Quote of the Day (Dennis Lehane, on Boston Working-Class Humor)

“To this day… I've never met a comedian half as funny as at least five people I knew growing up. In Dorchester … my dad was part of a bar culture. He used to bring me into bars all the time and pretend, telling my mother we were at a farmers’ market so he could sneak in and have a drink on a Saturday. So I grew up listening to people talk and tell stories and they were always working-class stories. The point of any working-class story is ‘I got screwed,’ right? But [also] ‘I got a little bit of vengeance,’ like ‘I keyed his car,’ ‘I slept with his sister.’ It's a tragic story: ‘I got screwed.’ But it's got a little bit of levity in it…. I think in Irish culture, personally—and that's where Dorchester is, and Savin Hill, where I grew up— that's where we get our sense of humor, [from] the Irish. They believe that God is a prankster and we're the butt of the joke, you know.  That's something that just goes into my work.”—American crime novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane interviewed by Anna Kusmer for the “Say More” podcast, Boston Globe, Jan.8, 2026 episode

The image accompanying this post, showing Dennis Lehane at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken by David Shankbone.

Photo of the Day: Steeple of ‘Old North Church,’ Boston MA

Even without knowing it at first, I knew there was something important about this steeple when I saw it from a distance while I was in Boston 12 years ago this October.

Technically speaking, this is now the Episcopal Church’s Christ Church. But it is known to history as “Old North Church,” and if there’s a more famous steeple in American history or literature, I can’t think of one right now. I had to take this picture as soon as I became aware of it.

You know about it from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” with the memorable lines:

He said to his friend, “If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch

Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,–

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

A plaque downstairs commemorates Revere and William Dawes, the other rider who alerted the countryside that, per the steeple signal, the British were marching to Lexington and Concord by sea across the Charles River and not by land.

The two men, unnamed in Longfellow’s poem, who actually climbed the steeple and held high the two lanterns were Old North Church’s sexton, Robert Newman, and vestryman, Capt. John Pulling, Jr.—men whose courage was all the more conspicuous because, as Patriots, they went against the prevailing Loyalist sentiment in the congregation.

Here I am, using the phrase “technically speaking” again—this was not the original steeple glimpsed by Revere. This is actually the third on this spot. The first, the one seen by Revere, was destroyed in the 1804 “Great Gale of Boston.” The second, built two years later, fell down into Hull Street in 1954 as a result of Hurricane Carol. (Luckily, the steeple was swaying so long that the neighborhood had enough time to be evacuated.)

The steeple you see now was rebuilt a year later, and made to look more like the one that Revere saw—only this time, with added steel reinforcements to safeguard against future storms. So far—God willing—it has held.

This Day in Baseball History (Speaker Starts Record Hitting Streak)

July 24, 1912—Tris Speaker, the 24-year-old centerfielder of the Boston Red Sox, began his third streak of 20-plus games with consecutive hits in a single season, an unusual record that no hitter has since matched—not even Joe DiMaggio.

The Yankee Clipper, with a (single) 56-game hitting streak, has, along with Willie Mays, long since displaced Speaker in the popular imagination as the greatest centerfielder in baseball history. But the Gray Eagle deserves to be better known—and particularly for his performance in this season 100 years ago, when he not only led the Bosox to a World Series triumph but won the Chalmers Award—predecessor of today’s Most Valuable Player Award—in the bargain.

The future Hall of Famer’s offensive prowess (part of a season in which he batted .383, garnered 222 hits and stole 52 bases), demonstrated so strongly in this unusual set of streaks, was overshadowed by another great hitter of this era: Ty Cobb. The Georgia Peach batted .410 that year—and, as I noted in a prior post, stole most of the media attention that summer because of a notorious incident in which he ran into the stands to beat up a disabled heckler.

Speaker’s brilliance at the plate might also have been taken for granted because of his superlative defensive skills. So fast that he could catch up to long line drives, he repeatedly played close to the infield, even throwing out batters before they could even reach first base. In effect, his daring positioning allowed him to function as a fifth infielder and plug up any holes on the diamond.

