By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
Because people are kind enough to talk to me, I feel the least I should do in return is have something interesting to say. I am aided in this endeavor by the fact that I am interested in just about everything. I have noticed, however, not everyone has the time to go look up interesting things, which is all the better for me. Especially, it makes for good conversation, if I find interesting things that connect history with what is seen on the news today.
As a natural INFJ introvert, I would honestly rather go read things, so you don’t have to, and just report back, rather than spend time in a crowded room, which is painful for me. (Hey, we work with what we have.)
Also as a healthcare lawyer who counsels small business owners, nothing interests my clients more than “how do business people succeed” (followed closely by the subject of “how do we avoid what brought them down?”)
And no one did it better, nor fell farther (further?) . . . farther, than the ones who started the “Gilded Age” where great American business fortunes, ones built by the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegie were on full display in parts of Manhattan. There is an HBO TV show that pretty much tracks the history in The Gilded Age from about 1870-1890.
Mark Twain is said to have coined the term, referring to the fact that the “gilding” is typically a thin gold veneer, covering over something more common (and possibly rotten) underneath.
Astor. The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune. Anderson Cooper first wrote Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty in 2021. (He is a “Vanderbilt,” his mom was Gloria Vanderbilt, who made designer jeans in the 1970s after the Vanderbilts lost all their money.)
Cooper and Katherine Howe’s latest book is about the John Jacob Astor family whose fortune was built by John Astor when he arrived in America in 1783 to trade beaver furs. Essentially, Astor was a maniac, driven to make as much of a fortune as he possibly could, to the exclusion of almost anything else in his life, which I suppose is as much a gift as a curse.
The Massacre at Astor Opera House. America has gotten less refined since the days when ordinary people wore business suits on airplanes, to baseball parks, or just about anywhere else they went in public.
But it never occurred to me how far we have fallen culturally, until I reached Ch. 3 of Astor, entitled “Massacre Opera House.” (You really aren’t going to believe this shit, but they had a riot . . . over Macbeth.)
In 1849 the New York State Militia fired on protestors at the Astor Opera House, killing at least 22 people and wounding over 100 others. That isn’t the unusual part, Captains of Industry in the Gilded Age would often call in the Pinkertons and then the National guard to start shooting protestors, as in the the Homestead Massacre at Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh in 1892.
So, why Macbeth? The Astor family funded an opera house which played to rich people, only to discover there weren’t that many rich people. Ordinary folk, like me (I am Irish from Mississippi) often can’t tolerate whatever it is that passes for music in an Opera house.
So the Astor Opera House began putting on plays, for rich people, just to pay the bills. One of which was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. (Which I agree, still doesn’t sound like “riot” material.)
Apparently, here is the missing part we didn’t know, this insult was part of a larger culture war. Shakespeare was more of a “common man’s” entertainment, while opera (and the opera house), were reserved for the elite. The Astor Opera House had scheduled a performance of Macbeth on the same day and time another performance of Macbeth was being held a theater for the lower classes.
The rich people had not only upstaged the poor people, they stole the poor folk’s favorite star. Headlining the Astor Opera House performance was a guy named “Macready” the biggest international star in the business. If you can imagine Beyonce cancelling a performance to play Jeff Bezos’ wedding, you get the point.
Also, culturally in New York and New England, WASPs or “White Anglo Saxon Protestants” thought they were better than the Irish Catholic and Scottish whose last name frequently starts with some variant of “Mac.”
So in a nutshell, you have an internationally famous guy named “Macready,” playing another famous guy named “Macbeth,” at the Knickerbocker (old money) opera house, where no one named “Mac-anything” would have been welcomed.
That’s when “all hell broke loose.” The crowd outside bombarded the theater with stones and then tried to set it on fire. That’s when the National Guard opened fire to shoot “the culture” out of anyone in the area. Macready, the star of the show, was eventually able to leave in disguise.
I don’t think this was as much about opera, as it was about eternal culture wars in general. But I am kinda proud of my Irish forefathers, caring so much about Shakespeare. Which might explain why poor people used to wear suits to the ball park. Sometimes, all a man has is an old suit, money for a matinee . . . and his culture.