From Ireland to Boston and no Further

Today is Saint Patrick's Day (Slainte!), and as everyone knows, Boston is one of the most Irish cities in the United States. St. Paddy's is celebrated here with an almost religious fervor, on a par with Mardi Gras in New Orleans or New Year's Eve in Times Square.

But the Irish whose descendants shower Boston Common with green beer every March 17th didn't just appear in Massachusetts out of nowhere. Starting in the colonial period and continuing into the early 20th century, thousands of Irish fled the wars, poverty and famine of their homeland for the relative security of North America.

As a relatively small city with little industry to employ unskilled laborers, Boston was not the first place many of these refugees would have chosen to call home. It was simply a place to make port before heading west to find jobs and buy land. But for the Irish immigrants who had enough money to get to the United States and no further, Boston was the end of the line. By 1890, Massachusetts was home to 260,000 Irish immigrants-- over a quarter of a million people-- and the majority lived in the greater Boston area.

Like New York city, Boston had Federal offices and officials who were tasked with receiving, processing, and vetting this flood of humanity. Newly arrived, confused and disoriented, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans and others were packed into immigration stations and "inspected" to determine whether or not to allow them to enter the country, often on the basis of physical and mental factors.

Unlike New York's Ellis Island, however, Boston-bound immigrants were not received in a single, centralized hub, but rather through isolated stations on Long Wharf, in East and South Boston, and in Charlestown, adding to the confusion. And once these new arrivals were deemed fit to enter the country, Federal officials often took no more notice of them, leaving "bewildered immigrants" to spill out into the street with nowhere to go and no idea what to do next.

I set out to briefly write about a small glimpse of Boston's immigrant past, and ended up covering only a fraction of what I intended. There will be much more to come. But if you want to read more on the subject  now you can do so here, at the website of the exotically-named Gjenvik-Gjonvik Archives, which is actually in Woodstock, Georgia.

Keeping the Tap open during Volstead

You can't hear the term "Jazz Age" without thinking about Prohibition. Or the Volstead Act, as its officially known. It's the law against the sale of alcohol within the borders and territorial waters of the United States from 1920 to 1933. The Prohibition era seems to have been on the minds of writers, directors, and TV executives lately; authors Daniel Okrent and Dennis Lehane wrote Last Call and Live by Night, respectively, there was a "Great Gatsby" remake with Leonardo DiCaprio, and HBO's  "Boardwalk Empire" is wrapping up its fifth and final season. With legal access to booze curtailed except for "medical" purposes, where did New England get its alcohol from?

Truth be told, residents didn't seem to mind the Volstead Act all that much. With easy access to both the Canadian border and the Atlantic Ocean, the region proved a challenge for Federal agents trying to catch bootleggers. Alcohol kept flowing pretty much the way it always had.

New Hampshire's Nashua Telegraph for January 14, 1921 claimed that in the year since Prohibition had taken effect, $10 millions worth of alcohol had been seized by the government in New England and New York state alone. In the same span of time, 10,000 bootleggers had been arrested.

One gang of bootleggers consistently evaded the government's grasp. In 1923, a two-masted schooner was constructed in the Nova Scotian town of Lunenberg and christened the I'm Alone. Designed as a rum-runner, she smuggled liquor up and down the New England coast until 1928, in the process earning approximately $3 million for her owners and acquiring a notorious reputation with the US Coast Guard.

In 1929 the I'm Alone left her comfort zone and sailed for the Gulf of Mexico. In March, the schooner was approached off the coast of Louisiana by the USCG cutter Wolcott. The Wolcott demanded the surrender of the I'm Alone, claiming that the Canadian ship was within US waters. The captain of the I'm Alone refused, insisting that they were actually within international waters. When the I'm Alone headed out to sea, the Wolcott gave chase, and the rum-runner was eventually sunk 220 miles off the American coast. You can read more about the incident here.

Boston,1914

I found the contents of the link below in the Norman B. Leventhal collection at the Boston Public Library. While visions of copyright infringement and lawsuits make me hesitate to actually post the image, I've made it available through the link below, which will take you directly to the BPL's website.

This link connects to a map of Boston as it was exactly one hundred years ago, 1914, the same year that the Great War was declared amongst the Great Powers in Europe. Already a bustling, industrializing city with a busy subway system, in 1914 Boston was considering adding several improvements to its subway, including a line that would run directly from the South Station to the North Station. Any readers who commute in the city today and who know that this proposal STILL hasn't taken effect, feel free to roll your eyes.

I walk through (and ride under) these streets 5 days a week, and I can tell you that the street layout has changed very little since this map was first published a century ago. Visitors who come to Boston from the Midwest and West Coast often complain that the streets are too crooked, too hard to navigate. And that's true, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The fact that this map is so similar to the maps that you can pick up from city visitor centers today is comforting, in a way. The disconnect that many people experience when trying to visualize the past isn't quite so jarring if you're only going back a hundred years or so. Your grandparents may have been around, but if not then certainly your great-grandparents. And even though the people from that age have passed on, along with many of the buildings that they lived in, and the things that they owned and carried and used and cherished, the streets of their city remain largely the same.

If you can imagine one hundred years, you can do two hundred, and perhaps more. The Boston Public Library has opened the door, and it's up to you how far you want to step through it.

About Jazz-Age Boston

Directly contradicting the title, this blog isn't just going to be about Boston in the 1920s and 30s. If you just started reading this blog (which is a given, since this is the first post), please know that I've started off our relationship by lying to you. Let's start over.

My name is Aaron M. Dougherty, and Jazz-Age Boston is a product of historical research I'm doing on the world of 100 years ago. In 1914, the first World War started in Europe. In the United States, automobile magnate Henry Ford was paying his workers a five-dollar a day wage, an unheard-of sum for blue-collar Americans. The era was marked by increased industrialization, globalization, and other trends that still echo today.

And now a few points about subject matter...

Point 1: When I write about the "Jazz Age," I cover a lot more chronology than just the narrow, ten year period of the 1920s. Things that happened in the twenties were influenced by things that happened during the previous decade, and in turn influenced the decade following. Prepare to jump around a lot.

Point 2: Just like today, Boston in the twenties did not exist in a bubble. People came and went, lived and died. I'm going to talk about events outside the city, in Massachusetts, in greater New England, in the rest of the country and probably even outside of it. It's very stream-of-consciousness.

Why Boston? And why this particular period in its history? Part of it is because I live here, and 1914 was a momentous year all across the globe. Another part is because I think that every particular place and time ought to have its moment in the sun, that there's not a single piece of the human experience that's without importance.

Specifically, as one of the great American cities,  Boston experienced early 20th century American anxieties about immigration, industrialization, and modernity. As much as the city is known for its role in the American Revolution, its universities and its art and cultural scene, it was also a notorious haven for rum-runners during Prohibition, and it was here that Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed despite hazy evidence and international protest. Beantown has had its share of both highs and lows, and you'll uncover quite a few surprises if you look back more or less a century ago.

A quick note on sources; I'm used to citing them for my research. This blog isn't quite the same thing as a graduate thesis, but I will try to make my sources available for interested readers. I'll also attempt to make sure that images and pictures on this site are in the public domain, while posting links to relevant copyrighted images.