Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston (episode 251)

Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to hub history where we go far beyond the freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 2 51 Lost on the Freedom trail, the National Park service and urban renewal in Postwar boston.
Hi, I’m jake in just a few moments, I’m gonna be joined by Seth Bruggeman author of the recent book Lost on the Freedom Trail,
in it, he traces the development of the Freedom Trail and our boston National Historic Park, examining the inevitable tension between driving tourism revenue to boston and doing good history.
He delves into the politics surrounding our local historic sites during the trauma of urban renewal in boston and during the violence of the bussing era that followed.
He also explains how the freedom trail and related sites have been used to defend dominant ideas about whiteness at several different points in boston’s contested history.
But before we talk about the creation of the Freedom Trail in boston National Historic Park, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports hub history on Patreon.

[1:11] Thanks to your support. This interview should be the last remote interview I carry out without video as I’m sure you can tell almost all of our interviews on the show are recorded remotely.
I’ve only done two or three using zoom because I don’t love their audio quality in the past.
I’ve been using another tool that gives me good audio quality but doesn’t allow video, but there are a lot of times when the conversation gets awkward without nonverbal cues for a long time.
I’ve wanted to move the show over to a different recording service, one that allows video to facilitate the conversation while still recording high quality multi track audio.
And thanks to you, I was just able to sign us up for this service even though it costs a bit more each month than the old one.
So to all our sponsors who made this transition possible. Thank you.
If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, just go to patreon dot com slash hub history or visit hub history dot com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

[2:19] I also want to make a couple of announcements before we get started first. My hours at work are changing this summer.
I’m not quite sure yet how that will impact my prep time for the show, but if you notice disruptions to the release schedule or if you see more reruns than usual, it’s probably due to my dreaded day job with that out of the way.
I also just want to announce that we are now a multiple award winning podcast.
If you listen to the last episode, you heard me brag a bit on the 2020 preservation achievement award, that hub history guy,
and since recording that I learned that hub history has received a massachusetts history alliance star award for innovation and communications in public history. How cool is that?
I’m joined now by Seth Bruggeman South is an associate professor of history at Temple University, where he studies the role of memory in public life, especially how americans have used objects, whether it’s in museums, monuments, historic sites or beyond,
to exert control over how we understand the past.
Lost on the Freedom Trail is his 4th book, Seth Bruggeman Welcome to the show.
I have to say to start out. I really appreciated that you started out the book with a passage from a Spenser novel by robert B Parker. God Save the Child.

Seth:
[3:35] Right. Mhm.

Jake:
[3:36] I’m a transplant to the boston area. Came here for school originally and one of the big reasons I chose moving to boston over some of the other options was I love the Spenser novel. So are you also a fan?

Seth:
[3:45] Mhm. Well, you know, I wasn’t before I wrote this book and then I was working on the project and a friend mentioned you should read the Spenser novels and,
and I read that one and I saw that quote,
and I think it may be the first line in a chapter in the novel and I read the line and I thought wow, you know, he just summarized my entire story in one sentence. So I had I had to use it.

Jake:
[4:11] If memory serves, it’s sort of a gritty description of coming up to the Tobin Bridge with triple deckers and projects of Charlestown on one side and the sparkling Navy Yard and the other. Is that about right? Oh, sure.

Seth:
[4:20] Yeah. Would you like me to read it? So this is from Robert B. Parker’s, God save the child, which was published in 1974.
And this is, as you noted, jake the voice of Spencer who is the haggard detective who is at the core of these novels.
I drove north out of boston over the Mystic river bridge with the top down on my car on the right was old ironsides at birth in the navy yard and to the left of the bridge, the bunker hill monument,
between them stretch three decker tenements alternating with modular urban renewal units.
One of the real triumphs of prefab design is to create a sense of nostalgia for slums.

Jake:
[5:05] I love it.

Seth:
[5:06] Parker’s writing is wonderful and it’s evocative and it’s it’s simple but it’s also rich.
But you know that line caught for me both the feeling of driving through that space today in some ways.
Um but also it captured the sense of change, right, the process of an urban place changing.
Um and connected it to memory which are things I’m interested in. So it seemed perfect.

Jake:
[5:33] Now, before we get too far into this, I guess I should say that the book is lost on the freedom trail and it’s a history of both the freedom trail as the title indicates, but also of boston National Historical Park.

Seth:
[5:45] Right?

Jake:
[5:45] And it’s funny because one of the, the tag lines that I use for the show is that this is the show that goes far beyond the Freedom trail. But this time we’re gonna stay on and near the freedom trail.

Seth:
[5:54] Yeah. Mhm.

Jake:
[5:56] And I think it’s, I think it’s very unlikely that somebody has been listening to 250 odd episodes of this. This podcast doesn’t know what the freedom trail is, but just in case we have, somebody from Minnesota has never been here.
Can you just give a brief description of what the freedom trail is and what it’s for?

Seth:
[6:13] The Freedom Trail is literally a trail. It is a walking path,
rendered on the streets of boston, sometimes with paint a red line drawn on the sidewalk, sometimes engraved or inlaid with metal medallions and other markers.
But essentially it’s a walking tour of some of the city’s most iconic historic sites and those historic sites specifically are those that narrate the saga of the american revolution.
So the trail has been there since the late 50s but it has changed a little bit over time.
It’s gone through a couple of permutations, but it remains probably one of the nation’s most popular if not the most popular heritage walking trails.

Jake:
[7:00] So it’s it’s interesting you mentioned that the Freedom trail is devoted to the the sites that evoke memory of the american revolution and.

Seth:
[7:07] Mhm.

Jake:
[7:09] Good section of your book is dedicated to sort of how boston came to focus on that period in our historical memory.
We had almost as long a history prior to the revolution as we’ve had since in a lot of ways.
Um, you know, a lot of other history happened in boston.
So how did boston Pivot away from the Puritan period or 19th century history or our colonial wars against France, whatever the other periods maybe, and focused just on the revolution.

Seth:
[7:37] This is a great question and it’s one that a number of historians have wrangled with probably Al Young most famously,
you know, I I try to synthesize some of their work and then also share some insights, but to kind of capture the general thread of that story.

