USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 10
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While there has been perhaps little of the spectacular in the last fifty years, they have been characterized by steady constructive effort. The four volumes of the Justin Winsor Memorial History record a foundation in civil life as sturdy as the rock-ribbed soil of the city itself. Upon that foundation the present generation has erected structures embodying the commercial, political and social life of the community. The work must soon pass to other hands. It is to be hoped that the high courage which characterized the early pioneers, enabling them to overcome hardships, to triumph over difficulties, and to meet obstacles with enthusiasm, may be found reflected in the efforts of the present day, and be handed on untarnished to the men and women of succeeding generations.
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CHAPTER III THE POPULATION
GAINS AND LOSSES By WILLIAM A. LEAHY
If the white man had not come to America, there would probably have been little change since 1630 in the site of present-day Boston. As far as we know, the Indians left the spot as wild as they found it. It is the pressure of civilized humanity with its complicated needs that has given to the inner reaches of Massachusetts Bay their ever shifting contour and animated expression. All the alterations of the last fifty years described by Mr. Fay are the work of human hands. The story of the city, first and last, is simply the story of its people. This chapter is a study of the population in recent years, of its trends and flows and especially of its racial groupings.
Five principal changes must be noted during the period embraced in this volume. First, there is the drift to the outlying sections, within the city limits but away from the congested center. Following this and merely continuing it, is the exodus to the neighboring towns, which has built up the suburbs at the expense of the capital. The constant departure of young people, seeking wider opportunities, represents a more real loss, which is offset, however, by the influx of fresh native blood from the towns and rural districts of New England and fromn distant states. The inflow of immigrants has been a transforming influ- ence more powerful than any of these. Finally there is the natural balance of births and deaths, the inevitable displacements due to the march of time, which removes the older generation one by one and ushers in the new.
The net result of these various increments, losses and exchanges has been a large increase in numbers. In 1880 the city counted 362,839 inhabitants. By 1930, with only one small annexation, the total had risen to 781,188, a doubling and something over in fifty years. There is no prospect, however, that this lively growth will continue. The land area of Boston, less than forty-five square miles, is limited as compared with that of other large cities and most of it is now comfortably occupied. Parts of the old city reached their saturation point long ago and the slow gain of the past five years indicates that the advance in population, impressive when we look at the entire period, has now been practically arrested.
For the first half of the period the gain was rapid enough. When we restore in imagination, or with the help of old photographs, the city as it looked in 1880, we realize that almost every part of it has been made over. In that year a branch of the Public Latin School stood on Harrison avenue in the heart of what afterwards became the Chinese quarter and not far from the house occupied by Wendell Phillips. To decorate the platform for their annual exercises at Tremont Temple a group of boys would drive out to mid-Dorchester,
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originally a farming district, and gather daisies, wild irises and columbines in the meadows. Later that part of Harrison avenue was widened; the old brick residenees were torn down or converted to business uses; the Chinese came and settled there for a time, only to be forced southward into Hudson, Tyler and other adjoining streets. It would be hard to find irises or eolumbines in any part of Dorchester today, except the cultivated varieties planted in gardens. The few farms of the city are situated near the extreme southern boundary and ahnost the only large meadows that remain to soothe the eye of the wanderer are those preserved in the publie parks.
The heart of the original town, where the first settlers lived, is now a central market or emporium for the whole metropolitan area. Its characteristie features are no longer the brick dwelling and the old-fashioned shop front, with living quarters overhead, but the granite bank, impregnable-looking fortress of finance; the office building, a beehive of a thousand eells; the department store, lifting one floor above another, like so many exposition halls gay with intermin- able booths and counters. On busy days an endless stream of humanity defiles through streets like eanyons or is shuttled up and down in the rise and fall of perpetually moving elevators. During the peak hours of travel this throng inust number hundreds of thousands, but few of them are dwellers in the district. By nightfall the stream has thinned perceptibly. Soon the buildings will be locked and the sidewalks all but deserted. Shoppers, salespeople and clerks have gone their several ways. The taxicabs have ceased eircling in search of customers. The rasping cry of the nighthawk is heard over the silenee. Only caretakers and transients are seen.
This part of the city, old Boston, reached its maximum as a residential section in 1910 and is now declining fast. South Boston and Charlestown are in a similar case. Dorchester, on the other hand, jumped in 1930 to more than ten times the number of inhabitants it had in 1880, and West Roxbury and Brighton, even East Boston and Roxbury, showed substantial gains. These phases are common to all large eities. Business seizes the citadel, so to speak, the vantage point of converging traffie, causing rents and values to rise and thus compelling the residents to move out into the open districts.
