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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467137508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2017 |
| Series: | Wicked |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
SINS OF A GREAT CITY
Two men on a drunken spree in the early hours of August 8, 1885, decided to venture inside Bose Cobb's dance hall, drawn by the light and music pouring from its open door. James Barnes and George West entered the crowded barroom and were immediately approached by painted women looking for a dance and a drink afterward. West was willing, but amid the noise and chaos, Barnes realized he was drunker than he had thought. His partner found a bench where Barnes could lie down and sleep it off and then left him to join the fun. Some time later, Barnes awoke. Still drunk and now disoriented, he pulled a revolver from his pocket and brandished it in fear. West saw what Barnes was doing and rushed to his side, easily wresting the pistol from his hand, but Barnes had a second revolver, and this one went off, shooting West through the neck. James Barnes fled the scene before the authorities arrived to ask questions.
To a reader of dime novels, popular in the 1880s, a scene like this would feel familiar, evoking images of America's Wild West, but this event took place in the West End of Boston. Bose Cobb's dance hall on Norman Street was the most notorious of Boston's free-and-easies. Found in every major city at the time, free-and-easies were meeting places for sporting men, outlaws, slumming gentry and adventurous men of all classes. They were so called because of their free and easy approach to the law, particularly laws regarding liquor, gambling and prostitution, and for their egalitarian admission policy — at a free-and-easy, anything goes and everyone is welcome. Evenings in these resorts were often punctuated by violence, sometimes ending in bloodshed.
Some free-and-easies specialized in entertainment featuring musicians, dancers and comedians. Gray's Opera House in the West End was a saloon offering musical performances in direct violation of the city's liquor laws. In spite of its elegant name, Gray's Opera House did not stage operas. In fact, the quality of its entertainment was considered lower than that of a dime museum, but it launched the careers of several successful burlesque and variety performers.
Bose Cobb's place on Norman Street provided only enough music for dancing and had a ready supply of young women for men without partners. With its scofflaw approach to Boston's stringent liquor laws, its interracial dancing, two floors of illegal gambling, adjacent brothels and its frequent bloodshed, Cobb's was well known by sporting men across the country as one of the most infamous free-and-easies in America.
Of course, everyone in Boston knew of Bose Cobb's dance hall; his name in a news story meant vice and corruption, with no further explanation necessary. But the free-and-easies, the gambling "hells," the houses of ill fame were not the real Boston; they were the haunts of outsiders — transients, sailors on leave, emancipated slaves and the waves of immigrants arriving daily. To the average churchgoing citizen, Boston, at its core, was still the Puritan City.
Boston in the Victorian era was seen as the moral and intellectual capital of America. In 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the Boston Statehouse as "the hub of the solar system," implying that Boston was the center of everything important. This epithet, later expanded to "The Hub of the Universe" and often shortened to just "The Hub," was, somewhat grudgingly, accepted by the rest of the nation. Boston was the "Athens of America," the "Puritan City," leading the fight for the abolition of slavery and for a free and, above all, moral society.
But among the city's righteous elite — clergymen and Boston Brahmins who felt a strong sense of responsibility for the moral behavior of others — there was a growing sentiment that vice in Boston had reached dangerous proportions. In 1885, Boston had two thousand licensed saloons, one for every 180 citizens, and perhaps one thousand more unlicensed. While not all were as wild as Bose Cobb's, even the quietest saloon could ruin a man's life or break up a family through drunkenness, and every saloon held the threat of gambling, prostitution and violence. And it wasn't just saloons; the fruits of laxity in public morals were everywhere. Theater galleries had become little more than bordellos, and their stages were filled with dancers in pink tights. Graphic public advertisements featuringsemi-clad actresses and newsstands selling publications with uncensored illustrations and stories glorifying crime and violence were displayed in plain sight of impressionable children. Scandals involving adultery and domestic violence were erupting among the city's better families. All this depravity would be expected in New York, the Sodom of America, but Boston was better. For the moral leaders, the city was on the road to hell, and something had to be done to turn it around.
They formed groups, each fighting vice in its own way — the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Law and Order League, the Young Men's Christian Association, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice and so on. Many of those involved, actively and financially, were the same people who had fought for the abolition of slavery. When that sin was vanquished, the fight against vice seemed like the next logical step.
Individual crusaders joined the fight as well, and chief among them was a charismatic and provocative Methodist minister named Henry Morgan. Though he had a church of his own — the Morgan Chapel on Shawmut Avenue in the South End — it proved too small to hold the number of people anxious to hear him speak on the sins abounding in Boston. He periodically rented out the Boston Music Hall, with three thousand seats, and filled them all with ardent followers.
Reverend Morgan's message, resounding so loudly, was that Boston had lost its way by abandoning the values upon which it was founded. "Alas alas! The Boston of 1776 is no more! Puritanism has given way to modern paganism. Patriotism to greed. Devotion to sensuality. Sacrifice for self."
