This episode is being released on April 14, 2019, which means that Abraham Lincoln was shot 154 years ago today. That’s why we’re talking about the links between the Lincoln assassination and the city of Boston. President Lincoln, his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and Boston Corbett, the man who killed Booth, all had transformative experiences in Boston.
Lincoln and Booth and Boston
- The Boston City Council mourns President Lincoln.
- How Boston Changed Lincoln, via the Globe.
- A cool map/infographic of Lincoln’s 1848 visit to Massachusetts.
- An overview of the 1848 trip from a 1941 issue of the New England Quarterly.
- Contemporary press coverage of a Boston speech on the 1848 tour.
- Lincoln’s appearance in Dorchester.
- A biography of Edwin Booth relates how he got the news of Lincoln’s assassination.
- More on John Wilkes Booth’s Back Bay lot.
- John Wilkes Booth practices trick pistol shooting in Boston, just days before the assassination.
- After the shooting, the Booths are investigated and/or arrested.
- An overview of the Booth brothers in Boston.
- An overview of the Parker House Hotel’s experience of the Booth brothers.
- John Wilkes Booth meets with spies at the Parker House.
- John Wilkes Booth gets engaged to Lucy Hale, didn’t fake stage fights.
- An overview of Boston Corbett’s life.
- Boston Corbett’s firsthand account of the pursuit and killing of John Wilkes Booth.
- Lt Edward Doherty’s account of the pursuit and killing of John Wilkes Booth.
- The mid-90s chain email forward drawing links between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations.
Boston Book Club
Given the connection to the theater in this week’s episode, our pick for the Boston Book Club is Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil.
In 1878, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded by a meeting of Boston residents following a speech given by Anthony Comstock. Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He made it his mission to fight the social ills of society. The meeting was attended by more than 400 white, upper class men who elected a committee of eight of their peers to run the organization. Women, who were excluded from the organization, would be forced to combat social ills through endeavors such as founding settlement houses, running orphanages, and pioneering the concept of social justice.
The society’s membership required a minimum contribution of $5 or more, equivalent to about $150 today. It held its first annual meeting in Park Street Church in 1879. In 1891, it was renamed the Watch and Ward Society because its members were watching for and warding off evil. At that time there were four social evils that they were watchin’ for– gambling, liquor, fancy ladies, and obscenity. Over the decades, the Society policed the theater so aggressively that many productions were forced to stage watered down Boston versions.
Here’s how Amazon describes the book:
Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society–once Boston’s unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society’s upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. A spectacular romp through the Puritan City, here Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase “banned in Boston.”
Along with the book, check out Episode 40 for more on the Watch and Ward.
Upcoming Event
And for our upcoming event this week, we have a book talk at the North End branch of the Boston Public Library on April 24. When the Watch and Ward society went looking for scandalous behavior to ban, they could usually find it in Scollay Square. The Old Howard Theater had started out as the headquarters of an apocalyptic group of Millerite Christians who believed the world would end in October of 1844. When 1844 came and went without a rapture, the building was repurposed for everything from vaudeville to Shakespeare. Among the many thespians to grace the Old Howard’s stage was the famous Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, who portrayed Hamlet there, and his much more famous son Edwin Booth, who played Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet, and other roles on the Howard’s stage. You can hear a lot more about the Booths in this week’s show.
Before it was bulldozed in the 1960s and replaced by the decidedly blander Government Center, Scollay Square was home to everything from boxing matches to burlesque shows to bordellos. By that time, even the Old Howard had gotten down at the elbows. Its fate was sealed when vice squad detectives snuck a movie camera into the theater one night in 1953 and captured a dancer doing an illegal striptease. Author David Kruh will be discussing his book Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square. Here’s how the library describes the event:
Learn about the Square’s pre-Colonial origins through its heyday as an entertainment mecca, to its current incarnation as City Hall Plaza. Visit the Old Howard Theater, Crawford House, and Joe & Nemo’s hot dog stand and relive the days when vaudevillians, slapstick comedians, and strip teasers ruled the Square.
The event is free and open to the public, beginning at 6:30pm. In a delightful detail, it’s marked as not suitable for children and teens!