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Roxbury Mass.

Henry Vincent Greene – The Soda Jerk Who Made the 20s Roar

Henry Vincent Greene made a simple promise to the hard-working men and women who invested their savings with him. He would “put John Smith’s money to work alongside that of John D. Rockefeller’s for our common prosperity.”

And the idea made sense. Why put money in the bank to slowly grow when it could increase by leaps and bounds in the hands of the financier Henry Vincent Greene? But was he a boy wizard of Boston’s State Street financial district or was he more like Charles Ponzi, the great fraud of the age?

Newspaper illustration of Henry Vincent Greene

Henry Vincent Greene

Greene was born in 1888 in Lawrence, Mass., to a relatively poor family. He received only a grade school education – not uncommon for the times. As an ambitious young man, he left home to move to Roxbury in Boston to take a job as a soda jerk for $12 a week. He jumped from that to the more lucrative profession of selling cosmetics and patent medicines for Armour and Company. The firm had made Dale Carnegie a household name when he turned his sales techniques into a best-selling book: How to Win Friends and Influence People.

And Greene was cut from the Carnegie mold, as well. What he lacked in education he made up for in personality and gumption. After one failed attempt to start a fence company, he rounded up investors to back his newest idea – a bank.

Greene tried to get a national banking charter, but was rejected. The states of Maine and New Hampshire shot down his requests to set up shop selling his securities. But he successfully opened his doors in Massachusetts as the Commercial Finance Company in 1916 at the age of 25.

The idea was sound enough. The business would sell shares to investors, and lend out their money to other businesses. Greene rapidly assembled a team of 2,000 salesmen to call on potential investors – many of them unsophisticated laborers.

Making People Happy

He boasted that many of his salesmen were pillars of their communities. He found them among the ranks of doctors and ministers who sold the shares with the promise of “bringing the better kind of financial opportunities within the range of the small investor.”

The salesmen would take a healthy commission, along with Greene, making everyone happy. He built his empire up to more than $30 million by 1920 and paid healthy dividends. The H.V. Greene Co. became a wonder of State Street, with Henry living in a luxurious home in Weston and a summer place by the shore.

But in 1921, the high flying days of the company came to a crashing halt with the failure of the Massachusetts Motor Co. The company sold cars and financed them for its customers. Americans had gone car crazy in the 20s, and business boomed.

Greene was the money behind the badly run company, but the first signs of trouble came when Massachusetts Motor didn’t pay for some of the cars it was buying as it sold them. A closer look at the books showed that the company’s loose credit policies had allowed it to sell cars to far too many people who couldn’t afford them. Greene pledged more money to prop up the enterprise, but he didn’t have deep enough pockets.

Trouble

The Massachusetts Motor Co. went into bankruptcy. Soon, the Boston Legal Aid Society and attorney general began receiving complaints from H.V. Greene investors who didn’t receive dividends.

Greene had been targeted by complaints in the past and had always silenced his detractors. They likened him to Charles Ponzi because he made good on any requests for refunds or repayment. This time was different. He couldn’t make good and was sued for more than $14 million. His company was forced into receivership to prevent Greene and his partners from looting it further.

Charles Ponzi

The state charged him with deliberate fraud, and the newspapers had a field day picking over the rise and fall of the soda jerk turned millionaire banker. As Greene’s empire worked through bankruptcy, the details were as depressing as they were familiar. He had used new investor money to pay dividends to old investors that weren’t supported by new business but were designed to spread the word that H.V. Greene was a booming investment.

Henry Vincent Greene, No Ponzi

When he couldn’t produce new investors, the money simply ran out. A special master concluded in 1924 that Greene personally did not defraud people. However, the company deliberately overstated its value, and it owed millions to its customers.

Greene vehemently denied the charges that he was another Charles Ponzi. But in 1926 he finally put the case to rest by pleading no contest to two fraud charges. He then paid a fine of $2,500. The rest of the charges against him were filed without finding.