The outfielder, however, remains among an elite group of players whose superior glove is matched by a devastating bat. His .344 lifetime batting average exceeds Babe Ruth’s. His 3,515 hits—still fifth best on the all-time list—were accumulated in the deadball era, when, as the “Green Monster” blogger notes, “the league-wide batting average was .243, entire teams only hit less than 10 home runs in a season, and pitchers were allowed to scuff, spit on and manipulate the ball in ways that are illegal in today's game.” He remains the career leader in doubles, and his 436 stolen bases are simply another manifestation of the speed that made him such a daring and unique outfielder.

When it comes to all-around brilliance on the diamond (and even in the clubhouse—as player-manager, he would direct his next team, the Cleveland Indians, to a World Series triumph in 1920), Speaker’s election to Cooperstown in 1937 was as close to a slam-dunk as possible. But “character”—the criterion that has prevented gambler Pete Rose and steroid user Mark McGwire from entering the Hall of Fame—proves a more difficult problem for this hero of early baseball.

The fact was that the player who set these records—and could change the outcome of the game with his bat as well as his glove—often felt out of place in the Red Sox clubhouse and his adopted city, a fact outlined with considerable skill in Tris Speaker: The Rough-And-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend, by Timothy M. Gay (2006). 

The Hubbard, Texas, native reflected the rural Protestant sensibilities of his region. He not only thought that the Civil War was “the war of Northern aggression,” but admitted to a sportswriter early in his career that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Moreover, on a Red Sox squad with growing appeal to Boston Irish Catholics then coming into their own as a political force, Speaker was, together with great friend “Smokey Joe” Wood, one of the “Masons” clique in opposition to its “Knights of Columbus” contingent.Tensions between the two groups became so bad that at one point, Speaker’s practical joke on fellow outfielder Duffy Lewis—knocking his cap off out on the field so that the Lewis’s receding hairline was exposed for all the world to see—led to fisticuffs. Catcher Bill Carrigan, another member of the "Knights" who had clashed with Speaker, didn't mourn his loss after the centerfielder departed the Red Sox just before the 1916 season in a contract dispute.

In Speaker’s defense, one could argue that he grew over time—or, at least, that his rough edges were smoothed out. He eventually married an Irish Catholic immigrant, and 20 years after his retirement he mentored Larry Doby, as the player who broke the color line in the American League adjusted to the outfield.

But Speaker may have been guilty of the one offense that, above all else, still represents the third rail in baseball clubhouses: gambling. Late in their playing careers, Speaker and Cobb faced an accusation from pitcher Dutch Leonard that they had bet on and “fixed” a game. The two men, in fact, resigned after American League President Ban Johnson followed up on Leonard’s charge by speaking to the two players.

Then, when the news aired publicly, Speaker and Cobb, deciding they had nothing left to lose, turned around and fought the charges, with the help of their attorneys. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, finding Leonard’s credibility problematic, absolved Speaker and Cobb, and the two finished up their careers with the Philadelphia Athletics. But, to some extent, the taint of scandal clung to their names in baseball front offices. 

When Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck asked Speaker to work with Doby, this was the first major league job that “Spoke” had had in years. Ironically, the name of “The Gray Eagle” ended up sanitized through his assistance to a man he would never have wanedt to play with or against early in his career because of the color of his skin.

My longtime friend, autograph authentication expert Jim Spence, offers a fine analysis of the career—and distinctive scrawl—of Speaker here.

(Photograph of Tris Speaker from the Prints and Photographs division of the Library of Congress)

Flashback, February 1842: Fatigued Dickens Feted by NYC, Then Bites Its Hand

In 1989, Tom Wolfe wrote a controversial Harper’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” questioning why writers were neglecting the rich subject of American society for minimalist engagements in navel-gazing.

