Dateline: Boston 1905

Henry Smith Pritchett

2011-10-04T18:32:00.004-04:00

During the first 35 years of its existence, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was headed by its founder, William Barton Rogers, former Civil War General Francis A. Walker, and two MIT professors. The selection of Henry Smith Pritchett to become the Institute's fifth president in 1900 signaled a shift in direction.

Pritchett held a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Munich and had demonstrated both his academic and administrative strengths. He had spent 17 years in academia, and three years in an impressive stint as superintendent of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey where he developed a close relationship with President McKinley. He was young, bright, energetic, well-connected, handsome, socially adept, and popular, and he arrived at MIT in the summer of 1900 with high hopes for his future there.

Despite his achievements at MIT, Pritchett's career as a college president ended up being a brief six years in duration. In 1904, Pritchett proposed what was essentially a loose merger between Harvard and MIT. Under this plan, Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School would become part of the Institute, the Institute would move to Cambridge under the aegis of Harvard (on the site currently occupied by the Harvard Business School), and Pritchett would retain the presidency and a certain amount of independence for the Institute. MIT alumni and faculty were largely opposed, but the real fly in the ointment was the unwillingness of the Massachusetts legislature to allow the sale of Tech's Boston property on Boylston Street. Pritchett resigned the presidency of MIT after the deal fell through, and left Boston in 1906 to head the brand new Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Pritchett is largely a forgotten man in Boston and Cambridge but his influence on education and educators in this mecca of US education was enormous.

MIT

His first achievement was his work at MIT. Dr. Robert Payne Bigelow, a professor there from 1893-1933, says that Pritchett's administration was "a turning point in the history of the Institute."

Pritchett’s primary concern was for student welfare—academic, social, and physical. He encouraged students to seek advice from him, he established a department of physical education, he turned the culture on its head by having top faculty teach freshmen, he cultivated relations with the staff and increased their salaries, he sent professors to visit laboratories abroad, and he developed the departments of chemical engineering and applied electricity. Bigelow goes on: “I have naturally watched with much interest its growth from the turning point under Pritchett to the magnificent institution it is today. I have seen practically all of Pritchett’s dreams come true.”

Franklin Union

Pritchett was a great supporter of other forms of industrial education. In 1904, as a trustee of Boston's Franklin Foundation (the accumulated value of a thousand pound legacy bequeathed to the city by Benjamin Franklin), he was instrumental in getting Andrew Carnegie to match the $408,000 then in the fund. This created a large enough endowment to found an evening training school to be called the Franklin Union. The conditions attached to Carnegie's gift were two: that the school be similar to the Cooper Union and NYC's Mechanics' and Tradesmen's School, and that the City of Boston provide the land. Both conidtions were met, and the school opened in its new building in Boston in the fall of 1908.

Today the Franklin Union has become the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, offering nine associate's degrees in engineering and industrial technology, a bachelor's degree in automotive technology, and a variety of certificate programs.

Lowell Institute

During Pritchett's tenure as MIT president, he was asked by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a Harvard professor (and later to be Harvard president), MIT trustee, and trustee of the Lowell Institute to find a man who could plan and conduct courses aimed at training industrial foremen. The Lowell Institute had grown out of a bequest by Lowell's grandfather, textile merchant John Lowell, to offer what were to become hugely popular free public lectures to the citizens of Boston. The new undertaking would be a joint venture by the Lowell Institute and MIT. Pritchett selected Dr. Charles F. Park to be the director of the Lowell Institute School for Industrial Foremen, a move to which Lowell credited the successful launch of the new school. Since 1996, the Lowell Institute School has been a part of the Northeastern University College of Professional Studies, offering bachelor's and associate degrees in engineering technologies.

TIAA-CREF

Pritchett's final contribution, this time to educators, was not limited to the Boston area. As President of the brand new Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he was charged with developing a plan to provide pensions for retired faculty members. The Trustees had originally hoped to fund free pensions but it became apparent to them that the endowment was not large enough for this purpose. Pritchett proposed a pension fund partly funded by the institutions and the faculty members themselves. This was named the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (now better known as part of TIAA-CREF), and Pritchett served as its President from 1918-1930. (TIAA-CREF today holds over $450 billion in assets.)

NOTE: The Lowell Institute was also the founder of Boston's public radio/TV station WGBH in 1951. In 1946, the Institute had begun broadcasting its lectures on the radio, and the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council was the licensee for one of the newly created FM radio channels in April 1951.

Illustration Credits and References

Photo of Henry S. Pritchett from the MIT History website.

1903 photo of the Boylston street MIT campus from Hello Boston History Photo Archive.

Information about Henry Pritchett's career largely obtained from Henry S. Pritchett: A Biography by Abraham Flexner, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

El Jaleo, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and TJ Coolidge

2011-07-20T15:46:00.004-04:00

The painting El Jaleo hangs on the first floor of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in a space and setting designed by Isabella to truly showcase this huge (11 feet wide!) and beautiful work by John Singer Sargent. I have admired it numerous times; when I taught at Simmons College (located right across Palace Road from the Gardner) I frequently ate lunch in the lovely little Gardner café, and always stopped for a few moments on my way to lunch to study this painting.

But I just learned today that two of my favorite women from 1905 Boston, Eleonora Randolph Sears and Isabella herself, had a connection through this painting. (Click here to read my previous post about Eleonora.)

Eleo's grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, had seen Sargent's talent early on and purchased the painting in 1882, shortly after it was first exhibited by the 26-year-old painter. Isabella, who was a friend (and a cousin by marriage) of Eleo's mother (and TJ's daughter), Nora Coolidge Sears, coveted the painting and tried to buy it from Coolidge for 30 years. According to Eleo biographer Peggy Miller Franck, Coolidge put her off with vague assurances that he would sell it to her one day.

In 1914, most likely worn down after the death of both Nora and her brother in 1912, TJ agreed to loan El Jaleo to ISG for an exhibition she was planning.

Isabella had spent 30 years imagining how to display the painting for maximum effect. In 1914 she directed some major remodeling in Fenway Court (now the Gardner Museum) and constructed a new gallery for the painting, set off by a Moorish stone arch edged with mirrors, and with a display of musical instruments and a row of footlights on the floor in front of the painting. Frank says that when "T.J. saw the showcase that Belle had created, he gave the painting to her."

References

Information from Peggy Miller Franck's Prides Crossing: The Unbridled Life and Impatient Times of Eleonora Sears, Beverly: Commonwealth Editions, 2009.

Massachusetts Issues State License Plates, 1903

2011-01-23T14:24:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts was the first state to issue automobile license plates, starting in June 1903. The plates featured white letters on a cobalt blue background, with the words MASS AUTOMOBILE REGISTER across the top. They were made of porcelain-covered iron, and were quite small, growing wider as the number of registered vehicles grew larger.

When the law requiring the plates was enacted by the Legislature, the public was given until September, 1903 to comply. The first plate issued was number "1", to a man named Frederick Tudor. That number is still an active registration in Massachusetts, held by a member of the Tudor family.

Through 1907, the year of issue was not printed--but unique number ranges were assigned to each year.

For example, in 1905, plates were issued in the range 7,014-11,902. The middle plate on the first row below, from www.worldlicenseplates.com, is a plate issued in 1905. In 1908, as can be seen in the third plate in the first row, the year of issue started appearing on the plate.

Prior to the enactment of the new law in 1903, Boston was the only Massachusetts locale requiring automobile registration, and automobile owners had to make their own plates.

Illustration Credits and References

For further information, see the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles site. The first license plate illustration in this post appears there as well.

NECCO, Part 3

2010-10-28T14:40:00.005-04:00

In a previous post, I displayed some recent photos of the former NECCO (New England Confectionery Company) factory buildings in the Fort Point Channel area in Boston. An alert reader who works in the vicinity has made me aware of some wonderful old photos of NECCO and the various other buildings of the Boston Wharf Company (B.W. Co.) in that area. Thanks Eric!

There are 152 photos in the Boston Wharf Company Collection, and they are housed in the Boston Public Library Print Department. They were just posted online this month--a good reason for continuing to recheck old sources.

This photo of the New England Confectionery Company was taken from the bridge slip in Fort Point Channel at the corner of the Summer Street Bridge. It was taken between 1902-1907, but I'm thinking 1907 is more likely, since it looks like it includes the additional buildings that were constructed in 1907 (after the main building was constructed in 1902).

Click here to see how the building looks today.

Saving Boston Common

2010-08-21T19:52:00.004-04:00

It's easy to look at the huge, green expanse of the Boston Common in the middle of Boston and imagine that it was always obvious that it would remain pristine and untrammeled. But in the late 19th century, the Common came close to being pillaged to support an improved transportation system in the city.

Public transportation in Boston in the 1880s consisted of a number of competing horsecar companies, which ran horse-drawn conveyances over rails through the city streets. The system was fragmented, and often competing horsecar lines laid parallel tracks next to each other in the congested city. The speed of the horsecars was about 5 mph, which limited the maximum commuting distance from the city center to about 4 miles.

There was a clear desire to speed up transit and reduce congestion but it was not clear how that was going to happen. Cable systems were being built in San Francisco and elsewhere--but cable could not easily be adapted to Boston's topography: winding, crooked streets, the incursions of the river and the sea, and the looming Beacon Hill.

Electric car lines installed in Richmond, Virginia in 1887-1888 seemed more promising, but it was too expensive for multiple competing horsecar companies to take on.

Eventually, an entrepreneur by the name of Henry Melville Whitney acquired 5 million square feet of land along Beacon Street in Boston and Brookline, with a plan to build housing and a street rail line along the boulevard from Brookline to the center of the city. When the existing horsecar firms did not demonstrate interest, he engineered a buyout of all their stock, and the West End Street Railway Company came into existence.

At the time of the acquisition in 1887, West End owned 8,400 horses, and 200 miles of track. By 1892, two-thirds of their track had been converted to electric operations, and by 1894, 90%. Boston had faster, cheaper, and better public transportation than any other US city.

But West End was a victim of its own success. Increased travel speed was followed by further city population growth and expansion of the city to the "streetcar suburbs" in Dorchester and elsewhere. There was pressure on West End to add so-called "rapid transit" to its system--either by subway or elevated line. Whitney actually won a charter for an elevated line--but study convinced him that it was not suited to the inner city.

A city Rapid Transit Commission (which included Congressman John Fitzgerald, later Mayor of Boston) was formed in 1892. They held 51 public hearings and traveled to the major European cities with rapid transit systems. Fitzgerald didn't like the "buried-alive" feeling of being in the London tube, though he was more impressed with the "cut and cover" subways that were very close to the surface. The RTC made a series of recommendations which included a subway under Boston Common to reduce the major congestion on Tremont and Washington Streets.

City dwellers had a significant emotional attachment to the Common, but the growing suburban population of 1893, frustrated by transportation delays, pressed for several alternative solutions: widening Tremont Street by chopping off the end of the Common, adding an elevated line along the edge of the Common, or laying tracks directly across the Common itself.

West End's proposal wasn't much better--building a subway under the Common but seizing 4 acres for a switching yard and station, cutting down 100 trees, covering the entire subway area with cement or brick, and building 330 ventilation holes, each surrounded by an iron fence 19 feet in circumference!

There was a huge uproar from Bostonians led by the Boston Evening Transcript, and including Julia Ward Howe as a key protestor. The Transcript said it would be like subdividing Bunker Hill into housing lots.

In 1894, the legislature held hearings and prepared an act (that would be approved by voters in a referendum later that year) that would authorize the city to build subway lines under Tremont and Washington Streets, a transit bridge to Charlestown, and a transit tunnel under the East Boston harbor. A private firm would also be authorized to build an elevated line from Charlestown to Roxbury.

The trolleys coming into the inner city would enter the tunnel instead of tying up narrow Tremont Street with tracks and congestion. And construction of that first subway tunnel was just like the Big Dig--they built it in the middle of the living city! Each night, they would dig 12 foot wide strips on Tremont Street, and then cover them and shore them up with timbers. In the daytime, traffic down Tremont could continue unabated, and the workers could continue with digging and construction underneath.

Amazingly enough, the project was brought in on-time (opening in 1897 and wrapping up construction in 1898) and under budget. The city retained ownership of the line, and West End (which became Boston Elevated Railway Company in 1897) leased the right to operate the electric trains through the subway. In that first year, Park Street Station became one of the busiest railroad stations in the world--serving 40 million passengers in its first eleven months of operation.

Boston thus became the first city in the U.S. to implement a policy of public ownership of rapid transit lines. The relationship with the private monopoly to operate the trains continued until the 1920s, when rising costs and growing competition from automobiles resulted in losses for Boston Elevated and the city took over operations.

NOTE: The remaining provisions from the 1894 act were quickly completed--the bridge to Charlestown opened in 1899, the elevated electric line from Charlestown to North Station opened in 1901, and the East Boston transit tunnel under the harbor opened at the end of 1904.

Illustration Credits and References

The two photographs in this post were found on the website of "Perfessor" Bill Edwards, Ragtime Era Nostalgia. The first shows streetcar traffic on Tremont Street in 1895, and the second shows an open streetcar entering Park Street Station via the new tunnel in 1897.

The painting by Childe Hassam, Boston Common at Twilight, shows both the beautiful Common and the streetcars lined up on Tremont Street, and was painted in 1885-86. Hassam's studio was here on Tremont Street.

Information about the history of Boston's public transportation comes primarily from Charles W. Cheape's Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1880-1912. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Predictions from 1900

2010-08-09T19:12:00.006-04:00

In the December, 1900 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. made 29 predictions for the next 100 years. Some seem silly or shortsighted. (Air travel is only seen as a military action, for example.) But here are a few that were right on target.

Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top.

Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

Prediction #8: Aerial War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities. Such guns will be armed by aid of compasses when used on land or sea, and telescopes when directed from great heights. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. . . . Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of to-day. They will make what are now known as cavalry charges. . . . Rifles will use silent cartridges. Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below.

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

Prediction #21: Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath.

Illustration Credits and References

The illustration at the top of this post is of a telephone operator ca. 1900, from Encyclopedia Britannica.

