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 11
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What is astonishing is that, in spite of all these changes, amid the variety of types that may be seen on the Common any July Sunday afternoon, certain traditions of the city should be so well maintained. It is natural to emphasize change, because change is dramatic, but life in Boston has its constant aspects as well. The "state of mind" seems to continue from one generation to another. Strong influences must be at work so to mold this great miscellany that many of the newcomers think and feel very much as the older citizens do. For one thing, the colonial stock and what may be called its natural allies arc, as I have said, stronger numerically than some think and much stronger relatively in wealth, culture and effective leadership. Even if it does not readily strike fire and leans a little toward patrician reserve, it has inherited a high sense of responsibility and meets its obligations in the spirit of noblesse oblige. Moreover, the historic city itself exercises a compulsion on its citizens. Outsiders may think us too complacent, but it is the simple truth that nearly every Boston man who goes elsewhere to live looks back on his early home with affection and pride.
Some of us, obsessed by the race dogma, underestimate these influences of example and upbringing. Given a receptive state of mind and hospitable treatment, a residence of fifty years almost anywhere will establish a strong local sentiment. Seventy-five years are enough to make "an old Boston family." Those that can go back a hundred, of whatever origin they may bc, feel that they touch hands with the Revolutionary fathers and look upon their tombs in the Granary Burial Ground almost as family monuments. While the heart of the colonial American, perplexed by the babel about him, may play truant at times, the newcomers are often eager to prove their attachment to the country which has opened for them the door of success or afforded them relief from intolerable burdens. No one has written more reverently of the "Mayflower" Pilgrims than John Boyle O'Reilly in his Plymouth poem, and there is a lesson for all of us in the liberality of Judah Torah, the Jewish merchant of New Orleans, whose subscription of $10,000 toward the erection of Bunker Hill Monument, only equaled by that of Amos Lawrence, "enabled the coin- mittce to carry through its project successfully." Such devotion to the Ameri- can ideal and its symbols is not rare among recent immigrants. The town tablets preserving the local muster-rolls in the late war, the soldiers' names attached to many of our public squares, are evidences of passionate loyalty that deserve full recognition and generous requital.
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Another unifying agency, no doubt the most powerful of all, is the public school. This influences chiefly the second generation of · newcomers or very young members of the first. In the classroom they learn the American speech, if their own happens to be different, and come in contact with educated Americans. On the campus they play the American games. Out of hours they read (and sell) those panoramic chronicles of American life, the newspapers.
Upon these early contacts and the associations of business and society follows the great racial solvent of marriage, but no figures are available that would enable us to estimate the frequency of this. Even in the South, where color tells the tale, opinions vary widely as to the amount of mixture. As a rule, in Boston as elsewhere, racial intermarriage moves along the parallels of social and cultural latitude. The Huguenots, for example, though foreigners, were accepted as equals in colonial days and blended rapidly with the British settlers. A Huguenot strain in one's ancestry is a source of pride. The Acadian exiles, not less French and presumably not less capable and attractive, were obliged to accept an inferior status and made less fortunate unions. The same principle governs in Boston today. Like tends to marry like. Couples of different racial origin will be found to be well matched socially and in other respects. The natural consequence will be that, as the newcomers prosper and advance, more of them will marry into the earlier stocks. That those of the first generation still mate principally within the race is natural and, perhaps, desirable. With their children, however, ancestral usage no longer controls, new ties are formed and more and more frequent intermarriage supervenes to hasten the process of amalgamation. One remembers a child having in his veins colonial American, Irish, German and Portuguese blood,- a prophet in his still tiny person of the composite Boston of tomorrow.
