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Jewish-American history

Socialite Martha Codman Karolik, 70, Takes a Musical Husband, 35. It Goes Well.

Martha Codman in 1928 shocked and titillated East Coast high society when she married an immigrant Jewish opera singer, Maxim Karolik.

She was 70. He was 35.

Moreover, she came from several old, old, wealthy New England families. He didn’t even pretend to. He called himself “Maximum Karolik, but not at minimum prices.”

Martha Codman Karolik in 1906

He once wore a mink-lined overcoat to the exclusive Somerset Club in Boston. His host told him gentlemen don’t wear furs. He replied, “Who ever accused me of being a gentleman? I am a tenor!”

But with his wife and, later, alone, he collected thousands of pieces of paintings, drawings. sculpture, portraits, silver, furniture, prints, engravings, and donated it all to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

And as author Carol Troyen pointed out, Maxim Karolik brought more distinction to the Codman family than the family itself had done in 200 years.

Martha Codman Karolik

Martha Codman was born July 24, 1858, the only surviving child of John Amory Codman and Martha Rogers. Martha’s ancestry included a collection of Brahmin names: Derby, Crowninshield, Pickman, Amory and Codman.

Elias Haskett Derby

Her mother’s great-grandfather, Elias Haskett Derby, was a Salem shipping merchant and one of the richest men in America. Her father, John Amory Codman, was a wealthy artist from the storied Amory and Codman families. He had a mistress, Violet Kimball, who he visited on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for 14 years — at least according to her love letters, which provoked much amusement when read out loud in court.

Proper New England ladies were supposed to keep their names out of the newspaper except at birth, death and marriage. Martha Codman and her mother ignored that rule in a big way.

Squam Lake, New Hampshire, by John Amory Codman, 1848

John Amory Codman died in 1886 and left an estate worth an estimated $400,000. It included a hefty bequest to Mrs. Kimball. The will was challenged by Martha and her mother (“La Femme Terrible,” according to Mrs. Kimball). The case made newspaper headlines for several years. Finally, the ladies settled, giving Violet Kimball $15,000.

Martha’s mother already had wealth of her own, including industrial stocks and large real estate holdings in Boston and Newport. Martha Codman lived with her mother until she was nearly 50. They both had an interest in their family history, and they traveled throughout Europe together collecting family records. Together they kept up an active social life among the elite in Boston, Newport and Washington, D.C.

Martha Codman, On Her Own

La Femme Terrible died in 1905. Martha Codman, then one of the richest women in America, began to build mansions – the Codman-Davis in Washington, D.C., and then Berkeley Villa (now Bellevue) in Newport R.I.

Codman-Davis House in Washington, D.C. (now the Thai Ambassador’s residence)

She hired her cousin, society decorator Ogden Codman, to design both.

In 1927, she invited Maxim Karolik to sing at a gathering in Washington.

Singing Waiter

Maxim Karolik had arrived in the United States five years earlier with few possessions but his charm and his voice. Born in Russia on Nov. 21, 1893, he studied opera at the Petrograd Grand Opera.

He made a living performing at evening entertainments – kind of a “singing waiter,” according to Troyen.

After that concert in Washington, Martha invited him to spend the summer at her Newport house, filled with silver, heirlooms and 20 Siamese cats. She asked him to join her on a trip to Europe. He said yes. Then she asked him to marry her. He said yes to that, too.

They married on the French Riviera. The December-May union of a Brahmin heiress and Russian Jewish émigré horrified her relatives. They insisted she stay in Europe for a year with “the singing bridegroom.”

Maxim Karolik

Martha wrote to her aunt, the one relative who sent her a wedding gift, that Maxim was a gentleman with a wonderful mind, a lovely disposition and a splendid voice.

“Of course, I know what people will say, but I am determined not to pay any attention to that, but get all the happiness and pleasure out of what remains to me of life,” she wrote her aunt.

Collecting

Martha already had an interest in 18^th century art. She had already inherited exquisite early American furniture, silver and paintings, but she needed more to furnish her mansions. She bought other heirlooms from family members with little interest in them.

Maxim encouraged her to collect 18^th century art beyond her family treasures. In 1935, they decided to form the M & M Karolik 18th century American arts collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

It debuted on Dec. 2, 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor. The New York Sun reported the crowd “panted and sweated and fainted and exclaimed aloud at the beauty revealed.”

To explain the collection, Karolik penned an Atlantic Monthly essay in 1942, as much about his marriage as about the 18^th century art.

“The concept that all men are born equal was to the men of 1776 no mere phrase…it implied a deep faith in the common man,” he wrote. Back then, wrote Karolik, the artist and the merchant stood on an equal footing with the soldier and the statesman. Karolik – no doubt thinking of himself and Martha – noted that Benjamin Franklin was friends with clockmaker Edward Duffield, George Washington was friends with Boston cabinetmaker Benjamin Frothingham and Thomas Jefferson was friends with Benjamin Randolph, the Philadelphia cabinetmaker who made the desk on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence. They acknowledged an “aristocracy of mind and spirit,” he wrote.

