BOSTON - NOTES ON 20th CENTURY HISTORY

"When confronted with change, Boston all too often displayed a mean and selfish spirit that belied its reputation as the cradle of liberty and the Athens of America
Political intolerance against those who protested Puritan establishment in the 18th century
Religious bigotry against Roman Catholics in 19th century
Racial hatred against African Americans in the 20th century
Change came grudgingly, often angrily and always slowly
Current challenge is the extent to which Boston will be able to retain its own distinctive identity as a city whose moral standards, civic virtues and intellectual accomplishments once inspired a nation."
HUB, Thomas O’Connor

"Boston has enriched my mind with information about the beginning of the history of a nation, the establishing of a new religion, and the publication of a daily newspaper that circulates throughout the world.."
Chiang Yee
“Pride of race has always flourished in Boston
Chiang Yee

1960 New Boston of Mayor John Collins
Collins vs. John Powers
Collins x Boston Coordinating Committee
The Vault met every two weeks at 4 o’clock in a boardroom near the vault of Lowell’s Bank on Franklin Street
$90 million development plan -- “rehabilitation” not bulldozer”

1962 February x Scollay Square Sears Crescent
New City Hall ‘Mycenaean or Aztec overtones” “looks like the crate that Faneuil Hall came in”
Government Center = regional importance x federal influence
1962 Boston experiences economic boom as its urban renewal program first in the country is a tremendous success -- Vietnam War dried up funds for renewal

1963 – JFK assassination

1964 MLK x Civil Rights Act.
1965 Voting Rights Act

1960s Busing in New Haven and Hartford, Conn. to achieve school integration

1966 Edward Brooke of Massachusetts is first black U.S. Senator since Reconstruction

1967 3 masked gunmen steal a Brink's armored truck carrying more than $600,000 from Brockton shopping plaza
Red Sox lose World Series in 7 games to St. Louis Cardinals

1967 Globe December 1967…Goodbye to T Wharf…This winter a harbor lighter equipped with a crane will tie alongside Boston’s famous T Wharf to complete the demolition work that has been going on since September.

1967 Kevin White = Mass Sec of State vs. long-time republican John Winthrop Sears
Financial cutbacks x social disruptions
1967 Louise Day Hicks vs. Kevin White
South Boston x school board x White support = father-in-law William “Mother” Galvin = Charlestown political boss
White began term during one of the most disruptive and chaotic periods in the nation’s history.

Political memories go long and deep in Irish Boston but by the 1970s, the old rivalries were largely forgotten
Irish-Catholic business leaders in Brooks Brothers suits, power breakfasts at the Ritz, practically indistinguishable from Brahmins
Irish fortunes in grocery and liquor business
Kenny, Doherty and Logan = barons of Boston’s liquor business
Dapper O’Neil with a golden voice and a golden touch

Garrity, White, Kennedy, Tip O’Neill – desegregation: “They broke ranks with the Clan” “turncoats”
“organization” Irish x “rebel” Irish

1968 MLK 1968 RK

Boston – as a major academic center and a great focal point anti-war resistance and as an urban community whose black population was increasingly militant could easily have been ripped apart

1969 Race riots in Hartford, Conn.; collapse of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad; Moratorium Day anti war candlelight vigil in Boston; Newton College of the Sacred Heart, near Boston, displays huge red fist on its front door; at Brown commencement, two thirds of students turn their backs on Kissinger

Anti-Vietnam: Boston protest obeying first governor’s admonition against “a standing authority of military men”

Kevin White worked long and exhaustively to keep city under control -- “little City Halls” x 16-year-term
Quincy Market

Mattapan was largest Jewish community in North East
mid-1950s x 50,000
In 1960-70 x 3,000 black families
By 1972, Jewish reduced to 2,500
Anti-Semitism of Irish youth against Jews in Dorchester
Blue Hill Avenue – “Jew Hill Avenue”

1970 Bishop Medeiros was first bishop in 100 years who was not Irish
1970 Hampshire College founded in Massachusetts; Boston Bruins win Stanley Cup
1971 Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves
1972 Massachusetts is only state to chose McGovern over Nixon in presidential election

1972, it seemed that Boston had weathered the worst of storm
1972 class action suit Tallulah Morgan v Hennigan
Assigned to federal judge William Garrity, an Irish catholic from Worcester, Harvard

1974, June 21 After two years – Garrity decision “Boston school committee had knowingly carried out a systematic policy of segregation” and “intentionally brought about and maintained a dual system.”