The government gave up its case when its chief witness would not swear that Greene had personally reviewed the printed advertising materials used to dupe investors. All he could say was that the marketing materials were brought to Greene’s office for approval and returned to the printer. But he did not see Greene actually look at them.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Seeing Boston By Streetcar on Film in 1906

Seeing Boston By Streetcar stands as one of the first films of the city ever made. It offers today’s viewer a fascinating glimpse of the city’s smoky, busy streets. The streetcar takes the viewer past Jordan Marsh and along Boylston Street to Copley Square and the Boston Public Library. Pedestrians, horses, carriages and carts vie for space in a free-for-all with no traffic lights, no crosswalks and no stop signs.

Viewers who first saw the film during its debut in 1906 probably found it even more fascinating.

Seeing Boston by Streetcar

(Note the brief fistfight at 2:26.)

The motion picture industry, even newer than the str had just started when American Mutoscope and Biograph Company filmed Boston by Streetcar in 1906.

The Early Film Industry

On April 14, 1894, the first kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City. Patrons viewed moving pictures through a peephole, which Thomas Edison’s laboratory invented. In New York two years later came the first commercially successful movie projection, again with an Edison invention – the Vitascope. Weeks later in Boston, Benjamin Franklin Keith showed a film with the Vitascope in his vaudeville theatre on 547 Washington Street.

In 1906, Boston’s first movie theatre, the Theatre Comique, opened on Tremont Row in Scollay Square. It typically showed a series of short films of real life, drama and entertainment. Cameramen traveled the United States filming scenery to product such cinema verite.

New England had dozens of film studios, including the Eastern Film Corporation in Rhode Island, the Commonwealth Photoplay Corporation in Massachusetts and Dirigo Pictures and Pine Tree Pictures in Maine. But then the film industry moved out west, in part due to the efforts of another New Englander — Thomas Ince, born in Newport, R.I.

People considered early movies technical marvels. The Boston Herald gushed over the debut of the Vitascope:

The scenes shown are full of life and action, simply lacking in vocalization. To describe the enthusiasm aroused would be impossible. Worthy professors and scientific men vied with grocery clerks in the warmth of their applause.

Billy Bitzer

A major figure in the early motion picture industry, G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, shot Seeing Boston By Streetcar. Born Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer in Roxbury, Mass., on April 21, 1872, he entered the family business as a silversmith. But he abandoned his well-paying trade for the infant film industry.

Bitzer developed early cinematic technologies and techniques such as the soft focus, the iris shot and the close-up. He collaborated for many years with D.W. Griffith, most notably filming and investing in Birth of a Nation.

Bitzer, behind the camera, with D.W. Griffith on location for the film Way Down East in 1920.

In Bitzer’s autobiography, published posthumously in 1973, he described his early years:

When I started out as a cameraman in 1896 the Biograph camera weighed close to a ton. These were the days before movies were ready to be projected on the screen. They could be seen only when the viewer turned a crank and looked into a peep-show machine at the penny arcades. In 1896 at Hammerstein’s Olympia Music Hall in New York, I was the projectionist of Biograph’s first screening in a theater. We showed pictures of Presidential candidate William McKinley at his Ohio home, which I had taken; of the Empire State Express rounding a bend; of Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle, and two or three other shorts.

Those “pictures of McKinley” actually amounted to the first presidential documentary. And Bitzer used the first known close-up shot in Rip Van Winkle.

Bitzer died of a heart attack on April 29, 1944 in Hollywood.

Streetcars

Twenty-five years before Bitzer took his camera onto an electric streetcar, Boston greeted the conveyance with similar awe. However, the electric streetcar got no warm applause. An inventor named Benson Bidwell had brought a demonstration model to the city. He hoped for a contract to build and operate a streetcar line. Bidwell described the reaction in the winter of 1884-85:

The cars were nicely upholstered and made a sensation among the Boston Yankees, who, when they came to fully understand that an unseen power was running, lighting and heating the cars, said it was either magic or a fraud; for they could not comprehend though they were afraid of it.

