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Boston Society in late 19th Century

Boston 19th Century Links

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“A strange dynasty with customs but no manners”

“It would have been better had we never been born in this degenerate and unlovely age”
Eliot Norton of Harvard

“We are vanishing into provincial obscurity…America has swept from our grasp. The future is beyond us.” -- Barrett Wendell

“There is something of reserve and hauteur about Boston society which is not altogether agreeable to strangers and is criticized and ridiculed by Americans from other parts of the country; but it is only on the surface and is hardly noticed at all by persons who have lived in Europe. It contrasts strongly with the free and easy manners of the West where the stranger of today becomes an old resident tomorrow but there is a dignity about it which is very attractive. To borrow a slang Western phrase, a Boston man doesn’t “slop over.” Boston boasts of her culture, and New York delights to sneer at the word, but there is a reality in it. There is culture in New York, but its influence is limited to a narrow circle. In Boston it rules the city and gives tone to society, There is non other city which has any right to call itself the Athens of America. New York is more like Corinth in the days of her greatest prosperity. Even the Irish are somewhat subdued in the atmosphere of Boston, and make much less trouble than they do in New York.

Its climate is not all that could be desired. Its east winds are unfavorable to weak lungs, and in winter disagreeable to all; but New York is not much better, and Boston has the advantage of having clean streets. The suburban towns are all beautiful, and there is an endless variety of charming drives in all directions. Cambridge is close at hand, with the literary advantage of a university town, and the city itself is provided with everything necessary for study or amusement.
But Boston is attractive to me because there is something restful in life there,. It is more like a European city. There is not the mad rush and whirl which distracts me in New York and is still worse in Chicago. Men do business on a grand scale, and Boston capital is found in all the great cities and all the great enterprises of the west, but men seem to take life more calmly than in New York. They are not in such a desperate hurry. So, in society there is much less extravagance and display, much less dissipation, much more quiet and sensible enjoyment.
BS E 57 1881

“Dissensions of inbred Calvinism in conflict with the encroachment of materialism; resistance between natural man and a stingy, hostile universe. Story of a man surviving in a world where joys are few, his greatest being the pleasure of learning to love to hate. The shadow of Cromwell still loomed, resistance to something was still the law of the land, and we live through Henry Adams, the dilemma of an 18th century Bostonian standing in the 19th century with one foot stepping precariously to the 20th.” -- The Education of Henry Adams

“There broods over the real Boston an immense effect of finality. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was just sufficient but no more sufficient to comprehend the whole achievement of the human intellect up to, let us say, the year 1875. Then an equilibrium was established. At about that year Boston filled up.” -- H.G. Wells, 1906

Post Civil War = many Boston Brahmins set up residence in Europe. Brahmins withdrew leaving control of the city to be assumed by the hated Irish.
Many of Boston’s first families married into European wealth and nobility.

1865 MIT Copley Square/ first public bathhouse at L Street
1866 First YWCA – two houses in Beach Street for young women who came from rural areas to work in city – Opposed by citizens who thought women should not live independently. Defended by Mrs. Henry F. Durant. “There will always be young women dependent on their own exertions for support.”
1866 John Greenleaf Whinier, Snow Bound

1867 Seven week shoemakers' strike and walkout at Lynn, longest in country's history

1868 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women; New England Woman Suffrage
Association founded

1869 Last whaling voyage from Nantucket

1869 June 15-19, National Peace Jubilee celebrated peace after the Civil War
Coliseum on Copley Square (Plaza hotel site) 50,000 people x 10,000 singers, 500 piece orchestra, 100 anvils played by Boston firemen in red coast, 12 cannon, bass drum 8ft in diameter. Financial success Patrick S. Gilmore originator and conductor given a $32,000 present.

BS M105 1869, September 8 hurricane …Coliseum was the first prominent building seized by hurricane and in a few moments the west end and a large portion of the roof gave way with a loud crash

Lucy Stone and others found the American Woman Suffrage Association moderate group separate from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's more radical National Woman Suffrage Association

1870s Age of Big Business x Vanderbilt Rockefeller Carnegie
outmoded Boston economy x traditional family business
old NE shipyards/ deteriorating textile factories
“Old Yankee dollar was not what it used to be”
Material forces and secular philosophies versus Puritan Christianity’s old moral concepts
Only the fit survive
Vanderbilt “The public be damned”
Final quarter of 19th century, New York took charge of health of world finance.

Francois Marie Charles Fourier – The Phalanx – An economic unit composed of 1,020 people

The Boston Savanarola = Orator Theodore Parker

1870 BSN: Locke Ober's – from Colliers, Nov 18, 1950:
“A recent menu listed 33 hors d’oeuvres and appetizers, 14 soups, 26 fish courses, 37 entrees, 17 veg, 16 kinds of potato, 19 salads and 27 desserts. Wine last of 9 pages.
Ward 8 invented in 1898 – concocted to honor an ardent prohibitionist.
Men’s bar is San Domingo mahogany carved in France. Has the patina of 75 years (in 1950). Women are not permitted in the bar except on New Years Eve and on the night of the Harvard Yale football game.
Originally two restaurants.. Louis Ober’s opened in 1870 financed by Eben Jordan, remodeled in 1886. Locke’s opened around 1891. Very elaborate wine and eating rooms. Long glass rail lighted to disclose flowers inside. Water wheel and controlled lighting simulating dawn, daylight and evening. Patron’s began to eat at Ober’s and drink at Locke’s.
In 1894, wholesale liquor firm bought both places and tore down the separating wall. The key to the connecting door was thrown into the harbor.
From Holiday Jan 1951:
Bathtub in ladies room. Cash register has been in service since 1886. Nude painting is of Mlle. Yvonne. Placed in 1877. She wears a black crepe sash if Harvard loses to Yale. Painted by an artist who lived in an attic on Bromfield Street. Cost $80.
Ober opened restaurant May 20, 1875. Frank Locke, a retired sea captain opened next door to Ober in 1892.

BS N menu late 19th c: “hummingbirds served in nut-shells”
1870 BS Everett – April 11 1870 “Intelligent persons observe with anxiety, the terrible mortality among children in this city in the last month…The mortality in tenement houses has been foreseen, was made only too certain by last summer’s experience, and, if science knows anything about disease, may have in large measure been prevented. Whoever visits the worst of these houses will be begged by the poor wretched who inhabit them, to see how beastly are the privies and how worthless is the drainage… In fact we suppose that some misconception at the City Hall as to whose business it is to attend to such things may be the reason that nobody attends to them, and that a hundred infants die in a week”
BIBL: Uncovering the Past – NE University and Its Environs –John A Martin (Development of Back Bay Fens.”

1870 Lorenzo Dow Baker of Wellfleet, Mass., founder of Boston Fruit
Company, is first to sell bananas commercially in Boston; Boston
Museum of Fine Arts established

1871 Alexander Graham Bell

World Peace Jubilee. 1872 June 17-July 4 Chorus of 20,000, 1000 piece orchestra 1000 piece band including four from Europe. 16 cannon. 100 firemen pounding anvils. Johan Strauss conductor. Financial failure due to gate crashers.

1872 H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church, Boston, completed; Boston Daily Globe begins publication; Nansen, oldest ski club in the U.S., established in Berlin, N.H.
1872 BS D119 October –epizootic epidemic = horse distemper …total suspension of South Boston, Charlestown, and Cambridge Horse Railway Travel…thousands of animals prostrated

1872 BS A 27-29 -- The International Ball at the Coliseum, grandest affair ever known in the US, 25,000 people present, the grand orchestra led by Strauss.
vast structure illuminated by thousands of tiny gas jets and adorned by hundreds of floral baskets…
It was hardly seven o’clock before the line of carriages began rolling toward the Back Bay….by eight o’clock it required the services of four officers and a sergeant to control the hackmen at the corner of Newton Street and Columbus Avenue. Four pigeon holes where attendants were checking garments….
You are at once struck by the fact that the crowd is a representative one. The first person you meet may be a resident on Beacon Street, while the next one probably works for a living and certainly came on foot. The great majority are in full dress but there are many who are not , and there’s every style down to an ordinary street dress. But the lady must not have her head covered…
One of the most noticeable personages was a beautiful lady in a heavy tea-rose silk, a polonaise looped high, with large tea roses, the edge trimmed with a very rich lace three-eighths of a yard in width, the bottom of the dress finished with a flounce of the sane material as the dress. A rich light blue silk was seen with a deep basque and sash falling to the bottom, the whole trimmed with rich point appliqué lace, the bottom of the waist of the basque defined with a lovely sprig of sweet peas and the same flowers on the beautiful train and looping the dress. A beautiful fair woman was noticed with a muslin embroidered in pink, with pink flowers. She also wore elegant diamonds.
Mr. Gilmore mounts the stand and the opening measures of a Lancers are played…
A waltz “And der schonen blauen Donau followed, of course, conducted by Strauss, and it was amusing to see the eagerness with which both young men and women hastened to join in the waltz.
President arrived twenty minutes past 10 o‘clock…Mrs. Grant wore her hair in the Pompadour style with one braid in back.
“The genius which has kept the feet of the Viennese in rhythmic motion, to the strains of his own delightful music, by the banks of the beautiful Danube, found little difficulty in asserting itself even under the rigid shadow of the Bunker Hill monument.
As early as 12 o’clock people began to depart…and horse-cars, jacks and picnic wagons were laden to their utmost capacity…At two o’clock the Coliseum looked almost as full as ever notwithstanding that 10,000 had departed
Am Washington pie and ham sandwiches by the cord, and coffee and ice-cream by the barrel. At the beer counter there flowed in streams sufficient to make a respectable Danube…Over 75 barrels were sold.
…About everybody said they never had a better time, though a New Yorker of the Tammany ilk, who was present thought it too blamed promiscuous, and signed for a nice select party at the academy, like the Americus club, you know.
…twenty one ladies fainted

Long Island in 1870s Sunday prize fights (1882 City took over Island -- Long Island Hospital and almshouse)

1872 BSN Sat eve Nov 9, 1872, at 7 pm, a Sabbath calm lay over greater Boston…shops were closed and all was peace and quiet. At 7.24 the alarm in the Boston stations exploded into action – Box 52, the hotbox on the corner of Bedford and Summer St, the heart of the business and manufacturing of the city. The first engine, Steamer no 7 arrived at the fire exactly 120 seconds after the alarm sounded but it was too late. The four story factory was ablaze from cellar to roof and the shutters and cornices were running in streams of molten iron and lead into the gutter.
By some law of nature the Boston fire spread against the wind and much of the apparatus was wrongly placed as a consequence. Fire spread rapidly – Summer St. Bedford- Hawley-Franklin- the dry goods center of New England – 60 acres of complete destruction…A fire so intense that its reflection was seen in the sky as far away as Canada. A fire that disintegrated granite and brick walls – a heat so great that great ponds of melted metal formed in what had once been streets. The wind created by the fire was so great that burned account books were carried as far away as Weymouth and charred fragments of ten and twenty dollar bills were picked up on the streets of Quincy.

1872 BSN: Old Pudding Lane was renamed Devonshire Street in 1872 as a tribute to Christian Devonshire who financed its rebuilding after the great fire of 1872. On this very street were:
One of the first ministers of the town
A terrible witch
A notorious pirate
A famous governor
One of the earliest newspapers
A tavern of national reputation – Rose and Crown, Sign upheld by two naked boys. Shocked local justices who ordered the sign taken down and the boys replaced by something else. Sign re-carved and boys changed to two charming – but equally unclothed girls. Outraged justice haled Mr. Phillips before court and ruled that the girls must be clothed “at least by garlands of roses."

1873 BS L200 Wreck of the Atlantic, April – survivors fed in Faneuil Hall – Harpers Apr 26, 1873.

1875 341,000 -- (1865 population = 140,000)
Boston 780 acres to 24,000 or 30 times original size No longer “tight little island”

1876-7 Blacks again reduced to third class citizens
“A blueprint for modern America” – Republic congress after secession

1877 First telephone exchange Boston/Cambridge
1877 Swan boats – Robert Paget

1877 January 19 and 20 Boston Music Hall “Miss Bertha Von Hillern’s Marvelous Illustration of a Woman’s Power of Endurance:…Her last great walk of 350 miles in 6 days and nights.

