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A Brahmin Suffragist Suffers a Night of Terror in Prison

On the night of Nov. 14, 1917, 63-year-old Mrs. John Winters Brannan wrapped herself in her heavy sealskin coat to protect herself from the thugs about to hurl her into a cold, filthy prison cell. A scene of violent confusion had suddenly surrounded her and the 32 other suffragists in the Occoquan Work House. The next 12 hours would ever after be known as the night of terror.

Police had arrested the suffragists picketing in front of the White House, taken them in vans to Union Station and put them on the train to Lorton, Va., 20 miles away. There, more vans picked them up and took them to Occoquan, where they waited in the matron’s office.

Silent Sentinels picket the White House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women began to notice shabbily dressed men milling outside. Then the workhouse superintendent, William Whittaker, burst into the room. “Seize these women, take them off, that one, that one, — take her off.” The men began manhandling the women, shaking one suffragist violently, throwing another to the floor.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan, though stunned, said to the superintendent, “I will give my name under protest.” Then she started to walk toward the desk.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” shouted the superintendent. “Don’t talk about protest; I won’t have any of that nonsense.”

It was exactly that intransigence – there’d been a century of it — that drove Eunice Dana Brannan to suffer through a night of terror for women’s rights.

Eunice Dana Brannan

Eunice Dana was born on Aug. 27, 1854, in Westport, Conn., the youngest of four children of Charles Dana, founder of the New York Sun and confidante of President Abraham Lincoln. Her ancestor, Richard Dana, had arrived in Cambridge, Mass., from England in 1640, founding a Boston Brahmin dynasty.

In the decade before the Civil War, Charles Dana worked as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and made it the leading voice of anti-slavery. He also believed in equal rights for women, an uncompromising position his daughter would adopt.

She married John Winters Brannan, a prominent doctor, in 1882. They had two sons and a daughter who later joined the woman’s rights movement.

Eunice Dana Brannan, 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A 1917 photo of her reveals a regal society matron in a jeweled dress with an elaborate coiffure. She was ‘an aristocrat of intellect and feeling,’ according to a colleague in the women’s rights movement.

Suffragist

When Eunice Brannan got involved in the women’s rights movement, the idea of standing on a soapbox to harangue strangers horrified her. But she traveled to England in the 1890s to see for herself the tactics used by the Pankhurst sisters, women’s rights activists who called themselves suffra-gettes.

In 1897, she told the Political Equality Club in Geneva, N.Y., that she had changed her mind when she saw the Pankhursts’ orderly outdoor meetings.

But over the next decade English suffragettes made little progress toward the vote. To gain attention for their crusade, the suffragettes began to smash windows, fight with policemen and go to jail.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan did not approve. Around 1908, Munsey’s Magazine reported, ‘Mrs. Brannan is said to have reduced a young English-American suffragist to the freezing point by the icy question, “And I suppose you have been in jail” leveled at her on the moment of introduction.

But decades and decades of work — organizing, marching, petitioning, campaigning — had not brought women full voting rights except in 11 U.S. states.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan would change her mind about going to jail.

Silent Sentinels

President Woodrow Wilson did not publicly support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. On March 4, 1917, the day of his inauguration for a second term, the suffragists picketed outside the White House.

Calling themselves the Silent Sentinels, they picketed nearly every day, rain or shine, wearing white, gold and purple sashes. They held banners that said, “Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty.” And they made it impossible for Wilson to enter or leave the White House without seeing them. Eunice Brannan was among the pickets.

Wilson put up with them for a while, even inviting them in for coffee. They refused. Then in April 1917 the United States entered World War I. That month, police started arresting the suffragists for obstructing traffic. The courts released them quickly.

Police arrest two of the Silent Sentinels. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women kept it up, and they started getting prison sentences. Then the prison sentences got longer and longer. In July, Eunice Brannan was among a group of suffragists sentenced to Occoquan Work House. One suffragist had a high-ranking husband who complained to Wilson, who pardoned them all after three days.

In August, the suffragists unfurled a banner that said,

“Kaiser Wilson Have You Forgotten Your Sympathy With the Poor Germans Because They Were Not Self-Governed? 20,000,000 American Women Are Not Self-Governed. Take the Beam Out of Your Own Eye.”