Morgan investigated Boston vice directly with the aid of a staff of agents, and he always came to his lectures armed with shocking statistics. In an 1878 lecture, he claimed he had discovered eight thousand prostitutes working in the city of Boston, a number that remained constant despite two thousand deaths in their ranks each year. He put the blame where it was due; the cause was "Men, lecherous men!" But as a self-styled Poor Man's Preacher, Morgan did not blame the poor workingman at home with his family. "The rich, idle spendthrifts are the city's curse. The law does not reach them. They go scot free."
Reverend Morgan visited all of Boston's "haunts of inequity" — dance halls, gambling "hells," spiritualistic mediums, quack doctors and saloons that opened on Sunday ("There are more persons in the groggeries of Boston on Sunday than in all the Protestant churches combined").
Morgan was a master at self-promotion and a tireless worker; when he wasn't lecturing on sin, he was writing about it. His novels — Ned Nevins the Newsboy; or, Street Life in Boston, published in 1867, and Shadowy Hand; or Life-Struggles: A Story of Real Life, published in 1874 — depicted the rise of vice in Boston and prescribed a return to the gospel as a remedy. His bestselling book Boston Inside Out! Sins of a Great City! A Story of Real Life, published in 1880, generated six editions and sold at least twenty-five thousand copies. Writing Boston Inside Out! as fiction allowed Reverend Morgan to illustrate his message by contriving elaborate scenes and extreme characters — corrupt businessman Augustus Gildersleeve, lecherous priest Father Titus and innocent country girls Minnie Marston and Rose Delaney — leaving their true identities up to the reader.
In the book, Morgan explains how he had come to investigate vice in Boston. On a trip to Europe, Reverend Morgan is appalled by what he sees. The public immorality, gambling and drinking on the Sabbath, particularly in Paris, prompt him to call Paris the worst place he has ever been. Augustus Gildersleeve disagrees, saying that Boston is worse than Paris, for everything that Paris does in public, Boston does in secret.
This is an epiphany to Morgan, who vows to return to Boston, find out if it is true and, if so, do everything he can to stop it. In reality, Reverend Morgan had been a temperance preacher his whole adult life and hardly needed a trip to Europe to show him the evils of Boston, but the point was made.
Boston Inside Out! exposes and indicts all of the city's corrupt institutions and individuals while following two story lines so prurient that, if Morgan's motives had not been so pure, it would surely have been attacked by other moral reformers. In one storyline, Augustus Gildersleeve's son Frank has become infatuated with young Minnie Marston from rural Connecticut, but her low social status prevents him from proposing marriage. Determined to have her regardless, Frank sets out to seduce Minnie with the help of his friend, a dentist named Dr. Forceps. Forceps, a depraved man of the world, introduces Frank to the sins of Boston, taking him to faro games and Sunday saloons, coaching his progress with Minnie by suggesting he take her to suggestive plays and bribe clairvoyants to make her more receptive to his advances. When all other attempts fail, Frank has his way with Minnie in Dr. Forceps's dentist chair while she is anesthetized by ether. The result is pregnancy, abortion and ruin for Minnie Marston.
The other storyline follows a well-connected Catholic priest, Father Titus, as he seduces Rose Delaney, a young married woman in his congregation. She becomes part of his harem of "nieces." Much of the controversy around Morgan's book was driven by speculation as to who the fictional characters were meant to portray. It is clear that a fair number of the twenty-five thousand copies were sold to people not fully committed to moral reform.
Morgan very graphically indicted those he felt responsible for Boston's moral decline, by reputation if not by name. First were the wealthy aristocrats of Boston, who descended from the Puritan founders and benefited from their righteousness but turned their backs on orthodox religion. Viewing themselves as outside the law, they leased their properties for immoral purposes and engaged in all forms of debauchery. Also guilty were the police and public officials who were in the pockets of the rum interests and refused to enforce vice laws.
Morgan's descriptions of midnight "explorations into the dark ways and by-ways of Boston" with its "myriads of flashing lights" and "strains of bacchanalian song, drunken shouts and ribald laughing" could easily apply to Bose Cobb's notorious West End dance hall. Bose Cobb, a flamboyant African American saloonkeeper, operating outside the laws of God and man, had become the symbol of everything sinful in the Hub. His dance hall, denounced by reformers as the worst place in Boston, was a gateway to sin of every description and often the scene of violence, yet it flourished year after year.
At the height of the Victorian age, no person in Boston knew more about the city's sinful ways than did Bose Cobb and Reverend Henry Morgan — one from the side of the devil, one from the side of salvation. There was scarcely an aspect of vice in Boston that was not perpetrated by one or condemned by the other. Each had a role to play in the competition for the souls of righteous Bostonians. Cobb's free-and-easy invitation to vice and depravity was countered by Reverend Morgan's frenzied shouts of warning:
Now why do I reveal Boston's dark ways? Why expose her snares, pitfalls, and forbidden paths? It is to warn the unwary! To awaken fathers and mothers to their children's danger! To a sense of duty! To fire the pulpit with alarm! To arouse the church, the press, and public opinion! Oh! fathers and mothers, set the signal for the coming train! For your children and your children's children! For generations yet unborn! The forests are cleared, the road-bed raised, the bridge is built, yet the track is ajar! Lo, the cars are coming! Your neighbors and your neighbors' children! Oh! set the signal for the coming train! Wave the flag! Swing the lantern! Lift the voice! Sound the whistle! Ring the Bell! DOWN BRAKES! DOWN BRAKES! Danger ahead! Friends and loved ones are at the brink! Ho! To the rescue! To the rescue! Set the signal! Set the signal for the train is coming!
