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 38
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The close of the World War was followed by an increased interest in avia- tion on the part of the public. With air officers permanently attached to Corps Area Headquarters and with many flying officers of both army and navy attend- ing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it became highly desirable that there should be some field in the immediate vicinity of Boston from which these men could continue their flight practice. An investigation was made and for a time the State Muster Field at Framningham was used for this pur- pose, but since the place was one hour away from Boston and too small for the safe operation of the larger type of planes, it became a vital matter to all persons interested in aviation to find a new and more suitable site for an air- port. About the same time the Massachusetts National Guard had under consideration the establishment of an air squadron, and the Boston Chamber of Commerce, being anxious to obtain the air mail for Boston, also started an investigation through its Committee on Post Office and Postal Facilities. Various sites were examined and after a considerable length of time the present site of the Boston Airport at Jeffries Point, East Boston, was chosen as being the best from all points of view. Its principal advantage, perhaps, was its almost indefinite capability of enlargement through the filling in of the adjoin- ing flats.
As the land was owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a bill was passed by the Legislature to permit the leasing of the necessary area to
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the army for ten years at a rental of one dollar per year. This bill also carried with it an appropriation of $35,000 for the construction of the necessary run- ways and the erection of hangars, which were to be provided by the War Depart- ment. The bill was signed by Governor Channing H. Cox and became a law on May 12, 1922. It contained several provisions which testify to the far sight and high motives of its numerous sponsors. Among these were the requirement that the army should permit, under suitable regulation, full use of the field by commercial and civilian flyers, and that additional adjoining land might be leased under suitable regulation to the navy, the air mail and private and commercial interests. Since it was recognized at the outset that the appropriation provided for in the bill would not be sufficient to cover the necessary construction work, the Boston Chamber of Commerce raised about $13,000 by public subscription and the City of Boston appropriated $4,000. The contract for the construction of the field was signed August 15, 1922.
The Airport was formally opened September 8, 1923, when nearly fifty planes, army, navy, air mail and commercial, took part in the most successful air demonstration ever witnessed in New England. September 6, 1924, saw another great event,- the first official landing in the United States of the army round-the-world flyers at the Boston Airport. June 17, 1925, the three naval planes which accompanied the Macmillan expedition to the Arctic were placed aboard the "Peary" at the Boston Airport under command of Rear- Admiral (then Lieutenant-Commander) Byrd. The air mail service was inaugurated July 1, 1926, and regular air passenger service was inaugurated April 15, 1929.
In July, 1931, Russell N. Boardman of Boston and John Polando of Lynn made a record non-stop flight from New York City to Istamboul, Turkey, covering 5,040 miles in less than fifty hours. A great reception was given to the fliers by officials of the state and the city on their return to Boston August 25, 1931.
Commercial aviation had now been successfully developed and the need for civil control became apparent. In 1928 the Airport was leased by the state to the city for development as a municipal field. The army and the national guard continued to use the field, but were relieved of the responsibility of regulating civilian activities. Under Mayor Nichols the landing area was increased, the administration building erected, lights for night flying were installed, and the various commercial buildings erected. The army and national guard hangars were moved to their present locations, and the Federal Department of Commerce erected a radio guiding beacon and a radio weather broadcasting station.
On taking office again in 1930, Mayor Curley started an extensive program of expansion to develop the Boston Municipal Airport into one of the finest in the world. An area almost as large as the old landing area was secured from the state and is now being filled. When this work is completed the city will apply for an AlA rating (the highest available) from the Department of Commerce. Hope is entertained for the ultimate transfer to the city of Gov- ernor's Island, which will permit further expansion and provide a site for a dirigible mooring inast. Temporary seaplane facilities have been constructed
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MAYORS OF BOSTON, 1906-1930
JOHN F. FITZGERALD
GEORGE A. HIBBARD
ANDREW J. PETERS JAMES M. CURLEY MALCOLM E. NICHOLS
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and a large seaplane port is contemplated. In all these recent activities his Honor the Mayor has been true to his previous record as a leader in every advance made at the Boston Airport. Without his energetic advocacy and support, not only at home but in Washington, progress would have been mucli slower in this important field.