More Arrests

In October, police arrested one of the suffragists’ leaders, Alice Paul, and the court sentenced her to seven months in prison. To protest her sentence, a larger-than-usual contingent of women picketed the White House. Police arrested them. A judge released them.

The suffragists went right back to the picket line. Again, police arrested them. A judge released them again.

The suffragists returned to the White House picket line. The police arrested 33 and, this time, the judge handed down sentences from six days to six months.

The prisoners came from all over the country and from all walks of life: the great-great-granddaughter of Revolutionary Gen. Artemas Ward, a Framingham, Mass., shopkeeper, a Romanian immigrant, the country’s only woman geologist, a 73-year-old Floridian with a bad leg and three munitions workers from Bridgeport, Conn.

Eunice Brannan got 45 days. She told the judge, “The responsibility for an agitation like ours against injustice rests with those who deny justice, not those who demand it.”

The Night of Terror

The night of terror began when they arrived at Occoquan Work House. Eunice Brannan wrote a deposition about it, and another prisoner, Doris Stevens, included it in her book, Jailed for Freedom.

“… I . . . saw the guards seizing the different women of the party with the utmost violence, the furniture being overturned and the room a scene of the utmost disturbance,” wrote Brannan. “I saw Miss [Kathryn] Lincoln lying on the floor, with every appearance of having just been thrown down by the two guards who were standing over her in a menacing attitude.

“… The whole group of women were thrown, dragged or herded out of the office on to the porch, down the steps to the ground, and forced to cross the road … to the Administration Building. During all of this time, . . . Superintendent Whittaker was . . . directing the whole attack. . . .

A cell in Occoquan Work House.

The thugs hurled the women into freezing, filthy stone cells, where they had no privacy. An exposed toilet in the cell could only flush from the corridor, so the women had to ask the same guards who’d abused them to flush the toilet for them.

More Terror

Eunice Brannan looked across the corridor and saw Kathryn Lincoln. Brannan asked whether she was all right after the guards had thrown her to the floor.

Instantly Superintendent Whittaker rushed forward, shouting at her, “Stop that ; not another word from your mouth, or I will handcuff you, gag you and put you in a strait jacket.”

The guards shackled Lucy Burns’ hands to the top of the cell, so she had to stand all night.

Lucy Burns in prison. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

They slammed the frail Dorothy Day down on an iron bench. When they hurled Dora Lewis into the cell, her head struck the iron bed. Alice Cosu saw her pass out and suffered a heart attack.

Mary Nolan, the 73-year-old Floridian, wrote that Alice Cosu was vomiting. “We called and called. We asked them to send our own doctor, because we thought she was dying. . . . They [the guards] paid no attention. A cold wind blew in on us from the outside, and we three lay there shivering and only half conscious until morning.”

Eunice Brannan thought of the offense with which they had been charged — obstructing traffic, — and felt their treatment was out of all proportion to the offense. She also concluded the superintendent, the matron and guards must have had the support of higher authorities.

The Next Day

The day after the night of terror, Mrs. John Winters Brannan put on prison clothes. A guard gave her a cup of skimmed milk and a slice of toast, and then took her to the sewing room. There she was went to work sewing on the underpants of the male prisoners.

Doris Stevens, Mrs. Hopkins and Eunice Brannan in prison garb, probably in July 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Marines from Quantico stood as sentinels outside the workhouse. None of their friends or family had any word about their situation. Matthew O’Brien, their attorney, tried to visit them but couldn’t. The phones to the Women’s Congress headquarters were tapped.

Finally, one of the marine sentinels went to the women’s headquarters and said ‘unknown tortures’ were going on. O’Brien, got a court order and forced his way into the workhouse. Still he couldn’t see his clients.

Some of the women refused to eat, including Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis. On Day 7, they prison officials force fed them. Lewis wrote that five people seized her and held her down. The doctor forced a tube down her throat, “I gasping and suffocating with the agony of it.”

9 Days After the Night of Terror

Finally O’Brien got a writ of habeas corpus to show cause why the women should be detained in a Virginia prison after their arrest in Washington, D.C. The hearing started nine days after the night of terror, on November 23, in a little courthouse in Alexandria.

The suffragists filed into court one by one, shocking some of the spectators. Some were so weak they had to lie on the benches. Eunice Brannan collapsed, and court officers took her to a sofa in an anteroom.

