USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people > Part 17
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77
I38
Main Street and Village Green
boots and shoes, bread and pastries, confectionery, cutlery, foundry and machine-shop products, malt liquors and wholesale meat-packing.
Note: Because of space limitations, duplication of statement has had to be minimized. For a complete picture, the historical account of Boston which follows should be read in conjunction with the essays in Section I, Massa- chusetts: The General Background.
Boston's first settler was William Blackstone, a recluse of scholarly and probably misanthropic mental cast, formerly a clergyman of the Church of England. He had built himself a hut on the western slope of what is now Beacon Hill, planting his orchard on what later became Boston Common. At that time the wilderness occupied the peninsula, which was about one-third the size of the present Boston peninsula. Almost an island, it jutted out into the bay, joined to the mainland by a long narrow neck like the handle of a ladle. It was a mile wide at its widest, three miles long, and the neck was so narrow and so low that at times it was submerged by the ocean. Blackstone's realm was bounded on the west by a mud flat (the Back Bay); on the north by a deep cove (later dammed off to make a mill pond); on the east by a small river which cut off the North End and made an island of it, and by a deep cove (later known as the 'Town Cove'); and on the south by another deep cove. Here the disillusioned clergyman read his books, farmed a little, traded a bit with the Indians, and breathed air uncontaminated by any other white man. His idyllic solitude was rudely shattered after four or five years, however, by the arrival of John Winthrop with a company of some eight hundred souls who settled in what is now Charlestown, just across from his para- dise. Their miseries were many. The water at Charlestown was brackish; and their settlement could not easily be defended against Indian raids. Blackstone visited them and was melted by the spectacle of their plight. He invited them to come across to his peninsula and the company eagerly accepted his hospitality.
Thus in 1630 Boston actually began. Winthrop's settlers called it 'Tri- mountain,' possibly because of three hills later known as Beacon Hill, Copp's Hill, and Fort Hill (now razed), or possibly because of the three mounded peaks of Beacon Hill (later shaved down).
The first year acquainted the Englishmen and their families with the rigors of the New England climate, and as it was too late to plant crops, more than two hundred died of starvation and exposure. The following spring a ship laden with provisions, long overdue, dropped anchor in the bay, and famine was averted. The freshly tilled soil later yielded a good crop and the Colony survived and grew.
Fisheries were established. Fir and lumber created an export market. The foundation of trade and agriculture were early laid. Within four years more than four thousand Englishmen had emigrated to Boston and its vicinity. Twenty villages ramified out of the peninsula town to form a definite Puritan Commonwealth.
139
Boston
The early Bostonians spent their days in labor from which the Sabbath alone released them. Women, with spinning, weaving, and all the family clothes to make, with large numbers of children to rear, had little time to cultivate the amenities of social intercourse. Pioneer life was hard, drab, and offered few comforts. Wood, for example, was the only source of fuel, and as late as 1720 Cotton Mather complained, "Tis dredful cold, my ink glass in my stand is froze.'
Divines were preoccupied with dismal theological abstractions, but the statute books reveal the fact that there were secular souls who displayed a wholesome proclivity for life. 'Tobacco drinking' (smoking) tippling, card-playing, dancing, and bowling identified the colonists with their Elizabethan forbears, but caused the town fathers much alarm. Sunday strolls or street kissing - even when legitimate - were subject to heavy fine, and an attempt was made to legislate 'sweets' out of existence. Christmas, reminiscent of 'popery,' was immediately placed under the ban and the elders often boasted that none of the holidays of old England survived the Atlantic passage.
A breach of these regulations resulted in punishment which was based upon the theory that ridicule was more effective than the isolation of imprisonment. Market squares were embellished by the erection of punitive apparatus - bilboes, stocks, pillories, and ducking stools. Public floggings were common and offenders were often forced to display on their persons the initial letter of the crime committed.
