The Bostonians

NANCY HALE

Throwing a revelatory and up-to-date searchlight on the last great stronghold of Puritania in America

Just as long as it stayed provincial, just as long as it remained proud and inviolate and sufficient unto itself, Boston was a huge success. Now, in the twentieth century, Boston's Hellenistic era of past-glory, you hear Bostonians apologizing for being Bostonians. It is Boston's fate always to he summed up in a symbol: seventy-five years ago it was the Hub of the Universe; at the turn of the century, Oliver Her ford annihilated its lingering pretensions with the quip, "an abandoned literary farm;" today it is the butt for vast, vague generalizations—the most conservative city, the most educated city, the city where all the girls have fat ankles. You will observe in what people say of Boston that superlatives are an essential part of the description; whether you love it or hate it, it has been and ever shall be a city of abolitionists and patriots, the home of shyly arrogant people who go the whole way in their beliefs. Those who think it is dull pay it the back-hand compliment of thinking it is the very dullest city there is.

If you were to say you sprang from Kalamazoo, people would say "Oh." But if you were to say you came from Boston, people would have plenty to say; for some reason Boston girls are supposed to be cut out with a cookie-cutter, all alike, and the pattern is something like this: healthy, definitely healthy, implying those ankles, pigeon toes, very frizzy hair badly done up, red cheeks, a rolling walk; basketball, tag football on Sunday, are their sports; dancing, decidedly not; they love their families, are extremely rude, and go every summer to the Northfield Conferences. This is the mould labelled "Boston Girl," and, arbitrary as all moulds are, it is surprisingly accurate.

Other popular preconceptions are less accurate. One is that all Boston families are so inbred as to carry a taint of insanity, but although the rolls of the McLean Asylum may be crowded with old Bay State names, insanity would not seem to be a characteristic of the Bostonian. Eccentricity, yes, obsessions perhaps, but insanity—if insanity may be taken to mean unbridled passions, uncontrollable activity—no. Perhaps if Bostonians were a little more insane, their parties would be better. One cannot imagine a resident of Beacon Street going insane with shrieking, hair-tearing and monkey faces; rather, his peculiarities would become a little more marked. Instead of living on the income of his income, he would be found trying to live on the income of the income of the income of his income, and in the end he would be taken quietly away in a van.

What does it mean when a city becomes a symbol? What does it mean when a metropolis, a place of living, breathing people with normal vitality and normal personal deviations in behaviour, becomes in the public consciousness so set in its ways that its reputation is static? For whatever generalizations may be made about New York or Chicago, there is always left a margin for exceptions; it is always understood that those cities are in a state of flux, that they may tomorrow develop a character they did not have day before yesterday. Boston, on the other hand, is just cold roast Boston. It is in the minds of the world, so to speak, embalmed.

Boston is not so much a joke as a byword. It is a byword for conventionality. And one of the most salient characteristics of the Bostonian is understatement. Now understatement is a grand old Anglo-Saxon trait, powerful and moving because it implies controlled passion behind. Emerson understated, but you feel the passion of his mind behind it. And all the more terrific against such a background of understatement was the fanaticism of Garrison and Mather. But what happens to the understated word when the passion is removed? It becomes all too accurately stated passivity. And one feels today that there is little passion in Boston. Surely this is because the city has become self-conscious of its reputation, is afraid to be provincial and utterly itself, and is trying to adopt the manners of the younger civic civilizations. Boston's whole charm is in the sturdy peculiarities, the unconscious eccentricities that first made it famous. If it has allowed itself to be shamed into throwing these overboard, it will have to develop a new nature and new unconscious characteristics. Otherwise, it will become merely an imitation of other cities—nothing. However, this will not happen while the older generation, so terribly and unequivocally themselves, hold the fort.

Any estimate of a city's significance must begin with a survey of its social system. With curious atavistic Puritan squeamishness, a Bostonian will not readily admit that Boston has a social system. The Bostonian, and I mean a true-bred son of the Winthrop-LowellCabot tradition, prefers to feel that he lives in a city where children of his grandparents' friends also live, and that they see each other once in a while. A true Bostonian shrinks from words like "society," and although he is one of the most snobbish of God's creatures, his traditions force him to believe that only in Washington and the false foreign capitals exists an organized society. This is, of course, a brilliant example of fake humility. But it is not a pose, it is an inheritance. And though he refuses to admit a social system, of course, there is one. It may be roughly classified as follows:

1. Children of school age. These receive an importance not given them in other places. Boston is a simple city and believes it is simpler than it is. Whole houses are reorganized wdiile its daughters are at Miss Winsor's, and the last remnant of Boston's intellectual tradition is to take the education of its children very seriously. It is significant to note that while any Bostonian will argue to the last gasp for the importance of pure education that is, the value of education for its own sake and not for the kudos of any particular institution—they all send their children to the most exclusive school they can achieve.

