USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 45
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Of the booksellers who, like the traditional cobbler, have stuck to their trade, the oldest is the firm of Burnham in Corn- hill. A distinguished book house is that of Lauriat in Wash- ington Street, which for more than 50 years has been head- quarters for the book-loving public, and which has made a specialty of the importation of English books, and old edi- tions. Goodspeed's, and Smith & McCance, in Ashburton Place, have each a distinctive quality-the former renowned for its rare and quaint editions, and for occasional essays in publication ; the latter for the size and extent of its collections of old books. Goodspeed also maintains a crypt of countless volumes under the Old South Church, and for some time had a shop on Park Street-bordering the Common, which once bade fair to be a true "booksellers' row."
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BOOK BUYERS
Despite the inpouring of hordes of immigrants unused to literary recreations, untrained in the English tongue, the an- cient Puritan town has remained the greatest book market in the United States in proportion to its population. The taste of its public is serious, and books of philosophy, history and biography lead in the volume of sales. A like condition exists throughout Massachusetts, and towns of a size which in some other sections of the Union would not support one bookshop unless its literary stock-in-trade were largely adulterated with stationery, fancy goods and even wall paper, find ample trade for the maintenance of several.
This widespread reading habit is, no doubt, largely due to the many colleges and preparatory schools which flourish in the Bay State. If student bodies, as pessimists insist, are largely given over to sporting pages and the yellow Sunday sheets, at least the faculties may be relied upon to maintain an intelligent and widespread interest in the better class of current literature. The educational institutions of the State not only help to maintain a book-buying public, but are, in several instances, the centers of active publishing enterprises of their own.
PUBLISHERS
Even to attempt a list of the publishing houses of Massa- chusetts during the last half-century with any effort to charac- terize each would be futile. Boston has boasted of publishers of the highest quality-and has not been wholly without those of an exceedingly antithetical character. Maecenas has enter- tained writers on Beacon Hill and cheered their days with adequate royalties, but withal there have flourished firms given over to the practice of making the author "pay the freight." It would be interesting to trace the history of those houses which have a century or more of service to their credit, and to point out how most of them began as booksellers, drifted into publishing, and built up gradually a body of authors whose names became almost as closely allied to the firms as those of the partners themselves.
A self-constituted vigilance committee in Boston for the
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FAMOUS PUBLISHING FIRMS
protection of public morals, the Watch and Ward Society, has an alert eye for literary violations of the pruderies of the peculiarly good, and now and then makes itself and its en- vironment rather ridiculous. Yet the type of fiction pouring from the presses of even eminent publishers is sure, if long continued, to create a just demand for some form of censor- ship. The stage and the "movies" have had to submit, even though their offenses have been less heinous than those of certain publishers.
FAMOUS PUBLISHING FIRMS (1828-1930)
The publishing house of Houghton Mifflin Company, as it now exists, is an enduring edifice built upon foundations reaching back to 1828. Long associated with the Old Corner Bookstore, at the corner of Washington and School Streets, the firm is now established in the equally historic neighbor- hood of Park Street. Enumeration of the various firms and partnerships finally merged in the house of Houghton Mifflin is needless. Most renowned of them was the firm of Ticknor and Fields, succeeded in time by Fields, Osgood and Com- pany. These names appear on many of the most notable of American title pages. Almost coincidentally with the estab- lishment of the latter firm was the foundation in 1852 of the Riverside Press, by H. O. Houghton. After a quarter of a century of work along parallel lines, the one winning high place as a publisher of the best in American literature, the other setting a mark of achievement in artistic typography, the two were merged in 1878 as Houghton, Osgood and Company, adopting two years later the present style of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Maintaining, as it does, the historic Riverside Press, this firm has contributed almost as much to good printing as to good literature. It was in the service of this press that Bruce Rogers, primate of artistic printing today, won his first recog- nition; and the title pages and formats designed by him for the limited editions issued by Houghton Mifflin Co. are unexcelled for symmetry and beauty. It is, perhaps, an addi- tional evidence of the interest of Massachusetts in the print- ing art that Rogers subsequently became printing adviser to the Harvard University Press.