BS Everett: 1870s : “On Sunday morning, before and after the Providence steamboat train has come screaming into town, the quiet of Boston is like that of any country farm-house – nay it is even more profound, as there are no feathered geese here, and but few barnyard fowls, to break the still repose…
In the same way it was necessary that the neighbors of Mater Lowe and Master Hunt should know every morning and afternoon that they were about to keep school by the clamor of the little Latin school bell…and by a similar passion for advertising is it necessary now that a steam whistle shall announce by a long yell that Brown and Teazle are going to begin making tape – or that Green and Black are going to begin to print chromoliths at six or seven as each new day begins…
… The legend in Roxbury and the South End is that the discipline of the Providence road is so poor that this scream is needed to wake the switch tenders on duty. Far be it for us to vouch for this hypothesis. All we know is that the Providence day break whistle – a protracted yell varying from four to eight minutes –deserves the credit of being the longest established of any of these shrieks which begin the city’s day.

1875 BS Everett –Work of the American Board – Ten year review in 1875 - They numbered in 1865, one hundred and fifty two men and one hundred and sixty three women including one hundred and forty three ordained missionaries, and eight unmarried women. Of the eight unmarried women, two have closed their labors – one after more than forty years of active service, during which one thousand Hawaiian girls were under her instruction…During the ten years 170 new laborer have been sent out, including seventy six single women and thirteen single men. Of this number 44 were children of missionaries following in the steps of their parents. Of the entire number over 200 continue in the field; three men and six women have died…Of the seventy six unmarred women sent out, two have died… six have been obliged to return by reason of impaired health, and eleven have married – three to missionaries of other societies, and two outside of the pale. During the ten years 25 men have died and 23 women. Considering the greater number of women in the field, it is evident that as a rule, women endure the missionary work better than men…Of the thirteen single men, three have married in the mission field, three have retired from the work, three have come home with impaired health and one fell victim to Romish intolerance.
The attempt to give any just conception of the work by actually accomplished by figures is as unsatisfactory as it is unjust. How shall we estimate the moral changes in the character and aspirations of millions of men under the influence of the gospel, as illustrated by the example of thousands of their own countrymen, rescued from the degradation of heathenism, and now compelling respect and admiration? How shall me measure the influence of the press, scattering its millions of pages of Christian literature far and wide, in city and town, on island and continent, in twenty different languages, in all parts of the globe? How estimate the results of education reaching hundreds of thousands of youth, wakening to new thoughts and hope, freeing the mind from its bondage to the superstitions of ages and leading to a just recognition of the spirit and power of that gospel which everywhere quickens and develops the intellectual as well as moral faculties of men?
The number of native pastors has gone up from thirty eight to one hundred and ten. The native pastors take possession and cultivate the fields already won, leaving the missionaries with other native agents, free to push the work of evangelization into the regions beyond. The power of the gospel has had its finest illustration in the in the high intellectual and Christian character of many of these pastors. Men are to be found among them of eloquent speech, of wise counsel, faithful in the watch and care of souls, prudent in the administration of ecclesiastical affairs. Churches under their administration represent finished work – our crown of rejoicing
By means of native agency, the actual field of operations has been enlarged, during ten years, full forty percent. The number of towns and cities occupied has increased from 441 to 575. The entire number of additions to the mission churches is 12,820 or over 100 to each ordained missionary…These conversions must be estimated by the fact that they represent the beginnings of Christian society amid the moral wastes of heathenism and corrupt forms of Christianity; and not the fruits of established and honored institutions. These followers of Christ have professed their faith in many instances with the loss of houses and lands, of family, friends and social standing, and sometimes at peril of their lives.
There have been no widespread and general awakenings in any of the mission fields – such as were witnessed in former years in the Sandwich Islands, among the Karens, and more recently in Madagascar – though such movements in some fields are anticipated at an early day. The preparation is making or already made and we wait for the Spirit of God to quicken into life the seed sown and nurtured in prayer and faith. Heathenism, whether in pagan or papal lands, entrenched in the native depravity of the human heart, buttressed about with forms and usages and institutions consecrated by the arts of a crafty priesthood, and the traditions of generations, involving the entire intellectual life and social life from infancy to the grave, yields but slowly to missionary effort , but it yields.

“In the early 1880s Boston was a rather provincial city, and life was simple.”

1875 Mary Baker Eddy publishes Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures, founds first Christian Science Church 2 years later
1876 U.S. Coast Guard Academy founded at New London, Conn.;
Mark Twain, living in Hartford, Conn., publishes Tom Sawyer,
Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone in Boston
1877 First intercity telephone communication, between Salem and
Boston; Black Beauty by Anna Sewell first published in America
by Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Rhode Island School of Design founded; amendment to
New Hampshire constitution abolishes rule that governor, senators, and representatives must be of the Protestant faith; Charles
S. Pierce, "Fixation of Belief"
1881 Boston Symphony Orchestra founded; University of Connecticut
established at Storrs; Frank Munsey of Maine starts the nation's
first illustrated general circulation magazine; Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., The Common Law

1881 Home for Intemperate Women purchased house at 41 Worcester Street. Later moved to Binney and Smyrna Streets, Roxbury

BS Everett: A week in Boston… Students everywhere…they say the shop girls carry rolls of music as they go to their work, so they may be mistaken for students. I don not believe that this is true. True you never enter a streetcar but you see a roll of music in someone’s hand; but if you knew how many music teachers there are not starving as well as how many there are starving, you would think there must be thousands upon thousands of foreign music pupils, besides the thousands upon thousands who are at home.
The natives are strange people. Everything is true which is said of their coldness, shyness and self-esteem. And yet it is all mixed up with a curious self-distrust and an abject certainty that things are going wrong, which belongs, I suppose, to the inherited belief in original sin. In it all there is all the Puritan intensity. What they do they do with all their might…The Quarter Millennial Birthday of the First Church….Episcopalians, Methodists, politicians, college men, all came together for this eulogy on the Puritans. The most beautiful church I ever saw was crowded together with an assembly which remained for five hours, almost unbroken for the splendid and imposing ceremony…The minister of the church is Dr. Rufus Ellis….The first group of speakers came Winthrop, Long and Prince. Winthrop is the lineal descendent of the glorious Gov John…Long is the present Governor – the idol of the young men who think is the man of the future; Prince is the Mayor of Boston…Then came the Te Deum rendered by a full choir and a grand organ. I wonder whether old Winthrop would’ve approved.

1882 BS Everett Hale… on American Society….It seems hard enough that the first two novelists of our Country (Howells and James) are so often driven for subjects to the behavior of American girls in Europe. It is a pity that the well taught and bred girl or boy, even in what are the best grades of American life, should be led to believe that American life is incomplete until “the last sweet thing” has been added in Europe.
…The truth is that the rather scanty lists of the heroes of James and Howells tales are recruited, people who spend more than half their life in Europe, and return only to scold their agent for the smallness of their remittances, have, will have, and can have no perceptible influence for good on the real civilization of America.
…We may go further and say that the large cities have, on the whole, very little weight in the social improvement of America .The reason is obvious. The large cities concentrate throngs of the Celtic tribes, always slow to scatter in emigration; they are deadened by abundance of pauperism and crime’ from the nature of the case they are the stalking grounds of shoddy men and women, of publicans, of farmers of revenue, and other accumulators of new wealth, and from the nature of the case, they abound in imitators of foreign fashions, It is vulgar people from such centers who have given Mr. Matthew Arnold his dislike of American manners. At the same time it is true that in the close vicinity of Mr. Tweeds’ showy clubs and expensive assemblies there might be found in New York social life, as dignified, as elegant, as any in the world. So in this city within sight of gambling houses and almost within sound the music in the dancing halls, there exists circles of society not to be spoken of as “a few rather highly civilized individuals”
In the smaller cities in the interior in the Northern, Middle and Northwestern states there exists and elegant and simple social order as entirely unknown in England, Germany or Italy... as the private lives of the dukes and princes is unknown in America.
…While the few “highly civilized individuals” are hopping backwards and forwards over the Atlantic to learn what is the last key-note which a pinchbeck emperor has decided on, or what is the last gore which a man-milliner has decreed, these Americans in the dignity of their own homes, are making America.

Bs v32 “In a quiet nook in the city of Boston there is situated an ancient hostelry, more like an English inn or London chophouse than an American dining room. Its present owner, Hon William D. Parks, for he has sat in the State Senate is now the oldest landlord in Boston, son of the founder of the establishment, Thomas Park, who came from Bath England and opened in 1842 a lunch room in a building owned by Josiah Quincy on Devonshire Street…It was known as The Shades… here was won’t to congregate those who were fond of racing and sporting, the talk was of the pedigree of blooded horses, and stories were told of the old English hunts of other times. The patrons of those days were fond of English cooking and English beer. The elder Park was the model jovial landlord but woe to the man who insulted him, for he was adept at fisticuffs…From Devonshire, Mr. Park removed to Morton Street, where his well earned reputation was sustained. Mr. {Park (jr.) has been for several years now at Bosworth Street, formerly Montgomery Place.
There are some gentlemen who have dined here for forty years. Every year since 1842, there has been sent, in order to reach here for Christmas time, a round of English beef, which would average one hundred and twenty five pounds in weight, which is served on the 26th free to all patrons. Everything is so thoroughly English you have but to shut your eyes and imagine yourself again “within the sound of Bow Bells” The roast beef is cooked as it was forty years ago, and the pold spit brought from England is still used. Yorkshire pudding is always served with the rare roast beef, and the guest can order foaming English ale; or the celebrated “Musty” which can only be had here, and receives this name for the reason that there is nothing musty about it, like the Hansom cab…
At the tables, always neat and clean, may be seen gentlemen of all walks of life… A gentleman well known to me has dined there for nearly a quarter of a century. He always sits in the same seat, and has the same waiter, who orders his dinner without asking what he will have, and when he has finished, the waiter places before him a piece of cheese and crackers stamped with the name BENT. I asked him why he prefers Bents to all others. He said that there were several reasons why…They were made of first class flour, on honor. HE had seen the process during his boyhood. Deacon Samuel Adams sent yearly a keg to his father….”

1885 BSN: A reporter assigned to cover the underworld had only to go to a place known to the police as ‘the old Wooden Building on Richmond St. near the corner of North, a rickety affair three stories high. It had been in existence nearly half a century.
In 1885 the leader of the underworld was a Negro, a “Doctor” Bond. He was the owner of the wooden building, a man of pleasing countenance, of medium height and inclined to corpulence.
Dark deeds committed within its walls fill many pages of the police record. Murders have been traced to its door. It was on the second floor of this building that “Mary the Murderer” carved a woman to mincemeat some years ago.”
At night, were it not for the friendly rays of a smoky kerosene lamp, the entrance of the building would be completely dark. It is on account of the darkness that the police have some much difficulty in locating criminals within its vile precincts. There are, it is said, a dozen avenues of escape leading from it. Its cellar is perfectly honeycombed. Several other resorts were visited in the territory known as The Black Sea. There was the Cove district, Fowler’s Liquor saloon, Old Bowling Green, Mrs. Flanagan’s lodging house and others.” From Boston Herald of 1895 quoting a newspaper article of 1885.

1885 BS V1 Apr 4 1885 “ It is rather a curious thing that the mind cure craze should be almost wholly confined to Boston, and that it should have so captivated the erratic Boston fancy. Here it sprang into existence some years ago under the auspices of Dr. Cullis whose faith-cure had in it the germ of this later system…it has become a firmly establish institution with a church…the Ma Metaphysical College on Columbus Ave…
The patient visits the mind curer, a Christian scientist, sits in a comfortable chair and is requested to think of nothing at all, while the operator sitting opposite puts her vigorous mind to work for half an hour That is all….
Science or no science, there remains the stubborn fact that hundreds of people have received great good at the hands of these new doctors, and that remarkable cures are every day reported.”