Since its acquisition by the city in 1928, the Boston Municipal Airport, at that time comprising one hundred and fifty acres, has been under the control of the Park Department. The present superintendent is Capt. Albert L. Edson. From here the Colonial Air Line runs six trips a day each way, carrying passengers and mail, and several other lines have operated during the summer season, making such points as New York, Albany, Springfield, Nantucket, Bangor, Augusta and White River Junction their objectives. Various com- panies, engaged in sales, service, repair work and student instruction, are located at the Airport, which is becoming more and more a center of every forin of aeronautical activity.
One has only to look back a score of years to the first short flights at Squan- tum to realize the changes that have taken place in the art of aviation itself and in the attitude of the public towards it. The higher and farther the airinen fly, the more we seem to accept their voyages as matters of course. Nowadays the statesman, the physician, the broker mount above the clouds to shorten their journeys as nonchalantly as they once took a carriage or the train. The citizen selects the painted air-mail box when he wishes his letter to be dispatched with triple speed. The high school boy studies the ways of engines, rudders and parachutes and dreams of his first solo flight. The planes in the sky, moving singly or in formation, attract scarcely more attention than so many flocks of doves. The stunt flyer at the fair furnishes only one more thrill for the gaping crowd. The Provincetown boat goes down the harbor escorted by a frolicking seaplane out for morning practice. The tongue of land off Jeffries Point creeps out toward Governor's Island, which in all likelihood will some day be leveled and annexed. Those whose desire it has been that the people should become "air-minded" have gone a long way toward carrying their point.
And in all this truly wonderful growth Boston has played a conspicuous part. Few cities can show finer names than those of Langley, the first man to advance the theory of heavier-than-air machines and to construct a prac- ticable plane on this theory; of A. Lawrence Rotch, whose pioneer experiments at Blue Hill with kites and captive balloons revealed conditions in the upper atmosphere and prepared the way for its invasion by men; of Norman Prince, the gallant war-pilot who gave his life for his country; of Godfrey L. Cabot, a former president of the National Aeronautic Association; of Jerome C. Hunsaker, Edward P. Warner and Dr. James Doolittle, products of the Institute of Technology, who have made its aeronautical department famous. The next task in Boston is the development of commercial aviation to a point equaling or surpassing that which it has attained in some of the countries of Europe. With the widespread public interest in the subject and the cordial support of the municipal authorities there is reason to expect that this goal will be achieved.
CHAPTER VI THE SUPERSTRUCTURE-ARTS, SCIENCES AND PROFESSIONS
A SKETCH OF THE LITERARY HISTORY OF BOSTON FROM 1880 TO 1930 By ROBERT E. ROGERS
In the year 1880 the most famous old publishing house in America, which had been carried on under the names of Ticknor and Fields, Hurd and Houghton, Fields, Osgood and Company, James R. Osgood and Company, and Houghton, Osgood and Company, became Houghton, Mifflin and Company .* The fol- lowing year William Dean Howells resigned as editor of its magazine, "The Atlantic Monthly," and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who had been editor of "Every Saturday," took his place. A few years later Howells went to New York to become editor of "Harper's."
These events may serve as memoranda of an historical fact, the passing of the old generation of writers and publishers - the most notable in American literary history - and the rise of New York as the new literary center of America. But the younger generation of Boston still hung on to the production of solid literature, although the great creative days were past. In 1881 Houghton and Mifflin started the "American Statesmen" series, and in 1882 Horace E. Scudder, literary adviser for the firm, issued the first of the famous "Riverside Literature Series," which may be said to have initiated modern educational publishing.
The most illuminating picture of Boston's literary history may, perhaps, be gathered by looking at it in 1880, again about the middle of our period, around 1900, and again during the past decade.
