For this new habit of mind, I blame two things: the U.S. Supreme Court, and the literary scholar Catherine Prendergast’s searing 2021 masterpiece, The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America.

From visiting Carmel, I had heard all about Carmel’s early 20^th-century history as a colony of artists and bohemians. But I had never heard of the poet French, or understood how much the popular history of Carmel left out—until I picked up Prendergast’s book, which defies categorization. It’s a head-spinning history, a maddening mystery, and a bracingly timely reminder of how easy it is to erase the aspirations and accomplishments of women, even in avant garde Northern California.

Portrait of Nora May French. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

The Gilded Edge begins with French’s own real-time account of her own 1907 abortion. This description, discovered by Prendergast in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, was hard to read last fall, when I first encountered it. It is infuriating to read now, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the constitutional right to abortion. Someone really ought to put the text on a neon billboard outside Justice Samuel Alito’s bedroom window.

French, a brilliant 25-year-old poet, “could not afford a ‘therapeutic’ abortion in a hospital even if she could convince a doctor to give her one,” Prendergast writes. So, the poet induced an abortion by swallowing pills she’d bought at a local drugstore in San Francisco. Such abortifacients, advertised in newspapers as safe and reliable, came in colored boxes with names like “Dr. Conte’s Female Pills,” and “Dr. Trousseau’s Celebrated Female Cure.” They also contained dangerous chemicals, like turpentine.

French recounts swallowing pills on a Saturday morning, and feeling nothing. The following day, she is awakened by a contraction, and then waves of spasms, nausea, and intense pain.

French had moved to San Francisco the year before, months after the earthquake, and was already succeeding as a poet and writer—winning a newspaper’s poetry contest and being published in literary journals. But if she had the baby (she had become pregnant by her married boyfriend Harry Lafler, a literary journal editor), she knew she was risking her burgeoning career, and could end up raising a child alone.

Between contractions, French wrote to Lafler. “Very dear, I have been through deep waters, and proved myself cowardly after all.” “I have gone through every shade of emotion…  It was as if we were walking together and my feet were struggling with some pulling quicksand under the grass. I would come near screaming very often.

“Motherhood! What an unspeakably huge thing for all my fluttering butterflies to drown in! A still pool, holding the sky.” “I looked into it day after day, and sometimes I could see the sky, and sometimes only my drowned butterflies. Oh—”

That is where the letter cuts off.

French did survive her abortion, and soon after relocated to Carmel, where she took up residence in the guest cottage of a married Bay Area couple with many literary friends, Carrie and George Sterling.

George Sterling styled himself as a writer (championed by Ambrose Bierce) and was a prominent member of the Bohemian Club, a famously elite male social institution with an artistic bent, and founded in 1872. But Sterling’s real business was real estate. He used his literary network to attract artists and writers to Carmel—among them Jack London and Upton Sinclair—to give the place a creative cachet that would help Carmel Development Company sell land. Prendergast shows that Sterling spent more time philandering and drinking than writing. Carrie Sterling did most of the recruitment work.

In Carmel, many bohemian men pursued the beautiful and talented French, plying her with writerly advice while seeking to co-opt her talent. George and Nora became lovers. Then, less than a year after her abortion and move to Carmel, Nora French died of cyanide poisoning. George Sterling was away. Carrie Sterling found her body. What actually happened remains a mystery.

The death of the young and pretty poet made news nationwide (“Midnight Lure of Death Leads Poetess to the Grave,” one headline crowed) and inspired copycat suicides. In the years to come, Carrie and George Sterling split up; each would later commit suicide, by cyanide. Others connected to the Carmel colony met unfortunate ends, too.

The saga took place in an era when people talked of the “New Woman” enjoying more rights and possibilities, Prendergast notes. But the reality was different, as the stories of Carrie Sterling and Nora May French demonstrate.