The kind of fiction Wolfe had in mind was the great urban novel of the 19^th century, especially realistic depictions of Victorian London by Charles Dickens (pictured here in 1842 by American painter Francis Alexander). Of course, when it came to America, Dickens had gotten there first. He had so much to get off his chest that it took him two books to do so: American Notes for General Circulation (1842) and, the following year, Martin Chuzzlewit.

(In the 1980s, I heard a college professor tell an audience at my local library that the one Dickens novel he assigned his students was the latter. It was not only Dickens’ longest work but, at the time anyway, his only novel not covered by Cliff Notes. I guess you could say the prof had a bit of a sadistic streak…)

Americans were outraged to find that this young author they had read so enthusiastically had leveled some of his most devastating criticism against their republic.

But Dickens, unlike many other Europeans, had not visited this country merely to confirm his prejudices. He initially had feelings of great regard for the United States and had been delighted at what he saw at his first stop, Boston.

But, as he continued what became a punishing six-month tour of the United States, Dickens’ idealism about the young country began to flag. He was exhausted by his clamorous fans and hosts, disgusted by many institutions, and resentful over the nation’s refusal to consider a subject he regarded as of the utmost personal importance: copyright laws that would help ensure a steady stream of income for his rapidly growing family.

I’m surprised that the subject of Dickens in America has been of so little interest to filmmakers. The only ones that come to mind are a 1995 Masterpiece Theatre mini-series adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, and a 1963 episode of Bonanza featuring Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith of Lost in Space) as Dickens, incensed that a Virginia City paper was reprinting his work without permission.

Dickens came to America in January 1842 with his wife Catherine for several reasons:

* After a five-year burst of nonstop writing activity that produced The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, his nerves badly needed a break.

* In the same way that more recent writers have seen articles as a means of financing their vacations, Dickens thought he’d be able to make money out of what he saw.

* American publishers, continuing a tradition that began with Benjamin Franklin the century before, were flagrantly violating the copyright of British authors such as William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott—and Dickens knew exactly how much he lost each time an American publisher stiffed him on royalties.

* Dickens thought he saw in the United States an alternative to the squalid conditions of his own country, and wanted to see if the young country matched “the republic of my imagination.”

The 29-year-old author was disappointed, in one degree or another, in all of these hopes.

Dickens could not have been more delighted with Boston. He came to the city in January 1842 at the most opportune time: five years before the Irish Potato Famine drove to its streets emigrants facing the most desperate poverty and the greatest urban squalor. He remembered that when he first glimpsed the city on a Sunday morning, “the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay…that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a pantomime.” He was similarly enthralled by the intellectuals such Boston and Cambridge intellectuals as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William H. Prescott, Charles Sumner, and Richard Henry Dana, praising “the humanizing tastes and desires [they]...engendered.”

Bostonians were so excited to see him that they didn’t make a peep when he pleaded for international copyright protection—a subject that struck as much at the economic livelihoods of editors and printers in America as they did Dickens himself.

New Yorkers were beside themselves as they read how Boston had gone all-out for the author. Gothamites, not to be outdone, wanted to give him the biggest greeting given to a foreigner since the Marquis de Lafayette toured America nearly a half century after the start of the Revolutionary War.

And so, they hit on the gaudiest celebration of all, the “Boz Ball” (named after the pen name Dickens had adopted with his first published writing, eight years before). Appropriately enough, they proposed to show him their love with this ball on Valentine’s Day.

The soiree was held in the Park Theatre, which, with capacity seating of 3,000, was the largest arena in the city. Tickets, sold at $5 each, were snapped up almost immediately, and even though some lucky buyers tried to scalp them for as much as $40 apiece, nobody was willing to part with their chance to see the social event of the season.

