Chapter 31

Natural History in Massachusetts

Only Bostonians can understand Bostonians and thoroughly sympathize with the inconsequences of the Boston mind.

—Henry Adams

Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system … That’s all I claim.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

NOTHING could more sharply reveal the antipodal poles in Massachusetts public life than the 1946 gubernatorial race between Maurice J. Tobin, the incumbent, and Lieutenant Governor Robert F. Bradford. From the point of view of background, and though the two men are good friends, this was among much else a straight-out struggle between the Catholic Irish and the Brahmins of Beacon Hill. Bradford won.

I saw Tobin, a former mayor of Boston, when he was still functioning in the City Hall. Functioning? Yes indeed. I sent him a telegram asking for an appointment; a day later the telephone rang and one of the pleasantest voices I’ve ever heard said, “This is Mayor Tobin. My private number is such and such. Call me up, and I’ll see you in a day or two.” I called several times; the phone may have been there but not the mayor. Then one day talking to Saltonstall I said that I hadn’t yet met his successor. Saltonstall volunteered to arrange a meeting, and called him at once, but at a different number. A voice said that Tobin would call right back. Saltonstall grinned saying, “They know where he Is, of course. It’s just a little ritual to protect him.” Tobin called back in 45 seconds; Saltonstall asked him to see me and he said to come right over.

He was in a suite at the Parker House, not at the City Hall. Instantly I remembered days when I was a cub reporter in Chicago twenty years before. This was politics. These were politicians. A knot of big men, wearing big hats and smoking big cigars, perched buzzardlike in the living room of the suite. Every four or five minutes, the door popped open, and Tobin (with no secretary or other intermediary) said to whomever was next in line, “Come in, Joe,” or “Okay, Bob, five minutes.” At 3:12 my turn came. Tobin said, “I haven’t had lunch yet.” We went down to a lunchroom in the basement. We were interrupted half a dozen times. I was impressed and fascinated. In what other country of the world could anything quite like this go on? This was politics, yes—the hardest-boiled kind of politics—but also it was democracy in action. The Negro waiter brought the check. He said, “You know my wife.” “Oh, sure,” Tobin replied. (She was a political worker somewhere.) The waiter asked the mayor a small favor, and Tobin at once agreed. Then an elderly man approached; he said that one of his sons, in the Merchant Marine, wasn’t getting his proper pay, because he had “lost” his own first name (!) and couldn’t be identified. I understood no head nor tail of what followed, but Tobin scribbled on a chit of paper, “Take this to so-and-so.” The man looked dubious. “It’s okay; they know my handwriting; you’ll get in,” the mayor said. “The old guy has two other kids in the service,” Tobin mentioned when the man left. Then he paused and said with great earnestness and emphasis: “After all we’re their servants. The government works for the people! That old man hired me!”

Tobin is a handsome, hard-working and elusive youngster of forty-five. He is intensely proud that in 1944 he carried such traditionally Republican strongholds as Gloucester and the fishing counties, Berkshire County, and even Provincetown. People enumerate several reasons for his success (a) He had the solid Irish vote, of course. (b) He did a good job as mayor for two terms, (c) He campaigns with great zest and vigor; for instance he visited 300 out of the 349 incorporated communities in the state. This campaign cost a considerable sum, something over $174,000, incidentally. Thirty-nine different people gave him one thousand dollars each.

Tobin is the son of a carpenter—once again we see the self-made man! He had to get a job at the age of nine, as a newsboy; he had one of the longest routes in Boston, and took the “owl car” at 4:30 A.M. to get to work; he went to school at night. Politics fascinated him from the start, and he was a member of the state legislature at twenty-six while he earned a living working for the telephone company.

Americans close to politics are traditionally irreverent; to the visitor from abroad, this is one of our most striking traits. I asked a Brahmin about Tobin. Reply: “If he makes as good a governor as he was mayor, he’ll be a national figure, but the gang around him will pull him down.” I asked a big newspaper publisher about him, and he replied calmly: “Has he character enough to keep really honest men around him?” Another comment back in 1944 was, “But Curley will wrap himself around Tobin’s neck, and that’ll be too bad.” Actually Tobin kept just as far away from Curley as he could, and denounced him often—and his record as governor was commendable.