1974 Sept busing 18,000 children
“death knell of the city”
ROAR Restore Our Alienated Rights
Louise Day Hicks
Louise Day Hicks, anti-busing “a ferocious lion with its paws on a bus” cartoon
“encouraged by sympathetic remarks by President Ford” – pressed for a constitutional amendment to overthrow busing
Discouraged by Ted Kennedy, Ed Brooke and Tip O’Neill

1974-1976 saw series of ugly racial incidents
Stoning, beating, firebombing and looting… earning Boston the label of the most racist city in America. For a city that had been the Cradle of Liberty and Athens of America, this was embarrassment from a historical and humanistic point of view
Schism between white and black but also between working class Irish in the hoods and their more affluent friends and relatives who had moved out to the suburbs. Busing in the hoods, not suburbs unaffected by Garrity ruling.
Irish/Italian felt betrayed by their own kind
“For the opponent on busing, the threat to their neighborhoods and lifestyles constituted a trampling on their freedom”

BIBL Ronald Formisano Boston Against Busing

1975 City still had an official censor
1975 Red Sox lose World Series in 7 games to Cincinnati Reds

1976 Queen Elizabeth II speaks to Bostonians from Old State House balcony when she visits the city during the bicentennial.

1975-76 Tall Ships/ Queen Elizabeth 2 and July Concert
Recession equal to Great Depression belied the bicentennial celebration
Large blue collar population = rising unemployment among blacks
Low income blacks/low income whites
A life and death struggle for economic survival
“In the long Celtic tradition of lost causes decided to go down fighting”
redlining – blacks refused loans in bad or blighted areas
Arson x Fenway
Kevin White – young, liberal, effective big-time city mayor – caught between the judicial gavel of Garrity and the rosary beads of Louise Day Dicks

1976 Boston's Quincy Market reopens (downtown urban mall movement); commemoration of the Boston Tea Party an environmental counter-demonstration highlighted by the dumping of packages labeled Gulf Oil and Exxon overshadows the official tribute

1977 Justice Department supports Maine Indians in their suit against the state for the recovery of aboriginal lands; 2000 demonstrators march on Seabrook, N.H., nuclear plant construction site and state police arrest those who refuse to leave

1978 Red Sox lose pennant race to New York Yankees in playoff game forced after team squanders 10 game lead in last month of season

1978 “Blackfriars Massacre” June 27. Five men killed in basement at 101 Summer Street near South Station. Two men from Lynn and Revere tried and acquitted. = Irish/ Italian mob-related killing.

1979 Massachusetts first state to establish a lottery solely for the fund of the arts
1980 Following lead of California, Massachusetts voters approve Prop 2.5 which limits property taxes; compromise settlement ends legal battle of Maine Penobscot and Passamaquoddy to recover their land in northern Maine federal government pays
tribes $81.5 million
1981 East Boston residents take to streets to protest cutbacks in fund
for fire, police, and teachers

No middle ground x no common ground
Whatever White did was wrong. Blacks accused him of selling out to the white establishment. Whites called him “Mayor Black”
Receptions at the elegant Parkman House
Downtown vs. neighborhoods 1979-1980s
Average working class residents of the hood suffered some of the worst effects of the Recession
1980 census – medium income of Boston was one of the lowest in the country
22 per cent low income/20 percent rent subsidy (national = 5 to 8)
White patronage accusation + birthday party for wife
1983 May 26 Federal investigation led White to retire from political life after 16 years in office, longer than anyone in city history

