With all this talk about Boston and the Olympics, you'd think the subject had never come up before; which is the sort of thing that happens when those with the inferiority complex, the pessimists, get control of the public debate. One does not need to be a historian to know how that sort of negativity distorts everything, including in this case understanding that Boston played so large a role in the fact that there are modern Olympics in the first place; which is what happens -- given how many people believe in the Olympic ideal Boston so importantly helped to launch -- when those with the superiority complex, the optimists, seize the day..
These are very different teams, the optimists and the pessimists, and the best way I find as a scholar to fairly consider the issues each team urges on us is to begin with the most distant, the most disinterested, the least local, perspective. This is probably why the best work in the field of Boston/New England Studies today is mostly being done not by scholars in New England universities -- there are exceptions: Boston University's Keith Morgan comes to mind; so does Shaun O'Connell at University of Massachusetts at Boston -- but by scholars far distant from the scene of the crime, so to speak.
Mark Peterson, for example, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, whose new book, The City-State of Boston, 1630-1865: Ebb and Flow in the Atlantic World is due out next year from Yale University Press, some portions of which I have read in manuscript, will startle quite a few people who think they know something of Boston's history. It is the kind of history I call, to site the subtitle of my own website, Boston-Centric Global Studies.
In so far as the Olympics are concerned, the best perspective to adopt in considering Boston's role historically may be from India: Professor Amresh Kumar's Complete Book of the Olympic Games. Published in 2007 in New Delhi --no American exceptional-ism, no Bostonian piety of place, no sports boosterism is in evidence. But in the section where Kumar details how the modern Olympics came into being in 1896 he concludes his discussion with an arresting observation : "That is the story of the revival of the Olympic Games after a lapse of fourteen centuries, the account of the little group from the Boston A[thletic] A[ssociation]."Fourteen centuries? In fact, the ancient Olympic Games began in the 8th century B. C. E. and ended in the 4th century A. D.
The Boston Athletic Association was based in an opulent clubhouse that was once one of the landmarks of a galaxy of institutions that are the subject of my next book, Gods of Copley Square: The Triumph and Fall of the Boston Brahmin at the Dawn of the American Century. It is about a vital but almost completely lost aspect of American history, for we have forgotten today about 19th century Copley Square, only the architecture of which survives to remind the few who remember that once, as Michael Cannell points out in his biography of architect I M Pei, it was "the Acropolis of the New World, as Bostonians boastfully called Copley Square." New Yorkers too! (Distance again.) The New York Times reported in 1894, on September 13th, that "Copley Square . . . contains as large a proportion of the fine structures in modern Athens as the Acropolis did in ancient Athens."
Acropolis of Faith and Leaning, Arts and Sciences, the triumph of the 19th century Boston Brahmin Ascendancy -- its cornerstones (all in one place, within sight of each other!) MIT, Trinity Church, the Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard Medical School and its centerpiece and apotheosis, the Boston Public Library -- Copley Square's Acropolis was as the Times noted Greek themed. Was not Boston the Athens of America? The new art museum, for example, was full of statues of Greek athletes, many of them the property of MIT across the square, where Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, spoke in 1889 at the Boston Conference of Physical Training. Doubtless it was because of the Frenchman's enthusiasm for Anglophile "muscular Christianity" that Boston according to David Randall was one of six cities who sent contributions to aid the movement for the revival of the Olympics.
Founded in 1887 by a group of athletically inclined young Brahmins eager to emulate the hugely successful New York Athletic Club, the Boston Athletic Association itself was broad-minded enough to include among their number a leading figure of Irish Catholic Boston: the poet and editor John Boyle O'Reilly, very much an enthusiast for sports of all kinds, whose signature appears in the letter soliciting the first members. Nine years later the BAA was similarly far-seeing with respect to the revival of the Olympics Games in Athens. Professor Kumar explains:
"There was no organized effort to send a representative team from the U S to Athens. But some members of the Boston A[thletic] A[ssociation] decided that their best men should be sent to compete," the Indian scholar writes: "the winning team at Athens consisted of a group of athletes sent over by a single club, the Boston A.A.,with James Connoly and Bob Garnett helping out." Hurdler Thomas Curtis from MIT, sprinter Thomas Burke from BU, jumpers Ellery Clark and William Hoyt and runner Arthur Blake, all from Harvard, won just about every other prize in the track and field events which were the center of interest at the first modern Olympics. A huge welcome- home rally in Copley Square greeted the victorious athletes, who were also feted at great civic banquet at the Hotel Vendome.
