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Seven Fun Facts About E.E. Cummings

Many school kids have a special affinity for e.e. cummings, who wrote about the circus and got away with funky punctuation, made-up words and no capitalization in his poetry. Young ladies, too, are drawn to his lyrical love poems, some of the best in the English language.

He loved to mangle that language like the cartoon character Krazy Kat. He even wrote an introduction to the first collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips.

E.E. Cummings. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Yet Cummings’ experimental poems weren’t just kid stuff.

When he died in 1962, critics acknowledged him as an important 20^th century poet. “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader,” wrote critic Randall Jarrell.

E.E. Cummings

He was born into a prosperous, intellectual Unitarian family in Cambridge, Mass. Like another New England poet, Robert Frost, he had a farm in New Hampshire. Throughout his life he found refuge at Joy Farm in Madison, near Mount Chocorua.

He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard, signed up to drive an ambulance during World War I and then wrote a critically acclaimed novel.

In 1923 his first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, came out. He wrote more books of poetry in the 20s that established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. Over his lifetime he also wrote 2,900 poems, four plays, two novels and essays. He also painted and drew.

For most of his life he lived in a small apartment at 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place … meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.”

He had two short marriages as a young man, then fell in love with a model, Marion Morehouse. They lived together for 30 years, until his death.

He died on Sept. 3, 1962 and is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.

Here are seven fun facts about e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, if you prefer. He used both.

1. Cambridge Roots

His childhood home in Cambridge at 104 Irving Street was across the street from the house Julia Child would later live in. Cummings’ home was the first in Cambridge to have a telephone (a hand-cranked version, that is).

The E.E. Cummings house in Cambridge

He was born Edward Estlin Cummings, named after his father, on Oct. 14, 1894. Everyone called him Estlin. His loving, well-to-do family encouraged his creativity as a child and supported him financially as an adult. He had a happy childhood, capturing its essence in his most famous poem, [in Just-].

When the world is puddle-wonderful

The little lame baloon-man whistles

Far and wee,

And Betty and Is’bel come dancing…

And the goat-footed baloon-man

Whistles

Far

And

Wee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, two Fireside poets, had also lived in the city and died within a decade of Cummings’ birth. Before TV and radio, people read poetry for entertainment in family settings – hence “fireside.” – and schoolchildren memorized poems in school.

Poets were celebrities, rock stars even, back then. Estlin Cummings wanted to be one from his early childhood.

2. He had a beloved African-American teacher

He attended the Agassiz School, a public school run by Maria Baldwin, the African American principal and early civil rights leader. The school now bears her name. About Baldwin, he wrote, “From her I marvelingly learned that the truest power is gentleness.” She called him a most loveable little boy.

As a boy, E.E. Cummings wrote a poem every day. His trademark: no space after a comma, began at the age of 14.

His first published poem appeared in 1910 in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine by the city’s high school students. The last line, about the retirement of his teacher, read,

“Than that which fits you best–our faithful friend.” But the printer left off ‘you.’ From then on, Cummings had an inordinate distrust of typesetters. “Later in his life he would become the bane of printers, insisting on galley after galley that he would examine with extreme care, correcting the most minute mistakes,” wrote his biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.

3. He spent time in a French military prison

E.E. Cummings spent 3-1/2 months in a French military prison. He had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. A bureaucratic mix-up left him in Paris for five weeks, and he fell in love with a French prostitute.

E.E. Cummings in 1917

Cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, wrote letters home that included comments opposing the war. The French military arrested him in 1917 and incarcerated him in a large room. His father protested vigorously and got him out of prison.

From that experience he wrote a novel, The Enormous Room, published in 1922, to critical acclaim.

4. He had Daddy issues

His father worked as the pastor of the South Congregational Church and as a lecturer at Harvard. He also served as secretary of the Boston Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Penal Aspects of Drunkenness and a supporter of the Watch and Ward Society.

His father was a large, powerful man, athletic and aggressive. Estlin, on the other hand, was small, uncoordinated and as a teenager had bad acne. His father often said, “I’d never give a penny to a son of mine who drank.” Estlin drank, but he got more than a penny over the years.

His daddy issues caused him to start rebelling against his father while at Harvard. He drank whiskey sours, visited burlesque shows and wrote erotic love poems. Once he parked his father’s car in front of a bordello.

