prinmin Culture Veroretta 2005 12/15/2014 CHAPTER I. THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND (Novel: Elsie Venner) 12/18/14 Home Authors Index > Oliver Wendell Holmes > Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny > This page Home Fictions/Novels Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, a novel by Oliver Wendell Holmes Short Stories Poems CHAPTER I. THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND Essays < Previous Table of content Next > Plays Search Nonfictions UPMC Bariatric Surgery Consider Bariatric Surgery at UPMC. Schedule a Consultation 00 Authors All Titles CHAPTER I. THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND AdChoices There is nothing in New England corresponding at all to the feudal Caste aristocracies of the Old World. Whether it be owing to the stock from which we were derived, or to the practical working of our institutions, or to the Brahmin abrogation of the technical "law of honor," which draws a sharp line between Read Online the personally responsible class of "gentlemen" and the unnamed multitude of those who are not expected to risk their lives for an abstraction,-- whatever be the cause, we have no such aristocracy here as that which grew up out of the military systems of the Middle Ages. What we mean by "aristocracy" is merely the richer part of the community, that live in the tallest houses, drive real carriages, (not "kerridges,") kidglove D their hands, and French-bonnet their ladies' heads, give parties where the JoS. A. persons who call them by the above title are not invited, and have a provokingly easy way of dressing, walking, talking, and nodding to people, BANK as if they felt entirely at home, and would not be embarrassed in the least, if they met the Governor, or even the President of the United States, face to 1000 face. Some of these great folks are really well-bred, some of them are only amazon.com. purse-proud and assuming, but they form a class, and are named as above EARTH'S BIGGEST in the common speech. SELECTION! 66- It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and shop here distributed. A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America. It splits into four handsome properties; each of these into four good inheritances; 75% these, again, into scanty competences for four ancient maidens,--with whom it is best the family should die out, unless it can begin again as its great- grandfather did. Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which represents MOS in a compendious form the summer's growth of a fat meadow of craft or Everything commerce; and as this kind of meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is ONLINE pretty certain that sons and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether they milk the same cows or turn in new ones. In other words, the millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of Guaranteed persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human Holiday element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without falling Delivery! into serious error. Of course, this trivial and, fugitive fact of personal wealth CWE + does not create a permanent class, unless some special means are taken to Save arrest the process of disintegration in the third generation. This is so rarely $25 OFF done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the Every $125 millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores Use Code: SAVE25 and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira ENDS 12/16 shop now chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their FREE SHIPPING legs in long boots with silken tassels. No Minimum! There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which nas a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste, not in any odious sense; but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity, and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the good-nature and http://www.readbookonline.net/read/6946/19297/ 1/3 12/15/2014 CHAPTER I. THE BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND (Novel: Elsie Venner) intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all we can and tell all we see. If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two different aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme cases to illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure is perhaps robust, but often otherwise, -inelegant, partly from careless attitudes, partly from ill- dressing, the face is uncouth in feature, or at least common,--the mouth coarse and unformed,--t eye unsympathetic, even if bright,-- movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the limbs,--tl voice is unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words were coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other aspect is commonly slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be pallid, features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--hi eye is bright and quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's fingers dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher, you know what to expect from each of these young men. With equal willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work. The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred to bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind of life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more than their share of development, -the organs of thought and expression less than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be developed. A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of elaboration. You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a large proportion of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons. That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some newer name takes their place, it maybe,-- you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female descendant. There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--a he may, perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other. It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual classe! The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them all. That is Nature's republicanism; thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical. The race of the hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of animal vigor. The scholar who comes by Nature's special grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality. A man's breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs. You broke down in your great speech, did you? Yes, your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in '82, after working too hard on his famous Election Sermon. All this does not touch the main fact: our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well- known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the land. Let me introduce you to a young man who belongs to the Brahmin caste of New England. http://www.readbookonline.net/read/6946/19297/ 2/3 Lot's Go - Boston - Rise of Boston Brahmins Page 1 of 2 Home Destinations Bookstore Resources Forums Features BOSTON LETSGO Boston / Life & Times / History / 19th Century: Boston Brahmins / Rise of Boston Brahmins LET'S Rise of Boston Brahmins Search Let's Go Independence from Britain was hard-won, but life after the war was even harder. The British had left BACK/UP/NEXT much of the city in shambles, and rebuilding was DISCOVER BOSTON A LET'S GO CITY slow in coming. Boston did not support (either ONCE IN BOSTON ideologically or financially) the War of 1812, LIFE & TIMES considered by many to be the United States' 2nd History war for independence from the British. When the 17th Century: Pilgrims US won the war, the city was punished and Buy from Glob & Puritans suffered even more economically---particularly in Amazon, 18th Century: the its maritime industries. The once-wealthy or for you American Revolution merchants began looking for other sectors to Not logged in 19th Century:Boston invest in, and soon the industrial factory boom Brahmins sweeping the US arrived in Boston, as Rise of Boston businessmen's coffers filled to the brim once STA TRAVEL Brahmins Civil War & Abolition again. great student from Post-War Boom This merchant elite literally and figuratively Birth of the Back Bay to presided over Boston from their graceful Athens of America depart brownstone homes high atop Beacon Hill, where Aug date Early 20th Century: Rev. Blackstone had first settled Boston just 2 return Corrupt Politics date centuries earlier. Dubbed the Boston Brahmins Late 20th Century: a I am a student City Reborn by one of their own (writer Oliver Wendell date of birth (m 21st Century: Building a Holmes), this elite class--described by Holmes as Modern Beantown the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy"--- Find for Further Resources was the dominant force shaping the city's political, ALTERNATIVES TO intellectual, and social currents, as well as its TOURISM architectural appearance. For it was Charles Bulfinch---the architect of many of the aristocratic Book a Only in Let's Go: Boston: homes on Beacon Hill (as well as the Choose a country Sights Massachusetts State House)---who patented the Choose a cou Food & Drink simple red-brick "Federalist" style that is the city's defining characteristic. Nightlife Sports & Entertainment Arrival Date: The snooty Brahmins were not only wealthier than Shopping anyone else in the city, but considered themselves Accommodations to be of a stronger moral fiber than others. Indeed, Number of Daytrips From Boston the so-called First Families of Boston (the Nights: Planning Your Trip Adamses, Cabots, Codmans, Lowells, etc.) were Service Directory SO isolationist that a local wit penned: "This is Powere http://www.letsgo.com/BOS/03-LifeTimes-457 8/24/2004 Let's Go - Boston - Rise of Boston Brahmins Page 2 of 2 good old Boston / The home of the beans and the This content is from Let's Hosteln cod / Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots / Go: Boston. And the Cabots speak only to God." Related links http://www.letsgo.com/BOS/03-LifeTimes-457 8/24/2004 12/15/2014 American Experience Murder at Harvard I People & Events PBS HOME PROGRAMS DONATE SHOP|PBS Exclusive Corporate Funding is provided by: AMERICAN EXPERIENCE MURBER ATHARVARD People & Events: Boston Brahmins The term "Boston Brahmins" refers to a class of wealthy, THE FILM & MORE educated, elite members of Boston society in the nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term in a novel in SPECIAL FEATURES 1861, calling Boston's elite families "the Brahmin Caste of New England." The Boston Brahmins have long held the TIMELINE interest of casual and professional historians because of their unique place in nineteenth-century American culture. They GALLERY were mostly the descendants of Puritans, having made their fortunes as American merchants, and they could not be PEOPLE & EVENTS described as egalitarian. Rather, they were the closest thing the United States has ever had to a true aristocracy. TEACHER'S GUIDE At Odds with Democracy MODDY MEDICAL In her book Elite Families, Betty G. Farrell writes, "Visiting Boston for the first time in the 1830s, Harriet Martineau noted that it was 'perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own "first people," as any in the world.' What particularly distressed Martineau was the evidence of an aristocracy of wealth amid a new republic, a group whose cultural pretensions and social exclusivity she saw as particularly at odds with the democratic ideals of egalitarianism and inclusive citizenship." Socially Exclusive Several factors, besides wealth, made Boston's Brahmins stand out as an aristocracy even from the wealthy of other cities. With waves of immigration to America's cities in the middle of the nineteenth century, the position of the wealthy and elite in every city was threatened. But in New York and Chicago, despite prejudice, the influence of immigrants quickly took root. In Boston, the Brahmins fought fiercely to close immigrants out. While they may have prided themselves on being the champions of abolitionism, they did not actually want black Americans, or any other non-Brahmin group, encroaching on their power or society. Peninsula City It was not difficult for upper class Bostonians to shut out their poorer counterparts. The unique geography of Boston, a peninsula city, made expansion possible only by landfill. All of Boston's new neighborhoods in the mid-nineteenth century were created by leveling off hills and using the dirt to fill areas of water to create new land. These new landfill areas were generally small and largely bordered by water, so it was easy to keep them exclusive. When immigrants did move in to the newly fashionable Old South End, the Brahmins moved X AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY out. Athens of America Besides money and the right real estate, a self-conscious set of shared values defined Boston's aristocracy. Boston Brahmins prized culture and education. Boston's elite liked to think of their city as the "Athens of America." For Boston Brahmins, Harvard College helped define this atmosphere) The Brahmins who didn't live in the prestigious Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston lived in Cambridge, near the college. By the 1830s, an elite corporation governed Harvard, and students of elite families filled its halls. Through Harvard, these families were able to teach the next generation the educational and the moral values they held dear. Puritan Values The Boston Brahmins' adherence to the