One section after another has been transformed by this eentrifugal pressure. The North End, once native and fashionable, in its first metamorphosis became Irish, with a Scandinavian mixture, as befitted a waterfront seetion. Sub- sequently Italian and Portuguese neweomers pushed out most of the earlier residents. The Italians are still there but their overflow has passed into East Boston and Revere, as well as into remoter seetions. The Portuguese, never so numerous as in Fall River or New Bedford, some time ago sold their church on North Bennet street, which is now a branch of the Public Library, well stocked with books for Italian-speaking patrons. Similarly the Jewish invasion, beginning in the 90's, flooded successive strata of old Americans, Negroes and Irish out of the West End until the invaders themselves, multiplying and prospering, were foreed to take over great areas in Dorchester, Roxbury, Chelsea and Brookline. The onee dignified South End holds many Greeks and Syrians, with Negroes in the parts bordering on Roxbury. The Poles and Lithuanians are heavily concentrated in South Boston, where their churches are rallying
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points. The well-to-do old Americans cling precariously to Beacon Hill and , the Back Bay for winter residence, summering at their seashore or country estates, if not in Europe. Others, in more moderate circumstances, still linger . in Dorchester, Brighton and West Roxbury, or wherever the tradition of the separate homestead with a little land around it and congenial neighbors can be maintained. Everywhere within the city boundaries these currents of social change and race migration are flowing. In the West, in the pioneer days, it used to be said that no one ever lived in his native state. Few Bostonians today dwell under the paternal rooftree or even in the neighborhood in which they were born.
The growth of the suburbs is another exhibition of the same tendency to dispersion. As recently as forty years ago it was only a step in almost any direction into the pleasant spaciousness of the countryside, with long vistas to refresh the eye and a glimpse of wild nature near at hand. The retreat of the older residents before the march of business and the advance of the immi- grants carried many of them across the boundary lines into the surrounding towns. Later the immigrants themselves or their children joined the movement. Train and trolley car, tunnel service, bus and automobile extended the radius of a comfortable journey to and from the office or other place of occupation. The result is seen in an average increase of some twenty-five per cent within ten years in the suburbs. Residential towns, like Arlington and Belmont, have doubled their population in that short period and cities like Cambridge and Somerville have become as congested as the capital itself. Much of this increase is overflow from Boston. All the radial roads are spillways which pour our surplus into the tributary towns. The city has colonized heavily the whole metropolitan area, embracing points as far away as Scituate, Concord and Winchester.
A detached observer, instead of regretting these removals, might wish that the cluster of municipalities affected could work together to encourage them. They have invigorated thousands of families who, living now under more natural conditions, escape the inevitable effects of crowded quarters, forced excitement and the competitive strain. They have developed what are surely some of the most attractive residential suburbs in America; and they have eased for the central city problems of health and housing which, were it not for this relief, might have defied the best efforts of the authorities to solve them. We are better off for this scattering of our people, even if it affects adversely our nominal rank among the cities of the nation. The real Boston of two million inhabitants is not made smaller by a political boundary.
A drain which is more serious, but more easily overlooked because it is invisible, is caused by the continual departure from the city of ambitious young men. The wealth of New York acts as a powerful magnet for Boston youth. Young women, too, leave home nowadays oftener than they used to. The teacher accepts a position in Brooklyn, the librarian in Cleveland. The bride accompanies her husband wherever his work carries him. Now and then men of mature age are summoned away. Washington calls capable officials into what sometimes proves permanent exile. Scholars and clergymen are tradition- ally nomadic breeds of fluctuating habitat. Every state in the Union inust
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have its quota of Boston-born citizens, who practise many professions and appear in all the ranks of society.
Sometimes we lose young men that we should have been glad to keep, if we could have foreseen their rise in after years. Among earlier examples are Franklin and Poe, who, though born in Boston, are associated rather with Philadelphia and Baltimore, and S. F. B. Morse, the inventor, a native of Charlestown, who had his career principally in New York. More recently such well-known personages as S. P. Langley, the astronomer; William M. Evarts, Secretary of State; Louis Sullivan, the architect; Childe Hassam, the painter; Alexander H. Rice, the explorer; Frances Perkins, the sociologist, and Professor Robert M. Lovett, are among those who have left the city of their birth to achieve distinction elsewhere. The elder J. P. Morgan, though not a native, was a graduate of our English High School. Others, like President Eliot and Senator Lodge, left the corporate city but remained within the met- ropolitan area. To a large extent, too, it must be said that Boston finds occu- pation for its gifted sons. With its great institutions of learning, including Harvard and the Institute of Technology, it is able to absorb much of its own product in scholarship and science and its professional and business activities are broad enough to employ most of its energetic offspring.
The influx of native youth has probably equaled this outflow in numbers and provided a full equivalent in quality. The farms and villages of all New England pour their vigorous young men and women into the cities. Since there is little return flow, the result is a depleted countryside, which must reproduce itself and at the same time replenish the cities; but this townward trek of country youth is not peculiar to New England or to the United States. All over the white man's world the city drinks the lifeblood of the country. In New England and still more in the western states the losses are made good in part by the willingness of certain immigrants to take the places left vacant by the rural youth of older American lineage.