[7:54] The revolution, like any kind of,
big, confusing, amorphous event gets politicized right after the revolution,
really sort of before it’s even over folks are narrating it and kind of claiming its meaning for the nation and for the city.
And and so the kind of the enormity of the possibility of rebranding one’s claim to the the,
american revolution um for political purposes going forward in some ways eclipses all other histories. Right?
Um I mean, to give an example of this as Al Young writes about by the 18 twenties for instance, you know, the wig party is kind of trying to claim,
memories claim the last remaining veterans of the war as these sort of symbols of entrepreneurial manhood and the young republic.
Um you know, who show you that really the kind of political system you need is one that encourages native born white men to have the kinds of tools they need to succeed and the rest of the nation will succeed.
And and so this immediately throws this memory into the broader cauldron of the slave issue in the United States. And.

Jake:
[9:21] I was gonna say a generation or two later, the republicans are also trying to claim ownership of that memory for their own political purposes, right?

Seth:
[9:28] That’s right, right? And Longfellow’s poem, you know, as as many of us know, um you know, is is an argument about um resisting slavery.
So both both sides of the political equation get into the business of harnessing revolutionary memory for their political ends.
And and in that sense, because revolutionary memory is such a powerful tool and because it serves power and it ends up serving whiteness in very particular ways.
I think what you see happen is that um because that memory is so lucrative, it ends up eclipsing other ways of remembering in boston.

Jake:
[10:11] You mentioned the longfellow poem, Paul Revere’s Ride, which many of us had to memorize in school and definitely still plays a big role in historical memory, especially at the paul Revere House in Old North.
But it looms very large in your book. It it seems to be a reference point Over and over for how Boston sees itself, even in the 20th century, that we’re seeing ourselves through sort of a longfellow lens.

Seth:
[10:36] Right? Yeah. And I mean, there’s a reason for that.
You know, one of my primary concerns in this book, you know, really all the work I do is to make very clear that we choose how we want to remember right and and the histories that are,
passed to us or those that we learn,
in places like boston are the results of choices made about how to remember.
And so in order to understand why we know what we do about the past.
We have to interrogate those choices, which means figuring out who made those choices for us and what their purposes were and and what the sources are.
And you know, the fact that Longfellow’s poem becomes in some way, a scaffolding on which to hang the story of boston National Historical Park.
Um, you know, in some ways the part carries the action of Longfellow’s poem.

[11:30] It makes us have to contend with the fact that the history we confront in the park and along the freedom trail is in many ways an echo of a poem, right?
Not written for the sake of doing history, but rather for a noble cause to to take a stance against slavery.
But nonetheless, it’s a piece of fiction with a specific intent. And so one of the, you know, the concerns I have in the book is to ask.

[12:04] So what happens when we organize a public historical experience such as a national park or the freedom Trail,
around a popular poem rather than say doing history.
Um, and and that’s, you know, and there’s there’s more to it than that too.
I mean, the the centering of paul revere a persistent and dogged centering of paul revere, and the story of the Freedom Trail is not accidental.
I make the argument that after World War Two, when the Freedom Trail really is born and matures,
and gets tied into processes of urban renewal, that paul revere’s a very handy symbol of that white male entrepreneurial accomplishment,
that we talked about a little bit earlier, and that becomes an organizing principle around which planners are building cities after the war.

Jake:
[13:06] How did we get to that point? So there was this huge upsurge in memory and commemoration around the centennial in 1876 and then,
another big upsurge, sort of in the interwar years or after World War One?
So what what happened to get us from Sort of Longfellow’s poem in the 1860s and the centennial in the 1870s through,
I guess, probably the 1930s were the first glimmering of planning that eventually becomes the park and the Freedom Trail and some of the other.

Seth:
[13:39] I’m glad you mentioned the centennial because the 1876 centennial, among other things, really,
popularizes the so called colonial revival, which most people probably think of as kind of sort of movement of home decoration and furniture uh, and and so forth and so on.
But the popularization of colonial stuff, whether it be those home decorations or or historic images or dress or open air museums such as colonial Williamsburg and others.
The popularization of colonial stuff after the centennial celebration shows just how profitable history can be, right, that it’s a marketing project that makes a lot of money for a lot of people.
And those folks are making money,
in part off the fact that many, many americans are concerned about the way the nation is changing, especially after Reconstruction,
and specifically white people who are very nervous about the movement of free people north.
They’re nervous about immigration, they’re nervous about um sort of the weakening of their economic position.
And so the colonial revival in many ways makes money off the fear of white folks that their patrimony is eroding.

[15:09] And so we have then by the 1930s in place, this notion that you can make money off the past.
We have this move to center Whiteness, then we get the great depression, right, which introduces a couple more interesting innovations.
One of them is a radically broadened National Park Service whose mission it is during the new deal years,
to sort of build american nationalism and give americans something to be excited about and to buoy their spirits.

Jake:
[15:43] Previously, the National Park Service had been protecting wide open spaces out west, mostly Yosemite, Yellowstone Glacier,
and now they’re being charged with moving into Eastern cities and and taking over historic sites that are more urban in nature, Right?

Seth:
[15:59] That’s absolutely right. And you know, it’s not that the park service had always prior to the 1930s been strictly wilderness sites.
I mean, there’s always a little bit of history mixed in, but it really is with the new deal that we see a push as you say, eastward.
Uh, and that pushed toward history, uh, and a push into cities.
Um, and 1935 is as a flash point for that.
It’s a national historic sites act where we see the agency getting a mandate to actually go out and find historic places that they can save from destruction, preserve and interpret.
And that becomes a part of a very important part of the nation’s heritage,
infrastructure going forward on top of which those previous forces profit, fear of difference and immigration, so forth, and so on. Get hung on.

Jake:
[16:56] Yeah, I’ve been to a lot of those urban park sites in Philly and san Francisco and just all over. And so I definitely appreciate the shift in focus along with of course their wilderness protection is also great.

Seth:
[17:08] The reason you’re seeing that impact so clearly in philadelphia and san Francisco boston will be an example. ST louis would be a good example of this too.
Is that the Park Service, as I’m arguing in the book,
is following the path created by urban redevelopment In the United States, which is maturing as early as the 1930s.
Right. And when I say urban development, what I’m saying is what I’m referring to is the focused,
intentional reorganization of cities, uh, to root out perceived economic failure and to build new futures for those places.
Um, and the Park Service is very interested in that, in that initiative.