Tomorrow in a figurative sense, of course, since there is no definite date to the prophecy and it is not likely to be realized soon. After two hundred years the Creoles of New Orleans are still distinct in language and customs. We may always have our little Parsee colonies here, worshiping their sacred fires and enough unlike the rest of us to wear an exotic or a privileged air after centuries of domicile. The lover of distinction and variety will not wish them too suddenly broken to a more ordinary mold. It is inevitable, however, that there shall be considerable mingling of blood, if not a complete coalescence. In the nature of things, the dark-skinned later immigrants must ultimately tinge the features, complexion, thought and character of the population as a whole. What type will finally emerge is a matter for conjecture. With the fairer northern races (Irish, British, German, Scandinavian, Polish, Lithuanian) in so great a majority it will not be a composition of violent opposites like the South American hybrids. With so strong a dash of Jewish and Italian blood it ought to be more versatile than any single strain that enters into the blend.
But speculations about the future, interesting as they are, do not settle our immediate problems. It would be uncandid to deny that the ingestion into the body politic of so great a mass of newcomers has not only disturbed the equanimity of nervous citizens but upset an established order of things and created a kind of temporary chaos. Boston is made picturesque by its diversity of types, but that is still more true of San Francisco, and few would wish to see
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that fascinating medley multiplied and stereotyped as the model American city. The Americanization movement, unintelligent and condescending as it occa- sionally is, was yet based on an instinctive recoil from manifest dangers, an instinctive sense of the need of civic union. There can be no abiding strength in a conglomerate society, made up of unassimilated blocs. Whatever the ultimate results of racial fusion niay be, the intermediate stages are not always reassuring. If, as we are told, Londoners of the third generation are hard to find, their places are taken by fellow-Britons, having the same speech, tempera- ment, outlook on life and general loyalty. The Greeks, heroically absorbing a million and a half of refugees from Asia Minor, have only taken back their own. A homogeneous people develops for better or worse its own special type and breeds more or less true to the pattern. With the enrichment of color in our polychrome cities goes a lack of cohesion and harmony. We confess to a certain bewilderment as we survey this huge patchwork of humanity with no threads of connection, no traceable design. In less cheerful moods one may look a long time into the melting pot and see little except a sort of witches' cauldron, a steaming brew of strange ingredients in muddy fermentation.
However, the shortcomings of our foreign-born population have been recited many times and it is not necessary to echo here that familiar refrain. We all agree that difference of language constitutes a barrier to mutual under- standing, and the immigrant should make an effort to learn English; that he is often unlettered, sometimes lawless, and occasionally has primitive ideas of sanitation; that he is generally a beginner in self-government which, like the other fine arts, requires a prolonged period of training before one can achieve the proficiency which we ourselves have notoriously attained. Impartial observers, like Bryce, have not failed to note retrograde tendencies in our cities, and one root of these evils is certainly the miscellaneous character of the popu- lation, which in the nature of things inust lack for a time a common meeting ground of interests and ideals.
Yet it is fair to ask how many of these shortcomings, charged, it should be said, against certain elements only, are simply the usual accompaniments of poverty. If we barricade people in sunless tenements and give them the work of diggers and scavengers to perform, we can hardly complain that their hands are not clean. We must also allow time for readjustment. Everything in our world was new at first to the European village folk who make up a large proportion of the immigrants. Judgment may well be suspended till opportunity has sifted the better from the worse. It was a great Massachusetts governor who said, "I have never despised any inan because he was ignorant or black or poor." Ten, twenty, thirty years later we may learn to our surprise what strength of character, what delicacy of taste, have emerged fromn that severe discipline of the slums.
For, after all, this milling of eager crowds, this swirling of strong currents, though we may see no definite direction in it all, means life and not stagna- tion. New life, good life, some of it, too. Country schools are primitive, even in parts of America, but country blood is vigorous and country hearts are unspoiled. Change of environment brings out unsuspected reserves of initiative and enterprise. Cortés and Pizarro might have been hanged as
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exemplary brigands had they remained in Spain. Home-keeping youths need not always have homely wits, but home-leaving Bostonians have been con- spicuously successful elsewhere, and out-of-town youths climb hand over hand up the social ladder in Boston. As for the new races, some of them are not intrinsically inferior to any in the world. Social barriers, however rigid, must bend before the surpassing brilliancy of Jewish pupils in our high schools and colleges, the predominance of non-British elements in music, the manual facility and expressive grace of the Italians, the energy of this group, the charm of that, the plodding tenacity of a third. Here, if we have eyes to see it, is the youth of America renewed,- the same challenge to obstacles, the same will to break through, that the forefathers showed when they entered the wilderness. This pedler, too, with his broken English, is a pioneer, -- his son will be one of the great art critics of the world. The father of this renowned electrician was sexton of a local church. This fruit dealer dreams of being a banker some day. He smiles as he hears Americans, calling themselves edu- cated, mispronounce his classical name, which by and by will be coupled with Morgan's in Wall street.
