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The Brahmin Rough Riders of New England

Some people believe that the Rough Riders were almost all cowboys from out West. After all, it had earned the nickname “The Cowboy Regiment.”

But that wasn’t entirely the case, as you shall see. Brahmins from New England with refined backgrounds also joined the Rough Riders.

Men from every New England state volunteered for Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders. Massachusetts had as many as 25. As a matter of fact, the actual commander of the unit, Leonard Wood, hailed from New Hampshire. Frederic Remington featured Woodbury Kane from Rhode Island in his famous painting of the immortal charge up San Juan Hill.

Col. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on top of San Juan Hill.

Roosevelt had four recruiting stations out West, in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Oklahoma/Indian Territories. He had vast experience in the West and knew the cowboys already knew how to ride and shoot. But Roosevelt knew another target-rich area full of ready-for-action men: His wealthy, pedigreed friends throughout New York and New England.

Roosevelt put out the word. They responded in droves from polo clubs, boxing clubs, duck blinds, steeplechase courses, yacht clubs, Ivy League athletic fields and glee clubs. Many had graduated from Harvard.

One Rough Rider, James McClintock, who hailed from California, said they were in it for the adventure.

The Rough Riders are the stuff of legend, having generated a movie, a television show and, of course, a President. They were, however, one of the shortest lived units in American military history. They only existed for four months and 13 days before they disbanded.

Rhode Island Rough Riders

Woodbury Kane, Newport;Joseph S. Stevens, Newport; Norman Maxwell, Newport; Charles Hatch, Newport; Joseph F. Flynn, Cranston.

Rough Rider Woodbury Kane

Woodbury Kane, a classmate of Teddy Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was born in Newport, a cousin of John Jacob Astor IV. A noted yachtsman, he belonged to the New York Yacht Club and served on the crew of the Columbia in the 1899 America’s Cup Race. He was also a noted big game hunter.

After graduation, he lived the life of a bon vivant in Newport and New York. In April 1898 he and other East Coast friends joined the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry.

After enlistment, he, William Tiffany and other East Coast friends donated two $7,500 Colt machine guns to the unit. When the unit expanded to a thousand men he received a lieutenant’s commission.

While serving in the Rough Riders he was always noted for being dressed to a T, no matter the conditions. While leading K Troop in the charge on San Juan Hill, he was wounded in the forearm. Kane was awarded a citation for gallantry and promoted to captain.

He spent the rest of his life living the life of a dandy until a heart attack cut him down at the age of 46. His obituary noted he left no children, but he did leave his beloved polo pony.

Vermont

Ira A. Hill, Grand Isle; Wallace Batchelder, Chester.

Wallace Batchelder graduated from Chester Academy in Chester, Vt., before enlisting in the Rough Riders. He later fought in the Philippines under General Wood. After his service he returned to Vermont, where he became a lawyer and chaired the state’s committee to elect Roosevelt President of the United States in 1904. He later broke with Roosevelt, who in 1912 sent him a telegram telling him not to support any candidate who didn’t support Roosevelt. Batchelder replied he wouldn’t support Roosevelt.

New Hampshire Rough Riders

Dudley S. Dean, Laconia; Walter F. Hickey, Nashua; Leonard Wood, Winchester.

Leonard Wood was the actual commander of the Rough Riders; Teddy Roosevelt was his second in command.

A descendant of four Mayflower passengers, he trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School. He served as a major general in the Army. When he came to command the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry in Cuba, he was a seasoned Indian fighter in the West and had already been awarded the Medal of Honor. After the Spanish-American War, he served as Governor-General of the Philippines and contended for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.

Dean was an All American football quarterback for Harvard from 1888 to 1890. He participated in the charge on San Juan Hill. That was not to be his last military adventure. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant colonel In the U.S. Army Air Force. He was the executive producer of the play Winged Victory, which ran from November 1943 to May 1944. He lived until the age of 79, passing away in 1950.

Dudley Dean, football star

Dudley’s son John H. Dean played football for Harvard too. At Harvard, he befriended Joseph P. Kennedy and they spent summers together at Cohassett, Mass.

Maine

Guy Muncie, Calais; Harrison J. Holt, Portland; Frederick C. Wesley, Bangor.