Jake:
[17:56] I was interested to read that because I I really associate urban renewal with the 50s and especially the 60s here in Boston. Um to read that there was a process that was really kicking off by the 1930s was interesting.

Seth:
[18:10] I think that that sense of urban renewal happening after the war is pretty common, but,
uh, in this story, you dig into the boston um national Historic Park genesis story and what you find out is that the people involved in it.
And so I’m thinking of a guy named Edwin Small for instance, who’s a National Park Service historian.
He’s hired on in the 19 thirties under the W. P. A. Fresh out of school. You know, young young guy doing history.

[18:39] He pretty quickly in his career by 1936 or seven, become superintendent of Salem National Historic Site.
And Salem is undergoing a pretty remarkable and intensive phase of urban redevelopment by 19 36 or 37.
And so small, who’s a park service person sees this and he becomes convinced that,
uh say demolishing old homes and replacing them with parking lots.
Uh, so as to showcase um prettier old or nicer old homes or more specifically old homes that had belonged to two prominent people.
Um He sees that as a good idea like this is, he’s inspired by that and it’s not an accident that small will become a lead player in what happens in boston later on.

Jake:
[19:42] So speaking of small in his central role, there’s a pivotal moment in the book. It’s set up as a pivotal moment in 1938, a fateful meeting between Edwin Small and John McCormick.
Well, you also introduced John McCormick and then sort of tell us about the roles that those two guys would play in reinventing boston.

Seth:
[20:02] John McCormick is a Representative U.
S. Representative from South boston And by 1938 he becomes very interested in making it so that the Dorchester Heights Monument,
in South Boston is made into a national monument, a national historic site.
In fact, he wants some kind of national recognition for Dorchester Heights and your listeners probably know what Dorchester Heights Monument is, but just real quick.
Um This is a monument built at Dorchester Heights.
The monument was built in the 18 nineties to celebrate the evacuation of the british um during the during the revolution,
um an early victory for for the colonials and it had become a kind of epicenter for the citizens of South boston and the site of patriotic memory and so forth.

Jake:
[21:00] People get a little confused that that Dorchester Heights is in South boston, but there, while Dorchester was still an independent town, it ceded some land to boston. South boston. So Dorchester Heights is in South boston confusingly.

Seth:
[21:13] So so thank you for the clarification that it’s that’s really useful.
Um but McCormick wants to make the monument a national monument and he gets that urge in 1938, um probably buoyed on by the same forces we’ve been talking, about right um.

Jake:
[21:23] Mhm.

Seth:
[21:30] The colonial revival and new National Park Service so forth and so on.

Jake:
[21:34] Well, you mentioned in the book that you said that you found nothing in his papers to indicate that he had a special interest in historic preservation. So it must have been a different impetus behind his his drive to create this park. Right. It’s a nationalized Dorchester Heights.

Seth:
[21:48] I’ll share with you what I think it was. I mean his papers are thin, but you know the papers of all boston politicians end up being pretty thin.
I’ve talked with many archivists who have um explain that those records get cleaned quite well before they ever arrive. So, so yeah, requires a good bit of footwork to put together the motivations.

Jake:
[22:06] Right, right. That makes sense.

Seth:
[22:11] So what is he interested in McCormick as,
others have said was feeling a little politically vulnerable in part because he was representing an irish american district and um,
he was a little nervous about his irish american credibility.
It turns out his dad was Canadian, a secret Canadian and and you don’t want anybody to know this.

Jake:
[22:33] A Secret Canadian.

Seth:
[22:37] So so there’s some sense that he might have wanted to do something very powerful for the residents of his district to kind of shore up his irishness.
Um um that’s going on. There is nervousness in south boston about shifting demographics and in that part of the city.
And there’s um their efforts to gerrymander districts to keep black voters out who um are newly arriving um first from overseas and then later from from the south.
So the black population of the district is making white people nervous.
And um I have a sense that McCormick is speaking to those interests.

[23:24] McCormick has a brother named Nacco McCormick who’s like,
irish american kind of thug who was very much involved in the community and it was the marshal of the ST patrick’s Day parade for for many years.
Um So he was tied into that community and it turns out that 1938 is the year that the Commonwealth,
voted to mingle the celebration of evacuation day with ST Patrick’s Day on the same day on March 17th.
So it’s a year where in irish american nationalism is in some ways being challenged, in other ways, it’s being asserted.
And my sense is McCormick is jumping into this and what his concern is, is not to celebrate history so much,
but rather um more firmly established that kind of awareness of irish american nationalism.
So that’s what I see happening here.
And you know, if you buy my argument, then it means the spark that is igniting the process that creates a national park.
Is that not necessarily an interest in celebrating paul revere? So, that’s a very different genesis story.

Jake:
[24:46] He’s a little bit early to the party. It seems like he’s very interested in the late 30s and 40s in some sort of federal protection for Dorchester Heights. But that that comes much later.

Seth:
[24:56] Getting back to Edwin Small. So McCormick takes the proposal too small and the park service and they are absolutely not interested and and and it’s really fun to see the response.
Um I mean, small is quite blunt about it. It’s like Dorchester Heights just isn’t that important or interesting from a historical person.

Jake:
[25:13] I thought that was hilarious because for me, you know, you think of, you know, it’s it’s what broke the siege.
It’s why we’re not won, it won the revolution, bringing the Canister Dorchester Heights. So to have it rejected is it’s not that relevant to the story, seemed really funny to me.

Seth:
[25:29] Well, it’s fun, you know, because this is a great example of how getting back to your earlier question, Why is it? We come to value some histories over others.
It can be shocking to look back and see how people have variously valued histories that we consider important now.
So The fact that there is some debate about Dorchester heights in 1938 is deeply interesting and it actually sets the stage for this story,
of similar failures to make the case for the necessity of a national park.
And the idea, it takes a very long time for anybody to successfully argue that boston needs a national park.

Jake:
[26:10] Before anybody is able to successfully make that argument, you end up with tourism boosters, People are trying to cash in on sort of post war wealth and mobility, with some other way to attract tourists to downtown boston.
And that’s where we get the freedom trail. So talk a little bit about the genesis of the freedom trail itself.

