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 7
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In Boston municipal affairs, especially as concerned the public schools, I took a more active interest. I was the secretary of the Boston Municipal League almost as long as it existed. The founder, president and real backbone of the League was Samuel B. Capen, who was also in its best days president of the Boston School Committee. The meetings of the Executive Committee of the League were always at Mr. Capen's office on Washington street,- he was a member of the well-known firm of Torrey, Bright and Capen,- and I still think of the faithful attendance of Rev. Frederick B. Allen and Edwin
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J. Lewis, the gifted architect, the latter happily still with us. Mr. Allen was a singularly consecrated and efficient man. Long the assistant minister at Trinity Church under Phillips Brooks, he was still longer executive secretary of the Episcopal City Mission and the head of the Watch and Ward Society. Whenever a hard job was to be done in Boston, there was Frederick B. Allen ready to undertake it, and when summer came he went up to his summer home by Squam Lake and refreshed himself by painting pictures. When May came, he went with the rest of us for the week at Mohonk; I see him and Moxom now starting off with their golf sticks for the free afternoon.
Mr. Capen was born in Boston and always identified with Boston; and Boston never had a better citizen. We were related in many ways. He was profoundly devoted to the peace cause, always of the Boston group which went out to the Mohonk Conferences, and one of the trustees of the World Peace Foundation from the time that Edwin Ginn established it. In his last years he was president of the American Board for Foreign Missions; and in its interest he undertook the tour of inspection through Asia which terminated in his sudden death at Shanghai. He wrote me frequently on the trip - from Cairo, from Ceylon, from the sea beyond - two letters reaching me after his death, coming as veritable voices from the beyond. I took part in the memorial service for him at the Old South Church, at the end of the same week, early in 1914, in the beginning of which I had spoken at the memorial meeting for Edwin Ginn, Mr. Capen's friend and long-time co-worker.
The period of the Boston Municipal League was coincident with the early days of the Twentieth Century Club, which meant much more to me, and of which it may perhaps be said that I was the principal founder. The idea of the Club and its name were not due to me, but to William Ordway Partridge, the gifted sculptor, who for some years made Boston his home. He was my good friend, and he wanted me to put the idea through; with some others, he thought I had a gift for organization. But his idea was of a small group of progressive men, with a center of a somewhat Bohemian character, where they could get together for simple cheer, good dreaming and good talk. This did not quite appeal to me, and I had many irons in the fire, but he readily agreed to my idea of something bolder and bigger. So the Club was launched, "to promote a finer public spirit and better social order," and it has certainly justified its existence. In 1893, when it was conceived, many of us were deeply stirred by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," the English "Fabian Essays," and Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," all of them considered dangerous by some of our proper folk, and I felt that a better center for frank and brave discussion of social reform than anything we then had in Boston ought to be established. A little group of Bellamy's disciples were already meeting together, as the "Cold Cut Club," and some of the leaders of this group joined the new organization, among them Sumner B. Pearmain, who was the Club's devoted treasurer as long as I was its president. For a long period after the opening, the equally devoted and efficient secretary was Edward H. Chandler, who had been associated with Robert A. Woods at the South End House.
One of the London "Fabians," William Clarke, an old Cambridge Univer- sity friend of mine, was here lecturing in 1893, and came to one of our organiza-
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tion meetings. A dozen of us, with Edward Everett Hale and John Fiske giving their names to head the list, issued the call, and the enterprise had a quick and warm response. I tried to induce John Fiske to become the president, but he was a little suspicious of our "socialist" proclivities. I was the president for eight or nine years; Charles F. Dole, by my desire, succeeded me for a yet longer time; then briefly John Graham Brooks, Samuel M. Crothers, George P. Morris and William C. Crawford; then the longer term of James P. Munroe, sadly terminated by his sudden death. Mr. Munroe was an indefatigable good citizen with devotion especially to the Institute of Technology, of which he was a distinguished graduate, and we had much in common, beginning with ancestral interests in Lexington. Mr. Brooks' beautiful tributes to Mr. Dole and Mr. Crothers should be printed together. His own services for industrial and social progress in this country throughout the whole period here studied were signal.
