In Roger Lowenstein’s biography of Warren Buffett, the author describes the dilemma Benjamin Graham faced when first considering whether to hire the young Buffett as a securities analyst at the Wall Street firm Graham-Newman. Buffett had been Graham’s star student at Columbia University and the two men were known to be close and regarded each other very highly. Graham-Newman was the only company in New York that Buffett had any interest in working for. There was only one reason for Graham not to hire Buffett. Lowenstein writes:
These were the days when Jews were locked out of Wall Street’s gentile firms, and Graham preferred to hold his spots for Jews.
Reluctantly, Buffett returned to Nebraska to work for his father. The year was 1951. Three years later, Graham called Buffet to tell him that things were changing on Wall Street. More companies were beginning to hire Jews and Graham now felt he could offer Buffett the position at Graham-Newman with a clear conscience. Buffett accepted.
Prior to 1954, companies like Graham-Newman that were known to hire Jews were kept at arm’s length by the larger firms and were cut off from many business opportunities. They, however, toiled on in relative obscurity, were able to employ a certain number of Jewish professionals and served a small number of investors and clients. It was what you might call a niche market outside the mainstream.
We face today a similar situation regarding professionals who are not in accordance with left-wing dogma. In the 2020s, mechanics or builders are still entitled to freedom of conscience, but not lawyers or bankers. Even the clients of such service providers sometimes face retaliation.
If there is still a way for anyone in this day and age to still freely express his or her thoughts and beliefs while also working within their chosen professions and enjoying the services of similar professions, the road forward can only lie in coming out of the shadows and self-identifying. Businesses and institutions forged in concealment are prone to easy destruction once they are detected. A more durable strategy is to build harder targets and, in the spirit of Benjamin Graham circa 1951 to say: “We do not hire liberals or squishes, not because we have anything against them as such, but because they could get jobs anywhere and at the present time right-wingers and principled conservatives cannot.”
In the spirit of self-identification, I propose the name “Bad Guys” for businesses and institutions that choose this route: “Bad Guys, Inc.,” “BadGuysBanccorp,” and maybe a white-shoe law firm “Badguys & Badguys.”
Of course, being a client of such an outfit would likewise be an act of self-identification that would incur genuine sacrifice. For some, it would be an act of defiance. For others, it would be the last refuge from being shut out of banking or legal services altogether. The Bad Guys sector would by definition be small. Its denizens would meticulously uphold the law because they know they will be granted far less grace in erring than their counterparts. Like the Jews of old, its clients and professionals would work harder than their neighbors for results that even at best never allowed them the same full extent of life. The struggle against new forms of hostility would be constant. But they would earn the ability to live their lives as they saw fit.
Perhaps in the future, some outward mark of dress or appearance would be warranted as well. Then again, the way things are going, this might not require any additional effort. Soon, not having tattoos or piercings, hair dyed in unnatural colors, or visible signs of disfiguring surgery might in themselves be sufficient to mark one as a “bad guy.”
The idea for the name comes from a professor I had once who was describing a course she had had to teach when she first got a job in the early1960s. Back then, there were still conservatives in academia and she had been forced to teach a course that covered the writings of authors she described as “bad guys.” She wouldn’t tell us who these people were, but apparently having to teach such material for a semester or two before the radicals took over had been an extremely traumatic experience.