Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Signs reading
NO IRISH NEED APPLY
became scarce as the new arrivals gained
political power, and the first Irish mayor
was elected in 1885.
By this time, Boston's class split was a
chasm, with the influx of immigrants
adding to the social tension. The Irish led
the way and were followed by Italian,
Portuguese, and eastern European Jewish
immigrants. Each group had its own
neighborhoods, churches, schools, news-
papers, and livelihoods that intersected
only occasionally with “proper” society. A
small but concrete example: The birth-
place of Rose Fitzgerald—later Rose
Kennedy, matriarch of the political
dynasty—is in the North End, an Irish
stronghold at her birth in 1890 that has
been a predominantly Italian neighbor-
hood for over half a century.
Even as the upper crust was sowing cul-
tural seeds that would wind up enriching
everyone—the Boston Symphony, the
Boston Public Library, and the Museum
of Fine Arts were established in the second
half of the 19th century—its prudish
behavior gained Boston a reputation for
making snobbery an art form. In 1878 the
censorious Watch and Ward Society was
founded (as the New England Society for
the Suppression of Vice), and the phrase
“banned in Boston” soon made its way
into the American vocabulary. In 1889,
the private St. Botolph Club removed
John Singer Sargent's portrait of Isabella
Stewart Gardner from public view (it's
now at the museum that bears her name)
because her dress was too tight.
The Boston Brahmins could keep their
new neighbors out of many areas of their
lives, but not politics. The forebears of the
Kennedy clan had appeared on the
scene—John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald,
Rose's father, was elected mayor in 1910—
and the city slowly transformed yet again
as WASPs and Catholics struck an uneasy
truce.
World War II bolstered Boston's
Depression-ravaged industrial economy,
and the war's end touched off an eco-
nomic transformation. Shipping declined,
along with New England's textile, shoe,
and glass industries, at the same time that
students on the G. I. Bill poured into area
colleges and universities. The rise of the
local high-technology industry led to new
construction, changing the look of the
city. The 1960s saw the beginning of a
building boom that has continued, save
during the occasional economic slow-
down, to this day.
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Still reeling from the international social
upheaval of the 1960s, Boston was the
center of a school-busing crisis in the
mid-1970s. Sparked by a court-ordered
school desegregation plan enacted in
1974, it touched off riots, violence, and a
white boycott (that age group includes a
fair number of prominent Bostonians
who have GEDs rather than high school
diplomas because their parents pulled
them out of school). In the years since,
the city has battled its reputation for
racism with varying degrees of success.
Impressions
The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond
mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are
decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.
—Boston native Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
We are Boston, Glasgow is Cleveland.
—John McKay, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, 1985
