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 5
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50
I took a warm personal interest in the erection of the Public Library and Symphony Hall, the architects of both being McKim, Mead and White. William R. Mead, the last surviving member of the original firm, was my cousin, and we talked much, especially about the library. The real head of the famous architectural house today, as for some years past, is William Mitchell Kendall, a Boston boy, a graduate of Harvard. The great group of buildings for the Harvard School of Business Administration is but one of many of the creations of the firm in this vicinity. Mr. Kendall is the son of Joshua Kendall, an accomplished scholar, and one of our few real lovers of Plato, whose school for boys on Appian Way in Cambridge is still well remembered, and his mother, Phoebe Mitchell, as striking a character as her husband, was a sister of Maria Mitchell, the famous astronomer.
My acquaintance with Major Higginson was outside the realm of music. He was a strong international man, as well as an ardent patriot, and a sincere friend of the peace movement. He was deeply interested in the International Peace Congress in Boston in 1904. I was the chairman of the Executive Com- mittee which arranged that Congress; and Major Higginson liked the results so much that when in 1909 a meeting of our citizens was held at the Mayor's office to plan the Boston celebration of the centenary of the birth of Lincoln, in complimentary words which quite surprised me and still make me blush, he moved that I be made chairman of the committee to choose the orator and arrange the program. Major Higginson was unquestionably during the last period of his life our foremost Boston citizen. I wish that every Boston young man entering upon the exercise of his citizenship might read the admirable biography of him by Bliss Perry.
In 1878, just at the beginning of the period of these memories, John H. Holmes became editor of the Boston Herald, remaining in that post for thirty years. From 1881 to 1906 Edward H. Clement was editor of the Boston Tran- script, having been associate editor for half a dozen years before 1881. Robert Lincoln O'Brien, successively editor of the Transcript and the Herald and Washington correspondent of the Transcript for many years before he became its editor, is happily still with us, although not now the head of a newspaper.
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These three have been the most distinguished and influential Boston editors in this period. Mr. Holmes was not a man of journalistie antecedents, but he lifted the Herald to a position which it had never known before and established a standard which no Boston newspaper had known before. A keenly intellectual man, versatile, eatholie, high-minded, with a profound sense of the funetion which a great metropolitan journal should perform, and with such men on his staff as George F. Babbitt, Osborne Howes, Julius Ward and Walter Allen, he rendered a notable serviee to this city. It is not too much to say that he more than any other man set the new paee for Boston journalism.
A unique figure in Boston newspaper life, Edmund Noble, for a generation associated with the Herald, began that eonneetion under Mr. Holmes. Born in Glasgow, and with a long and varied newspaper experience in England before coming to this country, he rendered almost every sort of service on the Herald, as reporter, reviewer and editorial writer. He has certainly been the best reporter in Boston. I am sure that many who like myself have had to give addresses from Boston platforms and to preside at publie meetings have felt a grateful relief when they saw Edmund Noble at the reporters' table. I have often had oeeasion to refleet upon how much more he knew about the subjeet under discussion than the man whom he was reporting. In his off hours he writes books on philosophy, for his philosophieal and seientifie interest is un- flagging, and it is always good philosophy.
Edward H. Clement was a man loved and honored in Boston like few inen of his time. Born in Chelsea, he was a Bostonian all his life, the very incarna- tion of the best Boston spirit. Having spent his student days at Tufts College during the Civil War, he carried through his life the devotion of that heroie period to liberty. Profoundly interested in the welfare of the freedmen, immedi- ately after the war he went to Georgia for service on a Savannah paper. Then he served on the New York Tribune and New Jersey papers, but soon gravitated baek to Boston, where he belonged. The Transcript celebrated its eentenary in 1930, as Boston celebrated its Tereentenary, but half a century ago it did not hold a place so prominent as the Traveler. It was Edward Clement who made the Transcript a Boston institution, a paper that no true Boston family ean keep house without. His old series of articles on Boston journalism in the nineteenth century is a valuable chapter in the period here surveyed. From 1901 to 1920 he continued the "Listener" column, which Joseph Edgar Chamberlin had founded in 1887. Mr. Chamberlin, besides wearing a transparent disguise as the "Nomad," still eonduets the "Listener" column with such a wealth of knowledge, especially of loeal lore, such good temper and good taste, that his work is a veritable Boston notion. If there be anywhere in the country more illuminating musical eritieism than that of Philip Hale in the Boston Herald and H. T. Parker in the Transcript, I do not know where it is. We have been debtors through the years to Mr. Minot and Mr. Edgett for the fine enthusiasmn, eulture and sanity which distinguish the literary pages of those journals, and Bostonians hold that not a few of the "Unele Dudley" editorials in the Globe will bear comparison with many numbers of the "Tatler."