In 1880 the men and women who had made the great classic period of our literature, the Boston-Cambridge-Concord school, were dead or near the end of their lives. Motley, Ticknor and Prescott, the historians, were already dead, as were Thoreau and Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and Jacob Abbott of the "Rollo" books.
Of those living in 1880, Richard Henry Dana of "Two Years Before the Mast," Longfellow, and Emerson died in 1882, Wendell Phillips in 1884, James Freeman Clarke in 1888. In 1888, also, Bronson Alcott died and his daughter, Louisa May. James Russell Lowell, younger than the rest, died in 1891; Whittier in 1892; Francis Parkman in 1893; Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Peabody in 1894. They were the last of the old guard.
There were in their prime in 1880, however, a good number of writers closely associated with this elder generation, with reputations already estab-
* EDITORIAL NOTE .- In 1908 the name was changed to Houghton Mifflin Company, which is the present form.
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lished and work well done, who were to dominate Boston letters for at least a score of years. Chief of these were Julia Ward Howe, for so many years president of the Authors' Club and of the New England Women's Club; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, historian of Unitarianism; Hezekiah Butterworth, long editor of "The Youth's Companion"; Charles Eliot Norton, art critic and Dante scholar; Edwin P. Whipple, critic and essayist, and a few of the women fiction writers of an earlier day, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose Terry Cooke, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose connection with Boston was rather tenuous. John Townsend Trowbridge, author of "Cudjo's Cave" and "Jack Hazard," was still in his prime.
Younger than they, and dominant in the Boston of the 80's and 90's, were the successive editors of "The Atlantic Monthly," William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Horace E. Scudder, holding down what was still the most important editorial post in America. The veteran Oliver Optic (William Taylor Adams) was perhaps the best-known writer for boys in America. Frank Sanborn was left the sole repository of the Concord tradition and carried on the work of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy. Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts man and founder of a paper in Boston, after writing romantic novels, produced in 1888 his "Looking Backward," the most famous of all the American versions of Utopia.
Charles W. Eliot was making over American university education. Phillips Brooks was one of the most eloquent preachers in an age of pulpit eloquence. Francis Amasa Walker, economist, was president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. John Fiske, later a student of history, was the most notable expositor and champion in America of Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Francis James Childs, student of early English, and William J. Rolfe, the Shakespearean, were at work in Cambridge. George Herbert Palmer, the philosopher, now in 1931 nearing his ninetieth year, is the last of that generation.
In the office of the Pilot, the oldest Catholic paper in America, John Boyle O'Reilly was at the height of his reputation. He was the most notable Catholic writer of his generation, poet, journalist, impassioned advocate of liberty and democracy, equally beloved by all sects and parties. With him in the Pilot office were Katherine E. Conway, poet and essayist, whose book, "Watchwords," contains the best of O'Reilly, and James Jeffrey Roche, author of "The V-a-s-e," O'Reilly's successor on the Pilot and poet and wit in his own right. Robert Dwyer Joyce, a Catholic doctor, was a well-known verse writer of this period. After him, from the same Ireland that sent us O'Reilly, Roche and Joyce, came the Unitarian clergyman, Henry Bernard Carpenter, who was also esteemed as a poet.
Among the younger men, Henry Cabot Lodge's reputation for literature was at that time more notable than his political promise, and Robert Grant was commencing a brilliant career in literature and the law.
One of the best known American writers of sentimental and inspirational fiction was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, author of "Gates Ajar," who often collab- orated with her husband, Herbert D. Ward. Margaret Deland had just.
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come from Pennsylvania to the city where she has since lived and written her Dr. Lavendar stories. Sarah Orne Jewett had published her first book, "Deephaven," and was beginning to be known in Boston, as was Louise Chandler Moulton, the poet.
The greatest of them all died in 1886. She was Emily Dickinson of Amherst and has no connection with Boston. Thomas Wentworth Higginson sponsored her in vain to the Boston group, which followed the too delicate and traditional taste of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and would not recognize her.