Phase II

The Karoliks then moved on to the 19^th century. Their first collection represented the fine and decorative arts of the urban, colonial elite. The second, more middlebrow collection, included art that didn’t cost a whole lot.

They decided to avoid brand-name painters, and instead to focus on art they liked. “Our motto is, ‘Tell me if the painting is good, and I won’t care who the painter is’,” Maxim liked to say.

Salem Harbor by Fitz Henry Lane

Much 19^th century art had fallen out of favor by collectors. Works by such artists as Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole were stored in attics and could be picked up for a song. Martha, getting on in years, let Maxim do much of the legwork.

Sunlight and Shadow: Newbury Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade. National Gallery of Art.

Martha died at 89 on April 21, 1948. Maxim continued to shower the museum with forgotten paintings from the Hudson River school. He also discovered Boston luminists Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane and folk art. In 1951, the M. & M. Karolik collection of American Paintings, 1815-1865 went on exhibit.

Meditation by the Sea, an American folk art oil painting by an unknown artist from the early 1860s. Karolik Collection, MFA.

After Martha Codman Karolik

Karolik loved an audience and spent a great deal of time in the museum. The museum’s director, Perry Rathbone had to keep Maxim’s ego “in a permanently polished condition,” wrote Rathbone’s daughter.

Rathbone made Karolik an honorary curator, which meant he spent every weekday from nine to five in the museum. Wagging his forefinger, he made pronouncements to visitors and remined Rathbone of the collection’s greatness. Rathbone once wrote that Maxim sometimes made him regret his love of American art.

Pictorial quilt: one of the few surviving quilts by Harriet Powers, considered one of the finest examples of Southern pictorial quiltmaking. Karolik collection, MFA>

In 1962, the third and final phase of the M and M Karolik collection went on exhibit, M. & M. Karolik collection of American Water Colors & Drawings including sculpture, 1800-1875.”

Maxim in the News

Time magazine reported on the event – and on Maxim:

[He] divides most of his time these days between his late wife’s summer mansion in Newport and the Ritz in Boston. At the Ritz he usually lunches alone, but every few bites he springs across the room to greet in heavily accented English some acquaintance at another table.

His “batonlike index finger” accompanies an avalanche of talk, “which is usually about Maxim Karolik,” the magazine reported. Both in Boston and Newport,

…he is like a character out of an old Russian novel—a tall, exuberant figure with a penchant for astrakhan-collared coats or pea jackets with mink collars and cuffs. “In Newport,” he says in a typical Karolik maxim, “I am prominent. In Boston, I am important.”

Maxim as an older gentleman

Maxim Karolik died at the age of 70 on Dec. 20, 1963. In the end, he and Martha gave the MFA more than 2,000 high-quality, diverse objects.

Carol Troyen, writing in American Art, summarized the impact of their generosity: “Without the M. and M. Karolik Collections, the holdings in American art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, would compose merely an extremely fine provincial collection.”

With thanks to The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & a Daughter’s Search for the Truth by Belinda Rathbone. And Fitz Henry Lane and Maxim and Martha Karolik: A Tale of Two Love Stories, a lecture by Carol Troyen.

Images: By AgnosticPreachersKid at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17984196.

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Mary Antin, Poster Child for Letting Immigrants Into America

Mary Antin wrote a poem praising George Washington just a few years after she arrived in Boston a poor, 13-year-old Russian Jew who spoke only Yiddish. She published her first book at 18. At 30 she wrote a national best-seller that launched her into political circles that included President Theodore Roosevelt.

Mary Antin became famous as a symbol of the immigrant who achieved the American Dream. But she also discovered the dark side to the dream, and that fame doesn’t necessarily bring happiness.

Mary Antin

To some, her rags-to-riches story seemed too pat, too easy. Later in life, Mary Antin hinted at her embarrassment about winning wide acclaim for a slim accomplishment.

“[S]he considered her position a false one and suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence,” wrote Sarah Blacker Cohen.

Mary Antin

Maryashe Antin was born June 13, 1881, to Israel Pinchus and Esther (Weltman) Antin in the shtetl of Polotzk in the Pale of Settlement. The Pale, a western region of Imperial Russia, was crowded with impoverished Jews evicted from the cities. Antisemitism made life dangerous for them.

Map, the Pale of Settlement

The Antin family at first prospered in the Pale, with a large house and servants. As a traditional Jewish girl, Mary Antin received an inferior education to her brother. Later, in a short story, she wrote, “What are daughters worth? They’re only good to sit in the house, a burden on their parents’ neck, until they’re married off.”

When illness destroyed her father’s business, the family ended up living in a room. “We had absolutely no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects,” she wrote.

Mary Antin and her older sister Fetchke as children

Coming to America

In 1891, her father borrowed money to get to Germany. There an emigrant society helped bring him to Boston. To Mary, America became the Promised Land. Three years after he left, their father sent them a letter saying he’d saved enough money to bring them to America.