1983 Ray Flynn vs. Mel King Flynn represented concerns of the neighborhoods as opposed to interests of downtown business and political establishment
1984 Jan 2 Flynn held the largest inauguration in history to accommodate 4,000 friends, neighbors and campaign workers -- “The people’s Mayor”
(1978 607 racial incidents, down to 157 in 1987)
1985, Dr. Laval Wilson = first African American president of schools
(1974 45,000 white pupils to 15,842 in 1987)
Judge Garrity turned control of the school back to the BSC.
School system had become 75 % non-white
Latin American population increase = 1970s/Asian in 1980s

1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, based
in Boston, receives Nobel Peace Prize
1986 After coming within 1out of victory in Game 6, Red Sox lose
World Series to New York Mets after potential 3rd out ground
ball goes through first baseman's legs

1987 Flynn second term victory but setback in his home wards after he announced decision to comply with federal order to desegregate the schools.
Flynn Administration x high tech economy x Massachusetts Miracle x Dukakis

1980s Reagan administration = high-flying economy reminiscent of the Roaring
Twenties
1988 Bush – within a year the MA miracle collapsed.
National recession toll on Boston – guns, drugs, violence, gangs

1988 Yale alumnus sets fire to shanty erected by students to protest
university investment in South Africa; Rhode Island is only state
that celebrates VJ Day, commemorating victory over Japan in
World War II
1990 68 percent of Vermont population is rural, highest of all states;
Vermonters elect a democratic socialist as their only congressional
representative; uninsured paintings $100 million are stolen
from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

1991 Flynn third term

1993 x MCAS

1992 Last surviving member of New Hampshire's Shaker community,
Ethel Hudson, dies at 96
1993 First mayor of Italian descent, Thomas Menino, elected in Boston

1993 Menino/grandson of Italian immigrants who had left village of Grottaminarda in the province of Avellino early in the century

1999 Boston School committee decided it would no longer use race as a basis for assigning children to public schools. Boston school population now 84 per cent minority – more than 97 per cent of city’s 64,000 students would be assigned to first choice schools “Busing is being abandoned” wrote Orlando Peterson in NYT “because there is nothing for busing to do.”

New Bostonians = New Americans of the 21st century

Vietnamese refugees x St Peter’s Church Dorchester
Academy of the Pacific Rim in the old Westinghouse building where Menino’s father worked.

By 1990s, the once dominant and unquestioned authority of the Catholic church in a predominant Irish Catholic city had lost a good deal of its earlier force.
Cult of Celebrity x “Speed over decorum” “innovative over tradition” “e-culture” “high-teach barbarism” (George Will) “incivility” electronically disassociated generation

1997 The Vault officially announced its discontinuance
Murray x Fleet Gilford Bank of Boston and May of Boston Edison decided that the Vault no longer served its original purpose

1990s The "Big Dig" most ambitious publicly funded construction project in modern American history, designed to create system of tunnels and sunken roadways in Boston, runs billions of dollars over budget sparking national debate over how to proceed with
improving the infrastructure of American cities /estimated $14 billion/8 miles x 18 years to 2004/landfill x too soft
Convention Center: “The waterfront is going from lunch boxes to brief cases” Cambridge developer
Central Artery = by time it was completed, it was already obsolete)

2000 May “The city is swimming in money” Boston Magazine
Post WW2 shift from mill-based to mind-based economy “a hotbed of innovations”
An unprecedented level of prosperity in Boston, which became the nation’s largest source of venture capital
$1.5 trillion, third largest after London and NY
+ $5.5 trillion or quarter of the nation’s mutual fund business
Combined wealth of 20 richest people in town exceeded GOP of New Zealand

In the course of 300 years Boston has actually succeeded in adapting to a number of substantive changes without losing that sense of history that is so much a part of its special identity, and without giving up on a commitment to excellent that has characterized its social and cultural life -- O’Connor

AFRICAN AMERICAN BACKGROUND – 1860-1960
O’Connor:
1860 – 2261 black population
1866-1868 – 1000 blacks migrate from the South
1870 – 3496

