One of the city’s largest private employers, Citigroup, has come under populist fire for its 20-year, $400 million partnership deal with the New York Mets, a deal that included naming rights to the Mets’ new stadium in Queens. Citi, of course, has fallen on hard times. It received $45 billion in funds from the Trouble Assets Recovery Program and another $300 billion in federal loan guarantees. Even with that help, Citi has had to lay off more than 50,000 workers.

Several members of Congress have demanded that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner find a way to cancel Citi’s deal with the Mets. 

That opposition is part of a broader attempt to force damaged companies to abandon rational, legitimate business practices simply because they received taxpayer support. By making the simple act of advertising a product or holding an off-site business meeting taboo, demagogues are not helping Citi, AIG, Bank of America or the economy in general. Rather, they are prolonging the day when these companies will pay back the taxpayers in full.

Citigroup agreed to pay the Mets $20 million a year for 20 years in 2006, back in the days when a “tarp” was something groundskeepers rolled onto the infield during rainstorms. The Mets named their new stadium Citi Field, but the deal was about more than just naming rights. In fact, it was an investment in a partnership with the Mets that includes significant media currency and many other opportunities to interact with potential clients.

While everyone is focused on the large price tag of $20 million per year, when fully understood, Citi’s partnership with the Mets makes sense on many levels. As an advertising strategy, it’s hard to beat. Up to four million people will visit Citi Field this year. Millions more will pass by the stadium as they battle traffic on Roosevelt Avenue, Northern Boulevard, the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway. The Citi Field logo is visible from the Long Island Rail Road, the No. 7 subway line—and even from the air, as planes depart and arrive at nearby La Guardia Airport. Citi’s deal will grow public awareness of the bank’s services and will build partnerships with potential customers. How is it wasteful to make a bid to become the dominant bank in the most lucrative banking market in the world?

Citigroup is headquartered in New York and employs nearly 30,000 people here, including nearly 6,000 in Queens, making it the borough’s largest private employer. Citi intends to use its extensive roots in the community to bring underprivileged children to the stadium, and is partnering with individual Mets players to bring financial literacy programs to the city’s public schools.

Critics need to realize that banks, car companies and insurance giants—humbled though they are—still have to advertise their products, still have to reach out to local communities and still have to travel to meet clients and would-be clients.

Citigroup’s deal with the Mets is good for the city. Critics of the deal should spend more time understanding the full package of benefits and less time trying to make it a political piñata. Furthermore, at the rate the Treasury is printing money, $20 million per year might seem like a bargain if we enter a period of hyperinflation. Just like most of the business practices that the government is criticizing, Citigroup’s deal with the Mets is the sort of thing that should be judged by its impact over time and not condemned today.

That said, his campaign against bonuses paid to executives at American International Group has gone too far, and may prove to be counterproductive. Indications are that the attorney general himself understands this. Published reports assert that Mr. Cuomo has been agonizing over the publicity storm he unleashed when he subpoenaed AIG for a list of those who received bonuses. While the names have not been made public, some AIG employees have received death threats, and all have been tarred as virtual criminals for accepting money that was owed them by contractual agreement.

Mr. Cuomo’s subpoena led to the revelation that shook Washington last week—that AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses after receiving an astonishing $180 billion in federal bailout money. The uproar led the House of Representatives to pass a measure of questionable constitutionality that would impose a 90 percent tax on those bonuses.

Our political leaders seem determined to out-tough each other in dealing with those held responsible for today’s economic chaos. But in their rush to regulate compensation, outlaw corporate junkets and otherwise shame business leaders, politicians may be hurting companies that received federal assistance packages.

In such times, fear is not the only emotion we need to keep in check. Mr. Cuomo and other political leaders should be wary of anger as well. Those death threats made to AIG employees remind us that word and actions have consequences. Who, then, will be held responsible if needless exposure leads to senseless tragedy?

Alger Hiss
and the Battle for History
By Susan Jacoby.
Yale University Press. 256 pp. $24.

When Susan Jacoby told her 86-year-old mother about her most recent book subject, she got this response: “Who cares about that anymore?” With the end of the Cold War, her mother implied, generations of Americans had completely forgotten about Alger Hiss, and those who hadn’t had stopped wondering long ago whether he was a victim of anti-Communist hysteria.

