The list of the most fascinating American towns includes San Francisco, New Orleans, Santa Fe, and, of course, Manhattan. Oddly, Newport, Rhode Island rarely appears on the list for reasons I do not understand. The place is rich with history that points back to the Gilded Age before the Great War and puts on display the best that America had to offer the world.
These days, you arrive on this large island—somehow less famous than neighboring Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket—via the mighty Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge. Going over it is an amazing experience in itself, positively breathtaking. But it was completed only in 1969. Before then, and through the late 19th century, travelers arrived via ferry.
And arrive they did. It was the summer destination of the “Robber Barron” class that had set up its business operations in Manhattan, while the social side of this group came to be ensconced in Newport. This is where the great mansions were built, houses intended to show Europe a thing or two about what real wealth can achieve. Some make the castles of old look modest by comparison.
There was an ethos at work here. It was rooted in a philosophy of what America put on display. Instead of aristocracy, we would have a new meritocracy that only freedom would make possible. Through freedom, technological innovation, and service to the common man, some people would grow enormously rich, not by taking from others but by creating wealth as Adam Smith explained. America between the Civil War and Great War showed the world how it was done.
Newport lives today as a vibrant museum of this era, thanks to earnest efforts at preservation and continued entrepreneurial genius. For example, this is the home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame with grass courts and a famous club. You can go to watch and even to play. Being there for a tournament with all the straw hats and white trousers on display creates an illusion of a different and more civilized time.
You can still tour many of the houses and it is certainly worth doing. They are all spectacular, dreamy in every way, especially those with side gardens and tea houses. How often have you had the chance to walk through houses this mighty, looking at the structure and design, trying to understand what it would be to live there, observing how the cooks and laundry staff worked? It’s extremely rare and yet available to anyone.
Plus it reveals something about American history of which the popular mind knows little. We know about the Frontier from children’ s books, the Civil War from legend, the New Deal from the valorization of FDR, and so on. But for some reason, our history lessons pass right over this period except to demonize these years for their wealth inequality.
The HBO series “The Gilded Age” has begun to rectify some of this neglect. But even here, the writers and directors have a tin ear on the commercial side of the period. In the show, most of the action is social and strangely petty while the barons of railroads and steel come across as an exploitative and superficial caricature. The writers clearly understood nothing about the genuine commercial side of the age. Even though I cannot stop watching it, I find the whole series to be ahistorical and even cringy in many places.
For the real deal, come to Newport and see for yourself what the meritocratic spirit built and how American culture plotted to replace the Old World with something much more spectacular.
It’s amusing that by the time of the Great War, the ethos in the culture began to change. These grand houses were labeled as too garish and opulent. “White elephants” they were called. The new tax regime was so insidious that the families had to leave them. Many were torn down as relics to the past while some were saved.
For my part, I cannot bring myself to criticize these places at all. I find them tremendous and thrilling, showing a level of wealth and a willingness to spend it that is extremely rare even in our times when “wealth” mostly consists of digits and stock valuations. The Gilded Age generation of moguls had hard cash based on gold and silver. We’ve never seen anything like it since, and likely never will.
You can tour them with a batch of tickets over several days. No reason to rush. The electronic tours give you the deep history along with interviews of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, such that you are plunged straight back to the 1880s and 90s.
If touring glorious mansions is not your thing, the other great attraction of Newport is its cliff walk, which should be more famous than it is. On one shoulder, you have the rugged and raw Atlantic coast and, on the other shoulder you have these beautiful and manicured estates.
The full walk is 3.5 miles and 7 if you come back the same way or walk down the parallel streets to see all the shops and grab a bite to eat. Prepare with lots of water, solid walking shoes with strong soles, and a few hours to spare. It’s a full day in both directions because you will take time for pictures. You will come back with plenty.
There are moments on this walk when you cannot believe your eyes. It’s some of the most gorgeous ocean views I’ve seen outside of the coast of Spain. The air smells salty with a seaweed aroma and lovely sounds of waves crashing against rocks. The path is mostly paved until, suddenly, you are stepping carefully over tricky rocks, and at times it feels dangerous.
July is the height of the season so, just as in the Gilded Age, Newport is busiest right now. But even so, the prices of food and hotels are not entirely unreasonable. This is not like Martha’s Vineyard which mysteriously adds a zero to all normal prices and no one thinks a thing about it. At Newport, you can actually enjoy dining outdoors and people watch downtown for $15–$20 a plate, which is fantastic for the views and venue.
The place occupies a special role in American history because by the late 19th century, the world knew that this new experiment in freedom and democracy was working better than anything else in the world. It was the nation that could, and Newport was the core of what kind of society freedom could build out of industrial progress.
And if you like beaches, there are two wonderful ones here on this island and they are not nearly as busy as you might expect. To be sure, they are not the same as those in Florida and Southern California. The water is much colder and saltier and the sands more rough hewn. But with the growing popularity of the cold plunge, maybe this is also a feature and not a bug.
We live in an age of nostalgia for the past and somehow our minds keep drifting back to the age of the old masters in art, music, and architecture, before a time of war and cynicism in which civilization itself has often seemed to be hanging on by a thread. This was not true in the Gilded Age when this young but deeply confident nation put on display for the world all that it could be.
Newport preserves this now, not just as a lesson in history but as an ideal for which we might again strive today. It’s not just the pretty scenery, but a living argument for what a confident, industrializing society can build when it stops apologizing for success. In an age of regulatory thickets, industrial capture of administrative agencies, cultural self-doubt, and digital abstraction, seeing physical evidence of what free minds plus capital plus cultural confidence can achieve is inspiring.
