On Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism

This is a really interesting piece of urban history. Connolly starts at the busing riots of the 1970s and notes that commentators had been pointing to Boston’s history of ethnic tensions going back to the coming of the Irish in the 1840s and after. Boston, then, was fundamentally a city of group spirit with intractable racial and ethnic conflict. Connolly pushes back on these claims and says that, yes, while there was ethnic and racial conflict in the nineteenth century, it hardly defined the city. Instead, both Yankees and Irish were subsumed under the Democratic Party thanks to the city’s powerful machine, effectively muting the most intransigent tensions.

The transformation in Boston into a city that consistently experienced ethnic tension actually occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Muckraking and criticism of the urban machine, both aspects of the then-powerful Progressive movement, sought to reform the city into one without so much corruption. In 1909, the city of Boston produced a new charter that considerably weakened the role of political parties and instead favored community interest groups and business interests. In doing so, Yankees and the Irish both lost the overarching banner that both of them had rallied under before, and ethnic politics became far more contentious. To make matters worse, Progressives had sought to eschew ethnic and class politics in favor of smaller community organizations. This ultimately backfired, as community organizations were even more ethnic in nature than other institutions, widening the divide even further. Both Yankees and Irish came to rely on the language of Progressivism in order to further their own interests, which were now pitted against one another.

As a fundamentally 21st century person (I was born in 1995) who lives in Boston, I did not realize that Boston’s historical narrative was one of ethnic conflict. It’s alluded to at times when speaking to older people, and there is some legacy of it in the suburbs, but I had not realized the extent to which it was such a defining factor of Boston’s history. Boston is a racialized city, to be sure, largely a result of de facto segregation (see White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism for a good study of how this takes place—in Boston as well as Atlanta), but I didn’t realize that tensions were so palpable in the past.