The pre-eminently dignified and representative Boston newspaper half a century ago was still the old Advertiser. We often wish today that the pages of
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our newspapers were smaller, like the papers of Paris and Berlin. But the Advertiser page was larger than the others, although there were only four pages. Illustrations in our newspapers had not then come into vogue; neither, happily, had the monstrous headlines which we suffer, so that all the papers had a much more respectable front. The editor of the Advertiser in 1880 was Delano Goddard, one of the most high-minded men ever connected with the Boston press. He came to Boston from Worcester, where he had been the editor of the historic Massachusetts Spy. On the Advertiser staff then or soon after were Edward Stanwood, afterwards the editor of the "Youth's Companion" and long the secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society; and Edwin M. Bacon, who was afterwards for many years my neighbor on Pinckney street, a man who held many newspaper positions in Boston and who knew his Boston better than almost anybody in the town. His little "Dictionary of Boston" is invalu- able, and is only one of half a dozen of his Boston books. He loved Boston as Charles Lamb loved London, and relished his morning walk around Boston Common as Doctor Johnson relished a walk down Fleet street. In the years when we touched elbows I never knew him to take any other outing-although he wrote the best book that exists about the Connecticut Valley. The musical critic of the Advertiser was the popular Louis C. Elson. The dramatic critic was Henry A. Clapp, as distinguished a figure in his way as Edward Clement, a representative of what was finest in our newspaper life. He was for a long period our most accomplished Shakespearean, and his Lowell Lectures were marked events.
Delano Goddard was in 1880 the center of this brilliant Advertiser group. His gifted wife, Martha Le Baron Goddard, was a daughter of Plymouth, and their home on Mount Vernon place, beside the State House, holds a charmed place in the best Boston memories of that time: Few people now recall Harriet Preston's striking little novel, "Love in the Nineteenth Century," which the initiated knew to be a reflection of the Goddard courtship and marriage. I knew Mrs. Goddard much longer and better than I knew her distinguished husband, for after his death her home until her death was the same as my own. I wonder whether Boston boarding houses of the character of that one still exist. The head of that old Pinckney street house was an incarnation of the kindliest and staunchest spirit of the New England village. Mrs. Goddard, carrying her sorrow so sweetly, and revered by all for her resolute activities, was our dean by divine right. There was a young Technology professor with his bright Wis- consin wife. There was a young graduate of the Harvard Medical School, destined to become the head of the state insane asylum in South Carolina. Professor Hinckley G. Mitchell, soon to be so conspicuous a heretic, and his wife were of us. I had known Mitchell as far back as our student days at Leipzig, where we had adjoining rooms in the same house, with the door between usually open. He was then and always the painstaking friend and helper of his circle. Dallas Lore Sharp, in the introduction to Mitchell's unfinished auto- biography, published after his death, paid just tribute to him as one of the saintliest of men. He was the best Bible scholar I ever knew. His power to inspire students was almost unexampled; and bishops never did a more bigoted or foolish thing than when they removed him from his chair at the theological
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school, under the almost universal protest, be it remembered to their praise, of the faculty and officials of Boston University.
For a time at the boarding house, Helen Campbell, the author of "Prisoners of Poverty," an untiring worker for humanity, was of us. So in some domestic interlude was Charles H. Levermore, later the president of Adelphi College at Brooklyn, and the winner of the Bok peace prize, but at that earlier time a professor of history in the Institute of Technology. So for a year was the brilliant Mary M. Kingsbury, already consecrated to social welfare, and des- tined, as Mrs. Simkhovitch, to years of distinguished service as the head of the John Street Settlement, in Greenwich Village, New York. There were charm- ing girls from places as widely distributed as Greenfield, Washington, Madison and Peoria, studying in Boston schools.