The “Boz Ball” was an event like no other: “the greatest affair in modern times … the fullest libation upon the altar of the muses,” according to Gotham diarist Philip Hone. Only Donald Trump could have matched its spirit of excess:

· Carriage traffic stretched for a quarter mile from the theater;· The ballroom was decorated with characters from Dickens’ plays;
· Dickens entered the hall accompanied by a general in full-dress uniform, serenaded by the tune “See the Conquering Hero Comes”;
· Tableaux vivants throughout the night pantomimed scenes from Dickens’ novels;
· Guests, one female attendant wrote a friend, consumed “50 hams, 50 tongues, 28,000 stewed oysters, 10,000 pickled oysters, 4,000 candy kisses, and 6,000 candy mottoes. (Oysters, she allowed, might be in short supply following the event.)
· Somehow or other, amid the food, guests and tableaus, space was found—barely—for dancing.

In a letter to close friend and future biographer John Forster, Dickens could hardly stop including details of the night. But the managers of the Park Theatre, who ordinarily had to deal with less-than-capacity crowds for their handsome building, proposed to make more money with another ball at less than half the price.

As the night of the second gala approached, Dickens begged off because of a sore throat. Park Theatre management, fearing the wrath of paying customers, requested a doctor’s certificate. Nothing doing, Dickens responded. It may not have been entirely coincidental that, almost immediately afterward, he announced that he would accept no more invitations to public dinners or receptions.

But there was one more he had to make in the meantime: the “Dickens Dinner,” held four days after the Boz Ball. The banquet, held at the City Hotel, was hosted by Washington Irving, the most famous American author of the time. Lately Thomas’ 1967 history, Delmonico's: A Century of Splendor, observed that for years afterwards, this banquet was regarded as “a model of gastronomy.”

After this, the mood began to sour on both sides. Though Dickens succeeded in getting more than two dozen prominent writers (including Irving) to sign a petition to Congress concerning international copyright, American newspapers began to take sharp exception to his call for creative protection.

For his part, Dickens was growing metaphorically and physically sick and tired of the experience. He loved his visits to the theater, but not to the social institutions he had told his hosts he was also there to document: prisons, almshouses, police stations, a lunatic asylum, and the seedy parts of town. The Tombs, in particular, provoked his disgust (“a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the worst old town in Europe”).

All this tramping around, in dismal midwinter weather, left Dickens and his wife with colds and sore throats. As they traveled south, their disposition didn’t improve at all. The justification of slaveowners for “the peculiar institution” especially angered him (“Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power”).

Though sales of American Notes that fall were enormous in the United States, the book outraged many of those who had once hailed him. The response of the anonymous reviewer of The New Englander was typical:

“These Notes are barren of incident and anecdote, deficient in wit, and meagre even in respect to the most ordinary kind of information. They give no just conception of the physical aspect of the country of which they treat; much less do they introduce the reader to the homes and firesides of its inhabitants. Nor could any thing better have been expected, since Mr. Dickens merely skimmed over the country, seldom remaining longer in a place than to learn its name, to acquaint himself with the facilities of eating, drinking, and sleeping, afforded by its principal hotel, to note down a few particulars respecting its public buildings and institutions, and to inquire with a professional feeling concerning its alms-houses, its prisons, and its purlieus of low vice and wretchedness . . . . The perusal of [the book] has served chiefly to lower our estimate of the man, and to fill us with contempt for such a compound of egotism, coxcombry, and cockneyism.”

Edgar Allan Poe summed up the general feeling more succinctly: the book was “one of the most suicidal productions, ever deliberately published by its author, who had the least reputation to lose.”

A quarter century later, Dickens returned to the United States, still professing his high regard for this country. This time, the abolition of slavery had eliminated one source of one of his most fiery criticisms of the nation (though it would take two decades more, by which time Dickens was dead, before Congress finally passed international copyright legislation).

Nonetheless, something about this rambunctious country exhausted this writer who, with all his bursting energy, liked to call himself “The Inimitable.” On another visit to New York in December 1867, the writer who, T.S. Eliot wrote, created characters “of greater intensity than human beings” grew so tired after a marathon studio session that he vowed never to be photographed again.

The image taken at this time, therefore, is the last known photograph of the author that nearly everyone--including the city he had turned against--couldn't get enough of.

