One of us did build something that outlived him

Danny Thomas, St Jude, and the single exception to everything argued above.

We argued here that the Lebanese abroad built enormous wealth and almost no institutions. That nothing compounds, because everything runs through the person and stops when they do.

There is one enormous exception and he was a comedian.

Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz was born in Michigan in 1912 to Maronite parents from Bsharri. He took the name Danny Thomas in 1940 and became one of the biggest television stars in America.

Before any of that, broke and unsure whether to stay in the business, he made a vow to St Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of hopeless causes. If he found success, he would build a shrine.

Most people do not keep that kind of promise. He built a hospital.

St Jude Children’s Research Hospital opened in Memphis in 1962, dedicated to catastrophic childhood disease, with a principle that has never been abandoned: no family receives a bill. Not for treatment, not for travel, not for housing, not for food.

That principle needs paying for, every year, forever. Which is the part of the story that belongs on a Lebanese record.

In 1957, five years before the hospital opened, Thomas founded ALSAC, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, and he built it explicitly on his own community. He went to Lebanese and Syrian families across America and asked them to fund it as a debt of gratitude to the country that had taken their parents in.

ALSAC is now the largest healthcare related charity in the United States and raises the overwhelming majority of St Jude’s annual operating budget.

Read that again with the earlier argument in mind. A Lebanese immigrant’s son did the thing we said our diaspora never does. He did not write a cheque. He built the machine that writes the cheque, staffed it, gave it a constitution, and pointed it at his own community as the funding base.

He died in 1991 and is buried on the hospital grounds. The institution did not wobble. It is bigger now than when he was alive, which is the actual test and the one almost nothing passes.

So the argument stands, with one correction. It is not that Lebanese people cannot build institutions. One of us built one of the most effective charitable institutions in the world, on a promise made when he had nothing, and funded it by asking Lebanese families to pay a debt none of them legally owed.

It has been done. Once. That is the problem and it is also the proof.