Puritanical values of their forefathers made them unique. It is possible to imagine that John Webster, a Brahmin by birth but lacking in wealth, may have been so desperate to hide his debts that he killed his social peer, George Parkman. Shock and Disgust Boston Brahmins were horrified at the murder of one of their own, but they were even more upset that one of their own might be the killer. Most responded initially with shock, disgust and insistence on Webster's innocence. As the trial wore on, many Bostonians came to believe Webster had done the unthinkable. Most of those in Cambridge who knew him, however, remained sympathetic defenders of Webster to the end. THE BOSTONIAN SOCIETY Propriety and Medical Work Webster was respected by his friends as a Harvard professor, but many of them may have been suspicious about his actual laboratory work. In 1840s http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/murder/peopleevents/p_brahmins.htm/ 1/2 12/15/2014 American Experience I Murder at Harvard I People & Events America, chemistry and anatomy were still viewed as the periphery of medicine. Americans may have had a sense of the necessity of dissecting bodies, but would have cringed at the thought of how it was done, or how bodies were procured. This was a time in which proper etiquette and morality so strongly proscribed the personal touch of the human body that some doctors actually diagnosed by mail, upon only a description of symptoms. Doomed by His Social Standing In the end, Webster's social standing as a Boston Brahmin may have actually been detrimental to his chance for life. Not only Brahmins, but letter-writers from all over the country thought his sentence of death overly harsh. There was little chance that George Briggs, Massachusetts' governor and a well-known lay preacher, would commute it, however, because to do so would appear to be a bow to Brahmin pressure. With the memory of Washington Goode, a black Bostonian who had recently been hanged for a crime without clear evidence of his guilt, Governor Briggs was in a tight position. The Fall River Weekly News summed it up this way: "If any delays, misgivings or symptoms of mercy are manifested, the gibbeted body of Washington Goode will be paraded before the mind's eye of his Excellency. If he relents in this case, though the entire population of the State petition for a remission of sentence, Governor Briggs will forfeit all claim to public respect as a high minded, honorable and impartial chief magistrate. He can do one of two things and retain his character as a man and a public servant: resign his office, or let the law take its course." previous I return to people & events next Murder at Harvard Home I The Film & More I Special Features I Timeline Gallery I People & Events I Teacher's Guide American Experience I Feedback I Search I Shop I Subscribe I Web Credits © New content 1999-2003 PBS Online / WGBH http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/murder/peopleevents/p_brahmins.html 2/2 Society oF America Archwoists 24 (1968) Bostonians and Their Neighbors as Pack Rats By L. H. BUTTERFIELD* Massachusetts Historical Society T HE two-legged pack rat has been a common species in Boston and its neighborhood since the seventeenth century. Thanks to his activity the archival and manuscript resources concen- trated in the Boston area, if we extend it slightly north to include Salem and slightly west to include Worcester, are so rich and diverse as to be almost beyond the dreams of avarice. Not quite, of course, because Boston institutions and the super-pack rats who direct them are still eager to add to their resources of this kind, and constantly do. The admirable and long-awaited Guide to Archives and Manu- scripts in the United States, compiled by the National Historical Publications Commission and now in press, contains entries for be- tween 50 and 60 institutions holding archival and manuscript ma- terials in the Greater Boston area, with the immense complex of the Harvard University libraries in Cambridge counting only as one.¹ 1 The merest skimming of these entries indicates that all the activities of man may be studied from abundant accumulations of written records held by these institutions, some of them vast, some small, some general in their scope, others highly specialized. Among the fields in which there are distinguished holdings-one may say that specialists will neglect them only at their peril-are, first of all, American history and American literature, most of the sciences and the history of science, law and medicine, theology and church his- tory, the fine arts, finance and industry, maritime life, education, and reform. No wonder that in 1889 one of the most articulate of all Boston- ians, when mired in the plethora of materials he had to go through Paper read before the Society of American Archivists at its annual meeting in Bos- ton, Oct. 5, 1960. The author is editor in chief of The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 1 I wish to thank Philip M. Hamer, Executive Director of the Commission, under whose official and personal supervision the Guide has been prepared, for the privilege of consulting the entries for Massachusetts institutions in advance of publication. By the time this paper appears in print the Guide will have been published by Yale University Press. III 142 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST in writing a two-volume biography of another Bostonian, exclaimed from the depths : Who was that much abused prophet who destroyed the library at Alexandria? I do not recollect his name. Nevertheless, there should be a monument erected to his memory. Would that he could come back to life once more, and begin at Harvard College and thence proceed to Washington, leaving a smouldering mass of burning records behind him.² Yet when Charles Frances Adams, 2d, who uttered this complaint, died, he left a mass of correspondence, diaries, notes, drafts, clip- pings, and other papers that run to many thousand pages and span his career as army officer, public servant, businessman, scholar, and writer. The papers have come to rest, naturally enough, in the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, where they are consulted with great frequency. The underlying causes for phenomena like these in the Boston scene spring readily enough to mind. In spending a few minutes pointing out a few of them, I can hardly expect to tell this audience anything it doesn't already know. They are not, of course, peculiar to Boston and its neighborhood, but they have been conspicuously operative there, in combination with each other, over long periods of time. In the first place, Massachusetts was settled early, and the early settlers were literate and serious-minded men-the kind of men who make and keep records. The great prototypes were Governor William Bradford of the Old Colony, the manuscript of whose mag- nificently detailed and movingly written record "Of Plimoth Plan- tation" reposes in a special exhibition case in the State House; and Governor John Winthrop of the Bay Colony, whose original journal of the years 1630-49 in the Puritan refuge at Boston is a foundation stone of the Massachusetts Historical Society's collections. There are few other documents matching these in importance, but it would appear that hardly any Puritan clergyman, or for that matter any literate layman, failed to keep a diary in order to discuss how he stood (or thought he stood) from day to day with the Almighty. Cotton Mather says in his Diary that he celebrated his children's birthdays by obliging them "to consider, first, What is their main Errand into the World; and then, What have they done of that Errand. And such of them as are old enough to write, shall give me some written Thoughts upon these Things.' 3 To be sure, in 2 Charles Francis Adams to Theodore F. Dwight, Feb. 15, 1889, Adams papers, Mas- sachusetts Historical Society. Adams was writing his Richard Henry Dana; a Biog- raphy (Boston, 1890). 3 Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th ser., 8:219 (1912) BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 143 Cotton Mather's time the old religious sanctions were already crumbling, and they were to crumble further, but the habit of jour- nalizing persisted. In the eighteenth century the sons of the Puri- tans were much less addicted to examining the corruption of their souls but marvelously given to recording the weather, the state of the crops, small business transactions, family events, politics, and all the town gossip. Their endless jottings may only occasionally rise to the level of great literature, as in John Adams' Diary, or to the priceless comprehensiveness of the Rev. William Bentley's. But the collective result is a body of personal records probably un- matched in any other time or place. Thanks to the labors of Mrs. Forbes it has been largely brought under bibliographical control, and her book, happily, is kept up to date by the staff of the Ameri- can Antiquarian Society. Since literacy breeds esteem for itself, the Bay colonists founded schools and a college. Harvard had no rival in New England for 65 years, none in Massachusetts for over I50 years, and it con- sequently remained the nerve-center of letters and learning for a large region for a long time. The publishing and book-trade center for the same region very naturally developed in the political and economic capital of the Colony and Commonwealth, a few miles away just across the Charles. By the early nineteenth century it was a truism that Boston and bookishness went together.5 Writing to a friend in Germany in 1839, the historian Prescott said that if a young Bostonian "is not fond of books he may as well go hang himself." 6 It is perhaps not to be wondered at that most Bostonians found reading and writing books preferable to hanging, but it is remarkable how many became historians of either the first rank or near it. Their names are familiar to all of you: Sparks, Ticknor, Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, Parkman, and a whole shoal of 4 Harriette Merrifield Forbes, comp., New England Diaries, 1602-1800; a Descriptive Catalogue of Diaries, Orderly Books and Sea Journals (Topsfield, Mass., 1923). This invaluable descriptive listing includes unpublished as well as published diaries, with locations, when known, of the manuscripts in both private and institutional custody. Additions and corrections are entered in a copy in the library of the American Anti- quarian Society. 5 By the end of the century the abundance of authors in and near Boston had be- come a joke. A New England correspondent for the Chicago Evening Post reported to his paper about 1900: "Merely as a matter of general statistics and possibly of gen- eral interest, it may be set down that every family in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, boasts a rubber-tree and an author. In certain instances there are two or three rubber- trees and an author, and in others two or three authors and a rubber-tree, but the average holds good, and we are all very happy and contented." Helen M. Winslow, Literary Boston of To-Day, p. II-I2 (Boston, 1902). 6 Roger Wolcott, ed., The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847, p. 72 (Boston, 1925). 144 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST Adamses. Historical scholarship requires ample sources. Harvard and the Boston Athenxum could be relied on for printed works, supplemented by the extensive libraries in their specialties that all of these writers and many of their friends assembled. The Massa- chusetts Historical Society offered important manuscript resources in the field of early New England history, but the collective require- ments of these historians embraced two continents. They covered them thoroughly and eventually enriched the libraries of Boston and Cambridge with what they had acquired, augmented by their own correspondence and other personal papers. The Sparks col- lection in the Houghton Library, the Ticknor collection at the Bos- ton Public, and the Parkman, Prescott, and later portions of the Adams papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society are examples. Wealth was of course a contributing cause to the growth of all kinds of cultural resources in the Boston area. Wealth established and nourished libraries and other learned institutions; it also estab- lished dynastic families whose versatility of talents running over several generations has been a marked characteristic of Boston his- tory. The Adamses, who have been successively statesmen, writers, and businessmen of eminence for two centuries, are merely the best known of such dynasties. John Adams could point in his own life- time to the Quincys, Saltonstalls, and Winthrops as members of a natural aristocracy that had always flourished in New England soil. Others like the Higginsons, Holmeses, Lowells, Lees, Warrens, Jacksons, Cabots, Forbeses, and Danas came to the fore in the later eighteenth or early nineteenth century and are still very much in evidence today. Their abilities gave them prominence in public and professional affairs. Being articulate, they created masses of personal records. Being solvent, they kept them-until at length these great family archives passed one by one into the custody of suitable repositories. For Bostonians the suitable place for deposit- ing one's earthly remains has for a long time been Mount Auburn cemetery; for one's books, either Harvard or the Athenxum; for one's family papers, the Massachusetts Historical Society. The principle of voluntary association has always run strong in Boston, as it has in all