“Carmel was a roiling pot of exploitation. Women’s horizons were limited by the identities the men assigned them, namely scorned wife and elusive muse,” Prendergast writes. “Even when men claimed to want women who were more sexually liberated or allowed to work outside the home, all the negative consequences of the flowering of liberation were women’s alone to bear.”

The indignities these women suffered didn’t end with their deaths. Nora May French and Carrie Sterling were largely left out of the mythology of Carmel. The lecherous George Sterling, whose poetry is hackery, is still remembered as the great Bohemian writer who helped make Carmel the place it is today. (He even has a park named after him in San Francisco.)

There is no archive of French’s papers, Prendergast writes.  She located French’s letter, describing her abortion, among Lafler’s records. “Wouldn’t it be nice, I think, to see it amid a collection of other letters testifying to the length of women’s struggle for reproductive freedom, rather than among the papers of an abusive ex-­boyfriend?” the author asks in the book.

Today, at the end of our own Gilded Age, and the beginning of the post-Roe era, this story speaks all too loudly. The lesson is about more than abortion or discrimination. It’s about the human horrors of letting judges, or anyone else, determine our rights on the basis of history—especially when history omits so much.

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I have been living in America’s second Gilded Age—our current era that began in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s—while writing about the first, which began in the 1870s and continued into the early 20th century. The two periods sometimes seem like doppelgängers: worsening inequality, deep cultural divisions, heavy immigration, fractious politics, attempts to restrict suffrage and civil liberties, rapid technological change, and the reaping of private profit from public governance.

In each, people debate what it means to be an American. In the first Gilded Age, the debate centered on a concept so encompassing that its very ubiquity can cause us to miss what is hiding in plain sight. That concept was the home, the core social concept of the age. If we grasp what 19th century Americans meant by home, then we can understand what they meant by manhood, womanhood, and citizenship.

I am not sure if we have, for better or worse, a similar center to our debates today. Our meanings of central terms will not, and should not, replicate those of the 19th century. But if our meanings do not center on an equivalent of the home, then they will be unanchored in a common social reality. Instead of coherent arguments, we will have a cacophony.

A Currier & Ives print called “Home Sweet Home.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

When reduced to the “Home Sweet Home” of Currier and Ives lithographs, the idea of “home” can seem sentimental. Handle it, and you discover its edges. Those who grasped “home” as a weapon caused blood, quite literally, to flow. And if you take the ubiquity of “home” seriously, much of what we presume about 19th century America moves from the center to the margins. Some core “truths” of what American has traditionally meant become less certain.

It’s a cliché, for example, that 19th century Americans were individualists who believed in inalienable rights. Individualism is not a fiction, but Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie no more encapsulated the dominant social view of the first Gilded Age than Ayn Rand does our second one. In fact, the basic unit of the republic was not the individual but the home, not so much isolated rights-bearing-citizen as collectives—families, churches, communities, and volunteer organizations. These collectives forged American identities in the late-19th century, and all of them orbited the home. The United States was a collection of homes.

Evidence of the power of the home lurks in places rarely visited anymore. Mugbooks, the illustrated county histories sold door to door by subscription agents, constituted one of the most popular literary genres of the late 19th century. The books became monuments to the home. If you subscribed for a volume, you would be included in it. Subscribers summarized the trajectories of their lives, illustrated on the page. The stories of these American lives told of progress from small beginnings—symbolized by a log cabin—to a prosperous home.

A picture from a late 19th century “mugbook”: Ira and Susan Warren of Calhoun County, Michigan represented millions of Americans who saw the meaning of their lives in establishing, sustaining, and protecting homes. Image courtesy of History of Calhoun County, Michigan by H. B. Pierce, L.H. Everts & Co, 1877.

The concept of the home complicated American ideas of citizenship. Legally and constitutionally, Reconstruction proclaimed a homogenous American citizenry, with every white and black man endowed with identical rights guaranteed by the federal government.