But Ms. Jacoby, an independent scholar and the author of The Age of American Unreason, a lament for the loss of intellectualism, doesn’t agree with her mother. In Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, she argues that Hiss remains a marker and metaphor in our intellectual culture, striking chords “located along ideological fault lines that, in spite of cultural shifts, extend from the 1930s to the present.” Conservative scholars of history, she writes, continue to use the Hiss case to link power-hungry intellectuals with anti-American liberalism; to raise questions about their loyalty, patriotism and commitment to national security; and to portray the New Deal, and the Great Society, as insidious attempts to replace free enterprise capitalism with state-sponsored socialism.

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History provides a timely reminder that even though economic and geopolitical realities “have undergone vast changes” in the past few decades, intellectuals on the right and the left in the United States still argue about the past as if it were the present. However, Ms. Jacoby’s own evidence at times undercuts her claim that the Hiss case has continued to play an important role in our increasingly polarized politics.

Looking back, Hiss’ contradictory testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1948; Whittaker Chambers’ disclosure of State Department microfilms encased in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm; and Hiss’ perjury conviction did of course heighten public awareness of the danger of Communist subversion at a time when more than half of Americans were not familiar with the phrase “cold war.” But by the late ’50s, Ms. Jacoby admits, Hiss was “yesterday’s news.” Interest in the infiltration of government by Reds was fading, as was respect for informers.

Hiss resurfaced in the 1960s and ’70s as the victim of the unethical, opportunistic, Red-baiting Richard Nixon, and as the embodiment of a multilateral foreign policy: Like Daniel Ellsberg, supporters suggested, he answered to higher, anti-fascist ends. Ms. Jacoby admits, however, that he was scarcely “in the forefront of anyone’s mind in a country still being torn apart by the Vietnam War.” Nor did the Hiss case mean much to the majority of college students who occupied buildings between 1967 and 1971.

By the late 1970s, most anti-Communist liberals became convinced that Hiss had lied to HUAC, and spied for the Soviet Union when he worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the State Department in the 1930s and ’40s. So with the publication in 1978 of Perjury by Allen Weinstein, then a professor at Smith College and now the United States archivist, Ms. Jacoby indicates, Hiss’ die-hard defenders found themselves outside the mainstream of scholarly and political discourse. The consensus around Hiss’ guilt grew even stronger after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the K.G.B. and the C.I.A. released classified documents describing the activities of an American espionage agent with the code name “Ales.”

Ronald Reagan, of course, took Hiss’ guilt for granted. In 1984, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Whittaker Chambers. A year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Hiss’ petition to vacate his conviction because errors of fact had generated manifest unfairness during his trial. Because Hiss remained fixated on the “facts” of his case, Ms. Jacoby writes, even sympathetic journalists in the age of glasnost and perestroika portrayed him as, at best, an ambiguous figure, possibly a martyr, “even if he is probably not one.”

The consensus about Hiss, Ms. Jacoby concludes, is not matched by a consensus on whether the United States was damaged more by American Communists or the anti-Communist crusade. And that debate continues to matter because an analogous one is now being conducted over torture, warrantless wiretaps and the rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The “real significance” of Hiss’ fate, Ms. Jacoby writes, “revolves around the question of whether the normal, self-correcting, legally sanctioned mechanisms of a democratic society can be trusted, in times of fear and genuine danger, to preserve national security without violating individual rights and constitutional traditions.” She believes they can. And so does Barack Obama.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Ms. Theallet’s longtime seamstress was at a sewing machine nearby. The place was filled with books, black-and-white photographs, African and South American travel trinkets, a fish tank and rolls of brightly colored fabric protruding from bins. Rising Phoenix-like from the clutter was a headless mannequin in an exquisite brown silk floor-length dress with a rich orange bow cascading off one shoulder, from Ms. Theallet’s two-year-old namesake line.