Seth:
[26:30] As the, the steps to creating a national park are somewhat lengthy and failed in many ways. The steps toward making a freedom trail are really rapid and successful.
The core part of the story in the beginnings of the freedom trail have to do with a guy named Bill Scofield who’s a local newspaper man.
And Scofield gets this notion after World War II and by 1951, certainly that what the city needs is some kind of,
tool for tourists who want to experience,
boston’s historic sites, but don’t want to be inconvenienced by the seedier aspects of downtown boston.
And, and so this is a period when the city is changing quickly.
West end, um, is in the process of being demolished.
The old Scholar Square neighborhood is just about to get cleared out,
and scofield is he’s responding to white middle class tourists who don’t want to see homelessness.

[27:45] Or they’re nervous about seeing people who don’t look like them.
He says something to the effect that we don’t we don’t want people coming to our city, setting out to sea paul, revere’s house and ending out at another north end salami counter, right?
Which in I I think in a very real way, is the equivalent of saying, we want we want tourists to bring their money, but we don’t want him to have to bump into working class Italians.

Jake:
[28:15] Yeah, it’s funny how, how late mainstream american culture embraced italian americans in general and italian american food and in particular because it’s such a mainstay today.
But you can read old accounts of walking through the north end and smelling the stench of cooking garlic and things. You know the things we smell now, walking through the north end and go, oh, I got to go to the lunch there, That sounds great.

Seth:
[28:37] When you read those older accounts of how disgusting that was often, that is, you know, my sense is often that is veiled language.
I don’t know that people are that deeply upset by the aroma of cooking, but I do think they’re often still thinking, you know that Italians are,
they’re thinking about Sacco and Vanzetti, they’re thinking about radicalism and in the north end, maybe they’re talking about economic difference and things that are offensive to the sort of folks who really prefer the colonial revival.
So that’s who’s scofield is writing for.
And he, you know, he pitches this notion that there should be a walking tour for those people.
And this is also the same time that, you know, downtown businesses are trying to kind of entice white americans back into the city to spend their money at shops and grocery stores and whatnot.
And so that’s where the freedom trail comes from. He proposes this trail. He calls it the Liberty Trail and there are a few other names.
Um, but it’s, it’s a proposal made in a series of newspaper articles that the mayor likes. The idea serves his agenda.

Jake:
[29:52] You describe it in the book as a walking tour of Longfellow’s historical imagination, which comes back to that theme again. But what does that mean? What sites did scofield choose for his proposed tour? And what does that tell us about what was happening in boston, I guess at the time?

Seth:
[30:07] Yeah. Well, you know, the sites are not much different than what you would see on the trail today.
Right? You’ve got, you know, cops hill burying ground. Old north bar beer house, daniel Hall, uh, Statehouse so forth and so on.
You don’t get the liberty tree, which is at that point, still just on the edge of chinatown, uh, and in a place that would not in scofield’s mind be appropriate for these new visitors to go.
So you don’t get such like that And you certainly don’t get sites that celebrate people of color in the american revolution or women.
These are very much stories about heroic men doing great things for long fellows portrayal. But without the anti slavery politics mixed in.

Jake:
[30:56] Right. The freedom Trail or the freedom path, I guess in its first iteration, officially opens with Mayor Heinz support in 1951.
So in that first year, if a tourist was going to come and walk the freedom path, what would they actually encounter that it was too early for the red line on the sidewalk, I think?

Seth:
[31:15] The first two or three years, you might have experienced something a little different each year.
Um, there would have been like some plywood signs with maybe pictures of paul revere on them.
Maybe the word freedom trail printed on them. They’d be scattered around pretty in substantial I guess I would say.
But a handful of markers, probably some print literature in some ways.
You know, the early trail begins as a really a marketing campaign,
and that’s not an accident because its sponsors, ultimately the boston ad club, uh, and then the Chamber of Commerce are the organizations that take over, uh, and manage this thing.
And so you can imagine it had a fairly sophisticated marketing campaign as a result.

Jake:
[32:09] You include the cover of a comic book that was printed in the 60s by the Chamber of Commerce to promote the freedom trail.
And it’s such a time capsule of attitudes at the time where Dad is confidently declaring that good government means low taxes and the teenage son at the end having experienced the wonders of the freedom trail.
So maybe one of these days I could even work in boston, which you know not, maybe I’ll move to boston. I live in boston. No, no, no.
We’re a white suburban family. We live in the suburbs.

Seth:
[32:41] That’s exactly and and that, I mean it really captures that idea, doesn’t it?
I mean, you know, you have in that image, you know, the american nuclear family, the dad is the head of household, this idea that they live outside, but they’ll come in the profit right to build wealth there.

Jake:
[32:45] Mhm.

Seth:
[32:58] And also, you know, we need to see this within the context of american anti communism, which is very much alive.

Jake:
[33:04] Oh yeah.

Seth:
[33:06] You know, we’re in the midst of the cold War at this point.
You know, if we were to snap back over to the park service and and look at some of the congressional hearings over the idea of whether or not to create a park in boston.

Jake:
[33:17] Those hearings kick off right at the same time that the Freedom Trail officially opens. I think it’s the same year, right that McCormick introduces a study bill.

Seth:
[33:25] Yep, that’s that’s absolutely right. Yeah, 51 is the year and and yeah, and those conversations among um, you know, our elected representatives about whether or not,
this idea should be studied are run through with conversations about communism and how investing in American historic sites is a way to Theresa’s communism.
So was at the time rhetorically images such as that nuclear white family of of means, you know, that,
those presentations of what an ideal american family should be or is,
were, you know, part of the nation’s foreign policy at that they’re a weapon in fighting communism by by creating a model visual model the success of the american dream.
Um, and and the freedom trail story is deeply, deeply tied into that.

Jake:
[34:20] Once McCormick brings a bill before Congress to start studying the idea of a national park in boston, what sites would have been purchased or taken over or partnered up with by the Park Service?

Seth:
[34:32] It’s not much different than what you would imagine today. So that the earlier, you know, the early versions of the proposal will include bunker hill, old North Old State House.
I mean, some of the core sites. The difference is that the proposals then we’re including not just those properties, but land condemnation proposals as well.
Right? So we want to create a park wherein we will build them all around paul revere house and, you know, we’ll do that by destroying homes and and moving people off the property.
Um, and that happens in a couple of cases. So, so when the proposals go to Congress, the Park Service creates proposals that smell very much like an old generation of redevelopment,
that involves the displacement and demolition.