5. Cummings was a Republican

Though he wrote avant-garde poetry and lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, he registered as a Republican and supported the anti-Communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Patchin Place in Greenwich Village

He visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and criticized the poverty and squalor under Stalin. Susan Cheever wrote, “He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism…” He hated the Kennedys and refused an invitation to the White House from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

6. Estranged from Daughter

His first wife, Elaine Orr, abducted their daughter and he didn’t see her for more than 20 years. Cummings had an affair with Elaine while she was married to Scofield Thayer. She had Cummings’ child, Nancy, in 1919, but her husband was okay with it. Thayer gave Nancy his name and supported her.

Elaine divorced Thayer to marry Cummings in 1924. They stayed together all of two months and divorced after nine.

Elaine told Nancy that Thayer was her father, that he was dead (he wasn’t), that he was crazy (he was).

Elaine shuttled Nancy across the Atlantic and around Europe, putting her in the care of nurses, governesses and boarding schools. Nancy on her own she discovered the poetry of E.E. Cummings. During World War II she worked in Washington, D.C., as a typist and a linguist, and met and married Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson.

Joy Farm n New Hampshire

Nancy’s mother-in-law invited her to stay during the summer at her summer home near Mount Chocorua. Cummings, nearby at Joy Farm, invited her for tea but didn’t disclose their relationship. She agreed to meet him again in Greenwich Village to have her portrait painted, and felt herself falling in love with him. Finally he told her the truth.

7. Dirty Dancing

He admitted his addiction to striptease and burlesque while delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. When living in Greenwich Village he frequented the burlesque show at Minsky’s National Winter Garden to see his favorite stripper, Cleo. As a Harvard undergraduate, he went to the burlesque show at the Old Howard Theater in Boston’s Scollay Square. In Paris, he dated a prostitute named Marie-Louise. He wrote articles for Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 defending burlesque as “art which is alive.”

Drawing of a dancer at Minsky’s

We relied on several fine biographies of E.E. Cummings, including E.E. Cummings A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno; E.E. Cummings By Catherine Reef; Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings By Richard S. Kennedy; e.e. cummings: a life by Susan Cheever.

Image: e.e. cummings house in Cambridge By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22922253. This story was updated in 2021.

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Fred Allen Jokes His Way Through Dirty Old Boston

Before Groucho Marx, before Johnny Carson and before Saturday Night Live, there was Fred Allen. A wildly popular radio comedian, he created a fictional backstreet called Allen’s Alley on his show. In it, commentary on the news of the day came from his ensemble of actors, like Senator Beauregard Claghorn, so Southern he wouldn’t drink water unless it came in a Dixie cup.

Fred Allen in the 1940s

There is a real Allens Alley in Boston. It’s across from Lagrange Street on Tremont between Boylston and Stuart in the heart of the theater district. It was there that Fred Allen began his career as a wisecracking juggler on the vaudeville stage. He moved onto radio, and from 1932 to 1949 The Fred Allen Show made him a star. It also put him in the pantheon of great American humorists like Mark Twain, S.J. Perelman and Robert Benchley.

The vivid characters that populated Allen’s Alley were a big part of his appeal. So was his wordplay. He delivered lines like “What’s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?” He honed his humor through years of study, a habit he picked up as a teenaged employee of the Boston Public Library. And he developed his observational humor from the people he knew in a city we might know today as Dirty Old Boston. A city that teemed with corner saloons, flophouses, triple deckers, stockyards, Odd Fellows Halls and dim alleys.

Years after he made it big in New York and Hollywood, he said,

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Allens Alley in the late 1890s

Fred Allen

He was born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894, or, as he put it, his tiny cry soiled the acoustics of Cambridge, Mass. His birth certificate put his birthplace in Boston, but Allen speculated his father, Henry, made the mistake after celebrating the occasion a little too much. A year later came a brother Bob, and then their mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, died.

His Aunt Lizzie took in the three Sullivan males. She already had a houseful that included her brother Joe, her two sisters, Mary and Jane, and her husband, Mike, a plumber who couldn’t work because lead poisoning had paralyzed him. Her tenants paid her $5 a week for room and board, and sometimes her sisters would quarrel and move out. Lizzie would then have to make do until they returned. She could make a leg of lamb last a week and sifted ashes from the furnace to salvage coal, her nephew wrote.