2. Débutantes. These enjoy tin* same sleepless round of gaiety as their sisters in the other cities, although their parents unanimously suffer under the misconception that their festivities are kept simpler. From early autumn to late December there are dances at the Somerset, the Woman's Republican Club, and very swell ones at the Copley-Plaza, and then, suddenly, with the first day of the Christmas holidays, the parties are no more. Why? Harvard has gone home. For if coming out really is a marriage mart, then it is a peculiarly inefficient one in Boston, because the men provided for the debutantes are without exception Harvard undergraduates. This condition, while adding much to the gaiety and late hours of parties (since it seems sophomores never have to go to bed), does not make for matrimony. It is all very well for the girls from Philadelphia and New York, who by hook or crook "get to" the parties in Boston, knowing well that by virtue of not being natives alone, they will have the most marvellous time and be cut in upon incessantly; for them, with a secure feeling of plenty of high-salaried young business beaux back at home waiting to take brides, Boston is a Mecca for having a good time. But the manly little Boston girl has got to think of marriage, and she has a choice: to grow older along with her college beaux, and. with luck, snap one of them up as he leaves the Class Day Exercises; or to dig about for young men out of college, started on their careers, and unmarried. These may be regarded as practically nonexistent. Why this should be so is a problem, but definitely there is no recognizable group of young bachelors as there is in any other city. In the first place, they never go to parties, so no girl ever meets them. As a consequence, most young girls follow the first plan of action, and for that reason, hard though it be, they marry younger than you would think. While they are waiting around for the wedding bells to ring, they occupy themselves with the Vincent Club. This is a remarkable and characteristic institution: election to it places a debutante once for all on the social scale, since only a handful of girls are elected each year. It lias no clubhouse, no facilities; all it does is to give a show once a year for the charity whose name it bears, the Vincent Hospital. Members are supposed to be chosen for the talents they might bring to bear on the show. Really, it is a closed corporation with a secret board of nomination that works in a mysterious way its wonders to perform. Once a year, a few weeks before the show is scheduled, the Vincent meets, and then there are tryouts—Helen does her little tap-dance, Alice and Peggy sing songs in close harmony, and Elizabeth gives a monologue; they decide to get the man on from Ned Wayburn's to direct the show.

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3. The New People. By these are meant the increasingly important group, composed largely of persons of native birth, but who are not Bostonians in the snobbish sense, who give the parties, own the motors and are what you meet when you go (without letters of introduction) to Boston. They run over to New York constantly, dress well and serve cocktails. They have such a good time that they don't bother either to aspire to or look down on—

4. The Old Guard, who haven't got a chance to survive, since they don't rouse themselves to resent the intruders. Part of the Boston point of view is that tolerance (left over from the days when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was conceived as a place where all might come to worship as they saw right) of newcomers in the eyes of the Old Guard. The New People are Mammon-worshipers, and that is their business. The Old Guard never repulse them; they are even extremely pleasant to the ones they know at sight; but of course, the New People never get in. If the Old Guard feels that Amory should run for the Legislature, or that a party should be given for some obscure Polar explorer whom they recognize, you may lay your money and sit back and know that Amory will get into the Legislature and that the party will be magnificent, oppressive, and utterly pre-War, with divine Burgundy, atrocious food, gran(les dames in incredible brocades, and distinguished gentlemen of the purest lineage in the whole world.

Not only do they feel that a French Marquis is inherently and racially an impostor, but they put actors and actresses in their Elizabethan place; you feel that in this day and age the Bostonian would approve of the old custom that denied Christian burial to a mummer. Stars whose society is booked weeks in advance of a tour to any other city, are ignored in Boston; you never meet one at a party.

These are the principal bulwarks upon which is founded what we must not call "society" for fear of embarrassing the Bostonians. These people can remember when the Back Bay was water; when, as children, the family cow was pastured on Boston Common; when the Roxbury Latin School was the best in Boston; when l)r. Hale read the Lord's Prayer on the steps of the State House at the turn of the new century, without acoustics, and people on Tremont Street could hear that Bull of Bashan voice; and when all little Boston children went to Papanti's dancing school, although only the oldest can remember the senior Papanti teaching the steps and playing the fiddle at one and the same time.

This goodly and honourable company is old, and getting older, and pretty soon they will all be dead and Boston will be delivered over to the Philistines and will probably become a much more amusing place.

Meanwhile the night-clubs in Boston are far and few, and their lifetime is limited, for they seldom can be made to pay. As far as one can tell, there are no speakeasies. Expensive lunching-out does not exist to any extent; most people lunch at home, and the debutantes lunch at SchrafTt's. People walk in Boston; you walk out to shop, to tea, to dinner even, under the pleasant trees along the mall on Commonwealth Avenue, or across the crazy cow-paths of the Common. The Public Gardens is, in a stiff, begonia, Victorian sort of way, the most charming park to be found in America, especially when it is almond-green in springtime seen from the windows of the Ritz Carlton. Across the street, in the St. Botolph Club, among dark old furniture, the white-haired old men go on reading their papers. As to the physical evolution of the city, the main change is in Newbury Street, which has become the Madison Avenue of Boston. That is the doing of the New People. The Old Guard have been content to go on buying hats at Hovey's, shoes at Thayer McNeil's, and everything at S. S. Pierce's, pronounced "Perce" by any true Bostonian, just as Tremont must always have its accent on the last syllable.

The only time when you can really taste the flavour of Boston, the old Boston where everyone had grown up together and you could learn the way to a friend's house by merely asking the first person you met on the street, is on Beacon Hill on Christmas Eve. There, where motors are forbidden for the night, where every window holds three lighted candles for the Christ Child, or a beautiful little creche or a dazzling Christmas tree, where the snowy streets are filled with Bostonians on foot, walking up and down steep Beacon Hill in the starand candle-light, you do realize that this is an old and very simple city.

Boston's intellectual sun has perhaps set; the Emersons, the Lowells, the Margaret Fullers are not being reproduced in replica. Beset by a swarm of Celtic hornets, the Bostonians have lost spirit and don't tinker much with politics any more; you do not find many who use the flat, long A down in Washington nowadays. The "sunny side of Beacon Street" is just a side-walk, to-day, with quiet, orderly people going their way and not bothering anybody, socially, politically, religiously or intellectually, underneath the cool green elms. But, as the Boston wit, Jeffrey Roche, would have it in hysterical Latin in one of his deathless lyrics, "Dies erit praegUida, Sinistra quum Bostonia," which, translated as best one may, means "It will be a cold day when Boston gets left."