Watkins' predictions can be found in full here.

Mad Men of an Earlier Era

2010-08-04T18:23:00.001-04:00

If you're a Mad Man watcher, you'll know that we don't get a lot of the back story of Sterling Cooper's founders. But assuming that Bert Cooper (played by 79 year old Robert Morse) is about 75, that means he was born about 1890, and graduated from college about 1911. This was just in time for him to go and work in the fledgling advertising industry. Although the J. Walter Thompson agency had been founded near the end of the Civil War, what we think of as modern advertising really got its start in the early years of the century.

Prior to the late 19th century, advertising was largely a means for delivering information. Printing companies often did the design and layout, and many ads used only words. But in the 1900s, a number of forces came together to result in the development of modern advertising.

Rapid growth in technology spawned new printing techniques and new manufacturing techniques.
The growth of mass-marketed consumer products was breathtaking, and companies needed a way to get their message out.
The population of the country was growing at a rapid clip, and there were thousands of magazines and thousands of newspapers to carry the messages.
A real middle class was emerging.

The first true consumer culture in the U.S. was birthed in the 1900s. Because products were being developed so rapidly, advertising was often used to raise awareness of the category. For example, Colgate promoted the idea of regular toothbrushing, Gillette of daily shaving, and Kodak the concept that everyone should document his/her life.

Technology was also changing packaging--both in the type (the wax-sealed carton or wax wrap for crackers that we still see today in the Ritz box) and in the use of packaging to provide brightly colored brand recognition.

Department stores had developed in US cities in the latter half of the 19th century, but by the 1900s they were adding features that you would still recognize if you grew up in the fifties--soda fountains, lunchrooms, beauty salons, and spacious women's restrooms (with real space for resting!), and advertising promoted all of these features.

In the 1900s, copywriters, artists, designers, and account executives became part of every ad agency's mix.

Advertising and retailing techniques were introduced that are still in use--an enormous customer database at Sears (maintained on index cards and used to segment customers for mailings), advertising jingles, coordinated national campaigns, familiar characters, four-color graphics, advertising in local newspapers, fixed pricing, clearance sales, gift with purchase, pretty girls handing out samples, and even the investigation of fraudulent advertising.

Illustration Credits and References

The ad at the top of this post consumed the entire back cover of the August 1905 issue of The Redbook Magazine. (Author's collection.) It appears in four-color print and features a new package for Colgate's Violet Talc and a key benefit for the woman who buys it: "the new sifter cannot injure soft hands and manicured fingernails, as do the old-fashioned boxes."

The second ad, also from the author's collection, was on the back cover of the June 8, 1905 issue of Life Magazine. While it is not as colorful as the previous ad, the emphasis on filtering and aging, and the well-known tagline, are both techniques visible in beer advertising today.

Information in this post about advertising comes primarily from Bob Batchelor's The 1900s, part of the American Popular Culture Through History series (Greenwood Press, 2002).

The Berkeley Building

2010-07-27T18:08:00.003-04:00

The Berkeley at 420 Boylston Street, designed by the firm of Codman and Despradelle, is a lyrically beautiful building that was completed in 1905. Désiré Despradelle was a professor of architecture at MIT who had been educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris--an architectural school that was highly influential on early 20th century U.S. architecture. Boston lagged behind Chicago and New York in construction of the new steel-framed buildings (especially skyscrapers), and this building doesn't compete on height, but its exterior is stunning--its steel frame ornamented with glazed terra-cotta, copper, and glass.

Despradelle taught at MIT from 1893 until his untimely death in 1912, and his students would go on to teach and practice architecture across the country in the years that followed. Guy Lowell, a former student of Despradelle's (and also an MIT instructor), would design the new Boston Museum of Fine Arts building--completed in 1909.

Despradelle also designed the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston which opened after his death.

Illustration Credits and References

The photograph of The Berkeley Building appears on blog.petaflop.de

The photograph of Desiré Despradelle was found at the MIT Museum website, which also provided information on Despradelle's career.

Mean Streets

2010-05-31T17:46:00.006-04:00

One of the reasons 1905 interests me is that it represents a collision year between old 19th century life and the new 20th century world. On February 2, 1905, the symbolic met the real in Boston when an automobile, a trolley, and a sled full of lumber drawn by four horses collided near the intersection of Dorchester Avenue and Center Street in the winter dusk.

The trolley struck the car and threw it against the sled. The driver of the sled, which had been stuck at the side of the road, was "shaken up." I guess!

Amazingly enough, although the car was totalled (including losing all of its wheels), its occupants sustained only cuts to their faces and hands. As the Boston Globe reports:

The wreckage was cleared away with apprehension by the passengers of the electric car [the trolley], it being feared that one or more of the occupants of the auto had been killed. They arose without assistance, however, and were able to proceed to their homes.

The owner of the vehicle was a Dr. F. L. Purdy of 86 Vernon Street, Brookline, who was riding with his wife in the chauffeur-driven vehicle. Dr. Purdy seems to have been living under a black cloud during this period--his house had burned in 1904 and he lost several valuable paintings in the fire. And about a month before his February 2 accident, the same house had been burgled.

It's hard today for us to imagine what city streets were like in 1905. There was an element of lawlessness--and pedestrians, newsboys, bicyclists, trolleys, cars, horses, and wagons/sleds all occupied the streets willy-nilly. The film below, shot in San Francisco a few days before the 1906 earthquake, makes it apparent that this kind of accident must have happened often--especially on a winter evening!!

Grandfather's Clock

2010-01-26T18:21:00.007-05:00

Grandfather clocks are so-called because of an 1876 song by American songwriter Henry Work which opens: "My grandfather's clock was too tall for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor."

I am very fond of that song, because my Dad used to sing it to me (and with me) when I was a little girl.

Thanks to history writer Rick Beyer who recently blogged on this story, which is part of his forthcoming book on The Greatest Music Stories Never Told. Here is a 1905 recording of the song by the Edison Male Quartet which Rick unearthed at UCSD's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

The grandfather clock to the left was made in 1905 by the Waltham (MA) Clock Company; photo is from the Antique Clocks Guy website.

Honey Fitz Runs for Mayor

2009-11-21T09:28:00.006-05:00

John F. Kennedy's grandfather, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, ran for mayor of the city of Boston in 1905. The special election had been precipitated by the sudden death of Mayor Patrick Collins in September. Fitzgerald won the Democratic primary eight weeks later, and then defeated his opponent, the highly respected speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Louis Frothingham, in the general election.

This cardboard photograph with his campaign slogan at the bottom, "The People not the Bosses Should Rule," was handed out to voters during the campaign.

One of the new campaigning techniques used by Fitzgerald was the motorcade. The Boston Globe describes the night before the primary when Fitzgerald and his retinue zoomed about the city in the rain in a parade of six automobiles. They stopped in each of the city's 25 wards for the energetic Fitzgerald to say a few words, often to huge crowds.

Fitzgerald won the primary against the candidate of the ward bosses, Ned Donovan. Ned was a close friend of ward boss Martin Lomasney, and when Donovan lost the primary, Lomasney refused to support Fitzgerald in the general election.

On the night before the election, Lomasney called his followers to a meeting where he announced: "I'm not going to lay down and be with the gang that has done such a job on us. Now I am going the put the lights out for two minutes. I haven't had time to check up to see who is here and who is not. If anybody here doesn't want to go through with me, just slide out in the dark and there'll be no hard feelings." Lomasney put out the lights, and two minutes later not a soul had moved. On election day, Lomasney's ward supported Frothingham--the first time it had voted Republican in recent memory.

NOTE: For more information on Martin Lomasney, click here to read my earlier post.

Illustration Credits and References

The campaign photo is part of the collection at the JFK Library in Boston.

The story of Lomasney's election eve speech is recounted in Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

A Phone in Every Room!

2009-11-15T14:16:00.007-05:00

Here is an ad from a January, 1905 edition of the Boston Globe, touting the features of the 500-room Castle Square Hotel, at the time the largest hotel in the city.

$1 a day for singles with shared bath, $2 a day for a double with a private bath, and $3 a day for a suite. And. . . a combination house and long distance phone in every room! (I was actually surprised there were fully telecommunicating hotels this early.....)

Mary Ware Dennett

2009-11-09T18:05:00.014-05:00

Women artists in 1905 were often on the forefront of movements for social change. Mary Ware Dennett used her own personal experiences as an artist, wife, and mother, to advocate for sex education and birth control at a time when such support was considered extremely controversial.

Mary Ware was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1874, and moved with her family to Boston after the death of her father. She attended the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1891-1893, and took a position as head of the Department of Design and Decoration at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (now Drexel University) when she was 20. After three years there, she and her sister Clara went to Europe to travel and study. They acquired some samples of Cordovan leather hangings, and revived the craft, teaching themselves how to make these pieces. On their return to Boston, they opened a handicrafts store, which later came part of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts which Mary helped found. Mary continued to serve as the Artistic Director for the shop.

Mary's goal for the SAC was to help garner financial independence for arts and crafts workers. But the board of the SAC was more interested in guiding consumer tastes, and insisted on taking a commission from the artists who sold their work at the store; this made it difficult for them to make a profit.

In January, 1905, Mary would resign from the Society's Governing Council in protest. (Of course, there are two sides to every story, and the Society apparently needed the money. 1905 also marked the year that sales in the store were large enough, at $37,000, to permit the Society to achieve its own financial independence.)

In 1900, Mary married Hartley Dennett, a Boston architect. They seemed to have an ideal partnership--Mary was an established professional at the time of her marriage, and she and Hartley worked together at first--she focused on the interior decoration of the houses her husband designed. But Mary found herself derailed by pregnancy, bearing three children in the first five years of her marriage, one of whom died as an infant. All three deliveries were difficult, and they took a toll on her health. After the birth of her third child in 1905, she suffered serious internal injuries and her doctors advised her to have no more children. But birth control was never discussed. The Dennetts, both in their early 30s, were educated, well-traveled, and progressive. But Mary later wrote: "I was utterly ignorant of the control of conception, as was my husband also. We had never had anything like normal relations, having approximated almost complete abstinence in the endeavor to space our babies."

Mary felt that the only alternative was to give up sex. Hartley was not about to follow suit, and in 1907, whhile Mary was in New York having surgery to repair the damage suffered after her last child, Hartley had an affair with one of his architectural clients.

When Mary discovered this, she determined to end the marriage, and was able to win custody of her two sons in 1909. The Dennetts were granted a divorce in 1913.

Mary had become involved with the woman suffrage movement in 1908, and in 1910 she took a job with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and moved to New York City. After resigning from NAWSA in 1915, she joined Jessie Ashley and Clara Gruening Williams in founding the National Birth Control League (which would become the Voluntary Parenthood League in 1919).

Also in 1915, Mary wrote a pamphlet for her adolescent sons entitled "The Sex Side of Life". It explained reproduction in no-nonsense terms, and represented sex as a vital and joyous part of life. After privately distributing copies to friends and acquaintances for several years she published the pamphlet in 1918. Throughout the 1920s it was widely distributed to individuals, youth and church organizations, and state health departments.

In 1922, the Solicitor of the Post Office banned the pamphlet as obscene, and Mary Ware Dennett was put on trial in 1928 under the Comstock Law. (This refers to a law enacted by Congress in 1873, An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use. Anthony Comstock was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization financed by wealthy and influential New Yorkers. He and his organization lobbied hard for the bill, and, after it was enacted into law, Comstock was appointed special agent of the U.S. Post Office and charged with enforcing it, a position he held for 42 years.)

Mary was convicted and fined, but appealed the decision with the backing of the ACLU.

Two years later, the US Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Comstock Law "must not be assumed to have been designed to interfere with serious instruction regarding sex matters." The Dennett case was part of a series of decisions that culminated in a 1936 ruling in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries. This decision removed all federal bans on birth control materials and information as tools for medical professionals. However, contraception per se was not removed from the prohibitions of the Comstock Law until 1971.

Interestingly enough, the Comstock Law gave rise to George Bernard Shaw's coinage of the word "comstockery" in 1905, when Comstock attacked Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, as "one of Bernard Shaw's filthy productions" by "this Irish smut dealer." In a letter to the New York Times on September 26, 1905, Shaw responded: "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States."

Illustration Credits and References

Photo of Mary Ware Dennett from album page in the Carrie Chapman Catt Albums, part of the Carrie Chapman Catt Papers at Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections, album 5, “New York State and N.Y. City.”

Other sources for this article included:

Harvard University, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Dennett, Mary Ware, 1872-1947. Papers, 1874-1944: A Finding Aid.

"Powders, Pills, Pessaries, Pamphlets, and the Post Office: The Struggle for Access to Sex Education and Birth Control," News From the Schlesinger Library, Spring 2009.

Christen, Richard S., "Julia Hoffman and the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland: An Aesthetic Response to Industrialization," Oregon Historical Quarterly, Volume 109, No. 4, Winter 2008.

Rengel, Marian, Encyclopedia of Birth Control, Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2000.

NECCO, Part 2

2009-09-20T20:31:00.015-04:00

In my last post, I talked about the old NECCO factory that was built in 1902 in the Fort Point Channel area in Boston. On September 13, I was in Boston and went exploring with Dave to find the factory (and also to look for the Gillette factory which began operation in 1905).

I knew the factory was somewhere near the intersection of Summer and Melcher Streets, and right behind Melcher are two streets called Necco St. and Necco Ct. We located buildings on three of the four corners of that intersection that looked like the right era. We walked around, took pictures, and left. In the car on our way to find a bathroom and get something to eat, I was trolling the internet on my iPhone (something I seem to do pretty regularly these days!) and found a December 2008 document from the City of Boston entitled "The Fort Point Channel Landmark District Study Report." One of the many exciting facts contained in that report was a detailed description of the architecture of the Necco building, and its street address (253 Summer and 11-37 Melcher). It turns out that the original factory building was a gorgeous, curving yellow brick building on Melcher that we had seen on our visit, but immediately rejected as being too elegant for a factory. Who knew? The buildings immediately behind it (which we had guessed were part of the Necco complex on our first visit, located as they were on 5 and 6 Necco Court) were also built for Necco, and connected to each other and to the main building by the four-storey green connectors you see in the photos below. However they were not there in 1905--they were constructed in 1907.