He didn’t get the contract, but other people did. Bostonians quickly got over their fears after the first streetcar line opened to Brookline on Jan. 5, 1889. Within seven years, the city had a network of electric streetcars. As Boston By Streetcar shows, fear of the cars had disappeared.

The electric streetcar had a huge impact on Boston’s growth. They allowed for the development of streetcar suburbs, starting with Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, then moving out to Brookline, Somerville and Arlington, to name a few.

Today, a few streetcar lines remain in Boston. They include the four Green Line branches, and the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line.

This story about seeing Boston by streetcar was updated in 2023. To read more about the early film industry in New England, click here.

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Samuel Danforth, Star-Gazing Puritan, Sees A ‘Herald of wrath to a secure and impenitent World,’ aka, A Comet

When a mighty comet streaked across the night sky in 1664, Samuel Danforth predicted a series of catastrophes for his fellow Puritans who lived in the howling wilderness of New England.

He even did it in some of the first verses published in the New World:

There, with long bloody Hair, a Blazing Star
Threatens the World with Famine, Plague & War :
To Princes, death ; to Kingdomes many crosses : To all Estates, Inevitable Losses …

Danforth, both an astronomer and minister, created the first known almanac in America. He also delivered sermons described as powerful, eloquent and tearful.

In a pamphlet published about the comet of 1664, Danforth wrote the Bible made the purpose of comets very clear: as signals of great and notable changes.

And bad things had already started to happen in New England.

Samuel Danforth

Samuel Danforth was born Oct. 17, 1626 in Framingham, England. He migrated with his father and five siblings to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. He studied astronomy at Harvard College. After graduation in 1643 he stayed on as a tutor and published almanacs in 1647, 1648 and 1649. Those are the earliest surviving almanacs in America.

Ordained a minister in 1650, he became pastor of the church in Roxbury, Mass.

In 1670, he delivered one of the most famous sermons in history, A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness, to the Massachusetts General Court.

Danforth, typical of the Puritans frightened by the frontier that crowded in on them, asked a question in the sermon. “What is it that distinguisheth New England from other Colonies and Plantations in America? ” The answer: They entered the “waste and howling wilderness” to “walk in the Faith of the Gospel with all good Conscience according to the Order of the Gospel, and your enjoyment of the pure Worship of God according to his Institution, without humane Mixtures and Impositions.”

Danforth was also a true product of the Puritan culture of condemnation. He rebuked tavern-goers when he saw them through his study window. When a young man named Benjamin Goad was hanged for having sex with a ‘lady horse’ in broad daylight, Danforth delivered a sermon justifying his execution as essential to preserving the church and society.

Comet of 1664

In the winter of 1664, a comet crossed the night sky and caught the attention of such European notables as Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton. Pepys, in his diary, recorded “mighty talk” about the comet, and the king and queen had stayed up to watch it. Ordinary people went into a frenzy, prophesizing awful events – which did happen. They included one of the coldest winters in history, the plague and the Great Fire of 1666.

In New England, Danforth couldn’t resist offering a theological interpretation to the comet in a pamphlet. He gave it the daunting title An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star; As it appeared in New-England in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and in the beginning of the 12th Moneth, 1664. Together with a Brief Theological Application thereof.

Though he lived in a howling wilderness, his conclusions about the comet conformed to contemporary scientific thought in Europe.

This Comet is not a new fixed Star, but a Planetick or Erratick Body, wandring up & down in the etherial firmament under the fixed stars.

The rest of it revealed pure Puritanical thinking. He wrote, for example,

The Holy Scriptures, which are the Authentick and un- erring Canon of truth, teach us to look at Comets, as Portentous and Signal of great and notable Changes.

Earthquake

Danforth also noted that an earthquake provided a similar warning four years earlier. The earthquake of 1663 caused some houses to be “rock’t like cradles” and might portend the “Lords shaking the foundations of our Churches and of our civil state.”

