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James Russell Lowell

Oscar Wilde Stirs Up Boston

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.

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Elbridge Gerry, the Unfairly Maligned Revolutionary Who Approved the Gerrymander

Marbleheaders today will tell you it’s too bad Elbridge Gerry is best remembered for the creation of oddly shaped and highly partisan electoral districts, known as gerrymandering.

Elbridge Gerry

When he served as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, the General Court sent him a plan to redraw political districts. Gerry thought the plan unfairly favored incumbent politicians. But he signed it anyway, probably the biggest mistake of his life. That single act would seal his reputation for political chicanery.

Elbridge Gerry didn’t deserve to have his name forever linked with political trickery. During his lifetime he had a reputation for integrity. He stood on principle even if it cost him. His shrewd business sense and logistical acumen were indispensable to the Revolutionary cause. He knew how to keep New Englanders and the military supplied – an oft-overlooked key to American victory.

John Adams admired him, saying,

If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.

The Roads of Revolution

Elbridge Gerry was born in Marblehead, Mass., on July 17, 1744 (Old Style), the son of a wealthy merchant.

By the tme he was 20, Elbridge Gerry earned graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard. His master’s thesis in 1765 argued the colonies should resist the recently passed Stamp Act.

A depiction of the Second Continental Congress voting on the United States Declaration of Independence

After Harvard, he went to work for his father’s counting house. The Gerry family owned ships and traded dried codfish with Barbados and Spanish ports. He prospered, and by the time he took his pen to the Declaration of Independence he was ranked the 11th wealthiest of the 56 signers.

In 1770, Elbridge Gerry sat on a Marblehead committee to enforce the prohibition on tea. He later joined his father on Marblehead’s Committee of Correspondence. The committees, which served as shadow governments, were crucial to successful colonial resistance to Britain.

He was elected to the Massachusetts General Court in 1772. There he made friends with Sam Adams. When the British Parliament closed the port of Boston in June 1774, Gerry managed to get provisions and arms to New England. Marblehead became a key port of entry, and Gerry made sure the goods they delivered made it safely to Boston. The Revolutionary propagandist Mercy Otis Warren said he did it with “punctuality and indefatigable industry.”

Supply Chain Issues

As a member of the Committee of Safety of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, he played a key role in moving arms and ammunition to Concord and away from the British Army. On the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride, he was staying at the Menotomy (now Arlington) Tavern with two patriot colonels. The tavern was on the road the British took to Lexington. Some redcoats stopped to search it, and Gerry and his companions escaped capture by hiding in a cornfield, still in their nightclothes.

He then spent the early days of the Revolution in Boston raising troops and supplies for the Continental Army, using his business contacts in Europe.. It was Gerry who came up with the plan to encourage privateering. He might have been hanged for it.

John Adams was a big fan of privateering as a revolutionary weapon.

Adams wrote privateering,

…pays its own expenses and procures its own men … and is the surest way of distressing their commerce, [and] protecting our own.

Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs

Elbridge Gerry was a small dapper businessman, aristocratic and charming but without a sense of humor. He didn’t marry until he was in his 40s. When he did marry Ann Thompson, 20 years his junior, he made up for lost time. They had 10 children.

Ann Thompson by John Vanderlyn

He was a man of principle, though those principles could change.

After the Revolution, he spent the rest of his life in and out of political office. He bought Elmwood, the Cambridge estate of the former lieutenant governor, Thomas Oliver, which the state had confiscated. Later James Russell Lowell was born in the house.

Elmwood, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

He played a large role in the Constitutional Convention. At first he supported a strong central government. Then he refused to sign the Constitution because it didn’t guarantee individual liberties. Later he supported ratification.

He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1793, a diplomat to France from 1797-98 and governor of Massachusetts from 1810-12.

Gerry lost much of his money when elected governor because his brother defaulted on a large loan that Gerry had guaranteed. Needing a job, Elbridge Gerry asked President James Madison to choose him as vice president. Two weeks after he lost re-election as governor, Madison did him a solid and invited him to run as his vice president. Madison had a motive, though. He wanted to appease the Northeast after he started the hugely unpopular War of 1812.

Madison won reelection, and Gerry then became popular in Washington, D.C., and a favorite of Dolley Madison. He died in office on Nov. 23, 1814.

Gerry Plus Salamander

Gerry had won election Massachusetts governor as a Democrat-Republican.

The Legislature was then controlled by the Democrat-Republicans as well. Under the state constitution, it had to redraw electoral districts. The lawmakers sent Gerry a plan that drew some districts in crazy shapes to make it easier for the Democrat-Republicans to win re-election. Gerry thought the plan unfair. He told his son-in-law he found the bill ‘highly disagreeable,’ but he signed it anyway on Feb. 11, 1812.

Detail from Gilbert Stuart self portrait, Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, R.I.