Harrison Holt graduated from Phillips Andover and Harvard. Upon his Harvard graduation in 1898 he enlisted with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. After the war and some business ventures in Mexico he joined the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser as a reporter. Later in life he wrote novels and detective stories, including The Calendared Isles, a Romance of Casco Bay (read it here) and Midnight at Mears House.

Connecticut

Edward C. Hall, Wallingford.

Unlike most of the Ivy League Rough Riders, Edward Hall graduated from Yale, not Harvard. Upon graduation in 1894, he went to work for Westinghouse and did a brief stint at a North Dakota ranch before enlisting with the Rough Riders. After the war he joined General Electric in Lynn, Mass., then transferred to the Schenectady office, where he died in 1912.

Massachusetts

Harry A. Curtis, Boston; Prescott H. Belknap, Brookline; John D. Hubbell, Boston; Rufus K. Thomas, Boston; Wellman H. Saunders, Salem; John P. Gardner, Boston; Guy H. Scull, Boston; Harry A. Davis, Boston; Francis B. Crowninshield, Marblehead; William H. Mitchell, Salem; Winslow Clark, Milton; Edward F. Donnelly, Boston; Michael F. Hogan; William T. James, Fitchburg; Arthur M. Leroy, Boston; Raymond Morse, Springfield; Edward A. O’Brien, Charlestown; William J. Tudor, Boston; Harry C. White, Somerville.

Francis Boardman Crowninshield, another Harvard graduate, went on to become a noted international yachtsman. He fought with Troop K of the Rough Riders and took part in the charge up San Juan Hill. In 1900, he married Louise DuPont from the famous chemical family. In 1911, he won the King of Spain’s Cup in Spain, now among his many trophies at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Mass.

Rough Riders. Image courtesy New York Public Library.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

This story updated in 2022.

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Proposed Ban on ‘Bitch’ Only the Latest in Boston Censorship

A Boston politician’s proposed ban on ‘bitch’ is only the latest in a city that has outlawed rock ‘n roll, Leaves of Grass and a $5 bill with bared breasts on it.

It wasn’t so much the city that did it, but a puritanical group of Boston Brahmins called the Watch and Ward Society. Boston’s own version of the Taliban, Watch and Ward policed published works from 1878 to the 1930s. But banning books and plays unintentionally heightened interest in them. And it turned Boston’s political correctness into a joke.

Watch and Ward made the mistake of tangling with the great satirist H.L. Mencken. In 1926, it banned copies of his American Mercury magazine because of a short story about a prostitute. Mencken came to Boston and orchestrated a farce. Before a crowd he sold a copy of the magazine to the Watch and Ward secretary, who then had him arrested.

A judge acquitted the publisher, and the Watch and Ward Society would soon turn its attention to banning gambling. But well into the 1970s – and certainly today – Bostonians have tried to regulate language and thought.

Ban on ‘Bitch’

In 2019, a state representative from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, Daniel Hunt, filed a bill at a constituent’s request. He called it “An Act regarding the use of offensive words.” The bill states, “A person who uses the word ‘bitch’ directed at another person to accost, annoy, degrade or demean the other person shall be considered to be a disorderly person.”

The ban on ‘bitch’ would impose a $150 fine for a first offense, $200 or six months in prison for a subsequent offense.

The Boston Herald quoted a consultant named Chip Jones, who asked, “If we’re going to ban the word bitch, why are we only protecting 51% of the population from having their feelings hurt?” The answer, he said, was that men have become second-class citizens.

Other critics said the law wouldn’t stand up in court for 10 seconds.

Ban on ‘Bitch’ Not the First

The Watch and Ward Society had deep roots in Massachusetts’ Puritan theocracy. In 1651, Boston’s Puritan leaders banned a book by William Pynchon because it criticized Puritanism. A disgusted Pynchon returned to England the next year.

Then the Watch and Ward Society got rolling in 1878 at a meeting that barred women. A historian called its membership list “almost a roll call of Boston Brahmin aristocracy.”