And he offered several examples of recent calamities: The death of Puritan ministers. Mr. John Norton, “translated into an higher Orb” and of whom New England was not worthy. Also the death of Samuel Stone, “the strength and glory of Connecticut” who “fell a sleep sweetly and placidly in the Lord.” (Stone was assistant to Thomas Hoooker, and Hartford was named for his home town.)

Their principal grain was turned into “an husk and rotteness” by “the sad Mildew and Blasting.”

A severe drought the previous summer burnt up their pastures, and early frosts “smote our Indian corn.”

He then concluded:

God forbid that any of us, should be Ασε΄ρες πλανη˜τας wandring Stars, Eccentrick and Erratick in our motions, as all Seducers and Impostors are for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

Samuel Danforth lived another 10 years, dying on died November 19, 1674 at the age of 48.

This story updated in 2021.

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How Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney Outwitted Her Protestant Postal Customers

When Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney got the job of postmistress in Auburndale, Mass., the town’s Protestants boycotted her stamps.

That created a problem. She needed money to support herself and her poetry, and a postmistress’s compensation depended on sales.

Fortunately, she had many, many friends in Boston’s artistic and intellectual circles who helped her get by.

Some view her as the ‘lost lady of American letters,’ but not because of her postal service job.

Louise Guiney by Fred Holland Day

Louise Guiney

She was born Jan. 7, 1861, in Roxbury, Mass., the daughter of Patrick Robert Guiney and Jeanette Margaret Doyle.

Her father emigrated from Ireland with very little money, but worked his way through college, became a lawyer and served heroically in the Civil War. He achieved the rank of brigadier general. After the war he entered politics, winning office as a Republican–one of the first Irish-Catholics to do so. He lost a bid for Congress but won as assistant district attorney. Plagued by his war injuries, he died when Louise was 16 and left little money.

A devout Catholic, she was educated at a convent in Providence, but couldn’t afford college. She continued to study on her own and to write poetry published in the Atlantic, Harper’s and Scribner’s.

Her biographer, Henry Fairbanks, called her a rare combination: ‘pure of heart, brilliant of mind.’ Critics considered her a bridge between Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She also bridged the intellectual and artistic circles in fin-de-siecle Boston.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Bohemian

She formed a close friendship with a Bohemian group from a somewhat raffish Beacon Hill neighborhood that included the architect Ralph Adams Cram, Fred Holland Day, artist Tom Meteyard, poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. Across the hill, she belonged to a group of intellectual women that included Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields and Alice Brown, with whom she is believed to have a Boston marriage.

Her financial straits forced her to take a job as postmistress in Auburndale. The postmistress’ compensation was determined by how much business the post office did. So Louise Guiney became victim of an anti-Catholic plot. Ralph Adams Cram, who organized a response, recollected,

The suburb of Auburndale was a favorite retreat of retired Protestant missionaries. …Suddenly the business began to decline rather alarmingly. Certain Sherlock Holmes procedures … revealed just what was happening… .. The situation was intolerable to the evangelical mind; therefore the Papist incumbent must be driven out by the simple expedient of transferring the trade to other neighbouring post offices – which was done.

Concerted action on the part of Lou Guiney’s friends produced notable results. We all bought postage stamps … in such quantities that the Auburndale post office advanced in the matter of business done, and with such leaps and bounds that finally an emissary from the Post Office Department was sent out to ascertain what it all meant.

Louise Guiney eventually took a job at the Boston Public Library, where she wrote poetry and essays in her spare time.

Boston Public Library

Oxford

In 1901, she moved to Oxford, England, where she used the libraries to research an anthology of Catholic poets. She also wrote several biographies and edited books about the Catholic literary tradition in England and Ireland. Though her health suffered, she stinted on food and coal to buy books.

Today, critics note her lyrical, Old English-style poems recall 17th-century English poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation.

Informed by her religious faith, Guiney’s works reflect her concern with the Catholic tradition in literature and often emphasize moral rectitude and heroic gallantry.

Louise Guiney died Nov. 2, 1920, of a stroke at age 59, leaving her work unfinished.

This story was updated in 2022.