This cozy house of Theallet staged its first runway show in September 2008 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, using only black models (partially in homage to Yves Saint Laurent, the first designer to cast a black model). Admiring reviews noted the designer’s association with Azzedine Alaia, the influential Parisian couturier for whom she toiled for 10 years. “You see that I’m not young, right?” said Ms. Theallet, who would not give a more specific age than early 40s. But New York has been a rebirth of sorts. “Here, I don’t have the heaviness of the past,” she said.

Before Brooklyn, she and Mr. Francoeur—who now have a 2-year-old son, Leon—lived in the Chelsea Hotel for four years. “It was craaaaaaazy at that time!” Ms. Theallet said.

“We used to travel a lot,” said Mr. Francoeur, suddenly appearing at the doorway in Buddy Holly glasses, designer jeans and a crisp cardigan. He said his wife had trouble fitting into the mold of corporate America.

“I don’t want to make mass production,” Ms. Theallet said. So she freelanced, briefly designing a line with makeup artist Francois Nars before turning her attention to her own creations. Detailed and intricate, they are produced in very limited quantity, selling at Barneys and Jeffrey for $1,800 to $3,000.

“I never want to lose this,” the designer said. “The freedom.” Dark-haired, pale and curvaceous, she was wearing a black gauzy dress of her own design over black jeans and pink leather Adidas high-tops. Growing up in the South of France, she traveled often to London to visit cousins and discovered Siouxie and the Banshees, the Sex Pistols and the Clash. They inspired her interest in fashion. (Though not, she was quick to note, her current collection, which critics called “happy,” “charming,” “modest” and “feminine.”)

“She has the punk spirit,” Mr. Francoeur said.

“But it’s not about me,” Ms. Theallet said quickly. “It’s about somebody else. Somebody more like … It’s not me.”

She has yet to fully conceptualize her fall 2009 collection. “I’m totally stressed out. I’m not even here,” she said, craving a cigarette.

“Maybe it can happen tonight, maybe can happen in three days, I have no idea,” Ms. Theallet said. “It’s, like, killing me. Make me feeling sad and blah, blah, blah. And after, I’m so happy!”

“When she’s got it, she’s got it,” said Mr. Francoeur, smiling gently.

“After, I think maybe I’m crazy,” she said.

Ms. Theallet’s years working for Mr. Alaia, and for Jean-Paul Gaultier before him, may have made her a bit of a technical perfectionist, obsessed with workmanlike details. But they also freed her from fashion’s eternal preoccupation with the new.

“Times have changed,” she said. “Everything is already done from the past, so we can say, ‘This is modern and new,’ but it’s not true.

“I don’t know what’s fashion now,” Ms. Theallet said with a heavy sigh. “I just try to make beautiful clothes done in a beautiful way.”

PHOTOGRAPH: John Huba
Hair by Mitch Barry; makeup by Jordy Poon for Rita Hazan Salon

Today fans of Ms. Savit’s designs include Beyoncé, Elton John and the teenagers trawling Soho. “I work with Michael Kors, I work with Ralph Lauren, I work with Vera Wang. This is within the past six months,” said Ms. Savitt the other day, dressed in this season’s wide-legged jeans. For over three decades, she was in business with her sisters Michelle and Wynne under the label M + J Savitt, but she struck out on her own in December of 2007.

“It took me 30 years to figure a way to do it,” Ms. Savitt said with a laugh. “One sister [Michelle] was getting married and moving to California and I didn’t want to stay there and work with the other sister [Wynne]. That’s what it boiled down to.

“When I left, I took nothing. I just said, ‘Buh-bye, it’s all you. I want to do my own thing.’” But the exit was not completely seamless. On Oct. 7, 2008, according to papers filed in New York’s Southern District Court, Wynne sued Ms. Savitt for trademark infringement.

“She believed that she owned my name, but she doesn’t own my name,” Janis said firmly.

Recent designs are going in two directions, the first “all based on chains … that look like braided pieces, like a little girl who braids her hair.” Recently she sent some antique cameos to a shop in California that normally fixes up car parts. The resulting bib necklace is edgy, but classic.

The second is centered around classic pins. “Take your mother’s brooch, a diamond brooch—hopefully she had a big one,” Ms. Savit said. “Then you put broad brass and steel chains with it to make it more casual and updated.”