Offenses against Puritan theology were severely punished. Boston, dedicated to Calvin, neither understood nor admired toleration. Quakers and other non-conformists were ruthlessly persecuted and martyrdom became a commonplace in the Puritan town. Roger Williams was ban- ished for having 'broached and divulged diverse new and dangerous opinions against the authority of the magistrates.' Mistress Anne Hutch- inson, a 'heretic,' followed Roger Williams into banishment. Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was hanged on old Boston Common in 1660; Mary Jones, Mary Parsons, and Ann Hibbins were hanged as witches. The town fathers were content to sacrifice freedom in their attempt to achieve unity. The Reverend Nathaniel Ward, speaking for all good Puritans, remarked, 'All Familists, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keepe away from us.'
- In spite of a narrow religious and moral outlook, her commerce insured Boston's future greatness. Scarcely a year after the Puritans had invaded the splendid isolation of Mr. Blackstone, Governor Winthrop launched the 'Blessing of the Bay.' The Puritan 'Rebecca' sailed to Narragansett and purchased corn from the Indians. Vessels called at the Bermudas and returned to Boston with cargoes of oranges, limes, and the equally exotic potato. They traveled up the Delaware in search of pelts. Fre- quently they put in at New Amsterdam to traffic with Dutch burghers, and twelve years after the founding (1642) ships laden with pipe staves and other products tied up safely at English docks. Thus began the
140
Main Street and Village Green
maritime history of Massachusetts with Boston as its center. Shipbuild- ing, fishing, whaling, industry and exchange made the Colony a bustling outpost of imperial Britain.
From 1630 to about 1680, Great Britain was so absorbed in troubles at home that, notwithstanding the Navigation Act of 1651, she gave little attention to regulating the enterprise of her infant Colonies. In 1691 a royal governor was sent; in 1733 the Molasses Act was passed; but the Colonial merchants had virtually free trade until 1764 when Grenville began the vigorous enforcement of the mercantilistic measures. From then on friction increased rapidly and the Colonies developed a burning sense of grievance.
The American Revolution resulted from a series of bewildering subtleties, but many dramatic episodes, seemingly reflecting the broad issues of the controversy but actually telescoping them, took place in Boston's crooked streets. The Boston Massacre (1770) on King Street (now State) occurred in the shadow of the Old State House. News of the British advance on Lexington and Concord was semaphored to Paul Revere by the glimmer of a lamp which swung from the belfry of the Old North Church. The rafters of Faneuil Hall rang with the impassioned oratory of the champions of liberty. The Old South Meeting House was the point from which fifty men disguised as Indians rushed to Griffin's Wharf where British mer- chantmen rocked idly in the harbor, their holds crammed with East Indian tea (1773). It was the Boston Tea Party which confronted the British Cabinet with the choice of capitulation or force, replied to by the Port Act, which marked the beginning of a policy of coercion and led swiftly to open warfare. The battle of Bunker Hill in near-by Charles- town was one of the early engagements of the war. Boston was regarded by the British as a most important objective, and the failure of the siege and the evacuation of the city by the Redcoats was the first serious blow to Tory confidence.
Commerce suffered a temporary eclipse in the depression of the post-war years, but the discovery of new trading possibilities in the Orient offered an opportunity which enterprising Yankee merchants were quick to perceive. The development of the China trade and the exploitation of the Oregon coast rich in sea otters restored Boston to its former eminence. Wealth poured into the coffers of merchants, traders, and shipmasters. In 1780, 455 ships from every quarter of the globe docked in Boston Harbor, while 1200 vessels engaged in coastwise traffic out of Boston. During a single year (1791), seventy Yankee merchantmen cleared Boston for Europe, the Indies, and Canton.
Boston's maritime prosperity was stimulated by the wars between Eng- land and France which followed the accession of Napoleon. In 1807 the shipping of Boston totaled 310,309 tons or more than one-third of the mercantile marine of the United States. The Jefferson Embargo and the War of 1812 seriously crippled the city's maritime development. Al- though she recovered, and although the era of the clipper made Massa-
I4I
Boston
chusetts famous throughout the world, and although the 'Sovereign of the Seas,' built by Donald McKay in East Boston (1852), was the envy of the British Admiralty, the War of 1812 really marked the beginning of the end of Boston's maritime supremacy. Thereafter manufacturing and industry gradually supplanted commercial interests.
