glide Memorial United Methodist Church of San Francisco with its most famous minister, Cecil Williams and his wife Jan Mirikitani.  Cecil and Jan are in a head butting fight with the Bishop of the United Methodist California-Nevada Annual Conference, Minerva Carcaño.

The history: Three Methodist ministers were invited by Bishop Tippett in 1962 to create a dynamic new church form in a vital urban center.  The first, Lew Durham found the other two, Ted McIlvenna and Don Kuhn. The time was fortuitous. Within three years San Francisco became the center of the hippie revolution as well as the Gay liberation movement. The three original ministers had active community organizing projects underway and no interest in being traditional pastors. They found and installed a young black activist, Cecil Williams.

Glide, in 1962, was an endowed church with a six story office building (in photo office building is attached to church), a hotel one block away and a portfolio worth several million dollars.  It had been created in 1931 by Lizzie Glide, the widow of Joseph Glide. Joseph had been a cattle rancher who owned land in Kern County California where large oil deposits were found.

Glide’s trust document was created on behalf of the Methodist Episcopal Church South.  A vestige of the Methodist split before the Civil War over slavery; the Methodist Episcopal Church South became the United Methodist Church in 1939.

Much of the Glide portfolio consisted of money from the sale of various properties in California that were owned by the United Methodist Church. This money was melded into the Glide portfolio.

I became Glide Treasurer and Business Manager in September 1970, invited by Don Kuhn and the Board.

One of the tenets of the Methodist Church is that pastors are appointed and rotated to individual churches by the local Bishops and Superintendents.  One goal of the rotation is to keep the ministers from becoming too controlling of the congregation or too controlled by the congregation and to avoid corruption and adverse attachments.

When it was time to move Cecil Williams he wouldn’t move to another church. He was black and closely tied to local politics.  He couldn’t be moved by the Methodist Church. He soon married his secretary and gained complete control over Glide and its Board by 1980.  He was forced to retire at age 70 in 2000. He never did retire and no ministers were comfortable under his control in the next 18 years.

At this point he claims Glide Church is his. The Glide Memorial Trust documents make it clear that the church and all it assets belong to the United Methodist Church.  

There may be a legal battle.  Cecil Williams will lose. There is no reason in trust law that the original trust document should be changed.

Darwin observed in commerce

The Darwinian model of random variation with selective application of survival, works fairly well in commerce.

If we look at a shopping street with large buildings that have offices in them, we will see a steady change over time as the foot traffic changes, as the demographics change and as tastes replace one type of business with another.   Technological change also plays a role.

The source of change is primarily innovation in the society and it is most often focused around new businesses.  A pastry shop becomes a flower shop as the Italian immigrants are replaced with a gay population and the flower shop is replaced with a children's clothing shop as married couples move into the safe neighborhood. Then a boutique shoe store. Then a Radio Shack opens on the street as electronics become part of the social fabric, lately giving way to a watch retailer and then a smart phone shop.

We can watch the evolution of automobiles under Darwinian conditions.  In 1920 there were dozens of car factories in the U.S. including steam cars, electric cars and reciprocating gasoline cars.  There were fat tires, skinny tires and balloon tires with tubes. By 1935 many companies had consolidated and many types of cars were gone.  A few major technologies became dominant as more people used cars and simplicity of repair and simplicity in driving became ascendant.

Headlights and starting motors were being standardized and ignition timing was being automated.  

Watching autos evolve has been a process of seeing technologies that failed being dropped and tastes of consumers slowly dominating.  As women and families became buyers, and roads became highways, safety and reliability became selection factors. By 1960 automatic transmissions with a ‘park’ feature and gasoline engines became dominant.  Starting motors were universal.

Imports improved the entire auto industry in the 1970’s as Japanese quality and durability became norms while English, French and Italian cars, with obscure engineering elements, lost importance in the world market; and Communist cars disappeared altogether.