The undisputed autocrat of the breakfast-table and the dinner-table was that robust man from Maine, Samuel F. Hubbard, a salient personality, smacking of the soil, afterwards for twenty years the superintendent of the North End Union, long a marked figure of the Twentieth Century Club and the City Club. He was everybody's friend, a man of the tenderest and sturdiest sympathy and of what John Hay would call "huge mirth." The Herald once published an article about him as "The Most Popular Man in Boston," for which caption there was abundant warrant. He was my close friend for almost the whole period of these memories, and after my marriage he never failed for thirty years to come to us for Christmas Eve, when a score of friends joined us for the "Christmas Carol." We always cast him for "Fezziwig," and the circle would not have thought the rendering authentic without him. The thought of him here brings up pictures of the old Pinckney street boarding house and long summer evenings when we sat on the broad roof of the ell, which he called "The Lawn," and dreamed across the river to Cambridge and the sunset. I wonder, I say, whether such boarding houses still exist in Boston. Everybody now without an individual home seems to haunt restaurants; but these Boston memories of the last generation would not be complete without this representative picture.
The religious journals have always played an important part in our Boston life. I have known best in this period the Congregationalist and the Christian Register. But Dr. Charles Parkhurst, the editor of Zion's Herald for a generation before 1920, was a veritable institution in New England Methodism. The Christian Leader has won my growing esteein for its growing devotion to the cause of peace. I knew and admired John Boyle O'Reilly and James Jeffrey Roche, successively editors of the Pilot and, much more, inspired poets of freedom.
There were few men of his time in Boston who knew our Puritan history so thoroughly or loved our traditions so fondly as Henry Morton Dexter, for years the editor of the Congregationalist. His learned work on "Congre- gationalism as Seen in its Literature" is a storehouse of exact information on our origins much broader in its scope than its title implies. Rev. Albert E. Dunning, who succeeded him, was stalwartly loyal to the same traditions, and his devotion to the peace cause also brought us closely together. Howard Bridgman, his successor, stood close to me in many ways. Two editors of the
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"Christian Register," George Batchelor and Samuel J. Barrows, were valued friends of mine and able men. Mr. Barrows, for some years minister of the famous old First Church of Dorchester, at Meeting House Hill, was an accom- plished historical scholar, especially in the field of our New England beginnings. The "Register" office in the Barrows period was a delightful place to look into. Mrs. Barrows was a famous stenographer and an all-round enthusiast, and Mrs. Emma Marean of Cambridge used to help, and even succeeded Mr. Bar- rows for a time as editor. Mrs. Barrows was much liked and trusted by Dr. George E. Ellis, then the venerable president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, young friend of Daniel Webster and everybody's friend. Once a month for many winters, a dozen persons, in which fortunate circle I was included, were invited to his Marlborough street home for supper, Mrs. Barrows being entrusted with the inviting. Doctor Ellis did the talking, drawing upon an unrivaled experience and acquaintance, and if there were richer and more interesting evenings in those days in Boston, they were few and far between.
The Boston pulpit fifty years ago and in the next ensuing years saw some marked men. The most illustrious preacher was Phillips Brooks, who came to his native Boston from Philadelphia in 1870, while Trinity Church was still on Summer street, and who died as bishop of Massachusetts in 1894. His influence upon the religious life of Boston was incalculable. The power of his presence was such that his printed sermons reflect inadequately the impres- siveness of his spoken words. I heard most of the famous preachers of the time in England and America - Beecher, Spurgeon, Liddon, Stanley, Mar- tineau, but no other gave such an immediate sense of inspiration. The Sun- day afternoons in which so many of us, from many churches, listened to his enraptured utterance remain forever sacred memories of divine communication. We are fortunate at this time in the gift of Bishop Lawrence's strong and tender little book about him, to add to Professor Allen's great biography. Bishop Lawrence's other book, "Fifty Years," whose bold and advanced utterances precipitated one of the most notable theological controversies of the time, also contains a memorable tribute to Phillips Brooks' influence upon himself and upon his age. Phillips Brooks was a quickening spirit more than a contributor of new thought. After he died we had a memorial meeting at the Twentieth Cen- tury Club, in the founding of which he had been deeply interested. The speakers were his successor, Doctor Donald, and Edward Everett Hale, and Doctor Donald's opening word was this: "I shall say little about Phillips Brooks' theology; it was simply the theology of Horace Bushnell." If he had said Dean Stanley, it would have served as well. Our great Boston preacher was the pre-eminent Broad Church preacher of his age. He made the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts a different church, and he made Boston a different Boston.