In practice, the Gilded Age mediated those rights through the home. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments established black freedom, citizenship, civil rights, and suffrage, but they did not automatically produce homes for black citizens. And as Thomas Nast recognized in one of his most famous cartoons, the home was the culmination and proof of freedom.

“Emancipation,” an illustration by Thomas Nast from around 1865. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Thus the bloodiest battles of Reconstruction were waged over the home. The Klan attacked the black home. Through murder, arson, and rape, Southern terrorists aimed to impart a lesson: Black men could not protect their homes. They were not men and not worthy of the full rights of citizenship.

In attacking freedpeople, terrorists sought to make them cultural equivalents of Chinese immigrants and Indians—those who, purportedly, failed to establish homes, could not sustain homes, or attacked white homes. Their lack of true homes underlined their supposed unsuitability for full rights of citizenship. Sinophobes repeated this caricature endlessly.

An 1878 lithograph panel called “While they can live on 40 cents a day, and they can’t.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

In the iconography of the period, both so-called “friends” of the Indian and Indian haters portrayed Indians as lacking true homes and preventing whites from establishing homes. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had Indians attacking cabins and wagon trains full of families seeking to establish homes. They were male and violent, but they were not men. Americans decided who were true men and women by who had a home. Metaphorically, Indians became savages and animals.

A poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World in the late 1890s. Image courtesy od Library of Congress.

Even among whites, a category itself constantly changing during this and other eras, the home determined which people were respectable or fully American. You could get away with a lot in the Gilded Age, but you could neither desert the home nor threaten it. Horatio Alger was a pedophile, but this is not what ultimately cost him his popularity. His great fault, as women reformers emphasized, was that his heroes lived outside the home.

Position people outside the home and rights as well as respectability slip away. Tramps were the epitome of the era’s dangerous classes. Vagrancy—homelessness—became a crime. Single working women were called “women adrift” because they had broken free of the home and, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, threatened families. (Carrie broke up homes but she, rather than the men who thought they could exploit her, survived.) European immigrants, too, found their political rights under attack when they supposedly could not sustain true homes. Tenements were, in the words of Jacob Riis, “the death of the home.”

As the great democratic advances of Reconstruction came under attack, many of the attempts to restrict suffrage centered on the home. Small “l” liberal reformers—people who embraced market freedom, small government, and individualism but grew wary of political freedom—sought to reinstitute property requirements. Failing that, they policed voting, demanding addresses for voter registration, a seemingly simple requirement, but one that required permanent residences and punished the transience that accompanied poverty. Home became the filter that justified the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, Indian peoples, eventually African Americans, transients, and large numbers of the working poor.

The home always remained a two-edged sword. American belief in the republic as a collection of homes could and did become an instrument for exclusion, but it could also be a vehicle for inclusion. Gilded Age social reformers embraced the home. The Homestead Act sought to expand the creation of homes by both citizens and non-citizens. When labor reformers demanded a living wage, they defined it in terms of the money needed to support a home and family. Freedpeople’s demands for 40 acres and a mule were demands for a home. Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union made “home protection” the basis of their push for political power and the vote for women. Cities and states pushed restrictions on the rights of private landholders to seek wealth at the expense of homes. In these cases, the home could be a weapon for enfranchisement and redistribution. But whether it was used to include or exclude, the idea of home remained at the center of Gilded Age politics. To lose the cultural battle for the home was to lose, in some cases, virtually everything.

The idea of home has not vanished. Today a housing crisis places homes beyond the reach of many, and the homeless have been exiled to a place beyond the polity. But still, the cultural power of the home has waned.

A new equivalent of home—complete with its transformative powers for good and ill—might be hiding in plain sight, or it could be coming into being. When I ask students, teachers, and public audiences about a modern equivalent to the Gilded Age home, some suggest family, a concept increasingly deployed in different ways by different people. But I have found no consensus.