Kumar goes on to detail the second and third Olympic Games. "The winning team at Paris [in 1900] was made up of groups of athletes sent over by a half dozen or so for the larger universities . . . . The winning team at St Louis [in 1904] was comprised of groups of sent there by athletic clubs from all over the country, notably New York, Chicago and Milwaukee . . . . One club in 1896; half a dozen universities in 1900; . . . twelve big athletic clubs . . . in 1904."America was on the march. And Boston, it would seem, from the perspective of 20th century India, had clearly led the way. About which all historians in this area, east and west, agree, including about the huge significance of the unfolding Olympic Movement for the American century. As John Kiernan and Arthur Daly wrote in their Story of the Games (1936) "the small band of Bostonians dominated the games so much it constituted the beginning of United States ascendancy in the modern Olympic games."
How much the BAAs determination carried the day Kumar makes plain. "It was a good plan and a good team," the Indian scholar writes of the first small band of Bostonians in 1896, "but the whole proposal came close to collapsing three days before the athletes were due to sail for Athens. There wasn't enough money . . . . In this emergency Oliver Ames, a former governor of Massachusetts, came to the rescue. So with passage paid and enough money to provide board and lodging in Greece and return tickets to Boston, the little team started on what was to be a triumphant journey."
The gift actually of the former governor's son, Oakes Ames -- Governor Ames having died a few months earlier -- the journey was certainly fueled by the Ames fortune, which makes a point few register: there were Brahmins and there were uber-Brahmins. Every group, even an aristocracy, has an officer corps. And it is the officer corps, the uber-Brahmins, who are the real aristocracy, and it is in that sense the word is used here.
One result of all this, by the way, was the Boston Marathon, sparked by the effect on the Boston team of the thrilling marathon that concluded the first Olympic Games. Now one of the great races of the runners world, it was an inspiration for returning team members to link their plan for a Boston race with the ride of Paul Revere, commemorated on Patriots Day. That was to span more than fourteen centuries in the largest sense, fusing things both ancient Greek and revolutionary American in new ways typical of the New World Acropolis.
THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
One can see in this brave tale the time-honored Boston Brahmin modus-operendi -- evident since the 1600s, when the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay, so well educated as to field at once an intellectual aristocracy -- fell into the habit of a civic polity that the great scholar Perry Miller identified as 'a speaking aristocracy in the face of a listening democracy.' Two centuries later Tocqueville also noticed this presiding if not always controlling principle of Boston life in the 1830s. But although the idea was so embedded it survived into the mid 20th century -- of WGBH's Brahmin founder, Ralph Lowell, it was was said, for example, by The Jewish Advocate that he "typifie[d] aristocracy in love with democracy"-- it could not really survive the decline and fall of the Brahmin Ascendancy in the early 20th century .
Or could it have? There is quite a contrast certainly between Boston's major impact on the revival of the modern Olympics in the 19th century and the efforts, ineffectual, finally, in the 20th century to convince the United Nations its world headquarters should be located in the New England metropolis. The "Ethnic Ascendancy," as Boston College historian Thomas O'Connor called it, which succeeded the Brahmin Ascendancy during the period from the First World War to the 1940s, when the core citys politics were dominated by newly empowered immigrant leaders of the second and third generations, was in no sense at all aristocratic. On the contrast, how could they not have been nervous heirs to a civic tradition grand enough that they had not yet made their own.