To sum up, Tercentenary Boston has a considerably changed population and does not keep the same outward aspect. Our Rip Van Winkle, coming to life after a sleep of fifty years, would look in vain for the copse-bordered country road that was Blue Hill avenue, and would stare up incredulously at the Custom House tower and the terraced altitudes of the Shoe Machinery Building. Yet, like the waterfall or the river, we remain, if not in substance the same, a tolerable likeness of our earlier self. The low murder rate of Boston, its freedom from race riots and lynchings, its incorruptible judiciary, the fair elections, in which every ballot is scrupulously counted, the admirable quality of certain public services, such as schools, parks, libraries and hospitals, the attachment still felt for the city by its wealthy citizens, as evinced by a con- tinuous stream of munificent public donations, the high standard of courtesy maintained in the great stores and observable in casual contacts, are among the signs that mark the present generation as not wholly unworthy of its pre- decessors. Disquieting symptoms appear (by no means confined to the immigrant population), but in some fields, notably in education and in public hygiene, there has been truly epochal progress under leadership of a very high order. All in all, the past half-century must be regarded as a period of transition, with no settled outcome in sight; but if in the next fifty years our city can bring out the finest potentialities of the peoples living here today, it need not fear comparison with its own distinguished past or with the achievement of other American cities.
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THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEWER RACES
By WILLARD DE LUE
There is nothing more colorful, picturesque and romantic in Boston his- tory, and especially Boston history in the last half-century, than the achieve- inent of our newer citizens - the men and women of foreign birth who came to Boston seeking new opportunities in life, and, having found them here, have themselves given gifts in return.
And their greatest of all gifts has been the gift of their very blood, the gift of a new life stream in our population, fresh and virile and aspiring; a blood stream rich in those pioneering instincts upon which the foundations of American civilization were built by another and earlier immigrant group, and one to which we may have to look for the building and development of the future.
To tell, within the limits of this brief paper, of the aspirations and the achievements of these, our newer citizens-the immigrant himself, his children and his children's children - would be utterly impossible. I shall not attempt it. Yet the Memorial Volume would be incomplete without some estimate of the position that they have come to occupy in contemporary Boston, and sonie record of the progress they have made in a community which, until recent years, retained dominantly the character of its Puritan founders.
There are two methods by which an immigrant group can adjust itself to a well-established civilization of preponderantly different blood. One is by imposing its own civilization upon that which it finds. The other is by infiltration and adaptation, entering into the spirit of the existing order, using it as a channel or medium for greater self-expression, accommodating itself to the new life and contributing to it whatever gifts it has to offer.
It is a splendid commentary upon the character of our newer immigrant stream, that in this city, in a very special way, these population groups have so merged themselves in the original blood stream as to enrich, but not to change it. It takes a microscopic investigation of the cultural and political life of Boston today to discover the presence of these new living corpuscles - not because they are few, or unimportant, but because they are so closely inter- iningled with the old. To change the metaphor, our newer citizens have entered into the warp and woof of the great, living, colorful, dramatic tapestry that is Boston today.
Theoretically, as you walk along Boston's streets, pretty nearly three per- sons in every four you meet are, according to the census, either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born partents. More than half of these come of Anglo-Celtic stock; hence may be accepted as being racially, culturally and linguistically similar to the older citizenry. But there still remain 264,000 persons, or about a third of our whole population, who are of immediately non-British origin. So, again theoretically, as you walk the streets of Boston,
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every third person you meet is derived from a non-English speaking country, being either foreign-born himself or the child of a foreign-born parent or parents.