Robert F. Bradford, the governor since January, 1947, is now forty-three, a Harvard man, a scion of one of the most potent and distinguished of all New England families, a lively straightforward person whose blood is not merely blue but purple, and a splendid type of unselfish public servant. Though he is of necessity a politician too, he carries nothing of the extremely professional aura that enwraps Tobin. Bradford, a lawyer by trade, was for some years partner to a former governor of Massachusetts, Joseph B. Ely; out of this same law firm came Horace A. Hildreth, the governor of Maine—an example of the close inter-locking of New England politics. Bradford has a pleasant and comfortable manner; he takes an adult and reasonable line. Politics in Massachusetts is expensive: his 1944 race for lieutenant governor cost $47,601.43. Bradford became well known locally in the 1930’s; he is still, however, so inconspicuous on the national scale that he does not even appear in the 1946–47 Who’s Who. In 1938 he was prevailed upon to run for district attorney of Middlesex County, the most heavily populated county in the entire United States. The courts there (New York Herald Tribune, August 25, 1946) were only averaging a 26 per cent conviction record. After being in office a year, Bradford had raised this to 93 per cent, and in 1942 he returned to the county $166,000 in unspent appropriations. Running for re-election, he won like a tidal wave. American citizens, no matter what one may say to the contrary, do in the long run appreciate good and clean local government. As lieutenant governor too, though in this post a person has little to do, Bradford served admirably. This is a man to watch. Any good governor of a key state like Massachusetts is worth watching. Who’s Who, put him in.

Another Word on Bay State Politics

The first thing to reiterate about politics in Massachusetts, an extremely distinctive and important commonwealth, is the crucial position of Boston and its urban vote, which is so big that Massachusetts as a whole is one of the few states with a Catholic majority. Statistics aren’t always reliable, but Boston is probably 75 per cent Roman Catholic at least. Thus the struggle for power in Massachusetts is, and for many years will be, that of the predominantly Republican hinterland versus Catholic, Democratic Boston. One of the most emancipated critics of local politics I met, W. E. Mullins of the Boston Herald, says that the basic and irreducible Republican vote is 800,000, the Democratic 700,000. This makes for bitterly close races. Also it makes for divers-colored results in an oddly checkered pattern, with Republican and Democratic victories alternating through the ticket. Massachusetts has gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1928, and Senator Walsh has been a terrific vote getter; yet Saltonstall’s victories were also tremendous, as we know, and seven out of the last nine lieutenant governors¹ have been Republican. Moreover, the Republicans always win a majority in the General Court (legislature) and in the House of Representatives.

Massachusetts, alone among American states except for New Hampshire and Maine, preserves an institution known as the executive council, a relic of colonial days. It grew up before the Revolution because the citizenry demanded the right to vote for and choose a council among its own kind, as a check on the royal governor sent out from England. Nowadays this executive council has little power except in approving gubernatorial appointments, yet it is an interesting survival. Saltonstall had a 7–1 majority on the council; Tobin had it 5–3 against him. Any time a Republican governor takes office with a Democratic council or vice versa fireworks are likely to occur.

Because the contending forces are so evenly balanced the way to play politics in Massachusetts is to nail down your own party first, then make raids into your opponents. Saltonstall was absolutely sure of Yankee Republican support; so he could afford to do favors to Democrats, hoping to entice them over the wall. Conversely, Tobin contended hard for Republican support, since most Democrats voted for him anyway. In other words the secret of Massachusetts politics is the cultivation of your enemies. Carried to its logical conclusion this results in the paradox that no Massachusetts politician can gain office unless supported by his opposition.

Last of the Buccaneers

The fantastic and incredible James Michael Curley, at present mayor of Boston, sues for libel at the drop of a hat; so I will proceed cautiously. But Time (November 20, 1944) dared to write, “As onetime mayor he helped himself to $30,000 of political graft,” and so far as I know Time was never sued. Curley is a kind of rank perennial that cannot be weeded out; a typical American condottiere of the old school; a wonderfully charming old man when he wants to be; and a jailbird among much else. One of the abundant legends about him is that he was actually in prison when, many years ago, he was first elected to public office; the offense was minor—a technical charge. Curley conducted his campaign—-he was running for the city council—from his cell in jail.

Curley, who is seventy-one now, has been governor of Massachusetts once, mayor of Boston on four different occasions and a Congressman several times. He has had plenty of defeats as well as victories:² he was beaten once for Congress, twice for governor, once for senator (by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whom he liked to call “Little Boy Blue”), and three times for mayor. Saltonstall beat him for governor; Tobin beat him for mayor twice. Yet the legend persists that “only Curley can beat Curley”; if things go right he is almost irresistible; he bursts out like an unquenchable and explosive stream.