Logo of the Watch and Ward Society

Shortly after its formation it banned Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The list of verboten works grew quickly and included Boccaccio‘s The Decameron, Rabelais‘ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

The expression ‘banned in Boston’ really took off in 1896, when Boston society ladies objected to the new $5 bill. Numismatists consider it one of the most beautiful U.S. currency designs ever, but it depicted a few undraped breasts. Some Boston bankers wouldn’t accept the indelicate bill, and the U.S. Treasury scrapped it a few years later.

Not in Boston you don’t.

But the ‘banned in Boston’ label only sparked interest by audiences perhaps looking for a lascivious thrill. Booksellers outside the city began to seek out the banned books.

Watch and Ward in 1927 banned Oil by Upton Sinclair for a motel sex scene, so the publisher printed 150 copies of a so-called fig-leaf edition. It had the sex scenes blacked out, which fueled the controversy along with sales. In 2007, the novel was adapted into a movie, There Will Be Blood, rated R.

Sin Not, Or At Least Don’t Talk About It

In 1958, Boston banned rock ‘n roll after an Alan Freed concert featuring Chuck Berry got rowdy. Two years later, Richard J. Sinnott (pronounced sin-not) picked up the torch of Boston censorship as chief of the city’s Licensing Division. For 22 years, he kept ‘banned in Boston’ alive by policing words and images.

He made sure strippers didn’t lose their pasties and he made Edward Albee change “Jesus Christ” to “Mary Magdalene” in the city’s performances of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. He banned the Jackson 5 in 1970 because he thought they had violent fans.

The Jackson 5 was OK for the Jim Nabors Show, but not Boston

Then in 1975, during Boston’s busing crisis, he banned Marvin Gaye, because, he said, “we didn’t want black and white together so they wouldn’t kill each other.”

That same year, WCVB-TV refused to air the first eight episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter, because the show dealt with desegregation.

Boston’s nanny mentality continued into the 21^st century, when a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood asked the transit authority to ban ads for the video game Grand Theft Auto.

The request met the same fate as the ban on ‘bitch’ probably will.

With thanks to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

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J.P. Marquand, Sly Satirist of Proper Bostonians

J.P. Marquand mastered two literary genres. As author of a 1930s detective series centering on the international crime-solving detective Mr. Moto, he crafted a hugely successful potboiler mystery series from 1937 to 1957. Hollywood adapted the books for films and made Marquand a wealthy man.

J.P. Marquand

But he is more highly regarded as writer of literary satires, and his favorite targets were the Boston Brahmins. His books brim over with stories of unhappy blue-bloods trapped in their stifling lives while their bank accounts dwindle and their blood lines grow stultifyingly thin.

In an America growing ever more casual in the mid-1900s, Marquand’s characters still religiously dressed for dinner and knew how to eat bread. Yet they couldn’t master some of life’s more basic tasks, such as living within one’s means.

Not born wealthy, Marquand was, nevertheless, surrounded by wealthy New Englanders all his life. He attended Harvard (on scholarship) and Harvard elites figure in many of his works. He had a keen awareness of the differences between a public school boy who gratefully attended Harvard and the students from elite private schools who viewed a Harvard degree as their birthright.

The Literary Marquand

Marquand was such a popular literary figure, he made the cover of both Time and Newsweek in 1949. The pinnacle of Marquand’s success came in 1938 when The Late George Apley, published in 1937, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book takes the form of a memoir written so slyly the reader never quite knows if Marquand’s overall intent is to mock or praise the values of Boston’s blue bloods.

J.P. Marquand on Time and Newsweek covers

J.P. Marquand on the covers of Time and Newsweek

In one passage, Apley offers an admonition to his son against frivolous spending of even the tiniest sums of money: “There is not much place in this world for personal gratification, nor is this particularly becoming to people of our position.” Apley the character was not ungenerous, however, encouraging support of charitable institutions.

In the book’s most famous anecdote, Apley’s grandfather builds a mansion in the newly fashionable South End. But he sees a man in shirtsleeves across the street. The sight so shocked him he sells his house the next day and moves to the Back Bay.

Scene from the film, The Late George Apley

Apley was adapted for the stage and film, but the story worked best as a novel. Marquand tells it as a memoir, pulled together by a writer who takes on the project after Apley has died and his family wants a better understanding of the man he was. On occasion, readers have stumbled on the work and taken it as fact rather than fiction. Marquand’s editor reported there were instances when visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts asked at the information desk where they could see the fictional “Apley Bronzes.”

