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| Generic 19th Century depiction of rioting/street brawl represents the kind of melee that erupted on Boston's Broad Street in 1837. |
It began as, so many unpleasant
things do, with a traffic jam of sorts. It was June 11, 1837
and the place was Boston a/k/a the Hub of the Universe.
After fighting a fire in neighboring
Roxbury the volunteer firefighters of Fire Engine Company 20 had
stopped at a saloon to wash the
smoke out of their throats.
After refreshing themselves they departed to make their way back to the station. They found their way blocked by a passing Irish funeral parade. An outraged fireman,
named George Fey began cursing at the mourners then took a shove at one of them.
Instantly a melee erupted and quickly escalated as paving stones were hurled and all manner of makeshift
weapons, including the brigade’s
fire axes, were deployed.
Fire
Captain W. W. Miller ordered his men to make a run for the firehouse. When they
got there Miller sounded an alarm
that called out all of the city’s fire
brigades. Those heroes rushed
to the scene and along with Company 20 to the scene of the initial fight. By that time the
funeral procession had passed but
the commotion had attracted a crowd which the
firefighters immediately attacked.
It was called the Broad Street
Riot, and became the greatest street
disturbance in the city’s history.
About 1000 people on both sides
engaged in a furious street battle.
Fire fighters chased their foes inside
some homes which were then systematically
smashed up. Although no one
was known to be killed outright, fighting went on for hours.
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| Unitarian Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot. |
It was broken up when Mayor
Samuel Atkins Eliot—Unitarians will recognize the name as a member
of that faith’s most distinguished
family—who had been on the scene of the original fire, arrived with 10 companies of militia he had hastily called out. The violence
was quelled, but not the simmering rage boiling between
the immigrant Catholic Irish and Boston’s working class Protestants. The fine lads of the fire brigades, you see, were all recruited among the city’s Protestant laborers, apprentices, and shop clerks.
No Irish need apply.
Boston, founded by Puritans,
had a tradition of rabid
anti-Catholicism stretching back well before the American Revolution.
It was then the custom for gangs of
apprentices and laborers to gather every year on Guy Fawkes Day—called locally Pope Day—for parades bearing effigies of the Pope to be
burned. Gangs from the North
and South sides would customarily run into each other and engage in a semi-ritualistic gang brawl between them. All of this in a
city virtually bereft of any actual
Catholics, except whatever seamen
might be lounging around the port.
It took a shrewd organizer, Samuel
Adams, to transform these street
hooligans into the muscle of the
Sons of Liberty.
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| Volunteer fire brigades like this one required a lot of manpower to pull
the engine through the streets, handle hoses and bucket brigades, and
tear down burning walls. The men in Boston were recruited among
Protestant apprentices, laborers, and street toughs and were idolized in
their community. |
After the Revolution when Boston’s municipal
volunteer fire companies were organized, they were drawn from the same pool.
Boston had recovered as a major port
and trading center. By the turn of the 19th Century it was beginning to attract immigrants,
especially from Ireland, seeking work. Most of them were
Catholics. There was plenty of
work and whatever resentment the
locals might have was kept in check by
prosperity. But President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on trade with warring European
powers and the War of 1812 all but
destroyed Boston’s commerce and led to a regional depression. Tensions
mounted between Yankees and Micks. Street brawls became
common.
The first ever public Catholic Mass in Boston was not held until
1788. In 1803 the Catholics were numerous
and prosperous enough to open Holy
Cross Church, designed by the same architect—Charles
Bulfinch—who was building the city’s impressive churches for the Standing
Order. By 1808 there were enough Catholics—the vast majority of
the Irish—to establish the Diocese of Boston. The first Bishop
was Jean Cheverus, a refugee from
the French Revolution.
After the War of 1812, commerce resumed, and so did
prosperity. New waves of
immigrants arrived. Catholics began building
not only churches but other institutions—a
convent and schools. This rapid
rise of Catholics in their midst inflamed
the Protestant Clergy as much as job
competition inflamed the working class. Denouncing insidious Popery in thundering terms became common on Sunday mornings and the city’s several
religious publications could be relied
on for more.
No matter how theologically liberal the Boston clergy were—and most of them were
very liberal religiously and would soon formally
break from the Calvinist Standing Order and become openly Unitarian—few of its members
could resist the siren call of
anti-Popery. Rhetoric heated
up which seemed to give a sanction to
anti-Catholic street violence.