One district in Essex County was shaped like a salamander. The editor of an opposition newspaper hung the map over his desk. The story goes that the artist Gilbert Stuart came into the editor’s office one day and saw the map. Stuart then grabbed his pencil and drew a head, claws and wings onto the map and said, “That will do for a salamander.” The editor retorted, “Better say a gerrymander.”

The newspaper printed Stuart’s cartoon along with the word gerrymander and spread it far and wide. Elbridge Gerry’s reputation was sealed for the ages.

Historian Sarah J. Purcell offers another take on him. Elbridge Gerry, she wrote,

…was consistently motivated by a desire to do what he thought was right to create the most moral, virtuous, and stable American nation possible.

With thanks to the Society of the Descendants of the Declaration of Independence. Image of Elmwood By Midnightdreary – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5578063.

This story last updated in 2022.

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When Mark Twain Bombed Giving New England’s First Roast

Mark Twain bombed in a very big way when he poked fun at America’s most august literary lights during a 70th birthday party for John Greenleaf Whittier. He later said he was never in his life so miserable as he was on Dec. 17, 1877, when he delivered an after-dinner speech that fell flat.

Whittier had achieved fame and honor as one of the five Fireside Poets, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They had distinctly American voices, and they were called the Fireside Poets because their poems could be read and memorized by the whole family as they sat around the fire. Lowell, at 58, was the youngest of the group; Bryant, at 82, the oldest.

Several years before Mark Twain bombed in Boston, he looked like this.

Twain had achieved fame as a fresh new voice from the West — too fresh, it turned out.

Mark Twain Bombed

The Atlantic Monthly hosted the dinner in part to showcase the intellectual and literary firepower of its contributors. The magazine had invited 58 distinguished writers. Holmes and Longfellow were there, as was the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 74 years old and suffering from dementia. The Boston Daily Advertiser called the assemblage “without doubt the most notable that has ever been seen in this country within four walls.”

The Hotel Brunswick

Twain, who at 42 was much younger than the august group gathered before him, thought he’d have some good-natured fun at their expense. He launched into a story about a lonely old miner in southern California who’d been visited by three disreputable tramps: Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Holmes. The miner described Emerson as “a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” while Holmes was “as fat as a balloon” and Longfellow was “built like a prizefighter.”

John Greenleaf Whittier

Twain recounted how the poets quoted apposite selections from their own poetry at the miner, while drinking his whiskey and cheating at cards. “They swelled around the cabin and spouted,” said Twain. Then they fought and made the miner sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” In the end, he reveals the three tramps are imposters.

The humor lay in the pretensions of the drunken tramps. Mr. Holmes, for example, enters the shanty and exclaims, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!” When served whiskey, he exclaims, “Flash out a stream of blood-red wine.” The miner tells him he’ll drink his whiskey straight or he’ll go dry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

When the miner discovers the Longfellow imposter making off with his boots, he shouts, “Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?” Longfellow replied, “Going to make tracks with ’em; because:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unsmiling

As Twain later told the story, 50 or 100 people attended the banquet.

“Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned toward the light first one way and then another—a charming man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to other people).”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

They listened with attentive interest, he wrote. After the first 200 words, Twain began to expect laughter, but heard none.

Black Frost

“Now, then, the house’s attention continued, but the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn’t know.” He went on, he said, but with difficulty. In the end, he didn’t know enough to just give up and sit down.

His friend William Dean Howells also attended the dinner. Howells described the speech as “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe.”

William Dean Howells

“After the first two or three hundred words,” wrote Howell, “those Atlantic diners became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly end.”

Several days later, newspapers across the country reported on the speech. Many proclaimed it in bad taste. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin claimed sales of Twain’s books had dropped off, and it was even suggested he moved up his planned departure for Europe to avoid the negative publicity.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union even weighed in, passing a resolution objecting to the number of boozy beverages served with the seven-course meal: Sauterne, sherry, Chablis, Champagne, claret and Burgundy.

Smart and Humorous. Or Not.

Twain wrote in his autobiography that he tried to forget about the dinner for years. In 1906, an acquaintance he called “Mrs. H.” wrote to him about it, saying her family found humor in his story about the miner.

Twain dug the speech out of his files, and found it didn’t have a single defect.

“It is just as good as good can be,” he wrote. He called it “smart” and “saturated with humor.” “There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere,” he wrote.

Several days later, he looked at it again and called it “offensive and detestable.’ And then he reversed his opinion again.

Whatever it was, the speech was memorable. It is still, to this day, being discussed by scholars and historians.

This story last updated in 2022.

19 comments 3K views

James Russell Lowell

Oscar Wilde Stirs Up Boston

Oscar Wilde

Newport, R.I.

Unmanly Oscar Wilde

Boston

The Visionists

Elbridge Gerry, the Unfairly Maligned Revolutionary Who Approved the Gerrymander

The Roads of Revolution

Supply Chain Issues

Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs

Gerry Plus Salamander

When Mark Twain Bombed Giving New England’s First Roast

Mark Twain Bombed

Unsmiling

Black Frost

Smart and Humorous. Or Not.

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