In 1822, Boston became a city; railroads were being built from 1830 on and played an important part in urban development; the first horsecar line, connecting Cambridge and Boston, was built in 1853. Between 1824 and 1858, the Boston peninsula was enlarged from 783 acres to 1801 acres by cutting down the hills and filling in the Back Bay and the great coves with the excavated gravel as a basis for reclamation. The Neck, which William Blackstone could not always cross on foot because of the tide- water, was raised and broadened, so that what was once the narrowest part of Boston proper is now the widest.
During the era between the War of Independence and the Civil War, Boston ideas underwent a parallel transformation from the provincial to the urban. Stimulated by European currents of thought and the philosophy of the frontier, Boston began to revolt against the theology of Calvin, a revolt typical of the democratic spirit of the nineteenth century. Unitarianism under the leadership of William Ellery Channing threatened to dissolve the entire system of Puritan Congregationalism (1825). The new doctrines were embraced by Harvard and the fashion of Boston, but hardly had the rebellion subsided when new dissension broke out within Unitarian ranks. Ralph Waldo Emerson shocked his parishioners of the Second Church (1832) by tendering his resignation and retiring to Concord to ponder the mysteries of Transcendentalism. Theodore Parker, another Unitarian minister, immersed in German philosophy, Biblical criticism, and evolutionary geology, began to preach a new variety of natural religion which rejected conventional theological forms and banished the supernatural.
Coinciding with the democratic movement and partly as a result of it, a flurry of philanthropy and reform arose. John Lowell, Jr., bequeathed a fortune to establish Lowell Institute (1839) in order to provide the people of Boston with free lectures by 'foremost scholars and thinkers of the English-speaking world.' This democratization of education was supplemented by the creation of the Boston Public Library (1852). Horace Mann devoted his reforming spirit to the development of formal education. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe dedicated his efforts to the emanci- pation of the deaf and blind. With the financial assistance of Thomas H. Perkins, the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind (first located in South Boston, later removed to Watertown) was founded, a unique institution for its day (1832). The first public surgical operation which made use of ether as an anesthetic was performed (1846) at the Massachusetts General Hospital. A controversy between the two claimants of discovery, William Thomas Green Morton and Charles T. Jackson (the claim of a country doctor in Georgia had not yet been advanced), was temporarily settled by a tactful verdict of the French
142
Main Street and Village Green
Academy which awarded each claimant a similar amount, one for the discovery of ether and the other for its application.
Nowhere was the reforming spirit more active than in the anti-slavery movement. William Lloyd Garrison had no respect for the interests of cotton, whether expounded by planters or manufacturers. He invaded Boston and founded the Liberator (1831) and was rewarded in 1835 with physical violence at the hands of a mob partly composed of Boston gentility. The development of cotton manufacture in Lawrence and Lowell was not without its effect on State Street and Beacon Hill. Re- spectable elements of society thought best to refrain from emotional language or harsh criticism after Southern statesmen began to ask perti- nent questions concerning workers in Lowell and Lawrence mills. Garri- son attacked the Constitution because it recognized slavery as legal, and Boston patriots could hardly suffer so sacred a document to be disparaged; but Garrison's fervor attracted Wendell Phillips, a brilliant orator whose lineage was almost as old as Boston, and he became an equally zealous advocate of the cause. Other converts were enlisted - Channing, Parker, Lowell, Longfellow, Dana - and under the championship of such ultra- respectable persons, the anti-slavery crusade gained ground rapidly.
Boston played a less important rôle in the Civil War than in events preceding it. Unable to meet the prescribed quota of soldiers by voluntary enlistment, the city fathers first employed the draft in 1863, precipitating the Boston Draft Riots. The poorer classes, irritated when their rich neighbors purchased immunity from compulsory service for the sum of three hundred dollars, objected so strenuously that the militia was called out to quell the disorders. Among the regiments which did march South to uphold the honor of Boston, one of the most famous was commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, an abolitionist 'of gentle birth and breed- ing.' Composed of Negroes, this regiment led the attack on Fort Wagner where Colonel Shaw and nearly half of his followers fell.
