God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praise
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
DELL BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
Copyright Page
For Alvin Davis,
the telepath,
the hoodlums’ friend
"The Second World War was over—and there I was at high noon, crossing Times Square with a Purple Heart on."
—ELIOT ROSEWATER President, The Rosewater Foundation
AMERICA’S GREATEST SATIRIST KURT VONNEGUT IS...
"UNIQUE... one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best."
—DORIS LESSING
The New York Times Book Review
"OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST. ... We laugh in self-defense."
— The Atlantic Monthly
"AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST."
— Harper’s Magazine
"A MEDICINE MAN, CONJURING UP FANTASIES TO WARN THE WORLD."
— The Charlotte Observer
"A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION."
— Chicago Sun-Times
"A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM."
—The New York Times
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.
1
A SUM OF MONEY is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.
The sum was $87,472,033.61 on June 1, 1964, to pick a day. That was the day it caught the soft eyes of a boy shyster named Norman Mushari. The income the interesting sum produced was $3,500,000 a year, nearly $10,000 a day—Sundays, too.
The sum was made the core of a charitable and cultural foundation in 1947, when Norman Mushari was only six. Before that, it was the fourteenth largest family fortune in America, the Rosewater fortune. It was stashed into a foundation in order that tax-collectors and other predators not named Rosewater might be prevented from getting their hands on it. And the baroque masterpiece of legal folderol that was the charter of the Rosewater Foundation declared, in effect, that the presidency of the Foundation was to be inherited in the same manner as the British Crown. It was to be handed down throughout all eternity to the closest and oldest heirs of the Foundation's creator, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater of Indiana.
Siblings of the President were to become officers of the Foundation upon reaching the age of twenty-one. All officers were officers for life, unless proved legally insane. They were free to compensate themselves for their services as lavishly as they pleased, but only from the Foundation's income.
As required by law, the charter prohibited the Senator's heirs having anything to do with the management of the Foundation's capital. Caring for the capital became the responsibility of a corporation that was born simultaneously with the Foundation. It was called, straightforwardly enough, The Rosewater Corporation. Like almost all corporations, it was dedicated to prudence and profit, to balance sheets. Its employees were very well paid. They were cunning and happy and energetic on that account. Their main enterprise was the churning of stocks and bonds of other corporations. A minor activity was the management of a saw factory, a bowling alley, a motel, a bank, a brewery, extensive farms in Rosewater County, Indiana, and some coal mines in northern Kentucky.
The Rosewater Corporation occupied two floors at 500 Fifth Avenue, in New York, and maintained small branch offices in London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Rosewater County. No member of the Rosewater Foundation could tell the Corporation what to do with the capital. Conversely, the Corporation was powerless to tell the Foundation what to do with the copious profits the Corporation made.
These facts became known to young Norman Mushari when, upon graduating from Cornell Law School at the top of his class, he went to work for the Washington, D.C., law firm that had designed both the Foundation and the Corporation, the firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. He was of Lebanese extraction, the son of a Brooklyn rug merchant. He was five feet and three inches