Almost from the first, the membership of the Club has been of both men and women. I think it was the first considerable club of that character. There are six hundred members now, but some of us still think back with pleasure to the day of small things, when three-score gathered for the Saturday luncheons at the first rooms in Hancock avenue, and Sam Hubbard was high steward, chief cook and head waiter; then to the time when such pioneering social re- formers as Robert A. Woods and Mary Morton Kehew were so active. For the Club was not simply a talking body, but a very active body, with energetic committees concerned with many urgent municipal and educational reforms. Its educational committee, in which Samuel T. Dutton, Dr. Edward N. Hart- well and Charlotte Barrell Ware were leaders, provided the Boston teachers with courses of Saturday lectures by Edward Howard Griggs, Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh and others, of a higher order than they had had before. The notable series of lectures on beauty in the home drew great audiences and their counterpart is needed in Boston today. The series of crowded noonday organ recitals in the churches, originated and managed by Prof. Leo R. Lewis of Tufts College, was a new public service warmly welcomed and repeated elsewhere. The memorable midnight meeting in front of the State House, with twenty thousand people present, to greet the birth of the twentieth cen- tury, was arranged by the Twentieth Century Club. Doctor Hale, who was the central figure in the observance, devoted a chapter to it in his "Memories of a Hundred Years," and I need only to recall attention to that impressive account.
In the early days of the club there were Wednesday night lectures as well as the Saturday luncheons, and some of these meetings are outstanding in memory. Howells came; so did General Francis A. Walker, with his sharp impeachment of the strict gold standard in our currency; Keir Hardie and Sidney Webb from London. President Andrews of Brown University, just back from some months in Europe and the East, startled us by his picture of the militarism and jealousies he had found everywhere, warning us that we were living in a fool's paradise. This was years before any clear rumblings of the World War, and many thought, I with others, that he was an alarmist. In fact, one of our leading Boston editors in the discussion sharply brought him to book for scaring the people. The cloud, then to us no bigger than a man's hand, was all too
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soon to cover the sky. I did not myself discern it until our visit to England and Germany in 1907, when I wrote my impressions, published in the "Atlantic Monthly " the next year.
It was in 1895, the year after the Twentieth Century Club was established, that Cleveland's ill-timed Venezuela message came. The amount of latent jingoism and readiness for war with England which it let loose was incredible to most of our people. The story is best told in Norman Angell's "Patriotism Under Three Flags," where few men in Congress appear in a worse light than our own Senator Lodge. The general reaction in Boston and Massachusetts was one of amazement and stern condemnation, and never did the Boston pulpit render nobler or more necessary service than on the next Sunday. The Twen- tieth Century Club for the only time in its history departed from its rule of not passing resolutions, and registered its unanimous protest.
At the Peace Conference at Washington, in April, presided over by Senator Edmunds, I was one of a large Boston delegation, and President Eliot and Edward Everett Hale were prominent figures. Already a year before, the first Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, destined to become so signal an agency in the American peace movement, had been assembled by Mr. Smiley, and the principal address was by Doctor Hale, on international organization, especially a permanent international tribunal, as the hopeful means to prevent war. The Mohonk Conference of 1896, with the Venezuela message just behind it, and with Senator Edmunds presiding, was far more important than that of 1895. I was the secretary of the Conference that year and for several years ensuing, and there was no more devoted or influential group at Mohonk during the years up to the World War than the large Boston group.
