“CONSOLIDATION”
AND THE GREAT PARK
The
children are back at Columbine High School now for the new school
year—if they can still truly be called children, after the
terrible violence perpetrated upon them. We can only hope that
the murder of twelve of their classmates was a random moment of
madness. We can only hope, that is, for in the time since the
killings in Littleton, Colorado, we have proven ourselves completely
unable to address whether or not they reflect any greater, underlying
problems in American society and, if so, what we should do about
them.
It's
hard to know where to begin with governmental responses to the
massacre. President Clinton's campaign to have movie ticket-takers
check IDs more closely—a move so meaninglessly symbolic it
could have warmed only the heart of Dick Morris? Congress's brief,
vitriolic debate, in which both sides trotted out their favorite
whipping boys before agreeing to do nothing at all? Democrats
scourged easy gun access while pretending that the ongoing adoration
of firearms by Hollywood has anything to do with their use. Republican
whip Tom DeLay responded with a histrionic speech in which he
put the blame for the Colorado shootings squarely where they belonged—on
day care, abortion, and the teaching of evolution. (“Guns
don't kill people, science kills people”?)
Yet
considering the contempt, rightly or wrongly, that most Americans
now have for our elected officials, we can't be very surprised
at their performance. What is surprising is that we have not expected
more than a resounding silence from our private sector. That is
to say, from the rest of us. After all, one-hundred-fifty years
ago, faced with another act of senseless violence and a government
that they deemed to be corrupt and ineffectual, a small group
of New York gentlemen responded with a serious re-examination
of our entire society—and ended up giving us our greatest
urban park, a first-rate college, and other institutions from
which we benefit to this day.
The
incident that galvanized this burst of philanthropy was the so-called
Opera House Riot, or Actors' Riot—a bizarre, tragicomic incident
of a sort that seem to happen with such regularity in New York
City. It all began on May 10, 1849, when Great Britain's leading
actor, William Macready, took to the boards to play Macbeth at
the city's Astor Place Opera House. Macready's bitter rival was
the leading American actor of the time, Edwin Forrest, best known
for his vigorous performances in the title roles of Metamora and
Spartacus. Forrest was a stalwart of the traditional style of
stage acting, which emphasized much bellowing and leaping about.
He was also a favorite of New York's predominantly Irish poor
and working class.
Macready
was not much liked by anyone, and particularly not by his fellow
actors, who loathed his insistence on such things as rehearsals
and performing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them. New York's
upper class did affect to prefer his revolutionary new acting
style, though, with its emphasis on relatively subtle gestures
and line readings. (Not so subtle that he did not gain the nickname,
“Die Again Macready,” for repeating his signature death
scenes upon demand. Actors!)
Forrest
blamed Macready for orchestrating the failure of his recent tour
of England, where he had been booed off the stage, by the time
Macready took the state in Astor Place their feud had escalated
into out-and-out class and ethnic warfare. Thousands of “Forresters”
stoned the Opera House, stormed its doors, and tried to seize
the rifles of the state militiamen prudently called out to guard
the theatre. The militia responded by firing point blank into
the rioters, killing 22 of them and wounding many more.
It
was the first time that soldiers had fired directly into a crowd
in the history of the United States. The event sent shock waves
through New York's elite, many of whom had just moved to the newly
fashionable Astor Place neighborhood. Few of them doubted that
the shooting was necessary to save the Opera House—and Macready—from
destruction. More importantly, though, it led them to take a serious
look at the society they lived in—and to see what they could
to improve it.
The
new reformers were hardly representative of New York's upper classes
as a whole. They included such men as the merchant Robert Bowen
Minturn; industrialist Peter Cooper; editors and journalists Horace
Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and E.L. Godkin; clergymen Henry
Whitney Bellows and Henry Ward Beecher; the social reformers George
William Curtis and Solon Robinson—and a trio of friends in
the new field of landscape architecture, Calvert Vaux, Frederick
Law Olmsted, and Andrew Jackson Downing.
With
some notable exceptions (such as Cooper, a longtime Democrat and
self-made man) they were wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon men, all
drawn from the city's old, Whig merchant elite. They would soon
be among the founders of the Union League and the Republican party—all
things that would influence their critique of American society.
But
above all, as Iver Bernstein points out in his seminal work, The
New York City Draft Riots, the reformers shared the conviction
that they “teetered on moral catastrophe.” Their feeling
was understandable. New York in the 1850s was passing through
an especially squalid, if exciting, epoch in its always turbulent
history. Herds of loose pigs still ran loose in the streets, and
the city's sewers were so stopped up with butchers' offal that
it was not uncommon to see boys playing in the gutters sailing
paper boats on puddles of blood. Mobs of street youths fought
in the streets—urged on by the very gangsters and ward-heelers
who had egged on the Astor Place mob. The city's public servants
were little better. New York's volunteer fire companies were notorious
for their impromptu brawls over fire hydrants, while in 1857 competing
municipal police forces actually staged a donnybrook on the steps
of City Hall.
Yet
the reformers' dissection of American society went beyond the
blood on their cobblestones. Even beyond the gnawing conflict
over slavery, the America of 1850 faced a host of pressing problems
and challenges. The economy was dynamic but increasingly given
to cycles of boom and bust. It was not uncommon for even the richest
families to insist their sons learn a useful trade, lest the fortunes
they had procured melt away in a few days of speculation and panic.
