Wall Street needs a talk with grandparents

I would like to ask them what they expected when they came here from Cork in the 1890s. I know what they left -- grinding poverty. Those who could leave did.

By "here," I mean the United States, specifically New York City.

I don't think they expected streets paved with gold. They weren't that country. Just country enough that when they visited one of Hannah's relatives, an O'Keefe, first name now lost to history, they thought he was American royalty. He wore a suit, had a bootblack shine his shoes, paid cash for a shave. Mr. O'Keefe was the champagne buyer at Altman's, the tony department store at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue.

I suspect they expected hard work -- hard work that would pay off in time. If so, they were right.

I used my grandmother's name first because she was the dominant partner in the marriage and took the lead in the department of hard work. She ran a boarding house for Irish immigrants in Harlem. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she brought boarders into the house. Only Irish. No "foreigners." An irreverent cousin called my grandfather "the boarder" because, while he drove cab, he let her do the work at home.

I imagine Hannah as never finishing her labors. There was always another bed to change, meal to cook, carpet to beat, Irishman to hector about overdue rent. And she had five children. As far as I can tell, she is one of two members of my branch of the Sullivan clan with any entrepreneurial talent. The other one isn't me.

She saved the money she made. Enough to buy a handsome house in the Bronx during the Twenties. She wasn't a homeowner long before she died. High blood pressure.

The family had a dog called Sturdy. A wonderfully descriptive name for a tough pooch. Perhaps Sturdy followed my grandmother's example. She was sturdy too. Sturdy enough to handle Irish boarders and five kids.

I am thinking that if my grandmother were here she would have a lot to say to Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, the Wall Street bankers, the real estate speculators and the other geniuses who so badly wounded the American economy. Hannah believed debt was a sin. Today we are paying the wages of sin.

What a country Hannah and Michael Sullivan's grandchildren inherited.

I came of age during the Vietnam War, while the country went mad. I am growing old during the economic meltdown, while the country goes mad. OK, people have a reason for anger. I understand. Many Americans have lost their savings, their homes, their jobs, and their hope for tomorrow. But they are spinning like a gyro. One minute they are for President Obama. The next minute not. They are for change. Then they fear it. They want the government to "do something." Then when the government does, they're infuriated.

So they get up in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, kick the dog, and seethe while they watch TV news. Politics is such a crooked racket, they tell themselves.

New York City politics were plenty crooked when my grandparents arrived. The Democratic machine ran the city. You can read all about the machine in George Washington Plunkitt's reminiscences "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall." Actually, Plunkitt was a conservative when it came to corruption. He believed in "honest graft" -- graft with limits. He famously warned: Don't steal the golden dome off City Hall. The men and women who derailed the American economy may have gone to Harvard and Yale, but they never read Plunkitt. Some of them, like Alan Greenspan, now plead naïveté. They never understood the power of greed, they say. So they never kept an eye on the golden dome.

Hannah and Michael Sullivan are buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. They bought the family plot with cash money. It figures. They knew only cash money. They lived before complex financial instruments -- collateralized debt obligations, interest-only loans, credit default swaps, stated-income asset loans -- drove a great nation to its knees.

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com