See Yourself: Toward Uncovering a New Boston That History Almost Forgot

The story that the City of Boston’s officials most wanted to tell in the middle of the twentieth century was that of a bright, shiny, new Boston forcefully willed to life by a remade political establishment. This “New Boston” offered everything that the old Boston did not: high-rise office buildings, multilane expressways, luxury housing, retail shopping destinations, and a solid tax base to maintain it all. Yet, one pesky question threatened the legitimacy of this vision: Whom was it for? An ethnically and racially diverse city of more than 700,000 residents, largely working class, demanded to know how the New Boston benefitted them. Beyond a self-interested call for quid pro quo, Boston’s long-time residents and newly arrived immigrants challenged what they identified as a pro-business growth agenda that regarded them as little more than impediments to the city’s reinvention efforts. Even the most casual urban observer might wonder, “who were the people that lived in Boston during its twentieth century reinvention quest and how did they help produce the city we know today?” Two new historical works peel back the city’s physical and political layers and tackle these questions. The result is a much-needed, revised contemporary social history of Boston.

Jim Vrabel’s A People’s History of the New Boston and Marilynn S. Johnson’s The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Region since the 1960s chart Boston’s long history of city-making and upend the city’s well-worn narrative of hardscrabble Irish catholic immigrants triumphing over their moneyed Yankee protestant adversaries. By revising a story many may think they already know, Johnson and Vrabel produce accounts much more complex, arresting, and incisive than previously available. Both authors rightfully identify urban renewal as catalytic for a new kind of activist politics demanding changes within City Hall and Boston’s surrounding neighborhoods. Yet it is the pulse of global economic restructuring and the movement of capital away from historic city centers that animate their works. Johnson and Vrabel document how global capital shifts coupled with a host of domestic housing, lending, and transportation policies favoring heteronormative white, nuclear families created homogeneous settlement patterns outside of cities and left urban populations at the economic mercy of cash-seeking, pro-business coalitions. The tension and confluence of these disparate forces inform their research projects and point readers beyond Boston’s geographic borders to understand, anew, its dynamic rise as a modern metropolis.

Vrabel achieves his best storytelling when describing local protest victories and their connections to shifts in the political establishment. Ratifications to Boston’s official charter in 1909 and 1949 strengthened the power of the mayor while dispersing and then consolidating the power of the city council. Boston’s formal political drift toward highly centralized executive authority created an institutional structure able to deliver large-scale change a la urban renewal but ill-equipped to respond to grassroots resistance. As Vrabel demonstrates, City Hall became not just a place for citizens to get a job but “a place to fight.” Boston’s newly reorganized political order left large swaths of the city without direct political representation and vulnerable to government ambitions. Destruction of the New York Streets in 1957 followed by clearance of the West End in 1958 displaced thousands of the city’s residents in the name of modernization. These official government acts permanently altered the physical face and social composition of the city and convinced many neighborhood residents that the much-hyped New Boston was not intended for them. As Vrabel shows, a vocal and aggrieved political constituency was spawned.

Melding newspaper accounts, monographs, and personal interviews, Vrabel organizes a compelling collection of vignettes to author “a people’s history.” He is neither seduced not persuaded by the postwar boosterism of the city’s growth coalition. Instead, he casts his attention to several 1960s era social movements and political protests. Vrabel thereby exposes the democratic hopes and dreams of Boston’s residents and demonstrates how ground-level organizing revitalized the city in unpredictable ways. Vrabel’s understanding of institution-building is not limited to a consideration of physical buildings, a frequent oversight of urban historians and stubborn preoccupation of architectural historians. His analysis moves across the city’s surface to reveal the citizen actions that redirected its form. He strips institutions to their true essence: human actors behaving according to shared values and norms (pace Anthony Giddens). By sidestepping academic debates about urban morphologies, Vrabel advances a city-making vision attuned to popular will and suspicious of narrow notions of “progress.”

Replaying powerful citizen-led battles against airport expansion, affordable housing loss, and racially segregated public education, Vrabel documents all the ways that activist tenants, neighbors, and parents forged a more expansive vision for the city’s modern revitalization. For all of the bold proclamations of Boston’s mayors from Hynes to White armed with federal dollars and new plans for public housing and highways, none could convince the city’s residents of their own obsolescence. Vrabel’s argument exposes the bruising battles fought to ensure citizen participation in public policy setting. On this point, he quotes long-time political activist Lew Finfer: “‘There is an assumption today that people have a legitimate right to be included when public policy gets made…That happened because of a lot of hard work by a lot of people’” (Vrabel, p. 234).