Although some Bostonians had indicated a reluctance to support the Northern cause during the war, the celebration of peace left little to be desired. The moving spirit of the great Peace Jubilee held in June, 1869, was Patrick S. Gilmore, an exuberant Irish bandmaster, whose grandiose plans for this occasion made P. T. Barnum seem a novice by comparison. A coliseum seating 30,000 people was erected near the site of the present Copley Plaza Hotel housing an Angel of Peace, thirteen feet high, to- gether with an extinguished torch of war, frescoes, doves and angels, medallions, emblems and flags, as well as the largest bass drum in the world, constructed for the occasion, and four organs that required relays of twelve men to pump. Ten thousand choral singers combined with an orchestra of 84 trombones, 83 tubas, 83 cornets, 75 drums, 330 strings, and 119 woodwinds, produced an awe-inspiring 'Niagara of harmony.' At one stage of the celebration, a hundred members of the Fire Department, clad in red shirts, blue pants, and white caps, suddenly appeared and beat upon a hundred anvils in what was doubtless the loudest performance of the Anvil Chorus from 'Il Trovatore' ever given. President Ulysses S.
143
Boston
Grant, who attended, appeared unimpressed, and John S. Dwight, fore- most music critic of the day, fled to Nahant in order to escape the din.
This amazing exhibition reflected the American adoration of size as well as the immaturity of the new wealth which the rise of industry was bringing to Boston. The proud and graceful clippers that had sailed from Boston Harbor had been displaced by smoke-belching steamships which were largely of British ownership. Says Samuel Eliot Morison, in his 'Maritime History of Massachusetts':
The maritime history of Massachusetts ... ends with the passing of the clipper. )'Twas a glorious ending! Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as the clipper ship. In her, the long-suppressed artistic impulse of a practi- cal, hard-worked race burst into flower. The 'Flying Cloud' was our Rheims, the 'Sovereign of the Seas' our Parthenon, the 'Lightning' our Amiens; but they were monuments carved from snow. For a few brief moments of time they flashed their splendor around the world, then dis- appeared with the sudden completeness of the wild pigeon. One by one they sailed out of Boston, to return no more. A tragic or mysterious end was the final privilege of many, favored by the gods. Others, with lofty rig cut down to cautious dimensions, with glistening decks and topsides scarred and neglected, limped about the seas under foreign flags, like faded beauties forced upon the street.
Money formerly invested in shipping now flowed into the mills and factories that sprang up in large numbers in Boston and its suburbs. The shoe and textile industries, which had boomed with the artificial demand of wartime conditions, continued their advance under the stimulus of capital released from maritime pursuits. Other manufacturing estab- lishments followed the trail to Boston, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the intellectual 'Hub of the Universe' had become the industrial hub of New England.
A new commerce grew from this new industry. It was neither so ro- mantic nor so important as that of pre-Civil War days, but it sufficed to establish Boston as one of the leading ports on the Atlantic seaboard. Shipping became an adjunct of manufacturing plants; raw materials, such as cotton and wool for textiles and leather for shoes, were brought to the factories and the finished products carried to the remotest markets of the world, In 1901 ships sailing out of Boston Harbor carried goods valued at $143,708,000, while imports in that year amounted to $80,000,000.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Bostonians could (and did) boast of other things in addition to a thriving industry and commerce. Boston had at least two much-touted claims to fame: John L. Sullivan, the great- est fighter of his time, and the first passenger-car subway in America, a two-mile stretch from Arlington and Boylston Streets to the North Station. The last horsecar was discarded in 1910, and while bicycles, drays, and carriages were still dashing along at the reckless speed of eight or ten miles an hour, electric surface lines were being built in every section of the city. An elevated railroad (begun in 1909) pushed into
144
Main Street and Village Green
the suburb of Forest Hills; downtown Boston was transformed by steel, cut stone, and marble; the National Shawmut Bank, the buildings of William Filene's Sons Co., and Jordan Marsh Company, all erected shortly after 1907, set a pattern of utilitarian beauty which changed the external character of the city.
The growth of industry was paralleled by the growing consciousness of labor. One of the most spectacular strikes in the history of the labor movement was the Boston police strike of 1919, based on the formal complaint of an organization of 1290 Boston patrolmen, that their wages had failed to keep pace with living costs, that the police stations were unsanitary, and that they worked overtime without compensation.