I had been a member of the American Peace Society for some years before the opening of the Mohonk Conferences, and in 1887 in its behalf had taken to President Cleveland and to Senator Hoar at Washington the Society's petition for action by our government in behalf of international arbitration in accord with recent similar action by the British Parliament. In 1892 Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood became general secretary of the Society. Doctor Trueblood was a scholar, had been the president of a college in Iowa, knew the history of the peace movement better than any other man in the country, and was a forcible speaker and writer. He quickly made the "Advocate of Peace" the best peace journal in the world; and his survey of the progress of the cause during the year was long a distinctive feature of the opening session of the annual Mohonk Conference. For most of his term as secretary the president was Robert Treat Paine, a leader in so many social welfare activities in Boston; and the two men were devoted fellow workers. Boston had been the headquarters of the Ameri- can Peace Society since 1837, when by the earnest invitation of the Massa- chusetts Peace Society, which had been founded by Noah Worcester and Channing as far back as 1815, it removed its office here from Hartford. The prophetic William Ladd was then its president, and Boston from that time was the center of the peace movement in America. In 1911 the American Peace Society changed its quarters from Boston to Washington. The World Peace Foundation, founded in Boston by Edwin Ginn, had then been firmly established.
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The call for the first Hague Conference, to meet in May, 1899, found nowhere in America a warmer response than in Boston. The American Peace Society was very active, and the pre-eminent leader both in Boston and in the country was Edward Everett Hale. Doctor Hale was the greatest peace preacher in the American pulpit of our time. Some years before 1889, when in his sermon at Washington on the centenary of Washington's inauguration he had prophesied the organization of the nations along the lines of our own na- tional federal system, he had declared the peace cause to be one of the paramount concerns of the Church. Following the call for the Hague Conference, which seemed to him the great fulfillment of his hopes, he, now seventy-six years old, crusaded through the country in its behalf from Boston to Chicago, often speaking two or three times a day. I was at the time the president of the Massa- chusetts Good Citizenship Society. I felt with my associates that the promotion of world order was now a commanding concern of good citizenship; and early in 1899 I arranged a course of Monday noon addresses at Tremont Temple to promote American interest in the approaching Conference. These meetings, which were largely attended, were addressed by Doctor Hale, Doctor Trueblood, Samuel Gompers, Rev. Reuen Thomas and others, and had a marked influence upon our public opinion.
An interesting incident of our crusade was a visit from Ramsay MacDonald, then a young journalist in London and an ardent helper of William T. Stead in his crusade there in behalf of the Conference. Stead had started a vigorous little paper to promote it, entitled "War Against War," and MacDonald came to me with an introduction from Stead to strengthen co-operation between the English and American workers. His visit proved the delightful beginning of a growing friendship; but we little divined as we talked beside the fire in our Pinckney street home that we were entertaining a potential prime minister. Doctor Hale liked him as much as we did, and we got up a good meeting for him at the church. Doctor Hale, following Stead's example, started a little paper for the campaign, "The Peace Crusader," and I used to join him every Monday forenoon, to help get it into shape. It was one of the inost tragical ironies of history that the assembling of the first Hague Peace Conference should find both England and the United States engaged in iniquitous conflicts with weak and struggling peoples, England in the Boer War and ourselves in the subjugation of the Philippines.
In 1901 my wife and I were delegates from the American Peace Society to the International Peace Congress at Glasgow, and from that time on to the outbreak of the World War we attended many of these Congresses in Europe. The idea of International Peace Congresses was first broached in the office of the American Peace Society in Boston, by Joseph Sturge of England, and the first of thesc congresses met in London in 1843. After an interregnum came the famous congresses at Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London, in the four years beginning with 1848, all promoted largely by the American Peace Society and all largely inspired and organized by our own Elihu Burritt. Then came wars; and the congresses were not resumed until 1889. The session of 1893 was at Chicago, and in 1904 the congress came to Boston. I was the chairman of the Executive Committee. It proved the largest Peace Congress that had
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ever been held, sometimes with crowded sessions simultaneously at Tremont Temple, Park Street Church and Faneuil Hall. The opening Consecration Service at Symphony Hall on Sunday evening was most impressive. The service was conducted by Doctor Hale, with the sermon by Bishop Percival of Hereford, and the singing by the Handel and Haydn Society. John Hay, the Secretary of State, came to give the opening address at Tremont Temple. Among the hundred European delegates were William R. Crener, the founder of the Interparliamentary Union, and the Baroness von Suttner. The co- operation of Governor Guild and Mayor Collins, both my good friends, was constant. Patrick A. Collins was the most interesting and attractive person- ality among the Boston mayors of my time. By his invitation I had in 1903 given the Fourth of July oration at Faneuil Hall, on "The Principles of the Founders," emphasizing as a strong feature, with liberal appeal to their own words, the fact that Washington, Jefferson and Franklin were the pre-eminent peace statesmen of their age.