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This inability to recognize the rarest spirit of its day is curiously typical of Boston literature of that period. It can be seen that there were still names of real power and importance. It can also be seen that they were mostly in fields other than creative literature. It is not altogether easy to decide why it was that after 1880 the important creative literature of America was written elsewhere than in Boston. Some reasons may be guessed at. The heirs of genius are seldom geniuses themselves, and it is certain that Aldrich, Howells, Norton, Higginson and the rest thought of themselves as the Elishas who inherited by right of birthplace the mantles of the great dead Elijahs and were, therefore, scornful and contemptuous of the new literature, the homespun, indigenous writing of the West and South which was coming to the front.
Boston could not easily understand Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte and the local color writers who lacked European or academic culture. That literature, in turn, had little use for Boston. Bret Harte in one of his stories quotes a character as saying: "We ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash and we don't want no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in the ino'nin'. We aint Boston; we're Pike County, we are!" They were tired of a Boston which, according to Howells in "A Chance Acquaintance," "would rather perish by fire and sword than be sus- pected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere." The dominance of such a Boston is, perhaps, why Howells removed to New York. It is possible to believe that the men who might have carried on Boston's literary greatness were killed in the Civil War, but Boston suffered no more than other great centers. Another explanation must be sought.
New York was becoming the metropolis. To New York after 1880 gravi- tated naturally the most ambitious and energetic men and women who hoped to make their mark in literature. Boston had two or three great publishing houses where New York had a dozen. More important, the 80's saw the rise of the magazine in America. Since that day most of the important imagina- tive literature in America has found its way to the public first through the magazine. The most enterprising magazines were in New York; the quality group, "Scribners," "The Century," "Harpers," as well as the earliest popular prints of the 90's, "Munsey's," "McClure's," and John Brisben Walker's "Cosmopolitan." In Boston "The Atlantic" still hung on, though with declining influence, under Houghton Mifflin management. Their juvenile magazine, "Every Saturday," had to be sold to New York. The oldest and most serious of our reviews, "The North American," moved to New York.
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"The New England Magazine," old and influential, had to suspend publica- tion in 1917, just as the famous "Youth's Companion" .did in 1929. All the money in literature lay in the magazine field and inost of the magazines were in New York.
Usually an increasingly cosmopolitan population means an increase in literature and artistic creative power. In Boston it meant just the reverse. The population growth from Ireland and Italy which made Boston a largely Catholic city, and the growth of the Jewish population, gave us virtually no cosmopolitan literature, as was the case in New York. In one of the greatest Catholic centers of the United States there have been almost no Catholic writers, ecclesiastics or laymen, of recognized distinction. Massachusetts, like ahnost every section of the Union, has been drained of its literary talent to make a literary and artistic center of New York. Only in non-creative literature, fostered by scholarship and traditional culture, has Boston held her own.
Possibly the decline of Boston's business enterprise and initiative for the past fifty years has had something to do with it. Edward Everett Hale thought so. In 1898, speaking at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Boston University, Doctor Hale said:
"The leaders in Massachusetts sixty, seventy, eighty years ago were the men who had done something. They had discovered the Columbia river or traded for furs with the Indians, or split ice off an iceberg in Labrador and sent it to Havana or Calcutta; and the young men - the Bryants, the Holmeses, the Palfreys, the Lowells - who grew up in a circle of men who could do something, are the men who made our literature. As I look round on the leaders of society now, whose most prominent business is to unlock a safe in a safety deposit vault and cut off the coupons from their bonds and carry them to be cashed, these men do not, to my mind, compare favorably with the men who split the ice from the Labrador iceberg or who dis- covered the Columbia river. And I am quite sure that just as fast and just as far as Massachusetts and New England do anything that is worth doing, so fast and so far will Massachusetts and New Eng- land have a literature."
If that were true in 1898, it is not altogether untrue today.
Certainly the Boston of the 80's that Howells describes so keenly in "The Rise of Silas Lapham" and "A Modern Instance" was one which had no lack of eminent men in letters, provided one remembers that the creative fire and energy of the years from 1840 to 1870 could not, in the nature of things, have perpetuated itself.