George A. Gordon, whom I knew long, came to the Old South Church a dozen years after Phillips Brooks came to Trinity, and he occupied the Old South pulpit for forty years. His theology was essentially that of Phillips Brooks, and it is a question whether his distinctly theological influence in Boston and New England was not greater. As the minister of the most historic and
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important Congregational church in the country, he came closer to the pre- vailing order here, and he had a greater tendency and talent for theological discussion.
The meteoric career in Boston of William H. H. Murray, first at Park Street Church and then at Music Hall, ended just as the half-century began. Murray and Gordon both came to Boston from churches in Connecticut, but never were two men more unlike in temper and method, although theologically they were in essential accord. As Professor Mitchell's trouble was with the bishops, Mr. Murray's trouble was with his deacons. If both minister and deacons had had a little more tolerance and patience, a little more mutual respect for varying antecedents and habits, a little more common sense, Mr. Murray's Boston story might have been longer and a marked blessing for the town, for he was a man of sturdy and noble nature, of rugged honesty and rare powers; a great pulpit career was ruthlessly checked.
We always remember that William E. Barton, though his later ministry in Chicago was longer and more important, was for years the pastor of the Shawmut Church, and he came back to make Massachusetts his permanent home for his last years. No other man has done so much as he to conserve and enrich the great Lincoln memories. The saintly and intrepid Clara Barton, of Red Cross memory, a Worcester County girl, was of his family, and his biography of her is an invaluable record. He was a prince of speakers for young people and no one was more warmly welcomed at our Old South summer lectures. Charles Carleton Coffin, the famous Civil War correspondent for the Boston Journal and writer of so inany splendid books for boys, was long a leading member of the Shawmut Church. He was my wife's uncle, and Boston never had a more loyal and devoted citizen. Our last association with Mr. Barton was at Lausanne in the summer of 1927, when we were together for a week at the time of the great Church Conference. At the same hotel with us was Bishop Brent, the president and originator of that remarkable conference, who also had been the minister of a Boston church.
I first knew Philip Moxom in Cleveland, in my early days of western lecturing, soon after 1880. I stumbled into hearing him in his Cleveland church, instantly recognizing his rare vitality, and when he came to the First Baptist Church in Boston, I confidently anticipated the impress he would make upon our religious and intellectual life. Doctor Hale thought him our best preacher. He was always one of the Boston group, of which Doctor Hale was the leader, which in the May days each year went out to the International Arbitration Conferences at Lake Mohonk.
I first met Brooke Herford similarly in the West. He had come to Chicago from a most successful ministry at Manchester in England, and his ministry in Chicago and afterwards at the Arlington Street Church in Boston was even more notable. His mental vigor, warm sympathies, practicality and humanity brought a fresh and wholesome current into Boston preaching. He was long my neighbor on Pinckney street and I held him in high and affectionate esteem. His return to England during the full tide of his success in Boston, a chivalric thing on his part, as he felt he was more needed in his fellowship there than here, was perhaps a mistake. When we saw him in London a few years after-
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wards, although he had been the head of an important parish, he was not only ill but sad, and his death followed too soon. Doctor Hale's neighbor in Rox- bury, long minister of the historic church of John Eliot, was James De Nor- mandie, a man of beautiful spirit, ripe culture and rare devotion to our New England history.