The census tables show how much this drift of country youth has contrib- uted to the upbuilding of Boston. In 1915 some eighty thousand residents, more than a tenth of the whole present population, were recorded as born in other states. New England and New York naturally furnished most of these but some twenty-five thousand were born in states farther away. The number born in Massachusetts outside of Boston is not given but it was undoubtedly large.
There is no reason to suppose that Boston, or the country either, has suffered in this exchange. The native-born immigrants, preponderantly, one would suppose, of native parentage, have furnished the city with many distin- guished leaders. Northern New England sent us Webster and Longfellow. Such well-known women as Julia Ward Howe and Mrs. John L. Gardner came from New York. H. H. Richardson, the architect, Richard Olney, Cyrus E. Dallin, Dr. Harvey Cushing, Roland W. Boyden, Philip Hale and Howard Coonley, to mention only a few, are adopted sons, yet as closely identified with Boston as any of its children. Of the sixty-four contributors to the present volume no fewer than forty belong to this class of native outlanders. Six others were born abroad, one of them of American parents. Only eighteen are natives of Boston.
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America is a young country and the pioneering spirit is still strong among our young men. We do not expect them to remain fixed to the soil, like the peasant proprietors of France, in an adinirable, yet somehow serf-like, con- stancy. One likes rather to think of these transplanted youths as ambassadors of good will from one section to another. Through them North and South, East and West interpenetrate and the web of the Union is woven stronger with living threads. But theirs is a trickle in and out of individuals, following the trail of opportunity or adventure, not a mass-movement like the tide of European immigration, which began a hundred years ago and, before it was checked by recent legislation, profoundly altered the racial complexion of the nation. As we look back upon this movement, we are reminded of the old folk-wanderings. We seem to see a great stampede, more like the periodic migration of lemmings than an orderly and intelligent progress of men. The newcomers groped their way hither and thither, guided, it would seem, by rumor rather than by any directing agency, such as might have adjusted the relations of labor demand and supply, of idle land and peasant seekers. It has been fashionable in some quarters to attack the immigrants, as if they were to blame for coming here or for being what they were. The truth is the whole experience was one that reflected little credit upon our national foresight and our reputed powers of organization.
The effect in Boston, as in other large cities of the north, has been to convert the old native stock into a numerical remnant, strongly intrenched in wealth and culture but hopelessly outnumbered and helpless in all contests in which mere numbers prevail. It is sobering to reflect that while a goodly minority of the present inhabitants of Boston, probably more than two in five, were born in the city, not one in eight, perhaps not one in ten, is the offspring of Boston-born parents. In 1920 about a third of our population were natives of other countries and nearly three quarters had one or both parents born abroad. If we could add all who are of foreign descent in the third and fourth generations, the pro- portion of newer Americans would be overwhelming.
It is plain that the influx of immigrants has produced a more radical trans- formation than the steady infiltration of native Americans. There are more of them; they came in families or clans, not singly; they keep more to themselves; and they are different. A youth from Maine or a girl from Berkshire does not present any marked contrast to the descendants of Winthrop and Saltonstall. Their own ancestors may have made the voyage in the "Arbella " or lent a hand in the Tea Party. Even the Germans and Irish, who were the principal immi- grants before 1880, had been dribbling into the country since the colonial period and were not altogether strangers to the British people who settled this region and imposed upon it their speech and folkways; and the English, Scotch and British Canadians were their kindred. But the last fifty years have seen a tapping of more remote human reservoirs and the arrival of types which were previously unfamiliar.
In 1880, all the Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Chinese, Albanians, Slavs and semi-Slavs of Boston, gathered together, would have made hardly more than a handful. Jewish pupils were rare in the high schools, which they now eagerly throng. The Italians were just occupying the first little church built
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for their exclusive use on Prince street. Not long after that date millions of southern and eastern Europeans began crossing the Atlantic, driven by persecution or hard living conditions at home. Between 1890 and 1920 the' number of persons in the United States of Russian parentage (few of them Russians in race) increased fifteen times, those of Italian parentage thirteen times, those of Austrian and Hungarian parentage ten times, while those of German parentage only a little more than held their own and those of Irish parentage declined. Boston received its share of these refugees,- a sprinkling from nearly all of the races, a substantial quota from two or three.
The racial composition of the city today cannot be determined with accuracy but the following estimate may have some value. It is at any rate based on a careful study of the published data.
Nearly three fifths of our population stem originally from the British. Islands. This group includes colonial Americans, English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, English-speaking Canadians and Newfoundlanders. Of these the Irish form a majority, numbering rather more than a third of the whole popu- lation. The Canadians also are a substantial body. It is hardly necessary to point out that the British and Irish elements are relatively declining. A hundred years ago the city would have been far more English, fifty years ago more Irish, thian it is today.