BS E 157 1885 The center of Cambridge is Harvard Square, around which the college students cluster so closely that the students, as he takes some country friend into the yard finds it hard to divest his descriptions of the guide-book manner. This square in a somnolent triangle, three miles from Boston, whose natural state of calm is vexed by the bells of the horse cars that trundle through it, or by the screams of their wheels, as they round the curve…Once in a while too its dust is stirred by some mortuary precession of cattle on their way to the neighboring abattoirs. At the eastern end of the triangle just where the streets begin to widen, stands a generous old gambrel-roofed wooden building known as Wadsworth House. Which was built in 1726 for the official residence of the presidents of the college…”

Despite its high educational standards, Harvard’s prime function in the 19th century was to serve as a vestibule through which young men entered society
Harvard “ a subtle, cruel typically Boston excursion to remind him he was an intruder”
Caste system
Hasty Pudding is the most famous club – proving ground for election to one of 10 social final clubs. Porcellian, Fly etc.
To 1860 – no water or sewer in the yard. Students carried water in buckets from one of two pumps. Cold water wash only.
Charles William Eliot – 40 years president 1835-1875
1870 Wellesley
Porcellian: what happened to Depression swindler?
“A Harvard Club man”
Harvard – ?? Until 19th century with exception of a few language instructors not a single teacher, not a grad until19th century… 1737 –1790, not one New Yorker entered.
Harvard’s three lies: John Harvard, founder 1638
*1636 not 1638
*John Harvard nothing to do with Harvard founding…
*Imaginary person

BS U116 “The Marlboro (Mass) Times denounces the movement if the colored people of Boston to erect a monument to Crispus Attucks, and calls him the bloodthirsty leader of a murderous and cowardly mob engaged in an entirely unprovoked and wanton attack upon a handful of peaceable British soldiers.” This is a new view of the subject; but then, we once heard a good old lady exclaim, after reading a tablet on the Lexington road which said “On this spot three British soldiers were killed by” etc. “Shocking! Where were the police!” From The Pilot

1886 : BS Stone to commemorate Boston massacre installed outside State House
BS E121 Nov 14 John Boyle O’Reilly’s glowing tribute read at the dedication of memorial to Crispus Attucks on the Common
“And honor to Crispus Attucks, who was leader and voice that day,
The first to defy and the first to die, with Maverick, Carr and Gray…”
NB Criticism of the monument x “assailants of the soldiers were a mere rabble of “saucy boys”, Negroes, Irish Teagues and Jack Tars”…Attucks was a “great burly foul-mouthed half-breed” …

1888 BS Everett : I can remember when “vacation” meant for a public school in Boston, the three days after the third Wednesday in August, and the fortnight following.
There was also a weeks recess or vacation in the beginning of June, For the rest, the Boston Boy or girl, if he or she went to a public school, spent forty eight weeks of each year at school. The scholars had, as a happy phrase put it, three days more at Thanksgiving, They did not have Christmas.
This steady work of 48 hours was exceptional. Except in larger towns, the public schools were open for about 13 weeks in winter and 13 weeks in summer.
The general system now is a compromise between the two., The spring and fall vacations of the old Boston plan are run together in a long summer vacation. Our Boston schools are closed for almost ten weeks….

BS U54 “I can see it now – the old Latin schoolroom where we used to sit, and hammer over Greek, after the small boys had gone. They went at 11; we because we were 12 stayed till 12. from eleven to 12 we sat with those small boys who had been kept for their sins, and Mr. Dilaway. The room was long and narrow… whose walls, when I knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriate to kitchens. But by a master stroke of Mr. Dilaway, those walls were made lilac or purple one summer vacation. We sat to recite, in long settees, pea green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well worn floor. There for an hour daily, while brighter boys that I recited, I sat an hour musing, looking at the immense Jacob’s reader and waiting my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, not much harm came to you. So in the hour you could get fifty three minutes and some odd seconds of day dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow ahead of you broke down, and a question passed along of a sudden recalled you to modern life.” Rev E.E. Hale in Atlantic Monthly.

Latin School
Groton, St. marks, St. Paul’s Middlesex.
Rev Endicott Peabody x Groton “a concentration camp with games”

1888 First demonstration of an electric automobile, built by Fred W
Kimball Co., Boston; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, about
socialist Boston in 2000, published
1890s Maine and Massachusetts battle the gypsy moth; 3 million tons of
ice cut from Maine's lakes and ponds to supply iceboxes in the
U.S. and abroad
1890 Emily Dickinson's poems go through 7 printings
1891Harvard neurologist P C. Knapp writes the first paper in the U.S. on brain tumors
1892 Trial of Lizzie Borden in ax murder case in Fall River, Mass.
1894 Boston Immigration Restriction League established pushes for literary tests to keep out "undesirables"; Radcliffe College affiliates with Harvard

BSN: IS Gardner “asked to contribute to the Mass Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary she refused saying that there was no a charitable eye or ear in Boston….
Whispered that she was a pervert. Her friendship with young artists and musicians was misunderstood – or perhaps understood too well.

1895 BPL to Copley -- nucleus of the collection was a gift of 50 volumes sent in 1841 by the city of Paris Tontine Crescent x Franklin Street –
Matthew Arnold observed a barefoot newsboy reading quietly in the library: “I don’t think I have been so impressed with anything else I have seen since coming into the country.”
1870 Scandal BPL x Bacchante Statue removed and now in New York
Artists sketch of statue said model was Sarah Brown, daughter of an English nobleman and most perfect beauty known to studios. Chas Dana Gibson sketched her. Died last spring at age 26. Her father was an English nobleman, her mother a beautiful Jewish circus rider. She lived a gay life in the studios.

BSN Library x McKim, Mead and White…
McKim bought statue by Frederick McMonnies and presented it to the library to be placed in the courtyard. Cost $25,000 – Nude girl, infant, bunch of grapes
Prudes and blue stockings objected. Gift withdrawn. Sold to City of New York. Replica now in Boston Art Museum. Art museum has its statue troubles. Six nudes, gift of a prominent socialite did not fit in. Placed at side of building and forsythia bushes planted in front of them. Concealed in summer but in the winter they stand out in all their nakedness and they get icicles on the damnedest places.

BSN: Boston Library…after the scandal of the Baccante statue…came the Great Battle of the Library Seal. Over the three main arches of the entrance are the seals of the State, the City and The Library. The Library seal consists of two nude boys holding the torches of learning and supporting an open book. It is all innocent enough but the Boston Evening Record chose to make a campaign of it:
Under huge headlines WIPE OUT THE BLOT they wrote “The women and children of Boston have rights even at the library.” “This indecency must not remain to affront people who wish to enter the building”
The protest was too ridiculous to succeed and as Walter Whitehall of the Athenaeum said “the boys remain – neither clothed nor castrated.”

BSN Library statue The Baccante by MacMonnies in Paris depicted the figure of a joyous dancing girl holding an infant cradled in one arm while in her other she dangled a bunch of grapes before him. All Boston broke out in a rash of Puritanism. Both the girl and the baby were nude. She wore no wedding ring. The grapes could symbolize nothing but drunkenness and it was said that the model who posed for the statue was a notorious prostitute.
Post came out with a screaming headline “ Art Commission will set up Naked Drunken Woman for our inspection”
A committee of City Fathers was given a private view and it was said that the Rector of one of the local churches had a very private look – alone, at midnight and behind locked doors.
The gift of McKim was rejected but the poor girl was not homeless long. The wicked people of New York were happy to buy her and place her in the Met. Less than a year later our own museum purchased a replica and it has been there for years unashamed and uncriticized.”

The moral storm had hardly subsided when the library received a gift from the King of Greece. It was a bust of Bacchus and the pure Bostonians became vocal once more.

Then a newspaper reporter noticed that the seal of the library was carved over the entrance. The seal was supported by two nude boys. The storm broke out once more in spite of the fact that only a person with more than 20/20 vision could make out the figures. This was too ridiculous and the figures remained, as Walter Whitehall said “neither clothed nor castrated.”

1895 W E. B. Du Bois receives Ph.D. at Harvard; Connecticut's Hart Rubber Works produces first American air filled tires; player piano invented and manufactured in Meriden, Conn.; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Soldier's Faith
1897 William James, The Will to Believe
1898 Anti Imperialist League founded in Boston to protest military action abroad, specifically in the Philippines; first U.S. subway be gins operation in Boston
1898 Spanish American War – rumors…A public banquet in Havana to celebrate the bombardment of Boston
1899 Biggest banquet in nation's history takes place in Boston 2000 diners, including W B. Pluncket and President McKinley, and 400 waiters to celebrate U.S. Senate's ratification of peace treaty with Spain

BSN: There was a young lady of Boston
A two horned dilemma was tossed on
As to which was the best
To be rich in the West
Or poor and peculiar in Boston.”

1884 BSN: Globe Jan 1884 notes:
Steamship far to any point in Europe $21
Kentucky Bourbon $1.40 qt.
Women for housework $3 a week
Ladies complain that food cooked by the new electric method tastes strongly of electricity.
Best type of shoes $3
Ladies scarlet all wool underwear 75c
Men’s suits $8
Overcoat $5

BSN “Professor Eliot of Harvard used to say that the happiest million people in the world lived in a circle whose center was the Boston State House”

BSN “Mrs. Cabot lunching with Chicago friend:
In Boston we place all our emphasis on breeding – in fact we think almost exclusively of breeding. The Chicago lady replied: Well we think that’s fun, too – but we do find time for other interests.”

BSN: Probably the best example of Boston smugness is statue of Phillips Brooks statue in front of Trinity –Copley Square:
“Preacher of the Word of God
Lover of Mankind
Born in Boston
Died in Boston”

BSN: You can tell the real Bostonian who says, “Lewisburg Square” not Louisburg
S.S. Perce not “Pierce” Fannel Hall not Faneuil

BSN: Copley Square, pronounced Cope –ly by the artist himself. Hard to realize that during the Revolution a French sloop anchored at this point.

BSN: Back Bay filled in 1857 to 1894. Mrs. AD Whitney “The Back Bay has been filled in a section of Paris dumped into it.”

BS F206 There is a process of a perfectly artificial kind which is yet supposed to absolutely indispensable by a large number of important personages here in Boston…It is called “coming out.” To young females it has hitherto been presented as an unavoidable obligation. Men “get out” somehow, without any formality though I did hear a typical “afternoon-tea” kind of man, as he good naturedly qualified a lady’s age, lisp out “Oh, no she cant be that old. She came out the same season I did!”
In plain English to be a bud, to be presented to society, to come out means the condition of grown up party going, to which young women have been taught to look forward, from early girlhood, as the important era of their lives, to the excitement of which father and mother, brother and sisters, latent admirers, schoolmates, and old family servants contribute by their active sympathy and intense occupation. No less a person than Judge Grant has magnified the importance of the debutante’s plunge in fifty-eight pages of his Confessions….
The cynical observer who sees the girl that was a blushing child yesterday scarcely feeling it delicate that the other sex should look down upon her from the walls of her maiden bower, talks of a “lamb led to the sacrifice.” Time and the Hour, Boston May 1897

Boston women were strangely Spartan – China captain’s wife: “There, do I look like a boy?”
Reform and puritanical bent of women
Margaret Fuller, archetype of a 19th century Boston woman: “I know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”
Fuller = indoctrinated counterpart of the merchant prince
Julia Ward Howe (Battle Hymn); Amy Lowell: Cary’s: Cabots etc.

Isabella Stewart Gardner -- Chiang Yee: “…said she was descended from Robert Bruce of Scotland and counted Mary Stuart among her ancestors. She actually belonged to Invernahyle branch of the Appin Stuarts.
The Rajah and the Light of India” (headdress jewels)
ISG – Japanese friends in her box at opera – in costume of no invite

Masked Ball x Verdi – to get round objections of the Rome censor in 1859, Verdi transplanted story from Rome to a factional Boston!!

“Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated” –Thomas Aldrich Story of a Bad Boy Bibl

IMMIGRATION

Late 1880s and 1890s majority Italians – Waterfront of North End = 1000 in 1880s x 7000 1895 – then to East End and other areas that had been Irish
“la via vecchia” the old way of life

1880s –1890s – Jews…In 1840, there were less than 40 Jews in Boston. By 1860, there were 1,000, mostly Polish. 1853 German Rite x Temple Israel.
1910 – 80,000 Jews seven Yiddish newspapers and active Yiddish theater
1906 West End “ It was a beautiful time for the Jews.
Poles on line that separated South Boston and Dorchester

1900 – 1910 150,000 Italians – Bay state
80,000 Poles
25,000 Lithuanians
Boston, Lowell, Lawrence, Brockton

Chinese: “For almost a century Boston had maintained relations with mainland carrying on a valuable China trade that contributed to personal fortunes of many local merchants.
1890s First permanent Chinese community
1875 Chinese brought in to break a strike at a shoe factory in North Adams. Settled in area around South Station.
1890 South Cove = 200 Chinese residents

BS R329…A Chinese lot at Mt Hope… “Chairman LeForest Hall of the Board of Directors if Mt. Hope Cemetery declares that there is no occasion for misunderstanding on the part of lot owners in Mt Hope with regard to the recent sale of a lot to the Chinese. For many years past the Chinese have entered Mt. Hope and performed their peculiar burial rites in and amongst the graves of lot owners and in some instances have gone so far as to carelessly set fire to and burn the shrubbery, They have also scattered papers and other debris all over the property,
To the end that a better condition of things may be secured the trustees decided to sell them lot of which they have exclusive control. It is located at the far end of the cemetery, beyond the Potters Field and will be fenced in. It will not be used as ground of burial but will be devoted to grounds where in the Chinese may perform their funeral ceremonies, The internments will be made as heretofore in graves secured by the purchase in the city lot.”

BS G 3 population 1895
Irish 220,000
“Old Americans” 80,000
Scotch 35000
Jews 30,000
English 30,000
Germans, not Jews 20,000
Italians 20,000
French 10,000
Scandinavians 10,000
Negroes 10,000
Portuguese 4,000
Chinese 1,000
Various 17,000

In the eighteenth century, there was a larger proportion of Negroes than now.. in 1752 there were 1541 negroes or nearly 10 percent of the total population of whom half were slaves
With the gradual abolition of slavery they rapidly decreased and in 1790 there were only 766. In 1860 they constituted about one percent and now about two per cent.
The first record of any immigrant other than English is in 1652 when the ship John and Sara brought 272 Scotchmen – Cromwell’s prisoners, who were sold to service.
The first considerable influx of Irish Catholics was in 1737 when the Charitable Irish Society was organized. It is curious that among the early rules of this society was one that no Catholic would be eligible for office. It is recorded in the Weekly Rehearsal of 1732, as an interesting piece of new, that an Irish priest had said mass among some Catholics of his own nation, and it was guessed that “we doubtless have a considerable number of them here.”

“A New Englander felt much at home among his own people in London than in one of our seaboard cities” OW Holmes:
Some moved out to Dover, Marblehead
Others + “drastic measures”
1894 Immigration Restriction League x Henry Cabot Lodge
“an inferior race”

“Society to Promote Good Citizenship”
Neighborhood centers called “settlement houses.”
Social and education service to slum dwellers
South End House/West End House
Encouraged the better classes – young men and women from Harvard and Radcliffe – to put talents to good use by helping immigrants

1892 Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.
Mitigate dangers of European style class hatred: established Denison House in crowded South End – movement of Wellesley grads into the congested immigrant neighborhood in belief that the “influence of ladies” might be a good thing
BIBL: Women in the City x Sarah Deutsch

BEACON HILL

BSN: There is another side to Beacon Hill but people rarely talk about that. Like our own back side it is there but not mentioned. Here are slums or near slums where the poor live near enough to the rich to act as servants and to be convenient as objects of charity.

In 1790 Harrison Gray Otis nephew of James Otis married Sally Foster—the prettiest girl in Boston. Five years later he built her a house as an anniversary gift. (Cambridge and Lynde)
Mrs. Otis helped to complete Bunker Hill monument. Funds exhausted. Ladies gave a great Bazaar and sale held in Scollay Square. Mrs. Otis sold kisses for five dollars and raised over $1000.

In 1843 William Miller a popular revivalist preacher predicted the end of the world. HE named the date and the hour. His large following the Millerites built a tabernacle where they could gather to meet their end in comfort. End did not arrive. Tabernacle sold and used for lectures and concerts. Jennie Lind sang here. Italian opera was sung here for the first time in the US. Uncle Tom’s Cabin showed for the first time with real bloodhounds!
For over a hundred years a place of refined an elegant entertainment – The Old Howard.
And here today “there is something doing at the Old Howard from 9 to 12”
Christmas Eve on Beacon Hill

About 50 years ago, clergyman named Shurtleff living on West Cedar Street introduced the European custom of placing a candle in the window to guide the Christ Child. Idea spread. Now almost every house in Boston is illuminated.
In 1907 Ralph Adams Cram, the famous architect with a group of friends sang carols on the hill. This idea spread to others. Now traffic is suspended – orderly crowd. Scene of beauty and deeply religious significance enacted by the Hill such as is seen nowhere else in the world.
For many the evening ends happily with hot Tom and Jerrys at the staid and most respectable Hotel Lincolnshire.

Beacon Hill by Mildred Weston, unpublished
“Let’s go up to Beacon Hill
Right now – if you don’t care
There’ll be a million tulips out!
And a million sailors there! (****)
Let’s go to the Public Garden
Lets sit on the Frog Pond rim
Let’s take some rides on the Swan boats, daddy
And watch the real swans swim”

BS E43 March 1, 1884? “OLD Families Who Share in a Squatter Sovereignty” – death of Jonathan Mason, of old time Beacon Hill notoriety removed the last one who could, in a personal way, explain the history of squatter sovereignty in that delectable portion of Boston’s select aristocracy. Tradition has it that there were some queer things in those days when the western slope of Beacon Hill, then an unbroken pasture of briar wood and weeds came suddenly into possession of certain individuals, and the court end of town was changed from Fort Hill way, Pearl Street, High Street, Franklin Street and Tremont Street to the westerly slope of Beacon Street, below the old Hancock mansion, including Mt Vernon Street, which then contained the large open area residences of Messrs, Mason, Joy and Gibbs.
The Junto – as it was then called, embraced the names of Harrison Gray Otis, Jonathan Mason, John Jay, David Sears and a man who figured largely then as an architect and builder – Cutting, by name, changed since to Cotting.
Official documents say that these parties purchased, but tradition and contemporaneous facts prove that there was no title which could be considered vested in the eye of the law. There was no proof to show that this territory ever belonged to Blackstone, and the Hancock estate never claimed it, and therefore it belonged, according to the old colony laws, to the state. But the priority right of settlement and occupation carried the day, and the fortunes of the descendants of some of the first families are based upon such an uncertain tenure, and yet it was a sort of Pandora’s box to those who claimed. The social scandals, the family quarrels, the intermarriages which followed and were broken up, would, if truthfully told, surpass any court record in Europe. The Masons as a family and race were haughty to a degree, cultured, of course, because culture in those days was the exception. Of all the families I have named there is scarcely one left to perpetuate the follies, the vices or the riches of the originals – that is, bearing the same names.

BSN: Beacon Hill where dwell those socially immaculate who inspired Tom Appleton to coin the phrase “Cold Roast Boston” (See note re Nahant)
Beacon Street which was originally called Almshouse Lane.
Violet window panes #64 Beacon St Dr Vernon Briggs. X shipment of glass from England in 1818
#40 The beautiful Women’s City Club.. his is the house where Longfellow courted Fanny Appleton. A Bullfinch design furnished in the early 19th century period. The dazzling crystal chandelier was purchased over 100 years ago from the historic Gore mansion in Waltham by Frederic Tudor, the ice king
#10 ½ Athenaeum – The Life of a Highwayman George Walton wrote the book in the Mass State Prison, where he was later hanged. Published in 1837 and bound in leather made from Mr. Walton’s own skin.

BSN: Louisburg Square; Joseph Isagi, Consul to Turkey 1844-53 lived at #3. Sent to Greece for a statue of Aristides. Residents objected. Added Columbus and a fountain. Accepted.
Pinckney Street: Home of the Cabots and Lowells.

1893 BS F56 Beacon Hill… In the evenings it dozes in slumberous quiet, the hum of the city only being heard from the upper windows of its old-time houses. Some of these houses have big backyards to them, with elm, horse chestnut and pear trees…It used to be said that in this region a house could never be had unless some old family became extinct.

“In the mansion on the water side of Beacon Street”
OW Holmes: Beacon Street: “The sunny street that holds the sifted few”
1816-24 Beacon Street houses x purplish glass from England and exposed to the hot sun...a natural transformation
“Irish cop on the beat who foraged in the family kitchens of the upper middle class Beacon Hill residents”
Mount Vernon Street, Louisburg Square
Aristides statue and Columbus
Fireflies and crickets
Dickens – Charles Street
Thackeray – No 20 Louisburg Square x Vanity Fair
Willow Street – Iron railings to hold onto in slippery weather

Nativity scene on Boston Common
Christmas – kerosene lamps and candles in windows – yellow red orange
Phillips Brooks, Bishop of MA, rector of Trinity Church in Copley Square: O Little Town of Bethlehem

Codfish cakes on the breakfast table on Sunday
“It is a common saying among Puritans that brown bread and the Gospel is good fare”
Baker called each Saturday morning to pick up the family’s bean pot
Oatmeal and Dundee marmalade

What cocktail is to New York, large tea is to Boston, but small tea is the real custom.
Tea: A sort of High Communion of proper Bostonian hospitality. Daily at 5, winter or summer.

1828 Tremont House
1855 Parkers/Parker House Bar
1868 Locke Ober/Jacob Wirth’s
“They swallow but don’t eat; and like the boa constrictor, bolt everything whether it be a blanket or a rabbit” Harper’s 1856
Oyster Union House
Thackeray x oysters at the Parker: “as if I’ve swallowed a small baby”
Parker : codfish tongues and cheeks sauté”
No 9 Knox Street x restaurant

The dining cars on the New Haven Railroad

1827 Lorenzo Papanti Tall, skeleton thin, fiery tempered Italian count – In 1834, Mrs. Otis chose Papanti to be her partner for first every waltz seen in Boston.
1837-1899 = Papanti ballroom
1845 The “Caper” City – all age ball, Lorenzo Papanti x palatial quarters on Tremont Street.
1876 Johan Strauss 100th anniversary of signing of Independence concert…Boston Waltz

1889 Oscar Wilde – Boston girls – “Boston artists reduced to painting Niagara Falls and Millionaires.”

Vincent Club drill routine in British grenadier guards uniform
Hotel Somerset – Mr. Foster – A Frenchman who liked Napoleon III – never mastered American dance

“The Assemblies” – no invitation to anyone outside the first family circle
Alexander Parris – David Sears mansion = now the Somerset Club

Fanny Kemble Butler

Sylvester Graham, 19th century dietician and religious nut
…Baker’s Riot…lecture at Amory Hall… boycott bakers
The Dyspeptic Bostonians, a natural target
1896 Fannie Farmer: “The Boston Cooking School Cook Book”

1890s ..70 percent of all people lived at one time or another in boarding houses for average of three years.

1882 Hotel Vendôme, first commercial building to have electric lights

1885 Hugh O’Brien, first Irish American mayor

1892 Pledge of Allegiance written by Francis Bellamy at 142 Berkeley Street
1897 First subway streetcar – Park to Arlington/First Boston Marathon

Emerson: Plato of the golden age of classical Boston
Thoreau: Socrates
Tory Row, Cambridge – Craigie House, Longfellow House
Hawthorne from Salem to Boston x Peabody sister Sophie
Margaret Miller (‘her faith in demonology” (Hawthorne, Blythesdale romance)
James Russell Lowell – The Biglow papers
Oliver Wendell Holmes – saved Old Ironsides

Late 19th century – The Last Puritan – George Santayana

1900 Dreiser’s American Tragedy x The eminence of Boston literary scene passed

BS B84 Common…Over in the far corner at Boylston and Tremont is the very ancient tiny cemetery in which lies the body of a young lover, who was slain by his rival – it was the first duel fought in Boston with swords and the last duel fought with any weapons in the city. It was here that OWH (Aristocrat) stood with the young schoolmistress from their boarding house , when she dropped her rose upon the grave of the lover. He had walked often with her on the Common he loved, and at last he asked if she would follow the Long Path with him…it was a fateful decision when she said she would walk it with him to the end of their married lives.