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| As fire brigades stood by a Protestant mob burned the Ursuline Convent and Girl's Academy. |
Things really blew up in 1834 in Charleston—now
the Somerville neighborhood
of Boston—home to a large population
of working class Protestants. It was also the site of a Convent of Ursuline Nuns, and the academy for girls that they operated. Since no equivalently high quality education was
available to girls in Boston, many of the city’s Unitarian elite had enrolled
their daughters there, regardless of
warnings from their ministers. In 1834 the school had 47 students,
only six of whom were Catholic. The neighboring Protestants resented both Catholics and the haughty Bostonian elite.
Rumors
circulated of Protestant girls being “sold” to the convent. Then in
August word began to circulate about
a nun who possibly wanted to leave the
convent, but was prevented from
doing so. Inflamed by a circular
calling on the citizenry to intervene to free the mysterious woman, a mob
gathered on the evening of August 11. Early the next morning they rushed the convent with torches
and burning tar barrels. The nuns and students barely had time to escape and hide in the garden while the building
was vandalized then set on fire.
Responding fire brigades not only refused
to extinguish the flames, but they joined
the rioters. The building burned
to the ground in two hours.
The following morning Mayor Theodore
Lyman convened a meeting at Faneuil
Hall to try to calm the situation and instigate an investigation into the arson. Bishop
Benedict Fenwick called another meeting about the same time at Holy
Cross, now officially a cathedral at which he tried to keep the outraged Irish from pouring into the streets to seek revenge. He was largely successful.
But a new Protestant mob assembled
and marched first to Faneuil Hall with the intent
of breaking up the Mayor’s meting and then on to the Cathedral. They
were foiled at both points by a
Militia guard. After failing to
procure arms from the guarded arsenal they proceeded on to the
Convent. In a frenzy as the
Convent itself still smoldered the mob destroyed the gardens and orchards,
set bonfires, and pulled down fences before exhausting their fury.
The city’s clergy were divided by the convent riot. Orthodox
ministers including Lyman Beecher,
soon to rise to fame as a
leading abolitionist either openly cheered the rioters or found excuses for their actions in
supposed Catholic immorality and exploitation of pure womanhood.
The city’s Unitarian divines generally
decried the violence but refrained from any action or speech
which could be considered coming to the
defense of Catholics. The only sympathy
came from Bishop Fenwick’s personal
friend, the Universalist Hosea Ballou, himself an outcast from the local religious
establishment.
The self-confessed ring leader of
the riot, John R. Buzzell and a
dozen others were charged and brought to trial, but Buzzell boasted:
The testimony against me was point blank and sufficient to
have convicted twenty men, but somehow I proved an alibi, and the jury brought
in a victory of not guilty, after having been out for twenty-one hours.
In the end only one defendant, a 16
year old boy seen burning a book
after the main arson, was convicted. The boy had no attorney and not a friend in the world, because he
was sentenced to life in prison.
That sentence was so manifestly unjust
and out of line that Bishop Fenwick
and Mother Superior Sister Mary St. George joined 5,000 local citizens petitioning for a commutation of sentence for the boy. He was eventually released.
Catholic demands for restitution for the failure of authorities to protect their property kept the memory of the Convent Riot alive in
both communities as the Boston City Council, Charleston Town Meeting,
the County of Middlesex, and the Massachusetts legislature all
considered and rejected claims year after year.
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| Anti-Catholic cartoons like this kept Protestant workers inflamed. |
Tensions between Catholics and
Protestants remained high. Then in January of 1836 Awful
Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent
Exposed was published and
became an instant best seller.
In fact it was said to be the mostly
widely read American book between Parson’s Weems’s spurious biography of George Washington and Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book was a pot boiler novel supposedly
written by Maria Monk, a young woman who had escaped from a convent. It told a hair-raising story of sexual
exploitation. The book, since proven
to be almost total fabrication, fueled new
waves of anti-Catholicism and led
directly to the emergence of the Know Nothings, a rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret society and
political party.
Given this kind of history, the Broad Street Riot comes clearly into focus. Fourteen
Irish and four Protestants were brought to trial. Like the
earlier Convent Riot, no Protestants were convicted. The four Irish were all sentenced to terms in the work house.