Marquand saved some of his sharpest wit for his home town of Newburyport, Mass. and his own family. Marquand moved to Newburyport as a teen. He was raised there by two aunts. He attended Newburyport High School. And he inherited a part interest in a country estate there, which was shared by a large group of cousins – the Hales.

J.P. Marquand Invents Wickford Point

In 1939, the estate became the setting for Marquand’s novel, Wickford Point. The book tells of the relationship between a writer, Jim Calder, and his extended, old New England family that has fallen on hard times – the Brills. The Brills live at their house at Wickford Point struggling to pay their bills and mooching off Jim. The book opens with Jim visiting Wickford Point. He awakens to discover that one of his cousins has siphoned the gasoline from Jim’s car and used it to drive to the beach. The picture doesn’t get any more flattering as the story progresses.

In one scene Jim returns to the house to find his cousin Sid boasting about his ability to twiddle his thumbs, which he has perfected after an evening of practice. The scene was most probably directed at Marquand’s cousin Robert Beverly Hale. Hale was an artist who mastered painting human anatomy, becoming an expert at drawing hands.

The Hales

The whole Hale clan belonged to the family that included patriot Nathan Hale and the writer Edward Everett Hale. Robert was hardly the only Hale cousin who had a doppelgänger in the fictional Brill family. In the book, Mary Brill pursued love, and she would inevitably lose out to her prettier sister Bella. The two daughters most likely were drawn from real life Laura Hale and her half sister Renee Oakman, a model. Married four times, Renee’s exploits and adventures entertained a generation of gossip fans.

One highlight came when she accused her young companion of stabbing her. The New York Times dutifully reported: “Mrs. Renee Oakman Bradbury, 41-year-old former model and a descendant of Nathan Hale, was in serious condition tonight in North Country Community Hospital after having been stabbed in the neck with a steak knife at her home, 14 Bay Avenue, Sea Cliff, by a 25-year-old male companion.”

Other members of the family made appearances in the book, but the most pointed roasting was probably directed at John Brill, the Wickford Sage. John Brill, deceased by the time of the action in the book, was a poet revered by the family as an authority on all things. The real-life Wickford Sage was Edward Everett Hale, Unitarian minister, author and orator. Later generations of Hale children would recount that when they misbehaved, their parents would take them to the statue of Hale in the Boston Public Garden to scare them.

Statue of Edward Everett Hale

Denials and Lawsuits

Marquand denied that the Hales were the model for the Brills. But no one particularly believed him. Renee Oakman Bradbury would glibly introduce herself to a reporter from Life magazine, saying, “Why, I’m Bella the bitch.”

The Hales contemplated suing Marquand, but decided against it. Despite the unflattering portrayal, “we still like John,” they declared. The bonds of friendship would be sorely tested, however, in 1947 Marquand filed a lawsuit to break up the partnership that owned the 48-acre estate that was the basis for Wickford Point.

Marquand wanted the property sold and the proceeds divided among all the owners. He said the action was taken so that his father, who held a share of the property, could retire comfortably. The Hales and Marquand fought it out in court. Marquand hired a lawyer with impeccable credentials from one of the prestigious white shoe firms. The Hales hired a street fighter.

Marquand should have guessed how a fight between a blue-blooded lawyer and a street fighter would end. The Hales won. The judge ordered the property divided between Hales and Marquands.

Thanks to: The Late John Marquand: A Biography, by Stephen Bingham.

You may also enjoy this story about author John Updike, who also embarrassed some of his friends and neighbors with fictional treatments of them that were a little too exposing. Statue of Edward Everett Hale By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69820917.

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The Antis: Women Who Fought Against the Vote

In the late 19^th century, women known as antis began to organize against women who wanted the right to vote.

A cartoon making the antis argument. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The antis viewed suffragists as angry killjoys who wanted to intrude on politics, the proper realm of men. They argued women didn’t need the vote because men could conduct government for both sexes. Further, they contended, the vote alone assssscouldn’t fix any injustice women suffered.