This Day in Literary History (Party Girl Mystery Leads to O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8”)

May 29, 1931—Starr Faithfull had a name practically made for the tabloids, and what happened to her in the hours following this date—the last one on which she was seen alive—assured that she would remain there for weeks.

The 25-year-old beauty, who lived with her family in New York’s Greenwich Village, now went missing from an ocean liner off Long Beach, Long Island, only to turn up just after dawn on June 8—fingernails painted bright red, wearing an expensive fitted black-and-white dress, but face down, seaweed tangled in her hair, dead.

The condition of the body—badly bruised—would, by itself, have been enough to guarantee the interest of law enforcement. But it also turned out that Starr’s liver was found to contain the barbiturate veronal, and that she had kept a diary in which her sexual history—including flings with numerous men—was exhaustively detailed.

With her bobbed hair, taste for liquor and disregard for sexual mores, she seemed to embody an F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper. But just a bit of probing showed that, in one crucial respect, she resembled less one of those "flaming youth" than Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night: both were victims of child molestation.

These facts, coupled with a slow news cycle, guaranteed that the Starr Faithfull case would hit not only the tabloids during the first half of the summer of 1931, but also even the pages of the good, gray New York Times. Four years later, John O’Hara would transform her life and sad end into a bitter dissection of sex and class in Prohibition-era Gotham, Butterfield 8. If the latter title rings a vague bell, it might be from the obituaries several weeks ago for Elizabeth Taylor, recounting that her first Oscar came for her performance in the 1960 adaptation of the O’Hara novel.

Gloria Wandrous, the protagonist of O’Hara’s only roman a clef, or tale based closely on a real-life incident (he normally used the general details of a person’s life while transforming the externals), is seduced as a child first by a friend of an uncle, then by a heavyset school principal.

The facts in the Starr Faithfull case were even more sensational. When reporters burst into the apartment Starr shared with her family on St. Luke’s Place, a few doors down from New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, they discovered in her diaries a reference to a cousin of her mother’s--identified as AJP—who had molested her with the aid of ether while she was a child.

“AJP” turned out to be Andrew J. Peters, who had quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to run for Mayor of Boston. Little could anyone have imagined that this successful “reform” candidate, who won City Hall back from the clutches of Irish-American boss James Michael Curley, was, in his personal life, far more vile than his opponent--a cold man who paid off Gloria’s parents--downwardly mobile relations of his--to hush up the explosive scandal.

Part of the money was used to send the young girl on transatlantic voyages, where she developed a taste for high living. None of it, however, managed to still her mounting desperation. "I am playing a dangerous game," Starr wrote a friend shortly before she disappeared. "There is no telling where I'll land."

Just how she landed on Long Beach became the concern of Nassau County's District Attorney Elvin Newton Edwards. Over the next few weeks, the D.A.'s explanations for the event shifted like the sands on which the tragic young woman was found.

First he announced that she had been killed on the liner by two men (one a prominent politician), then taken out in a boat and tossed overboard; then that she was knocked unconscious aboard a boat, then thrown into the water. Then, Edwards announced, the politician was “practically eliminated” from consideration as a suspect. Later, his office turned their attention to "Chicago gangsters" and even questioned publisher Bennett Cerf. Finally, Edwards focused on suicide as the probable cause of death.

Many people, Edwards announced at one point in the investigation, were glad that Starr was dead. In any event, the police ended up destroying her potentially explosive diaries, and nobody was ever charged in the case. The case of Starr Faithfull remains unresolved to this day.

Surprisingly, outside of O'Hara, few writers have treated what was once one of New York's most sensational cases. Gloria Vanderbilt (who, as a child, would have known many of the adult high-society types who would have crossed paths with Starr) imagined what her missing diaries were like in the fictional The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull (1994). The one extensive nonfiction treatment of the case appears to be Jonathan Goldman's The Passing of Starr Faithfull.

