In Praise of the Commons –A dissertation and celebration of the important places and ideals that were created for all of us.

by John Beske

Last Friday, Marla and I spent a beautiful autumn afternoon wandering through downtown Chicago, and we marveled at the many wonderful things we saw that are completely free for anyone willing to make the effort to experience them. We walked just a sliver of the spaces and it took us hours.

the author at Cancer Survivors Garden at Maggie Daley Park

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We strolled through Millennium Park, Maggie Daley Park, the Cancer Survivors Garden, a gorgeous little park we found snuggled between the two famous Jeanne Gang skyscrapers (the Aqua Tower and the Vista Tower), and finally the Riverwalk, which stretches several blocks farther west of State Street than I had realized. This is just a tiny part of the open public space in the downtown area – there’s also the Lakefront Bike Trail, Oak Street Beach, The Mag Mile, Navy Pier, Grant Park, the Buckingham Fountain, Northerly Island and so much more.

Marla outside Feed Your Head Café on Chicago's Riverwalk

A section of the western part of the Riverwalk

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Pretty much every city and small town in the country has at least one nice public place that is free for everyone to enjoy. The tiny little Minnesota farming village where I grew up had a huge beautiful park with a playground, a baseball field, a pretty lagoon where we could skate in the winter and hundreds of feet of lakefront shoreline. In Wilmette, where Marla grew up, there are many parks and of course the beautiful Gillson Park and Beach at Lake Michigan. 

These spaces are collectively known as Commons – cultural and natural places that are accessible to everyone. Anyone, regardless of age, race, gender or legal status, can visit any of the many public beaches in Chicago, swim in Lake Michigan, visit the many gorgeous gardens and parks throughout the Boulevard System and spend time in so many, many other public places and spaces.

Downtown Chicago in the 1860s

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Chicago didn’t start out like this. Chicago was all natural prairie and swampland in the early 1800s and grew to a thriving metropolis in less than 50 years. Because it was on the southern tip of Lake Michigan and close to the Mississippi River watershed, it became a major trade center where millions of tons of lumber were hauled from the recently denuded forests of northern Wisconsin and Michigan. Much of this lumber became the houses, shops and other buildings of the rapidly developing city and even most of the sidewalks and many of the roads. Squished in between the sawmills and lumber yards of the downtown area were kerosene storage areas, slaughterhouses, and every manner of industry, all billowing smoke into the air and dumping their sewage into the Chicago River. City leaders went to increasingly ludicrous and sisyphean lengths to try and keep all of the toxic crud out of Lake Michigan, which the Chicago River flowed into, and was the source of Chicago’s drinking water. In all, it was a very productive but smelly, dirty and kind of unpleasant place.

All this swift progress came to a sudden halt in October of 1871 when, after a particularly dry summer, the Great Chicago Fire burned down much of the city including nearly the entire central business district.

Undeterred, civic leaders spread across the country crowing about the massive potential of this important city that had suddenly become a blank canvas to build on, and one of the world’s most massive building booms began in earnest. And since they didn’t want to build a new city only to have it burn down again, they developed strict building codes, requiring new buildings to be made from stone and brick rather than wood.

Building was fast and furious, and by 1892, in addition to rebuilding most of the downtown, they had built a magnificent area just south of there called The White City, where they staged a huge event called the World’s Columbian Exposition. This six-month event drew massive throngs of tourists and many business leaders, artisans and visionaries were all coming to witness this amazing new modern city.

A view of the White City from the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1892. Most of the structures were temporary, but some are still around including the current Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum.

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The chief architect of the Exposition was a man named Daniel Burnham, who, 27 years later, presented The Plan for Chicago, later known as the Burnham Plan that refashioned the city as a place for people rather than simply for industry.

One key and enduring aspect of the Plan was to turn all 26 miles of Chicago’s lakefront into a publicly-owned commons that was accessible to everyone. Over the years, innovations followed that collectively led to all of the breathtaking public areas that Marla and I, along with millions of others, enjoy whenever we get the chance.