Her mother read the letter aloud. “There was an elation, a hint of triumph, such as had never been in my father’s letters before,” she wrote in her book, The Promised Land. “He saw something — he promised us something. It was this “america.” And “America” became my dream.”

In 1894, Mary Antin left for America.

Book cover, From Plotzk to Boston

In a book of her letters (now an audio book), she described how her family traveled in packed, airless fourth-class railroad cars. They encountered corrupt crossing guards and German officials who crudely disinfected them. They were locked in quarantine until finally they took the steamer across the Atlantic and reunited the family in Boston.

Boston Slums

Mary’s father’s attempts to make money failed, and the family moved from slum to slum: Chelsea and Boston’s West and South ends. They lived in gloomy tenements filled with “unkempt, half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners, pitiful in the eyes of social missionaries, the despair of boards of health,” she wrote.

Boston’s South End, from The Promised Land. The original caption read, “Harrison Avenue in the South End ghetto.”

But her father had hope for Mary, frail and clearly intelligent. He enrolled her in the local public school in Chelsea, called the Williams School. Said to be the largest school in New England, it had many non-English-speaking immigrant students.

Mary Antin’s father.

Because she spoke no English, Mary Antin had to wedge herself into a kindergarten desk. After four months, a composition she wrote called Snow impressed her teacher. The teacher sent Snow to an education journal, Primary Education, which printed it. And so Mary Antin determined to follow a writer’s career.

She wrote a poem called “My Country,” which described her thrill at sharing citizenship with George Washington. Then she went to Newspaper Row and found an editor willing to publish it.

Uplifting Tale

Mary learned quickly, and her teachers held her up “as an illustration of what the American system of free education and the European immigrant could make of each other.” Many people wanted to hear that story, and Mary Antin made a career of telling it.

Her bestselling book, The Promised Land, offered up a romanticized version of the immigrant’s assimilation and rise through public education.

In the book, Mary found a way to glorify their South End tenement on Wheeler Street, which ran crookedly between brothels on Corning Street and a saloon on Shawmut Avenue.

“I delighted in the moonlike splendor of the arc lamp just in front of the saloon,” she wrote.

Boston Public Library

She also rhapsodized about the hours she spent reading and dreaming in the Boston Public Library. “That I who was born in the prison of the Pale should roam at will in the land of freedom was a marvel that it did me good to realize. That I who was brought up to my teens almost without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that ever were written a miracle as great as any on record. That an outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell in a palace–this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung,” she wrote.

Her patriotism would later cost her her marriage.

First Book

Mary’s sister Frieda went to work at 14, which allowed Mary to attend Girls’ Latin School, Boston’s premier public prep school for girls.

Assembly at the Girls’ Latin School

Lina Hecht, a Jewish philanthropist, took notice of Mary Antin. Hecht arranged to have her letters about her journey to America translated from Yiddish and published. So in 1899, 18-year-old Mary published her first book, From Plotzk to Boston. (The printer misspelled the name of her home town, Polotzk.) The precocious scholar-immigrant thus achieved local celebrity.

Marriage

Mary’s life took another turn on a field trip with the Hale House, a South End settlement house sponsored by Edward Everett Hale.

The trip was led by Amadaus Grabau, who studied at Harvard and worked at the Boston Society of Natural History. Their attraction to each other may have seemed unlikely – she, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who wrote poetry; he, an American-born son of a Lutheran minister who studied geology. Not to mention the 11-year difference in their ages.

Amadaus Grabau

They married on Oct. 5, 1901. She was 20, he was 31. Her marriage outside her faith cost her some friendships, though her family stood by her.

Mary had dreamed of going to Radcliffe. But after marrying Grabau she followed him to New York, where he had gotten a job as a professor of geology at Columbia University. They lived in university housing on Morningside Heights and then in Brooklyn, a far cry from the dingy South End tenements she knew in Boston.

Mary attended Columbia Teacher’s College and Barnard, but didn’t graduate. They had a daughter, Josephine Esther, on Nov. 21, 1907.

At Columbia, Grabau had a reputation as a loner and a workaholic. His marriage to a 20-year-old Jewish immigrant writer and his failure to develop friendships with his colleagues marked him as an outsider.

Mary Antin, Celebrity

Then in 1912, when Mary was 32, she published the wildly successful The Promised Land. It made her a celebrity. Former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote her letters. He credited her — along with Jane Addams and Frances Kellor — with lighting a fire under him to support women’s suffrage.

Mary Antin in 1916

Mary sent her daughter to boarding school and embarked on a national lecture tour about immigration. On Dec. 12, 1912, 1,000 people came to listen to her at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Then from 1913 to 1918 she lectured on “The Responsibility of American Citizenship,” “How You and I Can Serve Our Country” and “The Public School as a Test of American Faith.”

Her goal was to prove that immigrants could become good American citizens during a time of rising anti-immigrant feeling.

By the time her lecture tour ended, World War I broke out – in Europe and in her home.