Three of the most brutally abused women didn’t appear in court. The judge asked why. The defense said they were too ill. O’Brien retorted the prison officials didn’t want people to see their injuries. The judge ordered the three to be brought in the next day.

Testimony About the Night of Terror

On the morning of November 24, Eunice Brannan got a chance to talk to her husband, now the chairman of the board of trustees of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He testified during the hearing that day:

“I find Mrs. Brannan in a state of almost complete collapse from the shocking treatment to which she has been subjected in Occoquan Workhouse … Today is the first opportunity I have had to hear my wife’s full story, though I have been in Washington three times this week, attempting to find out the actual conditions of her imprisonment.”

The superintendent had forbidden her to describe her treatment to anyone, he said. Brannan said he noticed the look of terror that came into the faces of all the women prisoners when William Whittaker stepped near them.

“From my wife’s account it was evident that the suffrage prisoners were deliberately terrorized when they entered Occoquan and were treated with great brutality by the men guards, who handled them and knocked them about with the fury of thugs, under the immediate direction of Mr. Whittaker himself, who called out that the men ‘would be glad to get their hands on them and handle them rough.’”

Brannan concluded the suffragists had broken no law, since the Constitution guarantees their right to petition and the Clayton Act makes picketing in the District legal.

Not Guilty

“If they are guilty of an offense it is trivial in comparison with the outrageous insults and brutal treatment to which they have been subjected.”

The judge ruled for the women, saying they could be paroled pending appeal. Eunice Brannan and two others agreed to their release, fearing prison would kill them. The others insisted on serving out their sentences in the Washington District Jail.

Julia Hurlbut, Eunice Brannan, 1918, probably in front of National Woman’s Party headquarters in New York City. Note Brannan’s coat. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Vindication for the Night of Terror

News of the night of terror sparked protests across the country. In March 1918, four months after the night of terror, a judge ruled they’d been illegally arrested, convicted and detained in Occoquan Work House.

In 1918, Eunice Brannan burned one of Wilson’s speeches in Lafayette Square. “We have forgotten the history of our country if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate when it is necessary to readjust matters,” she announced

On August 18, 1920, the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

With thanks to David Dismore, “Today in Herstory: The “Silent Sentinels” Go Back to Court — This Time, to Seek Justice,” feminist.org blog. And to Chas Wells, Biographical Sketch of Eunice Dana (Mrs. John Winters) Brannan, Alexander Street, and Doris Stevens, “Jailed for Freedom.” This story updated in 2022.

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Ellen Day Hale, Brahmin Bohemian, Paints Like a Man

Ellen Day Hale received little recognition for her art during her lifetime, but she did win independence as a new kind of woman who rejected her traditional role.

‘June’ by Ellen Day Hale, courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts

She was one of eight children of the famous Unitarian minister, Edward Everett Hale and Emily Baldwin Perkins.

Her father won literary renown for short stories like The Man Without A Country, and he served as chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1904-1909. Ellen often helped him as hostess.

Ellen Day Hale

Born Feb. 11, 1855 in Worcester, Mass., Ellen Day Hale grew up in a family full of accomplished women, including her great aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Writer and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman was her first cousin. Her brother, Philip Leslie Hale, was also an accomplished artist and art critic.

Though her family belonged to the Boston Brahmin caste, they didn’t have much money. Ellen would have to support herself with her work, not an easy task for a woman in late 19^th century Boston.

She studied painting in Boston and Philadelphia and then, like a thousand other Americans, went to Paris to study art. She studied female anatomy and mastered likenesses of the female form.

Self-Portrait, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Her self-portrait demonstrates her prowess, as well as the influence of French Impressionist Claude Manet.

The painting, which she began in 1884 at the age of 29, tells us a lot about the bold and unconventional Ellen Day Hale. Her bangs, for example, could have connoted promiscuity – or androgyny. Her bold gaze and her fashionable outfit suggest her willingness to push traditional boundaries.

Ellen Day Hale had an art teacher who criticized the central placement of her hands, suggesting she make them smaller and prettier. Ellen refused. When she brought the painting back to show in Boston, one critic said it demonstrated “a man’s strength in the treatment and handling of her subjects.”

