Congratulations, Chuck!
I’ve said before that I prefer to look forward, so I’m generally not a fan of dinners honoring past accomplishments. But when the Museum of American Finance awarded my friend and longtime competitor Chuck Schwab its Financial Innovation Award, I was happy to be there, along with TD Ameritrade’s current and incoming Chief Executive Officers, Fred Tomczyk and Tim Hockey, and several members of TD Ameritrade’s Board of Directors, including my son Todd. For nearly fifty years now, Schwab and Ameritrade have been at the vanguard of a revolution in personal finance that has empowered countless individuals to take control of their own futures. Congratulations, Chuck!
The Gettysburg Replies Project
I am student of history, so I was excited last year when I learned that the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum was sponsoring what they were calling the Gettysburg Replies project. The project challenged presidents, judges, historians, filmmakers, poets, actors, and others to craft 272 words of their own to celebrate Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, or a related topic that stirs their passions. (272 words may not sound like a lot, but it was all President Lincoln needed to write what most folks consider one of the greatest speeches of all time.) The project included contributions from President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, General Colin Powell, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and many others, including yours truly. The hardcover book looks great and you can buy a copy from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library store here.
I was honored to be included in this fun and interesting project. My contribution, in 272 words (you can count them), is reprinted below:
In November of 1863, when President Lincoln went to Gettysburg to dedicate the new cemetery there, my great-great-grandfather Richard Rutter Ricketts was working the land at his farm in southwestern Iowa. Born in 1802, Richard was too old to fight in the still raging Civil War, but he was hardly indifferent to the struggle. Richard had grown up surrounded by slavery. As an apprentice carpenter in Baltimore, and later in New Orleans (where he made coffins during the terrible cholera epidemic of 1832), he worked alongside slaves, witnessing firsthand the injustice of their plight. Slavery may have been a settled part of his world, but it was not something he could abide, and in the 1840s, after he married my great-great grandmother Charlotte Platt Ricketts, an ardent abolitionist from a family of abolitionists, he joined the anti-slavery cause in earnest. When he and Charlotte moved to Iowa in the 1850s, they became active participants in the Underground Railway, their farm in Civil Bend, near the Missouri River, serving as a well-known transit point for escaping slaves.
Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg was reported widely at the time, and there is little doubt that Richard and Charlotte heard about it. I’m sure its words resonated deeply with them. The proposition that all men are created equal was a defining principle of their lives, as was the notion that the great task of securing freedom remains a continuing obligation for us all. It’s a legacy I’ve spent my life trying to honor, for it remains every bit as pertinent today as it was when Mr. Lincoln first spelled it out back in my great-great-grandparents’ time.
Nebraska City and Arbor Bank’s J. Sterling Morton Award
I was born and raised in Nebraska City, and while I’ve done many things since leaving there when I was 18, something of that place stays with me to this day. It’s hard to put into words, but if I were to try, I’d say it’s the values of integrity and consistency – values I’ve tried to bring to my life and my work.
So it was a great honor when Grant Gregory informed me that Arbor Bank, which is headquartered in Nebraska City, had decided to bestow the J. Sterling Morton Award on me. The oldest state-chartered bank in Nebraska, Arbor Bank – or Otoe County National Bank of Nebraska City, as it was known back then – was the financial cornerstone for my family growing up.
Like everyone who grew up in Nebraska City, I was familiar with J. Sterling Morton. The founder of Arbor Day and a former cabinet officer who returned to the United States Treasury 20% of his department’s appropriated budget when he served as Secretary of Agriculture, Morton had a powerful commitment to environmental conservation and government fiscal responsibility that resonates strongly with me. Indeed, I’ve tried to champion the same values of environmental conservation (through the Ricketts Conservation Foundation) and fiscal responsibility in government (through Ending Spending), so it is a particular honor for me to receive an award that bears his name. I particularly like this quote by Morton:
There is no aristocracy in trees. They are not haughty. They will thrive near the humblest cabin on our fertile prairies, just as well and become just as refreshing to the eye and as fruitful as they will in the shadow of a king’s palace.
The Museum of Nebraska Art’s Exhibition “Scenes of a 19th Century Journey: Paintings by Alfred Jacob Miller”
The Ricketts Art Foundation has been working hard with The Buffalo Bill Center of The West and the Museum of the Mountain Man to create the world’s largest online catalogue for Alfred Jacob Miller’s artwork. FUR TRADERS AND RENDEZVOUS: THE ALFRED JACOB MILLER ONLINE CATALOGUE is expected to launch in the summer of 2015.
In the meantime, I am excited that The Museum of Nebraska Art is presenting an exhibit entitled “Scenes of a 19th Century Journey: Paintings by Alfred Jacob Miller” that will feature the Ricketts Art Foundation’s Miller artwork. The exhibit runs until June 21, 2015 and, on April 4, 2015, the museum is hosting a special reception featuring Peter Hassrick, among the foremost experts in Miller and his work. You can learn more about The Museum of Nebraska Art’s exhibition here.
I hope those of you who have the opportunity to do so visit The Museum of Nebraska Art and see Scenes of a 19th Century Journey: Paintings by Alfred Jacob Miller.