Jake:
[35:26] And boston by this point, by the time the commission’s actually created the study, the creation of the park,
boston has been through a very traumatic period of what we called slum clearance at the time, where we displaced thousands of people in the West End, in the South End, in different,
parts of boston that had to be redeveloped by which we mean flattened and started over.

Seth:
[35:47] That’s right. Thousands of people, primarily working people, people of color, thousands of people who did not ultimately get put elsewhere. We’re taking care of us, or large percentages of folks did not get relocated.
And what is so problematic about that is that when the Park Service shows its support for that model of urban redevelopment of slum clearance is, as you say, and his folks would say, then,
essentially, the Park Service is tacitly endorsing the removal of working people and people of color.
And that message, it’s very clear that that message gets across.
It’s very clear later in the response of folks who live in Charlestown and in the north End, and the pushback that the Park Service gets against the proposed legislation that eventually fails.
So, so people know what’s going on and they don’t like the idea and and that that comes through.

Jake:
[36:50] So we keep we keep alluding to to a commission that’s going to study the creation of a park. So that is officially the Boston National Historic Sites Commission that’s authorized in 1955.
So who makes up this commission that’s going to be weighing the historical value of sites in boston?

Seth:
[37:08] So the boston National Historic Sites Commission. Right, So this is the commission that’s created to see whether it makes sense to create a boston National Historical Park and if so, how to do it. So who’s in the commission?
Representative tip o’neill is on the commission, Senator Saltonstall is on the commission louise Francis, crown and Shield, who’s a prominent preservationist, is on the commission.
The only woman on the commission, Conrad Wirth, who’s the director of the National Park Service,
uh, and also somebody with very deep roots in urban renewal and then also a few minor characters that I’ll leave out for now, but a fellow, um,
who’s very important named Mark Bartman, who ends up becoming the president of the commission and Boardman,
is a, uh, he’s a boston patriot is very sometimes very invested, especially in paul revere’s story and he’s a plastics magnet.
So he’s a very wealthy industrialist and that’s the kind of small group that’s put together the beginning to run the commission. Um, yeah.

Jake:
[38:22] And you mentioned that Park historian Edwin Small started taking on a very central role also, even though I don’t think he was a commission member. Right.

Seth:
[38:30] Well, no, he wasn’t chosen to be in the commission. So, so essentially what happens, all of these wealthy prominent people are put together in a room to figure out the problem of boston and they get nothing done because they just argue with one another.

Jake:
[38:42] Yeah, welcome to boston.

Seth:
[38:43] Um, that’s right.
So, so Portman realizes they need somebody to help.
He asked the National Park Service who has a hand in all of this and they say, hey, we’ve got just the person for you.
How about this guy Edwin Small And now you and I have already talked about Edwin small from back in 1938.
Right Now, we’re in 1955, and Edwin Small is coming back to be the person who’s going to be essentially the lead administrator for this commission.
And because the commissioners are so argumentative and conflicted and,
can’t get anything done, it creates this incredible opportunity for Edwin Small or really kind of take charge quietly in the background and put his imprint on the work of this commission.
And in fact, he says so much and interview years later, he says, you know, look, I came in, I got it together, I essentially did all the work for them.

[39:51] And I believe it, I mean, it’s small that ends up writing the final report.
But what’s amazing about this is when small comes in 55 to do this and finishes the report in 61, he’s essentially bringing to that work the same vision he had,
From back in 1938.
Right, and and so, you know, this is how inertia gets built into historical interpretation, where we see old ideas recirculated for a very long time.
And as you recall, his ideas were born of his experience of urban renewal at Salem.
Um and we’re very much rooted in the colonial revivalism of the early 20th century.

Jake:
[40:36] One thing that the commission was evaluating, as they considered all the different sites that might have been included in a park was something called survival Value.
And you noted that they concluded that Faneuil Hall and the Bunker Hill Monument had virtually no survival value. So so what was this that they were trying to evaluate? And why did some of these iconic places in boston not meet the test?

Seth:
[41:00] By survival value. The notion is this or the question is this, should we keep a structure?
Should we preserve a historic structure if not enough of its original form remains.
So that it would be recognized by the people who knew it in that time?
Right. And so at Faneuil Hall for instance, by 1955, Faneuil Hall looked nothing like an faneuil hall looked during the 18th century.

Jake:
[41:36] I was entirely renovated in the 19th century.

Seth:
[41:38] It renovated, expanded, change the structure itself effectively wasn’t the same structure.
Right. And so there’s a question, you know, do we keep it at bunker hill?
You know, the issue was the monument though, about the revolution?

[41:56] Actually had nothing to do with the revolution. Right. It’s not like the monument was there during the war.
The monument rather is a symbol of how we’ve chosen to remember the war.
And so the arguments of those two sites, uh, you know, boiled down to that.
That question, like does the federal government preserve sites that have quote no survival value meaning that aren’t in some way index ical to the moment that produced them?
And the way they end up answering the question is, yes, we absolutely do,
because the places are important and because they’re so much a part of our memory,
how could we not and and still call ourselves people who care about revolutionary history?
And and that’s a fascinating argument because it points back to that problem. We talked about earlier about the persistence of myth.
And you know, how does the poem become the basis for history and so forth, and so on. And and these folks are choosing to keep those icons in circulation, even though their their significance is in doubt.
But can I tell you that briefly, the story about the meat market? Um.

Jake:
[43:11] Yeah, absolutely. I was about to lead us there because,
it seems so funny, but also so very boston for this high minded commission to get dragged into very low politics about whether Faneuil Hall should host butchers, whether butchers should have their shops and in Faneuil Hall.
So how did we get involved in that debate?

Seth:
[43:32] I I mean in some ways it is the, the essential story of the book.
So the problem is this by the mid 20th century,
Nathaniel hall had become home to dozens of food vendors, specifically meat merchants, butchers,
who are a real popular feature of of the area and served, you know, the food needs of local residents and you know, we’re known for giving good deals on their meat and we’re also kind of part of the local color of the community.
And this bothered the commission especially bothered people like Mark Portman, the chair of the commission, because in his opinion, the meat merchants were loud,
they were smelly because, you know, they threw their their scraps back in the alley.
They attracted vermin and at the end of the day, in the perspective of Mark Portman,
that meant they weren’t very historical because in his mind, his colonial revival mind, history is something that is comfortable or at least soothing in how it celebrates a,
noble american past,
and meet merchants didn’t feel that, that that bill for for Bruggeman.