Etching

An etching by Ellen Day Hale, ‘Willow Whistle’

Like her brother Philip, Ellen wrote about art. She authored a book, History of Art: A Study of the Lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer. Unlike her brother, she couldn’t support herself teaching, a profession that offered few opportunities for women.

In 1883, she met the artist Gabrielle de Veaux Clements and they became lifelong partners. Clements taught Hale how to etch while they traveled Europe. Ellen Day Hale saw the commercial possibilities of etching, and sold her images of the European countryside. Later, she and Clements sold etchings of their travels to California, Egypt and Palestine.

Morning News, 1905

They also made money decorating churches. Hale’s niece remembers how they did it:

If a church decoration was under way, Miss Clements and the other old maids might all work on it — painting great oranges, like burning orbs, high on the Tree of Life, or many-colored flowers in the Palestinian grass–while Aunt Nelly worked on the circle of radiance around the Child.

They returned to the United States and moved into a house together in Gloucester, Mass., where they maintained a Boston marriage.

Ellen Day Hale died on her 85^th birthday in 1940 in Brookline, Mass.

With thanks to Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 by Kirsten Swinth.

Images: The Willow Whistle, By Madeleinegb – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47425325; June By Madeleinegb – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47425245. This story was upudated in 2022.

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Polly Peabody, The Bohemian Blueblood Who Invented the Bra

Inventing the bra was possibly the least interesting thing Polly Peabody did in her life.

Polly Peabody as Caresse Crosby and her whippet, Clytoris

Born Mary Phelps Jacob, she was called Polly Peabody during her first upper-crust marriage and Caresse Crosby during her scandalous second. She and her husband Harry Crosby personified the Lost Generation as they cavorted recklessly through Europe. After he committed suicide (and murdered his mistress), she devoted herself to business – publishing, not underwear. She had an affair with an African-American boxer and a third marriage to a football player 18 years her junior before dying in Rome at the age of 78.

Polly Peabody

Mary Phelps ‘Polly’ Jacob was descended from Puritans, but was anything but puritanical. Her ancestors included Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford and William Phelps, founder of Dorchester, Mass., and Windsor, Conn.

She was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on April 20, 1891. Her family divided its time among New Rochelle, Manhattan and Watertown, Conn.

She grew up, she later said, ‘in a world where only good smells existed.’ If she wanted something, she usually got it.

Polly Peabody Invents the Bra

Polly went to boarding school at Rosemary Hall (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Conn., graduating at 19.

Bra diagram, 1914

But from the age of 12 she prepared to make her debut, attending one to three balls every night and sleeping until noon every day.

One evening she put on a sheer gown for yet another debutante ball. She noticed her corset stuck out of the top of the low-cut bodice. She asked her maid to fetch two handkerchiefs, some pink ribbon, a needle, thread and pins. They quickly fashioned a simple bra.

After the dance her friends demanded to know the secret to her risqué look. When a stranger offered her a dollar if she’d make a bra, she realized she had the makings of a business.

On Feb. 12, 1914 she filed for a patent, and in November the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted her one for the ‘Backless Brassiere.’

Her lingerie career was interrupted by her marriage the next year to another Puritan blueblood, Richard Peabody. His grandfather, Endicott Peabody, who founded the Groton School, officiated at the wedding.

Polly Peabody may have started her bra business because she couldn’t rely on her husband. He had little interest in their two children, and when he wasn’t going off to war he liked to get drunk and watch buildings burn.

Home of the Bra

Polly Peabody started the Fashion Form Brassiere Company – your basic sweatshop — on Washington Street in Boston. In her autobiography she admitted she only made a few hundred bras for a few department store accounts. The shop, though, turned out to be a good place for trysts with her new lover, Harry Crosby.

Washington Street in 1920

She met Crosby in 1920 at a party on Nantasket Beach while Peabody tried to dry out.

Eventually, she sold her patent for $1,500 to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Conn. The Warner brothers, Lucien and Ira, had made millions selling Coraline Health Corsets. Three-fourths of the corsets sold in America came from Bridgeport, and most came from the Warner brothers.

The company began to make the backless bra in mass quantities. It got a boost from the U.S. War Industries Board in 1917 when it asked women to stop buying corsets to free up metal for World War I. Warner Brothers made more than $15 million from the bra patent.