In November, 1945, Curley was once more elected mayor of Boston. He was also Democratic representative in Congress from the 11th Massachusetts district; thus he held one job that paid twenty thousand dollars a year, and another that paid ten thousand dollars. On February 18, 1946, very shortly after he took office as mayor (he won this fourth term by an unprecedented majority) he was sentenced by a Washington, D. C., federal court to six to eighteen months in prison, on conviction of a sixty thousand dollar mail fraud in connection with war contracts. Curley at once appealed; then, free on bail, he took the train for Boston. On February 21, ten thousand of his wildly cheering supporters met him at South Station, tied up traffic for half an hour, and took him home with a brass band playing “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes.”

Before this Curley had been in trouble too, if he would call it trouble. The local courts ordered him to pay back to the city of Boston $42,629, part of which he “improperly received” during a previous term as mayor. It took him a long time to pay; he was in court no fewer than nine times in regard to arrears and other details. Was Boston ashamed of all this? Not much.³ Curley cannot be removed from office as mayor, since the city charter contains no provision for a mayor’s recall. Mostly the newspapers kept their mouths shut after the 1946 federal conviction, though the Herald, which was once sued by Curley, did dare to say that “it would perhaps be a little regretful that a city of 770,816 should be run from a jail.” (Time, September 2, 1946) Howard Brubaker commented in the New Yorker, “Bostonians have again disproved the charge that they are narrow-minded people. They … can see merits in James M. Curley not visible to anyone else.” Governor Tobin, however, did attack Curley. His plaintive reply was, “I don’t think any man could be more vicious and cruel than he has been to me.”

Curley came into prominence when the great Irish-descended population or Boston first began to assert itself; for many years he was the undisputed champion of the local Irish, and his basic source of power was his identification with all the resentments closely cherished by the Irish underpossessed. And, be it remembered, the Irish and people of Irish stock were indeed severely discriminated against; there were signs in Boston ONLY PROTESTANTS NEED APPLY FOR JOBS and so on; no Irishman could get anywhere in economic or political life because the Brahmins and middle Yankees held the doors tight shut; the Boston Irish fifty years ago were in almost the position of the Mexicans in San Antonio today. What Curley did was to crash through all this. His rise was an absolutely proper and inevitable phenomenon, and he has always been perfectly frank about his methods.

Curley was totally self-educated. In his thirties he spent two evenings a week in the home of a Boston utilities magnate; he roamed through the library, and reported like a schoolboy on the books he absorbed, During his great dictatorial years his influence was, on the whole, to the good. But his power began to fade when, a few years ago, the late great Cardinal O’Connell appeared to be disapproving of his general line. Nevertheless, Curley retained the faculty of pulling not only himself but everybody else up by the bootstraps.⁴ A fantastically effective speaker, either to great crowds or alone with friends, he had—and has—a gift of gab almost unrivaled in America. I heard one man say of him with a kind of wistful affection, a man who certainly had no reason to be fond of him, “I suppose that fellow is the damnedest single human being I ever met.”

The Boston Irish

Nowhere else in the United States does a single community dominate a metropolis in quite the manner that the Irish Catholics dominate Boston. No Anglo-Saxon Protestant could ever conceivably be its mayor, and Boston is probably the only city in America where, in order to have a frank political talk with anybody, you have to begin with the question, “Are you a Catholic?”

There is a little joke.

“What is Boston?” someone asks.

Answer: “Part of South Boston.” South Boston is, of course, the major stronghold of those of Irish origin.

Some years ago Kitty Foyle, Christopher Morley’s well-known novel, was offered for serialization to the Boston Globe; its canny editor instantly turned it down. But another Boston newspaper bought the novel sight unseen, because of its reputation as a best seller. A big promotion campaign began. Then abruptly it was stopped; the book never appeared. No outside pressure caused this, nor was there any public explanation. What happened was simply that, on actually reading it, the editor of the second paper knew that he couldn’t possibly risk printing a serial in which a Catholic girl has an illicit love affair.

Yet, for all their immense power, the Irish-born and the second-generation Irish do not play much of a role in nonpolitical affairs. They “permeate without controlling,” I heard it said; they are a kind of minority—except in political offices—although a majority. They have entered all fields; but they don’t quite “take them over.” For instance, only one small Boston bank is Irish owned, and only four out of thirty directors of the Chamber of Commerce are of Irish descent. There are few dominating Irish figures in law, medicine, or finance, and none of the big department stores are Irish controlled; not a single Irishman is an officer, a committee chairman, or a member of the executive committee of the New England Council.