American urban centers. At first, as mer- 7 Almost from the year of its founding, in 1831, Mount Auburn became a prime tourist attraction and a manifestation of several of the New England traits described in these paragraphs. Guidebooks were published, such as Dearborn's Guide Through Mount Auburn With Sixty-Two Engravings of the Monuments, for the Benefit of Strangers Desirous of Seeing the Clusters of Monuments With the Least Trouble (Bos- ton, 1851). A century later the proprietors, mindful of their historical as well as custodial obligations, published Foster W. Russell's Mount Auburn Biographies; a Biographical Listing of Distinguished Persons Interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1831-1952 (Cambridge, 1953). BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 145 chants accumulated wealth and the Puritan theocracy was obliged to loosen its grip on their lives, Bostonians associated for social purposes. The Diary of the Boston merchant John Rowe during the years preceding the Revolution is a monotonous record of meat, drink, and company in Boston taverns and of rural excursions that sound for all the world like the outings of the Club of Odd Volumes or the Colonial Society of Massachusetts today. Political organiza- tions-the famous "caucuses" which introduced a new word into the language and which Sam Adams molded into an effective ap- paratus for harrying the royal government-can be traced as far back as the 1740's. But as John Adams noted during his service in the first Continental Congress, while Philadelphia might be inferior to Boston in most things that mattered, its straight streets and its numerous organizations for charitable and cultural purposes put Boston to shame. The crooked streets of Boston were beyond remedy, but Adams could do something about the other deficiency. A month after the Declaration of Independence was voted he wrote his wife: "If I ever get through this Scene of Politicks and War, I will spend the Remainder of my days in endeavouring to instruct my Countrymen in the Art of making the most of their Abilities and Virtues A philosophical Society shall be established in Bos- ton." 9 He did not wait for the end of the war, but during a brief interval between diplomatic missions in the fall of 779 he proposed the idea at a dinner held for the new French minister to the United States in the "Philosophy Chamber" at Harvard College.10 From this hint sprang the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, launched in the following year, the parent or grandparent of all the later (and innumerable) learned societies in New England. In his old age Adams wondered about the consequences of his idea: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences [he wrote his friend Van der Kemp in 1818] was founded on a good plan and would have been a glorious Institution if its original design had been pursued. But Ambition has well nigh ruined it, by splitting it into Morsells, erecting its Committees into an Historical Society, an Agricultural Society, a Medical Society, an Antiquarian Society, not to mention Missionary Societies, Bible Societies and Peace Societies, Assylums for Insane &c. And all this for the sake of multiplying Presidents and Vice Presidents, Recording Secretaries, corresponding Secretaries, Tresur- ors &c. and for the sake of converting them all into political Electioneering 8 Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant, 1759-1762, 1764-1779 (Boston, 1903). 9 Aug. 3-4, 1776, Adams papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 10 Correspondence of the Late President Adams, Originally Published in the Boston Patriot, p. 163-165 (Boston, 1809-[1810]). 146 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST Engines. These Things have made me perhaps too indifferent about them all. I have given you all the Transactions of all of them I ever owned and shall never purchase any others. I find more entertainment and Information in De Grim, La Harpe and especially in Sysmondi.11 Perhaps some method of birth control should have been early applied to Boston's professional and cultural associations, for today one could spend most of one's time attending their meetings and reading the "literature" they produce in one's own specialty. But the principle of natural selection has worked pretty well in weeding out the weaklings; it is also true, despite Adams' complaint, that the salvation of the stronger ones has lain in specialization. This is a point to which I shall return later. I have so far said nothing about the most powerful force of all in the amassment of historical records in this community, namely filiopietism. Public celebration of the acts and virtues of our fore- fathers probably began in Massachusetts, for well before the Revolution the citizens of Plymouth began an annual commemora- tion of Forefathers' Day, and in I774 the local Sons of Liberty car- ried as big a piece of Plymouth Rock as they could manage to the center of town to use as a base for a liberty pole. In Boston the fer- tile brain of Sam Adams conceived in 1771 the plan of a harangue on each anniversary of the Boston Massacre to denounce British butchery. The idea had served its purpose by the close of the war. In 1783 two town orators were appointed, one to perform on March 5 and the other on July 4. Thereafter celebrations were held only on the national anniversary, and an American folk ritual was born.12 To meet the demands of the anniversaries that came thick and fast early in the next century-bicentennials of the founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620, of the Bay Colony in 1630, of Harvard College in 1636, and the jubilees of Revolutionary battles, national independence, and the establishment of the Federal government, all coinciding as they did with a new sense of nationalism following the War of 1812- New England produced a school of orators specializing in patriotic eloquence. At their head stood Daniel Webster, of whom Sydney Smith said that no man could possibly be as great as Webster looked; and not far behind was Edward Everett, who virtually made a career of commemorative oratory and ultimately published four tremendous volumes of speeches de- 11 Feb. IO, 1818, Adams-Van der Kemp letters, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 12 See James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators, Appointed by the Munici- pal Authorities and Other Public Bodies, From 1770 to 1852, passim (3d ed., Boston and Cleveland, 1854), a work that is itself a striking-and still useful-expression of Bos- ton filiopietism. BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 147 livered at patriotic celebrations, funerals of great men, the laying of cornerstones, and even the awarding of prizes at cattle shows. The same spirit was manifested in the publication of official rec- ords of Massachusetts' and the nation's early history and of both writings by and memoirs of the founding fathers. Jared Sparks forsook the Unitarian ministry in the 1820's to devote the rest of his life to activities of this kind. With Harvard as a base, and with the collaboration of Boston publishers, he was fabulously success- ful in both popularizing history and furnishing abundant new sources to the historical scholar. The founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791 and of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 1845 were similar manifestations. 13 But I must pass over these and others, indeed many others, in order to mention an especially spectacular example of Boston filiopietism. In the early 1870's the congregation of the Third or Old South Church, at the corner of Washington and Milk Streets, finding the site no longer suitable for religious purposes, built a "New Old South Church" (to the con- The Genealogical Society was largely the creation of the Boston bookseller and antiquarian Samuel Gardner Drake, who was never elected to membership in the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society. Drake at once began issuing the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, which has now reached its 114th volume. With a "small and earnest coterie" of associates who shared his resentful feelings toward the His- torical Society, Drake went on to found, in 1858, a historical publishing club, the Prince Society, which issued a long and distinguished series of edited documents and reprints until 1920, after which it died of financial inanition. The early history of the Genealogi- cal Society and the full history of its offshoot have been set down in George Wol- kins, "The Prince Society," in Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, 66:223- 254 (1942). The Genealogical Society continues to flourish; it maintains a large library that includes some 175,000 manuscripts in its field of interest but does not accession col- lections of personal papers. Symbolic of its present relations with the Historical So- ciety is the fact that its great collection of Gen. Henry Knox's papers, deposited in the library of the Historical Society in 1910, is now being published by the latter, with the owning institution's full approval, in a microfilm edition. Similarities may be traced in the history of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, which was founded in 1893 mainly through the efforts of Henry H. Edes, a man of means and antiquarian tastes but not a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. More by accident than design, the Colonial Society has until very recently been "a homeless body." Being thus unencumbered with either collections to care for or a staff to pay, it has been able to devote its founder's benefactions almost entirely to scholarly pub- lishing. Its familiar stout, blue-bound, and excellently printed Publications now number 38 volumes and are especially noteworthy for the extensive series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century records of Massachusetts institutions-academic, religious, and judicial-they embody. Having fortunately been unable to find a home, the Colonial Society was in a position in 1932 to become the financial angel of the young and strug- gling New England Quarterly and has continued in that useful role ever since. Mean- while, in 1911, Edes had been elected to membership in the Historical Society, and upon his death II years later he left it too a bequest. See Walter Muir Whitehill's "Historical Sketch" in Handbook of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1892-1952, p. I-12 (Boston, 1953). 148 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST fusion of all but Bostonians) in the Back Bay area, and the old building went on the auction block. The step was ill-timed, to say the least. The "Old South" had been the scene of town meetings after the Boston Massacre and before the Boston Tea Party Ben- jamin Franklin's family had attended public worship there; Otis, Sam Adams, Hancock, and Warren were names closely associated with its history. And then, just as the centennial of the nation's birth was to be celebrated, a wrecking crew attacked the venerable fabric. The furore that followed is what one might have expected in Boston. Poets, orators, and philanthropists were recruited the structure was saved; and the steeple, partly demolished, was mend- ed. As part of the rescue operation all manner of relics were dug out of attics and contributed, by well-intentioned friends of the cause, for a historical exhibition to help raise funds. These contri- butions-and others that followed-have long been displayed in the meeting house on the principle of visible storage. Here you may see (or until very recently could have seen) tea from the Boston Tea Party, buttons worn by John Hancock, a vest worn by General Sullivan, Joseph Warren's christening cap, wood from the Washing- ton Elm in Cambridge and from Mount Vernon on the Potomac, a piece of a blood-stained shirt said to have been worn by a Cam- bridge minuteman, an autograph of General Santa Anna, stays, shawls, bellows, canes, hats, bonnets, shoes, tomahawks, samplers, keys, nails, handcuffs, and some thousands of other objects that would give a present-day museum curator a permanent nightmare, though mingled among them are also a number of rare and valuable books, documents, broadsides, and prints. As well perhaps as any- where in the world, you can see here the pack rat instinct at work uncontrolled. Happily, the purposeful pack rat has been more in evidence on the Boston scene. His activities can be clearly traced from the early eighteenth century until the present. If I were to tell the story of collecting in the Boston area -which I cannot do in an after- luncheon speech- would divide it into seven chapters and entitle them : The Age of Prince and Hutchinson The Age of Belknap and Thomas The Age of Sparks The Age of Winsor The Age of Ford The Age of Brigham, and The Age of Jackson, Riley, and Shipton BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 149 The Rev. Thomas Prince and the Hon. Thomas Hutchinson, whose careers spanned the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, were the great precursors. When John Adams in 1774 found himself charged by the General Court with the task of stat- ing Massachusetts' northern and western territorial claims, he did not go to the provincial secretary's office or to the Harvard College Library but "to the Balcony of Dr. Sewalls Church [the Old South], where Mr. Prince had deposited the amplest Collection of Books, Pamphlets, Records and Manuscripts relative to this Country which I ever saw, and which as I presume ever was made." 14 Adams found some things to his purpose and still more, as he said and as his own library bears witness, to gratify his curiosity "in that elevated Situation." So did others, including the unknown member of the British armed forces who presumably carried off the unpublished manuscript of Governor Bradford's history of Plymouth Planta- tion, ultimately returned from London to Boston a century and a quarter later. Prince designed and left his collection of Americana for public use, under the title of "The New-England-Library" ; it has come to rest in the Boston Public Library and still serves its first owner's wishes. 