Maine native Kate Douglas Wiggin, who wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, supported the antis. She told a group of women in 1912 she would have ‘woman strong enough to keep just a trifle in the background, for the limelight never makes anything grow.’

As extraordinary as it seems today, the antis got plenty of support from women.

Who Were The Antis?

Suffragists started their first national organization in 1869. It would take the antis another 42 years to form theirs. They called themselves the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, or NAOWS. They passed out pamphlets that preached, ‘you do not need a ballot to clean out your sink.’ One pamphlet included household hints such as cleaning ink spots with sour milk — along with advice to ‘not waste time, energy and money’ on voting.

Other anti-suffrage propaganda pictured men caring for babies and doing household chores while women went off to vote.

The antis had many reasons for opposing the vote. Some with wealth and social prestige feared the vote would dislodge them from their comfortable positions.

Others viewed the suffragists as dangerous radicals associated with birth control, free love and the labor movement.

Some women became antis because they feared electoral politics would erode their ability to do good works. The Progressive Era, for example, got its name from women who tried to solve social problems in clubs, hospitals and settlement houses. They supported prison reform, shorter work days, an end to child labor and improved sanitation and diet.

The antis national organization. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Josephine Jewell Dodge

Josephine Jewell Dodge had wealth and prestige, but she also spent several decades promoting day care centers for working mothers. Dodge was born in 1855 in Hartford to Marshall Jewell, a prominent Connecticut politician who headed the Republican National Committee. She married Arthur Murray Dodge, son of wealthy Congressman William E. Dodge, in 1875.

After rising to prominence for her activism, Josephine Jewell Dodge turned her attention to fighting woman’s suffrage. In 1911, members of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage elected her their first president.

As an anti, she faced accusations that she was a political cats’ paw. The suffragists, who mostly supported temperance, claimed she carried water for the liquor interests.

The suffragists, of course, met the same kind of allegation. The antis charged the suffragists fronted for corrupt male organizations like Tammany Hall.

Both sides used ridicule as a weapon. And as head of NAOWS, Josephine Jewell Dodge confronted the same kind of ridicule the suffragists endured.

Ladies Riot

In 1915, a newspaper reported the antis and the suffragists nearly rioted at a meeting before the National Democratic Committee in Washington, D.C. Josephine Jewell Dodge gave a speech that affronted the suffragists.

“Charges of bribery hurled against Mrs. Dodge met with tears, then a haughty rejoinder — altogether like a men’s political affair except for the smoke,” reported the Washington Herald.

A ‘Western woman’ shook a handful of suffrage leaflets ‘under the nose of the very dignified anti,’ reported the Herald. She shouted that Josephine Jewell Dodge received $75 for delivering her speech.

“Mrs. Dodge flushed angrily and tears filled her eyes,” reported the Herald. “Then she replied in her haughtiest manner:

“As a woman of independent means I not only have never received a cent for my services, but I have financed the work of many others.”

State Chapters of Antis

The antis, just as the suffragists had, began their organizing in Massachusetts, though much later than the suffragists.

An anti-suffrage cartoon showing how the vote would backfire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1895, the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was founded by such Brahmins as Mrs. J. Eliot Cabot, Cornelia Baylis Lowell and Kate Gannett Wells. They attracted nearly 37,000 members by 1915 and had a headquarters on Boylston Street in Boston.

By 1910, the antis spread to other states, including Connecticut.

Mrs. Grace G. Markham, founded the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. It had branches in 161 cities and towns.

Mrs. Markham warned the ‘suffs’ had joined the Reds and wanted to incite class and race hatred.

The fight over woman’s suffrage divided many Connecticut communities, including a prominent artist colony.

In 1914, about 50 suffragists organized the Equal Franchise League in Old Lyme.

Two years earlier, 16 ladies, including art colony founder Florence Griswold, formed Old Lyme’s group of antis. Within a year the antis filled Town Hall for a speaker who denounced the suffragists. Alice Hill Chittendon explained ‘some of the undesirable results of equal suffrage already discovered.’

In January 1919, Mrs. Hermon Hubbard wrote a blistering letter to the New London Day, excoriating the newspaper for supporting the suffrage movement. She called it ‘the most radical and socialistic movement of the day.’ Six months later, she wrote a follow-up letter arguing women should stay home minding their children, ‘not running in the streets.’