Note that the back of the Melcher Street building (which you can see at the right in the above photos) is red brick with smaller windows--not as fancy as the front! None of the buildings is identified with any kind of signage (at least that we could see) to indicate that this was the site of the former Necco factory. And to further complicate the issue, many of the buildings bore a sign identifying the year of construction and a B.W.Co. logo. The photos below are of the sign on the building that turned out to be the 1902 Necco factory.

It was actually the B.W.Co. sign that led me to the research that led me to the report that led us back to the right building. It turns out that the Boston Wharf Co. was a huge commercial development operation that built most of the buildings in the Fort Point Channel District.

According to the report:

The Fort Point Channel Landmark District (FPCLD) encompasses roughly 55 acres across the Fort Point Channel from downtown Boston. This area, including the land, was entirely developed by a single corporation. . . .The Boston Wharf Company initially specialized in the storage of sugar and molasses, and gradually expanded its interests to become a major developer of industrial and warehouse properties served by ships docking in Boston Harbor, and by the railroad. The Boston Wharf Company laid out and constructed streets which they named for company officers and prominent tenants, parceled out lots, and erected nearly all of the buildings in the FPCLD from the designs of their own staff architects.

The last photo in this post is a shot of the Necco factory taken from the Summer Street bridge. It shows the side of the Necco building and Fort Point Channel itself, and you can see the Gillette factory site just behind the smokestack on the right side of the photo. (Gillette is still there today--having surrounded what I think is their original 1906 factory with many additional buildings over the years.)

Necco and Gillette took advantage of their location on the water, and right near the brand new South Station railyard, to ship their products nationally and internationally.

The American Sugar Refining Co. also built a plant in the Fort Point Channel area in 1902 to manufacture Domino sugar. Probably not a coincidence that Necco was located hard by the sugar factory!

Today the Boston HarborWalk runs through the basement of the old Necco building, connecting the waterfront along the more inland part of the channel with the area around the Courthouse Plaza and beyond.

New England Confectionery Company (NECCO)

2009-08-21T20:09:00.007-04:00

The New England Confectionery Company was formed in 1901 when three pre-Civil War candy companies merged. Chase & Company, Hayward & Company, and Wright & Moody, all founded in the 1840s and 1850s, joined forces and built a huge manufacturing plant in Boston at the corner of Summer and Melcher, along the Fort Point Channel. (I would imagine it was located somewhere near the intersection of what are now Necco Street and Necco Court--I'll investigate on my next trip to Boston!)

When it was completed in 1902, the new plant was the largest factory devoted exclusively to confectionary manufacture in the US--it occupied four five-story buildings and took up five acres of floor space.

Two of the first products to roll out of the new factory were Sweethearts Conversation Hearts and the newly-rechristened NECCO Wafers. Both were made from the same batter--the wafers (previously called Peerless Wafers) had first been introduced to the public in 1847 by Oliver Chase--whose premier accomplishment was the invention of a lozenge-cutting machine.

Sweethearts (previously known as Motto Hearts) had started out looking more like fortune cookies with a "motto" stuffed into a candy shell. Then Oliver Chase's brother, David, began experimenting with printing the sayings directly on the candies. In the new plant, the candies were rebranded and assumed the shape and size they still retain today.

By 1904, NECCO candies were sold in every U.S. state, as well as in England, Europe, Australia, and South America. And during 1904 and 1905, NECCO began advertising with display cards in magazines.

In 1905, NECCO introduced a new candy known as Peach Blossoms--peanut butter in a crunchy peach-colored shell. Like the conversation hearts and wafers, this product is still available today.

In 1906, NECCO would go on to demonstrate its forward-thinking attitude and caring approach to its employees by introducing a profit-sharing plan for workers. After a quarter-century in their Boston plant, the company would move to Cambridge, where it occupied an iconic location on Massachusetts Avenue from 1927-2003, and then to Revere where it is currently located.

Today, NECCO produces 4 billion NECCO Wafers and 8 billion Sweethearts each year, using plants in Louisiana and Wisconsin in addition to the Revere plant. Other brands under the NECCO umbrella include Mary Janes, Clark Bar, Sky Bar, Haviland chocolate products, Candy Cupboard, and Canada Mints.

References

Much of the history in this post comes from the NECCO web site.

Paul Revere House

2009-08-12T11:40:00.013-04:00

Sometimes it takes a while for a historical site to get respect! This postcard shows Boston's Paul Revere House in historic North Square in the North End of Boston in 1905. At the time it served as Banca Italiana and a cigar emporium by the name of F.A. Goduti & Co.

The North End of Boston had become a "Little Italy" during the previous couple of decades. Its population of approximately 25,000 had shifted from 4% Italian (and 85% Irish) in 1880 to 60% Italian in 1900 to 80% Italian by 1905.

Banca Italiana was one of many banks that served the growing immigrant community. One of its customers might have been Pietro Pastene's food shop, located right around the corner at 69-75 Fulton Street, which would someday became the giant Pastene Corporation, still today one of the country's oldest continuously operated family businesses.

The house had been built in 1680, and owned by Paul Revere and his family from 1770-1800. Then the house was sold out of the family, and became a tenement with ground floor shops.

In 1902, Revere's great-grandson, John P. Reynolds, Jr., purchased the building to protect it from demolition. Over the next few years, enough money was raised by the newly formed Paul Revere Memorial Association to renovate the building, and it opened as a museum in April, 1908. It was one of the first historic homes so preserved and opened to the public in the United States.

Click on the link in the first paragraph of this post to see the house as it looks today; you'll notice that the third story in the 1905 photo has been removed and replaced with the sloping roof.

References

I'm currently reading Stephen Puleo's The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007) which inspired this post.

Popular Music in 1905 - Listen!

2009-07-28T18:31:00.029-04:00

1905 was an exciting time in the world of American popular music, with new inventions and new styles rapidly changing rules and tastes.

The first gramophone, playing 78 rpm records, was introduced by Emile Berliner in 1887. This machine was a big improvement on Edison's wax cylinder phonograph, since it could play almost four minutes of music.

When the sheet music for After the Ball was published in 1892, it sold a million copies, and this phenomenon is often credited as being the beginning of American commercial "popular music". Billboard Magazine started publishing charts of music sales in 1894.

The sheet music for Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag was published in 1899 and become another million-copy seller--the first piece of instrumental music to achieve this status. The Cakewalk, a syncopated couples' dance, and the first black dance to be adopted by white audiences, became wildly popular in 1900.

Emile Berliner founded the record label Victor Talking Machines in 1901, the same year that the first 88-key player piano was built by Melville Clark.

Meanwhile, improvizational brass bands, and ragtime and honky-tonk blues piano players, were establishing themselves in the streets and clubs of New Orleans in the first decade of the century.

American vaudeville was evolving into the American musical revue and the great American musical theatre. George M. Cohan introduced his first Broadway musical in 1901, and in late 1905 he was putting the finishing touches on Forty Five Minutes from Broadway, which would open on January 1, 1906. Flo Ziegfeld would debut his Follies in 1907.

The "barbershop" quartet was just becoming popular; Sweet Adeline was first recorded by a quartet in 1904.

Irving Berlin was a saloon busker in the Bowery in 1905; he would go on to write Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1911.

In 1900, most Americans who were interested in popular music were interested in buying sheet music, and playing/singing at home. By 1910, Americans wanted to dance! In 1905, both trends were alive.

So what were the top charters in 1905? Here are a few you might still remember; all of these were listed in the Billboard top singles of 1905.

Click here to hear a 1906 recording of Billy Murray singing Give My Regards to Broadway, from George M. Cohan's 1904 musical Little Johnny Jones. NOTE: You'll have to click once more when you get to the website; this was the only one of all the songs in this post where I couldn't make the "embed" code work.

Click here to hear a 1905 recording of Arthur Collins singing Nobody, with music by Bert Williams and lyrics by Alex Rogers.

Click here to hear a 1912 recording of Billy Murray singing Erie Canal (Low Bridge, Everybody Down) by Thomas Allen. Around 1905, mule-powered barge traffic had converted to steam power and diesel was about to take over.

Click here to hear a 1906 recording of Billy Murray singing In My Merry Oldsmobile by Gus Edwards and Vincent Bryan.

Click here to hear a 1906 recording of Byron G. Harlan singing Wait 'Til the Sun Shines Nellie with music by Harry Von Tilzer and lyrics by Andrew B. Sterling. (Harlan often recorded and performed with Arthur Collins.)

Illustration Credits and References

Helpful data on the origins of various forms of American music can be found on Piero Scaruffi's website. He's authored a number of books on American music, including A History of Popular Music and A History of Jazz Music.

Information on the history of New Orleans music was found at carnaval.com/no/

Wonderful images from the early years of American music can be found here.

Boston Suffrage Parade - May 2, 1914

2009-07-27T17:39:00.019-04:00

NOTE: This event took place a few years off my target dates, but many of the women who marched in Boston in 1914 were already active in the woman suffrage movement, or other social movements, in 1905. What an amazing day this must have been for all involved!

On Saturday, May 2, 1914, American women from all across the country participated in a well-coordinated set of suffrage parades and meetings. A visit to Washington, DC was planned for the following Saturday, May 9, so that the various groups could present to Congress their petitions in support of a Federal suffrage amendment.

Boston was the location for one of the largest parades (and the first suffrage parade that had ever been held in Massachusetts). Various estimates put the number of marchers at somewhere between 9,000-15,000, and the number of spectators at 200,000-300,000. The crowd had been building all day--pouring into the city on trolleys and trains, carrying blankets and picnic lunches, and camping out on Back Bay doorsteps and on the Common until they took up their places all along the parade route by 4 p.m.

Chief Marshal Frances Curtis led the parade on horseback along with eight mounted aides. The mile-long parade was a sea of white dresses adorned with yellow jonquils, narcissus, paper roses, badges and ribbons. Over 800 policemen had been assigned to keep order at the parade, and streetcars were diverted from the parade route.

At 5 p.m., down Beacon Street from Massachusetts Avenue they came, well-known suffragists and college girls, elaborate floats, 13 bands, two hundred automobiles, and contingents of male supporters. The temperature was in the low sixties, and the weather sunny and breezy; the women marched with a noted seriousness of purpose.

They passed in review before Governor Walsh and Lt. Governor Barry, who stood at attention in top hats and overcoats on the State House on Beacon Hill, under the gleaming gold dome. (Former mayor "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, John F. Kennedy's grandfather, was also present on the State House steps.) They then passed before Mayor and Mrs. Curley who awaited them in front of City Hall.

The parade marchers then looped around the business district, and returned to conclude at the Tremont Temple.

The opening division of the parade included well-known suffragists--both local and national. Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of well-known abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone, and a prominent suffragist in her own right, was one of the leaders.

Local artist and Smith College graduate Blanche Ames, who had worked since 1903 providing beautiful illustrations for her husband's seven-volume study of orchids, marched with the parade committee. (Her husband was Harvard botany professor Oakes Ames who also marched in the parade--but in a different division.) In 1915, Blanche would produce a widely noted series of suffrage cartoons, and the following year, in 1916, she would go on to co-found the Massachusetts Birth Control League.

Thirty ushers marched wearing red and white striped gowns, and blue caps and shoulder capes. Representatives of countries where women already had the vote (or at least partial suffrage) marched in their national costumes; according to the Boston Sunday Globe, the "Finnish and Galician peasants" marched "with their hair unbound and floating free."

The second division included women from 80 Massachusetts cities and towns. The women from Concord and Lexington were accompanied by "Spirit of '76" musicians. Fifty Brookline women rode on horseback. One contingent of women carried a banner that read: "It takes a woman to make a flag."

The third division was headed by the Junior Suffrage League, led by Louis Brandeis' daughter Elizabeth, who would start on the the path to her long and illustrious career in economics and labor law as a Radcliffe student that September. (Her father would be named to the Supreme Court while she was still in college.) Self-supporting women came next, and then the professional women starting with stenographers and business women, then architects and artists, doctors and dentists, lawyers, musicians, nurses, teachers, writers, and actresses. Doctors and lawyers wore caps and gowns.

"Self-supporting women" included Margaret "Maggie" Foley, an outspoken Irish Catholic who'd joined the Hat Trimmers' Union, started organizing women workers in a hat factory, become a well-known labor organizer, and and had started working for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1906. She was known as "The Grand Heckler", and the applause that greeted her appearance, as she stood in the middle of a touring car, holding an immense red rose in her left hand and waving a white scarf with her right, was thunderous. (The red rose was the symbol of the anti-suffragists; she was clearly taunting them!)

Artists marching included sculptor Anne Whitney, whose statue of Sam Adams adorns Statuary Hall at at the Capitol Building in Washington. Anne was 93, and still active in the arts. She had been a well-known abolitionist in the pre-Civil War era, and, like many women abolitionists, had turned her attention to freedom for women after the War. (She would die less than eight months later, leaving $1,000 in her will to Alice Stone Blackwell "for use in the suffrage movement.")

Lawyers included Alice Parker Lesser, who had been admitted to the bar in Massachusetts in 1890--the first year women were allowed entry; click here to read a previous post on what Alice was doing in 1905.

Writers were accompanied by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, George Bernard Shaw's wife.

The fourth division included clubs, unions, and associations, the Massachusetts Men's League for Woman Suffrage, the College Men's Suffrage League (including 500 male Harvard students), college faculty members (women and men) in caps and gowns, and undergraduate women from Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Simmons, Smith, Wellesley, MIT, Tufts, and Boston University. (The last three were coeducational by this time; BU had been the first university in the U.S. to open all of its programs to women.)

The sun set at 6:45 p.m., but still the marchers came; it was past 7 by the time the parade wrapped up. Then many of the marchers headed to the Tremont Temple for sandwiches and a program of speakers and ceremonies.