15 Governor Hutchinson took other measures with the origi- nal materials that he inherited and otherwise acquired-or with such of them as survived destruction by the mob that pillaged his Boston house in August 1765. He had already published one volume of his History of Massachusetts Bay the year before. He now hurried to get his second volume into print lest further accidents occur. Both volumes were heavily documentary, and in 1769 Hutchinson issued a stout supplementary volume entitled A Collection of Original Pa- pers Relative to the History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay. In his preface he provided a rationale-as if they needed one !-for all the collectors and antiquarians who have followed from that day to this: "He who rescues from oblivion interesting historical facts is beneficial to posterity as well as to his contemporaries; and the prospect thereof to a benevolent mind causes that employment to be agreeable and pleasant, which otherwise would be irksome and painful." These were important efforts by individuals in collecting and publishing documents. The next age, roughly the half-century following the Revolution, saw the beginnings of organized effort, 14 Autobiography, under date of Fall, 1773, Adams papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 15 See The Prince Library; a Catalogue of the Books and Manuscripts published by the Boston Public Library, 1870, with a historical introduction by Justin Winsor. 150 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST BOSTO led by two remarkable men. The Massachusetts Historical Society, ble place to re the brain child of the clergyman-historian Jeremy Belknap, and the served many o American Antiquarian Society, the "lengthened shadow" of the the Boston Pu great Worcester printer Isaiah Thomas, were founded only 20 has been weak years and 40 miles apart, with aims SO much alike that one would contrary they suppose they were bound either to compete to the death or coalesce. ways. For ex: In respect to membership and overlapping management they have the need of P to some extent coalesced, but not otherwise. As the present directors called on the of both institutions have recently pointed out, and as Walter M. pensability of Whitehill's illuminating study of the independent historical societies both general a shows in detail, the two societies have by narrowing their fields of have turned or concentration continued to build to their respective strengths with- through funds out suffering the effects of sibling rivalry. The Historical Society's ableness is ow name has come to be synonymous with manuscripts of New England sources are pla interest: the Antiquarian Society's with early American newspapers the years the 1 and imprints. Both have maintained formidable publishing pro- ings, especially grams from the outset, with emphasis on documentary and biblio- policy is to dir graphical works. Their present relationship is epitomized by the ies. fact that the director of the Antiquarian Society, Clifford K. Ship- The second ton, is the author of the Historical Society's lengthening series of Age of Sparks Biographical Sketches of Harvard graduates in the eighteenth cen- and President tury, the materials for which he draws in varying proportions from colossus. Spar the newspapers and pamphlets in the collections he presides over was that one n in Worcester, the manuscripts in the Massachusetts Historical the lap, but [n Society, and the records preserved in the Harvard University Ar- Sparks enlarge chives, of which, when wearing the third of his numerous hats, he what was then is archivist. It was a nineteenth-century predecessor of his at Har- In the mid-18: vard, John Langdon Sibley, who endowed the Historical Society they then were with funds that continue to support this distinguished series. them, sometime One other early and lasting product of what New Englanders just as good as used to call "associated effort" cannot be passed over without was perhaps at mention. Reversing the usual order of things, the Boston Athenxum Cambridge. H originated as a publishing club, the Anthology Society, and a few Craigie House years later, in 1807, became a library. Wholly supported by private editing them f funds and one of the most agreeable places in the world for a archives for ma scholar or writer to do his work, the Athenxum became SO integral diplomatic care a part of the New England literary scene in the nineteenth century edit before his that ill-informed persons tend to think of it as a historical monu- Ultimately, as ment rather than what it is, an extremely busy and in fact indispensa- all the transcrip 16 The Independent Historical Societies, a study financed by the Council on Library 17 Walter Muir V Resources, directed chiefly to the research and publication activities of privately sup- ported historical societies and to be published by Harvard University Press. I am grate- 1956). ful to Mr. Whitehill for permitting me to read his chapters in typescript. 18 Jeremy Belkna Society, Collections, BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS I5I ble place to read and study. Though owned by its shareholders, it served many of the functions of a public library until the opening of the Boston Public Library in 1854, and neither of these institutions has been weakened by the neighboring presence of the other. On the contrary they cooperate in all the expected and in some unexpected ways. For example, when the trustees of the Public Library felt the need of preparing and publishing a centennial history, they called on the director of the Athenxum to write it. 17 The indis- pensability of the Athenxum is owing to the vast accumulation of both general and special collections that generations of Bostonians have turned over to it and that have been maintained and enriched through funds furnished by them and other Bostonians. Its agree- ableness is owing to the courtesy and efficiency with which its re- sources are placed at the disposal of any qualified inquirer. Over the years the Athenxum has acquired substantial manuscript hold- ings, especially in the fields of art and literary history, but its present policy is to direct proffered manuscripts to more suitable repositor- ies. The second quarter of the nineteenth century I have called the Age of Sparks because for several decades the Reverend Professor and President Jared Sparks bestrode the historical scene like a colossus. Sparks adopted Belknap's principle of collecting, which was that one must not wait "at home for good things to fall into the lap, but [must prowl] about like a wolf for the prey." 18 But Sparks enlarged the theater of his operations to include most of what was then the United States and several countries in Europe. In the mid-1820's he visited State archival repositories, such as they then were, from Maine to Georgia, set copyists to work in them, sometimes persuaded apathetic custodians that copies were just as good as originals, and then carried off the originals to what was perhaps at the time safer custody in his own capacious study in Cambridge. He brought a wagonload of Washington papers to Craigie House and put editorial assistants to work transcribing and editing them for publication while he himself searched European archives for materials relating to our Revolutionary history and the diplomatic career of Benjamin Franklin, whose works he began to edit before his edition of Washington's writing was complete. Ultimately, as I have mentioned earlier, most of the originals and all the transcripts Sparks amassed, together with his personal papers 17 Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston Public Library; a Centennial History (Cambridge, 1956). 18 Jeremy Belknap to Ebenezer Hazard, Aug. 21, 1795, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 5th ser., 3:357 (1877). 152 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST BOST that include journals of his scholarly missions that have long cried But if I a1 out for publication, passed into Harvard's possession 19 Sparks' stopping poin shortcomings as a historical editor were pointed out in his own life- unjust to thr time and have been emphasized often enough since. But if one past hundred considers the scantiness of published sources relating to early Amer- band of their ican history available to historians before, say, 1830, and what is still at wor Sparks furnished them in the hundred or SO volumes he issued during for accomplis the next two decades, one has a better notion of what his contribu- ing it under t tion was. tributions, W The bicentennials of 1820 and 1830, the example of Sparks, and from 1868 to other circumstances combined during this period to awaken the Public Libra authorities of the Commonwealth to the neglect of Massachusetts' seem well-ni own official records. Up to this point their history presents the same manuscript S dismal features as that of the archives of most of the older States. great cooper Much discussion occurred and numerous futile legislative resolves entitle him 1 were passed before Gov. Edward Everett in his inaugural speech of along withou 1836 successfully appealed for "a small appropriation" to put the also associat public papers "in systematic order" for preservation and use. For Library and five years thereafter a Salem clergyman with antiquarian tastes, at the Librar Joseph B. Felt, labored among the dusty accumulations, sorting and boyhood, wa binding up papers as he saw fit in subject classes ranging from "Agri- shelves of t culture" to "Witchcraft" and including such unhelpful categories special publi as "Ecclesiastical," "Indians," "Letters," "Literary," "Political," of the Amer and "Taverns." Felt's arrangement of the so-called Massachusetts edition of th Archives has never been disturbed, and in fact was continued by sup- editions of 1 plementary volumes under similar titles later in the century. Like family, to m the punctuation of the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Inde- sion and the pendence, which, as Carl Becker has said, follows "neither reason Brigham it is nor the custom of any age known to man," it is "one of the irremedi- the American able evils of life to be accepted with becoming resignation." Name eminent colle and subject indexes do something to mitigate the evil, but the in- to 22,000 VC dexes remain incomplete more than a century after the plan was five miles of adopted. In general the history of Massachusetts' public records, pers and Docum despite devoted labors by individuals in the past and currently, to have been pre makes unhappy reading. 20 Also John H. E ciety, Proceeding 19 Sparks' historical manuscripts, in 130 volumes, were given to Harvard in 1866 21 See Willia and were described by Justin Winsor in his Calendar of the Sparks Manuscripts in Library, Bibliog Harvard College Library (Harvard University Library, Bibliographical Contributions, industry on a n no. 22, 1889). His personal papers were acquired much later and include the long 22 No biograp sequence of journals of travel and research in the United States and Europe, from a voluminous a: which Herbert Baxter Adams printed only tantalizing selections in his biography, The be a collection Life and Writings of Jared Sparks (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1893). Perhaps contain parts of no other documents extant contain so much concentrated information on historical col- other Ford lette lecting, editing, and publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century. Society, Stephen 20 See Report to the Legislature of Massachusetts Made by the Commissioners Ap- way places. pointed under the Resolve, Chap. 60, 1884, Upon the Condition of the Records, Files, Pa- BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 153 But if I am to arrive at any conclusions or, more important, a stopping point, I must shorten even this synopsis. To do so will be unjust to three figures who have loomed large on our scene in the past hundred years-Winsor, Ford, and Brigham-and to a whole band of their collaborators. All three of these men, one of whom is still at work in his own vineyard at Worcester, are distinguished for accomplishments in gathering the raw material of history, plac- ing it under bibliographical control, and publication. Winsor's con- tributions, when examined in detail and with the realization that from 1868 to 1897 he administered the affairs first of the Boston Public Library and afterward of the Harvard College Library, seem well-nigh incredible. His notes and essays on printed and manuscript sources and on cartography and iconography in the two great cooperative histories he edited in the 1880's-these alone entitle him to our perpetual gratitude, since we still cannot get along without frequently consulting them. 21 Worthington Ford was also associated with two Boston institutions-the Boston Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society-with an interval at the Library of Congress. Ford's lifetime passion, literally from boyhood, was getting the raw materials of history into print. Whole shelves of the Historical Society's Collections, Proceedings, and special publications, supplemented by the old documentary Reports of the American Historical Association, the Library of Congress edition of the Journals of the Continental Congress, and selective editions of letters and papers of four generations of the Adams family, to mention nothing else, attest the driving force of that pas- sion and the acumen and skill of Ford as an editor. 