City Walks — Out With the Old

The New Year is upon us, and it’s time to reflect on the past. It’s easy to think about the troubles of the past year and imagine that there was a golden age not long before it, but if history tells us anything, it’s that underneath every golden image things were almost always a lot more rough.

Echoes of the Gilded Age

About a mile from my home is a mansion that once was owned by of one of the barons of the Gilded Age. Most of the property was sold off almost a century ago to a neighboring university and to developers of surrounding neighborhoods, but there are still extensive grounds and the mansion is maintained as a museum by a nonprofit, although the interior is now closed due to Covid.

From time to time the grounds are open to visitors, and you can poke around what’s left of the formal gardens and the artwork and outbuildings on the grounds.

There are some impressive pieces, such as these life size bronze statues.

There’s an ornate fountain flanked by elaborate decorative columns that anchor the end of a section of formal gardens:

And all over the property there are much smaller ornamental items, like this elaborate hitching ring:

It’s a beautiful, peaceful place, and I love walking around it, even though the gardens have only a sampling of the ornamental plants and structures that once filled the grounds. But its place in history is not really serene.

The Good Old Days Weren’t

The fortune that made possible this mansion and all of the acres of the estate came with a huge cost. The owner was notorious for running a viciously dangerous business, and workers were involved in accidents at alarming rates — longtime workers had roughly even odds of being killed or maimed on the job.

On top of that, worker wages could be slashed in a heartbeat when panic runs in unregulated financial markets made capital vanish as speculative paper fortunes evaporated. After one major wage cut, desperate workers responded with a strike. Overreacting armed forces brought in to put down this and related strikes opened fire in my city and elsewhere. Hundreds were gunned down across the country and dozens were killed in cold blood. Conservative activist judges created out of thin air their own authority to order that strikes be ended, and governors, mayors and the federal government all moved in.

Modern Day Amnesia

You wouldn’t know any of this walking around the grounds of this mansion, however. None of the promotional materials online mention the bloody history of the owner and his fortune. No plaques commemorate the workers who gave their lives and welfare on his behalf.

And yet the battles followed the owner everywhere he went. The historical records are clear that he dealt with the repercussions of his labor battles for the rest of his life, including when he passed through the iron gates surrounding this property.

But like I said, it’s peaceful now. I recently went for a run by the front gate, and a herd of eight deer strolled past the entrance to the mansion slowly grazing. Earlier this year I saw a piebald deer grooming another deer on the grounds.

But curiously, while there is no mention of human tragedy, you can find there an unexpected commemoration of a number of deaths.

There is a cemetery for family pets, complete with marble markers for their graves.

Some child’s heart probably broke when their little pet Tiny died after only a few years. And over a century later, we can still sympathize. These little markers heighten the sense that this estate is an isolated place, cut off from the bigger city and world around it, a refuge from greater troubles.

But we shouldn’t forget that nothing is ever really separate, and as we peer anxiously into the future year, we should remember that we’re not alone in feeling deep worries about what the coming year will hold, or how we might recover from what the past has wrought. Back then as now, capital used its might against workers, workers struck back, owners retaliated, and the struggles continue to this day.

This year workers went on strike against Caterpillar Tractor and Kellog’s Cereal and won a few concessions, as did employees of the supposedly liberal NY Times. Employees of Facebook, horrified by the damage Zuckerberg does to the minds of children, leaked damaging evidence to Congress. Meanwhile allies of the modern day robber barons launched a violent mob attack on Congress to attempt to wrest control from allies of organized labor, and we still have no idea if they might win a rebound attack. Workers have gained some new leverage over wages, but big business has gained endless free PR from reporters bemoaning “labor shortages” and dubiously fanning inflation fears.

Where will this lead us? Who knows. But we can safely say that there’s nothing wrong with yelling out with old and forgetting dreams of returning to the Gilded Age.