Strength in difference
American television audiences were treated in recent months to two outstanding period dramas set in the late 19th century.
“The Gilded Age” is set in New York City’s high society in 1882, as new and old money clashes on ritzy Fifth Avenue. “1883” chronicles the perilous trials and deadly challenges found along the Oregon Trail.
Both shows are descendants of previous popular programming: “1883” features the Dutton family of “Yellowstone” fame as its central characters; and “The Gilded Age” owes its lavish and luxurious depictions to creator Julian Fellowes, of “Downton Abbey” distinction.
As entertainment, the two series deliver handsomely, each with topshelf budgets and talented actors from stage and screen to match. Great attention to painstaking detail is evident in location, scenery, settings and costuming, which produces a satisfying visual smorgasbord.
As history, both also received accolades for Herculean efforts aimed at achieving a high degree of accuracy as backdrop to fictional characters and stories. “1883” brings gritty reality home to cowboy and frontier mythology, and “The Gilded Age” was filmed in some well-preserved and spectacularly ornate mansions of its time.
What’s perhaps most intriguing about the pair is that, despite the night-and-day contrasts in lifestyles and daily experiences on each show, they are snapshots of essentially the same time.
Viewers thus have the invaluable opportunity to see one of America’s greatest strengths showcased: the vast diversity of life and liberty in different states, under the unity of a federal— not national—government.
“The Gilded Age” and “1883” serve to signify the truest understanding of our Latin founding motto. They are two seemingly incongruous slivers of the pluribus that produce the American unum. Two out of a much greater “many” states, counties, cities and countrysides that form one nation.
How odd it seems that hazardous life in a wagon train on the wild western prairie (which was little more than a strenuous daily effort to survive) and pampered life in the ostentatious social strata occupied by established Astor wealth and newfound railroad baron fortunes were contemporary, connected, coexistent parts of the same country.
It’s easy to gloss over the significance of this discordance, to chalk up the hardscrabble versus hoity-toity contrasts as merely melodramatic TV.
Yet everything about the experience of American citizens in “1883” and “The Gilded Age” is dissimilar. From what they wore, what they ate and where they slept to how they talked, how they traveled and where they spent money, young Elsa Dutton’s ordeals in Texas and Kansas are several magnitudes removed from aspiring socialite Marian Brook’s soirees and balls.
The lesson in all this serves to remind us that the vast differences in various American lives are and have always been the key ingredient to our exceptionalism as a nation.
Nothing in Nebraska in the early 1880s looked anything like New York’s largest metropolis. And nobody expected that it should. New Yorkers didn’t feel the urge, or any sense of authority, to try and exert influence across the continent to bring Cornhusker construction “up to code,” for example.
The fact that primitive depots, schools, hospitals and other institutions prevailed in many rural states was simply not the business of New York, or any other older, more populous state. Likewise, states in the West never imagined that the moneyed societies of New York or Rhode Island should be taxed to finance improvements for them in the name of “equality.”
Throughout the country, Jefferson’s wording in the Declaration was well understood: The sacred truth was that people were created equal, not that they would or could ever remain so as their lives progressed. And certainly not that government would use force of dictate or mandate to attempt the impossible task of creating equality of outcomes.
It would be another quarter-century before Stephen Vincent Benet would pen his “Invocation” for “John Brown’s Body,” in which he celebrated the “American muse” for its priceless disparity in character and culture.
The muse comprised the “high stone and its arrogant fumes” of skyscrapers along with the “ruined gardens of the South;” the “cowboys riding in from the Painted Post” and “the clipped velvet of the lawns where Shropshire grows from Massachusetts sods;” the “grey Maine rocks” and “the cheap car, parked by the station-door …”
“All these you are, and each is partly you, and none is false, and none is wholly true.”
Benet viewed a blessed America not as one, “but clad in diverse semblances and powers, always the same, as light falls from the sun, and always different, as the differing hours.”
Such diversity is the opposite of “equity,” the left’s worshiped buzzword. Instead, to borrow Benet’s words, it’s the “pure elixir” of liberty.
American lives in “1883” and “The Gilded Age” were as various as our land, as Benet wrote. If we don’t recognize and remember how that unique diversity among and across a national people made America strong, we’ll be ill-equipped to resist woke or progressive ideology that would dismantle it.
The quicker we return to celebrating our differences from state to state, and rebuking those who would dictate uniformity, the sooner we’ll restore balance in place of polarity.