When Boston Had Confidence

I've thought a lot about Brahmin Boston's superiority complex, still alive and well in its parts of town, as Bostonians have been assailed yet again by the debate about whether or not ours is a "world-class" city, whatever that may mean, a debate occasioned by the selection of Boston as the American entry for the 2024 winter Olympics. At the same time I have been appraising an appalling new picture book entitled Dirty Old Boston, a book which celebrates — celebrates — Boston's nadir as a gritty, decaying city in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Looking at this dismal volume, I began to ruminate on how few Bostonians understand the two controlling narratives about New England's capital in the crossfire of which we all seem forever trapped.

On the one hand there is the legacy of the ever confident and optimistic 19th century Brahmin Ascendancy that always insisted, never mind Henry Adams, that the positive Unitarian voice of Boston be heard worldwide. There are such enduring literary landmarks as Longfellow’s "Paul Revere's Ride," in which he virtually invented the foundational American myth, to which one must add such enthusiastic responses as "The Promised Land," in which Jewish immigrant and slum dweller Mary Antin hymned the Boston Public Library as New Yorkers do the Statue of Liberty, and with the characteristic difference that it was for her an enabling "palace of the people," full of the learning she needed.

On the other hand, however, there is the very negative narrative of early 20th century immigrant Boston, also still alive and well in its part of town, a narrative which achieved its literary peak in George Higgins "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," the apotheosis in the minds of some of Irish-Catholic Boston, and which resounds still in pop culture in a song entitled "Dirty Water."

Mainstream American literature — in which of course Boston figures importantly — sets up a similar crossfire. Whether you read George Santayana’s "The Last Puritan" or Henry James's "The Bostonians" or "The Education of Henry Adams," or John Dos Passos' "Boston" or Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" or Edwin O’Conner’s "The Last Hurrah" or May Sarton's "Faithful are the Wounds," and you will be captured by one narrative or the other. Similarly with works of literary criticism.

The New York Times, without getting into the literature, testifies to the power of both these narratives. Commenting on January 5th of this year "Boston is wrapped up in an existential debate with itself about whether or not it is a 'world class' city," the Times, which knows better, could not resist opining that Boston has "an inferiority complex. And as it makes its first serious bid to host the Olympics, it shows."

That it also shows its superiority complex went unnoticed.

The New Yorkers are not talking about Brahmin Boston, of course, but about Irish-Catholic Boston, the profile of which is very different depending on your perspective. The most aggressively negative is James Carroll's: "Despite all appearances of patrician high-mindedness," Carroll, a journalist and writer of books on politics and religion, opines, "Boston's initial hatred of the Irish remains its Original Sin." A bit of hyperbole in the town of "The Scarlet Letter," but telling insofar as the emotions the subject still arouses.

More moderate is the view of the book Carroll was reviewing when he made those remarks: "The Boston Irish," by Thomas H. O'Connor, he an esteemed colleague who was a Boston College historian who agreed with and several times quoted in that volume the now classic history in this field, "The American Irish," by another journalist, this time a member of The New York Times editorial board, William V. Shannon. Therein, while Shannon certainly gives due weight to the "myopia" of the Yankees — and notes too "the drop in quality from the elder Holmes to the late George Apley … a measure of the toll the [19th] century had taken on the Boston aristocracy" — his analysis is arguably today the scholarly consensus:

[Boston's] Brahmins had a coherent sense of identity and a proud past. Their ancestors had started the movement toward the American Revolution … [and] the Boston Yankee had produced most of the nation's literary genius in Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott and the rest. The institution of Harvard dominated … The weight of this history, [of these] great names, and the awesome institutions was oppressive to the Boston Irish. It could not help but produce in them a massive inferiority complex … The Irish, understandably but unfortunately, often eased their resentments and inferiority feelings by cries of discrimination. The social and economic discrimination was real enough, but neither exaggeration nor self-pity was useful in combating it.

The most positive point of view is Gerald Leinwands in his American history textbooks, which celebrate immigration. "These Boston Brahmins," this historian writes, "felt superior to other Americans let alone to newcomers. But in the end their very political traditions and orientation worked to the benefit of the Irish newcomers … The sense of fair play among Boston's Brahmins was such that [they] neither raised nor sought to exploit with vigor the issue of Irish Catholicism. They refused, for example, to flock to the anti-Catholic anti-immigrant policies of the Know-Nothing Movement."