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New England Colonists Thunderstruck by the Lightning Storms of 1768

Terrific lightning storms unsettled New England colonists during the summer of 1768, when rising tensions with Great Britain led to conflict and violence. But unlike the Puritans of a century before, the colonists didn’t view the lightning as a message from God.

Benjamin Franklin

The Age of Enlightenment had arrived, and reason and analysis won over superstition and traditional authority. Or at least began to.

So even as Sam Adams was proselytizing for rebellion against the King, inquiring minds tried to analyze the severe lightning that struck that summer. They were continuing the scientific analysis that Ben Franklin had started. He’d conducted his famous kite experiment 14 years before then.

The 1768 Lightning Storms

The tremendous lightning storms in the summer of 1768 came as the Townshend Acts passed in 1767, took effect and colonists in British North America resisted them.

In February 1768, Sam Adams circulated a letter among the colonies opposing the Acts, calling them taxation without representation.

Agitators in Boston harassed customs inspectors, and in May a British warship with 50 guns sailed into Boston Harbor. In July, Gov. Francis Bernard dissolved the General Court.

Harvard’s second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

On July 2, lightning struck Hollis Hall at Harvard College. In a letter to the editors of the Boston Chronicle, John Winthrop wrote that what happened supported the view that lightning was electricity. He described how the violent thunderstorm beat down a chimney top, shattered woodwork and windows and tore several feet of brickwork. Several students felt a blow, which they compared to an electric shock. One students was thrown from his chair, perceiving neither the flash nor the thunder.

And then Winthrop described the lightning rod, which Franklin had invented in 1749:

In my house, that has such an apparatus fitted with bells to give notice of the passage of the lightening along the rods, the bells began to ring as soon as the first thunder was heard at a distance.

The bells continued ringing briskly for about an hour, he wrote. The lightning “frequently flashed from one bell to the other, and with cracks loud enough to be heard in the farther part of the house.”

Boycott

In August, Boston merchants agreed to boycott British goods until the repeal of the Townshend Acts. Tremendous thunderstorms struck from Salem, Mass., to Norwalk, Conn., on the afternoon of August 1. In Roxbury, Mass., lightning shattered a window. In Boston, it knocked a clock case into fragments on a Winter Street home. It also threw clothes around a room in a Water Street home and melted a pewter plate on a mantel in Temple Street. It stunned two children, who recovered.

That storm extended to Connecticut, where lightning knocked over a tree in Hartford, killing two cows, and set a barn in Norwalk on fire.

The fierce lightning flashes inspired a citizen in Salem, Mass., to send a poem to the Essex Gazette:

What grumbling Noise comes thro’ the yielding Air!
Is it the Cannon’s Roar! The Din of War?
No! — ‘Tis the Voice of God; he Thunder rolls,
And flashes Lightnings to the distant Polls.

British warships arrive in Boston Harbor.

Sulfur and British Soldiers

In September, 4,000 British soldiers arrived to keep order and set up permanent residence in Boston. A few weeks before the British began their military occupation, lightning tore a large oak tree to pieces in Wrentham, Mass.

But the next evening, September 8, brought the weirdest lightning strike of all.

It struck Daniel Mann’s tavern, where ladies and gentlemen sat around a tea table. A flash of lightning came into the room, followed by an explosion, apparently as loud as the discharge of a cannon. Large sparks were seen, and the air in the room smelled like sulfur, which gave one person an intense headache. A windowpane broke, a clock injured, the ceiling and floors damaged. One man felt a violent shock on top of his head, another felt pain in his shoulder and found his coat scorched.

“All the inmates were filled with terror,” reported Essex historian Sidney Perley in Historic Storms of New England.

In Rehoboth, Mass., lightning killed a 10-year-old boy. A barn in Mendon, Mass., burned to the ground when struck. In Uxbridge, lightning tore up the heart and floor of a house and stunned several family members.

“This shower was not as local as thunder showers generally are,” Perley wrote, “but it extended over a large territory, and the lightning was sharper and more frequent and disastrous than it was remembered to have been before in many parts of the region.”