Don’t Eat the
Rich, Again
by Jeffrey
A. Tucker
Newport, Rhode Island, is
surely one of the most spectacular places in the United States, and, for
what its amazing mansions of the Gilded Age represent, it should be
considered the Mecca of American capitalist private wealth, suitable for
pious pilgrimages of every sort.
Visitors to European
palaces return home to say the sheer scale has to be experienced to be
believed. So it is with these summer homes of the wealthy industrialists
of the Gilded Age. They are as immense and magnificent as the palaces of
the Old World, but with this difference: these were built entirely with
private money derived from excellence and service under conditions of
free enterprise.
These are the summer
"cottages" of the men and women who laid the foundations for
what would become the best of the modern economies. What a privilege
that they are available now for public tours, so that anyone can catch a
glimpse of that rare thing in the sweep of human history: immense
wealth, justly owned.
As a class, they took
their responsibilities as "dollar aristocrats" very seriously,
but were not shy about displaying their wealth. They believed, wrongly
as it turns out, that they were not living in a society of envy, and
that their wealth should be seen for what it was: a sign of success in
the service to humanity.
 The
Breakers
of the Vanderbilt family is the most famous among them, but it is
not the most charming. The
Elms, built by the coal industrialist Edward Julius Berwind, is more
breathtaking to the extent that it combines the tastes and sensibility
of an 18th century French chateau with the most modern
technology. Completed in 1901, and costing the equivalent today of $140
million to build, it featured electric lighting throughout the house (if
the tour guide is correct, many Newport residents figured that
electricity was just a passing fad).
 What
a thrill it is to imagine how new and exciting it must have been at the
time, and to contemplate how the commercialization of electricity has
transformed our lives so completely in a mere one hundred years. Mr.
Berwind loved technology and had a passion for bringing it to the world.
The son of German immigrants, he was a self-made man who became the
largest single owner of coal properties in the United States. His
property sitting on 14 acres – with ballrooms, sunrooms, libraries,
breath-taking dinning areas, intimate bedrooms, a conservatory, amazing
art, gardens – symbolizes not political power but the glory of private
life as a reward for commercial accomplishment.
This class of
industrialists had a certain consciousness of itself as the new elite
for a new world in a new time – and justly so. After 1870, it became
increasingly evident that the European monarchies were slipping away and
with them the system of privilege that came with blood and birth. In
their place stood the American capitalists, who excelled not in war and
political intrigue, but in the most peaceful of all activities, making
and providing things that others want to buy.
The hope was clear. The
next century would be the American century because American liberty and
commerce had triumphed over the statism and empires of the old world.
American capitalists would create dynasties more culturally powerful
than the most entrenched political families! Their wealth and skills
would be passed from generation to generation! This class would be the
key to the future of the world, bringing to all mankind a vision of a
better life, one that served all classes of society, brought the world
together through commerce and trade, put an end to war, forged a new
world where American values of liberty, property, and peace would
prevail.
And then something awful
happened. Instead of being heralded as symbols of America’s greatest,
they came to be demonized as Robber Barons. Scoundrels like Teddy
Roosevelt, and all his successors in the monstrous town of Washington,
D.C., would target this class, naming them not producers but parasites
– the first Big Lie of a century of lies. By tapping into that ancient
sin of envy, TR would call for inheritance taxes and antitrust laws that
would end up destroying these dynasties or forcing them to join the
state as partners in crime.
What these taxes and
regulations did not complete, World War I did, by drawing this class
into the great destructive project of war making. In the period of only
twenty years, their fortunes and sensibilities were smashed, and a dream
lost. Nowadays, these homes are owned by a private foundation. No one
could possibly pay the taxes, and the last of the family members left by
the early 1960s.
America ate its rich, in a
kind of slow-motion French Revolution. Actually it was worse: at least
the French Revolution began with an attack on the state that only later
went wrong; the Progressive Era was born in the basest possible motive:
the desire to expropriate private wealth.
After the Progressive Era,
private enterprise in America had been robbed of that crucial thing, a
private aristocracy: the self-made barons and lords necessary in all
times to keep the king in check. After that, it was just the individual
versus the state, and the individual lost.
Yes, this class
participated in its own undoing. Gabriel Kolko and Murray Rothbard have
shown us all the ways in which warring families after World War I
employed state power to smash their competitive rivals. What’s more,
the third-generation children of the original Men of Wealth participated
in the politics of redistribution, organizing proto-socialist movements
in Newport and using these mansions as staging grounds for destructive
politics.
Why did they do this? Did
this original New Class lack the values and grounding necessary to have
seen what a masochistic exercise this would be? In a perverse way, did
they actually desire their own destruction out of a sense of
self-loathing born of their ignorance concerning the social good wrought
by their capitalist acts?
For all the complications
of those years, these amazing mansions stand as testimonies to what
could have been. Truly, these astonishing mansions should be classified
among the Seven Wonders of the World, and yet what does it say that so
few Americans even know that they exist? Compare the numbers who come to
visit Newport, filled with shrines to capitalist creation, as versus
those who visit Washington and its shrines to despotism and death?
Yes, immense private
wealth still exists, but it must hide and it must affect a democratic
character, and it must pay constant obeisance to the politics of
equality. And notice, too, how every time a new class of independent
entrepreneurs raises its head on the American landscape, the trope is
repeated: the political class calls these people parasites and demands
their destruction. Why America continues to eat its finest children
cries out for explanation.
August
15, 2002
Jeffrey
Tucker [send him mail] is
editorial vp at the Mises Institute.
Copyright
© 2002 by LewRockwell.com |
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