Later Warner Brothers became Warnaco and manufactured underwear, swimwear and other apparel. The company moved out of Bridgeport in 1996, and developers converted the enormous factory into lofts.

The Warner Brothers factory

Caresse Crosby

Harry Crosby was a wealthy Boston Brahmin and World War I veteran. He and Polly Peabody had sex within two weeks of meeting. Then they married in 1922 after she divorced Peabody. They moved to Paris, where they spent freely, partied like mad, took drugs and lovers and started Black Sun Press.

Harry and Caresse Crosby

Polly Peabody became Caresse Crosby. She and Harry then started publishing their own poetry and the early works of such Lost Generation writers as Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Anais Nin and James Joyce.

By 1928, Caresse Crosby had started an intense affair with photographer Henry Cartier-Bresson.

Harry Crosby killed his lover and committed suicide that year. Caresse threw herself into the Black Sun Press after Harry’s death.

Eventually Caresse Crosby broke it off with Cartier-Bresson and fell in love with Canada Lee, an African American boxer and actor. She followed that affair with marriage to an unemployed actor and football player 18 years younger than she, Selbert Saffold Young. They bought a plantation in Virginia because he wanted to be a farmer. He often got drunk and stayed away from home. Caresse ghostwrote pornography for Henry Miller.

Later she opened a modern art gallery in Washington, D.C. She also founded Women Against War and started an artists colony in Rome in an old castle. A film, Always Yes, Caresse, was made of a tour of the castle. You can watch a clip from it here.

Caresse Crosby died in Rome on Jan. 24, 1970. Of the bra, she once wrote,

I can’t say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.

This story about Polly Peabody inventing the bra was updated in 2023.

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The Pet Names of Famous New Englanders

When the Pilgrims came to America on the Mayflower, they brought with them two dogs described as a spaniel and a mastiff. Though their names are unknown, the pet names of many famous four-legged New Englanders have not been lost to history.

John Adams and his wife Abigail were the first inhabitants of the White House, and their dogs were the first to romp on the White House lawn. The Adamses had two mutts named Juno and Satan. “If you love me … you must love my dog,” Abigail wrote in a letter to her granddaughter, Caroline Smith. As president, John Adams had the White House stables built, presumably to house his horse Cleopatra.

‘Love me, love my dog.’ Abigail Adams, detail from painting by Gilbert Stuart

Satan and Sin

Mark Twain loved cats and loved to play pool. Whenever he played, he put a kitten into the corner pocket.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote. So great was his affection for cats that he once rented two kittens, named Sackcloth and Ashes, during a summer stay in Dublin, N.H.

His pet names for his cats also included Sour Mash, Appollinaris, Zoraster, Blatherkite and Beelzebub. His favorite: Bambino.

pet-names-mark-twain-with-cat-on-his-shoulder

Mark Twain and friend.

He had a black cat named Satan and a tortoise-shell cat named Sin. They got along well.

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction,” he once wrote.

“I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a purring one,” he said. “They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”

Henry David Thoreau had a pet cat named Sylvia. Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently didn’t much like animals and had no pets. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Una had a Newfoundland named Leo.

Smart Setter?

Author Thomas Bailey Aldrich had an Irish setter named Grip, who he believed was smarter than some men he knew. The dog loved to bring Aldrich’s slippers from the bedroom to the parlor. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier had a dog named Robin Adair.

Daniel Webster wasn’t terribly fond of dogs or cats, but he loved oxen. When the great statesman returned to his Marshfield farm to die, one of his last pleasures was to sit in his window and admire his oxen. He was said to know them all by name, but alas, those pet names are lost to us.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., during his two-year voyage aboard the Pilgrim, adopted a dog he named Bravo in San Diego. Frederick Law Olmsted took a bull terrier named Judy along when he traveled the South to write about slavery.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait

Abolitionist John Brown loved animals and gave pet names to many. As a boy he had a pet squirrel named Bobtail. He raised sheep and had two shepherd dogs named Toss and Jack.

A Vice Named Cuddle Bunch

Louisa May Alcott joked her vices included an inordinate love of cats. She had a black cat named Cuddle Bunch who “had a fit,” and fell out of a window to her death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe loved her cat named Calvin who, according to Charles Dudley Warner, “walked into her house one day out of the great unknown and became at once at home.” Stowe named Calvin after her husband and let him sit on her shoulder while she wrote.