Quote of the Day (David Walker, on the “Wretched” Condition of American Blacks)

“There are not a more wretched, ignorant, miserable and abject set of beings in all the world than the blacks in the southern and western sections of this country, under tyrants and devils. The preachers of America can not see them, but they can send out missionaries to convert the heathens, notwithstanding….O Americans! Americans! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your destruction is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you repent.”—David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and very Expressly to Those of the United States (1829)

He was only the owner of a secondhand clothing shop, not, perhaps in 21st century eyes, a great deal higher than the “wretched, ignorant, miserable and abject” condition of the slaves he bemoaned, and he died less than a year after the appearance of the powerful 76-page tract on which his claim to history rests.

Nevertheless, in David Walker’s Appeal, published on this date in 1829 (the author’s 44th birthday) in Boston, this son of a slave father and free mother sounded a clarion call on what remains, all these many years later, the thorniest of American topics: race.

David Walker put his finger unmistakably on the hypocrisy of a nation that could denounce Turks for their brutal treatment of Greeks, while allowing in its own boundaries conditions that equaled or exceeded these. At the same time, he asked the uncomfortable question why white clergymen could preach of justice all the time it was violated in this country.

The North Carolina native had made his way up to Boston, where he became instrumental in the rising abolitionist movement. His manifesto resonated deeply with a New England used to jeremiads by preachers who foretold God’s destruction if human beings didn’t mend their ways and return to the ways of their forefathers.

(Walker also knew how to prick the conscience of the region where he made his home, noting that even in Boston, a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment, “in the very houses erected to the Lord, they have built little places for the reception of coloured people, where they must sit during meeting, or keep away from the house of God.”)

Colonization of free blacks in America, the solution to slavery preferred by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Henry Clay, held no charms for Walker, who rightly believed that African-Americans had enriched the land with their blood. But what raised hackles everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line was his call for insurrection, a remedy acted upon in 1831 by Nat Turner—and dreaded for the next 30 years by the South.

Though contemporary American politics has often been likened to a contact sport, it was infinitely more dangerous in the antebellum period, when violence raged everywhere over slavery. Not only was the “peculiar institution” maintained by brutal treatment of slaves, but by resort to duels, caning (of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a particularly fierce opponent), and mob action (against newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy).

That very likely was the fate meted out to Walker. A $1,000 reward had been offered for his death. He was found dead the following year, after the third edition of his essay. The mystery of his death was not solved, though a number of people suspected he’d been poisoned.

The condition of African-Americans has changed fundamentally since Walker’s time, needless to say, but the progress is also surely not as advanced as we’d like. Despair still is still the order of the day in so many parts of the African-American community.

For instance, last night, as I worked on this post, CNN led with a video of a Chicago honors student being brutally beaten to death by gang members.

Crime, subpar school systems, and collapsing family units—interrelated phenomenon—represent the next great arena of civil rights in America. Where is the outrage that will change these conditions, the way that Walker’s protest eventually did?

This Day in Irish-American History (Nativist Mob Burns Charlestown Convent)

August 11, 1834—A rumor that a Protestant girl was being held against her will spurred a nativist mob to go on a rampage against an Ursuline convent.

The land is now occupied by the East Branch of the Somerville Public Library, but freedom of inquiry was the last thing on the rioters’ minds—in fact, by the time they were done, burning a valuable library was one of the least of their outrages, which included destroying religious relics, ransacking the possessions of nuns and their students in the convent school, mutilating the remains of the dead in the on-site mausoleum, then torching the once-imposing building.

All of this was done with nary a move to help—even from the fire companies who’d arrived on the scene—from the crowd that watched the blaze.

The attack, part of a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry that swept the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century, also reflected the growing sense of disenfranchisement of native-born Americans who felt increasingly crowded by Irish emigrants. And this was before the great wave that came to America from the Emerald Isle following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.

The mob’s hatred also took root in class resentment and a patriarchal society’s distrust of educated women, such as the convent students and the sisters who taught them.

The event that precipitated the riot was the flight from the convent of an incoherent nun, Sister Mary John—the mother assistant—to the home of a neighbor. Before long, the convent’s mother superior, Sister Mary St. George, and Boston’s bishop, Benedict Fenwick, retrieved the exhausted nun, explaining that the recent heat wave and a heavy academic workload had induced “brain fever.”