Today, of course, the possibility the United Nations might have ended up headquartered in Boston seems as unreal to most as Boston's role in launching the modern Olympic Games, an example of how local and limited is the purview of most Bostonians now, whether city-dwellers or suburbanites, even in our increasingly global era. As well it shows how pervasive is the negative image of 21st century Boston when, for instance, the 19th century triumph of the Abolitionist movement against slavery, headquartered in Boston, has been quite overwhelmed by the 20th century disaster of the Bussing Wars in the matter of public school segregation, a disaster now identified not just with South Boston but with Boston as a whole."Dirty Water" indeed.
The facts of the matter are that when after World War II the new United Nations decided on an American and not a European location, "immediately", according to David Gordon in his Planning 20th century Capital Cities, "San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and New York competed for the honor." Because the Far West was to distant from Europe and the South would be hostile to non-white diplomats, "by a rapid process of elimination . . . the UN set its sights on New England and the upper mid-Atlantic . . . specifically, the organization would search such for a big site within sixty miles of Boston and eighty miles of New York."
(The original concept for the UN's headquarters in the mind of site-selection committee that came to the US was for a stand-alone suburban site in an area that was close -- but not too close -- to a major city. Both the British and French delegates preferred Boston, especially Concord and vicinity and the North Shore. The UN's head, Trygve Lie favored New York. .)
All these bids are detailed in Villanova University historian Charlene Mires's book on the subject published by New York University Press in 2013, and Boston's bid alone is the subject of a contemporary article by the same scholar, "The Lure of New England in the Search for the Capital of the World," in New England Quarterly. It was the subject as well of a Massachusetts Historical Society exhibition in 2013.
Although the effort, led by Boston's Irish Catholic mayor and by then Massachusetts governor, Maurice Tobin, did enlist the capital's Brahmin-oriented intellectuals -- Christian Science Monitor editor Erwin D Canham and MIT president Karl Compton, were both dispatched to London to appear before the site selection committee even before it came to America -- one factor singled out as particularly problematic for Boston was that "the UN's interest prompted resistance among residents", especially in the Concord area so favored by the British. Concord, it should be noted, was a stronghold of Brahmin descendants, increasingly identified with the former ruling classes flaws rather than with its virtues.
Then too the Ethnic Ascendancy did not it seems to me exert the kind of decisive leadership and civic and national -- and international -- ambition that had fueled so strongly the city's 19th century support of the Olympic Movement. In this situation other cities -- not so much bedeviled by Boston's ethnic and class rivalries -- were quick to seize the day, most notably New York and Philadelphia.
New York mayor William O'Dwyer and his development chief Robert Moses were determined to win this prize as no-one really in Boston was. O'Dwyer felt that the UN was "the one thing that would make New York the center of the world," and by his lights was right. His zeal fueled a decisive last minute coup,as explained in Samuel Zipp's Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (2001):
"By December 1946 the [UN site selection] committee was on the verge of selecting a site near Philadelphia . . . A last-minute effort saved the day for New York. John D Rockefeller [who had been interested in the project by Nelson Rockefeller] proposed to buy 18 acres of land on the East River [in Manhattan] . . . and deed it to the UN . . . . In an eleventh-hour family meeting the night before the UN was expected to ratify Philadelphia, the Rockefellers first considered donating family land in Westchester County . . . . Nelson realized that only [an] intown site could sway the UN back to New York. His father agreed to offer$8.5 million dollars [for the eventual intown site]. At 10:30 the night before the [UN] vote [an emissary] was dispatched to get [the Realtor] consent . . . . [A] year's worth of searching was abruptly ended in little more than a week."
FITZGERALD / KENNEDY
Would the Brahmin Ascendancy have done better? Consider MIT. When that revolutionary idea was proposed in the 1850s and 60s the New York Tribune editorialized according to Institute historian Philip Alexander "since the country did not need two such institutions New York was the better location." It was not much of a threat, however: two uber-Brahmin families, the Savages and the Lowells, made sure MIT founder William Barton Rogers had all the support he needed, including a land grant that was the cornerstone of the Copley Square Acropolis.