Marian Anderson owned two Kerry Blue terriers, Falla, after President Roosevelt’s dog, and Fenon.

Presidential Pet Names

Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace brought a menagerie to the White House. Their pets included white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, terriers named Peter Pan and Paul Pry, a Shetland sheepdog named Calamity Jane, chow chows named Tiny Tim and Blackberry, a bulldog named Boston Beans and a German shepherd named King Cole.

The Kennedy family on vacation with their dogs. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

The John F. Kennedy White House was filled with pets comprised of a mutt named Pushinka, a gift from Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev. Other pet names included a German shepherd named Clipper, a cocker spaniel named Shannon, an Irish wolfhound named Shannon, and the president’s favorite dog, a Welsh terrier named Charlie.

The First Couple often took one or two of the family dogs out for a walk under the cover of darkness. Traphes Bryant, the White House dog handler, said the people didn’t recognize them as Secret Service agents followed discreetly in a car. Sometimes, Bryant said, they “looked like two young college kids taking the dogs for a walk. They looked so happy.”

Cultural Pet Names

Leonard Bernstein, who grew up in Lawrence and later lived in Redding, Conn., owned a series of Dachsunds all named Henry. As an adult he owned a sheltie named Honey.

Bernstein incorporated the pet names of his friends’ animals into his music. The Library of Congress’s collection of his music manuscripts includes a trumpet score in Bernstein’s writing called Rondo (for Lifey). He sent it to actress Judy Holliday, whose dog was named Lifey. The music and lyric sketches for Bernstein’s orchestral composition Slava! have an alternate title on the title page: Puk – the pet name for Rostropovich’s dog.

The Bernstein family and Honey. Photo courtesy Library of Congress .

T.S. Eliot, though he grew up in St. Louis, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Eliots and summered in Gloucester, Mass. Eliot wrote “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” full of eccentric pet names like Skimbleshanks, Growltiger, Mr. Mistoffelees and Gus.. The book became the Broadway musical Cats.

And Lillian Jackson Braun, a native of Chicopee Falls, Mass., also invented fictional cats — Koko and Yum Yum — in her The Cat Who… mystery series.

This story about the pet names of famous New Englanders was updated in 2022.

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A Brief History of the Boston Brahmin

There’s more to being a Boston Brahmin than simply having an early Puritan ancestor, graduating from Harvard and living on Beacon Hill.

Boston Brahmin and President, John Quincy Adams, by George Peter Alexander Healy

You must not flaunt your wealth. You must shun glitzy resorts and you must be thrifty, perhaps traveling by T. The one new suit you buy a year must adhere to the Boston Brahmin dress code, now known as preppy. You must speak in your own British-sounding dialect. (To hear it, click here.)

You should probably marry a relative. Fortunately, you have plenty of choices, including Appletons, Bacons, Cabots, Codmans, Coolidges, Crowninshields, Forbes, Hunnewells, Lodges, Lowells, Parkmans, Perkins, Russells, Saltonstalls, Shattucks, Shaws and Winthrops.

You must eat roast beef on Sunday night and cold leftovers on Monday. That’s where the expression ‘cold roast Boston’ comes from. It was a favorite of Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a Brahmin who persistently failed to stay out of the newspaper.

William Weld

According to the Boston Brahmin code, you must only be mentioned in the newspaper when you are born, married and died. But many Brahmins, like Weld, couldn’t help but generate ink by taking high government office. Or running colleges, winning literature prizes or founding prep schools and orchestras. Or actually running newspapers themselves, like Boston Brahmin Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee.

Brahmin Coined

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., coined the phrase in 1861 in his novel Elsie Venner. In it he described Boston’s aristocracy as the “Brahmin Caste of New England.” Holmes wrote they believed destiny had set them apart to create a shining city on a hill. And they embraced the values of their Puritan forebears: hard work, thrift, culture and education.

Many Boston Brahmin families made their fortunes as merchants and financiers before Holmes published his novel. If you hadn’t made your money by then, the only way into the caste was to marry into it.

Some Brahmins were already wealthy when they arrived in the early 17^th century. Weld used to joke that his ancestors sent the servants ahead on the Mayflower so they could prepare the summer cottage.