The Irish in Boston derive from a very special background; they go far back, and the Charitable Irish Society is older than the Daughters of the American Revolution. But the great bulk of immigration did not come until the middle of the last century; in one year alone, 1849, 28,917 Irish arrived.⁵ They came packed like animals in ships that charged eighteen dollars as fare from Queenstown; most were ignorant, destitute—a starving rabble. They got jobs as ditchdiggers on the canals and railways, or at the lowest kind of menial labor. And they stayed in Boston instead of moving on, because: (a) they were too poor to move on; (b) they had had their fill of farming under famine conditions in the home country, and they liked urban living. For a time they found Boston an extremely hostile habitat. I have heard it seriously proffered by a non-Irishman that the Boston Irish of the last century were the worst-treated white minority that has ever existed. Not only could they not find jobs but they were forbidden actual entrance into whole districts; people said, “So long as we live, no Catholic shall enter here.” The Irish died in state hospitals without benefit of last rites, until in the 1860’s a law insisted that priests be allowed to enter such institutions; previously it had been forbidden. But the Irish proliferated nevertheless. Many remained poor—the great majority in fact—but some got rich. The “lace curtain” Irish replaced the “cattle Irish”; they moved slowly through Boston like a glacier. Then came the “suburban Irish”; and finally the Irish on Beacon Hill. There are men today whose fathers sold buttons on the streets who have splendid mansions in the most fashionable part of town.

What do the Irish want? Their fair share of power. That and to be let alone. They resent slurs like a famous one made by Rudyard Kipling, “Anything dirty will buy the Irish vote.” Why do the Irish sometimes make trouble? Because, as I heard it said, “they are a people who love to contrive things so that there will be no solution.” But actually they don’t make “trouble” often. If they ever should choose to be a serious nuisance they could hamstring the city in a day; consider merely what would happen if they should boycott non-Irish shops.

Politically the Irish may be closely influenced by what happens “at home” in Eire; Mr. De Valera’s moods can strongly affect South Boston. On the whole they are much less anti-British today than in 1914–18 when hatred of Britain was dense, intense, and bitter. During World War II the Boston Irish were notably loyal; a personal reason for this may have been the previous appointment of a home boy, Joe Kennedy, to the Court of St. James’s, and the splendid war record of his sons, though Kennedy himself was for years an isolationist.⁶

Inextricably bound up with the Irish question is the Catholic question. It is a subject almost never brought out into the open, particularly by Boston newspapers. But that the city is 75 per cent Catholic is an over-whelming fact, and the Pilot, the official organ of the archdiocese, is one of the most influential periodicals of its kind in the United States. Most Boston Catholics are vehemently and irreversibly anti-Russian—which can produce a considerable effect in Washington. Ex-Governor Tobin’s views on foreign policy are as parochial as his environment was bound to make them. Another point is the dislike of most Irish and many Catholics for Harvard; a reason for this is, of course, that Harvard is the great rival of the archbishopric for intellectual control of the community. “I don’t know why Harvard should dominate the city, but it does,” one famous prelate sighed not so long ago. In the whole history of Harvard, only one Catholic, a New Yorker, has been a member of the corporation. And the Irish say that Harvard “discriminates” against them.

Certainly the church watches its interests with extreme solicitude and care, no matter on what level. Consider the following from the Congressional Record of June 12, 1946:

LAWRENCE, MASS., JUNE 10, 1946

Federal Communications Commission,

Washington, D. C.

MY DEAR SIR: I am herewith enclosing editorial from the Pilot, official organ of the Catholic Archdiocese, of Boston, relative to the program Duffy’s Tavern, over the NBC network, and sponsored by the Bristol Myers Co., of New York.

I have written this concern regarding their sponsoring of this offensive program, which, in our opinion, is a direct insult to people of Catholic faith and Irish ancestry, but a reply from them states that they are unable to control this person who broadcasts under the name of Ed Gardner, and are, therefore, unable to remedy the situation.

The Bristol Myers Co. admits that the program is offensive but that they are unable to do anything about it, as this person, Gardner, persists in his weekly insults, with the full knowledge that the program is offensive.

A letter to NBC brought no satisfaction.

I am bringing this matter to your attention in order that some action might be taken to prevent our people of Catholic-Irish faith and ancestry from being lampooned and insulted over the air waves. Will you kindly advise.

