Cold Roast Boston
By D. W. BROGAN
QUITE recently, the once famous and opu- lent Boston banking house of Lee Higgin- son finally closed its spider-webbed doors. The purchasers of what was left of that once famous firm do not even propose to keep its name in the title. Sic transit gloria. Which now is a parable, for it marks the end of one of the great Boston dynasties and one of the great Boston institutions. For Colonel Henry Lee Hig- ginson is one of the heroes of Mr Green's book* —not, indeed, as a banker, but as the patron of the Boston Symphony; and he was in fact one of the most remarkable and admirable of the 'strong men of Boston,' less devoted to divi- dends and the first green peas than the hero of Longfellow's poem.
One of the things most praised in Mr Green's book is the abundance with which Boston, old Boston, produced public-spirited and effective citizens like Colonel Henry Lee Higginson. (Mr Green does not seem to know about Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an equally admir- able but much less rich Bostonian.) Mr Green's book is, indeed, two books put together, One of them a little narrow in its approach, but very in- teresting and presenting an argument which I am very much disposed to accept; the other, alas, a great deal of what I can only call literary haver- ings. That Mr Green should go off the rails so completely is a little surprising, since he very aptly quotes Admiral S. E. Morison's description of the Boston of the Admiral's childhood and his ex- tremely appropriate comparison of it with some of the great continental cities ruled by what the Germans used to call a 'patriciate.' Not taking up this clue, Mr Green wanders off into what I can only call mere literary chit-chat.
This failure to take up Admiral Morison's clue prevents Mr Green from giving even an adequate account of the Bostonians who created all the admirable institutions which he lists (there were other admirable institutions which he does not list). There is no point in comparing Boston with London or Paris. It was too small; too provincial; too soon eclipsed by New York; too genteel and colonial in its attitudes to Eng- land and, indeed, to Europe. But it was an extremely interesting, dignified and novel speci- men of a kind of society whose almost com- plete absence in Britain is one of our great weaknesses, from which we suffer now as we have suffered for a long time in the past. Boston should be compared with Geneva and with Basle, with Frankfurt and with Amsterdam as well as with Milan and some of the great Italian cities which had their own patriciates and pat- ricians. Only one city in Britain is really like Boston, and that is Edinburgh. Only Bristol and Norwich, with their strong Quaker infusion, and Manchester, with its important colonies of Ger- mans and German Jews, even enter this league. And a good case could be made that in the nineteenth, if not in the twentieth century, Boston was the most important of these civic republics, with a highly energetic, public- spirited, and self-confident civic aristocracy.
Its only American rival was Philadelphia. Mr Green briefly dismisses all its claims to rivalry. He dismisses Professor Shryock's dictum that Boston acquired its reputation for cultural
* THE PROBLEM OF BOSTON: SOME READINGS IN
CuttoRAt. HISTORY. By Martin Green. (Longman, 35s.) supremacy by classifying as 'culture' the things Boston was good at and ignoring the things which Philadelphia was good at. Yet there is a great deal of justice in Professor Shryock's re- marks; but then Professor Shryock is a historian of medicine and science and would not accept all of Mr Green's almost exclusive claims, for Boston hospitals, for example. One might also point out how superior nineteenth-century Philadelphia was in the visual arts. Nevertheless, I am for nineteenth-century Boston against nineteenth-century Philadelphia, and I agree with nearly everything that Mr Green says about Boston of the 'golden age' and even of the `gilded age.' But I think there are a great many other things he doesn't say.
Among the things which Mr Green innocently ignores is the Harvard Law School, which is more important than the Harvard Medical School because of holding a more commanding position in American cultural life. Indeed, his treatment of Harvard is curiously casual. At no time was it inferior to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The symbiotic relation- ship between Boston and Harvard across the Charles and, less important, between Boston and MIT across the Charles, is nearly ignored. I am told by my Boston friends that the old close relationship is not what it was. In the past century, Harvard was never so incestuously in- bred as Oxbridge. Nevertheless, the Harvard `Faculty,' that is, the dons, were very often proper Bostonians of great Bostonian dynasties. So was a great part of the undergraduate body, although more and more people came in from the outside, like the Roosevelts from New York. This, I am told, has changed. Harvard is far more `democratic'; so young women of distin- guished Boston families are no longer kept from going to Vassar and Bryn Mawr for fear of missing the partis sortables provided by the current group of Harvard undergraduates. (One member of a very great Harvard-Boston dynasty once gave me this as an apologetic explanation for not having had a college education.) But Mr Green is mainly concerned with the Boston of 'before the War.' He is anxious to show that the resentment of the 'genteel tradi- tion,' the alleged sterilisation of life by the mores of what Charles Francis Adams II called 'cold roast Boston,' is a fiction invented by degenerate descendants of the great men of the first half of the century. Thus, the -greatest cultural hero of this book is Ticknor, author of A History of Spanish Literature, of some importance at the time, but now forgotten and unread. Mr Green not only plugs Ticknor in a way which I think is excessive, but he is what I can only call a literary Federalist. He seems to think that the Federalists and the Whigs were solely repre- sented by austere, learned, public-spirited figures like Ticknor, Prescott, and Parkman. But the real representative figure of the later Federalists and of the Whigs was the `God-like "Daniel," ' and Daniel Webster was simply a superior F. E. Smith.
I am quite willing to admit that he was very superior; but that is what the critics of Boston, then and since, were protesting against. Mr Green does not seem to notice that the writers who seem to have had something fresh and original to say were nearly all Democrats or highly sceptical of the alleged virtues of the Federalists and the Whigs. He can find a great deal of this criticism of the old Boston 'estab- lishment' in Emerson and ThOreau; and the three still-living authors of the New England `Enlightenment' (taking that in the very wide sense that Mr Green gives to the word), Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, were none of them Bos- tonians and all of them Democrats. (It is true that Mr Green does not think much of Haw- thorne : but then, I do not think much of D. H. Lawrence. So that cancels out.) The person who did most to bring the standards of German scholarship into New England was George Bancroft, a highly successful Democratic politician. In what way was Rantoul inferior to either Webster or to that colossal bore, Edward Everett? The public-spirited founders of hospitals and museums and the numerous public institu- tions in which Boston was so rich (Philadelphia had a great many, some of them much older than any in Boston, thanks to an expatriate Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin) had an economic basis which is entirely ignored by Mr Green. (He has a very scrappy bibliography which, as a historian, I can only say, regretfully, shows the limitations of a purely literary education. Missing from it is a book like The Jacksons and the Lees in the Har- vard business series. Still more serious is the absence of Admiral Morison's great book The Maritime History of Massachusetts.) The second part of Mr Green's study is a series of literary essays on figures more or less con- nected with Boston or with Harvard. The connec- tion is sometimes rather remote, as in the case of Henry James, who was not in any sense a Bostonian, as the proper Bostonians constantly pointed out. Yet the Boston metropolitan area is reviving. The great technological institutions may be the basis of a new Boston more interesting. richer, more potent, more in tune with the modern world even than was the Boston of the 1840s. The best modern chronicler of Boston, Mr White- hill, thinks the future of Boston is more interest- ing than its past. This may well be; but the past deserved a more critical and scholarly treatment than it gets from this well-meaning but I fear not very competent book, so inferior to Mr Green's A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons.
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