Boston Herald Archives - New England Historical Society

In an early display of homophobia, 60 Harvard students dressed up like the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde when he delivered a lecture at the Boston Music Hall in 1882.

Wilde, later sentenced to prison for gross indecency with men, urged people to lead beautiful lives by surrounding themselves with beautiful things. He preached, ‘art for art’s sake.’

Wilde came to Boston with that message, part of a year-long lecture. He provoked strong reactions in New England.

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Some considered him decadent and subversive. The prominent Cambridge social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson accused him of writing pornographic poetry. The Boston Evening Transcript questioned, in verse, whether Oscar Wilde was a man or a woman.

But a group of Boston Bohemians – many of them gay — fell under his spell. And according to at least one critic, Wilde’s visit inspired cultural developments that made Boston the center of the aesthetic movement in America.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde toured the United States to promote a Gilbert and Sullivan play that made fun of him. The play, Patience, mocked the aesthetic movement then the rage in Britain.

The central character, Reginald Bunthorne, appears as a caricature of Wilde, a ‘fleshly poet’ committed to sensuous beauty.

The playwrights’ promoter, Richard D’Oyly Carte, thought a lecture tour by the celebrity aesthete would help sell tickets to the U.S. tour of the play.

Oscar Wilde, then a 27-year-old Irish celebrity poet and playwright, agreed to do the lecture tour. His motive, noted historian Douglass Shand-Tucci, was not to promote a play. Instead, he wanted to give force and coherence to the aesthetic movement emerging in the United States.

Wilde had a knack for attracting attention with his flamboyant dress, signature sunflower and tart witticisms. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad,” he said. “People are either charming or tedious.”

And he famously defined a cynic as one ‘who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Newport, R.I.

When Wilde arrived in New York in January 1882, he supposedly told a customs inspector he had nothing to declare but his genius. However, there’s no evidence he actually said that. He did say the Atlantic Ocean disappointed him – not stormy enough. A London periodical published a letter from the Atlantic Ocean expressing disappointment in Oscar Wilde.

Another publicity genius, P.T. Barnum, supposedly offered Oscar Wilde 200 pounds to ride Jumbo the Elephant carrying a sunflower, his trademark.

Thanks to his flair for attracting public notice his image appeared everywhere during his U.S. lecture tour. Drawings and photographs of him were ubiquitous in posters, newspapers, magazines, sheet music, even trading cards.

Oscar Wilde, sheet music, image courtesy Boston Public Library

He made a splash in Newport, R.I., where Julia Ward Howe entertained him at her home. He also lectured on “The Decorative Arts” at the Casino Theater.

His influence was still felt more than a hundred years later, when one of the Newport mansions, Rosecliff, mounted an exhibition in 2018 called, “Bohemian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement and Oscar Wilde’s Newport.”

Unmanly Oscar Wilde

There were plenty of dissenting voices, though. His hair and clothing especially drew criticism. He had a flamboyant stage outfit of velvet jacket, stockings and knee breeches.

He also wore his hair long with bangs – something only women did. When he spoke in New York, the Tribune reported he attracted ‘many pallid and aesthetic young men in dress suits and banged hair.’

Boston

He visited Boston twice, in January and in June. The city then considered itself the Athens of America, proud of its writers, artists and philosophers.

By 1880, the city had shed some of its Puritanical starchiness, at least in certain quarters. A Bohemian demimonde of artists, poets and architects had emerged. And the city was wild for the frothy musicals of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The poet James Russell Lowell had given Oscar Wilde a letter of introduction to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell had debuted the drag shows known as the Hasty Pudding Theatricals in 1837.

James Russell Lowell

Wilde had lunch with Holmes, and met artists and writers at the St. Botolph Club. The Boston Herald defended him in an interview, noting his ‘dress was no more of a departure from the ordinary than that of a dozen musicians and painters in Boston.’

Then came time for his lecture at the Boston Music Hall. Sixty Harvard students marched to their front-row seats, two abreast, carrying sunflowers and wearing knee pants, stockings and long-haired wigs.