Respectfully,

PATRICK J. SCANLON

In January, 1946, Superior Court Judge John E. Swift, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, in a public speech accused Russia of “international robbery and unblushing enslavement of whole nations.” Several times previously this somewhat extroverted judge had been in the news, notably when in 1941 he committed three children, whose parents were members of Jehovah’s Witnesses, to a reformatory because they did not salute the American flag in a public school. Judge Swift’s outbreak brought forward a sharp Russian protest, and lost Boston whatever chance it might have had to be the UN capital.

The Irish were certainly persecuted in their own country, they were certainly persecuted in Massachusetts (where incidentally the Congregationalist church was not disestablished until the 1830’s), and it is an unfortunate fact that almost every racial or other group that has been oppressed takes on a subsequent tendency to be an oppressor. So among other things Boston was, and is, probably the strongest Coughlinite city in America, which was one reason for much hoodlumism in the city and its environs and of an ugly outbreak of anti-Semitism in the spring of 1944. These “riots” were minor and nobody got killed; but the atmosphere was sinister enough. Mostly the police dismissed the incidents as “kid stuff”; and indeed, ordinary juvenile hooliganism was conjoined with them. A gang of a dozen alley rats would run into a pair of Jewish boys, and beat them up, or windows would be stoned at the Jewish Home in Dorchester, or offensive words would be scrawled on synagogues, including of all things loud chalkings of “Hitler” and “Gestapo.” A seventy-year-old Jew was assaulted on a streetcar by three young roughs, and two Harvard boys were beaten up by eight Cambridge toughs. Now episodes of this kind, though they went on for a considerable time, were concealed behind a thorough news blackout. Not a single Boston paper printed a line about any “incident” until the New York newspaper PM blew the story open, and most Bostonians, when they heard the news, were sincerely shocked. The whole story has been so well told that there is little need to recapitulate it here; a full and objective account may be found in the Atlantic Monthly (July, 1944) by Wallace Stegner. Though this article was fair-minded in the extreme, it was bitterly attacked in Boston; so was a mild enough essay in Life (January 15, 1945) which did little more than mention that some of the Boston Irish were underpossessed.⁷ The supersensitiveness of Boston and its great Catholic community is at a flash-point level on such matters, which is a healthy sign perhaps. When I asked Tobin about the disturbances he first seemed shocked that I should even mention them; then he asked me “not to be taken in by all that talk.”

The Christian Front headquarters in Boston had a considerable responsibility in this whole matter, let me repeat; the passions aroused were more political than religious. For years the Coughlinites had pumped out vicious streams of slander against the Jews, and Boston is reputed to have been Father Coughlin’s chief single source of income. A man named Francis P. Moran, formerly Boston leader of the Coughlinites, once publicly charged Roosevelt with treason and denounced him as a Jew. Of course no local Catholics of any responsible position had anything whatever to do with the “incidents.” The only charge brought is that the hierarchy might have taken a stronger line to discourage miscellaneous hoodlums. For instance a Jewish butcher in Dorchester had his windows regularly broken once a week for a period. Neither the police on the beat, the local relief organization, nor the insurance company were able to halt this vandalism. Then someone had the bright idea of appealing to the parish priest, and it stopped at once.

A further word on anti-Semitism. Popularly Boston is supposed to be the most anti-Semitic town in the United States—-though this situation is probably changing for the better, and I am not sure but what Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), and several places in the South are worse. In most American cities it would excite no comment if a rabbi and a priest were to be seen publicly together; in Boston, this event occurred at a recent book fair and it was considered not only a new development but a sensation. Mr. Stegner points out that the Jewish “problem” in Boston is almost as difficult as the Irish “problem”; there are, for instance, sixty thousand Jews packed in a single “sociological enclave” in one Boston district, who form the most solidly Jewish community in the whole country. And not only are some Boston Catholics anti-Semite; so are many Brahmins. I asked one blue-blood if Felix Frankfurter could become a member of the Somerset Club, the inner citadel of Beacon Hill. Answer: “Certainly not, but I would be perfectly willing to take him to lunch there and, as a matter of fact, he lunches there quite often.” Mr. Justice Brandeis, be it noted, never got an honorary degree from Harvard. But this may have been because Brandeis was what Dr. Lowell called a “radical,” not because he was a Jew.