[44:56] Now on the other hand, on the other side of the commission, you have walter in your White hill who argues that,
you know, the meat merchants are as as historical as anything else.
And Faneuil Hall, it was an actual, these are actual market dwellers.

Jake:
[45:10] It was one of our marketplaces. That’s what it was constructed for, right?

Seth:
[45:16] These are real merchants who are keeping alive civic traditions and serving a civic purpose.
And there’s some great lines from Whitehill about how, you know, the smell of raw meat is the most authentic historical experience you’ll have in boston.

Jake:
[45:35] Honestly, that’s probably true. So it seems like the yardstick for somebody like Portman and the folks who wanted to get the butchers out.
It sounds like they were comparing the experience that they envisioned at Faneuil Hall against colonial Williams.

Seth:
[45:51] That’s exactly right. And White Hill doesn’t want Colonial Williamsburg.
Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting, he was aware of Williamsburg of course. He was also aware of what had happened in philadelphia in terms of its renewal process and the creation of Independence National Historical Park there.
And in philadelphia, you know, the park service advising the city ended up demolishing so much historic property and ripping out of the historic core of the city, much of the spirit of the past as it were right.
The sort of tangible links, how people walk their, how they talked, their, how they engage one another.
And so he’s, he has all that in mind and he’s trying to encourage.

[46:34] A more vibrant encounter with a past that if not perfectly authentic, at least is a legacy of the previous version of boston.
And so so this becomes a pitch battle. I mean, Boardman wants to make money.
He wants people to come to this place and you know, spend their tourist dollars and not be offended White Hills, thinking more about the city itself.
People live there creating a different picture of the past and the two battle and they take the battle to the newspapers there.

[47:10] You know, they’re like lampoons posted this argument in Gentleman’s clubs around town.
It’s just a wild thing. And it gives you some sense of,
what was at stake in the arguments over preservation in the 1950s and shows you how little of it is really about anything I think we would think is about like doing history.
You know, it’s about other stuff and it also doesn’t involve historians per se.
And so much as you know, there are people who are doing hard research and thinking broadly about long trends and chronologies.
Um this is really about different versions of a kind of boosterism and about, you know, bringing tourists into town.
So it it’s you’ll note in the chapter, I go on for a very long time about it because it’s interesting, it’s also unfolding against changes in national regulation of the meat market.
Um so there there are strains of this debate about big government versus small government and who gets to make money in the US and and all those kinds of interesting issues, all of that to play. Yeah.

Jake:
[48:26] There’s a thread that carries forward into a pretty modern debate where the city was trying to push the meat and produce vendors out of annual hall to,
the area that became new market, which is both the site that was proposed as the center of our 2024 Olympic bid here in Boston,
and sort of the epicenter of our opioid crisis also, so that you can see the roots of some more modern debates coming from the same time.

Seth:
[48:50] Absolutely, and you know, it’s fascinating, you’re you’re spot on with that.
And yes, the roots of those arguments, you know, which are really arguments about what kind of nation we want to be and how american democracy works and how american capitalism works.
You can get adam through that meat market debate in really fascinating ways.

Jake:
[49:10] As that debate unfolded the commission. I don’t want to say it got sidetracked, but I’ll say it got sidetracked into about the time that the commission had sorted out a plan for what would become a minuteman National Historic Park.
Out in Lexington and concord, they announced that,
Faneuil Hall in the black stone blocks were basically the only parts of the historic core of boston that were worth protecting and right at the same time,
the government center redevelopment project was announced, which would have threatened what they consider the only two areas worth saving.
What sort of fault lines within the commission or within the city.
Did that reveal about who it was okay with demolishing areas and removing residents and who wasn’t?

Seth:
[49:55] Boston hires Ed logue right to come be the sort of, you know, the new urban renewal czar.

Jake:
[50:05] Yeah, main city planner, I guess at that point, right, brought in by Mayor Collins, john Collins, who was elected in 1959, I want to say.

Seth:
[50:14] 59. Yeah, the commission is finishing its work.
And when I say, the commission is finishing its work, I mean, Edwin Small is finishing the work just as Ed logue is coming to boston.
And it’s clear to me that small has largely given up on the possibility of coming up with a clear and coherent plan for downtown boston.
And part because I don’t think he’s that interested in it, honestly, um, I’ll get to that in a minute.
But also because I think he knows that logo is coming,
And the commission’s work is in some ways, all for not as a result of that, because Luke’s gonna bring his own plan small ever since the 30s,
really, really, really was interested in the Battle Road.
And so the whole time he’s working on the problem of creating a national park in boston, he just is dying to think about the possibility of creating a national park.
That’s for the Battle Road. And.

Jake:
[51:26] And correct me if I’m wrong, he becomes the first superintendent.

Seth:
[51:29] Yes, so that that’s the dramatic conclusion of this in some way.
You know, he comes up with a kind of a rough sketch for a plan for the commission by 58 59.
And from there on out, all he wants to do is think about the Battle Road.
And he just pours himself into that. And then his notes, he says, look, you know, pretty much history history is a mixed bag inside, what is it?
Route 1 28 Right? And we’re sort of losing the fight there. So let’s look elsewhere.
And he puts all this work into um the Battle Road project, which was never intended by the legislation that that um came forward to create the commission.
And as you, you point out, we kind of find out why later on he’s sort of building a place for himself to land, Right?
And he creates a part for which he becomes a superintendent, which in hindsight then makes us wonder, so what was he up to in boston all those years? And what kind of work was really getting done there?

[52:35] And then as a sort of side bit to that small later on and years later finds himself at the heart of the controversy where he’s,
he himself is buying up properties around the Air Force base to rent to people at inflated rates.
So about around hands come. So we find that small, You know, though, he’s supposed to be the kind of responsible NPS historian keeping everybody moving forward.
He’s got his own game and he’s interested in profit too.
And, you know, he’s leveraging the situation in very particular ways.