The World Peace Foundation was then already in the making. I had been Edwin Ginn's adviser and helper in the work since 1901, and became director of the Foundation, continuing in the position, as the chief agency of my own peace work, until 1915. Edwin Ginn was the first man in the world to give a million dollars for peace education. The firm of Ginn and Company, of which he was the head, was the leading educational publishing house in Boston. He had been deeply stirred by the Mohonk Conferences which he attended, and it was at one of these that he had first made the proposal which developed into the Foundation. He was a man of great force, enthusiasm and humanitarianism, and his devotion to the cause of better homes for the people was almost as generous as his devotion to world peace. His establishment of the World Peace Foundation was the culmination of Boston's long history in the peace movement, beginning in 1815 with the founding of the Massachusetts Peace Society, which immediately became the strongest Peace Society in the world. It has been one of the greatest movements in Boston's history, in which there have been so many great movements.
Charles Francis Adams, the late president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, once said, in emphasizing the import of the great social and political truth for whose development Massachusetts stood, that in this light "the founding of Boston was fraught with consequences hardly less important than those which resulted from the founding of Rome." True it certainly is that Boston has been the cradle of most of the greatest movements in our history in these three centuries. She was the chief cradle of the American Revolution, of the conflict with slavery, of the movement for the political and educational rights of women, of the reform and advance in our religious thought, of American literature in its golden age, of the movement for the peace and order of the world. This last has now become the commanding movement of our age. As the great cause of the last century here was the war against slavery, the great cause of today, growing ever more urgent during the half-century here sur- veyed, is the war against war. Boston was heroic and prophetic in the past; she feels the inspiration of her great traditions today; she will keep the faith in the days to come.
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CHAPTER II PHYSICAL CHANGES
THE PLANNING OF A CITY By FREDERIC H. FAY
From a city with an area of 27,729 acres in 1880 and a population of 362,839 persons, Boston has become, in 1930, a city with an area of 30,598 acres and a population of 781,188 persons. Such in a nutshell is the story of the growth of the city during the last half-century. How this increase in area has been achieved and how provision has been made for the welfare and happiness of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who have been added to the census figures of the city during this period, is by no means so easily recorded.
The term, "city planning," appears to be unknown to the contributors to the Justin Winsor Memorial History and yet the vision and the foresight of earlier generations, as manifested in the changes which took place in the physical plan of the City of Boston during the first two hundred and fifty years of its existence, are a challenge to the courage and imagination if not to the scientific methods and procedure of the present day.
The problems which arose in the first two centuries and a half of the life of the city, as a result of the annexation of adjacent communities, in the co-ordina- tion of disjointed street systems, as well as the difficulties involved in the leveling of the hills of the original Trimountaine, the filling in of the coves, and the development of school, fire, police, health and recreational systems, all were of a nature and a complexity to compel the application of the very highest form of city planning principles and practices in their conception and accomplishment. Unfortunately, these projects were undertaken as separate and isolated problems, and the solutions arrived at were for the most part dictated by expediency and without the benefit of any comprehensive plan.
Since the phrase, "city planning," fails to find a place in the four preceding volumes, it may be not only proper but desirable that this chapter should serve as a recital of the city planning events which have taken place in the community not only in the last fifty years but briefly, at least, since the settlement of the city. In other words, the canvas of the first two hundred and fifty years may properly be unrolled as the scroll upon which to rest the city planning structure which has been developed in the last half-century.