William Henry, Cardinal O’Connell, one of the most powerful and pervasive dignitaries in American church history, a remarkable old potentate about whom a whole picturesque section might well be written, died at a great age in 1944.⁸ His successor—as archbishop but not yet as cardinal—is the Most Reverend Richard James Cushing, D.D., a stalwart man of great dignity, common sense and good humor. His manner can be quite informal. In the autumn of 1944 he called at the state house to be sworn in as corporation sole of the archdiocese; this is an ecclesiastical position but the incumbent must be installed in a civil ceremony. A group of stenographers left their desks, crowding around the new archbishop and kneeling so that they might properly kiss his ring. He greeted them with the words, “My name is Cushing.” To another gathering, when he was asked if he belonged to the great Cushing medical family, he once replied, “No, I am from the South Boston Cushings.”

Dr. Cushing was one of eleven children. (So, incidentally, was O’Conneil.) His father was a blacksmith on the horse cars, who worked from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. seven days a week for a seventeen dollar wage; the fact that Dr. Cushing should have risen to his present exalted position from this humble background is, one scarcely needs to point out, a characteristic American phenomenon. Archbishop Cushing is unusual in that he has never been to Rome; normally it is considered essential that an archbishop should have studied in the Eternal City. When I saw him he recalled days when convents had been burned in Massachusetts; he insisted that Catholics in Boston today have very little economic power, and talked mostly about the indubitable good qualities of the local Irish, for instance their love of home life and simplicity.

Dr. Cushing’s formidable predecessor, Cardinal O’Connell, had an officially registered “lobbyist,” Frederick W. Mansfield (a former mayor), who performed his liaison work with the legislature and the like. It is thought that Dr. Cushing’s relations to politics are not quite so concretely close.

A final odd point is that many of the Irish, especially those prosperous and those who have moved into solidly Republican suburbs like Beverly, become Republican. This is of course because they are passionate politicians and they would be permanently excluded from political life and patronage if they remained Democrats. Exactly the inverse of this happens in communities in Florida, say, where Republican in-migrants turn Democratic.

Why Books Are Banned

There are several censorships in Boston; the most notorious is that of the New England Watch and Ward Society. But censorship of books is more stringent in Boston than anywhere else in America for another and broader and very obvious reason, namely that censorship is one field in which both Catholics and Puritans agree and have an identical objective.

Only rarely—if ever—is original action taken against a book by the authorities; instead, a private person or organization brings a bluestocking suit. Watch and Ward has taken steps against four books recently, Forever Amber, The History of Rome Hanks, Strange Fruit, and Erskine Caldwell’s Tragic Ground. In December, 1944, a municipal judge refused to support the attempt to suppress this last; this was the first time a Massachusetts court failed to back up Watch and Ward since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was banned in 1881. But in 1945 the Supreme Judicial court upheld the suppression of Strange Fruit, and at the moment of writing the Forever Amber case is still sub judice.

I asked why, if Boston is so puritanical about books, it permits burlesque shows, which are forbidden even in that latitudinous modern Babylon, New York. Reason: an innocent mind may be corrupted by a book unwittingly picked up, but anybody going to a burlesque show knows what he is in for, and the danger of damage to both public and private morals isn’t quite so great.

Late in 1946 the municipal censor ordered the exclamation “Oh, God!” cut from the celebrated play Life With Father, after it had played in Boston for many months. A substitute interjection, “Oh, fudge!” was proposed instead.

Hub of the Universe

We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not age which has killed Boston, for no cities die of age; it is the youth of other cities.

—W. L. George

Perhaps I have neglected to note a quality in which Boston seems to me to outrank any other city in America—charm. Stroll around Louisburg Square on a tranquil autumn afternoon. This is the central haunt of Brahmins; there is nothing in the country to rival it for a kind of lazy dignity, intellectual affluence and spaciousness, velvetiness, and above all a wonderful lacquered sense of responsibility to its own past. Of course it suggests rather than overstates. Indeed the quality of understatement characterizes much in Boston life, including its humor in particular.

After two hours of sturdy talk with Erwin D. Canham and R. H. Markham in the Christian Science Monitor offices I wanted a cigarette badly.

“Can I smoke?” I asked.

Mr. Canham, executive editor of the Monitor, replied gently: “Of course. But no one ever has.”

Also I have neglected so far to give any description of that unique Boston phenomenon—the trustee. Trustees exist in other cities, notably Philadelphia, but not to the same extent; nowhere else in the United States is the trusteeship such a “cherished tradition” (as the phrase goes), such an inextricable part of the life of the privileged community.