Now go out into the highways and byways of the city, and study faces as they pass you. Go into our schools, our theaters and lecture halls; attend our public meetings; visit our churches. Here and there, deep in the weave of the great fabric of our city life, you will find these different peoples and races showing themselves - but only in touches. They are there, but we do not see them. They are dwelling and working with us, but we do not feel their presence. We can be no more conscious of them than we could be conscious of the blood that they might literally transfuse into our veins. These people today are either a part of us, or are fast becoming so. The famed "melting pot" of America is indeed melting, say what you may to the contrary. The stranger of today is the brother of tomorrow. That is the miracle of the thing.
Some years ago, while at work in the rooms of the Massachusetts His- torical Society (that repository of a precious Puritan past), surrounded by portraits of Puritan Governors in their ruffs as stiff as the civilization they represented, and by books as ancient as the honored names they contained, soft strains of music came floating in through open windows - a melody from Verdi. And looking out, down into the back areaway, I saw a group of musi- cians, itinerants, playing their airs for the few pennies that came down to them from dwellers in the neighborhood. It was not the sweetness and feeling of the music, or the presence of the players in this back areaway, that impressed me. It was, rather, the strange contrast presented by those men and their inusic with the arid, formal, strait-laced civilization represented by the things surrounding me. Gay music of the opera - and stern Puritan fathers! And the thought came to me then with such force that I have never forgotten it, though many years have passed, that those strains of music drifting into a world of older things were perhaps symbolic of the gifts that our newer races had brought to our shores. With all the stalwart courage, purity of character, love of home, and readiness for self-sacrifice of the old, they possessed also a vivacity and freer emotionalism that has found expression in music and art, sport and competitive recreation, and in companionship as warm and bright and sparkling as the vintages of Burgundy. These things have left their mark upon the city. In every field of human endeavor a change has taken place; in every art and profession and industry these newer races have made their contribution.
Take, if you please, the field of music. John Sullivan Dwight's story of music in Boston to 1880, in the fourth volume of the Winsor Memorial History, is a recitation spotted so thickly with names of non-English tinge as to give it the appearance of a purely Continental chronicle. Boston owes its early pre-eminence as a musical center mainly to men of foreign blood, mostly to the Germans. And in our own day the continued prominence in the musical field in Boston of those of non-English racial stock is none the less noteworthy because of the equal eminence of the Smiths, the Joneses and the Browns. For there has been nothing selfish or exclusive about this participation by those of foreign blood. What they possessed, they gave. And the Chadwicks
REPRESENTATIVE BOSTONIANS - FROM THE NEWER RACES JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY MICHAEL ANAGNOS MARIE E. ZAKRZEWSKA GAETANO LANZA
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS
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and the Footes and all the others of that caste who are outstanding today have but picked up the torch that was passed on to them by the Zerrahns, the Eichbergs and the Listemanns of yesterday. Go to the Symphonies and the Pops. Go to the studios and the concert halls. Go to our theaters and our radio studios. Read the names of the musicians you find there, leaders and rank and file. You find thein preponderantly and distinctively indicating Continental origins.
Run over the list of exhibitors in the Tercentenary art exhibition at Horti- cultural Hall. Here, among the strong representation of native and English stock, is a German from the Fatherland, here a Bostonian of Italian parentage, and again, in order, a Scotsman, a Belgian, a Polish Jew (a great painter, by the way, one of whose portraits hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts), then four Russians in a row. Next comes a Greek, "one of our few men in sculpture who shows real originality," comments an artist friend of mine. Here's a Bostonian of German parentage, a native Italian, a Swede. Here is another Italian, noted for his ecclesiastical sculptures and reliefs. And still another Italian "one of our best sculptors," says my friend, better. informed in such matters than I.