This can easily be shown by reference to the Saturday Club, the inner shrine of Boston reputation and accomplishment for many years. A list of members (now deceased) who were elected to the club between 1870 and 1920 and who had some connection with letters follows :* Charles W. Eliot, Presi-
* The Later Years of the Saturday Club, M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927.
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dent of Harvard; Francis Parkman, historian; Richard Henry Dana; William Dean Howells; Edwin Laurence Godkin, editor of "The Nation"; William Barton Rogers, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Freeman Clarke; Phillips Brooks; William Wetmore Story, sculptor and poet; William James, psychologist and philosopher; Francis Amasa Walker, economist; Charles Francis Adams, Jr .; Raphael Pumpelly, geologist; William Watson Goodwin, Greek scholar; Thomas Bailey Aldrich; William Sturgis Bigelow, Buddhist scholar; John Fiske, historian; James Ford Rhodes, his- torian; Henry James, novelist; William Roscoe Thayer, biographer.
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That shows very clearly the characteristics of literature in Boston during this period.
A survey of the next generation is made easy for us by an admirable little book, written by Helen M. Winslow, who is still living, and published by L. C. Page and Company in 1902-03. This volume, called "Literary Boston of Today," and dedicated to Edward H. Clement, long editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, is an extraordinarily complete and interesting record, written with a good deal of personal charm. At the beginning Miss Winslow quotes one Roswell Field, a Chicago reviewer, then living in Boston.
"Merely as a matter of general statistics, and possibly of general interest, it may be set down that every family in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, boasts a rubber tree and an author. In certain instances there are two or three rubber trees and an author, and in others two or three authors and a rubber tree, but the average holds good and we are all very happy and contented.
"Back in Cook County, where culture is believed to make thirty revolutions a minute, we were accustomed to think that the amal- gamated poets and the concatenated laureates were tolerably plentiful; but, bless you, their mobilized force would not niake a respectable escort for the men and wonien of Boston who have not only written books but have had them published. . The Boston author impresses me as much less self-assertive than his Western brother. This is probably due to the fact that there are so many more of him.
The author is usually a charining gentleman, not wholly unconscious of his individual purpose but ready to concede that there are others. "
A careful reading of Miss Winslow's book discloses several facts. There were left in 1900 very few links with the great era; the number of women writers is proportionately much greater than before; there are fewer names of national reputation and genuine literary distinction and many more names whose connection with letters is more social than professional. Boston has always been given to awarding literary honors to society women (and even men) who are hardly more than amateurs at writing, as a scrutiny of the suc- cessive membership lists of the Authors' Club will show.
In Miss Winslow's book the old guard of the day were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, and Julia
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Ward Howe, all of whom died within the decade. Mrs. James T. Fields, wife of the publisher and author of valuable volumes of reminiscences, was still alive.
The young things of the 80's were now well established. Mrs. Howe's daughters, Laura E. Richards, author of the popular juvenile, "Captain January," and Maud Howe Elliott, wife of John Elliott, the artist, who also wrote a bit, stood next the throne of the president of the Authors' Club.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Harriet Prescott Spofford were still writing, but the most important and serious creative writing of the period was being done by middle-aged women; Sarah Orne Jewett, perhaps the best of them all, Mary E. Wilkins (not yet Freeman) and Alice Brown, all of whom wrote of New England life and whose work is a permanent part of American literature. Margaret Deland, who lived in Boston and wrote of Pennsylvania, was also at the height of her power. Lesser women story-writers were Eliza Orne White, Agnes Blake Poor, Anna Fuller, and two writers of juveniles, Helen Leah Reed (the Brenda stories) and Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Lothrop) of "Five Little Peppers" fame.
Among the men who were doing creative writing, there was Judge Robert Grant, whose anti-feminist novel, "Unleavened Bread," was as sensational around the turn of the century as "Main Street" was a decade ago. His later novel, "The Chippendales," is an admirable picture of the Boston of this first decade of the century.
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