BS E20 Lucretia Sturgis, who became Mrs. Joshua Bates, wife of the London banker, was the daughter of North End hatter. On the death of her father, who was a poor man, she was invited by her distant relative William Sturgis, the father of Mrs. Samuel Hooper, to take up her residence in his house. There she met Mr. Bates while on a visit to his native land. Not being in love with him the young lady asked the advice of her cousin William. He relied in his usual off hand way “ Have him, Creeche, have him!” and she did have him, and went to England with him and when he became an opulent member of Baring Brothers, their only child attracted the attention of Mr. Van de Weyer, for many years Belgian Minister at the Court of St. James…When he married Miss Bates she was at once accepted as a member of the charmed circle of British nobility.

RELIGION
The Puritan demanded learned ministers, not Jesus Shouters.
Channing – William Ellery – Federal Street Congregational Church
Theodore Parker “Like so many of his contemporaries, he withdrew to Florence where he died.”
Episcopalian – Phillips Brooks(1869), “An Episcopalian with leanings toward Christianity” (Unitarian critics)
Baptists were Arianists to Puritans – Roger Williams had founded first Baptist church in America Baptists = Ford Hall Forums
Methodists founded Boston University Theological School (Roland Hayes/Martin Luther King Jr.
Lutherans via Boston German immigrants in 1839

Tufts University – social reform

1820 …black millionaire OK in white church (who?)

Old Granary1660), part of the original Common (– John Wakefield, oldest upright stone
King’s Chapel = first burial ground …Winthrop, Chilton etc.
Park Street Church occupied site of the Granary, where the sails for the Constitution were sewn…early 19th century, this was known as Brimstone Corner because 1812 war powder was kept in the basement

From Calvinist – Congregationalist – Unitarianism – Low Church – Episcopalism – Transcendentalism = first of a succession of revolts by youthful Americans against their elders.
Bronson Alcott, a living symbol of the movement

CLEVELAND AMORY
BIBL PROPER BOSTONIANS

Breeding/ well-connected/Boston Social Register x 8,000/cold roast Boston/ (Amory says And this is good old Boston…by anon “western man” Harvard alumnus at dinner in 1905 and refined by Dr. John Collins Bossidy of Notre Dame in 1910)

1945 Court removed still existing ban imposed on the Boston Jezebel, Anne Hutchinson in 1637)

Boston Transcript

Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames

Family consciousness – “man of family supreme”

In a Boston Bowditch home there may be found the portrait of Habbakuk, the town drunk of Salem, side by side with that of his son, Nathaniel, the celebrated navigator and mathematician”
Oliver Wendell Holmes defined the Proper Bostonian: “four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of His Majesty’s Council for the Provinces; a governor or so, one or two doctors of divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of long boots with tassels”

OWH: “I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the 25 cent daguerreotype” (Autocrat 1858)
HCL: “My boy we do not talk about family in this country. It is enough for you to know that your grandfather is an honest man.”
“a blazoned crest on the family silver” “the same in worsted by a maiden aunt”

Lowell Christmas night parties – landmarks of Boston first family gatherings

Saltonstalls at Harvard: Nathaniel, 1659; Richard 1695; Richard 1722; Nathaniel, 1766; Leverett 1802; Leverett 1844; Richard, 1851; Leverett 1914; Leverett 1939…
No Saltonstall has ever married a Lowell (1947)

For a hundred years there have been Augustus Lorings …and other imposing names in Boston’s legal profession

Everett, a giant among proper Bostonians is nationally remembered almost solely for his part at the ceremony at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, in which he delayed Lincoln’s two-minute Gettysburg address by an oration lasting two hours.

First families marrying each other in a way that would do justice to planned marriages of European royalty
In such alliances there could be no blunder.
Cousin spouses.
Strict in rules of adoption – cases in which elder members of the family dissuaded a childless couple from adding offspring of unknown parentage to the family tree.
…daughters instead…children of these would not carry on the family name.
Scion courted his girl in the slow but steady Bostonian manner and upon death of his parents married her – thirty years later!

OWH: “We all carry the Common in our heads as unit of Space, the State House as the standard of architecture, and measure off men in Edward Everett’s as with a yardstick”
OWH declared that in the minds of all true Bostonians is the idea that Boston is the hub of the solar system.
“Why should I travel when I am already here.” – Beacon Hill lady.
Midwest: “A grand reservoir for our excess population” declared one Boston clergyman when area was first being settled.
Two sisters from Iowa to marry Bostonians…”In Boston we pronounce it Ohio”
Barrett Wendell – Blarney Stone – Did not kiss it but touched it with his umbrella and kissed that….BW’s letters…”the towns are brand new and very ugly” “I wonder if anyone ever reached the age of thirty five in New England without wanting to kill himself” –“liking Boston is like saluting the flag”
Boston x English traveler: “Proud to be a chill on the hot surface of American strenuosity”

To the salesman, Boston and environs have long been known as graveyard circuit –no worse fate can befall a traveling man than to have to spend Sunday in the city
New Yorker: “The best things about Boston are the east wind and the Merchant’s Limited.
Gov of Georgia: “a festering mud puddle”
“Election of a mayor who at the age of 71 faced the prospect of 47 years in jail.”

It’s been said that Walter Winchell would’ve starved to death if he lived in Boston.
“Except for charity no report has ever crossed my threshold, Mrs. Fiske Warren, three generations a first family leader.
Mrs. Eleanor Sissy Frotheringham, first family debutante, who turned into a nightclub torch singer and later married a sax player – Boston Herald file note: “Not to be referred to as a glamour girl”

Harvard: A Bostonian might speak disparagingly of the House of Bishops or the College of Cardinals but not of the Harvard Corporation.
Bishop Lawrence: “The President is in Washington seeing Mr. Taft.” (re Lawrence Lovell)

Bluntness of Cabots
Frostiness of Lowells
Tactlessness of Adamses
Perversity of Forbeses
Irascibilility of Higginsons
Frugality of Lawrences
“It is strong stock that can produce the same traits of character in generation after generation, I don’t laugh at it.” James Byrne, son of an Irish contractor who worked his way through Harvard tutoring sons of first families and became only man of his background and religion ever honored with membership of the Harvard Corporation.

Major Henry Lee Higginson “An institution” – Pro corporations. Monopolies. “Bully Hig”
“Institution men” essential to countering growing influence of the Irish Catholics and other foreign-born men of high influence.
Ran the men who ran the mills and banks and railroads and insurance companies.
1920 – campaign against Sunday movies and golf…”workmen who had no sport on Sunday do their best day’s work Monday.”

Watch and Ward society
Moral guards
Phillips Brown, one of the founders/Bishop Lawrence, officer/ Godfrey Lowell Cabot treasurer, with W&W for half as century
Beacon Hill Office x quarter million
Books and sex stimuli of all sorts
On Guard magazine
1878 – Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
1945 Forever Amber – Winsor came to address Boston Book Fair…same day her book was retired from the bookstores
1927 68 books – Wells, Lewis, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Anderson etc.
1930 MA obscenity law changed from book that contains obscene language to is obscene
1945 moved from criminal to civil courts
Theater – O’Neill Strange Interlude banned in Boston but played in the suburbs = Quincy

A blackmail ring terrorizing blue bloods by luring them into compromising position ? Dan Coakler and Joe Pelletier
A Russian war picture depicting Nazi persecution of a Jewish doctor banned on Sunday showing as a “incitement to riot” but allowed on Wednesdays!
BUT Old Howard burlesque show not molested
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – Rare books – “the expurgated edition”

Transcript, a voice to carry their way of life to the masses.
Daily afternoon paper, except Sundays
“Two reporters from the papers, sure, and a gentleman from the Transcript”
Milk and Washington Streets
Wed edition genealogy column
Saturday obituary = highlights of week
“Who nice in the Transcript is dead tonight?”
1830, July 24 first edition – “genteel tub thumper for the blue- bloods”
Poe: “lowest of his class infesting the literary world”
1942 Transcript died

1807 Athenaeum – the only library in Boston for nearly half a century. Aside from a temporary order admitting Harvard professors, it operated in complete privacy throughout the period. 10 ½ Beacon…overlooking the Old Granary Burial Grounds
“scruple room” “a place of social intercourse”
Walton the Highwayman’s bio bound in his own skin

Merchant Frank Stearns

Boston’s Lords of Creation

BIBL: the Young Lady’s Friend 1838 Farrar – her ideal gentlewoman was the daughter of a rich man.

“Ma’am I will thank you for that goose.” – Daniel Webster
“Born the day I left Boston” – Frank Appleton to CA
“We were tormented on landing by the Negroes. They are coarse and seem to have an Irish accent” (W.I. Montserrat x Jefferson Coolidge)

Visiting card corners
Works of male and female authors separated on bookshelves (!)
Mahjong

“A view of the Common as a fenced-in patch of his own such as Louisburg Square” where the 22 proprietors own the entire square outright and meet annually to tax themselves for upkeep of the park and their street.
Ames Corner – “rich man’s sidewalk – small areas of glazed brick laid in fancy patterns – Ames once officially connected with 75 railroads
BELKNAP Street (three parts) Upper: First family and some of the city’s finest houses; middle, long-standing residents but humbler; lower part = colored. Proper Belknaps petitioned to have their street changed to Joy St. Middle asked and then the Colored put in their request to be part of Joy. Name Belknap was abandoned and has not been used since.

Harrison Otis Gray – 19th century King of Boston Society
Joshua Montgomery Sears, a Boston merchant who was so busy making money in West Indies trade he didn’t get married until he was 65. On his death in 1857, he left Joshua, age 2…At age of 21, he became Boston’s largest taxpayer.

Spendthrift trusts tied up first family fortunes
Two year unpaid bill at store
Lowell and Lawrence Trusts.

Brandeis on Lowell: “men blinded by privilege, who have no evil purpose, and many of whom have distinct public spirit, but whose environment ,,,,has obscured all vision and sympathy with the masses.”
But Lippman called Louis B Brandeis “ rebellious and troublesome member of the most homogenous, self-centered and self-complacent community in the United States.”

Conflict – Plymouth – Pilgrims…hardly one of them had more than a few drops of blue blood…Boston was a definitely aristocratic undertaking, financed to tune of $5 million and made up of upper crust merchant adventurers…Two not overly cordial. In 1645 the Pilgrims asked Winthrop and Boston to help them against the French. Winthrop said OK provided the Pilgrims paid expenses. Pilgrims couldn’t so the undertaking fell through – except that the Bostonians promptly went down and began to trade with the French.
Not democrats – “If the people be governors, who then shall be governed” – John Cotton.
True Boston Puritan = Puritan who will never admit he is one.

With few exceptions all today’s first families are NOT those families that rose to early prominence in the city’s history.
Family fadeouts: Robert Keayne, a tailor who became Boston’s first great society merchant – Thomas Boylston – Paul Revere
Some died out…others were Loyalists – Many lived too well to last. They spent money instead of leaving it to their descendants e.g. John Hancock, spent half a million dollars in 10 years after Revolution/ Otis: Here was extravagance on a truly horrid scale – four meals a day starting with foie gras
The Quincy’s were aristocrats of the southern tradition rather than of the Boston school

Today’s families – from 19th century merchant princes – what family was doing in 150 years from 1630 to 1780 makes little difference – post rev/war of 182 = The Merchant Prince = the real family founder ..post merchant period. It is important that family never spend more than income of prince’s fortune – or produce some other merchants to make up stability
Three most prominent early families: Winthrops, Adamses Saltonstalls…became engulfed in 19th century commercial society.
A 19th century Saltonstall married a widow who inherited three fortunes: Appleton from her husband; Silsbee, father; and Crowninshield, from Mother. Then he went out and made a fourth fortune on his own as a mill man
Sir Richard Saltonstall rode a huge horse around Chestnut Hill with a red carnation in his buttonhole and a derby hat on his head.
His grandfather, Senator Leverett Saltonstall, was a poor man who had to sell part of his wine seller to send his son to Harvard.