The riot did cause Mayor Eliot to institute two reforms. First, he
established a paid Fire Department under the authority of the Mayor and Council. The volunteer brigades
were abolished, although almost all
of the members of the new professional
Department were drawn from their ranks. Second, he established a Day
Police to supplement the existing Night Watch. The two were soon merged into the Boston Police
Department. Recruitment into the new department came mostly from the Irish community. The two departments
remained largely segregated for decades
before the Irish and other Catholics began to be hired by the Fire Department.
Two
versions of the riot were told
and kept alive in their communities.
The popular version among working class Protestants was that the fire brigade
was rushing to a fire when blocked by
arrogant Irish mourners who would not let them pass. In some versions
children or whole families perished in the flames. It was manifestly not true.
That did not stop it from being believed and the story is retold to this day. The Mighty
Mighty Bosstones, a popular Ska and proto-punk band in the
1990’s sang:
The Boston fire-fighting volunteers
On their way to fight a fire somewhere
Met with a funeral procession
Proceeding way too slow
A brownstone burns out of control
We need to lay to rest this soul
Loggerheads on Broad Street Eye to eye and toe to toe
Broad Street’s just not broad enough
And you just don’t love God enough…
A new wave of immigrants arrived in
the 1840’s spurred by the Irish Potato Famine, and the flood gates of Europe opened up after
the Civil War. Catholics gained a majority in the city population and led by Irish politicians seized the City government, a move as bitterly resented by the class Unitarian
Brahmins who were used to running
things as by the still large Protestant working class.
Meanwhile the enthusiasm for reform
among the intellectual elite of
Boston, tended to grow in direct
proportion to the growing Irish Catholic population. Early support for moderation in alcohol
use was transformed into a temperance
movement aimed squarely at the taverns
of the scary, rowdy Irish. Free public
education was supported as a counter
to the Catholic’s system of parochial schools. Compulsory
public schooling was at first
meant to close the Catholic schools
and place children into public schools where they would be inoculated with Protestant values. Crusades for decency and morality in entertainment were aimed at popular amusements. What Do-gooders
saw as reform, the working class
Irish recognized as a cultural attack
upon them.
Late 19th Century resentments
resulted the persistence of the No
Irish Need Apply signs still frequently
seen in shops and factories. The politics of Boston and those signs
would be bitterly remembered by Joseph
P. Kennedy when he became a fabulously
rich man married to a daughter
of the former Boston Mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. He would inoculate
his sons, and by extension their
children with a resentment of
the WASP elite, and a determination
to prove themselves better than any of them.
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| Members of the almost all Irish Boston Police Department leave a 1919 strike meeting. WASP governor Calvin Coolidge crushed the strike with National Guard troops and banned the strikers for life from any public employment souring still strong resentments in Boston's Irish Southie community that have lingered to this day. |
While Protestant/Catholic relations improved across much of the nation,
and as Irish Americans established
themselves in politics and the professions,
the old strains eased in most places. But not in Boston. The Irish
found themselves “put in their place”
when Governor Calvin Coolidge, a quintessential
WASP, crushed the strike by the virtually all Irish Boston Police in
1919, banning every man for life from
public service. Many of those men, unable to find work, would make their close knit South Boston neighborhood —Southie—a bastion of bank robbers, cartage
thieves, and gangsters to this day.
If the Irish in Boston hold resentments to this day, the
Protestants have not been shining examples
of brotherhood. The Unitarian’s Beacon Press continued to publish virulent anti-Catholic
screeds well into the 1950’s. Unitarian
Universalist ministers generally supported Boston school desegregation in
the ‘60’s and ‘70’s including forced bussing which was voraciously—and occasionally violently—opposed by the Irish of Southie and were
often harsh in characterizing the
opposition as racist.
More recently conflicts over abortion
rights, LBGT rights, and marriage equality, along with the
continue scandals about clergy sex abuse in the Church, has led
to revival of anti-Catholic
rhetoric.
Today in most parts of the country with heavily Catholic populations, large proportions—often majorities—of
local Unitarian Universalist
congregations—are made up of former Catholics. But not so much in Boston, and especially
not among the Boston Irish. Disgruntled
liberal former Catholics would generally go anywhere to worship before they would set foot in a congregation of those they see as their ancient tribal enemies.
It seems some street brawls never
really end.