22 Of Clarence Brigham it is of course not enough to say that in 50 years' service to the American Antiquarian Society he increased that institution's pre- eminent collection of American newspapers prior to 1870 from 6,000 to 22,000 volumes and a million separate issues occupying, all told, five miles of shelving, and that his History and Bibliography of pers and Documents in the Secretary's Department (Boston, 1885), a document believed to have been prepared by Justin Winsor, who was a member of the special commission. Also John H. Edmonds, "The Massachusetts Archives," in American Antiquarian So- ciety, Proceedings, 3I 18-60 (1922). 21 See William F. Yust, A Bibliography of Justin Winsor (Harvard University Library, Bibliographical Contributions, no. 54, 1902)-a record of scholarly skill and industry on a monumental scale. 22 No biography or bibliography of Worthington Ford has been written. Since he was a voluminous and often a brilliant letter writer, the best memorial to him might well be a collection of his letters. The Massachusetts Historical Society, whose archives contain parts of his correspondence, is endeavoring to gather originals and copies of other Ford letters with a view to publishing a selective edition. The director of the Society, Stephen T. Riley, would welcome information about Ford letters in out-of-the- way places. I54 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST BOST American Newspapers, 1690-1820 was completed and published in and William 1947. But it would be hard to show in still briefer terms how Mr. Morse and C Brigham's shadow has lengthened that of his predecessor, Isaiah to the Saltor. Thomas. 23 1956, as M Massachusei We come now to the Age of Jackson, Riley, and Shipton, and gifts of both to some concluding observations on the present status of things. were announ Though I have given some notion of the extent and diversity of is slackening the manuscript resources of the Boston area, I regret passing over Despite J a great many specialized archives and collections that are of the mentation of first order of importance in their respective fields, for example the has continue extensive records of several religious denominations and their for- older institu eign missions; the vast assemblage of business records in the Baker Mr. Shipton Library of the Harvard Business School, extending from 1200 to Society, "wit our own day, for which Robert W. Lovett has compiled an ad- wisely narrot mirable List (Boston, 1951) ; the thousands of measured drawings their natural of old houses held by the Society for the Preservation of New Eng- them, when land Antiquities; the Women's Archives at Radcliffe College; and they have be the rich holdings in mercantile and maritime manuscripts at the publishing o Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum at Salem. For these and that appears many others meriting mention I can only refer the curious inquirer "Thus do ye to the National Historical Publications Commission's Guide, point- The hone ing out to him at the same time that he is fortunate indeed to have gators of his such a vade mecum. torians." T If the vitality of institutions of the kind we are talking about world more is measured by the quantity and value of their continuing acces- the gate. Fo sions, we may surely say that the institutions of Boston and vicinity is not popula are in a healthy condition. One has only to read William A. Jack- to maintain, son's annual reports for the Houghton Library and Stephen T. pend on priv Riley's for the Massachusetts Historical Society for overwhelming being what i proof of this assertion. Though Harvard acquired during the nine- has been eas teenth century a number of important manuscript collections relating Even the Fo to American history, it has undertaken energetic collecting only in remark attri recent decades and has very properly concentrated on literary ma- generally be terials. And it can already boast of the principal manuscript col- I do not lections of, among others, Joel Barlow, Emily Dickinson, Emerson, Howells, Longfellow, Henry James, Amy Lowell, James Russell speaking of all faults. T Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson, the publishing firm of Ticknor & Fields, and Thomas Wolfe. During roughly the same period- 24 In Novemb Historical Societ the last 25 years-the larger acquisitions of the Historical Society and probably or included the papers of such statesmen and diplomats as Robert teenth-century p Treat Paine, Richard Olney, John Davis Long, Amasa Walker, and political paj gressman, Senat 23 See, further, Clarence S. Brigham, Fifty Years of Collecting Americana for the to the Presidency Library of the American Antiquarian Society, 1908-1958 (Worcester, 1958). BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS I55 and William C. Endicott; also those of the historian John Torrey Morse and of the clergyman Noah Worcester; and large additions to the Saltonstall family papers. On the same climactic day in May 1956, as Mr. Riley has pointed out in his recent account of The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1791-1959 (Boston, 1959), gifts of both the Paul Revere papers and the Adams family papers were announced to the Society. There are no signs that the influx is slackening. Despite John Adams' complaint, quoted earlier, about the frag- mentation of learned societies in the Boston area, this phenomenon has continued and accelerated. And it has proved a blessing. The older institutions that by their charters concerned themselves, as Mr. Shipton has said in a recent report to the American Antiquarian Society, "with all that man and nature have done anywhere," have wisely narrowed their aims in order to fulfill them. By sloughing off their natural history collections and museum objects always placing them, when wanted, in institutions where they will be more useful), they have been able to concentrate on the gathering, processing, and publishing of historical sources, thus fulfilling the Virgilian motto that appears on the Historical Society's seal Sic vos non vobis- "Thus do ye, bees, gather honey for others." The honey so gathered is intended for serious and adult investi- gators of history rather than for the touring public or "junior his- torians." This policy is bound to evoke occasional criticism in a world more and more accustomed to measure success by the take at the gate. For institutions that have made the decision that history is not popular entertainment, there is no take at the gate. In order to maintain, to say nothing of expanding, their work, they must de- pend on private philanthropy; and the competition for such funds being what it is, the going is not easy. But then, the going never has been easy for institutions dedicated to research and publication. Even the Ford Foundation has not yet invalidated the truth of the remark attributed to Goldsmith that scholars, like race-horses, are generally believed to perform best when kept lean. I do not wish to give the impression that the institutions I am speaking of are embodiments of all scholarly virtues and free from all faults. The Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, has 24 In November 1960, a few weeks after this paper was read, the Massachusetts Historical Society received one of the largest collections of papers it has ever acquired and probably one of the most comprehensive in existence for the study of later nine- teenth-century politics in New England and the nation. These are the personal, legal, and political papers of George Frisbie Hoar (1826-1904), Massachusetts lawyer, Con- gressman, Senator, and Republican stalwart from the time of the Free Soil movement to the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. 156 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST BOSTON had its periods of aloofness and complacency, if nothing worse. Its the Department Handbook, published as recently as 1949, devoted three times as courthouse buildi much space to a register of its officers and members as it did to list- the known larger ing its manuscript holdings-though presumably most laborers in tate to speak of the historical vineyard are more interested in the latter than the stowed in whatev former information. (Steps have been taken to redress this bal- nineteenth-centur ance.) The Society's building long presented so void and gloomy wastepaper, and an appearance to anyone entering it that it has been compared with as its availability Tut-ankh-amen's tomb, and a member of the Society's council has to an antiquaria recalled that when he was younger he was actually afraid to come Court, the match into the building at all. (Steps are being taken right now to im- eighteenth-centur prove this condition. cellent order. 27 ( Yet one feature in the scene that I have been describing remains under scholarly § deeply disturbing. This is the total lack of liaison between those all that one could who, on the one hand, are professionally concerned with history and courthouse buildi the materials thereof and, on the other hand, public officials and cult for an inqui the community at large. Perhaps the numerous private societies before, and I ha have in a sense done their work too well and thus accustomed public must literally W officials to think-if they think about such things at all-that they plaster grit in or have little or no responsibility to support historical activities and the shelves. The promote historical knowledge. For this reason and for others not chusetts Archive easy to pin down, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in humiliat- above in this pap ing contrast with many other States, especially in the South and manned that det West, does pitifully little for its own history except to boast about tury, 28 and index it. Whatever private agencies may do for history, this is not a find and impossib] wholesome situation, for the State has obligations in this field that Despite a great cannot be properly discharged by any other authority. At present 27 These include, be: some things that should be done by the State are not done at all, in each county, a mas and other things are done badly. proximately 1,300 volu ranged and indexed u For example, although in the nineteenth century Massachusetts Suffolk County," in Co published important bodies of its earliest records and an excellent and the same author's annotated edition of its colonial laws, today it has no historical of the Supreme Judica publication program. 26 It possesses vast accumulations of original (1902). Rich in social tively little exploited b records of the highest possible historical value, but they are scat- Archives and Manusci tered among the Division of Archives, which is under the secretary 28 See the Report of of state's authority; the State Library, which is administered by long list of papers mis stories have reported 1 25 As a result of recent changes in the building, particularly the transfer of the "stole" documents in th reading room from its cramped quarters on the second floor to a much larger first-floor order to publicize the room long occupied by a museum now dismantled, the sign reading "CLOSED TODAY 1956. It is sad to repor EXCEPT TO MEMBERS," always placed on the front door on the Society's monthly meeting ground extension of tl days, was ceremoniously discarded at the October 1960 meeting, to the satisfaction of problems that the Com all concerned. and constructed with li 26 With the exception of a subsidy to the Massachusetts Historical Society toward as an archival repositor the cost of publishing an annual volume of the House Journals of the Provincial period. it will not house even State's noncurrent reco: BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS 157 the Department of Education; and the old and new Suffolk County courthouse buildings in Pemberton Square, Boston-to mention only the known larger concentrations of older archival material. I hesi- tate to speak of more recent but noncurrent records, which are stowed in whatever storage space can be found for them. Important nineteenth-century records are known to have been destroyed as wastepaper, and much else might as well have been destroyed SO far as its availability to historical investigators is concerned. Thanks to an antiquarian-minded former clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court, the matchless files of that court and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors have been rescued and put in ex- cellent order. (They are also now being microfilmed, though not under scholarly supervision, and the results may not prove to be all that one could wish.) The early records still housed in the old courthouse building present a sorry contrast. It is sometimes diffi- cult for an inquirer there to consult again what he has consulted before, and I have been in a basement storage room where one must literally walk on old papers covered with dust, soot, and plaster grit in order to reach materials jammed helter-skelter into the shelves. The Archives Division itself, custodian of the "Massa- chusetts Archives" or "Felt Collection" that I have mentioned above in this paper, has for SO long been overcrowded and under- manned that deterioration and pilfering have gone on for a cen- tury,2 and indexing and photoreproduction of materials hard to find and impossible to replace proceed at a snail's pace. Despite a great deal of legislation bearing on the subject over the 27 These include, besides minute books and the written-up "records" of the high court in each county, a mass of "early court files and miscellaneous papers" bound in ap- proximately 1,300 volumes and running to more than 175,000 cases, chronologically ar- ranged and indexed under their names. See John Noble, "The Early Court Files of Suffolk County," in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 317-326 (1900), and the same author's "The Records and Files of the Superior Court of Judicature, and of the Supreme Judical Court,-Thei: History and Places of Deposit," ibid., : 5-26 (1902). Rich in social as well as legal history, these records have as yet been rela- tively little exploited by historians and unfortunately are not reported in the Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States. 