If we cannot locate a central collective concept which, for better or worse, organizes our sense of being American, then this second Gilded Age has become a unique period in American history. We will have finally evolved into the atomized individuals that 19th century liberals and modern libertarians always imagined us to be.

The alternative is not a single set of values, a kind of catechism for Americans, but rather a site where we define ourselves around our relationships to each other rather than by our autonomy. We would quarrel less over what we want for ourselves individually than over what we want collectively. Articulating a central concept that is the equivalent of the 19th century idea of home would not end our discussions and controversies, but it would center them on something larger than ourselves.

I wish I could announce the modern equivalent of home, but I am not perceptive enough to recognize it yet. I do know that, once identified, the concept will become the ground that anyone seeking to define what it is to be an American must seize.

The post When the Idea of Home Was Key to American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The four most prominent characteristics of the Trump penthouse—its phenomenal size, ornamental gaudiness, aping of the European royalty and affinity with classical European artistic traditions, and public conspicuousness—are also how earlier generations of upper-class New Yorkers used their homes to display their wealth and power and convey their distinction. This pattern was at its height during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, during the reign of famous uber-capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with whom Trump seems to identify. Prior to the late 19th century, the houses of elite New Yorkers were decidedly more modest than they became in the Gilded Age; afterwards, the wealthy generally chose to shield their residences from public scrutiny and their tastes shifted away from the classical and neo-classical.

Among the handful of upper-class homes built in Manhattan during the colonial period that survive today is the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the present-day Washington Heights section of the upper part of the island, which was constructed in 1765 as a country house for Roger and Mary Morris. Roger Morris had been a colonel in the British Army and was a member of the royal governor’s executive council; Mary Morris was the daughter of Frederick Philipse, one of the wealthiest men in New York colony. Their country estate covered 130 acres of woodlots, orchards, and pastures and offered sweeping views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, lower Manhattan, and what is now the Bronx. The Morrises’ primary residence stood at the corner of Whitehall Street and Stone Street in lower Manhattan, close to the Bowling Green neighborhood that stood as the most exclusive enclave in the colonial city.

Another example of an upper-class New York City home from this same period was the six-room, two-story brick house where Abraham Lodge, a prosperous attorney, and his family resided during the 1750s. The Lodge mansion employed superior building materials such as brick and glass which had been previously unavailable in the colonies in either quantity or quality, and its interior boasted fine furnishings—many of them imported from Europe—that displayed the refinement and gentility of its owners.

Few images of the Morris country mansion appear to exist, but contemporaries remarked on its large size (for its time) and its elegant Palladian architecture. The Morrises were Tories who fled the United States following the American Revolution, and their country estate was seized under forfeiture laws and fell into disrepair. In 1810, the house was purchased by Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant, and his wife Eliza, who remodeled it in the Federalist style that was then the height of architectural elegance, adding a columned portico and overhauling the interior. Today, it is a historic house museum.

By the 1830s, the city’s prime upper-class residential area was the Lafayette Place-Bond Street neighborhood in what is now Greenwich Village. As the economy of New York City took off after the War of 1812 and the merchants’ offices, warehouses, shops, and rooming house that were the products of this urban economic boom began to encroach on old elite neighborhoods (like Bowling Green) in lower Manhattan, upper-class New Yorkers relocated to new neighborhoods like Lafayette Place-Bond Street that were emerging on the periphery of the built-up area. There, merchants, lawyers, bankers, and physicians settled in newly fashionable row houses and mansions. In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a prosperous hardware importer, and his wife Eliza bought a red brick and marble row house on a block of Fourth Street in the Lafayette Place-Bond Street enclave for $18,000 (which would be equal to $460,000 today). While many similar dwellings that went up in this vicinity before the Civil War were subsequently demolished or transformed beyond recognition, this house and its furnishings have been preserved almost completely intact because the youngest Tredwell daughter continued to live there until her death at age 93 in 1933. Three years later, the building became the site of what is now the Merchant’s House Museum.