EARLY CONDITIONS IN BOSTON
It is a fact that Boston had its inception in city planning principles, however much these may have been later overturned by the historic cow. It is recorded in the earlier volumes that in March, 1629, the Massachusetts Company in Eng- land engaged Thomas Graves of Kent, a skillful engineer, to go to New England
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in their interests and "lay out" a town. Arriving first in Salem, he soon removed, with about one hundred others, to Charlestown, where he proceeded without delay to "model and lay out the form of the town with streets about the hill," providing for each inhabitant a two-acre lot to plant upon. Overcome by sickness, grief, hunger and a lack of fresh water, the little group was soon forced to abandon the original settlement for a more favorable location on the other side of the Charles river "at a place called Trimountaine," and the plan of . Charlestown, in so far as it had been developed, was of necessity abandoned. Nearly a century and a half later it rose like a ghost from the ashes of the con- flagration which accompanied the battle of Bunker Hill. President Dwight, who visited the town in 1796, expressed his disappointment with what he then saw:
"After it was burnt, the proprietors had a fair opportunity of making it one of the most beautiful towns in the world. Had they thrown their property into a common stock; had they laid out the streets with the full advantage furnished by the ground, which might have been done without lessening the quantity of enclosed ground; had they then taken their house lots, whenever they chose to do so, as near their former positions as the new locations of the streets would have permitted,- Charlestown would have been only beautiful. Such a plan was indeed sufficiently a subject of conversation, but a miserable mass of prejudices prevented it from being executed."
It was but natural that, for the time being at least, the attention of our Puritan forefathers should be focused upon the difficult problems confronting them in the development of the area to which they had been, by necessity, compelled to remove. On the small peninsula, corresponding to the area now known as Boston Proper, scarcely a mile in length in any direction, were to be found, first, the three little hills from which Boston received its original name, Trimountaine. In addition, Copp's Hill rose precipitously over the water on the northeast to a height of 50 feet, while Fort Hill rose to a height of 80 feet above the level of the sea and to the stranger sailing up the harbor was one of the most prominent features of the town.
Then there were the coves of Boston, the deep inlets worn by the sea when- ever the yielding nature of the soil permitted, washing to a thinner and thinner thread the frail hold of the peninsula upon the mainland. At this point man stepped in, the coves swallowed up the hills and the progress of the sea was not only stayed but turned back upon itself, until Boston eventually appeared as part and parcel of the mainland. Whatever may be the problems of this or succeeding generations, it is but fair to say that they can scarcely surpass, if they ever fully equal, the difficulties which were encountered by the men of earlier days. Even if the solution was not in all cases perfect, the effort, at least, was monumental and required the exercise of wisdom, vision and farsightedness.
ANNEXATIONS
The first century and a half of the existence of the community, later destined to become known as the City of Boston, witnessed a remarkable fluctuation in the acreage totals. Nearby communities were annexed and later
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disposed of by grant or by sale with startling rapidity. Back and forth like a pendulum they swing, finally coming to rest in 1794, when the first official survey of the town was conducted, showing a total area of 783 acres or scarcely more than the original holdings.
Of the surrounding municipalities East Boston alone remained permanently annexed from the date of its original consolidation in 1637. With the annexa- tion of South Boston in 1804, Boston came into possession of another deliberately planned community. The annexation bill provided that the Selectmen of Boston should be authorized to lay out such streets and lanes as might in their judgment be for the common good. Mather Withington, a leading surveyor of the town, was chosen to draw a plan for the streets of South Boston, with instructions to have them run north and south, with cross streets east and west. The width of the streets, their distance from one another and their relation to intersecting or cross streets, were all indicated. The original plan was lost, but another drawing as near the original as possible was prepared twenty years later, with such additional streets as were found to have become necessary owing to the rapid increase in population. No further annexations took place until 1868, when Roxbury was added, followed promptly by Dorchester in 1870, Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury in 1874, and finally Hyde Park as recently as 1912,- the only annexation to be made in the fifty-year period to which this volume is devoted. All in all, these annexations have added 24,312 acres to the original area of Boston.
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