It was the Boston Brahmin vocation, why its ruling class was named after the Hindu caste of priest-teachers, over earnest perhaps, but effective: "The Boston Symphony Orchestra is Mr Henry L Higginson/s yacht," Richard Aldrich wrote in The Century , and Higginson -- "born in New York but brought up in Boston as a Boston family socially and intellectually most distinguished," was clearly an über-Brahmin even a Rockefeller would have stood up for.
It was not that the new Ethnic Ascendancy lacked money. Joe Kennedy could have bought anything in Boston the UN coveted in a minute. But there was nothing of the Brahmins mission about him at all. Indeed, his life story was such that one can certainly appreciate why Kennedy and his fellows seemed ambivalent about Boston given its attitude toward the Irish newcomers , documented by stories like the the burning of the Roman Catholic Ursuline convent in Charlestown by a Yankee mob, tales told and retold. The era of objective journalists had not appeared yet, nor, in terms of wide readership, the era either of critical historians. The fact that while there were certainly enough Fundamentalist working class Yankee bigots to perpetrate such horrific deeds was not balanced by the knowledge that there were also enlightened Yankee Brahmins, whose daughters as a matter of fact, constituted a large portion of the students of the convent school.
Nor could most have known then what we know now, or should know, and that is that the Ethnic Ascendancy like the Brahmin Ascendancy would soon generate an officer corps, an aristocracy of its own, at just the time, moreover, when the Brahmin decline meant the virtual disappearance of the über-Brahmin, something seen every day in the way Brahmin descendants hardly ever lived up to the old standards. There would always be wonderful throwbacks. Ralph Lowell. Eliot Richardson. But as the Ethnic Ascendancy was waxing, embarrassments multiplied in the Brahmin remnant, and, indeed, in allied groups throughout the WASP Ascendancy as a whole.
Consider that Philadelphia's presentation to the UN site selection committee actually sought to win points by "drawing attention to the undesirable 'Irish element' in Boston,", never mind pointing out helpfully that Boston had experienced "violent anti=Semitic attacks in Jews carried out during the war years by Irish-Catholic youth-gangs." In truth, there was bias on all sides. And it could get very personal.
Case in point! When Joe and Rose had moved to the Brahmin-dominated Boston suburb if Cohasset in 1822 only to be blackballed from the country club there, Kennedy finally had had enough,and moved his family -- including the daughter of a famous Boston mayor --to New York in 1927-29, retaining only a newly purchased Hyannisport summer home. Ralph Lowell, one of the last Brahmins standing, sized up the situation very well. Although Joe Kennedy's business practices were not such as Lowell was "comfortable" with (Kennedy was a "flamboyant" stock market operator) the Boston Brahmin who in the decade after the UN failure would become the founder of WGBH in Boston, admitted Kennedy and his family had been badly treated. It was, Lowell said, "petty and cruel" of the Brahmins to have blackballed the Kennedy's. But they did. Far from buying land for the UN in Boston, Kennedy and his family by the 1940s had been comfortably ensconced in New York for over a decade.
Remember, however, the spirited response to Brahmin Boston of Mayor "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald as a newsboy. Not surprisingly daughter Rose was of like mind. Although Rose regretted all her life, for instance, that Cardinal O'Connell, as bigoted against Yankees as any Yankee toward Irish Catholicism had advised her father strongly against her going to Wellesley College, where she had been accepted, and insisted instead she go to an RC convent school, Rose did not subside; she fought back.
"Rose resented the 'proper Bostonians', University of Wisconsin historian Michael O'Brien wrote in his JFK biography, for being a "closed society."However, its always wise to notice what people do more than what they say. "Despite the resentment,", biographer O'Brien wrote, " Rose, and many other fellow Irish Catholics patterned themselves after the Brahmin elite. They were earnest, self-conscious imitators. Rose . . . tried to match the Brahmins . . . aimless frivolity never appealed to her. Instead, she studied German and French and art at Boston University;took music and piano lessons at the New England Conservatory . . . She became the youngest member of the Boston Public Library's Examining Committee."