Cabot x 1700 Salem – Boston “J&A Cabot” after the revolution…John Cabot, grandson, 1st cotton mill x George ran away from Harvard to sea as cabin boy, successful career, 1st secretary of the Navy x Samuel, shipping m. daughter of Boston’s most successful shipping magnate, Perkins. Son of a wine seller who began career as a boy before the mast and ended by building a business reaching from Rio to Canton
“getting in through the cabin window”
Cabots are the Great Danes or the Mastiffs of the Boston social breed
10 Cabots in 1946/47 Who’s Who

John Murray Forbes, who at 16 swept floors for his supper and at 20 was close to being a millionaire. Brother was Robert Bennet; at 17 to China where he won the respect of great Chinese merchant Houqua worth $26 million in 1830/ correspondence of Houqua
Rev Taylor on Perkins: “Boston’s merchant princes! Do you want to see one, boys? There he sits, look at him…God bless you, sir! When you die angels will fight for the honor of carrying you to heaven on their shoulders.”
Black Ben Forbes – the youngest captain in the China trade ..routed Henry Higginson out of church and hustle him down to the bank to deposit $30,000 in doubloons.
John M Forbes – railroads/ Secret mission of England for friend Lincoln
“Get the business first fuss over the details later”
Friend of Alexander Graham Bell = third fortune
D. 1898 at age of 85
Allan Forbes x 1940s head of family BIBL : Life magazine photos of his Beacon Hill home = picture of Allan Forbes sweeping the sidewalk
Forbes of Milton have long been well known for their love of home and hearth. In summer to their own island off Boston’s south shore: Naushon
Forbes: those descended from Grandfather John Murray, the merchant, are “long-tailed Forbes,” while those from Robert Bennet, the sea captain are “short-tailed”
Robert Bennet dying : I have gone down to the docks, and I am waiting for the ferryman to ferry me over.”

A society founded on the romance of the sea
Codfish aristocracy
“Grandfather on the brain” “grandfather merchant”
“From one degenerate son of old Massachusetts seafaring stock to another” George Homans to John Forbes Perkins

Incredible vitality of women
Boston’s low-heelers…a familiar term for first family ladies
Old English Tea Room
Brittany Coffee Shops
“We’d spend whole afternoons sitting in bay windows and watching people walk up and down Commonwealth avenue.
“The Society of Those Still Living in the House They Were Born in”
The very first woman to land in Boston who came over with Governor Winthrop jumped from the bow of the boat onto the beach in order to gain distinction of being first ashore. Outliving her husband by 50 years, she supported herself by keeping open house for Harvard Students at an inn on Beacon Street and lived to be 105/ AT 103, she had her portrait painted lest her example of fortitude be lost on future generations of her sex.”

Four Brintons in Revolution: Never let me hear one of you was shot in the back!”

Few Loyalist women who were later able to return to Boston were know to change sides.
James Lowell :”My grandmother was a loyalist to her death. When Independence Day came round she would dress in black, fast all day, and loudly lament our late unhappy differences with His Most Gracious Majesty.”

True Bostonian always knelt in self-abasement before the majesty of English standards – the more the center of gravity of the nation shifted West, the more the Boston mind thrown back on itself resumed its colonial allegiance. (Van Wyck Brookes)
“More London than London”

Rarest relic of the China Trade mixed with outmoded Victoriana

“Great bulwark against Irish, Jewish and German invasion”

Married early, girls often went to sea, side by side, with their husband sea captain.
China Seas – ship sinking – wife stopped crew panic
Dumaresa Prince of Boston sea captains – “Blow her up!”

A zeal for reform
Margaret Fuller, Boston’s great feminist
The Proper Boston merchant held sternly aloof from Brooke Farm – his sisters and in some cases, his wife, did not.
“The Temptation of Milkmen”
Wendell Phillips – abolitionist…first speech ever made by a man advocating the rights of women.
“Unembarassable” – “Rules are made for others not her”
Chilton Club – “…claims she saw a first family lady emerge from the Chilton Club dressed in a Mandarin coat dating from the days of the Boston clippers and the China trade.”
City Club Corporation (not Boston City Club) x 180 members – enter through downstairs washroom.

1849 Gold discovered in California

1849 Nov 23, Dr. George Parkman walked off the face of the earth. Nephew of Francis Parkman. X John Webster White. “A Yankee bloodhound” Trial March 1850.

“Boston honest” “Boston dependable” “Boston direct” “Boston formality” “bluntness” “”a certain chronic irritability of Bostonians”

Generosity – “Character of true Bostonian was one of “wholesale charity” and “retail penuriousness”

Love of funerals and funeral going – “Melancholy is the one passion in my life”
1920s were a great period of funerals – Higginson, Gardner, Cabot etc.

Emily Post: “beautiful Boston balls”

Boston assemblies

Hooper Hooper – crossed Atlantic 79 times… “It would have been 80 had I not been in Paris”

Characteristic gait of the Proper Bostonian: Measuring off distances with long, ground consuming strides. Cane beat a brisk tattoo on the pavement as he hurried along.

Exeter Street Theater for movies – originally a church
Personal bookshop
Hotel Vendôme barber
“Cheap” – a word for New York in general
R.H. Stearns – department store – first floor glove counter
“stylish stout”
Every Friday all winter at Symphony Hall – “Symphony afternoon” –“And they will smile gently at the men who did not marry them. Although they may look bored, the will be quite happy. And their shabbiness will be in the traditional manner. For this is the Boston legend.”

“I come from Boston, I’m a Unitarian, and I wear drawers. Now you know the kind of hat I want”

The widow Gore and Joseph/Thomas Lee – in Boston’s gay post-revolution days, never spoke to each other for 50 years. “Let brotherly love continue” Church Bell.
Fay brothers feud lasted 35 years

Emily Marshall Otis, 1820s/1830s died five years after marriage
Eliza x Boardman/Otis “notorious” The first to waltz…established “salon” on Thursdays – “President Filimore, Lord Elgin and an Indian chief” Prided herself on her skimpy refreshments.”
Ticknor salons.
Helen Choate Bell: “Automobile would divide world into two classes – the quick and the dead.” “Go kick a tree for me.” “Asparagus? I always thought the cook braided the ends.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner, daughter of a New York dry goods merchant. In 1860, she married John Lowell Gardner, son of the last of Boston’s east India merchants and moved to Boston. She died in 1924, age 24. She didn’t drink tea, she drank beer. She adored it! Walks down Tremont Street with Rex on a leash. ‘Ce’est mon plaiser” Trumpeter. “Mrs. Jack.” The Gardner Party Jan 1, 1903.
“Walk erect!”

Nahant, first family vacation resort
The Glades
1882 – foxhunting
Myopia Club – North Shore. “Lately an uninhibited and overly rowdy fringe of Boston society, Hunt Balls.

Palfrey sisters/Cambridge to Boston Sarah, 88, learned Hebrew “Creator’s native tongue”

Charles Francis Adams “Charlie Ad” – Deacon – The Adamses have a genius for saying even a gracious thing in an ungracious manner.
Quincy was on the wrong side of Boston’s narrow social tracks.”
Old house – John Adams 1787 stubbornly refused to move to Beacon Hill where they belonged.
Charles Adams today finds Boston Irish “socially fascinating.”
Abigail referred to public as “the mobility”
1929 Charles Francis Adams took office as secretary of navy…His great-great-great grandfather founded the Navy.
Adams Look: intellectual power/iron will/calm determination/trait of self-dramatization
The one Boston family that seems to step in unadulterated fashion from the early Puritan ministers.
John Quincy Adams, the ablest of all/glacier/ wife Louise Johnson made his a miserable life. He began a typical day with a reading of five books of the Bible, a pre-dawn hike of five miles and a nude hour-long swim in the Potomac…against the current

Augustus Hemenway ..plantation in Cuba, kidnapped by pirates, bargained down his ransom”

John Cushing, 16, wanted to be a “writer” – Colonel Perkins sent him to China. At 23, he returned with seven million dollars. Perkins proved his point.

“God of the Unitarians was “an oblong blur”
Bishop Lawrence, Episcopalian leader Against the League of Nations

Merchant “traffickes to remote places”/ most of the best Boston families were founded by shipmasters – every real Boston family has a sea captain in its background
(Marsh/Parker – right era x wrong business /Preston x United Fruit/ Wood x American Woollen – right business x wrong era)
1848 Pamphleteer: “It is no derogation then, to the Boston aristocracy, that it rests upon money.”
A Weld = one of richest men in Governor Winthrop’s troupe – six generations of obscurity to 19th century x two great merchants x shipping and railroads
All were men who, if not actually pirates, were at least Vikings in their methods.
Triangular trade:
Rum to Africa/slaves to West Indies/molasses to Boston … Rum = “groceries and West Indies Goods”
A merchant prince on Merchants Row

1880s Boston was second largest wool market in the world surpassed only by London. As century closed Boston was entrenched as No 2 US export port

“Old time merchants dressed in stocks and long coats, against a background of brocades and silks watching with cold but fatherly eyes for their ships to come in and shaking their hard but honest fists under each other’s side whiskers.”
“A weakness for talking poor”
Thompson’s Spa Blue Plate lunch
“hair shirt complex”

Pewter ink pots

Russell Sturgis, merchant head not only of Boston’s largest East India company but also of London’s Baring Brothers.
Houqua and Russell and Company – No written agreements except a strip of ride paper – “Forty thousand dollars,” Houqua
The Country Club at Shanghai
‘Graveyard eulogies” = biographies
Shrewd, horse-trading Yankee merchant
French writer: “all that was needed was a good constitution and a bad heart”

1853…Boston finance had chance to buy the NY Central RR. Turned down because proposal by a Springfield man – may have reversed positions of Boston and New York, according to historian.
Wall Street was merely the “State Street of New York”

SHORTLY AFTER CIVIL WAR THE RECOGNIZED MERCANT ERA CAME TO A CLOSE – death in 1878 of John Lowell Gardner, last East India merchant, is a sort of generally regarded curfew – after that Golden Gates to Boston’s first family land clanged shut.

Boston colonels – Perkins, Lees, Lymans, Higginson

Spirit of a gentleman
A Boston gentlemen never takes a drink before three o’clock or east of Park Street = before stock exchange closing and in Business district
West of Park = club and residential district
Chestnut Hill – 1850s
Only reason any Bostonian ever went as far as Bar harbor was because lobster was five cents a pound.

Two firms – Kidder Peabody and Lee Higginson went to the wall in the Great Depression

A present leader of the Codman family campaigned vigorously for the Irish-Catholic mayor, long anathema to the blue bloods, and at the latter’s election was rewarded with post of fire commissioner.
At age 75, Captain John Codman felt he was “going soft” and rode a horse from Boston to New York in the middle of winter to prove he was not.

Endicott Peabody distrusted artists: “Something Puritan in him told him that despite his love for them often as individuals, they were a folk who have unreliable relationships with the world, the flesh and the devil, with a consequent weakening of moral fiber. At best, he felt artists are interpretive, and while interpretive is well in its way, it is not on a par with accomplishment.”

Men who counted their words as well as their change.
“ can’t do things myself but I can manage those who can”
“God made me a rich man”
Dyspepsia, crackers and milk
To retire from business is in, Boston first family society, a suspect activity.
The Proper Bostonian doesn’t go to Florida, Arizona or California except perhaps once in his life to satisfy his curiosity.

Ex-ambassador Kennedy has no illusions about being a Proper Bostonian: He would settle for the privilege of not being referred to in the nation’s press as an Irishman. “I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be an American?”

“…his clipper ship money has disappeared”

Provident institute for Savings founded in 1816 through the efforts of a Catholic arch-bishop and which has always had a preponderance of Catholic depositors – It was not until 1945 that a Irish Catholic man became a member of the Board of Directors.

Eles – Eleanor Sears “has never met a George Apley in her life.”
“A man who takes four hours to consumer one highball is not given to snap judgments”

Leverett Saltonstall: “Being a blue blood works both ways. When they don’t like what you do, they say it’s because you had a narrow and sheltered upbringing. When they like what you do they say its because you have had the advantage of education and breeding”

The core of the whole Boston system is clubdom – e.g. Mahjong Monday Club/ Sewing Circle

Samuel E. Morrison: deep significance to the fact that the founding of the Brookline Country Club in 1882 coincided with the closing of the American frontier

BIBL Selection from the Diaries of William Appleton 1786-1862. Struggle between worldly desires and religious convictions. “I feel that I am quite eaten up with business; while in Church, my mind with all the exertion I endeavored to make, was flying from city to city, from ship to ship, and from speculation to speculation.”