The write-up in the next day's Boston Sunday Globe, entitled "Women Give Great Parade" was the front-page story. The sub-heads tell it all: "Nearly 12,000 in Striking Appeal for Ballot." "Earnest Marchers Win Favor with Surging Crowds." "Finish at Tremont Temple Rally in Spirit of Exaltation."

Illustration Credits and References

Much of the information in this post comes from the May 3, 1914 front-page story in the Boston Sunday Globe. Photographs accompanied the article but the scan quality was very poor, and I couldn't find other photographs online from the Boston event. I've therefore illustrated with suffrage posters from the era.

The first illustration is a British poster from the Artists' Suffrage League, circa 1914.

The second is an American World War One era poster designed by Evelyn Rumsey Cary, a Buffalo, NY artist.

The third is a poster from a 1917 New York suffrage campaign.

The final illustration is a postcard entitled "Suffragette Madonna" from 1909--it was used by the anti-suffrage folks, who believed (among other things) that woman suffrage would somehow "feminize" men.

Sarah Choate Sears and John Singer Sargent

2009-07-23T17:22:00.019-04:00

Portrait of Sarah Choate Sears by John Singer Sargent, 1889.

I continue to explore women artists; today's post is about Sarah Choate Sears, a wealthy Boston woman, with money on both sides of the family. (On her engagement to Joshua Montgomery Sears at the age of 19 (1877), she received a diamond necklace from him as an engagement gift which had a purported value at the time of $50,000!)

Sarah was a collector and patron of the arts, but also a talented watercolorist and photographer. She had studied with Dennis Miller Bunker at the Cowles Art School, taken private lessons with various Boston artists, and attended the Boston MFA School for several years. She had won prizes for her watercolor portraits at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Portrait of Helen Sears by Sarah Choate Sears, 1895.

She had taken up photography in the 1890s, and used her camera for the same subjects as her watercolor painting--portraits and still lifes. She had produced photo portraits of many Bostonians, including a series of photographs of her daughter, Helen, who had been born in 1889.

Sarah was one of the founders of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston in 1897, and had shown her photographic work in exhibitions there, as well as at the Boston Camera Club. In the early years of the 20th century, her photographs were exhibited in London and Paris, and in 1904 she was invited to be a fellow in Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession group in New York. (Stieglitz himself owned her photo portrait of Julia Ward Howe.) The stage was set for her to establish herself as one of the most outstanding American photographers of the era, but her husband died after a debilitating illness in June of 1905. Having to take over responsibilities for his estate, and with a daughter still at home, she gave up artistic photography (though she continued to produce portraits of family and friends).

Portrait of Helen Sears by Mary Cassatt, 1907.

She and Helen moved to Paris later in 1905. Sarah had been a long-time friend of Mary Cassatt, who gave Sarah a set of pastels (now owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts), and urged her to take up that genre. Sarah did so, and began to create bold, modernist pastels and watercolors of flowers, which she would exhibit well into the 1920s.

Sarah Choate Sears and John Singer Sargent

Sarah Sears had most likely met the painter in Boston in the late 1880s. In 1889, he painted her portrait (shown at the beginning of this post), and in 1890 she returned the favor with the photographic portrait of him shown above.

In 1895 Sargent painted Sarah's daughter, Helen, in a very similar pose to the one Helen had struck in her mother's photographic portrait the same year, shown above. When Sarah sent Sargent a copy of the photo, he replied:

Many thanks for sending me the photographs. The new one of Helen has a wonderfully fine expression and makes me feel like returning to Boston and puffing my umbrella through my portrait. But how can an unfortunate painter hope to rival a photograph by a mother? Absolute truth combined with absolute feeling. [1]

In 1912, Sargent produced a charcoal sketch of the 23-year-old Helen.

References

[1] Letter from John Singer Sargent dated August 7, 1895 and quoted in Erica E. Hirshler's A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940, Boston: MFA Publications, 2001.

Much of the information about Sarah Sears that appears in this post was also provided in the Hirshler book referenced above. I saw the exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2001 which was the book's companion and inspiration and bought the book there--little knowing I would return to this period with such interest 8 years later!!

The Kodak Girl

2009-07-16T19:42:00.015-04:00

In 1888, George Eastman had developed the Kodak camera, designed to be both affordable and easy to use. And in 1893, at the Chicago World's Fair, he had introduced the "Kodak Girl" as the icon of the new camera's ad campaign.[1]

The Kodak Girl was young, pretty, energetic--an independent, outdoorsy single girl. (Eastman purportedly borrowed the name and concept from the popular "Gibson Girl" illustrations.) The two ads that accompany this post were from the 1905 campaign, and show the Kodak Girl(s) traveling in Holland and Japan.

Japan was an area of particular interest in the US in 1905 due to the emergence of Japan as a world power with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. And Boston was no exception! From May 1-4, Isabella Stewart Gardner held a huge Japanese bazaar at Fenway Court, as part of a fundraiser for the Sharon Home for Consumptives. And on June 17, 1905, the closing day of the Country Club’s 24th annual race meeting, Mrs. Gardner “wore a handsome gown of black silk, strapped at the shoulders over a yoke of white lace” and was accompanied by “two Japanese gentlemen” in costume.

Illustration Credits and References

[1] The Kodak Girl image would survive until at least 1972, when Cybill Shepherd modeled for the campaign.

I found the two ad images in Advertising Ephemera Collection - Database #A0160, Emergence of Advertising On-Line Project, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

The Holland ad was drawn by Edward Penfield, and the Japan ad by C. Allan Gilbert.

The quotes describing Mrs. Gardner's wardrobe and companions on June 17th appeared in the Boston Globe on June 18, 1905.

Amy M. Sacker, Artist

2009-07-09T19:28:00.007-04:00

In a recent post, I wrote about the Boston 1905 census data on working women. In this and some future posts, I will focus on specific working women from that year.

My first subject is an artist named Amy M. Sacker. She was born in Boston in 1872 and studied at the School at the Museum of Fine Arts (which was then located in the basement of the Museum, in its Copley Square location).

She won numerous prizes for her work at the School, and upon graduation began teaching decorative design at the Cowles Art School. When that school closed in 1900, Amy put plans in place to found her own school (The Miss Amy M. Sacker School of Design and Interior Decoration) the following year. She remained affiliated with the school for another 40 years. One measure of her school's appeal is the huge number of society weddings, announced in the pages of The New York Times and other newspapers, that listed the bride as a graduate of Sacker!

When the Society of Arts and Crafts was founded in Boston, Amy showed her book covers, bookplates, and illustrations at their first exhibit in 1897 (what is believed to be the first professional crafts exhibit in the U.S.). She remained affiliated with the SAC throughout her career. (The SAC is still active to this day, with a gallery on Newbury Street in Boston.)

Amy was a prolific book cover designer in the golden age of book cover design--the late 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century (after which paper jackets largely superseded the cloth covered bindings as a design element). She designed thousands of book covers during her career, and in 1905 she was designing for Little, Brown and L.C. Page in Boston (though she would move to Houghton Mifflin in 1907). Among her 1905 designs are the book covers shown throughout this post. Amy executed the popular floral designs of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as heraldic designs, but she was one of the first to put figurative designs on book covers, as in two of these examples.

In 1905, her studio/school were located at 8 Beacon Street in Boston.

In addition to her school, and her book design work, she was also teaching at Simmons College in Boston by 1911, traveling to Europe to study, and creating pieces for exhibits.

She exhibited her work throughout her life; this photo shows her at an exhibit of her portrait work in 1949, when she was 77 years old!
Illustration Credits and References

All of the illustrations in this post, and much of the information about Amy Sacker, are courtesy of Mark Schumacher's terrific treasure trove on the website of the library of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, which includes biographical information researched by Anne O'Donnell.

Amy Sacker's designed The Breath of the Gods and Under the Lilacs for Little Brown; and The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation for L. C. Page.

Postscript: Bell and Keller

2009-07-08T18:59:00.004-04:00

In a previous post I wrote of a letter from Alexander Graham Bell to Helen Keller in April, 1905. I recently discovered a copy of the actual letter in the Library of Congress collection of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, and wanted to share it with you!

The Diary: July 4, 1905

2009-07-04T14:41:00.005-04:00

Cynthia had returned from Boston to Cape Cod on June 17 to get the house ready for her parents (who were still at sea). She'd had a busy few weeks unpacking, airing out the house, washing and ironing curtains, and baking beans. There had been a graduation to attend on June 30, and she'd stayed up all night talking to Ben after the reception.

Here is her entry for July 4th, which sounds just like an entry that could have been made today! (Long Pond is the largest pond on the Cape, covering over 740 acres and split between the towns of Brewster and Harwich.)

Went up to Long Pond on picnic. Stayed and saw fireworks at night.

On July 5th, she would make the following entry:

Ben very cool to me now.

Not sure what happened between the pre-dawn hours of July 1, and four days later....

Illustration Credits and References

Photo courtesy of the Long Pond Watershed Association website.

Groton Redux

2009-06-22T17:32:00.000-04:00

In exploring the history of The Groton School in a recent post, I discovered that there were two well-documented punishments that the 6th form boys (the seniors) would administer to younger boys when they were considered to have broken the Groton code. These punishments were not officially sanctioned by Rector Peabody, but certainly allowed to go on without interference from him or the faculty.

One of these was called "boot boxing", where the offender was forced into his boot locker (a short locker for outdoor boots), and made to stay there, doubled up, for what might be hours.

The second was called "pumping". The miscreant was bent back over the edge of a trough in the laboratory, face up, and water was poured in his face from an open spigot to simulate drowning. There was a 10-second limit to the torture, but it could be conducted more than once on any given occasion.

Little Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., a few weeks before his father was inaugurated as Vice-President, was pumped for being “fresh and swell-headed.” Half-drowned but still spouting defiance after two immersions, he escaped being put under for a third time: the boys admired his pluck. Malcolm Peabody, the rector’s own son, was pumped because the older boys didn’t like his “tone.”[1]

These punishments were certainly still occurring in 1905, and for some years after that. No wonder waterboarding seems like a fine technique to men from the "old families". It was part of their prep school experience. . . .

Illustration Credits and References

The photo of the Roosevelt family was taken in 1903; young Teddy (several years after his "pumping") is standing just behind his father. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-113665.

[1]Kintrea, Frank. "'Old Peabo' and the School." American Heritage Magazine. 31.6 (1980).

The Groton School and the Foreign Policy of FDR and Truman

2009-06-17T12:06:00.012-04:00

Early in 1905, Franklin Roosevelt took time away from his law studies at Columbia to pose for this photograph in Rhinebeck, New York. He and Eleanor were married on March 17 (Uncle Ted came up from DC to give the bride away) and after the school year was over the young couple spent the summer honeymooning in Europe. At the same time, many of the teenage boys who would later become instrumental in the formation and execution of American foreign policy during World War Two and its aftermath were studying at The Groton School, 40 miles west of Boston.

FDR was the old man of the group--23 by the date of his wedding. He'd graduated from Harvard in 1904, and Groton in 1900.

Francis Biddle (a senior at Groton in the spring of 1905, and a freshman at Harvard that fall) would go on to become FDR's wartime Attorney General (1941-1945) and was later appointed by Truman to serve as a judge at the Nuremberg Trials.

Dean Acheson arrived at Groton in the fall of 1905 as a twelve-year-old; he would go on to serve as Secretary of State under Truman from 1949-1953. He played a central role in the creation of many important institutions, including Lend Lease, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and the early organizations that later became the European Union and the World Trade Organization. (HIs Groton claim to fame was finishing last in his class; Groton Rector and Headmaster Endicott Peabody repeatedly criticized Acheson's school performance. Purportedly, Peabody told Acheson's mother that he could not make a "Groton boy" out of her son, and Mrs. Acheson replied, "Dr. Peabody, I didn't send Dean here to have you make a 'Groton boy' out of him. I sent him here to be educated. . . . I will leave him here as long as I think you can succeed, though you give me considerable doubt.")

Sumner Welles was a year ahead of Acheson at Groton, where Eleanor Roosevelt's brother Hall was his roommate. He would take a break from his studies in March of '05 to travel to NYC and carry Eleanor's train at her wedding; Endicott Peabody was the minister at that happy occasion. Welles would become a foreign policy advisor to FDR and serve as under secretary of state from 1937-1943.

Averell Harriman was a year ahead of Welles. He would serve as a special envoy to Europe under FDR, and as Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1943-1946. He would continue to serve future presidents (JFK and LBJ) including a stint as the chief US negotiator at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam. (Harriman is famous at Groton for having, at the age of 13, communicated to his father, rail magnate E.H. Harriman, that Endicott Peabody "would be an awful bully if he weren't such a terrible Christian.")

It's hard not to think that something was in the air in the hills of Massachusetts in those first years of the new century that called all of those young men to public service. "If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land," said Rector Peabody, "it won't be because they have not been urged." And urge he did. Franklin Roosevelt said of Peabody, "As long as I live his influence will mean more to me than that of any other people next to my father and mother." Peabody would remain Headmaster at Groton until 1940, and live to see Roosevelt win all four presidential elections.

Illustration Credits and References

The photo at the top of this post is from the FDR Presidential Library and Museum.

The story about Endicott Peabody and Mrs. Acheson is reported in a number of sources; I have used the version in James Chace's 1998 book, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World.

The communication from Averell Harriman to his father is quoted in Rudy Abramson's 1992 book Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman 1891-1986.

Working Women, Part 2

2009-06-14T11:00:00.001-04:00

The employment of Boston women in 1905 was the subject of a recent post, with an emphasis on the broad range of work available to them. There were, however, a number of job categories which included NO women employees, and I've aggregated them below.

Government Mandate

There were obviously no women soldiers, sailors, or marines!

Building Trades

These jobs formed the largest block of professions not available to women in 1905. They included contractors, carpenters, plasterers, paperhangers, roofers, electricians, plumbers, copper workers, and masons. There were six brave women who listed their profession as painter/glazier/varnisher, and 26 women in miscellaneous woodworking jobs (though these could have been artisans rather than builders).

Work Involving Horses

Women rode or drove horses in 1905, but apparently work involving horses was not considered appropriate. There were no women grooms, stable workers, livery stable keepers, or harness and saddle makers/repairers.