World War I

Despite virulent anti-German sentiment during World War I, Grabau didn’t hide his attachment to the German culture. That contributed to the loss of his job at the university and to the end of his marriage.

Their daughter, Josephine, remembered their battles during World War I. “We fought the World War right in our house in Scarsdale. Mother was for the Allies and Father was for the Germans. Mother hung the Allied flag out her study window and Father put the German flag out his study window. They fought the war upstairs and downstairs, into the attic and into the cellar. It was too much for me and I fell apart. They saw what they were doing to me and finally agreed to separate for my sake.”

After they separated, he moved to China, where he played a key role in establishing Chinese geology. Along with expatriates and Chinese academics, Grabau recruited and trained Chinese geologists and set up institutions devoted to geology. He never reconciled with his wife, and he only returned to the United States once for the 1933 International Geological Congress.

Decline

Their separation marked the beginning of Mary’s decline. Her third book didn’t have nearly the success of The Promised Land. She wrote no fourth book. She withdrew from her friends and family, and suffered from health problems – both physical and mental.

Mary spent several years at the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center in Stockbridge, Mass. From 1922 to her death in 1949, she checked in and out of the Gould Farm, a healing community for people “experiencing emotional and psychiatric vulnerabilities” in the Berkshire mountains.

In 1930 she wrote to a friend, “I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.”

Mehar Baba.

She eventually followed of Meher Baba, an Indian mystic who claimed he was the avatar. Baba stopped speaking on July 10, 1925 and communicated using hand gestures or an alphabet board for the rest of his life. He traveled to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he enjoyed the attention of celebrities like Gary Cooper and Tallulah Bankhead.

Antin then followed Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian clairvoyant who founded another esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy.

The End

She died in 1949 of cancer. By then, The Promised Land had gone through 34 editions. The book opened with a bold statement: “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.”

But perhaps Mary Antin had wanted more than to be an assimilated immigrant. “One of the best novels I never wrote is called The Unwilling Celebrity,” she wrote in a letter. “It deals with the embarrassment of a woman who never succeeded in reconciling a large measure of public recognition with her insufficient achievement.”

With thanks to Sarah Blacker Cohen in Mary Antin’s “The Promised Land”: A Breach of Promise in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Winter 1977-78.

Also Keren R. McGinity in The Real Mary Antin: Woman on a Mission in the Promised Land, American Jewish History Sept. 1998.

And to Alan Mazur, A ROMANCE IN NATURAL HISTORY; THE LIVES AND WORKS OF AMADEUS GRABAU AND MARY ANTIN.

This story updated in 2021.

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Boston Riots Once Every 3 Years — for Centuries

Boston riots during the 18^th century happened so often you could have called the town Riot City.

Between 1700 and 1764, 28 riots broke out in Boston. During the same time, New York had only four, and Philadelphia had just six, according to historian Jack Tager.

Police try to quell a Boston riot after the Red Sox World Series victory in 2007.

The Boston riots encompassed all classes. Gentlemen and college students rioted, as did the poor. Women and children rioted for bread and meat. Bostonians protested against customs regulations, brothels and the impressment of sailors. Several Pope Day riots targeted Catholicism and led to the Stamp Act riot. Other Boston rioters attacked immigrants and union organizers. Sometimes the police rioted, but at least one rioted erupted when the police went on strike.

Michael Hindus studied Boston riots and reached a conclusion in a 1971 essay, A City of Mobocrats and Tyrants: Mob Violence in Boston, 1747-1863.

My study of rioting in Boston over an extended period has convinced me that too many types of people took to the streets for too many different reasons for any single formula to apply.

In other words, everyone seemed to riot in Boston.

The Boston Revolt

Tager counted 103 Boston riots from 1700 to 1976, or one riot every 2.76 years. But one man’s riot is another man’s revolt. In 1689, Bostonians engaged in actions the British government almost certainly viewed as a riot. Boston, however, called it a revolt.

King James II gave Bostonians a convenient target for their ire. He consolidated the northern colonies into the Dominion of New England and sent Sir Edmund Andros to rein them in. Andros cracked down on the forbidden activities of smuggling and trading with the French and Dutch. He also infuriated the Puritan elders by holding an Anglican service in a Puritan meeting house. The papist had to go!

Andros is taken prisoner during the Boston Riot, er, Revolt.

So armed Bostonians and militiamen from nearby towns seized Andros and his people and threw him in jail. The Protestant William of Orange, meanwhile, seized power in England, and Boston got away with it. Andros went back to the United Kingdom.

Boston Riots Over Food

In the 18^th century war and economic stagnation created chronic food shortages.

Boston riots first kicked into gear during Queen Anne’s War, which lasted from 1702 to 1713. The costs of the war fell heavily on Boston’s poor, who had to fight it in the north and cope with grain shortages at home. War profiteers hoarded grain to raise prices and gouge their customers, or else they shipped it to the Caribbean to feed the slaves on sugar plantations.

