This campaign season, we’ve heard a lot about the evils of the richest 1% of the country. But, as is so often the case, there’s another side to the story.

My family owes a great debt to a one-percenter who died more than 80 years ago. As you know, if you’ve been reading this blog, for the last six months we’ve been living in a local hospital, and that makes us guests of Alfred Irenee du Pont de Nemours.

Our 19-month-old son, Nate, has been undergoing treatment for leukemia at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington. This is the hospital that “Mr. Alfred,” as he was called when he worked at his family’s gunpowder factory, established in his will. And I’m grateful that he did.

The extraordinary doctors and nurses at Nemours have saved our son’s life twice in less than two years. First, there was successful open heart surgery when Nate was just five weeks old. Then, since October, there’s been the chemotherapy that’s driving Nate’s cancer into remission, hopefully, forever.

Mr. Alfred was many things: a powderman, a pugilist, a poet, a philanthropist. (He was also a banker, an engineer, and a musician, but I can’t think of “p” words for those.) And he was, from the moment of his birth, a plutocrat. That’s an old-fashioned word for a one-percenter.

Throughout his life, he experienced what it is to have enormous wealth. He also experienced what it is to have enormous suffering. Both his parents died in the same year when he was just 13. In adulthood, he went deaf and was blinded in one eye.

St. Paul wrote, “that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.” And so it was with Alfred, whose great hope was to improve the lot of his fellow human beings. Like Franklin Roosevelt, another aristocrat who learned firsthand how frail we all are, the hardships of Alfred’s life led him to develop sympathy for the downtrodden, the underdogs. And he acted on those sympathies.

Before there was a federal Social Security program, Alfred pushed Delaware to adopt a pension program for the elderly. While the state dithered over it, he decided to set up the system himself. He put up the money and had checks mailed to seniors up and down the state.

Alfred’s kindness (as well as his foibles) are brilliantly detailed in Alfred I. DuPont, The Family Rebel by Marquis James. I read this book while keeping Nate company in his hospital room. It was quite an experience to read about Alfred while being surrounded by the greatest manifestations of his legacy. Nate’s room overlooks Nemours Mansion, Alfred’s 300-acre estate patterned after Versailles.

It was an act of posthumous generosity that ensured Alfred would leave such a lasting legacy. (In that, he was like a decidedly eccentric one-percenter, Howard Hughes, who endowed the Howard Hughes Medical Insitute.)

Alfred left most of his fortune to charity when he died in 1935, writing in his will: “It has been my firm conviction throughout life that it is the duty of everyone in the world to do what is within his power to alleviate human suffering.” His money was used to create the Nemours Children’s Health System that today operates world-class hospitals in Delaware and Florida that treat thousands of children, including our Nate, every year.

Alfred’s life underscores a fundamental truth: Whether you’re a one-percenter, or a 321er like Nate, you shouldn’t be judged based on a group stereotype, you should be loved as an individual.

That’s a lesson a certain one-percenter running for President might want to recall.

Today’s blog entry is written by Ted to express our thanks to the legacy of Alfred I. du Pont.