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No single firm, of course, could stand representative of Boston's publishing activities. The house of Little, Brown and Company dates its genesis back 150 years and had its birthplace in that street which under the king was called Marlborough, and under the Revolution, Washington Street. Today it is housed in almost equally historic quarters, on Beacon Street under the very eaves of the State House, in a dwelling house of Boston's best period of domestic archi- tecture. Winning place first as a publisher of law books almost exclusively, the firm gradually took up the publication of fiction. In 1898 it absorbed the flourishing business of Roberts Brothers, and thereby added to its lists numbers of books by New England authors, among them Louisa M. Alcott, Edward Everett Hale, Emily Dickinson, Louise Chandler Moulton, and the monumental translations of Bal- zac and Molière by Miss Wormely. In later years the firm has acted as the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly Press books.
Among the books to which the house of Little, Brown & Company calls attention in its brochure are Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in 1873-the author being a member of the firm; Captain Mahan's Influence of Sea Power Upon History; Quo Vadis; If Winter Comes; and two Pulitzer Prize plays, Ice Bound and Craig's Wife. The pleasing fact is also chronicled that of Little Women and other Alcott books more than 4,000,000 copies have been sold; while Miss Farmer's The Boston Cooking School Book is set down as a "perennial. best seller." These statistics suggest that, however much the facts of Boston's activities may controvert Owen Meredith's dictum : "We may live without books," it upholds his wiser words : "But civilized man cannot live without cooks."
EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING
Boston has had much to do with the education of youth, even aside from Harvard and the other institutions of learn- ing within or near its borders. Among its publishers the house of Ginn and Company, issuing textbooks only, ranks at the very head. The devotee of pure literature may sniff at the textbook as something devoid of literary art. The expert in typography may question whether it makes any de-
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MUSIC PUBLISHING
mands upon the artistic capacity of the maker of books. The ordinary citizen may reiterate some of the charges of im- proper methods employed to secure the adoption of this or that series by acquisitive school boards. But the fact stands that the writers and publishers of textbooks exert a prodigious influence upon the national mind, and several attractive for- tunes have been made by partners or stockholders in textbook concerns.
Nor is the preparation of such books a light task for the most experienced writer. It is comparatively easy to interest or inform the adult mind, but to hold the attention of children or arouse the enthusiasm of youth in an educational problem is a different matter. At the Athenaeum Press, maintained by Ginn & Company, the books which have passed the scrutiny of the editorial staff are given a form suited to their purposes and importance. The press is one of the largest and best equipped in New England.
No reference to Ginn & Company would be complete with- out some account of the notable service rendered by its founder, Edwin Ginn, to the cause of international harmony and enduring peace. The World Peace Foundation, created by him and endowed with more than a million dollars, occupies a stately old-time dwelling house at 40 Mt. Vernon Street. Here is maintained a working library of volumes and docu- ments bearing upon international relations, while trained students and investigators produce authoritative studies of events bearing upon the relationship of nations. The Founda- tion also acts as sole United States agent for the publications of the League of Nations.
MUSIC PUBLISHING (1835-1930)
A branch of publishing in which Boston has long stood preeminent is the issuance of sheet music, and of volumes and periodicals dealing with music. The house of Oliver Ditson Company, oldest of its sort in the United States, has witnessed . the making of much musical history since in 1835 young Oliver Ditson put forth his first publication-a song entitled "There's not a Leaf within the Bower." How old-time in- tellectual workers in Boston clung together! Ditson was then working for the printing plant that issued the North American
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Review. We find the first mention of his musical work in the files of the Transcript for 1835. His first office was in the old gambrel-roofed building later to become famous as "The Old Corner Book Store." Since then the company has been linked closely with Boston's musical history. Besides encouraging and fostering orchestral and chamber music in every way, it has published various music periodicals, which have by gradual consolidation and evolution culminated in the Étude of today.
It is an interesting fact that according to the Census of Manufactures, taken by the Department of Commerce in 1923, Massachusetts put forth about one fourteenth of all the music, sheet and volumes, in the world; has a practical mo- nopoly of that class of publication in New England; and ranks third in the United States. For the publication of sheet music alone the State ranks second.