In 1707, poor women dumped out chamber pots on the heads of soldiers marching home from war. Then in 1710, Boston men tried to sabotage a grain-filled ship owned by war profiteer Andrew Belcher. The ship lay at anchor, about to depart Boston Harbor for the West Indies. One man rowed out and smashed the rudder; the next day 50 men rowed out and tried to force the captain to come ashore. Authorities had some rabble-rousers arrested, but didn’t charge them with anything because they had so much public support.

Riots and looting broke out the next year when a fire left 100 families homeless.

Then in 1713, Belcher once again shipped Indian corn to the Caribbean. Boston selectmen warned him against it, but Belcher refused.

Two hundred poor men broke in to Belcher’s warehouse, trashed it and wounded the lieutenant governor. Boston selectmen responded by passing a law that said grain could not be exported in times of food shortage. Grain also had to be sold at a set price to one of a group of 15 people. In 1714 the town established a granary where the poor could buy grain at below-market prices.

Another Boston riot over food broke out in 1737, when the price of meat skyrocketed. Rioters, including many volunteer firefighters, tore down butchers’ stalls.

More Food Riots

Merchant hoarding inspired 14 food riots in Boston during the American Revolution, including some led by women. Abigail Adams witnessed one and described it to her husband in a letter. “There has been much rout and Noise in the Town for several weeks,” she wrote.

Abigail Adams, 1766 (Benjamin Blythe)

During the Kosher Meat Riot of 1902, Jewish men, women and children led the battle against local butchers in the city’s poor neighborhoods. They were angry because the price of kosher beef suddenly rose to 18 cents a pound from 12 cents a pound.

The butchers blamed the Beef Trust in Chicago. Hundreds of Jews didn’t buy it or didn’t care. They formed picket lines outside the butcher shops, first in the North End, then a few days later in the West End. They smashed windows, threw rotten food at the shops and destroyed the product. Ten years later, history repeated itself with another meat riot.

Press Gang Riots

Bostonians rioted for three days against British press gangs in 1747. They’d had plenty of practice: they’d rioted twice in 1741 and once in 1746 against the press gangs.

Caricature of a British press gang

The British Royal Navy had a predilection for capturing — or ‘impressing’ — random American seamen and forcing them to work aboard his royal majesty’s warships. King George’s War was on in 1747, and mariners knew life aboard ship in wartime was harsh and dangerous.

So it did not go over well when, on Nov. 16 and 17, British press gangs rounded up 46 shocked sailors and tradesmen along the waterfront. About 300 men retaliated by capturing a British navy lieutenant. The riot escalated when Gov. William Shirley tried to call out the militia, who refused to respond. Shirley characterized the rioters as “seamen and a great number of lewd and profligate persons.” In reality, the respectable upper-class militiamen supported them. Shirley called them “ill-minded.”

The impressment riot helped set the stage for the American Revolution. It taught Boston that authorities couldn’t do much to suppress large-scale uprisings, wrote Hindus.

Draft Riots

Then in 1863, the Boston draft riot earned less notice than the draft riot in New York. The main actors were working-class white men who couldn’t afford the $300 to get out of the draft. They attacked an armory with women and children helping supply paving stones and ammunition. The women, fearing the poverty they’d suffer if the breadwinner went off to war, held up their children and dared militia to shoot them.

A century later, on April 9, 1969 Harvard police rioted. Thirty students protesting the Vietnam War took over University Hall, driving out the office workers ‘under duress.’ One student physically carried a dean out of the building. Hundreds more joined them, until police stormed the building. They handled the students roughly and injured many of them.

In 1970, a protest against the draft and the Vietnam War at Northeastern University erupted into a riot.

Stamp Act Riot

Annual Pope Night brawls between North and South End gangs in Boston had escalated up until then. They began with raucous parades making fun of the Roman Catholic pope, then turned into brawls—or riots, if you prefer–and a celebratory bonfire.

Attack on Gov. Hutchinson’s house

John Hancock and Sam Adams wanted to stir up trouble, and they found a reliable ally in Ebenezer Mackintosh, the leader of the South End gang.

During the Stamp Act Riot of Aug. 26, 1765, a mob ransacked the mansion of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Gov. Francis Bernard feared more violence a few months later on Pope Night, so he called out the militia from October 31 to November 6—the day before the Stamp Act took effect and the day after Pope Night. The militia stayed home.

That ushered in a penchant for riots that included the Liberty Affair in 1765, the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

Boston Riots Over Race and Slavery

In 1819 came a new wave of Boston riots, sparked by immigration, class-conflict and slavery.

Sixty African-Americans carrying clubs, knives and hatchets in 1819 confronted a group of white people who had captured a runaway slave. The whites fought off the rescuers and arrested 15, but not before one of them was injured.

During the 1829 Gentleman’s Riot, 1,500 members of Boston’s elite class, along with their clerks, rioted against abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Many had made fortunes in textile manufacturing, which gobbled up cotton harvested by slaves in the south.