Ms. Savitt’s inspirations include her father, Paul Savitt, an artist who lives in Soho. “He’s the kind of person you can ask about anything and he’ll know the answer,” she said.

A large photograph self-portrait of Mr. Savitt hangs in her midtown apartment near the front door. His eyes are wide and his mouth tight. The image breaks and squirms in certain places as if bugs are climbing out of him. “He’s never shown his work, he’s never sold his work,” his daughter said. “He just warehouses it.”

Not so Ms. Savitt, who is recently exploring a new side of commerciality with a brass cuff bracelet that looks like a can of Budweiser. “A classic American label,” she pointed out. So far she has melded the beer can to the cuff; next she will attach strands of diamonds. “I like the idea of recycling and making it into something cool. Like, ‘I rescued this beer can and turned it into a $5,000 piece of jewelry!’ No, I’m just kidding. ‘I turned it into something beautiful.’”

For the past year, Ms. Savitt has been on a jewelling jag, filling up armloads of boxes and several large tables in her home office with new pieces. But she still finds time to fish and rake for clams, wearing waders in Shinnecock bay with an 80-year-old friend who “knows all the good spots.” She’s also fond of staring at the sky.

“I take the train down to Battery Park, have a coffee there and look out,” she said. “New York’s a great place. ”

PHOTOGRAPH: John Huba</p

“Spencer, I want you to go down to Paul Stuart and get yourself a suit and a blazer and some new shirts. Don’t be cheap.”

On the one hand, the directive was comforting: I knew I was talking to the one and only Hoyt Bacon, a man who believes to the soles of his self-polished loafers that a man should always dress for success. But on the other hand, it was disconcerting. Up to this point my grandpa-sponsored shopping sprees had been restricted to essentials: navy blazers and the occasional poplin summer suit at the charmingly outdated, reasonably priced J. Press. Had the noble elder’s ordeal moved him to a singular, deliberate act of unbridled generosity—or simply cracked his nut?

“You’ve got to look the part,” he added before ringing off.

I flung myself onto the city streets and hailed a cab uptown. After all, Hoyt had never failed me before. Lengthy childhood conversations in his closet (perhaps examining his neatly organized belt collection; or custom-made blazers with colorful linings; or the sword hanging on one wall, still shiny from his days in the Navy) had always imparted a simple lesson: Buy nice things and take good care of them. At least twice after buying me a new pair of loafers, he would also give me a couple tins of polish and a little cloth to take home with me so I could shine them myself.

Growing up, there were also countless missions to the Brooks Brothers at the Century City Mall with my Grandma Jackie for blue blazers—never a modern model! “That’s hideous,” Jackie would tell the salesman. “Don’t you have something with some brass buttons?”

When I finished school, came to New York and began to try to think of myself as a member of the working world, suddenly those classic blazers felt logical, comfortable, manly. No more weird conversations in front of the mirror.

I’m gonna be a polo shirt, jeans and sneaker guy, white sneakers. Casual but clean. That’s cool. Hmm. Maybe I’ll get a little funky and work in some flannel. Ladies dig flannel. I’ll get the perfect flannel shirt. Yeah man, flannel’s cool, but fresh out of the laundry, not gross, dirty flannel. And white Rod Lavers! Look out world, here I—what in the hell am I doing?

These kinds of emasculating internal monologues are happening all over the city right now, resulting in grown men walking around uncomfortably in $200 distressed jeans that have been professionally caked with mud.

It’s rough out there, comrades—I know it is. Never before has the once-simple task of getting dressed to go to work been more complicated. People read as much into the way you present yourself as they have since the beginning of civilization, only you’re allowed to wear anything! The options are limitless. Yippee! Um, run for your lives!

Allow me a little latitude here and you will see that in fact Hoyt Bacon’s strict adherence to certain standards and bylaws regarding a gentlemen’s dress, his fixation “on looking the part,” represents a practical, empowering example that could help the many young men today who have trouble pulling up their pants, let alone making their way in the world.

If you’re a guy who’s inclined to want to express yourself with your clothes, to enjoy them, to be bold and walk tall in them, you’re in dangerous waters. I recommend looking back to the solid ground of tradition.