And Rose it was whose historical role it was to generate the Ethnic Ascendancy's aristocracy. When the Brahmins developed the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools to educate their own, and the Irish Catholics the parochial school system to educate their own, there was no question where Jack, Robert and Ted Kennedy would go to school. Brahmin rep schools were selected for all of them, and Harvard thereafter. Which everyone noticed. Nor did anyone quarrel with Massachusetts governor Paul Dever when, anticipating Walter Muir Whitehill, Dever pronounced Jack Kennedy "the first Irish Brahmin."
Is it any wonder then that when Joe and Roses eldest wrote his Profiles in Courage, he would write of the Brahmin's Puritan forebears that they were an "extraordinary breed who have left a memorable imprint upon our government and our way of life . . . .[The Puritan] believed that man was made in the image of God, and thus he believed him equal to the extraordinary demands of self-government",wrote young Kennedy, going on to quote G F Hoar about Kennedy's hero, John Quincy Adams. Adams had, he quoted, "a lofty and inflexible courage, an unbending will, which never qualified or flinched." One aristocracy had found another.
KENNEDY / ADAMS
It was Roses values that in the end triumphed. Notice how another voice far distant from Boston, the distinguished Black Studies historian from the American South, George Mason University professor Jeffrey C. Stewart, carries the tale forward to our own moment today; indeed, to President Barack Obama's recent visit to Boston for the dedication of the Edward M Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.
In his moving article, "Remembering: Edward M. Kennedy," published in Politico on August 29, 2009, Stewart did not ignore what he called the "family-driven [meaning, of course, Joe, not Rose Kennedy] Kennedy boys culture that thrived on the exploitive treatment of women," but insisted "the wild and crazy youthful [Ted] Kennedy had reinvented himself and became the conscience of his generation." Stewart moved smartly on to celebrated the senator's larger achievements:
"Buoyed by a family tradition that was more than the quest for power by a manipulative father and a raucous bunch of boys. The Kennedy family, after all, was Irish, and what distinguished that family is the way that it realized the ideology of civic leadership that was handed down to them by the Anglophile Brahmin class of Boston. That class was also organized around a series of families, such as the John Adams family that devoted themselves to to politics, endowed cultural institutions, and sought to accomplish something in public service . . . . that expressed themselves in Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and Civic Reform. Key was the notion that the poor should not be made to suffer . . . . What I find interesting is that an Irish family assimilated these Brahmin values and perpetuated them in the 20th century."
It was, so to speak, their turn, and neither John, nor Robert, nor Edward, would disappoint in the end. Stewart was insistent: "Ted Kennedy was buoyed by a unique synthesis of Irish political acumen and Boston Brahmin idealism . . . . This great clannish group have opened the door for Barack Obama . . . Just as the Brahmins had passed the torch to the Kennedy's, so, too, Ted Kennedy passed it to Obama. He did so by drawing on the Kennedy sense of history."
Edward M Kennedy as finally the Brahmin torch bearer has about it all the idealism and romance and more that drew Boston to the revival of the ancient Olympic Games in the first place,'the more' being what the Brahmins handed on; which would not be the "center of the world" -- bad timing that -- nor a "world-class" city either, whatever that may mean, but instead a different accolade: a "center of civilization," as it was called by that distinguished series of volumes in which Walter Muir Whitehill wrote the Boston volume referred to last time here. It was a city built by Winthrop and Harvard and Adams, by Hawthorne and by Emerson and Thoreau, by William James and Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Charles W. Eliot and T S Eliot, by Richardson and Olmsted and Sargent,and, yes, by Alexander Graham Bell and by Brandeis and by John Fitzgerald Kennedy too; a mother city of a great civilization to which all Bostonians today, however unworthy, are heirs.
Douglass Shand-Tucci is a historian of American art and architecture and Boston/New England Studies. His latest book, an historical guide to the MIT campus, is due out from Princeton Architecture Press in 2016. He is now at work on his next book, Gods of Copley Square: The Triumph and Fall of the Boston Brahmin.