When the gentlemen assembled, Mayor Theodore Lyman stood on a chair and asked them to desist. They didn’t, but marched to the Female Anti-Slavery Society to break it up, then went for Garrison. They tied him up and started to drag him through the streets, but two men rescued him. He holed up in the old statehouse. Then a coach provided by authorities took Garrison to jail and charged him with disturbing the peace. In the end, they let him go.

A smaller confrontation developed in 1843. “In Boston on August 27, 1843, sailors beat four blacks. When the victims defended themselves, a larger crowd gathered and assaulted every black person in sight,” wrote Paul A. Gilje in Rioting in America.

More Slavery Riots

During the Boston Slave riot of 1854, abolitionists led by Brahmin Thomas Wentworth Higginson armed themselves with axes. They attacked a courthouse in which fugitive slave Anthony Burns was held. They failed to free him, and the governor placed Boston under martial law.

Anthony Burns

Then in 1903, a speech by Booker T. Washington to the Business League at the African Methodist Episcopal Church turned into a battle between his African-American followers and those of William Monroe Trotter. Trotter thought Washington too much of an Uncle Tom, and his followers hissed and shouted during Washington’s speech. A melee erupted as Washington spoke. His followers provoked a melee in which someone threw red pepper and stink bombs. Twenty-five police showed up and arrested Trotter.

Anti-Irish Riots

Many ethnic riots, but not all, started because the Yankee laboring poor feared losing their livelihoods to the cheap workforce arriving from Ireland. The Yankees developed a predilection for beating up the Irish and trashing their homes.

In 1823, Yankee workmen rioted against Irish immigrants, throwing stones through the windows of their homes.

That was only a prelude to the Brothel Riots of 1825, when Yankee firefighters, teamsters and mechanics tore down two notorious West End brothels, the Beehive and the Tin Pot. Michael Hindus notes that the teamsters, or truckmen, had become the ‘fellows to call when any game was on foot in those days.’ They seemed to like fighting for its own sake, sometimes rioting, sometimes suppressing riots.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, "Uncle Sam's Boarding House" from Puck Magazine, highlights the party's anti-immigrant platform.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House” from Puck Magazine, highlights the party’s anti-immigrant platform.

During three days of rioting in July 1826, Yankee laborers nearly destroyed the Irish section of Boston. Hindus speculates the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4 may have inspired a torrent of nativist feeling. The clear meaning of the Revolution was getting muddied by immigrants and their strange Catholic symbols and rituals.

In 1834, a group of anti-Irish Know Nothings burned down an Ursuline convent in Charlestown.

In 1837 came the Broad Street riot. That year, a financial panic caused hard times throughout the country and economic uncertainty for Yankee laborers. Irish immigrants fought mostly volunteer Yankee firefighters on Broad Street. Ten thousand spectators egged on the 800 combatants, and the melee didn’t end until Mayor Samuel Eliot called in the state militia.

1917 Anti-Union Riot

On July 1, 1917, union members and socialists organized a peaceful parade of men, women and babies through the streets to a mass meeting on Boston Common. Mother’s League, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Labor League 20 and the Lithuanians of Boston. Soldiers and sailors attacked the marchers, trampled their banners and burned their pamphlets in the street. After an hour and a half of fighting, the police intervened.

A fight also broke out in Scollay Square, after the police superintendent revoked a peace advocate’s permit to speak.

Ghetto Riots of 1967-68

Boston had a relatively small African-American population until the 1950s, when many migrated north for better jobs and opportunity. But Boston grew increasingly inhospitable to its black population. Urban renewal destroyed neighborhoods and the local government offered little economic or political advancement.

In June 1967, a dozen women calling themselves Mothers for Adequate welfare locked themselves into a welfare office in the Grove Hall section of Roxbury. Police tried to eject them, and a fight broke out. The fight escalated into a large scale riot, as angry young people stoned police cars, smashed windows and set fires. Police arrested 30 rioters, while dozens of on both sides went to hospital with injuries.

That Boston riot mirrored African-American uprisings throughout the United States, riots that continued after an assassin killed Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4.

Immediately after King’s death, James Brown agreed to let his concert at Boston Garden be televised to keep young African-Americans at home. The hardest working man in show biz did keep many young African Americans rooted to their TV sets. But others stoned cars on Blue Hill Avenue, looted liquor stores, burned a furniture store and beat up some white people. The Boston riot, however, was more contained than those in Washington or Chicago or Detroit.

1972 Puerto Rican Riots

New England’s Puerto Rican riots have been largely forgotten. But three days of Boston riots erupted in the South End in July 1972 during a Puerto Rican Day celebration.

The Boston Globe reported the fight grew into a confrontation between bystanders and more than 100 policemen. Mostly young Puerto Ricans set buildings on fire, damaged police cruisers and stoned passing cars. The police were criticized for aggravating the situation.

Luis Palmarin, a South End resident, told the Globe: “The cop arrested me when I tried to stop him from beating a man who was bleeding badly. He threw me in the car, grabbed a soda bottle from the floor, called me a spic and hit me in the face with the bottle.”