Brahmin Oliver Ames, on the other hand, made his own fortune. He started manufacturing shovels in 1803 in Easton, Mass. His sons, Oliver, Jr., and Oakes, then accumulated enough money to underwrite the Union Pacific Railroad. His grandson, Frederick Lothrop Ames, was an original stockholder of General Electric, and the family’s real estate holdings enabled them to build the Colonial Theatre and parts of MIT. They also built the Ames Building, the tallest building in Boston from 1893 to 1919. Another grandson, also Oliver Ames, won election as the 35^th governor of Massachusetts.

Boston Brahmin vs. Boston Irish

Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., as a young man.

The Boston Brahmin had no love for the Irish immigrants who arrived on famine ships during the 1840s. Young Brahmins founded the Immigration Restriction League in 1894 shortly after they graduated from Harvard. The League had as its champion Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who sponsored a bill in Congress that would have required newcomers to pass a literacy test to enter the country

As the Irish began to accumulate wealth and power, the Brahmins found themselves having to make concessions. In 1901, March 17 was declared a holiday. Of course it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but to save face the Brahmins called it Evacuation Day. It marks the day in 1776 when British troops left Boston.

Boston Brahmins founded the New England Watch and Ward Society, a puritanical group of private citizens active from 1878 to the 1920s. It made Boston a target of scorn and – unintentionally – heightened interest in the books and plays it banned.

Brahmins also founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Peabody Essex and Isabella Stewart Gardner museums, WGBH, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenaeum.

They followed their Puritan ancestors who started Boston Latin School, the first high school in the country. Brahmins founded elite college preparatory schools like Choate (now Choate Rosemary Hall), Groton, Andover and Phillips Exeter. Then they sent their children and grandchildren to them.

WASPy Snobs

John Lowell, Jr., founded WGBH.

Sociologist Harriet Martineau visited Boston in the 1830s and concluded its Brahmins were “perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own “first people,” as any in the world.”

Novelist John P. Marquand lampooned the circumscribed life of the Boston Brahmin in The Late George Apley. When Apley’s grandfather moved to the South End, he was shocked to see a man in shirtsleeves across the street. So he sold his house the next day and retreated to Back Bay.

George Apley also has a family estate in Milton (Nahant or Beverly would have worked as well). He stays at the Boston hotels in New York, London and Paris and doesn’t know what he would have done in life without the Club. (One Boston club, The Tennis and Racquet Club, had rooms heated only by fireplaces as late as 1958.)

T.S. Eliot‘s poem The Boston Evening Transcript gently mocks the Brahmin caste to which he belonged (though his family moved to St. Louis). The Transcript, published from 1830 to 1941, was the paper of record. The Brahmins loved its book reviews, music criticism, college sports page, bridge department and genealogy column.

In 1935, the Atlantic magazine printed a critique of the Brahmin by S. Foster Damon. In it, he wrote, “The Brahmins still lived on the water side of Beacon Street or the sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue, they still dined at two and had ‘tea’ at six, they read the Atlantic and the Transcript, held four receptions a year, escaped the Egyptian heat of summer by moving to the North Shore; sent their sons to Harvard and their dead to Mt. Auburn.”

More to the point was the poem by John Collins Bossidy:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.

The Kennedys most certainly were not Boston Brahmins.

Boston Brahmin by Marriage

Isabella Stewart Gardner became a Boston Brahmin, at least technically, when she married John Lowell Gardner, Jr. However, she didn’t always adhere to the Brahmin code. Gardner posed for a painting in a low-cut dress, walked a lion down the street on a leash and scrubbed the steps of an Anglo-Catholic Church during Lent.

Young John Kerry receives a medal

Former Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry is a classic example of Brahmin by marriage. His father was descended from Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants who converted to Catholicism. His mother had the Forbes ancestors, and one of her sisters paid for his prep school education.

The Forbes family had made an early fortune in the China trade, built the transcontinental railroad and went on secret missions for Abraham Lincoln. The family made even more money investing in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Allan Forbes headed Boston’s State Street Bank and Trust Company in the 1950s. The family has its own quiet resort, Naushon Island, where a Forbes once grilled a stablehand on his thoughts about the Plantaganets.

When Kerry ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1996, he opposed his distant cousin: William Weld. And when he ran for president in 2004, he followed in the footsteps of other Brahmin presidents and presidential aspirants: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Photo: William Weld, By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50569492. This story about the Boston Brahmin was updated in 2023.