The next major evolution came with the hybrid engine in the late 1990’s and became almost universal.  It combined the high torque of electricity at starting speeds with high speed reciprocating engines. Much like the evolution of railroad diesel-electric engines in the previous century.

There are two aspects of Darwinian evolution that have bothered me in the biological world.  I asked Stephen J. Gould about both and he changed the subject because he didn’t know the answer.

‘What is the minimum size of a sub-species that can survive long enough to become a separate species?’  The problem is that too small a group will permit fatal genes to become dominant.

Concomitantly, ‘What level of new gene inflow can help a small sub-species survive?’

In the world of commerce I was introduced to a 1972 Xerox Parc idea of a small portable computer model that was supposed to become the future ‘laptop’.  For that to happen, nearly 30 years later, required a dozen elements including the Internet, Google and wi-fi.

In Darwinian terms: ‘for the subspecies to become a new species required a new very rich environment where many separate survival modes developed and were consolidated’.  Probably the way a wolf became a dog.

In terms of inflow to a weak sub-species; I’ve watched as a few international businesses expanded to new cultures, new nations with new kinds of people in management.  Like IBM and Sony where the expansion over a heterogeneous set of environments, nations, created a new vitality and far greater survival capability. Because of the inflow of new genes, a new diverse membership in management, survival was extended.

Commercial evolution has many similarities to Darwinian biological evolution.

I think we can learn about the biological model from observing the commercial model.

Wrong word: capitalism

When I look around me at the triumphal world, I don’t see ‘capitalism’.  It is not just the wrong word, it is the wrong imagery for the world I see.  I’m not a Marxist. The world I see is not shaped by Marx’s ideas of class warfare and proletarian rebellion.  Marx and his followers see a world where the owners of capital form a class that controls the lower classes that don’t own capital.  The communist revolution was going to occur because the capital owning class would not allow enough of the earnings from capital to flow to the lower classes.

If you can see that in the world around you, then you are a blind ideolog.  That doesn’t fit the world I live in in any way shape or form.

It was Marx who came up with the terminology of a ‘capitalist system’ as opposed to a ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ system.  In the two non-capitalist systems the ‘people’ and the government own the 'means of production'.

This has no relevance to the world today.

• Every communist system except North Korea has some property owned by ordinary people, often a farm or a garden, sometimes a house.
• Some giant economic systems, including the United States, have property and ‘the means of production’ owned by the national government or state governments.  Think of the military, the Army Corps of engineers, the park systems and space projects.

What I see everywhere around me is ‘commerce’. People owning many things, people working in countless ways, but most importantly I see a massive system of voluntary exchanges of goods and services.  The government is rarely involved in any case for 95% of living humans; people are universally involved in  the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Much of that voluntary exchange is for the individual’s work in the form of wages.  

I call that voluntary exchange system ‘commerce’.  When it is on a gigantic scale with thousands or millions of people cooperating, I call it ‘modern commerce’.

‘Capitalism’ doesn’t describe anything and has no meaning.  It is a great intellectual hollow mis-fabrication.

The vast world around us is made up of voluntary exchanges among individuals, groups, corporations and nations.  They are part of the world of ‘modern commerce.’

Am I being mean?

In 1896 Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times for $75,000 of borrowed money. Circulation was below 25,000.  In 1935 Ochs died and his daughter, Iphigene’s, husband Arthur Sulzberger became the publisher.

It is well known that both Ochs and Sulzberger, both Jews, considered themselves the elite of New York City.  They ardently sought to be included in ‘respectable’ New York society because they owned ‘the most important newspaper in the world’ in the most important city in the world.

I have in front of me the Social Register of New York 1960. That was the last year the Official Register was published for the ‘elite hereditary society’ of America. That hereditary society soon fell apart.

Neither the Ochs name nor the Sulzberger names are to be found in the New York Social Register.

They never made it.  

Since I consider the 21st Century New York Times to be a low grade dishonest mouthpiece for the Democrat Party, it is with glee that I point out this omission. These social climbers never made it.