When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in New York in 1831, he found a city a quarter of the size of Paris, perched on the lower tip of Manhattan, roamed by pigs. Speaking to everyone he met, high and low, he was struck by how many of the rich used to be poor. There was, he observed, an ‘equality of conditions’ that filtered down to the way parents treated their children.
The 25-year-old ‘wiry aristocrat’ filled 14 notebooks during his nine-month road trip across America to 17 of the 24 established states. It formed the basis of Democracy in America. ‘The American inhabits a land where everything is constantly moving, and each movement seems to be progress,’ he wrote. John Prideaux, former US editor of the Economist, takes the book with him as he retraces de Tocqueville’s journey for a new six-part podcast. How much of what de Tocqueville observed still survives?
Prideaux eavesdrops on a pretty ghastly sounding soirée at the Lincoln Center, and makes his way to the lavish apartment of the philanthropists Barbara and the late Donald Tober. Here, the ‘equality of conditions’ feels rather elusive. Tober’s block is guarded by a liveryman, and the lift opens directly into her home. The 91-year-old has commissioned a tomb for when she dies, ‘a seven-foot-long wave of love’, adorned with the Shield of Achilles, a pair of crossed skis, a violin and a horse. But she is also intent on spending most of her money on philanthropic causes before she dies. There may be little equality left in America in life, but in death, there is a kind of levelling.