Vrabel’s key contribution to the field of U.S. urban history lies in his illustration of the ways in which Boston’s electorate evolved into a powerful network of coalitions able to halt local, state, and even federal policy. By linking local mobilizations to larger national movements, Vrabel contextualizes his research within a broader history of U.S. social change-making while charting the rapid maturation of Boston’s activist communities. The synergies and divergence of national liberation movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War birthed a frothy cauldron for local activism of all types. Moderate integrationist organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) clashed with more militant groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later the Black Panther Party. As Vrabel notes, the formation of the Black United Front, the brainchild of Stokely Carmichael, and Boston’s own veteran organizer Chuck Turner, mobilized a politically diverse network of black organizations united in their opposition to the New Boston. Although Vrabel’s argument that civil rights organizing in “the south” rekindled a “flame in Boston’s black community” (Vrabel, p. 39) is flawed in some ways, his instincts are correct. Prominent activists including Turner, Sarah Ann Shaw, Byron Rushing, James Breeden, and Virgil Woods toggled between mobilization activities in northern and southern cities and displayed how the civil rights movement itself was constituted through boundary-crossing political agitation.

Vrabel works to highlight local social movements as well as the makers of those movements. Women feature prominently here. From Doris Bland, Ellen Jackson, Betty Johnson, Ruth Batson, Jean Maguire, Marcia Butman, the Mothers of Maverick, Doris Bunte, and Mary Ellen Welch, Vrabel elevates a new pantheon of female leaders too often missing from Boston’s twentieth-century historical narratives. The resolve of these movement leaders created a new city that literally would not exist without them. And through their stories, Vrabel succeeds in his mission to give “credit to many more people—women as well as men; black, brown, and yellow as well as white; the poor and working class as well as the well-off.” Vrabel argues that these actors “made Boston a more humane and morally better city” (Vrabel, p. 1). While some may challenge Vrabel’s claim that successful mobilizations of progressive ethno-racial coalitions produced a morally enhanced city, there is little debate that skillful citizen–led interventions propelled Boston’s status as a national leader for innovative, grassroots-driven urban planning and policy at a time when such examples were in great demand if short supply.

City leaders’ frequent calls to remake Boston’s urban fabric reflect the episodic nature of advanced capitalism. However, how these actors responded to the demands of local residents determined the economic and political course of the city. Markets and the agglomeration of human decisions that they embody are always conditioned by specificities of time and place. Barry Bluestone and others have documented the postwar regional decline of mill-based industries of textiles, paper, and timber and the proliferation of “trade, finance, transportation, and services of all kinds.” ¹ Boston’s muscular efforts to defeat the ravages of industrial decline and refashion its economic identity perfectly set the stage for a heroic spatial narrative. Enter stage left, Marilynn Johnson’s The New Bostonians. Johnson understands the nature of economic change and populates it with the lived experiences of immigrants who have arrived in Boston since the 1960s. Johnson’s analysis of greater Boston’s economic restructuring amid transnational political changes grounds her study in a rich consideration of larger geopolitical forces. Anti-communist movements in Latin America, Castro’s Cuban revolution as well as political out-migrations from the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean chart the routes of new communities destined to produce a new Boston. In this way, Johnson builds upon Oscar Handlin’s ground-breaking thesis that without the history of continuous arrival and labor of immigrants there would be no history of the United States because, in short, there would be no United States. Johnson advances Handlin’s argument by extending the bounds of his classic investigation beyond the nineteenth century and beyond a narrow focus on European migration. ²

Wielding census data and historical overviews of the changing built environment, Johnson effectively argues how new immigrants propelled greater Boston’s postindustrial economic prosperity. Chapter 4, “Immigrants and Work in the New Economy,” opens with a description of the Assabet Mill in Maynard from its 1840s beginning as a carpet factory to its twentieth-century rise as the “world’s largest woolen mill” and, finally, its subsequent life as a subdivided home for thirty high-tech companies. This economic arc from industrial manufacturing to services and tech has fueled employment growth at the upper and lower ends of the wage spectrum. As Johnson observes, immigrants have been a crucial talent pool for both poles. She shows how global diasporas have both staffed the new economy and affected political change in the greater Boston region.