The Burnham  Plan called for all 26 miles of Chicago's lakefront to be public space that was free and open to the public, including the present day Oak Street Beach

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These commons not only improve the experience of seeing the city and its environment in new ways, but they are essential places to enjoy the freedom to speak, the freedom to gather and the freedom to confront the government and other forces and policies with which we disagree. These freedoms are fundamental to the functioning of our society and essential to our survival as a democracy.

And not all commons are physical spaces. In fact, the largest commons in the history of the world is the Internet, which is, at least in concept, free to everyone, though there are lots of companies that charge people to access it. But fortunately, another wonderful commons, the public library system, offers free internet access to anyone who visits.

In 1998, we added our original little contribution to the world's largest commons

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In 1998, we determined that we wanted to claim our tiny homestead within this vast commons, and we launched VeganStreet.com, which we envisioned as a lively home away from home for the then-nascent vegan community – a place to grow this movement.

Since then, Vegan Street has grown to thousands of pages and home to a large and vibrant community, and the internet is now home to more than a billion different websites that are collectively visited by more than 5 ½ billion people to learn and to share their own stories.

All of these commons, both virtual and physical, are vital to our existence. Humans are a tribal species, and from the beginning of our existence, our survival has depended on groups of people banding together in communities for mutual protection and growth. As civilizations flourished though, most people got sorted into a hierarchical system where a few people gained great wealth and power by controlling the labor and lives of the masses who worked to support them. Those who had little survived largely by the strength of the communities around them.

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Today, in the United States and many other countries, society is still divided into haves and have-nots. The wealthy and powerful have their gated mansions, their luxury cars and boats and their exotic vacations, while many live in substandard housing with food insecurity, unsafe conditions and little room for advancement.

The wealthy have always wanted to keep a disproportionate share of the riches for themselves, and have strived to distance themselves from the masses whose labor has provided them with these riches. And time and time again, they overstepped their abilities, often crashing economies, ruining countries, starting wars and destroying entire empires in the process.

After one such money-grabbing period in history plunged the US economy into deep depression, a man named Franklin Roosevelt ran a successful campaign for President by promising to redistribute power from the wealthiest to the workers and farmers whose labor and goods built the country. This project, called the New Deal, made the Government into the largest employer, hiring more than 8 ½ million people to build roads, bridges and buildings and to staff schools and hospitals among many occupations.

The Common Man author, Vice President Henry Wallace, with The New Deal and Four Freedom's author, President Franklin Roosevelt

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A major goal of all of this was summed up in a powerful speech Roosevelt delivered at the dawn of the US entry into WW2 called The Four Freedoms that compelled Norman Rockwell to create his famous Four Freedoms series of paintings, as well as the brilliant 1942 speech by his Vice President Henry Wallace called The Century of the Common Man, where he articulated the need for a society built around the needs and abilities of ordinary citizens rather than those of the rich and powerful. This speech inspired Aaron Copland to compose his iconic Fanfare for the Common Man and helped propel the burgeoning civil rights and labor movements.

The Four Freedoms paintings by Norman Rockwell. Clockwise from upper left: Freedom of Worship, Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear

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This redistribution of wealth led to decades of prosperity and growth in the US that led to the development of the middle class, the expansion of higher education and the rapid growth of urban areas.

The millions of people who migrated to these cities and surrounding areas, as well as the tourists who wished to visit them, required beautiful spaces that were available to everyone, and the wealth generated by the workers, businesses and visitors supplied the capital to make them achievable.

Now, the US is engaged in a powerful division between those who want to keep these commons and freedoms for everyone and those who want to continue degrading the middle class and working class by funneling more wealth, power and rights to those who already have more than they need or deserve.

Nearly half of the country is willing and ready to throw away these commons and freedoms we enjoy. They are ready to elect a leader who wants to use military force to quell peaceful dissent, to arrest journalists for reporting the truth and punish anyone who speaks ill of him. They are beholden to a would-be dictator who has pledged to build internment camps to send American citizens for the crime of not being of the same race or culture as his, and who wants to take away the right to control their own bodies and futures from more than one-half of our own citizens.

The other half of us believe in freedom and Democracy and the right for all of us to have agency over our own beliefs and futures.

Let’s all fight for the preservation of all of these commons that we all hold so dear. Make sure that everyone you know votes on November 5th. Our country, our children, our way of life, our rights and our future all depend on it.