Though I must admit that my journey to Paul Stuart was a terrific failure. I wound up with a brown—my wife calls it peanut-butter-colored—tweed suit of a diamond-shaped herringbone pattern, and a sort of maroon corduroy blazer with suede leather professor pads. I spared Hoyt a viewing, lest I worsen the great man’s condition. But I stand behind those garments and plan to take excellent care of them. They’ll make for a good story to tell a terrified, pimply grandson one day.

Like Bobbi Brown and Laura Mercier before him, Mr. Bess, now a geriatric 22, is building his brand with lipstick: a dozen silky shades with suggestive names like Night Orchid, Pure Impulse and Natural Seduction. They are not lurid or flashy, but rather better versions of our natural selves: deep peaches and pinky browns, a red here, a rust there. Should you desire, he’ll apply a “nude” look to you with his own elegant hand, perhaps daubing one of his five glosses on top, setting you up for day’s turn into night.

“I wanted to create something for women to wear that wouldn’t go out of style, that would remain modern. Something women won’t have to second-guess next season,” Mr. Bess said recently over tea at BG restaurant. He was in his element. Late-lunching ladies repeatedly glanced his way, and at one point a fan stopped by to exclaim, “We must stop meeting like this!”

Then again, it’s hard not to look at Mr. Bess, who has enormous, doe-ish blue-green eyes, a puff of brown hair, elegantly bushed eyebrows and absolutely insane cheekbones. In his slim, tailored black suit; a crisp white shirt unbuttoned just so to reveal a flash of smooth ivory skin; and shiny black shoes, he resembled Robert Palmer, circa Addicted to Love. “Don’t be offended the next time you see me,” Mr. Bess said. “I’ll be wearing the exact same thing.”

Behind closed doors, he’s his “own guinea pig,” as he puts it, testing and trying on various shades he’s conceived after a night out, or a day in his studio. But during daytime hours, it’s women he wants to help shine. Mr. Bess grew up in Charleston, S.C., and his current career is very much influenced by a childhood swathed in femininity. “I just loved watching my mother get made up when I was little, and the glamour of going out,” he said. As an adolescent, he’d “direct” his mother and three sisters in how to put together a look.

He moved to New York at 15 to attend the Professional Performing Arts School for theater, and then moved to London after graduation. After a year, he said, “I returned to New York after modeling in London wanting to share my vision for women.” At 18, he began developing his first lipstick shades, inspired by ballet and opera, the work of Philip Johnson, Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman. He showed them to the powers that be at Bergdorf’s, et voilà! He had a home. Though he lacks a detectable accent, Mr. Bess oozes an effortless Southern charm and ease that fits in perfectly with the pomp of the place, which also stocks his eye shadows, mascaras and powder.

Part of the pleasure of the line is in the luxuriously minimalist packaging. Mr. Bess prefers a “smoky eye,” and his shadows, in varying hues of blacks, grays and browns, are each embossed with the makeup artist’s name and pressed into a tiny black wood-grain box, itself held in a suede pouch. The lipsticks are encased in black lacquered tubes that satisfyingly snap shut, and the glosses contained in four-sided glass tubes even Frank Lloyd Wright would find irresistible. Lightly scented with wild fig, they can be purchased in a 15-piece set called “Lip Wardrobe” for $350.

Or you can try to stop at one. Mr. Bess’s best seller? The rougey Deep Lust. “I have young girls and grandmothers who want Deep Lust,” he said with a laugh. Don’t we all, honey—don’t we all.

PHOTOGRAPH Ruven Afanador

Clockwise from left
Bulgari’s Astrale watch: 18k white gold case, with 92 brilliant cut and pave diamonds, Technological satin strap, White dial, Quartz movement, $26,500.

Van Cleef & Arpels Décolleté timepiece with 11.48 total carat weight on 18k white gold, $198,000.

Harry Winston Ultimate Ribbon Watch, 18k white gold and 9.4 carats of diamonds, $87,000.

Cartier watch in 18k white gold and diamonds, $39,850. Available at the Cartier boutiques on Fifth and Madison avenues.

PHOTOGRAPH: Hans Gissinger

PHOTOGRAPH: Michel Haddi
STYLIST: Freddie Leiba