Re-Growth: Summer 2021 Road Trip
I truly believe that these words and this philosophy sit at the heart of what New Capital tries to help our clients achieve - life, liberty, and happiness - and that your own life represents your own hopeful assertion of these vital things.
Dear Clients and Friends:
Happy July 4th, American Independence Day.
Hannah and I left Houston a few days ago in our Taxa Mantis camper and have had a wonderful time traversing some of the highways and sites of our nation’s southeastern section.
We spent a night at Fontainebleau State Park, in Mandeville, LA on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The park was once a 2800 acre sugar plantation and home to hundreds of slaves owned by Bernard de Marigny, a French-Creole American nobleman, playboy, planter, politician, duelist, writer, horse breeder, land developer, and President of the Louisiana State Senate. Now a beautiful park close to historic downtown Mandeville, the site is a wonderful place to jump off to New Orleans. We crossed the longest bridge in the world, the Pontchartrain Causeway, into New Orleans for a quiet weekday lunch at Shaya and a walk in the French Quarter. New Orleans is perhaps the most American city, where many cultures intermixed, river commerce culminated, slaves were bought and sold, and jazz was born. I always appreciate returning to this capital of authenticity. On this trip, I found the city and region to be still healing from Hurricane Katrina, fifteen years ago, and more recently COVID-19. But its spirit seemed strong and there was a sense that, with the current national dialogue over social justice, its time has come yet again to model peaceful and joyful relations between different cultures.
In Montgomery, Alabama, a city I had never before visited, we were one of many who lined up to get into the Legacy Museum and then the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Both of these extraordinary new institutions were founded by the Equal Justice Initiative and its dynamic founder, attorney Bryan Stevenson. You can learn about Stevenson’s story from the movie Just Mercy, which stars Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. The Legacy Museum teaches of the harmful and ongoing legacy of slavery and racism. The memorial is an acclaimed architectural and design marvel that stunningly remembers the victims of lynching. Montgomery is a city that has been changing since the modern civil rights movement began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, where the world first came to know the name Martin Luther King, Jr. King was then a 26 year old pastor at the Dexter Baptist Church, new to the community after moving from Georgia, and had already made such an impression that he was asked to serve as the public leader and spokesman for the boycott, launched in the wake of Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to give up her seat to a white bus patron. I found Montgomery, Alabama’s state capital, to be a quiet, friendly, historic, and gracious city, trying, as are all cities, to help its citizens succeed, educate its children, attract new talent and businesses, and change with the times. The city is blessed to sit in a beautiful area, with forested hills and flowing rivers around it, increasing interest from employers like Hyundai, and I truly enjoyed my time there and recommend a visit.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is by far the most visited national park in the United States (12 million annual visitors versus second place Yellowstone at 4 million). One of the few large national parks in the eastern United States, the Smoky Mountains, renowned for their vast biological diversity, were once the homeland of the Cherokee people. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson and the United States government approved, by a single vote, the Indian Removal Act, and in 1838 the U.S. government, encouraged by settlers hungry for land and gold, forced the Cherokee to leave their southeastern homeland on foot and in the dead of winter, for a newly designated reservation in Oklahoma. The Trail of Tears resulted in the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children. The Cherokee, thankfully, still possess a small sliver of homeland on the North Carolina side of the park, and are now the largest Native American tribe.
On this trip, Hannah and I camped in the deep forest of the park’s Elkmont campground, which was once the logging boomtown of Elkmont. In the 19th century, virtually all eastern forests of the United States were logged, and Park Service pictures of the times show eerie, denuded landscapes left behind. Since then, the re-growth of U.S. eastern forests has been one of the world’s great environmental success stories. Our country should be proud of re-growing its stock of natural capital, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park stands as a monument to this effort.
We arrived in the Washington D.C. area, appropriately, on July 3, to hot showers, a good bed, and time with our great friends who reside in the historic mid-century modern neighborhood of Hollin Hills in Alexandria, Virginia, just upriver from Mount Vernon, George Washington’s historic home and plantation, where over 500 enslaved people also made their lives. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed a resolution for independence from England (the “Lee Resolution”), and on July 4 Thomas Jefferson’s draft explication of the resolution was also passed. While the practical effect of these revolutionary actions was to create an independent new country - a nascent United States - what has been and continues to be perhaps most impactful are its famous words of political philosophy:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Many, if not most, regard these words to be the most important contribution made by the United States to the world, because they provide the most indispensable fuel for humans - hope. I truly believe that these words and this philosophy sit at the heart of what New Capital tries to help our clients achieve - life, liberty, and happiness - and that your own life represents your own hopeful assertion of these vital things.
Tomorrow, on July 4, Hannah and I depart our national capital, pass by Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City, for the small town of New Marlborough, Massachusetts. In February, we purchased some acreage in the Berkshires, part of the same Appalachian mountain chain as the Smokies, and will be camping in the deep forest there, amid the silent old stone walls, hopeful, liberated, and happy in nature for a few weeks.
Leonard Golub, CFA
Fiduciary Financial Advisor