New Hampshire Antis

A typical antis argument against the vote.

How did antis respond in 1920 when Tennessee approved the 19^th Amendment, reaching the threshold required to give women the vote?

Some antis refused to vote. But the diary of an Exeter, N.H., teenager shows a typical progression from anti to voter.

New Hampshire antis organized a state chapter of NAOWS, and Exeter formed its own chapter. Effie Tufts, an ardent anti, took her 16-year-old daughter Helen to hear two antis speak at Town Hall in 1913.

Helen reported in her diary that the meeting was ‘very good,’ and she had decided, “I’m an anti.”

In 1919, Helen’s father, state Sen. James Tufts, voted against the 19^th Amendment .

“Father fought it, spoke etc, but N.H. passed the suffrage amendment 18 to 10,” wrote Helen Tufts. “Worse Luck!”

She changed her tune in 1920, when at 23 she could vote for the first time.

“Mrs. Illsley came at — and took Mother and me down to VOTE!!! My first X ever put on a ballot was for Father for State Senator.”

With thanks to the Exeter Historical Society and the Florence Griswold Museum. This story about the antis was updated in 2022.

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11 Famous People Committed to McLean Mental Hospital

Sylvia Plath called McLean mental hospital the best mental hospital in the United States. U.S. News & World Report did too.

Though McLean mental hospital has excellent staff and conducts groundbreaking research, its reputation rests mostly on its rich and famous residents. They lend the place an odd glamour when they come to dry out, get sane or avoid prison.

So many Boston Brahmins stayed at McLean that it was said a proper Bostonian lived on Beacon Hill and had an uncle at Mclean mental hospital. Louis Agassiz Shaw II, for example, strangled his Irish maid and spent the rest of his life there surrounded by his books.

Creative people and their relatives also stayed at McLean mental hospital, including Al Capp’s daughter, John P. Marquand’s son, two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers and two of Van Morrison’s sidemen. Even, perhaps, William James.

McLean Mental Hospital History

Otto Folin in biochemistry lab at McLean Hospital, 1905

In 1811, prominent Bostonians founded the Asylum for the Insane in Charlestown, Mass., to care for the homeless mentally ill.

In 1823, a Boston merchant named John McLean left a generous bequest to the insane asylum, which renamed itself after him. Another renaming — to McLean Hospital — reflected the evolution of thinking about mental illness.

Originally built around a Charles Bulfinch mansion, in 1895 it moved to the Boston suburb of Belmont.One of the 11 famous people who stayed at McLean mental hospital chose the new site.

McLean mental hospital

McLean combines teaching, treatment and research, unlike most hospitals for psychiatric disorders. Today it is a private, nonprofit division of Massachusetts General Hospital and a teaching hospital for Harvard University’s medical residents. But most people know it through the songs, poems, books and movies that its patients created over the decades.

1. Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted selected the site for McLean mental hospital when it moved to Belmont.

Toward the end of his life he went to McLean after showing signs of dementia. Olmsted reported ‘noises in his head.’

His influence makes the place look more like a college campus than a mental hospital.

Frederick Law Olmsted

2. A Beautiful Mind

John Nash, the mathematical genius and subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind spent a month at McLean in 1959. Doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he spent the next 11 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

In 1970 he began to control his illness, and in 1994 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

3. Brother Ray

In 1964, police arrested Ray Charles for possession of pot and heroin, his third drug arrest. A sympathetic judge sent him to McLean for observation.

“The nicest part was meeting one of the nurses who I got next to a little later on,” Charles wrote in his biography, Brother Ray. He also entertained the other patients when he found another piano player. “A classical cat,” he wrote, “who could really wail.”

He alluded to his drug use in the song, Let’s Go Get Stoned.

Ray Charles publicity still

4. Sweet Baby James

As a high school senior at Milton Academy, James Taylor fell into a deep depression, sleeping 20 hours a day. He was sent to McLean mental hospital, where he was heavily medicated but grateful to be there.

After 10 months, he checked himself out against medical advice. He later wrote a song about it: Knocking ‘Round the Zoo.

Brother Livingston and sister Kate also spent time at McLean.