28 See the Report of 1885, probably written by Winsor, cited in note 20 above, for a long list of papers missing from the Felt volumes at that time (p. 11-14). Newspaper stories have reported thefts from time to time in recent years. In 1956 two reporters "stole" documents in the handwriting of Washington, Hancock, and other celebrities in order to publicize the need for better protection; see the Boston Traveler, Apr. II, 1956. It is sad to report, but true, that the new Archives Building (actually an under- ground extension of the Capitol) now being completed will by no means solve the problems that the Commonwealth has so long neglected. The building was designed and constructed with little or no advice from professional archivists ; its requirements as an archival repository have been subordinated to its museum function; and probably it will not house even the records now in the Archives' custody, to say nothing of the State's noncurrent records languishing in substandard storage elsewhere. 158 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST BOSTON years, the condition of local records round about the State is, with official use and t some exceptions, equally bad. At the turn of the last century Mas- such statute is a sachusetts was a leader in this field. A legislative act of 1884 us engaged in h authorized the appointment of a commissioner to survey local rec- part of the blam ords of a public nature and to take measures for making them both But I do not n safe and accessible according to law. The result was the well-known described should and comprehensive "Wright Report" of 1889. 29 The annual Re- Recent and pron ports which followed, prepared by Commissioner Robert T. Swan it is a cause that from 1890 through 1907, were models of their kind. Swan was tireless in his visits of inspection throughout the State, and he an- 31 Why the office o records have always nually lectured town, city, and county clerks, the legislature, and understood the worki the public at large on proper methods of making, storing, protecting, of the secretary of sta repairing, copying, and indexing records; on acceptable inks, paper, records and is author The history of the su typewriter ribbons, and binding materials; on fire hazards (even ords, I have touched predicting, correctly, where fires were bound to occur) ; on the under the title "Publ necessity of a central "public record office" ; and the like, not over- incomplete, and ineff I : 826-829 (Boston, I looking such details as the undesirability of "wooden spittoons," merely stating that " which, he pointed out, regularly caused fires in town and city halls. 30 the Commonwealth i Swan's energetic example inspired other States to set up public compensation of said (MassachusettsoGene record commissions that remain effective today, but in Massa- ary has since been r chusetts there has been a steady deterioration ever since his death defined. If there hav in 1907. In 1919 the independent office of commissioner was abol- simply a political per one would expect. L ished and its functions transferred to a "supervisor of public rec- State archival agency ords" in the office of the secretary of state. After 1920 the super- monwealth for 1959, visor's reports no longer appeared separately but were buried in cupies less than half charge papers, corpo the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. In his and the number of oa 1959 report the supervisor explained the meagerness of his find- here a personal wor ings by pointing out that his funds were too limited to permit him cheerfully renders ev of The Adams Pape to make many visits of inspection outside Boston. Needless to say, custody. there is no systematic, State-supported program for microcopying local records or for depositing either the originals or photocopies of older records in a central repository. So the process of attrition among Massachusetts' once matchless town, city, county, and parish A Friend of M1 records continues, in violation of law and good sense and to the Usually it is poss irreparable loss of historical knowledge. Library of Congres The immediate reason for this state of things is that the proud always filmed as a Commonwealth of Massachusetts has no statute properly defining editor of the forth public records, requiring their care according to modern standards, covered. At the An and granting a properly qualified archival officer sufficient authority whose order form ] and funds to see that such care is given them for the benefit of both Mr. Putnam's. I The sad result o 29 Carroll D. Wright, Report on the Custody and Condition of the Public Records of its contents was th Parishes, Towns, and Counties (Boston, 1889). 30 Robert T. Swan, Second [-Nineteenth] Report on the Custody and Condition of others holding posi the Public Records (Boston, 1890-1907). scriptions of its con BOSTONIANS AND NEIGHBORS AS PACK RATS I59 official use and historical research. 31 The reason why we have no such statute is a condition of public apathy for which every one of us engaged in historical work in Massachusetts must bear some part of the blame. But I do not mean to end on a gloomy note. The situation I have described should be viewed as a challenge rather than as a lost cause. Recent and promising weather signals on Beacon Hill suggest that it is a cause that can be won. 31 Why the office of archivist and that of commissioner (later supervisor) of public records have always been separate is a mystery that could be explained only if one understood the workings of legislative and bureaucratic minds. Both are in the office of the secretary of state, who under the constitution is charged with keeping the public records and is authorized to appoint deputies for the purpose (chap. 2, sect. 4, art. 2). The history of the supervisor's office, which was long concerned solely with local rec- ords, I have touched on above. His duties are defined in the General Laws, ch. 66, under the title "Public Records," but the provisions there laid down are antiquated, incomplete, and ineffective. See Massachusetts General Laws, Tercentenary Edition, 826-829 (Boston, 1932). The office of archivist was established in 1897 by an act merely stating that "The designation of the third clerk in the office of the secretary of the Commonwealth is hereby changed to Chief of the Archives Division; and the compensation of said officer shall be at the rate of two thousand dollars per annum" (Massachusetts General Court, Acts and Resolves, 1897, ch. 351). The archivist's sal- ary has since been raised, but neither his qualifications nor his duties have ever been defined. If there have been able archivists, this has been accidental, since the office is simply a political perquisite of the secretary of state. And the results have been what one would expect. Little of what professionals would consider the proper work of a State archival agency gets done. In the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Com- monwealth for 1959, for example, the report of the chief of the Archives Division oc- cupies less than half a page and is largely taken up with statistics on veterans' dis- charge papers, corporation records, and similar material photostated in the division, and the number of oaths filed by new State employees during the year. But I must add here a personal word. Despite all its handicaps the staff of the Archives Division cheerfully renders every kind of service within its power to those who, like the editors of The Adams Papers, have occasion to consult the records and manuscripts in its custody. A Friend of Mr. Putnam's Usually it is possible to tell the contents of a film that has been made by the Library of Congress Photoduplication Laboratory by reading the "order form" always filmed as an early frame. This, however, is not invariably so, as the editor of the forthcoming Guide to Photocopied Historical Materials has dis- covered. At the American Antiquarian Society is a film of a body of manuscripts whose order form runs: "The man for whom this is being done is a friend of Mr. Putnam's. Don't charge him anything." The sad result of this failure to include on the film the usual description of its contents was this: Three institutions, one holding the negative film, two others holding positives made from the negative, reported three differing de- scriptions of its contents to the Guide. Follow@BostonMagazine Like 59k Subscribe & Save 83%! RUN FREE 4/16 Presented by Boston BOSTON saucony® MOVIE PREMIERE CLICK TO RSVP NEWS RESTAURANTS A&E HEALTH PROPERTY STYLE WEDDINGS BEST OF MAGAZINE TRENDING: Turkey Armageddon Shaun Hill New Adidas/BAA Store search The New Brahmins MOST POPULAR By Alexandra Hall I Boston Magazine May 2004 1. Welcome to Boston's Urban Turkey Armageddon Recommend 12 13 Tweet 1 2. The Wit and Wisdom of Shaun Hill 3. On the Market: Nantucket Style in Chestnut Hill 4. Throwback Thursday: When Harvard Fans Declared 'We Suck' Murray Forbes III is out of breath. Dressed in a square-shouldered tweed jacket accented with a 5. The Boston Marathon Is Opening Its Own Store navy handkerchief, plaid oxford shirt, and paisley tie, he surges forward, dark bangs flopping over 6. Boston Designers' Favorite White Paint widened eyes and smoothly sculpted cheekbones as he pulls his arms back and shakes his balled 7. Kyle Chandler, Casey Affleck Filming Matt fist almost maniacally. "I was nearly killed!" he booms. Damon's "Manchester-by-the-Sea' on the North Shore This is not a life-or-death emergency. It's not cocktail-hour bluster. For the son of F. Murray Forbes Jr. who grew up on the exclusive flat side of Beacon Hill in a townhouse overlooking the Vincent Club and "a statue of an angel casting bread out into the water," this is simply another conversation about society's desperate need for art. Forbes is a dyed-in-the-tweed Brahmin. His great-great-granduncle was John Murray Forbes, patriarch of the "long-tailed" branch of the Forbeses, which means the relatively bohemian side of the venerable family, a branch historically given to supporting-and, in Murray Forbes's case today, embodying-art and drama. Forbes himself has spent his life painting and overseeing the Navigator Foundation, which finds and brings underappreciated art from Eastern and Central Europe to the Boston public. Presented by saucony® If he seems to exude a certain larger-than-life persona, Forbes has a right to. His ancestors made some of the country's first fortunes in shipping, built the transcontinental railroad, went on secret missions for Abraham Lincoln, helped create the Robert Gould Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial on Boston Common, and made millions investing in Alexander Graham Bell's experiments with a little RUN FREE something called the telephone. One of Boston's first families, the clan has continued its good works MOVIE PREMIERE 4/16 in recent generations, doing everything from heading up Boston's State Street Bank and Trust BOSTON CLICK TO RSVP Company (Allan Forbes in the 1950s) to running for president this election year (F. Murray's second cousin, John Forbes Kerry). It's no wonder Forbes is SO theatrical. SPONSOR CONTENT Not that he lives under the spell of his own charm. He likes hamming up the part of the grand storyteller, resuming the tale of how he was almost killed by an oncoming car while searching for art in Poland during the Cold War. And, frankly, he's working it. "These were important societies!" > he says with the swoosh of an outstretched palm. "They had a great deal of love of art-playwrights, poets, painters-even under communism. They came out of-if you'll excuse my language-bloody nations with a considerable culture, because society continues even under duress." His deep voice, infused with a vague dash of the BBC, is not marked by money in the crass Fitzgeraldian sense, but Time Capsule Trivia with something equally abstract: history. Listen to him long enough, and you can almost make out Content loading layers of ancestry, thick with both privilege and responsibility. Next Article: Without warning, Forbes clears his throat. "Now I'm going to ask something naughty," he says The Gap Between Sports and Teeth through a smirk. "If our idea of culture in Boston is something predicated on the understanding that Boston had an upper class devoted to maintaining its culture"- -he pauses for a moment for VIDEO effect-"I wonder what that leaves us now?" If Boston is, in fact, the Athens of America, the Boston Brahmins hover over our city like the gods of Greek mythology. Not only were they the ones responsible for molding Boston