Sadly, this is not the case today.
As with the rest of the country, Whitemarsh Hall entered a state of decline when the Great Depression hit. Unlike virtually all of his colleagues, however, Stotesbury did not lose all, or even most, of his money on that fateful day in late 1929 now commonly referred to as Black Tuesday. No, he remained solvent right up until the day he died as a result of his personal fiscal conservatism, despite being negatively impacted by Franklin Roosevelt's Raw --er, New Deal programs. After his passing, his widow vacated Whitemarsh and it became abandoned after being owned by a mining company for a few years. In a way, Stotesbury's catalyst for capitalism, the GOP, experienced a similar fate, with its grand ambitions of open markets and minds slowly being eroded to make way for the populist sentiments of those good ole Dixiecrats and "Real Americans" whose votes the party's hierarchy had high hopes of wooing.
By the time the the early eighties rolled around, Whitemarsh Hall had been reduced to little more than a jumble of vines and overgrown weeds with some really nice tiles and columns underneath it all somewhere. It was summarily demolished in order to create space for a prospective housing development. Meanwhile, its visionary's political counterpart was suffering along with it. The GOP's heyday of fiscal conservatism was, for the most part, lost amidst a freakshow of used Jesus salesmen whose tactics and beliefs would make even Elmer Gantry cringe, and a cadre of George Wallace-style conservatives whose hate for those who were not just like them knew no bounds. Still, despite these misfortunes, a glimmer of hope remained at the time for both Whitemarsh and the GOP. After all, with destruction comes opportunity; it would have been possible to build something even grander than the Hall and do some massive course corrections for the Party.
As you can guess, opportunity's knocks went unanswered.
A few years before the close of the twentieth century, Whitemarsh's grandeur was forever written into the history books with the construction of several rows of what are, to be frank, quite possibly the most unappealing townhomes imaginable on the spot where it had once stood so proudly. This was not the case for the GOP, however, as it experienced a semi-revival of its traditional values during the electoral revolution of 1994. Unfortunately, this revival lost steam relatively quickly, and by 2006, many of the party's most elder statesman were shilling amnesty for illegal aliens. All hope was not lost, though, as a stunning new movement, which billed itself as the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party, took hold in early 2009 . Its goals were not only agreeable, but in many instances honorable as they were designed to champion fiscal conservatism only, leaving behind the precarious social issues whose divisiveness nearly dragged the GOP into the permanent past tense, along with Whitemarsh. Things went very well for roughly one year until the usual suspects decided to enter the fray and turn the TEA Party into something it was never intended to be: the Second Coming of the late Jerry Falwell's insidious Moral Majority. Today, the current incarnation of the TEA Party stands to cost the GOP the critical gains it needs to retake both houses of Congress this November. It just might wind up being the best ally which the American left could possibly have dreamt of.
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