Seafaring Work

While women went to sea in this era with their husbands (Cynthia's mother was often at sea with Cynthia's captain-father), and went fishing privately (or canoeing with their boyfriends), they did not work in sea-related jobs. So there were no women fishermen (or oystermen!), boatmen, steamship employees, or vessel builders/repairers. Certainly, the seafaring jobs were subject to the same cultural restraints as military work--with resistance from the men themselves as well as from their wives.

Alcohol-Related Work

Women were apparently too pure and sensitive to work in alchohol-related professions. So there were no women brewers/maltsters or bartenders. (A number of women, however, were restaurant and saloon-keepers--apparently that was OK as long as you didn't get behind the bar!)

Other Work Considered Too Dangerous, Dirty, or Physical for Women

In this category I've included heavy duty manufacturing (carriage and wagon factory workers and steam boiler makers), transportation/telecommunications work (railway engineers, street railway employees, telegraph/telephone linemen, wheelwrights), and metal and machine workers (blacksmiths, gunsmiths, locksmiths, bellhangers, machinists, and mechanics). There were no women "porters and helpers (in stores, etc.)", since presumably this involved heavy lifting. There were also no women butchers or coopers (barrel makers).

Cultural Barriers

There were no women working as engineers and surveyors or as model and pattern makers (though there were a handful of women architects, designers, and draughtsmen). This work may have seemed more suited to the male "logical" mind, and certainly there would have been a barrier to the engineering work done as part of the building trades. It's probably also true that relatively few women were prepared mathematically for professions like these (a problem that unfortunately still persists in some forms today).

There were no women piano tuners. This seems surprising because of the large number of women working as musicians and music teachers.

A Modern Footnote

Some of the employment areas discussed above are still the most difficult for women to enter. Only 10-12% of engineers in the US are women. Only 3.5% of telephone linemen in Canada are women (couldn't find a US statistic, but I assume it's comparable). In the building trades, only 3% of jobs are held by women.

Illustration Credits and References

Census data from Census of the the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1905. Volume 2: Occupations and Defective Social and Physical Conditions.

The photographs were all taken in greater Chicago in 1905, and are from the Chicago Daily News Negative Collection. They are part of a wonderful collection of Chicago Daily News photographs that are accessible on the Library of Congress American Memory website. I'm assuming there are comparable Boston area photos--if you're aware of any, please let me know!

FIrst photo: Mrs. F. W. Hedgeland driving a car down a neighborhood street in Chicago with two women in the backseat. Credit: SDN-003345, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Second photo: Women on horses at the Onwentsia Horse Show in Lake Forest, Illinois. Credit: DN-0002809, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Third photo: Full-length portrait of Mrs. E. B. Bartholomew, Michigan, fly fisher, demonstrating casting in a park, in Chicago. Credit: SDN-003372, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Fourth photo: Club women standing in a train station in Chicago. Credit: DN-0002306, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts - John Singer Sargent

2009-06-12T14:57:00.007-04:00

In May, 1905, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired John Singer Sargent's painting, An Artist in His Studio. The work had been painted the year before in a hotel room in the Italian Alps occupied by Sargent's friend Ambrogio Raffele. Raffele was working on a bucolic landscape in this makeshift "studio". Due to the cramped quarters, Raffele has propped his work-in-progress on the bed and desk, in lieu of an easel. And imagine that Sargent is also in this same small space with his paints and easel--capturing Raffele at work.

This painting was the first non-portrait of Sargent's to be purchased by an American museum. The MFA paid $1,039.53 for it! It would be the first of many, many landscapes and other non-portraits of Sargent's purchased by the Museum. If you're in Boston, you can view it in the Susan Morse Hilles Gallery of American Impressionism.

Illustration Credits and References

The image of the painting, as well as the information on the MFA's purchase, courtesy of the John Singer Sargent Gallery website and the MFA website.

Working Women, Part 1

2009-06-06T12:22:00.024-04:00

Women were employed in large numbers in Boston in 1905. Mas-sachusetts state census data from that year indicates that 41% of adult women were working, and in many categories of employment--some surprising, some not.

Nearly 40% of working women worked in "Domestic and Personal Service" (and that of course does not count all the women who were "not gainfully employed" as housewives!) It's important to note that this category includes not only household servants, but also nurses, midwives, waiters, launderers, office cleaners, and boarding house keepers--all common women's work of the era.

Another 28% worked in "Manufacturing and Mechanical Pursuits". Women formed the vast majority of sewing machine operators--making everything from men's shirts to ladies' dresses. They were also in the majority in the manufacture of clothing items (buttons, collars, cuffs, hosiery, lace, silk, and ladies' hats) and various household products (brooms and brushes, carpets, paper, paper boxes, books, candy, and canned meats and fruits.)

25% were employed in the "Trade and Transportation" category. This included women working throughout Boston's offices. Women constituted 89% of stenographers and typewriters, 71% of telephone and telegraph operators, 60% of bookkeepers and accountants, 20% of messengers and errand/office boys (!), 18% of clerks and copyists, and even 4% of "officials of banks and companies".

And 7% were employed in "Professional Service" jobs, which included such disparate professions as actress, clergy, doctor, journalist, lawyer, "literary or scientific person", musician, and teacher. Nearly 20% of Boston's doctors were women in 1905, as well as 80% of the city's teachers and professors.

Only a handful of women worked in the two remaining categories. 98 Boston women were engaged in "Agricultural Pursuits", mostly as farm laborers, and 310 women worked as apprentices, primarily in textiles.

Illustration Credits and References

Census data from Census of the the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1905. Volume 2: Occupations and Defective Social and Physical Conditions.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken in the stenographers' room at Leland & Faulconer Manufacturing in Detroit, a company that produced automobile engines and merged with Cadillac in 1905 (shortly after this picture was taken). Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The photograph of the nurse is a Chicago Daily News photograph from 1905. Credit: DN-0002636, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.

The two office photographs were taken at National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio by American landscape photographer WIlliam Henry Jackson in 1902. The first is a scene in the Indicator Department and the second from the Typewriting Department. Note the design of the workspaces, which featured lots of natural lighting and task lighting. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

NOTE: NCR was founded in 1884, manufacturing the first mechanical cash registers. In 1906, they would introduce the first electric model. NCR still makes cash registers--among other things--only now they take the form of electronic point of sale systems, ATM machines, and check scanners!

"The Game": Harvard vs. Yale

2009-06-01T16:58:00.011-04:00

One of the many Boston-area sports highlights that have survived from 1905 to the present day is the annual football game between Harvard and Yale. That year, "The Game" took place at the Harvard Stadium which was a spanking new facility--designed by the well-known architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, and just completed in 1903. (Today, a venerable ivy-covered horseshoe, it is the nation's oldest stadium, and a National Historic Landmark.) The photo above was taken on November 25, 1905, when 43,000 spectators jammed the stands. (Click on the photo to enlarge.)

During its first 25 years in the game, Yale had lost only 10 times. Harvard had smarted under this dominance, especially after losing to Yale 12-0 in the 1904 game. So in 1905, Harvard hired WIlliam R. Reid to coach the team, and to establish a plan and a process for improving Harvard football so that Harvard could have a good shot at beating Yale--not just in 1905 but every year thereafter.

Bill Reid had played for the Harvard team during his freshman and sophomore years, and had led Harvard to victory over Yale in 1898, scoring two touchdowns. And the last time Harvard had beaten Yale had been when Reid coached the team (uncompensated) during the 1901 season while he was studying for a master of arts degree at the college.

Not surprisingly, Harvard saw Reid as the key to consistent victories over Yale, and hired the California prep school teacher in the spring of 1905 for what the New York Times called a "princely salary"--he was paid more than any other professor and in fact his salary approached that of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot.

Reid set about on a mission, which included a couple of innovations he introduced to the game of football--the development of the hand-off and the idea of a playbook. Reid wrote in his 1905 diary that "next year and hereafter it would be a good scheme . . . after the offense is planned . . . to start off the season with such a book".

Unfortunately, the Harvard team lost to Yale in 1905 by a score of 6-0, its fourth shut-out loss in a row. Controversy erupted during the game when Harvard player Francis Burr was smashed in the face by Yale tackler Jack Quill.

1905 was a tough year in U.S. football--by the end of the season three college players had been killed due to the violence of the game (mass formations and gang tackling were commonplace), and scores more seriously injured. During October, US President Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard '80) had called together the coaches of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to help figure out a way to decrease the body count. "Brutality and foul play should receive the same summary punishment given to a man who cheats at cards," opined Roosevelt.

And the Harvard Overseers agreed--threatening to abolish football at the school. Reid was named to head up a committee at Harvard which drafted 19 rules to improve the safety of the game. In December, a New York meeting of 68 football-playing colleges was convened, and the group determined to form a new rules committee. Early in January, 1906, the new rules committee was merged with the old rules committee, and Reid became secretary of the new group. In putting forth the Harvard-developed rules, Reid announced: "Either these 19 rules go through or there will be no more football at Harvard; and if Harvard throws out the game, many other colleges will follow Harvard's lead." Harvard had the clout to make that threat, the rules were adopted, and the Harvard Overseers agreed to let football continue.

Among the new rules drafted by Reid and adopted by the new committee were those changing the first-down yardage from 5 to 10 yards, creating a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage, and permitting the forward pass. In addition, the participants voted to get together annually to consider football issues. Thus emerged the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the body which still governs collegiate sports today. (It was originally constituted as the International Athletic Association of the U.S., and would be renamed the NCAA in 1910.)

Reid retired from college coaching at the end of the 1906 season (with a 30-3-1 record, but two 6-0 losses to Yale). But he is credited as the man who saved Harvard football and helped invent the modern game, and in 1970 he was ushered into the Football Hall of Fame for his achievements. Bill Reid died at the age of 97 in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Illustration Credits and References

Photograph of the 1905 Harvard Yale game courtesy of The Library of Congress.

Photograph of the game program from 1905 courtesy of the Antique Athlete website.

Grinold, Jack. "Review of Big-Time Football at Harvard, 1905: The Diary of Coach Bill Reid by Ronald A. Smith", The New England Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 4, (Dec., 1994), pp. 679-682.

Powers, John. "Landmark Celebration After 100 Years: Harvard Stadium Still Standing the Test of Time." Boston Globe. Boston, Mass.: Nov 14, 2003. pg. E.1

Smith, Ronald A., "Harvard and Columbia and a Reconsideration of the 1905-06 Football Crisis", Journal of Sport History, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Winter, 1981).

"Princely Salary to Coach: Harvard Will Give 'Bill' Reid $3,500 a Year for Football", New York Times, February 24, 1905.

Norumbega Park

2009-02-09T12:35:00.024-05:00

Recently I visited an exhibit at the Newton MA History Museum entitled "Romance and Recreation by the River".

Norumbega was an incredible amusement park in Newton that opened in June, 1897, and it was a popular destination for Boston area families and young people in 1905. Each year from April to October more than a half million people visited the park.

According to the late Robert Pollock, a long-time resident of Newton who used to work on the midway at Norumbega:

The park featured various types of recreation: a merry-go-round, canoes, huge wooden swings, free band concerts, extensive picnic grounds, and the largest zoo in New England. In addition, the park had a superlative restaurant, a penny arcade, an electric fountain with brightly-colored spotlights playing over great geysers of water, and a vaudeville theatre. The 15-cent round trip fare from Lake Street included admission to the park, and the ride out Commonwealth Avenue on the open trolleys became very popular with people from throughout the greater Boston area. Electricity for Norumbega's lighting, fountain, and carousel was provided by the same 600 volts of direct current used to power the trolleys.

As happened with areas along train and trolley lines in other parts of the country at about the same time, the park had been built by the street railway company to attract more business to the trolley line, and it was extremely successful.

In a previous post, I wrote about the "problem" of kissing in canoes on the river at Norumbega, which came to a head during the summer of 1905. It was said that there were a million dollars worth of kisses every weekend on the river (based on the possibility of a $20 fine)! And the song Down by The Riverside, which garnered new lyrics in 1902, was inspired by the activities along the river. (I also remember a popular recording of this song from the 1950s. The original music and refrain were, of course, based on an old Negro spiritual.)[1]

The theatre at Norumbega had been open air until 1904, when a roof was added. Vaudeville acts were featured twice a day, six days a week, with religious and inspirational music on Sundays.

There was also a "Women's Cottage" at the park, offering cots, cribs, sofas, and changing tables to facilitate the ability of women to visit the park with their children.

The park suffered a slow decline through the 1930s and 1940s. Trolley service to the park ended in 1930. The ferris wheel was damaged by the famous 1938 hurricane, and never reopened. In 1941, all the animals (except the bears) were sold off. And in 1965-1966, three fires destroyed the Totem Pole Ballroom, the restaurant, and the boat house.

Interestingly enough, visiting this exhibit reminded me that my Newton college had held a dance at the Totem Pole that I attended--probably in the spring of 1965. I wasn't paying enough attention to local news to learn that Norumbega received its final death blow in November, 1965, during my senior year.

Illustration Credits and References

[1] The lyrics of the popular song as I knew it in the 50s are shown below. Apparently there is some confusion about how much of these lyrics were part of the 1902 version:

I met my little bright-eyed doll

Down by the riverside (3x)

I met my little bright-eyed doll

Down by the riverside

I asked her for a little kiss

Down by the riverside (3x)

I asked her for a little kiss

Down by the riverside

She said "Have patience little man

I'm sure you'll understand

I hardly know your name"

I said "If I can have my way

Maybe some sweet day

My name and yours will be the same"

I wed that little bright-eyed doll

Down by the riverside (3x)

Well I wed that little bright-eyed doll

Down by the riverside

The color photos of sheet music and posters at the beginning of this post were taken at the Newton History Museum exhibit. The first illustration is from a 1905 poster. You can see cars running along the road which crosses the illustration left to right; trolleys are running down the median. The river runs to the left of the road that starts at the bottom and heads towards the top of the image. The boathouse is at the lower left.