A number of factors defeated the policemen and they voted to return to work. Governor Coolidge, however, disclaimed the power to reinstate the strikers, stating that he was opposed to 'the public safety again being placed in the hands of these same policemen.' Mayor Peters worked all during September 15 on a revised wage scale - for the new policemen.
Hardly had the excitement of the police strike subsided when Boston became the storm center of another crisis, concerning the arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of two obscure Italian laborers. The affair dragged out over seven years and was debated in every civilized quarter of the globe. The entire machinery of justice was smeared with suspicion and petitions flooded the office of Governor Alvan T. Fuller in an effort to stay the execution and obtain a new trial. The men were executed in Boston on August 23, 1927. The authorities no doubt breathed easier when the affair was safely over - though, as it turned out, the affair was far from over; Sacco and Vanzetti had become, for a new generation to whom 'Haymarket' was scarcely more than a word, the classic example of the administering of justice to members of unpopular political mi- norities.
For twenty years Boston, stimulated by an exposition ambitiously an- nouncing as its goal, 'Boston 1915 the Finest City in the World,' had been consciously building its physical self into a fine, clean, and beautiful city. Shortly before the nation-wide depression overtook it, it became obsessed also by a desire to put its spiritual house in order. Celestial roundsmen under the aegis of the 'New England Watch and Ward Society' inaugurated a virulent campaign against 'lewd and indecent' books and plays. What is salacity? It was like the time-honored stickler: How old is Ann? Other cities indulged in loud guffaws over the antics of the Boston censors as the latter grew hotter and hotter and more and more bothered over the perplexing problem. 'Banned in Boston' came to be the novelist's and dramatist's dream of successful publicity - 'a natural' in advertising. The greatest furore was occasioned by the refusal of the authorities to permit the Boston production of Eugene O'Neill's 'Strange Interlude.' The producers promptly moved their company to Quincy, where the play had a tremendous run, playing to audiences packed with Boston residents.
145
Boston
The Sacco and Vanzetti case, with its echoes still reverberating, censor- ship with all its trail of Rabelaisian mirth, the police strike, though it made Calvin Coolidge Vice-President and subsequently President - all were temporarily forgotten in the great Tercentenary Celebration which ushered in the third decade of the century. Even the cloud of the ap- proaching depression, considerably larger already on the horizon than a man's hand, cast no shadow on gala preparations.
The Boston Tercentenary Committee, in conjunction with State-wide subcommittees, mapped out a gigantic program. The ceremonies, con- ducted with considerable pomp, were formally opened by a 'Great Meeting held on Boston Common, where the chief address was delivered by the Right Honorable H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford. 'Little did the founders reckon,' said Professor Fisher in his oration, 'that a time would come when ... in the fullness of years, their New England would be followed by a New Ireland, a New Italy, a New Germany, a New Poland, and a New Greece, all destined to be merged into a great and harmonious Commonwealth.'
The story of the economic collapse, which followed hard upon the very celebration itself, is better not written except where it may be dissected and analyzed. Boston, for all its rigidity of pattern and form, continues to be a paradox. In spite of the depression, which affected it with the utmost seriousness, it is today still the metropolis of New England, the commercial, financial, and industrial center of a densely populated area, second to none in the diversity of its manufactures and the skill of its labor. And in spite of censorship it is still a cultural center, maintained so by the perennial optimism and courage of its artists, and the warm support of a great body of art-loving citizens. And in spite of its un- deniable intolerance, it is still the home of militant liberalism. Here Unitarianism and Universalism make their home; here liberal education waged a spectacular fight against the Teachers' Oath Bill; and Boston liberals picketed the very State House one dramatic afternoon in cham- pionship of the Child Labor Law. Boston is still the Boston of the Lowells, the Lodges, the Cabots, but it is from newer stocks that it derives much of its color, its hope, and its unquenchable vitality.
FOOT TOUR 1 (Back Bay and Beacon Hill) -3 m.
W. from Clarendon St. on Boylston St.
Copley Square is more photographed than any other plaza in Boston, owing to the stately architectural beauty of two sides of its triangular green, which is now marred by the contrasting stretch of shops, banks, and offices on its third side.
I. Trinity Church (Episcopal) (open daily) faces west on Copley Square. At the time it was built, in 1877, American architecture had for twenty
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.