Able to live well, if not as extravagantly as their nouveau riches neighbors the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Tredwells made use of their city house (and their country estate in Rumson, New Jersey) to corroborate their wealth, prestige, and taste. The front and rear parlors that occupied most of its first floor had wooden Ionic columns and plaster moldings inspired by the fashionable Greek Revival design. New household technologies like the Tredwells’ modern bell system and cookstove became status symbols for elites.

In the late 1860s and the 1870s, upper-class residences resumed their progression up the east side of Manhattan. They were displaced from the pre-Civil War elite neighborhoods (like Lafayette Place-Bond Street) as retail shops, stables, warehouses, and middle- and working-class inhabitants overtook those areas, while also being pulled further uptown by the open space and larger lots available there. In the 1880s the finest upper-class neighborhood in the city was Murray Hill, which occupied a corridor that ran up Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue starting at around 23rd Street. Extravagant mansions occupied the corner lots in Murray Hill, including Alexander T. Stewart’s at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, Leonard Jerome’s at Madison and 26th Street, and Collis P. Huntington’s at 57th and Fifth Avenue. Stewart was an Irish-born entrepreneur who opened the first department store in the United States, the famed Marble Palace at 280 Broadway in New York City in 1848, and who went on to make a fortune from retailing; Jerome was a stock speculator as well as a sports aficionado who participated in yachting and thoroughbred horse racing; and Huntington was one of the promoters who constructed the Central Pacific portion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

Many of the architects who built these Gilded Age mansions had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their designs mimicked Georgian town houses, Venetian palazzos, and French chateaus. Richard Morris Hunt created the mansion of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in the style of a French Renaissance chateau. It was built primarily by craftsmen brought over from Europe, and decorated with stone and wood carvings, stained glass, and embroidered textiles imported from the continent. Even grander was the 130-room palace of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, which occupied an entire block front on the west side of Fifth Avenue from 57th Street to 58th Street, and to this day is the largest single-family house ever built in New York City. Seabury and Eliza Tredwell’s row house (which had 17 rooms and 7,100 square feet of inhabitable space) could fit inside this Vanderbilt colossus 10 or 12 times over.

By the end of the 19th century, New York City guidebooks were lavishing 10 or 15 pages apiece on Murray Hill, with some laying out stage coach or pedestrian tours that let tourists “pass miles of the most magnificent and costly residences in America.” They supplied the home addresses of grandees such as Cornelius Vanderbilt II, John Jacob Astor IV, and John D. Rockefeller, along with descriptions of their mansions that estimated their construction costs. Like tourist maps that show the location of the homes of celebrities in Los Angeles today, these guides encouraged visitors to gawk at the fairytale mansions in Murray Hill. With their showmanship, ostentation and huge expense, these mansions advertised the achievements of their robber baron owners.

Since the Gilded Age, the homes of upper-class New Yorkers have gone in divergent directions. Many elites became concerned about their privacy and security and either moved their primary residences out of the city altogether or lived in apartment buildings, like the River House, at 435 East 52nd Street. After World War I and World War II devastated European societies and brought about the political and financial eclipse of their hereditary peerages, the European aristocracy lost most of its allure for rich New Yorkers. While the stuffy European traditions and the over-the-top displays of ornamental splendor of the Gilded Age never entirely faded away, in the 1950s elite New Yorkers with fashionable tastes began to adopt a modernist aesthetic, and by the 1970s they preferred more vernacular styles as they went about gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and former industrial areas like Soho and Tribeca. For the most part, wealthy New Yorkers who were alert to contemporary design tastes and social values no longer modeled their residences on the palaces and manor houses of the European royalty; once au courant, those styles now seemed dull and passé. Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan high-rise home is a throwback to the time when the New York upper class was at the pinnacle of its power and wealth, and did not shrink from commanding others to do its bidding.

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