PRESENT OUTPUT OF LITERATURE
Time was that a Boston imprint was looked upon as essen- tial for any book of serious literary character. Probably the time will never come when it will be a detriment. Even now the wholly materialistic Chamber of Commerce puts out as one of its claims to the greatness of Boston the fact that it sells at retail more books per capita of population than any city in the United States. But the old primacy in the book-publishing business has gone to New York. Unlike Punch's complacent author who blandly announced, "I don't read books; I write them," Boston may plead that she no longer leads in making books but in reading them.
Nevertheless, the Boston output of literature is not incon- spicuous. The city is still the second center of publishing in the United States, and while the number of volumes issuing annually from her presses is exceeded by those bearing a New York imprint, it is today greater than ever in the history of the New England field.
PUBLICATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
In addition to the distinctly commercial publishing houses, the educational institutions of Massachusetts, led by Harvard, are annually issuing more and more examples of literature
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TECHNICAL JOURNALS
which can only be put forth by the aid of a press above merely commercial considerations. No less than 56 such publications are listed in the latest newspaper directories ranging in serious- ness of import from the Purple Cow of Williamstown to the Harvard Theological Quarterly. The student bodies con- tribute to this list one daily, the Harvard Crimson, several comic sheets with such titles as the Bean Pot, Voo Doo, and Tomahawk, and a number of weeklies of more serious im- port. Most of the colleges publish an undergraduate maga- zine of some sort, the oldest being the Harvard Advocate, founded in 1866. The list includes Williams, Amherst, Clark, Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Smith, Boston University, Wellesley, and Holy Cross.
In the domain of more serious publications Harvard University naturally takes the lead, the Harvard Graduate Magazine, the Bulletin of the Graduate School of Business Administration, the Harvard Law Review and the Journal of the School of Medicine being the more important. To the non-technical reader Harvard journalistic genius shines most in the columns of the Lampoon, deservedly known with affec- tion as "Lampy," which, founded in 1876 as "a college Punch," is the oldest comic paper now published in the United States, although it suffered an eclipse of some months in 1880. Its artistic and humorous qualities have naturally varied in ex- cellence with the personnel of its editorial boards. The Crim- son (popularly known as "The Crime") shares with it the honors of the undergraduate field, and is the oldest American college daily.
COMMERCIAL AND TECHNICAL JOURNALS
It is the fashion nowadays to deplore the state of journal- ism and the decadence of ethical and artistic standards among publishers. Probably the same fashion was followed even in the bygone century when Pope complained of "the mob of gentlemen who write with ease." With no desire to break any lances in defense of the modern newspaper, and certainly with the fullest recognition of its tendency to sensationalism, there may be echoed approvingly this dictum of one of the most famous practitioners of "yellow" journalism: "A news- paper is a mirror reflecting the public. ... And the paper
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that the individual holds in his hand reflects that individual more or less accurately."
Perhaps if the tone of the daily press, and the character of the output of the publishing houses of Massachusetts mani- fest changes during the last half century, it may be because the tone and taste of local readers have likewise changed. But has there been an actual deterioration? It may well be doubted. So eminent an observer as the late President Eliot, of Harvard, disposed of the charge, so often and so lightly made, as follows: "Many people are in the habit of com- plaining bitterly of the intrusion of the newspaper reporter into every nook and corner of the State and even into the privacy of the home; but . . . this extreme publicity is .. . on the whole ... a beneficent and a new agency for the promo- tion of the public welfare. . .. The newspapers, which are the ordinary instruments of this publicity, are as yet very imper- fect instruments ... but as a means of publicity they visibly improve from decade to decade and taken together with the magazines and the controversial pamphlet, they shed more light on the social, industrial, and political life of the people of the United States than was ever shed before on the doings and ways of any people. This force is distinctly new within the century, and it affords a new and strong guarantee for the American Republic."
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Athenaeum Press (Boston, Ginn, 1927)
AYER & SON, N. W .- American Newspaper Annual and Directory (Phila., Ayer, 1928).
BLEYER, WILLARD GROSVENOR .- Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1927).
BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT .- Strangers Directory (Boston, continuous) -Contains "A Brief History of the Boston Evening Transcript."
DAVIS, HENRY RICHARD .- Half a Century with the Providence Journal (Providence, Preston and Rounds, 1904).