Was it a homophobic prank to embarrass Oscar Wilde? Or was it a publicity stunt dreamed up by Wilde himself? Whatever the case, Wilde knew what they had planned and came on stage wearing a conservative suit.

Wilde looked around him and said, “I see about me certain signs of an aesthetic movement.”

And then in a stage whisper, he said, “Save me from my disciples.”

Later on his lecture tour a newspaper reporter asked him about the Harvard students. He said the lecture ‘passed off brilliantly.’

“You don’t suppose for a moment that a movement of any importance can be affected by 60 young men?” he said.

The Visionists

Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour created a sensation in Boston, according to The History Project in the 1998 book Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland.

No other city took Oscar Wilde so seriously, argued Shand-Tucci in Boston Bohemia. He influenced one Bohemian group calling itself the Visionists

The Visionists included architect Ralph Adams Cram, a leader of the Gothic Revival in architecture; photographer Fred Holland Day, a pioneer in art photography; and interior designer Ogden Codman, who wrote a book on decorating with Edith Wharton.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Visionist Daniel Berkeley Updike, a prominent printer and type designer, called his firm Merrymount Press, after New England’s earliest Bohemian, Thomas Morton. He famously printed the Book of Common Prayer, financed by J.P. Morgan.

Bernard Berenson traveled in the same circles as the Visionists, and he advised Isabella Steward Gardner on what artworks to buy. Gardner, of course, built a Venetian palace in Boston’s Back Bay, filled it with art and then willed it as an art museum.

Gardner Museum Courtyard

The Museum of Fine Arts, Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library are also viewed as triumphs of the aesthetic movement.

Shand-Tucci quotes Mary Blanchard, who wrote a study, Near the Coast of Bohemia,

…to many Americans, Boston was a city that symbolized older standards that stood in opposition to the commercialism and modernity of a cosmopolitan New York, … [but] it was also the seat of the new ‘gospel,’ aestheticism, a gospel that attacked those very standards.

Images: Oscar Wilde sheet music By BPL – Flickr: Oscar Wilde, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16006196.

When malignant rumors threatened to undermine civilian morale during World War II, the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic tried to put them to rest. The pioneering effort spread to dozens of other cities before the U.S. government consigned it to a slow death.

Rumors were a big problem during World War II, more so than in World War I. Then, they were directed against the enemy and usually involved atrocities committed by soldiers. But the most common World War II rumors involved the U.S. war effort. For example, Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were raping women. Or no U.S. Navy vessels survived Pearl Harbor.

One rumor had a woman’s head exploding after she permed her hair and went to work in a shell factory. According to another, unmarried, pregnant WAACs were sent home from North Africa. Some people spread the canard that canned crabmeat packed in Japan contained glass or poison.

Through its listening network of ‘morale wardens,’ the Rumor Clinic tracked down rumors. They spread in taverns and on factory floors, in schools and at parties, on wharves and in stores. Each Sunday, the Boston Herald published a rumor and refuted it. Often, the refutation included analysis of the motivation that started the rumor.

Sometimes the Herald blamed rumors on Axis propaganda. Germany had effectively waged psychological warfare to spread panic and demoralization among civilians before invading Poland and France.

“…[T]he Axis has been clever enough, via short-wave broadcasts and moral saboteurs, to exploit existing lines of discontent,” reported Life magazine in its Oct. 12, 1942 edition. “Thus the people of the U.S. are led to a sort of psychological suicide by serving to circulate dangerous lies about U.S. Jews, U.S. Negroes, U.S. allies, U.S. leaders.”

Boston Herald Rumor Clinic

The first Boston Herald Rumor Clinic column in early 1943 spiked a rumor supplied by the government. By the next week, readers were sending in rumors. By the third week, the Clinic received more rumors than it could handle.

The column included the rumor in italics followed by the word FACT. It then refuted the rumor in boldface, often explaining the psychological reason for the rumor’s popularity. The columns were posted on factory bulletin boards, included in department store pay envelopes and sent with clean wash to laundry customers.