Like Vrabel, Johnson explores the political development of Boston’s diversifying population and chronicles several resident-led actions and protest movements. Both authors identify urban renewal and national freedom movements as instrumental in mobilizing grassroots populations to demand services, institutions, and political leaders more reflective of their needs and desires. Johnson adds further nuance to this discussion by highlighting how federal actions, including passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity, strengthened the quest for self-determination and political representation among black, Latino, and Asian voters. She writes, “(W)hile government-imposed urban renewal helped generate racial and ethnic-based resistance in Boston, federal and local efforts to calm those tensions provided support for new community-based organizations in the city’s growing black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods” (Johnson, p. 193). Johnson shows how federal resources used to launch organizations such as Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) simultaneously incubated a powerful cadre of grassroots leaders.

A fiery set of new leaders critiqued government-funded service delivery strategies and began “to challenge municipal policies and authority” head on (Johnson, p. 194). Johnson links young leaders’ dissatisfaction with the centralized authority of the state to an aggressive push for new political institutions and processes. Her analysis echoes the progressive social framework conceived by veteran political leader Mel King and detailed in his seminal work Chain of Change. ³ King theorizes three stages toward community development: the service stage; the organizing stage; and, finally, the institution-building stage. King’s developmental theory suggests that the evolution of collective consciousness can produce more decisive and consequential political organizing. Johnson’s research compliments King’s analysis and brings renewed attention to the proliferation of community-based organizations (CBOs) that took root during the urban renewal era.

As Johnson notes, CBOs channeled residents’ desire for greater political incorporation and better leaders. In many ways, these organizations functioned as de facto centers of governance for populations underrepresented or ignored by the political establishment. Johnson casts a spotlight on Latino activism and the rise of ground-breaking organizations such as the Association to Promote the Constitutional Rights of the Spanish Speaking (APCROSS), Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation (HOPE), Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA), and La Alianza Hispana. These organizations seeded decades of successful political mobilizations across Greater Boston. Historians are now only beginning to recognize their extensive political lineages. Following the scholarship of Miren Uriarte, Johnson documents how these local organizations propelled a long wave of progressive institution building in the city of Boston. ⁴ Land and housing battles further sharpened the missions of these organizations and spurred an outpouring of “urban renewal” counterplans. As Johnson notes, in Chinatown, growing land pressures hastened the emergence of vital organizations like the Chinese American Civic Association (CACA). The community-based planning efforts of CACA and Chinatown’s residents, like those of IBA’s mobilizers in the South End, signal a decisive moment in the political history of Boston’s neighborhoods. The rise of formal organizations with professional staff dedicated to advancing the interests of local residents while questioning the establishment defines a new organizational type in postwar Boston.

Noting the prominence of these new political organizations, Johnson unfurls a broad history moving through the 1980s and ending with consideration of Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s mayoral campaign in 2014. She traces several cross-racial political coalitions as well as the shifting political ideals of pre–World War II and post–civil rights leaders. Tireless activists in Chinatown and the South End secured housing for themselves and their neighbors and improved public service delivery. However, the bigger story is how these victories translated into political power able to directly challenge City Hall. Johnson identifies Mel King’s 1983 mayoral run against Ray Flynn as a culminating political event that catapulted Latinos and Asian Americans “as recognized payers in the city’s electorate” (Johnson, p. 211). King’s campaign coalesced the energy and leadership of a “Rainbow Coalition” of stakeholders transgressing race, class, religion, sexual orientation, language, and nationality to advance a progressive agenda of inclusive urban development and social change. Although heralded as an historic first for a black mayoral candidate in the city of Boston, King’s race produced more than votes. His ability to mobilize a multiracial coalition of city residents ushered in a tidal wave of political activism that has influenced every local race since. Flynn won 66 percent of the vote, but King catalyzed a new base of political power.

