Highlights and Lowlights

On the Merit of the Gadfly

Gad-fly

1: any of various flies (such as a horsefly, botfly, or warble

2: a person who stimulates or annoys other people especially by persistent criticism

a political gadfly

Notorious gadfly Evelyn Y. Davis died at age 89 in 2018. While she was alive, I did refer to her as a gadfly. So annoying. And so effective.

Today, I think I get it. Yes, she wanted as much attention as she would get. But there was an honesty to her appearances that I now appreciate. Sometimes you have to be annoying to bring justice to your cause. Just ask Socrates.

Evelyn Y. Davis in her Watergate office in 1990. (Photo: Associated Press, NYTimes)

Evelyn Y. Davis at the 2010 Ford Motor Co. annual meeting. (Photo: Getty Images, NY Times)

Mrs. Davis married 3 times but kept the surname of her first husband. She wrote a newsletter titled Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings, for which she charged $600 a copy.

And charge, she did, right into the press room we set up for the dozens of working international journalists who covered our proceedings. Demanding a press credential, she declared herself a journalist of the highest order: publisher of Highlights and Lowlights.

I handled media relations at General Motors when it was a Fortune 1 company. Each year we braced for her appearance at our annual meeting. Roger Smith, Bob Stempel, John Smale, Jack Smith, and Rick Wagoner— chairmen of boards and CEOs— prepped beforehand on how best to placate her, though we never knew in advance what the issue-du-jour might be.

She worked the gaggle of journalists in our press room, preferring to flirt with the men while accusing the women of jealousy. One year, she stopped in front of me. She looked me up and down. I braced for it: “You are jealous, dahling.”

But no; instead, she declared in her heavily accented and inimitable voice:

“I like your suit!”

Whew.

She was a strong albeit eccentric woman. Born into a wealthy Dutch family of Jewish faith, she made a name for herself by taking to task the CEOs of America’s largest companies. Her family spent time in a Czech concentration camp before emigrating to the US. She was one-of-a-kind. In a sense, she was quite Socratic.

Socrates famously used the aforementioned equine metaphor in his own defense in 399 BC. Keep in mind, Socrates is the one who refers to the light outside Plato’s allegorical cave as painful. That story … sunlight is the best disinfectant … for another time.

In “Gadfly on Trial: Socrates as Citizen and Social Critic,” (Demos, July 31, 2003) Josiah Ober writes about this.

When on trial before an Athenian council of 501 men for impiety to the pantheon of Athens and moral corruption “… Socrates claims that he should be rewarded for inflicting therapeutic pain upon his fellows. He famously explains his benefaction to the polis as analogous to the good done by a gadfly to ‘a large and well bred horse, a horse grown sluggish because of its size and in need of being roused… I rouse you. I persuade you. I upbraid you. I never stop lighting on each one of you, everywhere, all day long. Such a one will not easily come to you again, gentlemen… Perhaps you will swat me, persuaded by Anytust that you may lightly kill. Then you will continue to sleep out your lives, unless the god sends someone else to look after you.’” (30e-31a)

He also spoke graciously to his accusers, though this might have been a ruse: “I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.”

That Socrates was prosecuted because of his religious ideas and political associations indicates how easily an ideal held dear by his fellow Athenians—the ideal of open and frank speech among citizens—could be set aside when they felt insecure, Britannica reports.

“The Athenian love of free speech allowed Socrates to cajole and criticize his fellow citizens for the whole of his long life but gave way—though just barely—when it was put under great pressure.”

Barely a majority (280-221) of the Athenian Council voted to convict Socrates and sentence him to death by way of poison hemlock.

Credits:

The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/business/evelyn-davis-dead.html?smid=url-share

Demos, a Stoa Publication: https://www.stoa.org/demos/article_socrates@page=all&greekEncoding=UnicodeC.html#section_1

Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/Platos-Apology)

Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-perceived-fragility-of-Athenian-democracy