I still haven't found my copy of Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path in the packing, but some helpful soul put the thing online. And while the little ditty I'm about to share with you contains a lot that I find socially problematic, this New Deal era folk tune conveys a widely appreciable sentiment. I've included Fuller's preface for context:
... There were a number of individual bankers who went far beyond unwise banking practices and who, as individuals, took personal advantage of the information they had of individual depositors' affairs and of their privilege as top bank officers to do truly inimical things to enrich their own positions. Few today remember that a half-century ago a number of New York and Chicago's top bankers were sentenced into penitentiaries-the New Yorkers into Sing Sing-the senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company, the president of the National City Bank, the president of Chase Bank. Every one of them had been found to be doing reprehensible financial tricks. They were selling their own friends short. They were opening their friends' mail and manipulating the stock market. They were manipulating everybody. They were way overstepping the moral limits of the privileges ethically existent for officers in the banking game, so a great housecleaning was done by the New Deal.
The banking story is best told by a poem that was, at that time, allegedly composed by Ogden Nash but was never to my knowledge formally published and copyrighted. It was, however, memorized and widely recited from copies often typewritten by those who remembered it:
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