Boston City Councilman Albert “Dapper” O’Neil made the situation worse by ordering the police to “club those maggots and leeches out of the park.”

Police Riots

Economic hardship followed the boom years of World War I and unions ramped up their organizing efforts. On May Day, a day to celebrate international labor solidarity, socialists held a meeting in Roxbury at the Dudley Street Opera House.

Boston’s Roman Catholic churches had railed against socialists to their Irish parishioners. The Opera House meeting erupted into a brawl between the socialists on one side and police and weapon-wielding onlookers, including soldiers and sailors, on the other. When the hourlong brawl ended, police arrested 113 people and put them in crowded cells, their walls splashed with blood. Two police officers and a civilian were shot and dozens injured. In the end, two died.

Coolidge called up the militia to quell violence during the Boston police strike

Four months later, the police themselves went on strike for better wages and shorter hours. Young men ran wild, smashing shop windows and looting the merchandise, throwing rocks at streetcars and overturning street vendors’ carts. Gov. Calvin Coolidge called out the militia, who, along with Harvard students and upper-class volunteers, tried to quell the violence. The militia restored peace at the cost of eight lives, and Coolidge replaced the striking police with strikebreakers.

Anti-Busing Riots of 1974-76

Nearly everyone knows about the Boston riots against school desegregation from 1974 to 1976. The ferocity of opposition to busing set Boston apart as the Little Rock of the North.

In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr., came up with a plan to bus schoolchildren between black and white neighborhoods in order to comply with the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965. In response, Boston School Committee Chair Louise Day Hicks formed Restore Our Alienated Rights, and the group led demonstrations, prayer vigils, marches and sit-ins.

Sporadic violence broke out on both sides. A white youth tried to beat a black lawyer with an American flag, and a black teenager stabbed a white teenager in South Boston High school. The school closed down for a month, and Garrity fired the principal and took control himself. Five hundred police officers guarded South Boston High every day in 1975.

With thanks to Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

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Adrian, The Hatmaker’s Son Who Dressed America

Adrian is known as the man who designed the most famous shoes on the planet, but he also deserves credit for padding the shoulders of virtually every American woman during the 1940s.

A costume designer from Naugatuck, Conn., he worked with some of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden era.

He created Joan Crawford’s signature look both on- and off-screen, including the padded shoulders that defined women’s fashion in the 1940s.

“Who would have thought that my entire reputation as a designer would rest on Joan Crawford’s shoulders?” he once said.

Actually, his reputation rested on something else. He designed Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

Adrian

He was born Adrian Adolph Greenberg on March 3, 1903. His parents, Gilbert and Helena Greenberg, both had Jewish immigrant parents. His father’s parents came from Russia, his mother’s from Bohemia and Germany.

They were the only Jewish family in predominantly Catholic Naugatuck. Throughout his life, Adrian avoided drawing attention to his Jewish heritage, calling himself a ‘New Englander.’ He eventually dropped his last name and took his father’s first name, so he was known as Gilbert Adrian.

Adrian’s parents owned a milliner’s shop, and he grew up amidst fabric, ribbon, feathers and hats. His parents dreamed he would graduate from Yale Law School, but he had more interest in fashion and art. He illustrated Edgar Allan Poe stories when at the age of five, and he helped out at the hat shop after high school.

Joan Crawford in the Letty Lynton dress

In 1921, the Parsons School of Fine and Applied Art in New York accepted him. During his first summer vacation, he got a job designing costumes for the Gloucester Playhouse.

He later spent four months at Parsons’ Paris branch, where he designed a gown for a costume ball that caught Irving Berlin’s attention. Berlin invited him to design costumes for his Music Box Revue in New York City.

He didn’t contribute much to the show, but Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino’s wife, invited him to Hollywood to work on her husband’s film. Adrian bought a white suit and a black cape lined in red satin and headed west.

Hollywood

He was 24, charming and confident. Soon he was designing costumes for Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings. Louis B. Mayer gave him work designing startling and unusual costumes for Greta Garbo. He created a Eugenie hat for Garbo in the film Romance, which influenced hat design for a decade. Her belted trench coat and slouch hat in A Woman of Affairs caught the attention of Women’s Wear Daily.

Hollywood was just then beginning to influence American fashion as Paris long had. In 1930, 8 million Americans went to the movies every week. Film studios began working with retailers to tie in movie fashions with ready-to-wear clothing.

In 1932, Adrian designed a long white organdy dress with ruffled sleeves for Joan Crawford in the film Letty Lynton. The dress was produced by as many as 250 tailors, cutters, beaders, embroiders, jewel craftsmen, feather workers and seamstresses.

Billie Burke and Judy Garland as Glenda and Dorothy

The gown was widely copied by New York clothing manufacturers. Macy’s was supposed to have sold 50,000 copies from its Cinema Shop. Vogue reported the country was ‘flooded with little Joan Crawfords. The Letty Lynton dress is considered ‘the most cited dress in Hollywood fashion history.’