The Diary: January 19, 1905

2009-01-19T11:09:00.007-05:00

Cynthia was spending the Christmas holidays in her family home in Harwich. Cynthia's father, a sea captain, had been quite ill; the previous week, on January 12, Cynthia had written in her diary that he had been sick "all night and day"; she'd had to get up and go out in a snowstorm before breakfast to fetch the doctor.

January 19 appears to have been a significant day in the Cynthia-Ben relationship: she's noted "Remember" with asterisks at the top of the entry and she writes that she told Ben something, but the handwriting is illegible. The rest of the entry reads:

Letter from Cora and Celia. Papa is better now. Annie came over. Drove Maud to Chatham and came back to dance at Harwich Port. Had a time putting up the horse.

Illustration Credits and References

This image of a 1903 John Bratton song, My Cosey Corner Girl, is courtesy of the Heftone website. On January 4, Cynthia's friend Maud had arrived at the house with papers and this piece of sheet music--presumably for them to practice and learn.

Cole Porter in Worcester

2009-01-05T15:58:00.009-05:00

Contrary to popular opinion, Cole Porter didn't actually spring fully-formed from his Yale education, but spent the four years before that getting ready at Worcester Academy, a Massachusetts prep school. He arrived on campus in the fall of 1905 from Indiana as a fourteen-year-old freshman, moving into the dorm room that his mother had thoughtfully arranged to have furnished with an upright piano and oriental rugs!

While he was small, and not athletically inclined, he was, by all accounts, a popular student, attracting friends at the Academy with his winning personality and his often comic and risque piano compositions and performances. According to the Worcester Academy website, he graduated in 1909 second in his class, and was valedictorian, class historian, and author of the Class of 1909 Song, which, unfortunately has not survived.

Illustration Credits and References

Photograph courtesy of the Worcester Academy website.

The French Cable Station

2008-11-25T10:48:00.009-05:00

On November 24, 1959, the French Cable Station in Orleans, Massachusetts closed after sending the following message: "Have a happy Thanksgiving. Station closed."

The cable from France to North Eastham, via Newfoundland, had been laid in 1879, and the station then moved to Orleans in 1891. In 1898, a 3,200 mile direct cable ("Le Direct") from France to Orleans was installed. So by 1905, when the photo shown in the above postcard was taken, the French Cable Station was already a fixture on the Cape Cod scene. It later transmitted the news that Lindbergh had landed in Paris in 1927, and that the Germans had taken Paris in 1940. Today it serves as The French Cable Station Museum.

An 1892 Boston Globe article describes the operation of the station:

A good cable operator can keep up a steady pace of 25 words a minute, although of course on occasion and by spurts this rate is often exceeded; yet an operator who can do his 25 a minute is a skilled hand.

The French cable, after plunging into the Atlantic from the Cape Cod shore, makes straight off to sea for the island of St. Pierre, where there is another station, where the messages are repeated to Brest, on the French coast. The fact of the repetition, however, causes no delay worth consideration. . . .

Supposing operators at both ends are sending messages at the rate of 25 words per minute, that is to say, 50 words a minute both ways, each cable would have an hourly capacity of 3000 words, or 30,000 words per hour for the entire 10 - 72,000 for the entire 24 [hours] of each.

When it is understood that all these cables are kept pretty busy night and day, it will be possible to appreciate in a measure what the telegraphic communication between the United States and Europe has grown to be.

Illustration Credits and References

This article from Cape Cod Today describes the history of the station.

Wash Day

2008-10-14T09:34:00.005-04:00

Just found this photo on Shorpy: History in HD. According to "Shorpy", it's a Currier Photo taken in a laundry circa 1905, possibly in Boston.

The Shorpy site contains an interesting discussion about what's on the ceiling in the photo. I also notice that the woman to the right is standing on a raised wooden platform--probably because the wringing device she's operating (or the process of getting wet laundry out of the sink into the wringing area) generates spilled water on the floor--this might keep her from standing in water, or slipping. Or maybe it just makes her taller?

Martin Lomasney

2008-08-31T11:05:00.008-04:00

Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.

--Martin Lomasney

In 1905, the powerful boss of Boston's West End, Ward 8, was a man named Martin Lomasney. A native Bostonian, born in 1859 of Irish parents, Lomasney was known in the city as "The Mahatma".

In her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes him through the eyes of John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, John F. Kennedy's grandfather:

Fitzgerald described this first meeting in vivid detail, recalling the powerful presence Lomasney projected as he sat in his chair surrounded by a half-dozen loyal aides. A thickset, well-muscled man whose most outstanding feature was a hard rocklike jaw that made him a cartoonist's friend, Lomasney was a bachelor whose entire life was given to the building of his political machine, the Hendricks Club. He lived a simple, low-key life, renting a small apartment and wearing the same old battered straw hat year round, but to the people of the West End he was a god. Arriving early each morning at his headquarters, Lomasney worked 365 days a year, caring for "his" people in all phases of their lives.

Lomasney had supported Fitzgerald in his successful campaigns for Massachusetts state senate in 1892 and Congress in 1894. But when Fitzgerald sought the position of Mayor of Boston in 1905, Lomasney supported another Democrat, Ned Donovan, in the primary. Fitzgerald beat Donovan for the Democratic nomination, and all the ward bosses, except Lomasney, threw their support behind him in the election. Lomasney announced that he wouldn't support Fitzgerald, and "his" people voted for Frothingham, the Republican candidate. (It was the first time in years that Ward 8 had voted for a Republican candidate.)

In spite of the loss of Lomasney's support, Fitzgerald was indeed elected Mayor, a position he would assume on January 1, 1906.

But the story I most love about Lomasney, and the rollicking world of Boston Irish Democratic politics, happened a few years earlier, in 1898.

As told by James J. Connolly in The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925, Lomasney was battling with the Board of Strategy over a seat in the State Senate that represented the West End, along with the North End and part of East Boston. Lomasney backed Daniel Rourke, one of his Ward 8 supporters, for the seat, while his opponents promoted the candidacy of William J. Donovan of East Boston. Donovan had received more votes in the caucuses, but Lomasney controlled the nominating convention (which made the formal choice), and hatched a scheme to try and deliver the nomination for his candidate.

With nominations due at the Massachusetts State House in downtown Boston at 5 P.M. on October 20, Lomasney scheduled the convention for 4:30 of the same afternoon and announced that it would be held across Boston Harbor, in an East Boston hotel. SInce ordinary means of transportation from East Boston to downtown required forty minutes, it was widely suspected that Lomasney planned to use a ferry or another boat to deliver the nomination papers to the State House before the deadline. Donovan's supporters . . . secretly booked all the available rooms in the hotel and arranged to have men loyal to the Quincy administration manning the ferries running to downtown so they could prevent a Lomasney messenger from reaching the State House.

The result was a competition between the two factions to claim the nomination that involved parliamentary maneuvering as well as races on foot, bicycle, and boat. Rourke's delegates, led by Lomasney, arrived at the hotel late on the afternoon of October 20, where they assembled in a room Lomasney had surreptitiously booked several weeks earlier. After tricking Donovan backers into leaving the room, they quickly called the convention to order and nominated Rourke. Not to be outdone, Donovan's delegates held a separate convention across the hall and selected their own man. A race to deliver the nominations ensued. Lomasney dispatched a decoy messenger on a city-run ferry, which was soon stranded in the middle of Boston Harbor, purportedly with engine trouble. He then sent a sprinter--a Boston College football star--to a private boat that sped across the harbor. From there, a well-known local bicycle racer pedaled the nomination to the State House, arriving at 4:49 P.M. In the meantime, Donovan's papers were rushed downtown on a second ferry and handed off to another bicyclist. But his bicycle chain broke, and he arrived three minutes after Lomasney's messenger. . . . Lomasney's forces claimed victory.

Unfortunately for Lomasney and Rourke, the Ballot Law Commission eventually ruled Donovan the nominee.

Lomasney would go on to be a powerful force in Boston politics until his death in 1933. And if you come down Causeway Street (where Lomasney's headquarters were), pass North Station, and bear right, you'll find yourself on Lomasney Way for a block or so. Tip your hat to Martin as you go by--they don't make 'em like that any more!

Illustration Credits and References

The photo at the top of this post is of North Station on Causeway Street in Boston, taken in the 1890s. It is from the Library of Congress collection.

Eleonora Randolph Sears

2008-08-09T10:08:00.030-04:00

By night (and on selected afternoons), Eleonora Sears was a beautiful and popular young society woman in Boston (and New York), frequently mentioned in the "Table Gossip" column in the 1905 Boston Sunday Globe.

But by day she was a talented, energetic, and daring athlete, playing golf, swimming, riding horses, walking great distances, and winning tennis singles, doubles, and mixed doubles championships in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

Her first appearance in "Table Gossip" in 1905, on January 1, noted her presence at a dinner dance in New York over the Christmas holidays, celebrating the debut of President Roosevelt's niece, Corinne Douglas Robinson. She sat at a table presided over by Miss Eleanor Roosevelt (who would go on to marry Franklin later that year), and, according to the Globe, Miss Sears was "one of the most attractive girls" there.

Eleo had been born in 1881 into a well-to-do Boston family: Thomas Jefferson was her great-great-grandfather and her father was a shipping and real estate tycoon. The Sears lived in a townhouse at 122 Beacon Street, and they were a tennis family. According to the website of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, her father, Frederick Sears, was one of the first to play tennis in the U.S. in 1874, and her uncle, Richard Dudley Sears, was the original U.S. champion (winning the first US open in 1881 and every year thereafter through 1887).

Later in 1905, on a rainy Monday in early June, Eleonora wore white dotted French muslin over white silk and a white hat with pale blue plumes, and carried daisies as a member of the wedding party at the union of Grace Dabney and Robert Wrenn at Nahant.

On August 13, 1905, the Globe reported that she was deferring her visit to Newport as she is “having a very good time in riding, driving, swimming, and tennis with her own friends on the North Shore.” But by August 15, she was playing both singles and doubles at a lawn tennis tournament on the Casino Courts in Newport arranged by Mrs. John Jacob Astor and others. (Mrs. Astor would be divorced from her husband within five years, and therefore would not accompany him on his fatal Titanic journey in 1912.)

By the end of 1905 she was planning a visit to her friend Alice Roosevelt at the White House, and then expected to be off to Europe in early 1906 to visit friends in London.

The fact that Eleo was on full duty in society, attending the weddings, balls, debuts, and other events that were considered de rigeur for a woman of her day, seemed to give her the license to do what she wanted the rest of the time. She was one of the first women in Boston to learn to drive a car, and was frequently seen driving fast and skillfully around the city. (A 1908 Boston Evening Record tidbit notes that Eleonora Sears and Marie Lee had both "been seen driving through the congested parts of the city with the coolness of experts." Apparently there was some heated discussion among their friends about which of the two was the better driver, and "the champions of Miss Lee wanted to arrange a competition. . . . [T]here may be some wild driving through the city by two very good-looking lovers of the motor shortly.")

Sometime in 1905 or 1906, Eleonora started "being seen with" the young Harold Vanderbilt, heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, who shared many of Eleo's sporting proclivities. (He would go on to take the America's Cup three times in the 1930s.) They denied their engagement for some years (though Eleo's mother announced a "trial engagement" in 1911), and eventually drifted apart.

Eleo would go on to an incredible career as a sportswoman--the first great multi-sport woman of the 20th century. In 1910, when most of her accomplishments were still to come, she was proclaimed in a magazine article as "the best all-around athlete in American society." She would win 240 trophies in a variety of sports during her career.

Eleo continued to play tennis, winning the US women's doubles title with Hazel Hotckhiss Wightman in 1911 and 1915, and again with Molla Bjurstedt in 1916 and 1917. She was a finalist for the women's singles title in 1912, won mixed doubles with Willis Davis in 1916, and would be inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1968, shortly after her death.

She also continued to walk! She frequently walked from Boston to Providence, with her best time coming in 1926, when she walked the 47-mile trip in 9 hours and 53 minutes. (My father, who was born in 1920, recalls seeing motion picture images of this walk of Eleonora's on a primitive movie player he had as a child.) During a visit to France she walked 42.5 miles from Fontainebleu to the Ritz Bar in Paris in eight and half hours. She once walked the 73 miles from Newport to Boston in 17 hours.

She continued to swim--a 1908 Globe article reported that she would be “glad to accept the swimming race challenge” of Miss Vera Gilbert, the belle of New York’s 400. She was the first (not just first woman) to swim the four and half miles from Bailey's Beach to First Beach in Newport.

She bred and trained show horses for most of her adult life--and rode horses until she died in 1968. She took up polo (a favorite sport of her male society contemporaries), shockingly riding her horse astride. She was the first woman known to have worn trousers for sporting purposes when in 1909 she appeared on the polo ground of the Burlingame (CA) Country Club in breeches and a cutaway coat and asked to be allowed to participate in a match. She was promptly ordered to leave the field. In 1912, when she was seen frequently around Burlingame in her riding breeches (only on "occasions when I had just returned from riding" she claimed), the "Burlingame Mothers' Club" passed a resolution against her behavior. (While this resolution was posted all around town, Eleonora later found out there was no such organization.) Staying the course, she became the first woman to ride astride at the National Horse Show, in 1915.

She started playing squash in 1918, and in 1928 helped to found the US Women's Squash Racquets Association. She was its first singles champion that same year (at the age of 46), later served as its president, and was captain of the US national team.

She also would participate in baseball, field hockey, and auto racing. She would pilot planes, skipper yachts, and race power boats.

And she would continue to play her role in society. In 1924, when he spent a packed day in Boston hunting by day at Myopia, and dancing by night with the debutantes, Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales (although 13 years her junior) was said to be so charmed by her that he spent much of the evening as her dancing partner. (Edward would of course go on to marry Wallis Simpson, and abdicate the British throne.)

Another male admirer wrote a letter to Time magazine, published on February 22, 1963, which sums up Eleo's dual life:

Sir: I am amazed by the amount of publicity given to the announcement that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and some others managed to walk 50 miles. In December 1925, Miss Eleonora Sears walked from Providence to Boston, a distance of 47.8 miles, in 10 hrs. 20 min.