The minister of the Second Church of Boston, the church of the Mathers and of Emerson, during a large part of this half-century, was Edward A. Horton, whose death after a long and always so youthful life occurs just as this volume is in preparation. I knew him well during the whole half-century, and we were responsibly related as directors of the North End Union and otherwise. He was president of the Boston Common Association, and care for the Common was a very part of his religion. Never was so revered a chaplain of the Massa- chusetts Senate,- a post he held for a full quarter-century. His patriotism and his eloquence were fervent and his enthusiasm was inexhaustible.
Four of the younger men in the Unitarian fellowship were my close friends - Paul Revere Frothingham, Edward Cummings, Samuel M. Crothers and Charles F. Dole. By sad fatality, the deaths of all came close together. Frothingham was of the honored old Boston family to which Dr. N. L. Froth- ingham, so long minister of the First Church, belonged. Succeeding Brooke Herford and John Cuckson at Arlington Street while yet a young man, his quarter-century there, with his singular purity, straightforwardness and conse- cration, was not only a benediction to the church but to the community. Edward Cummings came to the South Congregational just as Paul Frothingham came to Arlington Street, first as Doctor Hale's colleague, then as his successor. A long-time student of social problems at Harvard and in Europe, and professor of sociology at Harvard, he brought to the church the same zeal for social wel- fare which had controlled his life, and Doctor Hale's conspicuous devotion to good citizenship and world peace marked his own ministry. It was in his last period that Doctor Hale's church was merged with the First Church, I being myself one of those happily merged.
Samuel M. Crothers came to the old First Church in Cambridge in 1894, half-way in the journey of his life, and during the latter half, at least, of his full generation there he was certainly the most interesting man in the Greater Boston pulpit. There may have been greater preachers, but he was much more than a preacher; he was the many-sided apostle of a humaner and more attractive and creditable society, and his dozen volumes of essays were the wittiest and most pungent in that period of literary Boston, as subtle in their humor, as pregnant in their purpose and as winning in their style as anything in Lamb.
Charles F. Dole was not a humorist like Crothers, but he was like him a saint. Both cradled in the rigid old orthodoxy, they obtained their freedom with varying prices and retained its serious consecration in varying ways. With little of the playfulness of Crothers, but with all of his kindliness, Dole's life was a crusade for a better social order and good will among men. His dominant concerns, like Doctor Hale's, were good citizenship and world peace, and with a purity and fixity of purpose which haloed him in the minds of all who knew him, he worked untiringly, through every agency which he could
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enlist or create, with a studiousness, a valor, a humility, an uncompromisingness, which made him a unique factor in our Boston life.
The year after Dole graduated from Andover Theological Seminary, a saint, destined to as long a life in Boston as his own, entered the Seminary. This was Francis E. Clark, the founder of the great Christian Endeavor Society. He went from Andover to a church in Portland, as Dole had done. He came from Portland to Boston, as Dole had done, to make Boston his home for the rest of his life, and during all the later part of that life I knew him well. In 1880, two years before he came, he had founded the famous society associated with his name. Its life just covers the half-century of this survey. The Society now numbers five million members all over the world. Boston has always been its capital, and it is not too much to say that it has been the most important religious movement in the half-century in Boston. Every Christian Endeavor Society has also been a Good Citizenship Society and a Peace Society, for Francis Clark was a Christian statesman of the highest order, and the pervasive good influence of the movement has been incalculable.
One of the early converts to the Christian Endeavor movement was a Boston boy, named George W. Coleman. He was twenty-three years old when he first crossed my path in 1890. He was just back to Boston from a shipwreck in the Caribbean, and came to the office of the "New England Magazine" for a job, which he found, to our mutual advantage. From us he went to the office of Doctor Clark's journal, the "Christian Endeavor World," and quickly earned an influential place in the movement, passing then through various interests, until he became the president of the Babson Institute. No religious worker could have a better inspiration or succession than from Francis E. Clark. The Ford Hall Forum, which has made Mr. Coleman best known, was started in Boston in 1908, and has exhibited under his control a breadth, an energy, an understanding of the real problems of the people, which have made it a vital and expanding national influence. I welcomed it warmly and have watched its growth with great satisfaction. I spoke at the first Ford Hall meeting, and was then and for many years one of the directors of the Forum.
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