ELY, MARGARET, compiler .- Some Great American Newspaper Editors (N. Y., Wilson, 1916)-Brief accounts of Samuel Bowles and six other editors.
FISHER, WILLIAM ARMS .- Notes on Music in Old Boston (Boston, Ditson, 1918).
GINN, EDWIN .- Outline of the Life of Edwin Ginn (Boston, Ginn & Co., 1907)-The story of the establishment of Ginn and Company.
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT, JR .- The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale (2 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1917).
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
HOOKER, RICHARD .- The Story of an Independent Newspaper (N. Y., Mac- millan, 1924)-One hundred years of the Springfield Republican.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & COMPANY .- A Brief Description of the Riverside Press, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1899).
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY .- A Portrait Catalogue of the Books published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company; with a Sketch of the Firm, Brief Description of the Various Departments, and Some Ac- count of the Origin and Character of the Literary Enterprises Under- taken (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1905-1906).
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY .- A Brief Description of the Riverside Mifflin & Company, Publishers, Together with a Description of the Riverside Press at Cambridge, Mass. (Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1890; present corporation, Houghton, Mifflin Co.).
LEAHY, WILLIAM AUGUSTINE, compiler .- A Compendium of Reports and Studies Relating to the Commerce and Industries of Boston (Boston, 1924)-Issued by the City Planning Board.
LEE, JAMES MELVIN .- History of American Journalism (Boston, Hough- ton Mifflin, 1917.
LICHTENSTEIN, RICHARD C .- "1825-A Retrospect-1925" (Burnham An- tique Book Store, Boston, 1925).
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY .- Books from Beacon Hill; the Story of the Boston Publishing House of Little, Brown and Company, 1837-1926 (Boston, Little, Brown, 1926).
MASSACHUSETTS : BUREAU OF STATISTICS .- Twenty-ninth Annual Report on the Statistics of Manufactures for the Year 1914 (Boston, 1916). MASSACHUSETTS : DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND INDUSTRIES .- Annual Report on the Statistics of Manufactures for the Year 1921 (Boston, n.d.). MERRIAM, GEORGE SPRING .- Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (2 vols., N. Y., Century, 1885).
PERRY, BLISS .- Park-Street Papers (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1908). ROSSITER, W. S .- "Printing and Publishing: the Barometer Industry" (Review of Reviews (1906) XXXIV, pp. 338-342).
SARGENT, GEORGE H .- Lauriat's, 1872-1922; Being a Sketch of Early Boston Booksellers, with Some Account of Charles E. Lauriat Com- pany and its Founder, Charles E. Lauriat, Written for the Boston Evening Transcript (Privately printed, Boston, 1922).
STEPHEN DAYE AND HIS SUCCESSORS (Cambridge, University Press, 1912) -Covers 1639-1921.
UNITED STATES : BUREAU OF THE CENSUS .- Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910 (11 volumes, Washington, 1912- 1914)-For statistics of printing and publishing see Vol. X, pp. 765- 781.
UNITED STATES : BUREAU OF THE CENSUS .- Census of Manufactures, 1923 (Washington, 1926).
UNITED CENSUS : BUREAU OF THE CENSUS .- Biennial Census of Manu- factures, 1925 (Washington, 1928).
VILLARD, OSWALD GARRISON .- Some Newspapers and Newspapermen (N. Y., Knopf, 1923).
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CHAPTER XVII
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN MASSACHUSETTS
BY REV. ROBERT HOWARD LORD, PH.D. Sometime Professor of History, Harvard University
Two ASPECTS OF THE SUBJECT
The history of Catholicism in Massachusetts presents two features of large interest.
First, in little more than a century the religious and social structure of this once fundamentally Anglo-Saxon and exclu- sively Protestant commonwealth has been profoundly altered by the incoming of other racial elements and the vast growth of the Roman Church, to the point where the majority of the population is now of other than English stock, and as far as church affiliations are concerned, Massachusetts is today more nearly Catholic than anything else. Indeed, the old Puritan Colony has become (save for Rhode Island and New Mexico) the most Catholic State in the Union, and one of the greatest centres of Catholic activity, not only in this country, but throughout the world. History affords few parallels to this transformation. Its consequences, though they cannot be fully evaluated today, can scarcely fail to be momentous.