5. Interrupted Girl

Susanna Kaysen was the daughter of John F. Kennedy’s deputy national security advisor, Carl Kaysen. In high school, her parents sent her to McLean mental hospital for treatment for depression.

Doctors diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. She left after 18 months. In 1993 she wrote a memoir about her time at McLean, Girl, Interrupted, made into a movie starring Winona Ryder in 1999.

6. Sister Morphine

Part of the 1960s British Invasion, Marianne Faithfull had a couple of hit singles and a relationship with Mick Jagger. She got addicted to drugs and alcohol, and at one point she was anorexic, homeless and a heroin addict.

She made a comeback, tried to dry out in Minnesota and then checked into McLean in 1985. Faithfull then resumed a long career as a recording artist and actress on stage and screen.

Marianne Faithfull on Danish TV in 1966

7. Best Seller

David Foster Wallace published his literary best-seller, Infinite Jest, at the age of 34.

In it he describes the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, based on Granada House in Brighton, Conn. He spent time there after a four-week stay at McLean Mental Hospital for help with alcoholism, drug addiction and depression.

Wallace struggled with depression for decades. At 46, he committed suicide.

8. Demon of Screamin’

Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer, was confronted by his bandmates about his drug use in the mid-80s. So he checked himself into the rehabilitation wing of McLean Mental Hospital.

He stayed off drugs after his stay until he fell off the wagon with painkillers. Back in the day they didn’t have safer alternatives to opioids like the kratom strains from Star Kratom that many rely on these days. Tyler returned to an unnamed rehab hospital.

Steven Tyler performing with Aerosmith on the National Mall in 2003

9. Bell Jar

In 1953, a depressed 20-year old Smith student named Sylvia Plath crawled under her house and swallowed a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. She lay under the house for three days until she was found.

Plath then entered McLean Mental Hospital for six months of treatment, which she wrote about in her novel The Bell Jar. She published several collections of poetry, which won critical acclaim. But she, too, committed suicide. After her death she won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.

10. Farm Equipment Heir

Stanley McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, played champion tennis at Princeton but fell prey to mental illness later on. T. Coraghessan Boyle later portrayed him as a sex-mad recluse in his novel Riven Rock.

11. Mayflower Screwball

The Brahmin poet Robert Lowell suffered from manic depression all his life.

He stayed at McLean Mental Hospital four times in eight years. Of his stay at McLean he wrote the poem Waking in the Blue in 1976. In it, he described ‘Mayflower screwballs.’

Robert Lowell

Image: McLean Mental Hospital administration building By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715880. Robert Lowell By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26201157. Marianne Faithfull By Photographer: A. Vente – FTA001007877 013 con.png Beeld & Geluid Wiki, Fanclub, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57844584. Steven Tyler By Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Rob Rubio – https://web.archive.org/web/20030911122036/http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=9357, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=994727.

This story about the McLean Mental Hospital was updated in 2022.

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The China Trader Who Built the Lyman Estate

The Lyman Estate in Waltham, Mass., commemorates one of the greatest China traders of his age, Theodore Lyman.

Few other memorials, written or in stone, remain of the Mainer who amassed a huge fortune and sired generations of prominent soldiers, scientists and politicians.

Unlike Thomas Handasyd Perkins or Samuel Russell, little has been written about Theodore Lyman. Even in his own time, he doesn’t seem to have had much fame beyond his own business and social circles.

If Theodore Lyman has gone unnoticed by historians, his Lyman Estate has not. Much has been written about the magnificent Federal country estate, the gardens and the oldest greenhouse in America.

Perhaps Theodore Lyman was too busy pruning his apricot trees to bother with getting his name in the paper or having his portrait painted.

Theodore Lyman

China traders in Guangzhou, where factories sold to westerners

In 1830, when Theodore Lyman was in his 70s, a British parliamentary committee investigated the East India Company and the China Trade. A merchant ship captain, A. Coffin, was asked, “Are the Boston merchants trading with China generally considered very wealthy persons?

“They are,” replied Coffin.

“Are you acquainted with Colonel Perkins?”

“I am.”

“Is not he one of the principal merchants in Boston?”

“He is the principal,” said Coffin. “Theodore Lyman has been one of the greatest traders.”