Changes in the nature of work were equally disturbing, with industrialization
leading to bigger, more impersonal factories, and unskilled laborers
replacing traditional craftsmen.
The
execrable urban conditions the reformers observed firsthand were
cause in good part by waves of new immigrants from Ireland and
Germany, flooding not only New York but Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Chicago. They overwhelmed the primitive social services
and infrastructure, were exploited by ruthless bosses and by corrupt
machine politicians—like the ones who had egged on the mobs
in Astor Place. Reactionary new parties such as the “Know-Nothings”
and the Anti-Masons used them as scapegoats, promoting a feeling
of unease, a sense that the nation was threatened by sinister,
hidden forces—the Pope, freemasonry, “the money power.”
In the face of such crises, the prevailing populist, laissez-faire
beliefs of Jacksonian Democracy no longer seemed sufficient. The
Jacksonians had been innately suspicious of most concentrated
power or government intervention, contending that Americans”
political rights would be protected by the universal (white, male)
franchise. Class differences would be ameliorated by a constantly
expanding economy and national territory.
This
was a largely optimistic outlook, but to the reformers America
seemed to have devolved into a conglomeration of special interests
posing as a nation; one bound to go on expanding endlessly—until
it exploded, or fell apart.
What
was needed was a society, with active government and private intervention
to push the many, disparate social and economic classes of Americans
together. A whole host of public institutions—schools, theatres,
parks, lecture halls, journals and newspapers—that would,
in Frederick Olmsted's words, be “so attractive as to force
into contact the good & the bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy.”
“Open
wide therefore the doors of your libraries and picture galleries,
all ye true republicans!” decreed Andrew Jackson in his journal,
The Horticulturist. “Build halls where knowledge shall be
freely diffused among men...Plant spacious parks in your cities,
and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of the morning, to
the whole people. As there are no dark places at noonday, so education
and culture—the true sunshine of the soul—will banish
the plague-spots of democracy...”
What
followed was a slew of inventive, public-private partnerships
over the next decade-and-a-half that achieved much of what the
reformers had sought. Many of their fruits remain with us to this
day. Everywhere, the reformers pressed for better public schools
and sanitary conditions. Godkin, with the help of Olmsted, Bellows,
and others, started his “organ of a higher Democracy" with
The Nation in 1863. In 1859, Peter Cooper founded the Cooper Union,
an assembly hall and institution of free, higher education for
working men and women—built just across from the site of
the Astor Place riot. To this day, Cooper lures leading art, design,
and engineering students away from Ivy League universities with
its free tuition. Undoubtedly, though, the jewel in the reformers'
crown was New York's Central Park. Here was where the reformers
set down to, in the words of Calvert Vaux, “translate Democratic
ideas into Trees and Dirt,” to create “the big art work
of the Republic.” The result, the 843-acre “Greensward”
plan, designed by Vaux and Olmsted, was a remarkable hybrid of
the educational, the utilitarian, and the simply gorgeous—the
very apotheosis of American pragmatism.
As
the park was planned, it would include a scenic reservoir, a parade
grouns, playgrounds, an exhibition or concert hall, gardens, lakes,
fountains, and even a lookout tower. There would even be a dairy,
to provide free milk to poor Manhattan families. (At the time,
New York families too poor to afford their own cow had to rely
on those kept at breweries and fed on leftover mash. Their milk
tended to be blue—and tubercular.) Other working families
would be “improved” not only with beautiful, man-made
landscapes and free concerts, but also by their mere contact with
more genteel New Yorkers cavorting with parasols and carriages.
There were, of course, considerable ironies attached to the park—not
the least of which was the crucial support the Union League gentlemen
received from self-interested real estate developers, or the public
monies it secured from Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood—just
the sort of unscrupulous, machine politician they loathed. Meanwhile,
some 1,600 of just the sort of working-class African-, German-,
and Irish-Americans the reformers professed to “improve”
were evicted from their small holdings to make the park possible.
Remarkably,
though, much of the reformers' vision was realized. Indeed, many
of Central Park's best features—the world-class museums of
art and natural history that flank its lawns; a public zoo, free
educational programs, Shakespeare productions, concerts and operas—have
been added over the decades, a development that would only have
confirmed the reformers in their republican faith. The elite do-gooders
were not without their flaws, and their failures. Their economic
conservatism often kept them from seeing that many of the working
men and women they wished to uplift needed decent housing, wages,
medical care, and pensions as much as good schools and parks.
Their social and religious prejudices led them into such dead-end
government meddling as the temperance and “Sabbatarian”
movements. Both intense poverty and political corruption remained
rampant in New York, and the Civil War saw the city torn by the
worst riot in American history.
Yet
the every day, the very real accomplishment of Central Park, for
one, remains with us, very much a grand commons of the republic.
Are we capable of carrying off such an endeavor today? And just
what would it be?
The
problems that we face now, particularly in such ambiguous episodes
as Littleton, seem both less daunting and more intractable. Perhaps
they are the sort of random tragedies that no strategy or social
improvement can prevent. Yet to simply shrug them off, to so cynically
exploit them for short-term political gain, is to do worse damage
to our nation than even the bullets which struck down twelve young
people. It is to earn for ourselves the scorn that, one hundred-fifty
years ago, Andrew Downing directed against “Social doubters,
who intrench themselves in the citadels of exclusiveness in republican
America, [and] mistake out people and its destiny.”
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