If you know the context of American education at this time, it’s easy to see why teaching this curriculum might be a stiff challenge for Sister Mary John. The school’s students were expected to master writing, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural and moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and “use of the Globes.” Only then did they get around to learning skills that the conventional wisdom of the day felt more necessary for young women: needlework, drawing, and cookery.

Keeping students up to all these standards is difficult enough now; it was almost unheard of back then, particularly in Massachusetts, whose public schools only allowed girls to attend six months out of the year (rather than nine for boys).

So, as area residents looked up at the convent atop Mount Benedict, they wondered: why on earth are the nuns teaching these girls so much? And why on earth are so many of the students Protestants like ourselves? (No more than one-fifth of the fifty-to-sixty students were Catholic.)
The answer to these questions, in the mind of these bigots, was simple: the nuns were trying to convert the girls as a first step toward taking over Boston.

At this point, it’s necessary to mention some of the other forces whipping up the populace:

* The “pornography of the Puritan”. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase was not just a nice bit of rhetoric about anti-Catholicism, but also a thrust at the peculiar predilection of descendants of Cotton Mather for lurid tales involving young Catholic women. It was a given that these novels would retail the usual charges against Catholics—the Inquisition, their allegiance to a foreign potentate (the pope), their exotic rites. But the real frisson of these horror tales was the salacious recounting of misbehavior by wanton priests and their compliant nuns. (Think what a field day these authors would have had with the Rev. Paul Shanley and Rev. John Geoghan; they wouldn’t have had to resort to fiction!) Indeed, one of these tales, involving a woman named Rebecca Theresa Reed, concerned the Ursuline convent.

* A sensational—and, of course, inaccurate—press. On August 8, the Boston Mercantile Journal ran a news item about a “mysterious lady who was being held against her will on Mt. Benedict. The item implied that she could have been tortured, even murdered. Three days later, the paper printed a small item noting that another small competitor called the story “materially inaccurate.” Obviously, someone forgot to get the message out to the rioters.

* The Rev. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe sensitized Americans to the plight of slaves with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her father was equally adept at doing so in the antebellum period. Too bad his sympathies did not lie with the Irish. The day before the riots, he was particularly energetic, preaching anti-Catholic sermons in three different churches.

* Sister Mary St. George. Yes, the Mother Superior herself. She was not the last person to react with asperity after a day of stress and physical exhaustion. (Henry Louis Gates and Hillary Clinton can relate.) But, after a period in which the convent had been subjected to unrelenting speculation—after she had already proved the falsity of the charges, to a visiting investigating committee—she’d had enough of the scruffy mob. For a long time, I could understand why Archbishop John Hughes of New York had promised “a second Moscow” (a reference to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, when the Russian city burned) if any nativist mob perpetrated outrages against Catholics. But Sister Mary St. George’s words on this occasion might have pushed things too far: the bishop, she told the mob, had at his disposal “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at this command.”

All of this produced a cauldron of hatred. It is fortunate that the nuns and students slipped out of the convent before the rioters burst in—who knows what they would have been subject to by the mob?

The ringleader of the mob, a big brickmaker named John R. Buzzell, was subsequently acquitted at trial. Only a youngster was ever convicted for this role, and that youth was later pardoned.

The ruins remained visible for another 40 years. The rioters expected it to force an exodus out of Boston. Instead, all they ended up doing was a more fervent embrace by Catholics of their faith—one that had already endured centuries of abuse and injustice, in the catacombs of ancient Rome down to the hedge schools of their native Ireland.

When the Irish seized political power, in Boston and in urban political machines around the country, many were disinclined to take seriously the cries of Yankee reformers. When the emigrants had been desperate to eat, the reformers had not been forthcoming. It should not have come as a shock that so many of the new bosses learned the lessons of the Ursuline convent burning only too well.