He was born in York, Maine, in 1753, the son of a minister. As a young man he went to work as a clerk in a Kennebunk store owned by Waldo Emerson. He went into business with his boss and married his daughter, Sarah, in 1776. She was 14. He was said to have planted elm trees in front of the store on the day he heard about the Battles of Concord and Lexington.

Sarah had four children and died at 21 in 1784. Lyman inherited his father-in-law’s property and went into shipbuilding and merchant shipping, a rare Mainer who owned his own ships.

“He rapidly accumulated property, not having the liberal and generous spirit for which Emerson was distinguished,” wrote one Maine historian.

China Trade

One of the first American ships to trade with China.

Theodore Lyman went to Boston to seek a bigger fortune in 1786, just as the American Revolution had ended and the China Trade began. He married Lydia Williams of Salem, Mass., in 1786 and had five more children.

Boston had suffered during the American Revolution; the end of the war brought on tremendous prosperity. Americans were now free to trade with China and the East Indies. Boston merchants took advantage of that freedom, shipping specie, furs, ginseng and opium to China, and bringing back tea, silk, nankeen, porcelain and cassia bark. Their fantastic wealth inspired a building boom that stretched to country estates in the Boston suburbs.

Lyman bought gold bullion from the Spanish and sold it to the Chinese at great profit. He sent his ships to the Pacific Northwest to buy furs, then to China to sell them for another enormous profit.

Lyman forbade his captains to mount cannon on their ship, though the seas swarmed with pirates. Capt. William Sturgis ignored him and secretly brought cannons aboard the Atahualpa. Pirates attacked his ship toward the end of a voyage, and he fought them off. When Lyman found out, he charged Sturgis the cost of freight for carrying the cannons.

In Boston, Lyman gave quietly to charity. Shortly after he died in 1839, he was praised for sending a daily supply of milk to 30 poor widows for two years, for three winters sending blankets to the Seaman’s Aid Society and funding the Children’s Friend Society.

Lyman Estate

The Lyman Estate

In 1793, Salem architect Samuel McIntire designed the house that anchored the 400-acre Lyman Estate in Waltham, Mass.

The town was home to the Boston Manufacturing Company, which ran a spinning and weaving factory that employed 300. But it was still the country, and there a rich China trader could escape the unhealthy, disease-ridden city.

McIntire designed a beautiful, symmetrical building in the Palladian style with an elegant ballroom. He also designed a summer house for the Lyman Estate. Later generations expanded the house.

The gardens of the Lyman Estate were laid out in 1793 by Theodore Lyman himself and his English gardener, William Bell. Rather than creating stiff formal gardens, Lyman designed a picturesque natural landscape. He dammed a brook to form a lake and grouped trees randomly. No fences for him, no geometric flower beds.

Greenhouse of the Lyman Estate

Horticulture was the rage among the wealthy, who loved to grow exotic imported plants. Lyman built a greenhouse, warmed by a wood fire, and grew lemons, camellias, grapes and apricots.

He also collected and planted native American trees in an ornamental woodland; apricot and peach trees. Sometime around 1820 he planted a copper beech from Europe, one of the first in America.

The Lyman Estate sparked a craze among the Boston Brahmins for picturesque English gardens, and was soon followed by others, like the Gore Place nearby.

In 1803, the town of Coxhall, Maine (then Massachusetts), was renamed Lyman after Theodore Lyman. Much of the town was burned in the Maine fires of 1947. Theodore Lyman died and was pretty much forgotten, except as the founder of the Lyman Estate.

Theodore Lyman’s children, like many offspring of the China traders, reinvested money made from furs and ginseng into mills and factories. The Lymans built Lyman Mills in Holyoke, Mass., employing 1200 people by 1900.

The Lyman family produced Democratic governors, judges, congressmen, ambassadors and mayors, mostly Democratic, as well as a physicist for whom a moon crater is named. The Lyman Estate remained in the family for 150 years. It is now owned by Historic New England and a popular spot for weddings.

Historic New England maintains an online collection of historic photographs of the Lyman Estate. Click here to view them.

Image: Lyman Estate by By Daderot at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003268; Lyman Estate greenhouse By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003261.