I know because I walked with her. Miss Sears entertained me for dinner that evening, and I took her to the theater. Miss Sears knows her age better than I do, but she was then in her 40s at least, and could probably outwalk the New Frontiersmen today.

ALBERT P. HINCKLEY, Orlean, Va.

Nothing like a brisk 10 hour walk to get you warmed up for an evening of dining and theatre. Way to go, girl!

Illustration Credits and References

The painting of the young Eleonora (entitled Young Girl in Rose (or Portrait of Eleonora Randoph Sears)) was painted by John White Alexander in 1895 when Eleonora was 13; the image appears on the Art Renewal Center website.

The auto is a current photograph of a 1914 Rolls Royce that was owned and driven by Eleonora (presumably when it was new!)

The photograph of Eleonora with her racquet appears on the Tennis Hall of Fame website.

The information about Eleonora was culled from numerous sources including the Boston Daily Globe, several other regional US newspapers, the Tennis Hall of Fame website, the Hickok Sports website, and many other websites devoted to women and sports.

The Longfellow Bridge

2008-08-04T12:54:00.012-04:00

Today's post was prompted by an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about the repairs needed on the 100 plus-year-old Longfellow Bridge.

The bridge (known as the West Boston Bridge until 1927) was designed by the architect Edmund M. Wheelwright, a Boston native and Harvard graduate. Wheelwright had been part of the design team for the Boston Public Library when he worked for McKim, Mead, and White in NYC. He had started his own firm in Boston in 1897 and appears to have begun working on the bridge design quite soon after that, since construction started in 1900.

With excellent forethought, the new bridge was designed and built to support automobile and train traffic, even though the subway system didn’t extend that far at the time it was built, and cars were still exceptions on the roads.

The steel superstructure of the bridge was completed in 1904, and the road across the bridge was paved in 1905, although the grand opening of the bridge was not held until July 31, 1907.

I became interested in the bridge historically because, on the evening before the November 16, 1905 primary for the election of a new Boston mayor, John Francis Fitzgerald (JFK's grandfather), conducted a whirlwind speaking tour of all the wards in the city of Boston (zooming about the city in the rain with his advisors and supporters in a parade of six automobiles). At the first stop of the evening in West Boston (Ward 8), a little after 7 p.m., he spoke with 300 supporters at the intersection of Cambridge and Charles Streets, "at the entrance to the new bridge," reported the Boston Daily Globe on November 16.

Wheelwright's designs would create structures that have become some of the most visible landmarks in modern-day Boston and Cambridge. In addition to the BPL and the Longfellow Bridge, he also designed Horticultural Hall (completed in 1901), Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory (completed in 1903), and the Harvard Lampoon Building (completed in 1909). (Wheelwright had been a Lampoon member at Harvard.) He was also a consulting architect for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (completed in 1909).

Sadly, Wheelwright's work was cut short when he suffered a mental breakdown in 1910, which, according to the August 15 New York Times "developed in connection with his work as designer of the Hartford Bridge over the Connecticut River". He died in 1912 at a sanitarium in Connecticut, apparently by his own hand.

Kissing in Canoes

2008-07-29T12:35:00.022-04:00

Urban canoeing had become a popular activity in many US cities in the late 19th century. Boston's Charles River became a well-known destination for leisurely trips on the water, since the boathouses in Newton were accessible by train and trolley from all over the city.

One of the most popular of these sites was Norumbega Park which had been built in 1897, a year after the trolley running down Commonwealth Avenue in Newton had been completed. (The Marriott Hotel now stands at this location.) The park offered canoeing, a zoo, a merry-go-round, picnic spots, a restaurant, and a vaudeville theatre, and admission could be had for a nickel (fifteen cents if you bought a package deal including trolley fare). Its boathouses and Pavilion can be seen on the left side of the double postcard image below.

A large recreation area was also built at Riverside (on the Weston side of the river) the same year. The Riverside Recreation Grounds included the obligatory boathouse, the largest swimming pool in New England, a football field, a baseball diamond, a track facility and outdoor gymnasium, tennis courts, bowling alleys, a restaurant, a bandstand, and dormitories.

Both venues fast became popular destinations for huge crowds of families and young adults from all over the area.

In 1903, the Metropolitan Parks Commission, which controlled six miles of the Charles River, from Newton to Waltham, issued new rules of conduct for for the crowd of boaters in that area, forbidding activities such as drinking, gambling, and "any obscene or indecent act." From 1903 to 1905, 37 couples were arrested under these guidelines for kissing or lying down in canoes on this stretch of the river.

The young people fought back almost immediately. Canoeists who went out on the river refused to sit up straight, and young women taunted the police on the riverbanks to take action. Late in the summer of 1903, protesters massed below the superintendent's office which overlooked the river.

They "sprawled out" in disregard of MPC rules and set up phonographs outside the superintendent's office playing, as the Post put in, "jesting songs into his ear." Up and down the river, canoeing couples baited the police, playing love songs, throwing kisses at the officers, and disobeying the sit-up rule. [1]

Local newspapers charged that the problems on the river were all caused by troublemakers from Boston. The former mayor of Waltham surmised that Boston men brought their dates to the river to get them drunk. Yet data shows that of the 37 couples arrested in the two-year period from 1903-1905, only a third were from Boston--the rest were from the suburbs near the river.

In 1904, the MPC police equipped their station with darkroom equipment (the better to do some fast photo development of miscreants) and started monitoring behavior with binoculars. (You can see the MPC boathouse at Norumbega on the right side of the postcard above.) Boathouse owners in the MPC-controlled area cited a 50% loss of business, as many thwarted lovers rode the trains and trolleys to Dedham, which was not yet under the jurisdiction of the Commission.

In 1905, a new summer canoe house and ballroom was built on the banks of the river in Dedham, probably to take advantage of the boom in Dedham canoeing. Called Moseley's on the Charles, its ballroom is still a popular destination for weddings and banquets.

In her diary for June 5, 1905, Cynthia writes:

Helped wash in the morning. In p.m., went up to Dedham canoeing--Pauline, C. Rason, C.H., & I. "Cherries" on way home; Charlie got them for me.

And again on June 15:

Went canoeing this afternoon; it was just lovely on river. Pauline, Charlie, Lizzie, C.H., & I--took lunch.

1905 turns out to have been the pivotal year of change on this issue of behavior on the river. In September of that year, the MPC suffered its first court defeat on one of these indecent behavior charges, and the number of arrests dropped rapidly after that. Between 1906-1910, only four couples were arrested.

According to historian Thomas A. McMullin, whose wonderful article in The New England Quarterly was the source of much of the information in this post:

Scholars have traditionally argued that the shift in American romantic mores occurred in the 1920s, but more recent studies have suggested that the changes began earlier, particularly for the working class.

McMullin attributes these changes to the expansion of white-collar work at the turn of the century, the change in perception of what was acceptable behavior among young women (who had started bicycling and pursuing other outdoor activities, in addition to beginning to date rather than being "called upon"), movies--which showed "abundant images of romantic encounters", and the construction of the trolley network.

Illustration Credits and References

[1] The quotes above, and much of the other background information in this post, were taken from an article by Thomas A. McMullin in the September, 2000 issue of The New England Quarterly. The article is entitled: "Revolt at Riverside: Victorian Virtue and the Charles River Canoeing Controversy, 1903-1905." McMullin (at least at the time) was an Associate Professor of History at U.Mass. Boston.

The colored postcard at the top of this post is entitled "Canoeing on the Charles River," and it shows a photograph taken in 1905, and probably colorized a few years later. The sepia photo further down is a 1905 double postcard entitled "The Charles River from Weston Bridge, Auburndale, Mass." These postcards are part of a terrific collection of early 20th century postcards of the river that belong to the Newton History Museum. More postcards, as well as additional information on the Charles River in Newton, Norumbega, and the canoeing craze can be found at the Newton History Museum Website.

Caroline Bishop Stanley

2008-07-18T18:06:00.013-04:00

Caroline Bishop Stanley was born in 1879 to a Nahant, Massachusetts family that had lived near Boston for generations. Her family was related to many of the well-known Massachusetts families of the period, including the Cabots, Choates, and Perkinses. While the Stanleys weren't wealthy, they were comfortable, and Caroline seemed destined for a prosperous and circumspect Victorian lady's life. She had the leisure to pursue higher education and graduated from Boston's New England Conservatory of Music in 1905.

She was already "old" (by marriageability standards of the time) and still living at home, looking for a job as a music teacher. However, she wouldn't remain in Boston long. During the next few years, she went to Chicago, where she got involved with the social settlement movement. According to author Lesley Poling-Kempes, she:

. . . taught music at the Chicago Kindergarten Institute and began to move in a circle of educated and socially active women. . . . In her late twenties, Stanley joined this league of women who would later be called progressive idealists--educated, motivated women seeking meaningful work that led them out of a boring and useless existence in Victorian America. . . . Music, Stanley's friends believed, was a birthright of all people, and music education a vital part of any person's development and growth.

However, the biggest change in Carol Stanley's life was yet to come. In her mid-30s, she fell in love with a musician in Boston of whom her parents disapproved. She apparently acquiesced to their plans to send her out West to forget him. Most likely, her family thought a year or so away from temptation would be enough, and that she would return to Boston and take up an "appropriate" life.

But Carol never returned to Boston or Chicago (except for some brief visits). She took the train to Santa Fe sometime in 1914,
and with a Chicago friend spent a couple of years riding horses into the remote country in the Four Corners area, camping under the stars, and experiencing a kind of life that was completely foreign to her East Coast upbringing. (It's worth noting that Pancho Villa raided New Mexico in 1916--life was still pretty wild and woolly on the frontier!)

In 1916, Carol was part of a groundbreaking horseback excursion, which, according to Poling-Kempes:

. . . began in mid-September in Santa Fe, and wove across northwestern New Mexico and into the Navajo country of the Colorado Plateau. This particular expedition made headlines because no one had ever attempted to ride horseback to the Indian Country of northern Arizona and southern Utah from Santa Fe.

Near the end of the trip, on October 2, Carol married Richard LeRoy Pfaffle, one of the tour guides (whom she had met for the first time in the spring of 1916). Carol and Roy moved into a guest house at the Ramon Vigil Ranch, a guest ranch about 20 miles from Santa Fe, to act as caretakers. Several years later, they decided to open their own guest ranch, and bought a "crumbling but historically rich and outstandingly beautiful rancho" in Alcalde, NM, near the San Juan Pueblo. They renovated the property, and opened San Gabriel Ranch in 1920.

San Gabriel was a popular destination--the Pfaffles' guests included Rockefellers, Archibald MacLeish, and Willa Cather. Carol taught music at the Pueblo, and in Alcalde, during the winter months. But business was severely hurt by the Depression, and in 1931, after divorcing Roy (who was by this time a seriously ill alcoholic), Carol abandoned San Gabriel to foreclosure, and moved, with her Steinway piano and her Navajo rug collection, to a decrepit homestead outside of Abiquiú, a property that Roy had won in a card game a few years earlier.

Carol called the property Ghost Ranch, and she set about renovating it for another try at the guest ranch business. In the summer of 1934, the woman who was to become most associated with Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe, showed up, looking to spend some time in a casita there. Carol had only one room available for one night, and O'Keeffe took it. During the night, another guest became ill, and the family left their casita precipitously. O'Keeffe moved in, "and I never left".

In 1935, Stanley sold the ranch to one of her regular visitors, Arthur Pack, married her foreman, Lloyd Miller, and eventually settled with him in Arboles, Colorado, where Carol worked as the postmistress. She died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 67. Poling-Kempes writes:

Although it was a long drive over the high mountains in winter snow, Dorthy Burnham Fredericks remembers that "all the cowboys showed up for her funeral. All of them."

Illustration Credits and References

The photo at the top of this post is of the New England Conservatory in Boston, taken in 1904. It is from the Library of Congress collection.

The Ghost Ranch photo was taken by the author.

Information about Carol Stanley comes from Lesley Poling-Kempes' wonderful book, Ghost Ranch, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2005.

The Niagara Movement

2008-07-06T18:53:00.010-04:00

Some say that the 20th century civil rights movement began on July 11, 1905, when 29 black men met on the Canadian side of the Niagara River to form a new national organization called "The Niagara Movement". Led by W. E. B. Du Bois, the men, intellectuals and activists from 14 states, gathered to formally distance themselves from Booker T. Washington's conciliatory approach, and to establish a more action-oriented group. Two key members of the group were Bostonians Clement G. Morgan and William Monroe Trotter.

Du Bois also had a Massachusetts connection. He had been born in Great Barrington, in Western Massachusetts, and he, Morgan, and Trotter were all Harvard College graduates. Du Bois was also the first black to earn a Ph.D. from that institution.

Morgan had graduated from Harvard (along with Du Bois) in 1890, and then from Harvard Law School in 1893. He was the first black man to be senior class orator at Harvard; he and Du Bois had finished first and second in the junior class oratory contest the year before. He had been the first black Cambridge city councilor in 1985-1896, and was a practicing lawyer in the Boston area in 1905.

Trotter had grown up in the Boston area--first in South Boston, and later in Hyde Park. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard five years after Du Bois and Morgan, in 1895. He was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and in 1901 co-founded the Boston Guardian, and became its editor.

The 1905 formal address of the Niagara Movement to the country, co-authored by Du Bois and Trotter, acknowledged that "the negro American" had made a lot of progress in the prior decade. But, the address continued:

This class of American citizens should protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights. . . . We believe also to protest against the curtailment of our civil rights. All American citizens have the right to equal treatment. . . . We especially complain against the denial of equal opportunities to us in economic life; in the rural districts of the south this amounts to peonage and virtual slavery. . . . Common school education should be free to all American children and compulsory. . . . We demand upright judges in courts, juries selected without discrimination on account of color, and the same measure of punishment and the same efforts at reformation for black as for white offenders. . . .