The great Boston fortunes were made in textiles, in boots and shoes, and by the China trade. A young clipper captain might well retire with a sizable fortune after not more than two or three trips to the Orient the turnover was enormous and immediate. Then the millionaires of the day tended to put their capital into long-term trusts, which were nurtured by trustees with scrupulous conservatism and efficiency; succeeding generations of beneficiaries spent the interest, but as a rule could not touch the principal. Now this process is breaking down, and such well-known modern crudities as taxes are beginning to cut in. I heard it put this way (by an irreverent Brahmin lady): “We were confronted by the dire alternative of living on our interest—say twenty-five thousand dollars a year, which of course is penury—or by something equally unpleasant, digging into the reserves. So we curse contemporary civilization and dig into the reserves.”

It was presented to me on all sides, notably by trustees themselves, that the institution of trusteeship has a curiously subtle and intricate psychological basis. Many fathers of the last century and the early days of this distrusted their own children fearing that they would turn out to be either (a) namby-pambies, or (b) radicals, which would be worse. Yet they had a strong fixed family sense. Thus they contrived through the medium of the trusteeship to ensure that their sons could not maraud through the family fortune, and at the same time to arrange that the grandchildren would be provided for.

Most of the great trustees would not, I heard it said, invest in anything that they couldn’t see outside the window. So billions of dollars of Boston money became sterilized. There was very little impulse, by and large, to invest capital creatively, and partly for this reason, New England industry began to dry up. The trustees’ idea was above all to keep capital safe, not to risk it. Suppose a trust had a million dollars to invest in 1914. It will be proud today if that million is still a million. But think what it might well be today, if it had been invested in automobiles or some other such expanding industry!

If it is true that trusteeship is founded on the unwillingness of parents to believe in their own children, one should also point out a corollary phenomenon—that trusteeship made a generation of youngsters doubtful in turn of their own parents. Not only did it serve to make many young people distrustful of their own families, since they themselves were being distrusted; it made them skeptical and distrustful of something more important—of institutions in general, of institutions as such. This generalization, if correct, leads to a fancy paradox: that something intended above all to give enduring faith to institutions—what could be more of an “institution” than a long-term trust fund?—should have tended on the contrary to destroy this faith and to damage the institution itself.

Financial note: At the corner of Federal and Franklin streets in the core of central Boston is an empty lot. Here once stood the building of Lee, Higginson, & Company. Nothing could demonstrate with more startling pictorial impact how times—and Boston—have irremediably changed.

Two more items deserve brief mention. First, much of Boston seems physically ragged, dilapidated, and, in a way, deserted; on Commonwealth Avenue, I counted twenty buildings that seemed empty. This is partly the result of crushingly high urban taxes.⁹ Rows of houses that were once handsome are frowsy and down-at-the-sill, because people can no longer afford to keep them up; one can easily trace the collapse of whole neighborhoods as successively poorer waves of tenants drifted in—first the Irish, then Italians, then Greeks and Poles, finally the Negroes. The middle class tended to move out into near-by towns or suburbs; only the very rich and the very poor, as I heard it put, could afford to stay within the city limits. This of course has produced profound sociological results: it is not healthy that a great municipality should lose its middle class.

Which leads to point two. Technically the population of “Boston” by the 1940 census is 770,816. But it is a complete delusion to consider this the actual figure. If its statistics were calculated as they are in Los Angeles, for instance, the population would be about 2,300,000, and instead of being the ninth city in the United States, Boston would be third or fourth.

The fact that so many thousands of “Bostonians” live in suburbs and adjacent communities—like Cambridge, Dedham, Melrose, Newton, Brookline, Belmont—has produced political problems of staggering complexity. Within fifteen miles of Boston City Hall there are no fewer than forty incorporated municipalities—which means forty different police and fire departments, boards of health, and school systems! The resulting confusions, like those in Los Angeles, are anarchic. It also means that countless men and women who earn their living inside Boston proper, and who contribute cardinally to its wealth, social energy, and civic prestige, cannot vote there. The people with the biggest stake in the municipality have no opportunity to express themselves politically on municipal affairs.

In an effort to clear up this and other irrational anomalies an eight thousand dollar prize contest was held in 1944, under the auspices of Boston University, for plans to reorganize the city. About ninety projects were submitted by various groups; the chairman of the board of judges, Charles Francis Adams, read every line of every one. The winning prize went to a Harvard group headed by Professor Carl Friedrich; its major proposal was that sixty-six cities and towns of the Boston area should be united into a single metropolitan authority.