Adrian also designed costumes for two Connecticut contemporaries: Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn.

Ruby Slippers

Adrian routinely produced 50 sketches a day and earned $1,000 a week.

When he wasn’t working he presided over an antiques shop on Sunset Strip or painted at his cabin on a ranch in Palm Springs. He was openly gay, but married actress Janet Gaynor – who was believed to be gay as well – with whom they had a son, Robin. They remained married until his death.

The ruby slippers in the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of American History.

In 1938 Adrian began work on The Wizard of Oz, perhaps his most enduring work.

He designed everything from Judy Garlend’s blue gingham dress to the scarecrow outfit to 100 costumes for the Munchkins. He designed not one but two test pairs of ruby slippers.

Though the shoes were silver in the books, Adrian made them ruby red for the new Technicolor screen. (The ‘tech’ in ‘technicolor,’ by the way, is an homage to MIT, alma mater of two of the three men who invented it.)

One pair of slippers, the ‘Arabian test pair,’ had curling toes and heels. They detracted from Dorothy’s farm girl image, so MGM adopted the now-famous pair.

Each shoe had 2,300 sequins. Estimates vary about how many shoes the costume-makers actually made, but probably around 10. They made one pair a half size larger for Garland to wear in the afternoon after her feet got swollen.

The Arabian test pair of slippers

In 1970, MGM’s wardrobe department auctioned off one pair of slippers for $15,000. Nine years later, the anonymous donor gave them to the Smithsonian Institution. In 2000, another pair of ruby slippers sold for $666,000 at an auction.

Legacy

In 1941 Adrian left the film industry to start his own brand of ready-to-wear clothing. He didn’t think American women should imitate movie star fashions, except for the heroines of light comedy in middle-sized towns.

After a decade he had a serious heart attack, so he closed his store and bought a ranch in Brazil’s interior. He and Gaynor spent half the year there.

Eventually Adrian returned to Hollywood to design the costumes for Grand Hotel. In 1959 he began work on the upcoming Broadway musical Camelot but died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 56 years old.

Of his legacy, fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank wrote Adrian proved America could have its own style.

It didn’t have to evolve from sportswear but could emanate from Hollywood, bypassing Paris altogether.

With thanks to The Great Fashion Designers By Brenda Polan and Roger Tredre. Photos: Adrian By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47393940; Arabian Test Pair By Relaxatiallc at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47976533. Ruby slippers featured image By RadioFan at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13824876. This story was updated in 2022.

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Ed Ames, Ukrainian Boy from Malden, Gets Longest Television Laugh Ever

Ed Ames, best known for playing Mingo on the Daniel Boone television series in the 1960s, was actually a Ukrainian Jew from Malden, Mass. And as a Jew known for playing a Native American, he prompted one of the funniest moments ever on Johnny Carson’s talk show in 1965.

Ed Ames

He was born in the Boston suburb on July 9, 1927, the youngest of nine children. His parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and his real last name was Urick.

Malden Boy

The family was poor, but Ed and his brother Joe attended the prestigious Boston Latin School. With two other brothers, Gene and Vic, they formed a singing group eventually called the Ames Brothers. They entertained troops at military bases around Boston and at the upscale Fox and Hounds nightclub. They made their way to New York, where they recorded a hit single, Rag Mop, in 1950.

The Ames Brothers. Ed is at the top.

The Ames Brothers had a long and successful career on television, radio and in recordings. They were one of the first acts to appear on the original Ed Sullivan Show when it was broadcast from a department store. They had their own television show in 1950, the first syndicated series to be shown in foreign countries. In 1957, Ed recorded a single on his own, Bean Song (Which Way to Boston?).

Over 15 years, the Ames Brothers charted 49 hits until they broke up in the early 1960s.

Ed, known as the Boston Baritone, continued with an acting career. He appeared Off Broadway in The Crucible, which led to roles in the Fantasticks and then on Broadway in Carnival. and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Ames’ high cheekbones and dark complexion earned him roles as an Indian. He played Chief Bromden in Cuckoo’s Nest, then as Fess Parker’s sidekick Mingo in Daniel Boone starting in 1964.

Longest Television Laugh Ever

Ed Ames as Mingo

During the seven years he played Mingo, Ames learned to throw a tomahawk. On April 29, 1965, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson asked him to hit a target across the stage – a chalk-drawn cowboy on a wood panel. Ames threw the tomahawk right between the cowboy’s legs. Carson quipped, “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.” The resulting laughter was called the longest in television history.

He continued to perform on stage. His work playing Mingo drew praise from the Arizona Indian Association, which said, “You have done more for the Indians by your excellent characterization than all the missionaries, government officials and book authors combined.”

Ames had a successful solo singing career, with four hits during the 1960s: Try to Remember, Time, Time, My Cup Runneth Over and Who Will Answer? During the Christmas season, radio stations still play his version of Do You Hear What I Hear? He is still alive and owns a ranch in Santa Ynez, Calif.

This story was updated in 2022.

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