into a version of Athens in the first place, but their reputations are parallel: deities in history, enigmas in the modern,day. Rumors about the Brahmins' influence in old and modern Boston are as plentiful as they are contradictory. Without a doubt, the Brahmins were (and, some believe, still are) the shadowy cabal that pulled the city's strings from on high. Others say their wealth and power have dried up, that all they have left are their names and what's left in their trust funds. Admirers retort that the SHARE Brahmins are this city's caregivers, lovers of culture and education; detractors claim that they are elitist and provincial Boston royalty. What's undisputed is that, despite their generations of wealth, Video: Boston Marathon Movie Trailer the Brahmins were notoriously averse to the crass shows of wealth on display in places like Palm Beach or Newport. They are distinctly Boston creations, who actively shun glamour and attention in SUBSCRIBE spite of their fortunes. Subscribe Now Many of their family names are easily recognized: Lowell and Ames. Adams and Cabot. Forbes. Give a Gift Shaw. Appleton. Crowninshield. Saltonstall. But mostly, we non-Brahmins know the institutions they created and left behind and, in a few cases, still sustain: the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Customer Service Peabody Essex and Isabella Stewart Gardner museums, WGBH, the Museum of Fine Arts. In fact, Table of Contents most of us know these institutions better than the names of the benefactors who founded them because, by their nature, Brahmins don't like to chisel their names onto buildings. "The Brahmin mystique was that they were very quiet," says society columnist Jonathan Soroff. "You never knew FEATURED STORIES that they had a dime." In a sense, they were the originators of shabby chic; even today, there might be a Brahmin right under your nose, and you wouldn't even know it. The remaining Brahmins, comparatively relaxed by historical standards, closely guard their privacy, rarely ask that the hospital wings they pay for be named for them, and (believe us) do not rush to consent to interviews. As one Brahmin (who, of course, asked not to be named) put it: "My Mindy Kaling, The Monster 21 Top dear, a Brahmin should only be in the newspaper when he is born, when he marries, and when he Divine Next Door Breweries in dies." Comedian New England That ethos, almost unheard of in a culture of reality TV and Paris Hilton, was built up over THIS JUST IN generations of quiet community building. More than anything, the history of the Boston Brahmin is FASHION NEWS the history of philanthropy in Boston. And the sense of noblesse oblige that became the hallmark of the original Boston Brahmins was arguably a result of the fact that many of them started out with Tiffany & Co. Unveils New Watch nothing and became rich. Collection Even people as Old Money as Brahmins were nouveau riche once. And the means by which they got WEDDING BEAUTY that way were, if not always illegal, not always ethical, either. Get Glowing with Self-Tanners Most first families-that description notwithstanding-did not arrive here on the Mayflower. "If DEL.KEY ARTS everybody who says they came over on that boat really had," says one Boston woman who is a MFA Tells Ongoing friend of many Brahmins, "it would have sunk." (Nor are Brahmins, for the record, merely WASPs. Story of Japan with Even old-family white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, however wealthy they may be now, are looked Two New Exhibits down on by authentic Brahmins as "swamp Yankees.") EVENTS Dana-Farber Rink SPONSORED CONTENT Rats Take the Ice Suggested: Debunking Dental Myths Against Bruins Alumni in Charity In fact, most Brahmin names of note belong to old New England families of Anglican origin, many of Game whom settled in Boston at varying points before the 17th century and made their fortunes by the mid-19th. RESTAURANT OPENINGS Dave Punch Opening xfinity Late-Night Asian center "What the family forebears were doing in the 150 years from 1630 until 1780 or SO makes little Soul Food Diner difference," wrote Cleveland Amory in his landmark book The Proper Bostonians. "Neither the JUNE 9 accurate identification of the first bearer of the name to 'come over'-the Lees and the Holmeses POLICY have never satisfied themselves on this point-nor where the family originally settled-Boston's John Fish, Olympics TICKETS ON SALE NOW Opposition, and Gardners came from Maine, its Hallowells from Pennsylvania-are important considerations." Patriotism What mattered was that each family had what Amory terms a merchant prince-a patriarch to build the fortune and launch the family name in society before the 1860s. For many-the Lowells, the Cabots-that meant making money in industry, beginning with textiles. Seafaring was also a common pursuit, and that's where things grew lucrative-and often dubious. Many of the original Brahmins' dealings would make Enron look squeaky clean. Rum-running and TRENDING opium trading were not uncommon lines of business. PROMOTIONS & EVENTS Cabots, Derbys, Searses, Endicotts, Peabodys, Crowninshields-all were "men who, if not actually pirates, were at least Vikings in their methods," wrote Amory. "To ease their New England Design Home 2015 Home Module consciences, rum was technically known as 'West Indies Goods'; the label 'Groceries and W.I. Announcing Design Home 2015! Goods,' was a familiar one on Boston's Merchants' Row." Find out more details around when tickets will be available to tour this On land, some well-respected Brahmins were not above downright swindling. When Harrison Gray year's fabulous home! Otis and Samuel Cabot learned that the Massachusetts State House was to be built on Beacon Hill, vestibule they bought the artist John Singleton Copley's 15-acre estate at a ridiculously low price while Vestibule Spring 2015 For the latest in home design, Copley was away. When he returned, Copley was outraged-not only because he believed the land summer trends, and expert realty, was stolen from him, but because, not long after, it became worth more than he would make from check out the latest issue of Chic selling paintings for his entire life. He never got any satisfaction-primarily because the most Retreats Coldwell Residential Brokerage's custom publication, Vestibule! powerful Brahmin families at the time allied themselves against him. Many Brahmins never forgot how they came by their wealth and took measures to redeem Colleges Guide COLLEGES We help lease the college search themselves. "A big part of the Brahmin sense of giving to the community came from their guilt over UNIVERSITIES process with our annual Guide to the source of their money," says society writer Soroff. New England Colleges and Universities. Whatever their reasons for giving, the Brahmins gave big, founding and funding institutions and dedicating not only their fortunes to them but also in many cases much of their lives. Henry Lee View All Events & Promotions Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, made up the orchestra's annual deficits out of his own pocket, several times risking personal bankruptcy, and paid for the construction of Symphony Hall. In 1918, a handful of Brahmins-Judge Frederick P. Cabot, Frederick E. Lowell, and Bentley W. Warren among them-took up the cause, continuing to cover the symphony's deficits. This tradition didn't end until 1966, when the BSO began its first fundraising campaign. Then there's the historically Brahmin stronghold of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1869, the proprietors of the Boston Athenaeum-one of the nation's most outstanding private libraries, headed by the Cabots-agreed to give over a part of its impressive art collection for a museum dedicated to "the preservation and exhibition of works of art." The MFA was a receptacle of Brahmin goodwill from the start, receiving money and art from Brahmin family collections and presided over by men like Martin Brimmer, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Ralph Lowell, and Edward Jackson Holmes. When, in 1875, John Lowell's heirs gave artifacts he had collected on his travels through the Middle East, they later became part of the Egyptian wing. The gifts were staggering. "If you look at money that the museum's wealthy philanthropist founders put up in today's terms, that was an enormous amount," says Bob Henderson, the current chair of the MFA's capital campaign. Yet the Brahmins who founded the museum took measures to involve the public. "It was not a museum for the six or eight families who founded it," says Patricia Jacoby, who heads up the MFA's ongoing fundraising campaign. "So instead of funding it entirely themselves, they built a subscription program, asking hundreds of people to give nominal amounts SO they would feel like it was their museum, too." Boston's suburbs also were nourished by the first families. In Salem, the Peabody family was SO prominent, it was said there that you were a "Peabody or nobody." (Today, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem still draws the support and involvement of Brahmins like Saltonstall descendant George Lewis.) In and around Easton, Oliver Ames started manufacturing shovels in 1803, building a fortune that by the 1860s was enough to underwrite the Union Pacific Railroad. "Once that money was invested, they became big players," says Greg Galer, curator of the Industrial History Center at Stonehill College. "Frederick Lothrop Ames was an original stockholder of General Electric, and they had huge real estate interests, which is how they ended up building SO much of Boston- including the Colonial Theatre, parts of MIT, and the Ames Building," the tallest building in Boston when it was completed in 1893 and for 26 years thereafter. The Lowell family took up another cause: public education. From that would eventually come WGBH, today the country's largest public television producer, which has harvested literally hundreds of Emmys, Peabodys, and even Oscars. The station's roots took hold when Ralph Lowell and Harvard president James Conant offered public lectures-along with other local universities. Realizing the power radio would soon have, Lowell got himself a broadcasting license, and the symposium started airing lectures on the radio and, later, on television. It was also a Lowell who gave Isabella Stewart Gardner, perhaps the best-known Brahmin icon, her entrée into Boston society. Neither a true Brahmin nor a native Bostonian, she came here from New York to marry John Lowell "Jack" Gardner Jr., whose father was considered the last of the East India merchants. Not that she had any trouble making her mark: Gardner was as famed for her eccentric behavior as she was for her philanthropy. She drank beer instead of tea, for instance, and was rumored to walk down Tremont Street with a leashed lion. Once she openly flouted Brahmin shabby chic by wearing two enormous diamonds-not as jewelry, but on gold springs hovering above her head. Her wealthy contemporaries were not amused. That didn't keep the Gardners from hosting lavish dinner parties with luminaries such as Henry James and John Singer Sargent. Nor did it dampen Gardner's love of art or philanthropic spirit- not only in her Fenway mansion but also in the other causes she championed, including the Boston Public Library, the New England Conservatory, and the New England Home for Little Wanderers. "Mrs. Gardner's legacy is that she amassed people around this amazing collection of art, horticulture, music, and education," says Barbara Hostetter, now president of the Gardner's board of trustees. "But she also knew that having wealth meant you had a responsibility to your community." Historians consider the death of John Lowell Gardner in 1878 the date that entry to the club was ended. If you weren't a first family by then, you weren't going to become one. From the 1860s until the 1950s, being a Brahmin became more about who you married. (Intermarriage with a family whose status paralleled or eclipsed your own was SO important that the only Brahmin families not known to have married each other are the Saltonstalls and Lowells, and marrying a cousin was not at all uncommon.) This was but one way of preserving wealth. Trust funds, used creatively by the Brahmins, were another. Offspring could also draw from the profits of a family copper mine-like the ones owned by the Shaws, Agassizes, and Ameses. But these were, in one form or another, all remnants of the initial fortune. The time of the merchants was ending. "The Brahmins?" asks Eleanor Spaak, sounding surprised to even hear the term. "The Brahmins are nowhere right now." Socialite and society columnist for the Newbury Street and Back Bay Guide, she's watched the last vestiges of Brahmin clout shift to new families and new groups-Irish, Jewish, Italian. "They don't have the power they once did, and they simply aren't giving money like they used to because they just don't have it." She's not the only one who thinks SO. "Certainly there are still Honeywells and Cabots, but by and large most of the money that's being donated in town is coming from newly rich Irish, Jews, and Italians," says Soroff. "Look at the board of the Symphony-that was once a Brahmin haven. Now Peter Brooke is the chairman, Tom Stemberg from Staples, George Krupp, Chad Gifford, Nancy Fitzpatrick: These are not Brahmin names. So, yes, the Brahmins are the social history of Boston, and there's still a strong thread of that tradition, but they are not what they once were." Of course, just because they don't have a monopoly on power anymore doesn't mean the Brahmins have left