Today I'd give the final word to literary historian Shaun O'Connell, who in his "Voices and Visions," adds the remarkable observation that for the Irish as for others Boston did, indeed, offer "a noble vision, but delivered less than it promised, leaving its citizens in quest of a better place—a view of the city that echoes the aspirations of Boston's original Puritan settlers."

Nor did the situation change a lot when the huge Irish immigrant population of the small core city of Boston won political control of City Hall. Endowed to be sure with a great role, it was eventually clear, however, that it was in the context of a civic inheritance, however grand, that was not yet really their own. Certainly the imagination necessary to make it so was not widespread.

Better days were coming, however. For one of the most important examples that imagination was not totally lacking, historically, one need only consult historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," where Goodwin relates how in the late 19th century John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald — President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's grandfather — did indeed posses that imagination.

As a youngster selling papers on the corner of Beacon and Park Streets in front of the Massachusetts State House, surrounded by Beacon Hill's historic town houses and their Brahmin grandees, "Johnny developed a heroic image of Boston's merchant princes," Goodwin writes, noting that "even as a young boy he felt a special tie to Boston … Convinced that the heritage of patriots and abolitionists, the clipper ships and the country houses, belonged to him as much as to anyone else", the young newspaper boy exulted in the "self-confident vigor with which [Boston's Brahmins] sailed the seven seas" and then came home to "direct the destiny of their city and their nation."

That imagination, by the way, fueled all the tours of historic Boston "Honey Fitz" as an old man took his grandson on — as Sen. Ted Kennedy never neglected to acknowledge — never mind fueling the Kennedy dynasty as a whole, at the pinnacle of which, historically, now stands President Kennedy, whose bronze figure now stands on the State House grounds within sight of young Johnnie's "corner" of a century ago.

Thus it was that in the 1960s, historian Walter Muir Whitehill, when asked to write "Boston in the Age of Ralph Waldo Emerson," declined to do yet another tome on the most famous Boston Brahmin, preferring instead to write Boston in the Age of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. By then there had been Jewish Boston Brahmins — Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, for example — and, of course, Irish Protestant Brahmins — William Barton Rogers, for example, the founder of MIT — but President Kennedy was certainly pronounced by Whitehill, whose right to do so no one disputed, the first Irish-Catholic Boston Brahmin.

That book was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Press in its now famous "Centers of Civilization" series, other volumes of which included works on Athens in the Age of Pericles, Rome in the Age of Augustus, the Dublin of Yeats and Joyce and the Florence of Dante, and so on. The question of whether or not Rome or Athens — or Boston — was a "world-class" city never came up, any more than did the more historic nonsense of the "Hub of the Universe", as how could either when the so much more serious accolade was on offer of a "center of civilization."

Just a little history is necessary here. After the Civil War four national American capitals emerged: Washington finally became the effective political capital of postbellum America; New York emerged as the country's economic and media capital and Boston the nations' intellectual capital. Later, in the early 20th century, Los Angeles would emerge as the national entertainment capital.

Because Americans are mostly a great deal more interested in politics, money, celebrity and entertainment than in the life of the mind, Boston is for most, of course, effectively the least important of these the Capitoline cites. On the other hand, the American intellectual capital emerged in Whitehill's book as much more than that when he quoted British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead to the effect that "in so far as the world of learning posses a capital city, Boston, with its neighboring institutions, approximates the position that Paris held in the Middle Ages." Which reminds of another reason Boston, like Paris, is a center of civilization. Since the Reformation and the Renaissance the two driving forces in world history have been, respectively, the American and the French Revolutions, and the capitals in which the Tea was dumped and the Bastille stormed occupy now perhaps the first place upon serious reflection in the imagination of the world.

Finally, may I suggest the best way to keep one's balance when nonsense assails is to take up the furthest away perspective possible on a city so ancient and complex as to boast, historically, both superiority and inferiority complexes. A vantage point I like right now is Singapore, a part of whose foreign policy according to Prime Minister Goh Chek Tong is to become "the Boston of the East." Hence the MIT-Singapore Alliance, said to be the worlds largest interactive, distance education initiative.

However, more than a few suspect all this is more suited to the sciences than to the humanities, Singapore's government being distinctly authoritarian, and apt to overlook the fact that Boston has not only a learned but a revolutionary aspect historically. H. Chhapia, writing in the Times of India, was unforgiving, headlining his Asian perspective on the New England capital with four devastating words: "Singapore: not quite Boston."

Douglass Shand-Tucci's latest book is a historical guide to the MIT campus, due out in 2016 from Princeton Architectural Press. He is at work on his next book, "Gods of Copley Square: The Triumph and Fall of the Boston Brahmin."