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Fanny and Oliver, The Unlikely Pair Who Secured the Legacy of Walt Whitman

On July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman was first published – to widespread shock and awe. Today’s literary classic was 1855’s obscenity. Amid the furor over Walt Whitman’s explicit sexual imagery, two New England powerhouses conspired to make sure it was never forgotten.

Fanny Fern strongly defended Whitman’s collection of poems. Fern was not a force to be ignored. Born in Portland, Maine in 1811 as Sara Willis, she had plenty of grit. She fought her way out of the poverty that enveloped her after her first husband’s death.

Walt Whitman at 35

Fern became a widely read columnist in the New York Ledger, proving her brother wrong. He was a magazine publisher who rejected Fern’s writing as too provincial. For good measure, she published a best-selling roman-a-clef that pilloried her brother. Her main character ignored any responsibility to a struggling sister while actively working to inhibit her career.

So when Leaves of Grass created a hubbub, Fanny Fern couldn’t resist getting into the thick of it.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman published the book because of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem that called for a new voice to examine American culture and mores.

Leaves of Grass shocked proper society. Emerson praised it, but many others did not. According to some accounts, the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw the book in the fire. Critics decried it as filth. They called Whitman a hack. One even hinted in print that Whitman was homosexual.

Walt Whitman was employed at the U.S. Department of Interior at the time of the initial publication. The Secretary of the Interior thought the work pornographic and summarily fired him. (Whitman would recover with another government job).

Unspeakably Delicious

All this noise focused Fanny Fern’s firepower on the topic in May of 1856:

Fanny Fern

“Leaves of Grass thou art unspeakably delicious,” she wrote. “Walt Whitman, the world needed a “Native American” of thorough, out and out breed—enamored of women not ladies, men not gentlemen; something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing; it needed a man who dared speak out his strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadying, republican aristocracy; dictionary-men, hypocrites, cliques and creeds; it needed a large-hearted, untainted, self-reliant, fearless son of the Stars and Stripes, who disdains to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage …”

The praise from Fern and other critics helped give publishers the spine-stiffening they needed. They kept Leaves of Grass in print as Walt Whitman revised, expanded and reworked his masterpiece for decades.

Oliver Stevens

Thirty years later, Bostonian Oliver Stevens would give Leaves of Grass another needed boost – but in a very different way.

Stevens was the district attorney for Boston. He rose to prominence in 1875 in the trial of the notorious “belfry murder case.” Warren Avenue Church janitor Jim Piper had killed a young girl, Mabel Young, in the church belfry. The girl’s body and the baseball bat used to kill her were hidden in the belfry.

The case against Piper was a difficult one to prove and the attorney general, who usually prosecuted murders, was ill and unable to handle the case. Stevens, the young Suffolk County district attorney, stepped in. He masterfully procured a conviction that launched his 30-year career.

A fixture on Beacon Hill and his summer estate in North Andover, Stevens was part of a movement to clean up the out-of-control crime in Boston at the time. Liquor, prostitution and vice was severely squelched during his time.

Watch and Ward

Stevens worked closely with the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization formed in 1879 to reduce crime and immoral practices in Massachusetts. It would later change its name to the New England Watch and Ward Society and have a 100-year run as the morality watchdog in Massachusetts.

A who’s who of Brahmin society made up the group’s membership. In 1882 the group persuaded district attorney Stevens to intervene with the publisher and censor Leaves of Grass. So Stevens wrote to the publisher and condemned it as obscene. He insisted that the publisher remove the poems “A Woman Waits for Me” and “To a Common Prostitute.” He also demanded revisions to several other poems.

Whitman’s publisher, feeling the heat, asked the author to approve the changes. Whitman refused, and the publisher backed out of the project. But another publisher stepped in. The “Banned in Boston” label and controversy would step up sales, Whitman’s new publisher theorized. And that’s exactly what happened.

The title found new life, and the 1882 version went through five printings. By then, critics warmed to the work. Walt Whitman would continue to revise and republish it up to his death in 1892.

The book again received a boost when the government distributed it to troops serving in World War II as a celebration of the American way of life for which they fought.

This story about Walt Whitman was updated in 2022.

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