CHAPTER 2THE BLACK SEA
In the spring of 1858, the Reverend Perez Mason was preparing for missionary work, preaching the gospel and saving souls among the godless heathens. "This is carrying the war into Africa," wrote one newspaper, but Reverend Mason was not traveling to the Dark Continent; the quote was a reference to the Roman military strategy of attacking your enemy's home. Mason would be taking his mission to the notorious Black Sea section of Boston's North End.
In the 1840s, the Black Sea was a densely populated stretch of Ann Street between Union and Richmond Streets. Commercially, it was a lowprice shopping district featuring secondhand stores, new and used furniture stores and "slop-shops"— stores selling low-priced, readymade clothing, a business that proved to be quite profitable. Andrew Carney, a tailor who ran a slop-shop on Ann Street, was so successful that, in 1843, he paid $92,000 cash — ninety-two $1,000 bills — for the Goddard estate on Summer Street in downtown Boston and became a major real estate mogul. George W. Simmons, whose slop-shop in Oak Hall was the largest on Ann Street, would, in 1899, found Simmons College.
The low rents that attracted cut-rate retailers also attracted poor immigrants, African Americans, sailors and itinerants of every race and nationality, but it was not exactly a melting pot. Groups that were scarcely cordial in the best of circumstances were constantly at one another's throats in the crowded conditions of the Black Sea. Because of its nearness to the harbor, many sailors would stay in racially segregated Black Sea boardinghouses between voyages. One summer Sunday in 1843, a smallscale riot broke out on Ann Street when a dozen or so black boarders were blocking the sidewalk and the boatswain's mate of the USS Ohio, a white man, objected to walking around them. Words were exchanged and then punches were thrown; soon sailors poured out of all the boardinghouses to join the mêlée. Police were on hand, but their number was too small to break up the fight, so they rang the fire alarm and an engine full of firemen arrived, took charge of the scene and broke up the fight. Henry Foreman, who owned the black boardinghouse, came home from church to find the place in shambles, the windows broken and furniture demolished.
The residents of the Black Sea lived in crowded squalor, sometimes as many as twenty in a single windowless room, in conditions similar to those in the Five Points neighborhood in New York City. A fictionalized account printed in the Boston Bee in 1846, titled "Stella Lea, the Orphan Girl," depicted the dismal conditions in the Black Sea. Abandoned with her young child, Stella Lea's mother meets a man who promises to help her:
He finally brought the mother and child to Boston, and for several months they were the inmates of a miserable hovel in the purlieus of Ann Street. The child was now about five years old, and the angelic little being was surrounded, constantly, by the myrmidons of iniquity, old, filthy, debauched hags, and loathsome, profane, obscene devils, in the form of men; and she never knew what a pure word, or kind look, or a cleanly person was.
When the sun went down on Ann Street, the neighborhood descended into an abyss of drunkenness and debauchery. The basements of most of the buildings housed unlicensed saloons known as rum cellars; if music and dancing were offered, they were called dance cellars. Like the retail stores above them, the rum cellars sold cut-rate merchandise. Reportedly, Patrick Cain, proprietor of one of the cellar establishments, was arrested for selling gin without a license. A young man called to testify in Cain's defense swore that he paid for and drank a glass of fluid but could not swear that it was gin.
Bad liquor was the least of the Black Sea's dangers. Many of the cellars featured games of dead props (dice) or faro that were seldom on the level. Young toughs would wait on the street for drunks to emerge from the cellars and then relieve them of whatever money they had left. But the greatest perils of Ann Street were the nymphes du pave, the prostitutes of every age and race, ever present in every cellar and on every street corner. They would entice a man, charge him for their services and then steal his wallet. For obvious reasons, the victims seldom reported these crimes to the police.
The police and the officials of Boston were well aware of the activities on Ann Street, but the official policy regarding vice in the Black Sea was to leave it alone unless someone filed a complaint. Complaints were followed up and acted upon, but throughout the 1840s, no move was made to break up the Black Sea or stop its illegal activities. The victims of Black Sea vice were seen as outsiders — sailors on leave, business travelers, countrymen, itinerant bums — who willingly or accidentally found themselves in a dangerous place. Said one state representative, "Who ever heard of a Boston boy being shaken down in Ann Street?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wicked Victorian Boston"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Robert Wilhelm.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
1. Sins of a Great City,
2. The Black Sea,
3. Baiting Rats and Bucking the Tiger,
4. The Guilty Third Tier,
5. Obscenity,
6. The Social Evil,
7. Confidence,
8. Fresh from the Bogs,
9. Chinatown,
10. The Sporting Life,
11. Scandal,
12. Spirit and Flesh,
13. The Wickedest Man in Boston,
14. John Bull and the Mellen Conspiracy,
15. The End of an Era,
Sources,
About the Author,