1866 Two blacks in State House of Reps
1876-1895 One black from West End x Ward 9

Despite 1854 Sarah Roberts desegregation case, school continued to reflect city’s segregated patterns Elementary schools in Dorchester, Roxbury, Charlestown -- No blacks -- 1/3 of all black kids in two schools on the north side of the Beacon Hill

1895 West End redistricted x new wave of European Immigrants
South End x Washington Streets x Columbus Ave

1915 William Monroe Trotter x Guardian – Protested Birth of a Nation. Until 1934, when Trotter died, the Guardian reported on racial violence, police brutality etc.
Never more than two percent in 19th century

1920s “Smart Sets” “The Saturday Evening Quill” x black literary wag
BIBL Dorothy West The Living is Easy

1930s 20,000
1936 Dudley Street, almost all black
Chronicle and Guardian
Restaurants – Estelle’s and Jobils
South End and Lower Roxbury
Dr. Silas “Shag” Taylor ward 9 Mass Colored League / Shag and brother Balcom “Bal” in 1940s worked with the Curley machine/ Shag was “the Man” – switched to Democrats in 1930s x New Deal

1930s and 1940s Intersection of Mass Avenue and Columbus Avenue became center of Boston Harlem – Hi Hat Club/ Savoy Café/ Rainbow Lounge
BIBL Nat Hentoff Boston Boy
1940 Malcolm Little

By 1940s Boston’s relatively small African American Community began to grow in size
1944 Invention of the mechanical cotton picker spurred migration from the south
(1910 to 1970 total of 6.5 million blacks from south to north – 5 million after 1940) – In sheer numbers the migration surpassed that of any other group
1940 23,000
1950 40,000 from overcrowded Roxbury into Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Pl, Roslindale
Post WW2 x Jamaica and Barbados x Connection with 17th century Triangle Trade ?

1960, 10 per cent of population was African American

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FAMOUS BOSTON DISHES BSN:
Baked Indian pudding
Blueberry pie
Brown bread
Boston cream pie
Broiled scrod
Clam chowder
Cod fish cakes
Fish chowder
Clams
Lobster
New England Boiled Dinner
New England Salt Fish Dinner

BOSTON COMMON
BSN: Statue of Crispus Attucks, polished foot – Rubbing it brings good luck.
Boston loves its Common. Not an inch can be taken from it without a vote of all the people. No business of any sort permitted. ***** “Unless we consider some of the ladies there to be in business.” (Weston)

BSN: Every fine old city as individual as a human being. Boston is no exception. No other city in the US has as many spots of historic interest within easy walking distance.
The city is divided into districts…BEACON HILL, the last stronghold of the Boston Brahmin, the riotous NORTH END, mysterious CHINATOWN, the nostalgic WATERFRONT, sinister SOUTH END, cultureful BACK BAY, and the historical CENTRAL DISTRICT
Each section is colorful with the romance of the old and the romance of the new and each section has its own particular type of romance.
Incidentally each section also has its own particular smell. A blind man who knew Boston could orient himself by the sense of smell alone.

Roasting coffee, State Street
Fish, tar and oakum, Atlantic Ave (*** unless he were the blind man who passed a fish store and said, ‘Hello girls’) (!)
A rich mixture of unwashed humanity food and wine, North End
The same with beer instead of wine smell, South End
The pungent smell of leather, Essex
The barnyard smell of wool and hides, Summer St Ext.
Assorted cheap perfume, Washington St
Assorted expensive perfume, Tremont Street
A mixture of soft coal smoke and freshly sawed wood, Albany Street
Chop suey, peanut oil and incense, Chinatown
Absolutely nothing but rarified atmosphere, Beacon Hill (Weston)

