I watched the razing of the East Wing of the White House last week for a proposed 90,000-square-foot ballroom. President Donald Trump, who described the 123-year-old annex as a “very small building,” presumably hopes the addition will add a sense of grandeur to the campus.
Paying for the $300 million ballroom are companies with federal contracts, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Palantir, and individuals, including Trump himself.
Once finished, the ballroom will dwarf the 55,000-square-foot White House.
I’ll let others debate the pros and cons of the project. I’m struck by the timing of the project, specifically a gaudy display of wealth as tens of millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet.
It’s enough to make me wonder if the president has ever read Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s masterwork.
Set in 1830s Paris, Hugo’s tome was, in part, inspired by the June Rebellion of 1832 when anti-monarchists rose up to oppose the reign of King Louis-Phillippe during a time of economic stress and food shortages for most French while the wealthy showed few qualms about flaunting their extravagance.
Hugo didn’t shy away from the moral values he espoused in what is now considered one of the greatest novels in the Western literary canon. Hugo’s 1862 dedication reads in part, “…so long as the three great problems of the century — the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light — are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world; — in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”
For those who haven’t read Les Misérables or seen the musical by the same name or the numerous TV and film treatments, the book follows the life of a desperate, impoverished man named Jean Valjean who spends 19 years in prison for stealing bread to feed his sister’s starving children.
After he gets out, the story centers on Valjean’s life-long quest for redemption after a bishop in a small French town forgives Valjean after the ex-convict steals valuable silverware from the bishop.
The bishop had welcomed Valjean into his home after everyone else had barred him from theirs. After all, he was an ex-convict. Instead, the bishop showed empathy and compassion, behavior Valjean seeks to emulate through the years after his encounter with the bishop even as he is pursued by a relentless police inspector named Javert after Valjean changes his name to hide his criminal past.
Marva Barnett, a University of Virginia professor who has studied Hugo for decades, said the author was inspired to write the book after witnessing an episode in 1846 in which “a real-life Jean Valjean — a bread thief in bloody, filthy rags arrested and led through the streets by soldiers. He sees a wealthy woman who’s completely oblivious to what’s happening right next to her. Hugo observes all this and cares about this poor, homeless, wretched man. He sees that we need to do something or there’s going to be a cataclysm.”
Two years later, in 1848, revolution came to France. A coalition of radicals and liberals mobilized to oppose the monarchy of Louis-Philippe whose reign was hitting the poor and working classes particularly hard.
Hugo’s masterwork leapt to mind as I pondered the president’s decision to build a new ballroom for a third of a billion dollars as tens of millions of Americans are struggling financially to make it.
Trump campaigned on lowering grocery and housing prices and generally making life easier for working-class and middle-class Americans. And yet, his policies aren’t lowering prices. His on-again, off-again tariffs are hitting consumers and businesses hard while his aggressive deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants threatens to increase costs even more.
Meanwhile, he and congressional Republicans who control Congress are canceling or shrinking government programs and services relied on by tens of millions of struggling Americans, including food aid. Meantime, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced it will not release federal food aid Saturday.
The Trump administration decided not to tap roughly $5 billion in funds saved up for contingencies such a federal shutdowns to help about 1 in 8 Americans buy groceries through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
It is amid all this economic hardship that Trump has decided to tear down the East Wing and rebuild it.
If Hugo were alive today, I wonder what kind of story the great novelist would write; perhaps a Les Misérables for the 21st century?
I would read that novel.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.