newyorker | The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the
Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the
Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a
gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and
is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of
America’s great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers
Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly
during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of
which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington;
the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education,
at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler
institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other
universities. The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten
medical research. The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest
brother, Arthur, to “a modern Medici.” Before Arthur’s death, in 1987,
he advised his children, “Leave the world a better place than when you
entered it.”
Mortimer died in 2010, and Raymond
died earlier this year. The brothers bequeathed to their heirs a
laudable tradition of benevolence, and an immense fortune with which to
indulge it. Arthur’s daughter Elizabeth is on the board of the Brooklyn
Museum, where she endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist
Art. Raymond’s sons, Richard and Jonathan, established a professorship
at Yale Cancer Center. “My father raised Jon and me to believe that
philanthropy is an important part of how we should fill our lives,”
Richard has said. Marissa Sackler, the thirty-six-year-old daughter of
Mortimer and his third wife, Theresa Rowling, founded Beespace, a
nonprofit “incubator” that supports organizations like the Malala Fund.
Sackler recently told W that she finds the word “philanthropy” old-fashioned. She considers herself a “social entrepreneur.”
When
the Met was originally built, in 1880, one of its trustees, the lawyer
Joseph Choate, gave a speech to Gilded Age industrialists who had
gathered to celebrate its dedication, and, in a bid for their support,
offered the sly observation that what philanthropy really buys is
immortality: “Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory
may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into
porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of
commerce into sculptured marble.” Through such transubstantiation, many
fortunes have passed into enduring civic institutions. Over time, the
origins of a clan’s largesse are largely forgotten, and we recall only
the philanthropic legacy, prompted by the name on the building.
According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of America’s richest families,
with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollars—more than the
Rockefellers or the Mellons. The bulk of the Sacklers’ fortune has been
accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to
most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. While the Sacklers
are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they
almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma—a
privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed
the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Upon its release, in 1995,
OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic
that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The
drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five
billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.
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