Massachusetts Travel Journal (Day Four—Boston)

With the temperatures moderating somewhat, climbing all the way to 60 degrees, I decided it was a good day to experience Boston by boat.

I really have this thing for boat tours. Years ago, having dinner with other members of a writing group, we shared the first memories of our childhood we had used in our writing. All involved bodies of water—a harbor, a river, or, in my case, a creek near my house.

Something of the same yearning for the origins of a life probably underlie my fascination with rivers. I relate to the great closing line of the film and movie A River Runs Through It: “I am haunted by waters.”

My host at my bed and breakfast had suggested the prior day that I try the Boston Duck Tours. The name sounded a bit odd at first, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was. I wasn’t disappointed.

I bought a ticket for the one-hour, twenty-minute tour--$29, with tax—at the Prudential Center. The boat was the “Beantown Betty,” and our guide—or, as he cheerfully put it, “guru”—was a genial fellow named Fred. (That’s him with the duck on the walking stick, in the photo I took that accompanies this post.)

As the tour continued, I was delighted not only to learn about history but also to ride on a vehicle that participated in it. The “Ducks,” you see, were converted WWII amphibious vessels. The term is, in effect, a serviceman’s mongrelization of the military acronymn DUKW (D stands for designated, U for utility amphibious cargo carrying vehicle, K for front wheel drive, and W for double rear axle drive).

The Beantown Betty was one of 21,000 similar vehicles built between 1942 and 1945, being used most notably at D-Day. Our boat still had notations reminiscent of the period, including three cartoons with the once-ubiquitous inscription, “Kilroy Was Here,” and another inscription from a British Army commando at D-Day who had ridden on the vehicle years later.

That vet wasn’t the only person from the British Isles to join our intrepid little crew. In fact, the boat seemed full of them. I thought it was mighty nice of them to prop up the American economy, especially considering those unpleasant little matters we had with them from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815.

In any case, Fred kept up a running commentary as we went around the city, through such areas as Back Bay, Copley Square, Boston Common, the Boston Public Library, Beacon Hill, Government Center, the Longfellow Bridge, Bunker Hill, the North End, Faneuil Hall, the “Cheers” bar, and Newbury Street. He gave this film fan a particular thrill by pointing out the location filming, on Beacon Hill, of the upcoming Mel Gibson movie, The Edge of Darkness.

(Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve witnessed location filming of a major motion picture on Halloween. The first was nine years ago, when, unlike this time—when I did not get a glimpse of Mr. Gibson—I saw, in Savannah, Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron on the set of The Legend of Bagger Vance. I just hope Gibson’s project is less of a disappointment than Redford’s.)

When this fun and informative tour concluded, I ate a fast lunch in the food court at Prudential Center, then took the T train to the Government stop, walked several blocks to the North End, and visited the Old North Church and the Paul Revere House. Both Revolutionary War sites are worth talking about at greater length, which I’ll do in future posts.

For now, it’s worth mentioning another point about Longfellow’s immortal poem about Revere. In prior posts, I mentioned some issues that made this ride not quite the stuff of legend (e.g., the famous lantern signal was not devised for Revere’s benefit but for others, and he never made it out to Concord because he was apprehended by the British).

Well, there’s another legitimate bone to pick with Longfellow. The poem mentions “a friend” of Revere that hung the lantern. That “friend” bit marginalizes not one, but two people who took risks as significant as Revere’s: Captain John Pulling and Robert Newman, sexton of the Old North Church, who hung the two lanterns for up to a minute in the steeple window. (The church was then the highest structure in Boston).

The problem was this: If the patriots could see the lanterns, so could the redcoats, and they immediately began wondering why they were being put up at that hour of the night. By the time Newman came down the stairs, they were waiting for him. To evade capture, he came down the center aisle of the church, then jumped through the window to the right of the altar—now called “Newman’s Window” in his honor.

Newman could not escape arrest for long—General Gage figured out pretty easily who did and didn’t have access to the steeple at that hour—but eventually had to release him for lack of evidence—the same thing that kept them from holding onto Revere himself indefinitely.