1869 See Lowell essay in Atlantic Monthly: “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners” re overseas impression of Americans.
1845 American Facts by George Palmer Putnam

WARD BOSS

Mahatma, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzpatrick, Red Scare, Prohibition, Sacco and Vanzetti, North End

Paddy: the hopeless, witty Irishman, given to drink and quick to tears and laughter, who loved whisky more than “rows and ructions” and Bridget, the chaste and prudent but comically ignorant serving girl.

“Last descendant if the Puritans would be exhibited in a glass case at the U.S. Patent office as a national curiosity” Pilot
“I love Ireland as I love my mother, and I love Boston as I love my wife.”
Patrick Collins, mayor 1902-05

“The New England of Rum, Codfish and Slaves is as dead as Julius Caesar”
James Curley

“The day of the Puritan has passed; the Anglo-Saxon is a joke; a new and better American is here” – Curley

Republicans riding high at the end of Civil War. Yankee Democrats = Old Federalist and Whig Parties against radical social experiments of Republicans. Would have to form alliance with loyal Irish stalwarts who for more than three decades had made up the silent rank and file of the Democratic party

(Fenianism – Irish republican brotherhood. Finians, after a mythical hero of the Celts. Attempts by the Civil War vets to invade Canada)

Post Civil War = many Boston Brahmins set up residence in Europe. Brahmins withdrew leaving control of the city to be assumed by the hated Irish.

Generations of Catholic Children in Irish neighborhoods reared in the catechism of hate that instructed them never to forget the rights of Protestants – “No Irish Need Apply”

1868, Aug 18 Patrick Collins, 25 + Patrick Gorgan x Parker House meeting = Young Men’s Democratic Club
Collins – no high school – Harvard “The General”
One in a line of prominent Irish catholic pols who lost their fathers at an early age and dropped out of school to help their working mothers = Lomasney, Kennedy, Fitzgerald, Curley, McCormack, Powers
15 hours a day – 50c
“The perishing class” – fathers dead in their 30s and 40s
Chelsea – “the angel Gabriel” = beating up young Patrick Collins

1868, Oct Faneuil Hall meeting Collins and such Brahmins as John Quincy Adams, Noble, Gaston, Avery vs. Grant administration corruption

Benjamin Butler “one of the most hated men in the South” smashed the Collins x Brahmin coalition

1876 Patrick Maguire promoted Brahmin Democrat Frederick Prince as mayor – Maguire emerged as the city’s acknowledged political leader – “for the next 20 years party decisions were made in the back rooms of Maguire’s real estate office.

By 1880s, there were 70,000 Irish, no longer “inferior exiles in waterfront cellars”
Fort Hill to South Boston
1880s, gas, electricity, transport development: laborers needed, ditch diggers, hod carriers, pile drivers. cement mixers
generation with quicker wits, shrewder minds x better political connections
successful real estate investors
public-works contractors
owners of trucking companies
managers of construction corporations

1881 Collins to Congress
Collins = Consul-General in London?
As Mayor…died only two months before ending second term in 1905

1882 Maguire’s The Republic – “to champion all things Irish and attack all things Republican.”

1884 Mugwumps x Republicans = Cleveland

LOMASNEY
b 1859 Both parents died when he was 11. Newspapers, shining shoes, etc.
Hendricks Club
Ward 8
BSN: Winter Place running off Winter Street…here is Lock Ober’s, where the Ward 8 was created – and here is the best food, the most potent drinks, and the must alluring barroom nude to be found anywhere in the city of Boston.
Mahatma
Lomasney, e.g. found job for 17 year old as a “light extinguisher” in the West End
Lomasney Ward 8 – to relieve thousands of his people from “inquisitorial terrors of organized charity” “food, clothing, shelter”

Lomasney – Mahatma
Room 8, Quincy House on Brattle Street, near Scollay Square = “Board of Strategy”
“He worked day and night for the interest of the people in his district”
“…relieving thousands of the inquisitional terrors of organized poverty”
“He was a god” - Goodwin
Mahatma: “There’s got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to – not matter what he done – and get help. Help, you understand, none of your law and justice, but help.”

Both Martin Lomasney and his brother Joseph were shot in the course of bitter campaigns
New Italian and Jewish immigrants – Lomasney sent his lieutenants to meet incoming boats with “Welcome” signs
“dirty tricks” -- Send members disguised as Protestant clergyman to campaign in rival’s neighborhood
“run away with a girl”
“turned to prostitutes”
“seen eating meat on a Friday”

National politics = Yankee/ ethnic politics = Irish and other immigrant groups
Politics “fraught with the enthusiasm of tribal warfare and the passion of a major theatrical production”
Politics was a life and death struggle to gain power, status and reputation in a city that despised them and relegated them to a permanent underclass

“Emerald Necklace”

Ward bosses – “as well known and highly regarded in their neighborhoods as parish priests”
“What parish are you from?”
Ward divided in precincts, each with a captain, each captain supervised a dozen lieutenants, who in turn supervised workers assigned to specific streets
Each worker had to account to his lieutenant for failure of even one voter to show up at the polls
“like ancient feudal barons or perhaps like old Celtic chieftains, local leaders gathered a loyal following”

Neighborhood clubs or associations
Red Berry Club – North End
Neptune Association – Waterfront wards
Old waterfront wards comprising North End and West End
“recreational” = Irish pubs

Board of Aldermen/Common Council

1884 Hugh O’Brien, came in 1832 at 5, worked in printing at 12
Shipping and Commercial List
first Irish born Catholic mayor, businesslike, sober and cautious
“an Irishman of the better sort

BUT
A number of local politicians emerged who set themselves up as “ward bosses” turning out the vote

John Boyle O’Reilly, writer and political refugee
Exiled Irish nationalist escaped from an English penal colony in Australia
Papyrus Club
Bought the Pilot after six years
Celtic bard
“acceptable” to Brahmins
1888 Crispus Attucks poem eulogizing his role as a black patriot
1889 Address at dedication of Plymouth Rock Monument

BS CC 151 Transcript “Boston’s Oldest House Sold to a Hebrew Millionaire” small item re:
“For the first time in 200 years the old Wells House at 119 Salem Street has changed ownership, having been sold to A Ratshesky by H.S. Crowell representing the Wells estate. It is Mr. Ratshesky’s intention to refit the stores in the Wells House and adjacent buildings, and to construct buildings on the uncovered land in the rear.”:

BSN: Transcript, Oct 18, 1895: Shaving Street is the scene of more robberies than any other place in Boston. It is a short elbow-like way running from Federal Street to Mt. Washington Ave in the So Cove district. From the 1st of May to the first Aug, 36 habitués of Shavings St were sent to the Charlestown pen. There is a gang of young fellows growing up there who are worse than who live in Oak and Hudson Streets.
A thoroughfare that acquired an obnoxious reputation for houses of ill fame was Indiana Place. (Corning Street.) Another street of very low moral tone in the vicinity is Compton formerly Chapman Street.”

BS T52 DEC 1895 re naval fortifications headlines: “Shelled from off Nahant/The Penalty Boston would pay in a War with Great Britain…”Apropos of the pending question of the Venezuelan question and the bold assertion in every quarter of the duty of the government to maintain, against all infringers, the spirit of the Monroe doctrine”

1898, November 26.27 The Portland Storm
1899 United Fruit Company x Long Wharf – largest American trader in the Caribbean x Great White Fleet
1898 Fore River Shipbuilding Company, Quincy –Squantum plant = “Victory Plant” - 1919 69 ships from the two plants

1900 – 1920 Serious dislocation of trade x rail routes to the interior
1900 Trolleys replace horse cars in Boston

BS G84 In 1901 the State Street five were spoken of as “anarchists”

1901 Boston Red Sox founded
1902 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
1903 Teamster’s Union founded
1903 Red Sox win first World Series played, defeating Pittsburgh; New
Hampshire licenses liquor sales, ending 48 years of prohibition;
Massachusetts issues the first automobile license plates

1905 Collins death – “A generation of impressive Irish-born leaders had passed away”

1905 John Fitzgerald runs in without endorsement of Board of Strategy
“lone fighter” battling the machine, the bosses and the corporation
“the little general”
Honey Fitz
City’s royal family
Superintendent of Streets = “a gold mine” of patronage

“Good Government Association”
Honey Fitz versus Storrow
“a tool of the merchants of Boston”
“manhood against money”
“a bigger, better busier Boston”
“Sweet Adeline”

1906 First radio program combining voice and music broadcast from Brant Rock, Mass.

BIBL: Blackwoods Magazine December 1907 article on Boston

1907 Daniel J. Tobin, president of the Teamsters Union till 1952!
1907 William James, Pragmatism; Henry Adams, The Education of
Henry Adams
1908 Fire in Chelsea leaves 10.000 homeless and destroys $10 million in property; Christian Science Monitor begins publication in Boston
1909 New Hampshire adopts direct primary law

1910 + Boston led all US cities in fish market, next to Grimsby England was then largest fish market in the world. – Gloucester was first in salt-fish

MMS: Note in scrapbook alongside Titanic inquiry report : The trouble was too much liquor and prostitutes. It was a fine whitewash job.”

BSN1 pix…”ushering in of New Year on Beacon Hill…crowd on hill in front of the State House.
BS I – Boston born Ambassador Guild to St. Petersburg: June 2, 1912 Kleinmichel, one of the most fashionable residences in Serghievska, made famous by the millionaire diplomat Robert McCormick…”gone are the retainers, flunkies and royally robed couriers of the millionaire diplomat,” and in stead ,,,a strictly American atmosphere. “ As Governor Guild, on March 1907 he issued proclamation appealing for help for Russia. “The harvests of Russia have failed for two years, More than 20,000 people are suffering from lack of food of any kind…The little children are dying in the tens of thousands…The very clothes of little babes are sold for a handful of rye flour…Can we be deaf to the cry of a starving nation, especially when it comes from the nation that stood our friend in the dark hour of our great rebellion.” Boston Sunday Post June 2 1912

1912 Massachusetts becomes first state to enact minimum wage guidelines

1912-1918 Red Sox win 5 World Series

JAMES MICHAEL CURLEY
father from Galway, died when he was 10
Curley and friend taking the Post Office Civil Service exam for two young Irish immigrants – Found guilty by Francis Cabot Lowell and sentenced to two months in the Charles Street Jail. “Did it for a friend”
Irish ward bosses: “A collection of chowderheads”
“Goo goos”
“State Street wrecking crew”
Curley talked knowledgeably about Irish jade
“Young Jim”

Fitzgerald and Toodles Ryan, a blonde cigarette girl from the Ferncroft Inn
Fitzgerald withdrew because of his health
“Naughty, naughty Tommy Kenny”
Curley versus Tommy Kenny = 6,000 votes
Tremont Temple swearing in
Day after the election Curley proposed to sell the Public Garden for $10,000,000

“The People’s Mayor”

Campaign photo 1945 “..Curley (in raccoon coat)…”

BSN: Mechanics Building – 99-145 Huntington Ave…The crowd assembled to hear Curley speak at his first campaign for mayor was so great that the police had to hoist him through the window onto the platform – in the best Gen. Warren tradition.