The list is interesting, yet perhaps not so impressive in numbers as one might be led to expect. After all, why should we be surprised at this? Art best flourishes where there is leisure in which to cultivate it. And one should scarcely look for immediate artistic expression from those whose presence here is due chiefly to unbearable economic troubles in their old homelands. It is to the next fifty years, rather than to the last fifty, that we must look for the full fruition of artistic and literary capabilities among these citizens of foreign stock. Certainly the achievement of the present is a promise of what is to come. Even as I write, there comes into my room a young woman whose fame as a sculptor is world-wide. Russia was her birthplace. Today she is among the many citizens of foreign stock who are bringing new glory to Boston, their new home.
As in art, so it is in literature; so it is in every field in which the purely cultural attainments of the racial groups are to be measured. It is all too soon to apply the gauge. Remember, it is only in the last fifty years that the great masses of these non-British citizens have come here. The Irish and the Germans alone antedate that period. John Boyle O'Reillys and James Jeffrey Roches and Louise Imogen Guineys are not born every day, as those who boast Irish blood can well attest. So, let us be satisfied with a single Khalil Gibran, that glory of the Syrian race and of the Syrian people of Boston, whose mystic poems live on even while he himself sleeps the long sleep in his native Lebanon. There are dozens of lesser lights who may, momentarily, flare up into great luminosity. The humble content of the many newspapers and other Boston periodical publi- cations devoted to the interests of racial groups, whether printed in a foreign language or in English, must not blind us to the fact many of them inherit literary standards not exceeded by those of purely indigenous origin.
There is scarcely a single group among our citizenry that cannot point to its distinguished kindred in each of the professions. The law, especially, has
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attracted many; and already the Irish, Italians, French-Canadians and Jews have won posts of honor in the judiciary. Perhaps I have overlooked some other national group; I am not trying to be exhaustive but to show typical cases.
Consider the progress that this represents: "When I came to the bar in 1868," wrote that distinguished Bostonian, Henry Munroe Rogers, "there were only a very few Irish practitioners. There was one Negro lawyer, Robert Morris. There were no Jews, as far as I recall, excepting perhaps Max
Fischacher." Ten years later there was no great relative change. Among some twelve hundred lawyers in Boston, only sixty-six had names that might possibly suggest non-English origins - and of the sixty-six all but nine were Irish. Look over the list in this year, 1930. What a contrast.
Among architects in 1877 only five look at all promising to the student of foreign racial achievement - Cahill, Fehmer, Griffin, Lawlor and Riley. Of the thousand or so physicians possibly thirty or forty might be singled out. The dentists muster only seven, including two who were presumably repre- sentative of the Scots - a Macdonald and a McDougall.
Today one might point to an Armenian, honored for his skill in oral surgery. One might single out a Bostonian of Irish blood as one of America's foremost architects. One might point to men of Russian or German Jewish stock who are among our foremost bankers and merchants. Is not one of them now high in the diplomatic service? And another a distinguished member of the Supreme Court of the United States? We might take race after race, national group after national group, and name its leading lights. But that might prove doubly unfortunate. Some names that should be mentioned would probably be omitted; and too great a weight would be placed upon one end of the social scale.
For if we are to measure the character and the contribution of these newer citizens of ours only by the proportion of those among them who have attained eminence in the arts, sciences and professions, then we shall have applied a measure narrow and misleading. So also shall we err if we look only into the lives of those who have gained wealth and social prominence. Let us look at these, by all means; but let us look also into the humble homes, where the bright fire of family life glows so warinly. Surely there is none among the older households that can show greater love of home and family than can these, our newer brethren. In many of these racial groups the percentage of families owning their own homes runs extremely high - sixty or seventy per cent, I believe, in some cases, with the Lithuanians and the Letts establishing particu- larly enviable records. I single these out merely as examples. Other groups may equal or surpass them. As a boy I saw at close range the self-sacrifice and loyalty of brother to brother and sister to sister in an Armenian home that sheltered those now prominent in Boston business. In many of the other racial groups I can claim splendid friends and acquaintances - not all of them persons of wealth and prominence, but inen and women whose simple, unpre- tentious lives might well serve as models for some of the rest of us to follow. And it can be only a source of regret to think (as the recent Wickersham investi- gations suggest) that perhaps the looseness of some phases of our purely American
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