One stout Bostonian told me, “Thirty years from now, if we don’t do something, Boston will be so red that Muncie, Indiana, will think we’re Bolsheviks.”

Boston Labor Leader

The most important labor leader in New England is probably the Massachusetts boss of the CIO, an eloquent man of forty-seven, by name Joseph Salerno.

It happened that I saw him on the same day that I saw Charles Francis Adams. The contrast was a stimulating exercise. Adams—so sere, meditative, delicate, cultivated, and unchallengeably devoted to public service. Salerno—so blunt, confident, and unchallengeably fixed in doctrinaire convictions. Adams—great-great-great-grandson of one president of the United States and great-great-grandson of another. Salerno—born in Sicily and on arrival in Boston at the age of ten not knowing a word of English. Yet—I do not need to labor the point—each is a perfectly good American.

Salerno worked first as a waterboy in a factory; he had to quit school at twelve. Then he got a job in a pants shop, working from 6 A.M. every day “till the clock broke down.” He has participated in a dozen strikes; he has been an organizer from the earliest days; he is a good Catholic. Like many self-educated men he has a feeling for aphorisms, a love of the apothegm. Samples of his talk:

“Words become action; then action becomes history.”

“The purpose of life is more life.”

“No one has stopped believing in God because the postman brings you a letter for three cents. Is that collectivism?”

“What we of the CIO have done here is induce a new mental climate. Labor can’t be prosperous unless the rest of society is prosperous too. Life means jobs.”

“If you have a message that hits people both in pocketbook and ideals, they’ll act.”

Salerno also talked a good deal about the church. No longer, he says, does an Irish priest automatically come to the defense of an Irish cop when the cop bashes someone in the head on a picket line. “The church can’t afford it any more.” The great majority of Irish Catholics voted for FDR in 1944. Why? “Because most of them are working people; they want security.” And Salerno seemed to think that, rationally, there was no reason why church and CIO should not work together since—in Boston anyway—both have their strongest roots in the urban proletariat.

Composite Portrait of a New England Legislator

He is tall, gaunt, wrinkled, and there are great reserves of character in the face and raspy voice. He earns a living in a garage, and also owns a bit of real estate. His salary as legislator (which in New Hampshire would be two hundred dollars a year plus traveling expenses; in Vermont four hundred) is an important addition to his income. His wife is a farmer’s daughter from the next county; they have been married twenty-four years and have three children. The eldest son was a carpenter’s mate first class, another son is in his third year at the public high school, and is crazy about gliders; the daughter wants to go to Vassar. Our legislator has two brothers: one is a lobster fisherman in Stony Creek, Connecticut, and the other left Massachusetts many years ago, and is believed now to own a small farm in Iowa. Several generations back there were some complex marriages in the family; one distant relative is Greek born, and another married a Finn; but also our legislator is related to no less a personage than a former governor of the state. He believes in paying his bills on the dot, in the inherent right of his children to a good education, and in common sense. He gives ten dollars a year to the Red Cross, believes that “Washington ought to let us alone,” knows that very few Americans are peasants, and feels that the country has enough inner strength to ride out any kind of crisis. In several respects he is somewhat arid; but no one has ever fooled him twice. He is a person of great power. Because, out of the community itself, power rises into him. What he represents is the tremendous vitality of ordinary American life, and the basic good instincts of the common people.

So much for New England. We proceed now to the most important and difficult subject in this whole wide and interwoven panorama, New York.

¹ Boston Herald, November 29, 1944.

² Boston Herald, December 8, 1944.

³ Our friend the man from Mars—or Moscow—may well be given pause by this.

⁴ And nevertheless Franklin D. Roosevelt once offered to make him ambassador to Poland.

⁵ Cf. Boston’s Immigrants 1790–1865, a Study in Acculturation, by Oscar Handlin.

⁶ One son, John F. Kennedy, an attractive youngster of twenty-nine, ran for Congress in 1946 and won Curley’s former seat.

⁷ The riots provided, incidentally, the only known occasion when Leverett Salton-stall publicly lost his temper. A PM reporter called on him presenting various affidavits and asking for a statement; the governor had him thrown out of the office. But—note well—Saltonstall immediately opened an investigation, called for action, and apologized to the reporter a day later. “I had a rude awakening,” the governor said.

⁸ One big insurance company in Boston neglected to pull down its American flag to half-mast on the news of his death. It was so inundated with telephone calls of protest that it closed down entirely for the whole day of the funeral as a mark of belated respect.

⁹ The real estate tax is $42.50 per $1,000 of valuation.