town. It's just that much of their family money is gone, and many have moved away or married non-Brahmins. You can still find their descendants, gin and tonics in hand, at the Chilton and Vincent clubs or the Myopia Club. (The Forbeses still weekend on Naushon Island.) And there remain plenty of Saltonstalls. Some of them have moved to other cities; others have stayed and gone into teaching. A handful of Brahmins still are active philanthropists. Henry Lee keeps the Higginson family's tradition alive with his tireless work for the Public Garden. William Lowell still looks after WGBH and the Lowell Institute. There's Martha Crowninshield, who has made her own small fortune at Boston Ventures, and gives both her time and admirable sums of money to the United Way and Boys & Girls Clubs. Sylvia Pope-a Thorndike and a Saltonstall-is a force behind the Boston Ballet. Jack Gardner, Isabella's great-great-grandnephew, is chair of the Gardner Museum's board of trustees. And Bill Ames and other family members have continued to support Stonehill Industrial History Center at Stonehill College. Then there's Linda Cabot Black, who has labored for years to keep the Boston Lyric Opera going. And Helen Spaulding, says Boston Foundation board member Ira Jackson, "has done more for the poor and those normally forgotten about in Boston than you can imagine. She's the best essence of that old and much misunderstood group, the Boston Brahmins, for whom caring and giving back to the community were vital." There are whispered stories of the changers-on-descendants of Brahmins who live off dwindling trust funds and go to all of the social events but contribute none of their time and money to the community. "Some of these families will come to a cocktail party, and all they talk about is their kids' prep schools," sniffs one non-Brahmin socialite. Even more frustrating to many of the city's new philanthropists are the Brahmin descendants who use their names to join boards, then do little or no work for the cause. "So many of these Brahmin families, their money dried up years ago, and the current generations are utter failures," says one active philanthropist who moved to Boston several years ago. "They're in your social circle because their last names get them on the boards, but they don't do anything. They don't raise money, they don't stuff envelopes, and they don't help organize." That may be true, says 30-year-old Emily Webster, a member of the Webster Brahmins, who is herselfinvolved with the Young Friends of the Public Garden and the Nichols House in addition to working in her family design business, Webster & Company, and running an accessories business called Pilgrim Road. But, she says, "the reality is, sometimes you need a name." And the truth is those names get other people to buy tickets to an event or donate a lot to a cause. Still, there's no doubt that the face of giving in Boston has changed. "A lot of the Brahmin money has been diluted over generations," one socialite says. "There's a new sphere of people who now have huge fortunes, SO the groups of people who are giving have just diversified. What happened at the Wang Center in the '70s was a perfect example. Its board was all names of people who founded it, but the center was struggling financially. So when [Helen Spaulding's son] Joe Spaulding took over, he changed that by requiring a $2,500-a-year donation in order to be on the board, and a lot of people resigned. Now the board is made up of African-American and Latino names." Linda Cabot Black agrees that things have changed. "It used to be the Brahmins that supported the city," she says. "But that's just not true anymore. Now it's many different people." While new groups may have supplanted the Brahmins in wealth and power, it's the Brahmins who have shaped how people give in this town. Matthew Santangelo, a trust and estate specialist for Merrill Lynch, handles the philanthropic giving of many wealthy Boston families today. He sees a resurgent Brahminlike philosophy among the newest non-Brahmin donors. "In previous generations, there was giving among the pillars of the community," Santangelo says. "They would always reliably give to local, established institutions. Beyond those families, most people gave out of a sense of obligation and peer pressure. But now younger wealth creators are instead really interested in the impact of their money. They feel wealth has no meaning at all-i - it needs to be given meaning by doing something with it for the community. They want to make sure their children and grandchildren appreciate that." That means giving time along with money, an old-fashioned Brahmin-style approach that institutions like the BSO, the MFA, WGBH, and the Boston Foundation confirm is on the rebound. "We're seeing a demise of checkbook philanthropy," says Paul S. Grogan, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation. "People are much more apt to give money, but also volunteer and be personally involved with their causes." That makes sense to Linda Cabot Black. "I just love opera," she says matter-of-factly. "It's that simple. And without the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston wouldn't have an opera house at all. We're a world-class city, and the people who live here shouldn't be without that." Then there's Murray Forbes, who in his quest to keep his Navigator Foundation properly funded, summons the spirits of not only his, but two other Brahmin families. "You don't want to become old Henry Higginson," he chuckles, referring to the patriarch's flirtation with bankruptcy in keeping the Symphony alive. "But," he says, this time echoing Ralph Lowell's affinity for public education, "art and the humanity it represents are how we understand each other, and it must be made available to everyone." It was once said that in New York they ask how much a person is worth, in Philadelphia who his parents were, and in Boston how much he knows. If that's so, Forbes may be the best living example of the collision of the old Brahmin ethic and the new world. "It's about content," he says. "I'm not saying people aren't giving today. They are. But do their passions come across to the rest of the public? Because that is where the culture lies-not just in impressions or reviews or seeing our name in print, but in the art itself, and in fresh, new presentations of ideas to invigorate the civilization." HARVARD AND THE BOSTON BRAHMINS: A STUDY IN INSTITUTIONAL AND CLASS DEVELOPMENT, 1800-1865 Ronald story It is clear, in the light of recent historical work, that a concentration of elite wealth and power persisted in the United States throughout the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, 1 despite previous impressions of American social democratization accompanying changes in political style. In New England the concentration actually increased. Here the elite owned a larger share of the region's assets, and was more exclusive in terms of religion, residence, and social relations in 1870 and in 1780. What had been an incho- ate mercantile seaboard elite was, by 1870, an established Boston-centered upper class with diversified economic interests and a reasonably secure politi- cal position. 2 "Proper Boston" resembled its New York City and Philadelphia counterparts, except that it was somewhat more exclusive, more English in manner, and more intellectual, or at least more literary, in tone. 3 The change n nomenclature from "Federalist (or Whig) aristocracy" and "Boston Associ- ates," which were political and business terms, respectively, to the more general "Boston Brahmins" signified the attainment of class stature as well as class distinction. Many of the processes underlying this development are now clear as well. Sustained accumulation and sound marriage were obviously basic to the suc- ess of all the antebellum elites, Boston included. In Boston, moreover, industrial entrepreneurship and the formation of special financial institutions were integral to the process of accumulation, and these in turn provided the esilience and continuity necessary to durable class status. 4 Since this happened within the framework of a competitive electoral system with a road suffrage, adequate political influence and arrangements were highly important; although the political conflicts of the era, particularly those from 840 to 1865, have not been rigorously analyzed from the standpoint of lite development, it is obvious that politics at the very least did not dis- nantle the great economic infrastructure of the elite. Overall, elite develop- nent of this kind, notably in Boston, stood dramatically athwart the galitarian, antiinstitutional, democratic tendencies which were once thought, with some justification, to have characterized the age. Culture was also important. It helped to fulfill the tasks of acculturation nd socialization which highly resolved social classes always require, espe- ially in a society as fluid and unstable as early nineteenth-century America. by implication, it explains the singular intellectual sheen of the Brahmins, a uality not entirely to be expected, perhaps, in a group that remained SO intrepreneurial and industrially innovative. Yet cultural factors have received 4 J. of Social History 8, #3 (1975):94-121. Abstract of the Dissertation Family Structure and Class Consolidation Among the Boston Brahmins by Peter Dobkin Hall Doctor of Philosophy in History State University of New York at Stony Brook 1973 The history of Massachusetts has, from the middle eighteenth century, been dominated by a group of merchant families. Accompanying the power of these fam- ilies, has been an unusual number of technological and managerial innovations in business, and the development of important cultural institutions. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relations between eight of these families, the problem of innovation, and insti- tutional development. Through this relationship can be seen the basic form of an emergent class structure. The methods used in this exposition fall within the realm of collective biography. The eight families are treated as an aggregate. Their behaviors in such areas as marital and career choice, child bearing, and iii Further renconduction nmhihiten without permission Hall-2 testamentation analyzed as collective group behavior through the use of birth cohort analysis. The connec- tions between the families, corporations, and charitable organizations are studied through analysis of patterns of directorship and trusteeship. This study finds that the growth of corpora- & Lons and charitable organizations originates in the eighteenth century nexus between merchant families and business partnerships. In the eighteenth century, busi- ness capital was accumulated and allocated through testamentary, marital, and career arrangements by which family life was virtually inseparable from the needs of business. As economic opportunities expanded after the Revolution, these arrangements proved inade- quate both as sources of capital and as sources of reliable manpower However, new arrangements could not be made without major alterations in families and busi- ness--and through the creation of new organizational forms which took on functions which had previously been exercised in the family-business nexus. (From the crea- tion of new organizations-corporations and charitable institutions-there developed a wider relation of fami- lies, businesses, and organizations which appear to lay the basis for the continuing dominance of the merchant families over their society. From this relation is inferred the form of an emergent class structure. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hall. - 3 Table of Contents Page Abstract iii Table of Contents. V List of Figures vii List of Tables viii Introduction 1 I. Business Practice and Family Life, 1700-1812 6 Business Practice in Massachusetts Up To the War for Independence, 9 The American Revolution and Its Aftermath 24 The Response to Instability: Rationalization of the Internal Business Structure. 50 Success Magnifies Weakness: The Problems of Partnership as a Form of Commercial Organization. 52 The Reorganization of Mercantile Business. 82 Development of Alternatives to Mercantile Business: The Origins of Early Corporate Enterprise in Massachusetts 93 The Significance of the Development of Corporate Organization 105 II. Occupational Choice and Marriage Among the Merchant Families 112 Alternatives to Mercantile Careers for Merchant Sons 116 V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hall-4 Page Occupational Diversification Among Sons of the Merchant group 148 Marriage, Business, and Merchant Families 169 III. The Development of Testamentary Trusts. 195 The Origin of Testamentary Trusts in Massachusetts 206 Legal Definition of the Fundamental Issues in the Making of Testamentary Trusts 226 Trusts In Vitro: An Example of the Problems of Family Trust Management During the Early Nineteenth Century. 254 Final Developments in the Law of Testamentary Trusts. 289 Conclusions: The Social Impact of the Development of Testamentary Trusts 318 IV. The Model of Boston Charity 323 Origins of the Relation Between Business and Philanthropy 323 The Middlesex Canal: A Second Stage in the Linkage of Public and Private Enterprise 353 The Origins of Institutional Philanthropy and the Machinery of Economic Control. 360 The Internal Structure of the Model of Boston Charity 397 The External Structure of the Model of Boston Charity 413 Recapitulation of the Model of Boston Charity--Merchant Group Development to 1860 454 460 Conclusion 486 References vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.