Jake:
[53:14] And while he’s distracted and conquered, Ed logue steps in to fill the vacuum in boston in terms of leading, envisioning some sort of future historic area.

Seth:
[53:23] That’s right, that’s right load comes in and he has an entirely different vision.
And it’s interesting, you know, Logan has no idea what the Park service has done.
Um it’s like maybe by 62 or something like that. A memo goes around saying, hey, there’s this, you know, commission that did this report, does anybody know about it?

Jake:
[53:41] You write that it was a distant memory so soon by by 19.

Seth:
[53:43] It just vanished. Right. In terms of policy, it just vanished.

[53:47] And you know, logue is, you know, he’s a hired gun, He has a job to, you know, he’s being paid more than the mayor to make the city um, to reinvent the city. And so he has a much broader historical vision.
Um, and I’m not saying this makes it necessarily a better historical vision, but he’s not just concerned with revolutionary memory.
Um he wants his uh, the, he put together a little historical commission and he wants them to think broadly about significance.
And he wants to involve more people in that story. You know, at the core of his historic commission is a woman, a young woman named Gladys Lions who he tasks with doing much of this research.
Um keep in mind that the boston National Historic Sites Commission is staffed entirely by very aged people.
Um, and just, you know, 11 woman who doesn’t really have an active role.
So, so Logan’s thinking more broadly about chronology is thinking more broadly about who gets to choose what kinds of past we remember.
And he really is thinking more along the, the lines, walter, your white hill about how to animate the spirit of the city around its past.
Uh and it’s Whitehill, ultimately, that low picks to head up his historic commission.

Jake:
[55:15] And on the federal level, eventually the baton gets taken up by tip O’neill, who I don’t think was the speaker yet, but it would eventually be the speaker of the House. What were his efforts to get some sort of federal protection for sites in boston?

Seth:
[55:28] Yeah, so, you know, O’Neill was on the commission, but he really didn’t go to meetings.
Um you know, most of the politicians didn’t, but because he was on the commission,
he ended up being responsible for trying to implement its findings um during the 60s, which included the notion that,
you know, the, the government should come in and buy up some land and demolished properties and build a national park and Folks in Boston by the mid 1960s.
Uh, certainly working people, certainly people in the neighborhoods, um they’re thinking about would have nothing to do with that, that vision of mid century redevelopment was very much out of favor.
And it turns out it looks like O’neill probably didn’t even quite know the details of the proposal uh in terms of understanding the scale of demolition involved.
And um finally, when um, you know, the push goes back to congress, those congressional hearings.

[56:32] Uh, end up taking no action because the commission’s report doesn’t make the case ultimately, at that moment for why the federal government should step in,
and do this work when there are so many local historical associations doing such good work in boston already.
And so the whole, the whole thing just kind of stalls out in the mid-60’s.

Jake:
[56:58] It sounds like what gets the process started again really is sort of the 12 punch of the failure of boston’s bid to host the bicentennial World’s Fair on,
mainland and boston Harbor, which we have a past episode about the listeners, can can check out. It’s a crazy plan. Pure crazy.
And so the 12 punch of the failed bicentennial bid and then the the sort of unexpected, sudden closure of the Charlestown Navy Yard.
So how did that change? Planning and thinking about a boston National Historical?

Seth:
[57:30] Throughout that, that failed political campaign during the 60’s where nobody in the park service is talking to logue and nobody’s really thinking about the reality of, of of the urban situation in Boston, some things are changing.
So the freedom trail is getting more popular.
There have been some Park Service studies done on what it would take to build a park.
So those are happening. But right then these two, you know, simultaneous failures as I described them,
that sent politicians and planners and local boosters back into the mindset of thinking maybe a national park might not be a bad idea,
You know, because think about it, you know, what if we took this, this these bits of these old plans we had for the national bicentennial celebration and we created a gigantic maritime history park over at the Navy Yard.
And, and what if we did this and that we could create new jobs to offset the losses from the closure of the Navy yard.
We could generate more tax revenue potentially by, you know, developing these old places into shops and businesses.
Go back to Parker’s quote at the beginning of the book, we could, we could convert this failure into opportunity And you know, amid the industrialization.

[58:57] Amid the beginning of the move toward a contracted federal government as well.
Experience under reaganism, politicians love this concept.
And so they go back to the National Park Service and they say, hey, look, the freedom Trail has become so popular here.
Look how popular it is. Now, weren’t you all interested in creating a park at some time.
Why don’t you pull those plans back out and we’ll do it now?

[59:23] That’s the mood and in the late 70s and the park service, you know, several years from their serious plan making at this point. And they say, uh, we can absolutely not do this.
We never conceived of a national park that would include uh, you know, boston’s core historic sites and the Navy Yard, which is across the river and huge and the facility that we can’t manage.
We never plan for that. Our numbers were for, you know, just a small kind of preservation initiative, uh, sorry, Congress, we can’t do it.
Uh, so, you know, an interesting twist. The National Park service ends up arguing against the plan that he had had been pursuing for 30 years but because it knew that it would fail.
But Congress refused to accept that position.
And in the end, the Department of the Interior was effectively compelled to create a national park in boston on a shoestring budget and quickly Right in time for 1974. Yeah.

Jake:
[1:00:30] Our famous events happened in 1775, so we had to have a bicentennial a year early, and the park is only authorized or officially blessed on October 1, 1974. So that’s a pretty short time frame.

Seth:
[1:00:41] Just in time, right just in time. National Park production.
So it’s, it’s authorized and authorization simply means that Congress has authorized the money to go forward.
But that’s different than establishment which is actually opening the park and implementing that that allocation. So yeah, it’s only in 74 that they get to go ahead and now they have to do all the planning and staffing.

Jake:
[1:00:59] Mhm.

[1:01:07] They have to create a new concept of a partnership park, which is almost never been done before. Up until that point. So can you just introduce the listener to to that concept? What is a?

Seth:
[1:01:17] Sure. So up until the mid 1970s, probably the most common way to build a national park was simply to acquire federal land in the west.
That would mean adding onto federal tracts of land, expanding to protect the natural site in the east or in other parts of the country in cities. That would mean actually buying up land and homes and properties.