One for the Rumor Clinic

Here’s one: A man walked into a Boston saloon and offered to buy a round. He said he was celebrating because his son was sent to Australia and had been promoted to corporal. The stranger beside him replied, “No cause to celebrate, my friend. Hundreds of soldiers who went out there are right back here in Boston now — insane. Bad food, terrible living conditions. Why, I’m told there’s not even room for all of them in the hospitals.” The bartender overheard the conversation, wrote it down and sent it to the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic.

Mistreatment of American soldiers was a common theme. So were waste of rationed items, government corruption, the imminence of defeat or victory and the value of war bonds. Rumors exacerbated fears about military weakness. They also worsened racial tensions and undermined cooperation for programs like food rationing.

Homegrown Rumors

Rumors didn’t always result from German propaganda. People distrusted the U.S. government, partly because they opposed the war. But they also had reason to question what the government told them. The Roosevelt administration, for example, kept from the public the extent of the losses at Pearl Harbor. Rumors flew that the West Coast had no defenses because the Japanese had destroyed the entire Pacific fleet and most military aircraft. The rumors spread so widely that President Roosevelt finally described the actual damage in a fireside chat – 10 weeks after the attack.

Sometimes rumors started casually. A man who commented that Boston’s chimneys could hide anti-aircraft led to the rumor that the roofs were bristling with guns.

Resentment of the women who stepped in to take a man’s job inspired lurid tales that plagued the WAACs – the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. A rumor flew that male doctors lined up naked WAACs for inspection at training centers. According to another, the training centers handed out contraceptives to the WAACs. Some spread the rumor that 90 percent of WAACs were prostitutes.

It turned out American GIs started those rumors.

Morale Wardens

The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic had three parts: First, the Boston Herald itself. Second, the Division of Propaganda Research, set up within the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. The Division of Propaganda Research supervised the third part: a listening network of 300 ‘morale wardens’ — bartenders, waitresses, union representatives and insurance salesmen.

Robert Knapp, a student of Harvard psychology professor Gordon Allport, ran the Division of Propaganda Research.

Among the morale wardens was Frances Sweeney, who believed the enemy was exploiting traditional Irish hatred of the British. Life magazine described how the ’fighting Irish girl’ tracked down a rumor:

An African-American editor at the Boston Herald, William Harrison, told her he had heard a rumor that Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were killing and raping white people. He heard it from a friend who heard it from an artist, Lawrence Kupferman. Sweeney talked to Kupferman in his studio, where he told her he heard it from another artist, Giglio Dante. Dante told her he heard it in a North End bar from Tom McGowan, a business agent for the seaman’s union. Sweeney tracked him down at the union offices in what Life called the ‘tough Italian district.’ McGowan told her the rumor started after a Fort Devens soldier complained that Indians didn’t have a sense of humor.

Sweeney took the rumor to the anti-Fascist editor of La Costrocorreste, an Italian language newspaper, who printed a refutation in a column similar to the Herald’s Rumor Clinic.

Rise and Fall of the Rumor Clinic

Readers Digest and American Mercury also printed stories about the Rumor Clinic. Soon Allport and Knapp were helping to set them up around the country, in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Long Island, Syracuse, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Montreal, Oregon, and Washington.

The Roosevelt administration was not pleased. It had established the Office of War Information (OWI) to control all information about the war, and had started its own Rumor Control project. It never got off the ground because government bureaucrats wanted centralized control. They didn’t like the idea of ivory tower academics freely handling government information.

The OWI went to war with the local Rumor Clinics. It established stringent criteria for getting federal funding and tried to bury them in red tape. The OWI condemned the rumor clinics in a 1943 New York Times story, claiming the attempts to spike rumors actually spread them. The Rumor Clinics went into a decline and were gone by war’s end.

How effective was the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic? It’s hard to say. The OWI claimed it helped spread rumors rather than spike them. Gordon Allport published a study arguing his approach was more effective.

Whatever the case, it is quite certain that no woman’s head blew up in a shell factory after she had a perm.

This story was updated in 2021.

Boston Herald

Oscar Wilde Stirs Up Boston