1913 101,700 foreign-born entrants when immigration at its height
1913 Commonwealth Pier built
Honey Fitz x Port development
1913 Robert Frost, A Boy's Will, George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy"
1914 Yale Bowl, first full size football stadium, seating nearly 80,000,
opens in New Haven; Robert Frost, North of Boston

1914 Cape Cod canal

WWI broke out six months into Curley’s term
Recruiting tents set up on Lafayette Mall
Boston was principal wartime shipping port for Europe

? Curley denounced Pershing and openly criticized any Bostonian to serve with Pershing. Returning vets were scorned

1914 WWI Scores of Boston travelers caught unawares were later repatriated with much difficulty.
Boston 200 miles nearer Europe than any other large port in the US
(And closer to Panama Canal than Los Angeles/ Closer to Rio than NY)
1914 Censorship – 1970 Hair censored
Anti-Semitism: Irish and German bund

1916 Birth Control League of Massachusetts founded

Lusitania
1917, April 5, six German ships seized in Boston harbor x war declaration

NB: Operating at a base at Queenstown, Ireland, Boston destroyer flotilla successfully escorted large American fleets to and from England.
U151 sank Boston schooner Edward H. Coles
For first time since war of 1812 Mass waters were invaded and her coast bombarded by enemy craft?
U156 Orleans vicinity attack Perth Amboy, Boston tug

1917 Yankee Division of Massachusetts is first National Guard division
to reach the battlefields of France
Yankee Division x 5,800

End of war – Boston has become biggest wool center in any country, the largest exporter of boots and shoes, leaded in imports of hides and skins and the foremost fish market in US.
141 miles of waterfront
40 miles of berthing spaces and largest pier in the world

Irish longshoremen: method of hiring gangs of men = “shape up” “shaping up”

1918 Influenza – Boston had 10 times as many cases as NY

1919 September Visit of Eamon de Valera to the MA branch of the American Federation of labor

1919 Jan 15 molasses explosion
Post-War Depression

BSN: Police Strike:
August 1919, the Boston Social Club, an organization of 1290 Boston Police voted to join the AFL because their wages had not kept pace with he increased cost of living, the police stations were unsanitary and they received no added pay for overtime.
August 15 the Boston Social Club was charted as Policeman’s Union under AFL
Commissioner Curtis preferred charges against 8 policemen. Union called strike to become effective evening roll call on September 9. Only 30 out of 42o patrolmen reported for work,
Gov Coolidge called out 100 State Police.

Police Strike – No striking policeman was ever rehired
Boston Police Strike – division Boston Irish
Harvard students offered their services as scabs and strike breakers
“Good American Yankees do not strike”

BSN “During the Boston Police Strike (1919) thousands of crap games were in progress on the Common and a roulette wheel was set up on the Parkman Band Stand. The games ended abruptly when the State Guard bayoneted two men, shot the ringleaders and threw over a hundred into jail – creating a wind which blew Calvin Coolidge into the White House.”

BS Oral Histories VF: “…the police strike. That was a rough time to be in the city. People were robbed, and women were raped. It was not at all safe until the National Guard were called out. All store windows were boarded up, but too late for many were smashed and contents stolen.” – Lyman Carr 1988
“Riding on Boston streetcars, one long seat each side of the car running the entire length, for 5c. Seeing an automobile broken down and hearing people say “Get a horse!”
“When the iceman was coming, people put a card ion the window giving the size of piece wanted. The iceman came with a horse-drawn three sided wagon filled with cakes
cakes of ice, How we liked to eat the shavings chipped from the cake to make it more even. It was so good on a hot day.
“It was fun to stand on the end of Long Wharf and see ocean liners entering port or leaving. On sailing day visitors could go aboard with the passengers…While in the city exploring, we visited many of the great ocean liners.
“There was always the apple man calling out, ‘Apples, apples,’; in thye spring a strawberry man with his call, and year round – like the others with horse and wagon – the rag man. “Any old rags, any old bags, any old hags.”

1918-1922 Mayor Peters x 11–year-old Starr Faithfull

Curley reappeared as a reform candidate to “turn the rascals out”
“benefits and jobs”
Raising money from Brahmin banks
Lee, Higginson and Company/Kidder, Peabody and Co = two largest international banks x 90 per cent of the banking resources of Boston + two national banks Shawmut and national Bank of Boston

Curley helped widen the breach Yankee/Celt—rotted Inner City and Outer City – Protestant and Catholic
Cardinal William O’Connell opposed Curley – a triumphant separatist – “to free Catholics from all forms of Yankee influence”
Curley third time beat Mansfield by 21,000 votes

1914-1950 = Curley x four terms
1914- 1918/ 1922-1926/1930-1934/1946-1950
1911-1914 and 1943-1946 Congress
1935 Governor

Day 1 Curley and the scrubwoman
Shanty Irish – Lace Curtain – Venetian blinds
The Rascal King
Curley: Mansfield “as spectacular as a four day old codfish and colorful as a lump of mud”

JOSEPH KENNEDY

BIBL: Founding Father, Richard Whalen story of Joseph Kennedy
1848, Oct Patrick – Duganstown, County Wexford – Ballykelly Church – New Ross Seaport to Boston
Patrick Kennedy and Bridget Murphy 3 daughters and son – Patrick Joseph, born January 8, 1858
1859, Patrick, sr. died of cholera, 35
Bridget was a hairdresser at Jordan March
(1845 Thomas Fitzgerald left County Wexford – New Ross)
1863 Feb 11 Tom Fitzgerald’s son, John, born in small wooden tenement at 30 Ferry Street – red brick tenement in the shadow of the Old North Church Third of nine sons, father was a grocer by day, salon keeper by night
A bright son of immigrant parents he had been forced to leave college on father’s death
1892 at 29 was the boss of North End Ward 6
Senator x Ninth Congressional District “the boy candidate”
Defeated O’Neil and Nov 6, 1894 to US. Congress

Patrick to school at Notre Dame. Left to work as a stevedore, loading and unloading cargoes on the East Boston docks
“P.J” + Haymarket Square Tavern – whiskey business – Haverhill house
East Boston political boss
1886 PJ to MA House of Reps – Senate – Patrick Collins
1887 Patrick and Mary Hickey
1888 Sept 6 Son: Joseph Patrick Kennedy
1889 Sept 18 John Fitzgerald and Mary Josephine married …lived 4 Garden Street/Old North Church – “once the residence of Gov Hutchinson”
1890 Daughter, Rose born…
Mayor Honey Fitz = the shock of new blood into the corpse of Boston.
“lace curtains”
1915 Young Joe Kennedy and Rose married
Joe made his first million, then turned his back on Boston after he was blackballed by the Cohasset Country Club – moved to Riverdale NY

CHINATOWN

BSN: Chinatown x United Benevolent Association – The Chong Wah Gong Shaw (Six Companies) comprises over 70 families, established about 50 years ago (c 1890s)…The real power comes from their having control of the “jup gum” which means the “picking of the gold”
When a Chinese dies he is buried in a lot which they own in the Forest hills Cemetery. After seven years comes the “jup gum”. The bones are dug up taken to Chinatown where they are cleaned and polished by professional bone polishers, They are then sealed in large cans and shipped to China for burial in Chinese soil. If a Chinese offends the Chong Wah Gong Shaw his bones remain here and his spirit is doomed to perpetual wandering trying vainly to get back to the homeland. Herein is the reason that no Chinese cares to offend the rulers of the Six Companies

BSN…The leaders of the revolt to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty were Chinese of the United States. They came to America as political refugees after the Taiping Rebellion. Most were scholars – not coolies. They all dreamed of and plotted the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and all but one hoped to restore a pure Chinese Emperor. The one exception was Dr. Sun Yat Sen who had studied our system of government and believed that China should be a republic. The Chinese of San Francisco refused to listen to him – he was received coldly in Chicago – laughed out of New York.

In Boston in 1905 he found seven men who sympathized with his views – 5 laundryman and two restaurateurs. They met in a cellar at 12 Tyler Street – and I had what I consider the high honor of meeting with them on one occasion. Here was plotted the overthrow of the Manchu and the establishment of the republic and here was the strategic headquarters of the leaders of that revolt until the Republic was established in 1911. The She Gong tong – the Society of the Golden Lilly joined with him and the republic was formed = In 1644 about the time that the English were getting started in Boston, the Manchurians attacked an conquered China. They overthrew the great Ming Dynasty which had endured for centuries and established a Manchu on the throne. Some of the conquered Chinese formed a secret society – the She Gong Tong – whose object was to restore the throne to China. It was this society which engineered the unsuccessful Taiping Rebellion.

PROHIBITION

BSN: During prohibition a speakeasy was located at the end of T wharf which served a brew so potent that a special detail of harbor police were kept nearby to fish celebrants out of the water.”

Horace A. Stone – showboat
T Wharf Waterfront Club Speakeasy
T Wharf artists

Prohibition: Apathy toward Coast Guard – recalled attitude of the colonists toward smuggling before the American Revolution
Rum Row outside the three mile limit Gloucester to Provincetown
12 to 15 vessels at a time

1924, Oct 24/25 Tampa Stellwagen bank 20 miles off shore x a dozen rum runner
Squadron of 30 fast speedboats Tampa 3 to 5 inch guns
“rummies” powered by aircraft Engines
1929, December The Newport Massacre = killing of three smugglers x denounced at Faneuil Hall
130 vessels engaged

BSN: From 1800 to 1900 Beacon Hill was the stronghold of Boston’s most exclusive society. During the early 1920’s a curious social delusion prevailed. The social climbers felt that a season or two of residence on The Hill would lead to the proper social contacts and give an entrée into the charmed circle of the Lowells, Cabots and Hemmenways. ..Invasion of bourgeois suburbia to the Hill. Matrons and debs flocked to the Hill and quickly scooped up all deluxe apartments and penthouses. As thee new members took over on Pinckney, Mt. Vernon and Myrtle Streets, Art and Bohemia moved to the back side of the hill where garrets and old houses were still available. Of course they were not successful but the real estate agents prospered.

BSN: The Watch and Ward Society has guarded our purity far beyond our wishes or needs. Their Gestapo methods of using agents provocateur have sometimes brought them perilously close to having their charter revoked.
The list of books which have been banned is long and peculiar. Many of the banned books are innocent, even dry reading.
Including,
The world of William Clissold by HG Wells
Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
What I Believe by Bertrand Russell.

1920 Plymouth Rock moved back to water's edge from town square;
Connecticut's KKK chapters have over 20,000 members, reflecting hostility to Roman Catholics, who since the war are the most
numerous religious group in the state; Department of justice and
local police round up 600 aliens, many Russian, for deportation
in early morning raids and march them through the streets
in chains

1920 January-February—The Soviet of Deer Island (See photocopy) re Deer Island detainees during the Palmer Red Scare. “400 alien reds incarcerated on Deer Island.”

1920 April 15 Sacco and Vanzetti
“1921 Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrant anarchists, convicted for
payroll robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts
A Spanish carpenter
An Italian newspaperman
A young Jewish boy … working on their behalf
Judge Webster Thayer : “Anarchist bastards”
Boston herald Pulitzer editorial: “ As the months have merged into years, our doubts have solidified into convictions”
1927, August 22 Execution
BSN: “Within the recollection of most of us there was staged on the Common the “death watch” at the time of Sacco and Vanzetti trial. The only time that free speech has been forbidden on the Common was a period of two weeks during the Sacco Vanzetti trial.
Upton Sinclair: Boston

1922 E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room
1923 Boston Municipal Airport opened
1923 Robert Frost, New Hampshire
1926 Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conference founded in
Ripton, Vt., with help of Robert Frost

BSN 1927 newspapers:
Sirloin Roast 47c
Smoked shoulder 17
Haddock 7c
Coffee 27c
Fowl 35c
Boys suits two pant $5
Men’s silk shirts $1.79
Women shoes $1.75 at Filene’s

1928 First computer MIT “differential analyzer” – 1944 First automatic digital computer at Harvard
1929 General Court established Boston Port Authority

Merry-Go-Round Bar at the Copley Plaza post-Prohibition

BSN: Muriel Hawks expresses it well:

“Boston has beautiful ladies
Boston has smooth dancing men
And it’s really too bad
In fact very sad
That they taken in the sidewalks at ten”

BSN (cards) South End = “Skid Row” so-called by the Boston Traveler. Bounded by Harrison, Tremont, Broadway and Northampton. Pretty much a men only section. Few men, no prostitutes, men too broken, physically and mentally to be interested…

Few famous men have lived or been born here…Men of great villainy are equally scare: Beno Breen seems to be the only one. He was born in his mother’s speakeasy on Harrison Ave in 1892 and died in the City Hospital on Harrison Ave 45 years later. In his short life he was associated with 10 murders. Created and supplied hundreds of drug addicts. Made over million dollars in drugs and bootleg liquor. Arrested 20 times for assault on police and 30 times for assault on citizens. His gambling and liquor houses raided by police 271 times. There in a nutshell is the story of Boston politics and the police system in the South End in the 1920s.
South End and the Back Bay contiguous…this led Mayor Honey Fitz to say that when Ward 11 met Ward 13 the one instinctively looked for a monocle and the other for a brickbat.

John Fitzgerald in 1896 was instrumental in saving Constitution

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