Secondly, this great upbuilding of the older Church has taken place in a region which was originally the stronghold of ultra-Protestantism, and of all American communities the one most passionately hostile to "popery." It was effected, moreover, mainly by the Irish, of all newcomers those in some ways most antipathetic to the older stock. Racial antagonisms were thus added to religious ones to produce that "dead wall of prejudice and hatred, hard as the granite of our eternal hills," which Catholicism has had to encounter in this Com- monwealth. At first, a chasm seemed to separate Catholic and Puritan, New England and "New Ireland." On the effects of this cleavage, political and social, much of Massa- chusetts history in the past century turns. Naturally, there has been not a little friction, tension, conflict, legal discrimina-
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tions, political battles, at times physical violence, and a social estrangement that is even yet not completely obliterated.
With such sharply contrasted and contrary social elements, what else could have been expected? Perhaps the remarkable thing is rather that serious struggles have been so rare, and that so much progress towards reconciliation and mutual un- derstanding has been made. If Catholics have had to fight for their rights, they have usually been helped by liberal Protestants; and they have owed their final success largely to the sense of justice and the loyalty to democratic principles always shown in the long run by the Protestant majority. The outcome has benefitted not Catholics alone, but every element that desires complete religious freedom and perfect equality of rights between all religious bodies.
COLONIAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS CATHOLICISM (1630-1775)
No more unfavorable conditions for the growth of Catholi- cism could well be imagined than those in Massachusetts during the colonial period.
It is well known that the Puritans, with all their merits, were no friends of religious freedom. "What is contrary to the Gospel hath no right, and therefore should have no liberty," declared the Rev. John Higginson in the Election Sermon of 1663. "I look upon an unbounded toleration as the first-born of abominations," said the Rev. Urian Oakes on a similar occasion (1673). Increase Mather, in his Election Sermon of 1677, thundered against "sinful tolera- tion" and "hideous clamors for liberty of conscience", and the Rev. John Cotton affirmed as against Roger Williams that "it was toleration that made the world anti-Christian," and that "the Church never took hurt by the punishment of here- tics."
Least of all was any weakness in this regard to be expected in favor of Roman Catholics. Indeed, the violence and bitter- ness of Puritan sentiments towards "papists" can scarcely be exaggerated; and they need to be emphasized if one is ever to understand the deep under-current of aversion, distrust,
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and fear which the Catholic Church here has had to contend with even down to recent times.
The colonial hatred of Catholicism was based chiefly on memories of old unhappy things across the water: the reign of "Bloody Mary," the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Ulster Massacres, the "revelations" of Titus Oates, the struggle against the Stuarts. It was also accented by much that had happened, or was supposed to have happened, on the continent of Europe. Colonial experience could add the tradition of a century of conflict with the French "idolaters" in Canada, Indian raids under "Jesuit direction," the Deer- field Massacre, and triumphs of the godly over the "children of Baal" at Norridgewock and Louisburg. From all this there emerged a composite picture of Catholicism that was as lurid and grotesque in its ignorance as it was deeply fixed in the popular mind.
For an example one may turn to the New England Primer, which, as Paul Leicester Ford declares, gives "the Puritan mood with absolute faithfulness," and which was for over a century the school book of American dissenters. In all the editions of this much-printed classic one finds a wood-cut representing (with slight regard for historic truth) the sad fate of the Rev. Mr. Rogers, burnt at the stake by papists, his wife looking on with her nine small children and an infant at the breast, while in a long exhortation to his offspring the martyr adjures them inter alia:
"Abhor that arrant Whore of Rome and all her Blasphemies ; And drink not of her cursed cup, obey not her decrees."
Still more impressive was another picture with the legend, "Child, behold that Man of Sin, the Pope, worthy of thy utmost Hatred." Here the head of the Catholic Church was portrayed as the embodiment of "heresy," "idolatry," "covet- ousness," "malice, murder and treachery," "cruelty," and "the worst of lusts." Characteristic, too, was the annual festival called "Pope Day" (November 5), into which the Puritans transformed the "Guy Fawkes' Day" of England, and which was celebrated here from the Restoration period down to the
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