Henry Sullivan never earned his eldest son’s respect. “My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense,” Allen said.

Henry worked as a bookbinder by day, and when he returned home late at night ‘he seemed to have an impediment in his tread.’

“When my brother and I ran out to greet him we noticed that his breath was dominated by a potent element with which we were not familiar,” Allen wrote.

Perhaps because of his early poverty and family difficulties, or perhaps, simply, because of his Irish heritage, Fred Allen had a persistent sense of tragedy. Once, after rescuing a small boy from getting hit by a car, he shouted, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to grow up and have troubles?”

Dirty Old Boston

They lived in a duplex on Bayard Street in the Allston section of Boston, where the local characters ranged from an overoptimistic candy salesman to a mountainous schoolmarm he tried to forget without success. Mr. Harrington, the pungent soap-grease man, visited Aunt Lizzie in a great and rancid weekly event. Allen’s super-religious Aunt Mame left the bedroom window open at night to let in the Blessed Virgin. A neighbor, a retired gentleman named Tom Carpenter, burst into wakes and took over whenever he saw a funeral wreath on a door, whether he knew the departed or not.

As a boy Fred Allen attended North Harvard School and St. Anthony’s Church, where he got drafted as a choirboy. “The first Sunday I sang in the choir two hundred people changed their religion,” he wrote.

Choices

After 12 years at Aunt Lizzie’s, Henry shocked them by announcing he would remarry. He told his sons they could come with him and his new wife, who they had never met. Or they could stay with Aunt Lizzie. Fred chose Aunt Lizzie, his brother chose his father.

On his 14th birthday, his Aunt Lizzie told him to put on his best suit and meet his father at a saloon, Con Keefe’s on Dartmouth Street in Boston. The characters and the setting could have populated Allen’s Alley. In his autobiography, Much Ado About Me, he wrote:

“Con Keefe’s was a popular alcoholic shrine, a cheer chapel with all the routine accouterments: the swinging doors, the five-cent beer, the free lunch, the starched bartenders, and the inevitable quota of frowzy thinkers draped along the bar.”

As his father lubricated his throat, he told him he had to get a job. Then he introduced his son to a Mr. Hempstead. “If I had been old enough to attempt character reading, I would have judged Mr. Hempstead to be the custodian of a thirst and, as acting custodian, to be fulfilling his every obligation to his charge,” wrote Allen.

Boston Public Library

Mr. Hempstead did indeed get him a job as a runner at the library. He eventually got promoted into a job that gave him spare time to peruse the stacks. There he found a book on juggling and a book on the history of comedy. He began to collect jokes:

“The professor’s mouth was an adjective hutch.”

“Wind of my prowess spread through the grammar school like bad news at a pessimists’ convention.”

“The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover’s Lane holding his own hand.”

High School

He entered the Boston High School of Commerce, which he called a pet project of Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Honey Fitz, grandfather of President John . Kennedy

“There was a rumor that Mayor Fitzgerald had sung “Sweet Adeline” in office for so many years that the City Hall acoustics had diabetes,” wrote Allen.

The family moved to the Savin Hill section of Dorchester and later to a bigger place on Columbia Road in Dorchester. He was so busy working his way through high school he had little time and formed few friendships. So in his spare hours he learned to juggle or he squandered his money on vaudeville shows.

One day the library held a talent show for its employees. Fred Allen did his juggling act, and afterward a girl told him he was crazy to stay at the library. He should go on stage, she said.

If it hadn’t been for her, he wrote, he might have ended up the Boston Public Library librarian.

Piano Row

After graduation he worked for the Colonial Piano Company as a piano mover on Piano Row. He performed mini-dramas with two husky piano movers, a horse-and-wagon, a rope and a block-and-tackle. When a reluctant household failed to make installment payments on their piano, Fred Allen and his crew showed up at the door. They would go through the motions of repossessing the piano. The usual result was a housewife taking an oath on the graves of a number of departed relatives that she would pay up. On the rare occasion when that didn’t happen, they would give the person one more chance and leave with as much dignity as they could muster.

Piano Row today

When he wasn’t pretending to repossess pianos, he took his juggling act to Amateur Night shows, then all the rage.