Persons of Jewish and Italian descent number together from a fifth to a quarter of the population. If a recent Jewish tabulation is accepted as correct, the two races are not far apart in numbers but the Italians are more numerous.
The Germans (including Austrian Germans), Scandinavians, Poles and Lithuanians, combined, may number a tenth.
The remainder, a twelfth, is distributed among a score or more of races. Of these the colored people are the most numerous, numbering more than twenty thousand in 1930. Other considerable groups are the French (including French Canadians), the Portuguese, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Syrians, the Hollanders and Belgians, the Finns, the Hungarians, the Albanians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese.
It would be a satisfaction to know even approximately the number of residents of Boston who are of colonial ancestry but this group, descended from the founders of the nation, is precisely the one that is never counted. It is probably larger than is commonly supposed since there is a tendency among the late arrivals to exaggerate their numbers in the third and fourth generations. The old Americans are also more numerous relatively in the metropolitan city than in Boston proper and in the country at large than in either.
What can be said with certainty is that Boston today is unique in its racial composition. No city in the world resembles it at all closely in the ethnic elements of which it is composed. We have just named nearly a score of minor groups, but all the smaller units together, interesting and important as they are and some of thein large enough to make respectable cities, are only a fringe, numerically, about the solid core, which consists of Irish and British in the first order,- a substantial majority of the whole,- and Italians and Jews in the second rank, already, according to this estimate, numbering
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from a fifth to a quarter and gaining on the leaders. It is out of these four elements that the composite Boston of tomorrow will spring, re-enforced by the remaining sixth, by the infiltration from other cities and states, and by such future increments as the lessened stream of foreign immigration may add. At present it is not easy to see how any changes in prospect can affect the 1 ascendency of the four principal stocks.
Two nationalities are slenderly represented in Boston that we should have expected to find among the foremost in point of numbers. The scarcity of French Canadians, not only in this city but in the neighboring towns, is a surprising feature. Of English-speaking Canadian parentage we had in 1930 almost ninety thousand; of French Canadian parentage less than ten thousand out of more than three hundred thousand living in Massachusetts. We are also conspicuous among the cities of the north for our small number of citizens of German descent,- not more than thirty thousand in all. For reasons which have never been made clear, the main body of German immigration went west of New England, while the French Canadians, streaming over the border by hundreds of thousands, have preferred to settle outside of the met- ropolitan arca. It is because of its low percentage of Germans and French, as well as of Slavs, that Boston remains the most British, and particularly the most Irish, among the large American cities.
In certain north European elements we are comparatively weak. We cannot match Minneapolis in Scandinavians, Duluth in Finns or Detroit in Poles. We are, of course, far behind San Francisco in Chinese and New York and Philadelphia in Negroes. Yet all of these races with many others live among us in appreciable numbers and their presence lends variety and color to the human tapestry. The blue-cycd Swede sits beside the tawny Calabrian in the street car or sails before the inast with the no less swarthy Azorean. One public school includes more than a score of nationalities and the best scholars may bear almost any kind of name. For beauty it would be hard to match some of the Italian children at eight years or ten, unless it be among the whitish-blond Scandinavians or the brown-haired British with their delicately tinted skins and finely modeled, aristocratic features. Catch them off guard in their natural pose and expression and one would say that neither Raphael nor Van Dyck had lovelier child models than may be found in the streets of Boston.
As for natural growth, it is no longer a major factor in the increase of population here. The excess of births over deaths for the city as a whole (excluding nonresidents) is less than five thousand a year and a large percentage of these must be credited to natives of Italy, Canada, Russia and Poland. The birth rate has fallen off steadily and is now less than two in a hundred. While some of the foreign-born, notably the Italians, maintain a high birth rate, a marked decline is apparent in the older strains. This is due partly to the larger proportion among recent immigrants who are of child-bearing age and partly to postponement of marriage, diminished fecundity and other causes.
It should be understood that all these statistical groupings have a some- what artificial character. A man is himself whatever his group affiliations may be and in Boston it is becoming more and more true that the whole man
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seldom belongs to any one group. Neither language nor nationality, neither religion nor politics will classify our citizens completely. Race, as distinct from nationality, has been urged by some as a means of classification but at best it is a most uncertain criterion and not seldom it is the hardest of all to determine. Sir Arthur Keith, who is the foremost authority on the subject in England, regards the Irish as nearest to the Nordic type among the peoples of the British Isles, while Madison Grant and his school insist that they are about seven-tenths Mediterranean. Amid such wide variances of opinion, which are common in this field, it seems premature to pass final judgment on the essential quality of the various races, to decrce, as some are so ready to do, a rigid separation of the ethnological sheep and goats.
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