At the same time we want to acknowledge with deep thankfulness the help of our fellow-men from the abolitionist down to those who today still stand for equal opportunity and who have given and still give of their wealth and of their property for our advancement. . . . God forbid that we should ever forget to urge corresponding duties upon our people: The duty to vote. The duty to respect the rights of others. The duty to work. The duty to obey the laws. The duty to be clean and orderly. The duty to send our children to school. The duty to respect ourselves, even as we respect others.

Morgan became state secretary for the Massachusetts state organization, and his wife, Gertrude Wright Morgan, became the national secretary for women in 1906. Trotter did not favor allowing women to become members, and Trotter and Morgan (and their wives) clashed on this and other issues. Du Bois eventually sided with Morgan, and William and Geraldine Trotter left the movement in 1907. This feud in the Massachusetts branch was draining to the organization, and to Du Bois personally, who had been close to Trotter. Combined with financing and leadership problems, and continued conflict with Booker T. Washington, the Niagara Movement had broken up by 1910. But Niagara was instrumental in the formation of the NAACP in 1909, and most Niagarites transferred their allegiance to that organization.

Illustration Credits and References

The photo above was taken from the University of Massachusetts Library Collections. Du Bois is second from the right in the middle row; next to him (last in the row) is Robert Bonner, also of Massachusetts. Clement Morgan is second from the left in the bottom row.

The text of the address was taken from the July 16, 1905 Boston Sunday Globe.

Many original documents and photographs relating to the Niagara Movement can be seen at the University of Massachusetts web site, which has a large W.E.B. Du Bois collection.

Helen Keller the Maid of Honor

2008-07-01T09:56:00.014-04:00

Helen Keller, the famed deaf-blind social activist, was living with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, on a 7-acre farm in Wrentham, Massachusetts in 1905. She had graduated from Radcliffe College the year before, and she and Sullivan had purchased the farm at about the same time.

Helen had published her first book, The Story of My Life, in 1903, and a young Harvard English instructor, John Macy, had worked with Helen as the book's editor. Macy became a friend of Helen's, and of Annie Sullivan's as well, and on May 3, 1905 Macy and Sullivan were married in the sitting room at the Wrentham farm.

An article in the May 3, 1905 Boston Daily Globe indicates that Edward Everett Hale performed the ceremony. (Hale, a minister, activist, and author, was well-known for his story, "The Man Without a Country," and was the great-nephew of patriot Nathan Hale.)

Even then, Annie took second billing to Helen, with the headline for the article reading "Helen Keller the Maid of Honor", and Annie and John (and Dr. Hale) mentioned in the sub-heading.

The bride wore "a dark traveling gown and the groom a gray prince albert with light vest and tie." The ceremony was small, with only a few dozen guests, and was conducted "in a quiet and unostentatious manner."

Among the wedding gifts received was a "handsome clock and candelabras from Prof. Alexander Graham Bell." Interestingly enough, I have found (online--and still looking for corroboration) the text of a letter from Alexander Graham Bell to Helen Keller, dated April 14, 1905, which reads in part as follows:

I wonder whether you could keep a secret from teacher, and from Mr. Macey? I have just received $194 which I never expected to get, and your note of April 7, telling me of teacher's proposed marriage to Mr. Macey has suggested the thought - why not spend this on a wedding present for Miss Sullivan. The trouble is I don't know what to get that would please her and I want someone to help me. Why not you? I enclose a check for $194 payable to your order and would be very much please if you could spend the money for me on a wedding present for Miss Sullivan and not tell her anything about it until you give her the present for me.

Illustration Credits and References

The two photos above both appear on the website of the Annie Mansfield Sullivan Foundation. The photo of Helen Keller is her 1904 Radcliffe graduation portrait. The farm photograph was taken in the 1920s. The site also contains additional information about the history of the farm.

Would a Woman Make a Good President?

2008-06-27T10:10:00.007-04:00

A woman today would not make a good President for the identical reason that no man would make a good President who has been deprived, as woman has been and for as long as woman has been, of practically all participation in political life and all political responsibility. . . . She has been deprived of all civic imagination, all civic knowledge and all civic responsibility, so far as man could so deprive her. . . . Will there be women who will make good Presidents? That is another question, and one to which I give the ready answer, Yes. Woman's political capacity may be denied at the present time, but her capability is undoubted. There are many administrative functions in political life which she would perform far better than man; there are none which, as President of the United States, she would not perform as well, given the experience and practice which men enjoy.

These lines, written by lawyer Alice Parker Lesser, appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe on October 8, 1905, as part of a feature opinion piece by four Boston women. They had been asked by the Globe to comment on a recent speech by Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer who had addressed "a large audience of young women at one of our prestigious female colleges, to intimate that within the present generation the suffrage might be extended to women in every State, and to excite the enthusiastic applause of his emotional hearers by the hint that before they became gray-haired there might sit in the White House a woman who, like Queen Victoria, will shed lustre upon this country."

In addition to Mrs. Lesser, the other writers solicited for this piece included, according to the Globe sub-head, "the Following Women of Boston Who Have Engaged in Professions and Business": Elizabeth C. Keller, a physician and surgeon, Katherine E. Conway, editor of the Pilot, and Mae D. Frazar "of the Frazar Touring Co.".

Five years earlier, in a similar opinion piece entitled "Will a Woman Ever Be President of the United States?", Alice Parker Lesser had commented, somewhat sadly and quite presciently: "I have persuaded myself that some time in the future a woman will be president. But hardly in the next century."

Lesser also suggested that women would soon earn the right to vote. She herself was a women's suffrage leader, and would go on to serve as the delegate from Massachusetts to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Convention in Stockholm in 1911.

The last reference I can find to Mrs. Lesser was in a 1914 interview, so I don't know if she was still around in 1920 to exercise her right to vote. I certainly hope so.

Illustration Credits and References

The photo above was taken at a house party at Elm Court, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1905. It was reprinted in the Boston Globe on October 30, 2005. Click here to read the article about this 100-room "cottage" built by William Sloane and Emily Vanderbilt Sloane in 1886.

The Boston Marathon

2008-06-19T18:34:00.018-04:00

Photo of Fred Lorz in 1906.

Patriots' Day has been a legal holiday in Massachusetts since 1894. It commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the start of the American Revolution.

Bostonians who are familiar with modern Patriots' Day activities would find a lot to recognize in the holiday celebrations that took place on April 19, 1905. The Lexington fife and drum corps marched over Paul Revere's route; 25,000 spectators were on hand in Concord to view a civic and military parade; and dances, dinners, and athletic events also marked the date.

The 1905 Boston Marathon boasted 78 starters, about half of whom finished the race. (At that time the distance was 25 miles--mostly the same as today's route, finishing at the corner of Boylston and Exeter, near the Boston Public Library, but starting in Ashland instead of neighboring Hopkinton.) The winner was Fred Lorz of New York, in a time of 2:38.25; second place finisher was Louis Marks, also of New York; and third place went to a local man, Robert Fowler, running for the Cambridgeport Gym.

Lorz tripped over his trainer (one of 60 bicyclists accompanying the runners) near the end of the race, but was able to cross the finish line--the next day's Boston Daily Globe catches the felled bicycle and the falling runner in a terrific action photo.

Many behaviors that characterize the Marathon today were already present in 1905. A media car (the Globe's "White Steamer") led the runners; Wellesley women cheered on the "fellows" as they passed the College; and the huge crowd of men, women, and children near the finish line (most of whom who had waited in place for an hour and a half) shouted for every runner and "there was no let-up [in cheering],even after the first few had plodded in".

1905 was also the first year in which George V. Brown fired the starter's pistol at the beginning of the race. (Brown would go on to serve as starter until 1937, and his descendants are still honored with the responsibility.)

There were also a few differences! A Dr. Blake, who was examining the runners at the end of the race, noted that most men were in pretty good shape, but that those who had not drunk whiskey along the route "fared better".

Race winner Fred Lorz had achieved some negative press the year before when he participated in the 1904 Olympic marathon, run in conjunction with the St. Louis World's Fair. After suffering an injury at the nine-mile mark, he rode in a car for 11 miles; when the car broke down, he ran the rest of the way to the finish and was originally hailed as the winner. (See Rosie Ruiz!) After being tossed out of membership in the AAU, he was later reinstated when it was determined that he did not intend to defraud, and had merely thought to play a practical joke. After winning the Boston race in 1905, Lorz, who actually seems to be not much of a joker-type (given the pompousness of the quote which follows and the expression on his face in the photo above) referenced his history: "I guess those people who said I tried to steal the St. Louis race will now do a little thinking. . . I never claimed to have won the Olympic race, and after I finished I told Sec. James E. Sullivan of the AAU that I rode in that automobile."

Third place finisher Fowler would also be involved in another interesting race, when he participated in the running of the Empire City Marathon in Yonkers, NY on January 1, 1909, a bitterly cold day. Fowler won that race, setting a world record that lasted for about six weeks, but the race was declared over after the first seven men crossed the finish line. The New York Times surmised in their story lead that "the incompetency of the Yonkers police" was responsible for the premature finish. The Yonkers police chief, who was responsible for keeping order, rode a horse up and down the track; scorers and officials were interfered with by a boisterous crowd of 10,000; and three mounted police "rode through the group of scorers repeatedly". When an official complained, Chief Wolff "merely smiled and drove his horse at the officials, scattering them left and right."

In addition, the Times observed that the "contest in several respects savored of a farce. One contestant smoked a pipe while running around the track, another essayed a theatrical faint in front of the judges."

Police behavior seems to have been much more appropriate at the Boston race in 1905. Approximately 70 city policemen were on duty to control the crowd (estimated at over 75,000 between Coolidge Corner and the finish of the race). The Globe observed that these officers "did their work well, gave no offence, and left the scene with every spectator feeling that the police are humane and capable."

Fowler would go on to savor a win in the Boston Marathon in 1909, only a few months after the Yonkers farce. Frederick Lorz would finish second that year.

Illustration Credits and References

Photo of Fred Lorz above from the Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

Click here to read more about the bizarre 1904 Olympic marathon. (Lorz's deception is only part of the story!)

Click here to see a short article, accompanied by a WBZ-TV video, about George V. Brown, race starter, whose bronze statue was unveiled at the running of the 2008 marathon.

The Diary: June 18, 1905

2008-06-18T13:08:00.005-04:00

South Station in Boston ca. 1905, photo courtesy of Library of Congress

The day before, Cynthia had taken the train from Boston to Harwich (on Cape Cod), the location of her family home. Her Aunt Myra, her suitor, Ben, and others met her at the train. On June 18, she began the task of getting the house ready for the summer.

Cynthia's sea captain father, traveling with her mother, was still at sea and would not arrive until much later in the summer.

Came down to the house, opened the windows, and aired all out. Unpacked my trunk. Ben over in p.m. Stayed at Aunt Myra's.

Cy Young on the Fourth of July

2008-06-16T11:36:00.009-04:00

This photograph of Cy Young was taken in Chicago in 1905.

Cy Young (for whom baseball's Cy Young pitching award was named) was the pitcher on opening day of the 1905 season for the Boston Americans. (The Americans would take on their nickname, Red Sox, as their official team name less than three years later. But they were just the "Americans" when they started out in 1901, to distinguish themselves from the National League team, the Boston Beaneaters.)

Cy Young's birth name was actually Denton True Young; he earned the nickname "Cy" from "Cyclone", for the speed of his fastball. (And the Boston papers had a tendency to refer to him as "Old Cy".)

On the Fourth of July, 1905, the 38-year-old Young was the starting pitcher in the second game of a doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics. He pitched 13 scoreless innings (after the opening six) but went on to lose the game in the 20th inning.

Opposing pitcher Rube Waddell also pitched the full 20 innings for Philadelphia, and both pitchers would eventually find themselves in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Cy Young later said of this game: “For my part, I think it was the greatest game of ball I ever took part in.”

Illustration Credits and References

The photo originally appeared in the Chicago Daily News in 1905; I found it at this site.

The Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society has an excellent write-up about this pitching duel.

Lots of baseball information available here: http://www.baseball-reference.com

Antonio Corsi

2008-06-15T14:10:00.001-04:00

NOTE: This post was first published in my other blog, choosing-santa-fe.blogspot.com, on February 15, 2008.

This is a story about a man who was very well-known in the first quarter of the 20th century, but whom very few have heard of today. He was an artist's model (and a silent-film actor towards the end of his career) who worked in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, among other cities, and was the most sought-after artist's model of the day.

Although he was Italian-born, his Roman nose and exotic looks made him able to pass as a Turk, a Mexican, an American Indian, and a variety of other ethnicities. He maintained a studio in New York City with hundreds of costumes and could show up as any character an artist could imagine.

If you live(d) in Boston, you will have seen Corsi in many different settings. For example, he was the model for the famous Appeal to the Great Spirit sculpture by Cyrus Dallin, which has stood on Huntington Avenue in front of the Museum of Fine Arts for 99 years.

He also posed for 11 of the 16 figures in John Singer Sargent's Frieze of Prophets, which is one of the murals Sargent painted in the Boston Public Library (all of which I saw for the first time on a trip back to Boston last fall).

I encountered Corsi for the first time in the pages of a family diary from 1905. Cynthia, the young woman writer (who was 22 at the time), was living in Boston and studying at the Eric Pape School of Art. Twice she mentions a model in class by the name of Antonio Corsi. For example, here's her post from March 20, 1905:

Raining today; went in school. Antonio Corsi posed nude this morning, costume of pirate in afternoon.

That brief sentence intrigued me! I had to look him up, and was quite amazed to discover the level of his fame, and the prodigious amount of posing he did. Here's a photo of Corsi posing for an art class at about the same time as the diary. Imagine holding that pose for hours!

Here's another famous painting for which Corsi posed, The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot (owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC). Corsi was 11 or 12 at the time, and posed for both the male and female figures in this painting. (Look at the calves, thighs, and feet of both characters--they are almost identical.)

When I started researching Corsi, I immediately found a website dedicated to his work. Jake Gorst, owner of Jonamac Productions, is working on a documentary on Corsi, along with an exhibition of a treasure-trove of photographs (including those appearing in this post), and a book about Corsi's career. You can learn lots more about Corsi at this site--click the Multimedia tab to see all the photographs!