Fred Allen took a two-week vacation from the piano store and toured amusement parks and resorts in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Later he bought a vacation getaway in Old Orchard Beach. There he developed an affection for rural New Englanders, who inspired the Allen’s Alley denizen Titus Moody. Moody, played by Parker Fennelly, was a dour Yankee who didn’t hold with furniture that talked—meaning radio, then television. Moody parlayed the character into the Pepperidge Farm spokesman well into his 80s.

Aunt Lizzie didn’t approve of her nephew’s theatrical ambitions, and routinely told him about an actor she knew who ended up in a drunkard’s grave. But he couldn’t resist the dollar, the fun and the excitement.

Scollay Square

He did well enough to turn professional. That meant Scollay Square, Boston’s Tenderloin, which he called the hot foot to Boston’s conservative high-button shoe.

Scollay Square back in the day

There he found plenty of colorful, cheerful Dickensian characters to inspire his imagination: chorus girls, freaks, acrobats, song-and-dance teams, sailors returning home from long cruises. The sailors, he wrote, ‘invariably rushed to the Old Howard [Theatre] to check on the current models of female pulchitrude and to see if any improvements had been made during their absence.’

Years later, he remembered his vaudeville days with fondness.

Vaudeville is dead. The acrobats, the animal acts, the dancers, the singers, and the old-time comedians have taken their final bows and disappeared into the wings of obscurity. For fifty years–from 1875 to 1925–vaudeville was the popular entertainment of the masses. Nomadic tribes of nondescript players roamed the land. The vaudeville actor was part gypsy and part suitcase. With his brash manner, flashy clothes, capes and cane, and accompanied by his gaudy womenfolk, the vaudevillian brought happiness and excitement to the communities he visited.

Becoming Fred Allen

Finally his act was good enough for New York. His arrival in New York was met with as much excitement as another flounder arriving at Fulton Fish Market, he wrote.

Eventually an Australian booking agent saw his juggling act and booked him for a year on the Fuller circuit in Australia. He started in Brisbane, where he did one show a night and had not much else to do. So he picked up a hobby he’d abandoned when he left the Boston Public Library: reading. For the next 11 months, he used his spare time to read the American humorists, including Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Charles Dickens, Bill Nye, Artemus Ward and Eli Perkins.

red Allen and dummy, 1916

He wanted to write, but he claimed his High School of Commerce education hadn’t taught him to weld nouns and verbs together into an acceptable literary pattern. In Brisbane, he resolved to improve his act, his jokes and his writing.

His Australian tour lasted so long he returned to the same cities, where the audience knew his jokes. So he took from his trunk a ventriloquist’s dummy that he bought on impulse – “I was lonely” – and adapted a routine with it. Later he added a banjo, then a guitar.

When he returned from Australia, he no longer performed as a juggler. He was Fred Allen, a monologist.

At Last, Success

In 1932, he went on the radio. For the next 17 years, The Fred Allen Show appeared in various guises and with various sponsors. It became Town Hall Tonight and finally the Texaco Star Theater.

Allen’s Alley

He wrote his own jokes, featured guests and satirized the news and musical comedies. In 1942 he introduced Allen’s Alley with characters like Moody, Senator Claghorn, the malaprop-prone Mrs. Nussbaum and the comic Irishman Ajax Cassidy. He had married Portland Hoffa in 1927, and she introduced the show with a high voice that sounded like ‘two slate pencils mating or a clarinet reed calling for help.’

He also appeared on television and in film. Allen had little good to say about either. “Imitation is the sincerest form of television,” he wrote. And, “Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

He had even less use for Hollywood. “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart,” he wrote.

Last Years

John Steinbeck advised him on how to write an autobiography. Fred Allen wrote Treadmill to Oblivion, published in 1954, and had almost finished Much Ado About Me in 1956 when he died. On the night of St. Patrick’s Day he had a massive heart attack while taking a late night stroll down West 57^th Street in New York.

“The droll humorist’s death plunged his fellow entertainers into mourning,” read his New York Times obituary.

Fifty years after his death, the introduction to the reissue of Treadmill to Oblivion called him ‘one of the great radio comedians – not to mention one of the great wits – of the 20^th century.

You can hear one of Fred Allen’s radio shows here.

Images: Piano Row District By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003597. This story was updated in 2022.

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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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