PARK STREET
BSN For the first 50 years it was a footpath and cow path to the crest of the hill. For the next 120 years it was given over to public institutions – almshouse, poor house, jail, the insane asylum, and the pound. During this period the street was called Centry St. The third period which included most of the 19th century saw Park Street graced by the homes of Boston’s most prominent citizens. Three govs. 4 mayors, 2 presidents of Harvard, a sec of the navy, a sec of war, of the treasury and many famous authors, preachers, philanthropists and statesmen. From 1907 to the present the street has been given over to stores and offices.
#4 Atlantic Monthly #2 Hawthorne Hall where the first public meeting of Mary Baker Eddy was held – the cradle of Christian Science.
Park Street Church – “Brimstone Corner” from the great fervor of early preachers or, more probably – and prosaically – because brimstone was stored in the basement for making powder in 1812. (Weston)

OLD GRANARY BURYING GROUND. Third grave yard laid out in 1660. Stones in straight rows = Bellingham. More people buried in old granary that are known to more people than in any other cemetery in the country. Among these:
266 Revolutionary soldiers
17 members of the Boston Tea Party
John Hancock
Samuel Adams
James Otis
Paul Revere
Benjamin Franklin’s parents
Mother Goose (Vergoos, lived with her son in law printer Thomas Fleet and his 13 children) (Weston)

KING’S CHAPEL -- horizontal slabs to protect bodies from wild animals. Only example of churchyard cemetery built before the church.
Isaac Johnson, wealthy gentleman of Lincolnshire, came over with Governor Winthrop in ship which was named for his wife Arbella. Chose for his land the section now bordered by School, Court, Washington and Tremont Streets. First to die in Boston, Sept 30, 1630. Buried in the upper part of his garden. Another expressed with to be buried alongside Brother Johnson. In old records we find this ominous statement: “Brother Johnson’s garden is getting to be a place for vegetables” So they gave up the garden and created the graveyard.
Later (1686) they built a wooden church. Granite walls of the present church built around the wooden church and when it was completed they threw the old church out of the windows. Services were not interrupted. First building to use Quincy Granite. Special contract to cover loss in case the granite gave out.
Bell cast by Paul Revere. Organ brought from England. Chosen by the great musician, Handel.
Buried here: Winthrop, Cotton, Hester Prynne, Mary Chilton (Weston)

Thomas O’Connor State House talk 4/25/0:
City of change holding stubbornly to values
Jefferson “dirty little atheist” Jackson “wild man” – Boston’s men of breeding and intellect would have nothing of this
Intellectual arrogance
“Middling classes” – Quincy = “our less fortunate brethren”
First part of 19th century x “quiet revolutionary period” Set out to promote education of its citizens, the working class, poor and disabled. They had to be brought up “to know enough” and to “assimilate the moral and intellectual concepts that Bostonians knew made their city unique.”
Concept of civic and social responsibility
“Useful Knowledge Society”
“Lecture bait” – a prominent feature of Boston society – “they” = adoring public wanted to come and listen ton the great men talk.

Alien/ outsiders e.g. Irish…Know Nothings wanted to keep the Hub from turning, hold it fast the way it was.
40 years later, the immigrants were from SE Europe.
Immigration Restriction League of Boston
…and yet gradually the Hub began to turn, accepting outsiders:
City leaders sought to transform the immigrants into Bostonians
(1) public schools 2) settlement houses 3) night schools 4) historic societies
“culture factories”
“brainwashing”

1950 T Wharf : Blue Ship Tea Room x 27 windows facing the sea (+/-1923)
“silhouetted image of the tower of Boston Customs House against massive black heap of Beacon Hill.

L Street “Brownies”

1950-1970 New Boston x urban renewal from old dilapidated city to modern metropolis

2001- living in a moment when there is another New Boston
Winthrop, Hutchinson, Cotton Mather – and also no longer city of Fitz, Curley and the Kennedys… part of the past but may not be part of the future
“much less white”
Asian Americans, Latin Americans, African Americans – New Bostonians
Changes without losing distinctive qualities.
Boston is not just another city old/new//past/present
Morality – Puritan
Education – Harvard, e.g.
Representative democracy
Constants in history, sometimes good/bad
Bigotry and elitism
Political chaos

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17th Century : The Settlers
18th Century : The Seafarers
19th Century : The Workers (NPS)