Johnson’s scholarship provides a valuable reference guide for academic researchers, students, and curious readers keen to understand the arrival and political integration of Boston’s twentieth-century immigrant populations. She succeeds in providing greater historical context for Boston’s newer immigrants; however, her reliance on sprawling descriptions sometimes threatens the coherence of her central argument. Johnson’s thesis asserts that transnational populations have been essential to the development and economic strength of the region. But she does not stop there. Surveying a broad assortment of global actors and actions, Johnson connects larger geopolitical changes to Boston’s modern history. This intellectual framing places Johnson’s work among that of cultural and economic geographers such as David Harvey, Ed Soja, and Saskia Sassen and pushes urbanists of all disciplines beyond cataloging the physical conditions of cities to naming the multidirectional forces generating urban form itself. ⁵

Johnson also challenges historians’ traditional focus on “change-over-time” narratives and inserts a more complex temporal paradigm to describe the making of place. And by referencing a longer historical pattern of internationalism, Johnson destabilizes claims that Boston’s global integration is solely a twentieth-century phenomenon. However, there is more for Johnson to say here. Violet Showers Johnson (2006), Adelaide Cromwell (1994), and Peggy Levitt (2001) are but a few exemplary scholars who have documented the multicentury presence and contributions of transnational black diasporas settling in Boston. ⁶ Histories of Boston’s urbanization are incomplete without a full accounting of Afro-Caribbean and black southern migrations and how these populations fundamentally transformed the politics of affluent, slave-dependent cities on both sides of the Atlantic. The absence of these essential truths can produce a distorted and simplistic characterization of Boston’s history as an uninterrupted expansion of European cultural dominance when this is known to be a false narrative.

While Johnson does not fully explore the outer limits of Boston’s racial history, she does expand the bounds of classic regional case studies by tying changes in federal immigration law to industrial shifts within the city’s economy. By so doing, she presents a compelling synopsis of the key differences between nineteenth-century migration of Irish, Italian, and Jewish newcomers and their twentieth-century counterparts. She charts how pernicious racial and ethnic biases against non-European immigrants enshrined in federal law (1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the National Origins Act of 1924) found lasting, localized expression in redlining, residential segregation, and job discrimination despite eventual national policy reforms (Johnson, p. 26). Thus, Johnson’s study raises significant questions about the impact of U.S. immigration reform when subsequent actions of local municipal and state authorities often served to reinscribe racial and national divisions at the neighborhood level. This consideration of racialized legal categories and the localized production of social subjectivity deserves further probing. Both Johnson and Vrabel fall short on examination of this important subtheme of their work. The nuanced scholarship of U.S. cultural historian Matthew Frye Jacobson is instructive on this topic. ⁷

Jacobson’s Barbarian Virtues contextualizes U.S. immigration policy within the development of “white” as a privileged racial category. In his insightful study, Jacobson charts the history of America’s split personality: “savior of the world’s people” and anxious, even hate-mongering, national gatekeeper. By historicizing the construction of U.S. racial categories and critiquing the inherent contradictions that characterize U.S. immigration policy, Jacobson problematizes the nation’s obdurate, “parochial understanding of the world’s people themselves,” ⁸ Furthermore, his scholarship challenges immigration scholars to unravel the seeming fixedness of racial and ethnic categories. In so doing, Jacobson expands Oscar Handlin’s immigration thesis by calling immigration scholars to delve more deeply into the complex and paradoxical history of race in America.

Limitations aside, Johnson and Vrabel advance a long tradition of producing social counternarratives that transmute objects into subjects and thus move “invisible” populations into recognition as makers of history. Their works provide crucial updates to the story of Boston’s rise as a modern and globalized metropolis. Writers seeking to chronicle such a narrative must understand three truths: cities as malleable material objects, economic trends as reflections of collective decision-making and race, and ethnicity as contested logics often expressed as boundary lines. Johnson and Vrabel win on most of these points. Both soar when zeroing in on changes in governance at the local and federal levels and how these changes are resisted and remade during a period of intense questioning of authoritarian political authority during the 1960s and 1970s. The revelatory genius of their work is especially timely as current national debates over who has the right to participate in the making of America continue to rage. In 1996, welfare policy reform coupled with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act increased the precariousness of U.S. survival for poor and foreign-born populations alike. And, as Johnson notes, the DREAM Act has failed to make good on its promise of a formal pathway to legal citizenship for the thousands of transnational minors for whom it was intended. This policy alone threatens to destabilize the economic and political future of a new generation of new Americans. America’s inability or unwillingness to show the political will to protect multiracial working families and migrants who power its economy and fuel contemporary urbanization suggests an immature nation sowing the seeds of its own demise. In short, the battles for more representative political representation and social histories chronicled by Johnson and Vrabel are far from over. These authors invite Boston and the nation to look in the mirror and resist blinking. “See yourself,” their texts proclaim while demanding public recommitment to the work of transformative social change for populations that need it most.