[1:01:43] But land purchase becomes more and more difficult to do by the 1970s for a number of legal reasons. But also because the park service is struggling financially.
Uh, and that’s a trend that has, it’s actually always been a trend. The new deal is the last great period of funding for the National Park service. It’s kind of been downhill since then. But so it becomes impractical to build parks by buying land.
And so the Park Service begins experimenting with what is effectively public private partnership,
wherein it partners with a private organization,
that may own land or can commit resources uh, and provides that private organization with guidance, staff, support and vision to manage whatever the resources that is at the center of the park.
So in boston, what this ends up meaning is that at sites like paul Revere’s House, for instance, Paul Revere’s House is managed by the paul Revere Historical Association, which has been around for a long time private organization.
The site is within the park, but the National Park Service doesn’t own it.
It partners with the association provides support, thereby creating, as you said, a sort of partnership relationship, a partnership park.

[1:03:04] Um so the idea is to do this in boston, right.
The money, neither the money nor the plan is there to buy these sites out. Right. So, you know, the question becomes, how do you, on such a large scale build a national park around so many partnerships with individual sites.
Uh and this is the question that small never ended up answering or the commission never really ended up answering because they couldn’t figure it out.
They simply said the stewards will find a solution. Um and so that’s what in part was left to be done in 74.

Jake:
[1:03:40] A partnership model seems like a really complicated way to run a park. Was the National Park Service itself going to own anything besides the Navy Yard.

Seth:
[1:03:48] So the only cites the Park Service would own would be the Navy Yard, bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall and Dorchester Heights.
So, four sites that would be in direct federal management and then the others managed in partnership with a cooperating association.

Jake:
[1:04:08] Speaking. Speaking of Dorchester Heights, at about the same time that the park was being brought into existence,
Dorchester Heights was becoming very famous in America, but not so much because of its role in the american revolution, but in its role in current events.
Why was the spotlight on Dorchester Heights, then?

Seth:
[1:04:26] Dorchester Heights in the 1970s becomes the epicenter of what becomes a really violent and contentious,
school bussing controversy, which effectively is a racial controversy, right?
Um will white kids and black kids go to school with one another and,
This spills out into all facets of life in politics and work in Boston probably most famously caught in that iconic Stanley Forman photograph that he took in 1976 of the lawyer TED Lands.
Mark is a black man in a business suit, famously shown being assaulted by a white man holding an american flag.
Folks know this when they see it. It’s a Pulitzer prize winning,
photograph and what’s remarkable is that in the background of that photograph you can see the State House, just the tip of it, which shows you that,
the National Park National Historical Park, whether the portions of it on the freedom trail or down in Dorchester Heights where it now has a management,
role is at the epicenter of the nations Burning race war and in the middle of the 1970s.
Um that is the story and in that moment, juxtaposing.

[1:05:53] Um the racial climate with the aspirations of the bicentennial celebration is a real remarkable study in juxtapositions uh and failure for the american experiment and,
a national park charged with remembering the american revolution is being born in precisely that moment,
and in my estimation doesn’t do a great job at meeting that moment.

Jake:
[1:06:19] Besides Dorchester Heights, how were some of the sites associated with the new park entangled with with the liberation movements that were happening as the park was created?

Seth:
[1:06:29] There’s a great moment at Bunker Hill in the early 70s where,
a group of American Vietnam veterans who are opposed to the war petitioned to have a program at Bunker Hill and to assemble there and they’re denied it.
But they go anyway, we see marches in the navy yard, both protesting and supporting the war effort.
There are civil rights actions that pretty much all of these sites in every way that I can think of.
The national park is embedded in conversations about race powered, gender, citizenship, identity, and american nationalism. I mean, it’s, it’s all tied together.
How then do the parks creators, the folks who are charged with figuring out what this park is going to be about?
How do they respond to all of that and how do they take advantage of that moment?

[1:07:32] What I see in the, the records of this park is that by and large they don’t, and this has to do in part with the way that the National Park Service worked at that time.
The planners who came to figure out what this park would be about came from Denver, they’re flown all the way from Denver into boston,
to do the work of planning and that’s because the National Park Service had just gone through a period of,
centralizing expertise is kind of a corporate reorganization where park planners were put in one office out in what’s called the Denver Service Center and flown to various parts to figure out what those parks would be about.
And so the group of people who came to boston to figure out what this park would be about,
just sort of airlifted into this incredibly fraught place and given a few days to figure out how to tell the story of the american revolution.
And so I I don’t necessarily criticize them for not doing something more robust to take into account that torment on boston streets in that moment.
But the process didn’t allow for that.

Jake:
[1:08:48] And to be fair, the groups that were running the Freedom Trail and the individual sites weren’t necessarily wrestling with those questions at the time either.

Seth:
[1:08:56] They’re also not committed to. Most of those organizations weren’t necessarily claiming to do history work for all americans and to represent everyone equally.
The Park Service was, that’s the job of the National Park Service, which is to, to think broadly about how to make the nation’s cultural and natural resources eligible to everyone.
And so there’s a different mission now.
What’s interesting is the organizations that manage the partner sites at that moment were beginning to do much better work in my estimation in terms of thinking,
More critically about American history, being more inclusive, broadening the voices that contributed to their programming.
And by the 1980s, mid 80s, late 80s.
Uh anyway, those, those sites are um, you know, they are professionalized in a way that even the Park Service isn’t.

Jake:
[1:09:58] Well, these these planners from Denver, who were sort of air dropped into boston, came up with a few different possible paths.
Forward, they laid out sort of an overarching their series of overarching themes that would guide the entire park, and then for each component site, they would have a different emphasis for each site.
What what were they envisioning in terms of what some of the sites would focus on, and then just the alternative configurations that the park might have ended up with.

Seth:
[1:10:25] The big problem for the planners is how to squeeze all of these different sites into one narrative.
I mean, consider the fact that congress has charged this park with being a park that interprets the history of the american revolution.
And yet the Trust on Navy Yard has nothing to do with the american revolution did not exist.

Jake:
[1:10:47] Right did not exist.

Seth:
[1:10:48] So there’s some fundamental historical inconsistencies in the legend legislation and so these planners are trying to figure out how to, how to work on that.
And one of those folks had this really insightful notion of, well, you know, the best we can do is think about all of these units as like pearls on a string. They’re all beautiful.
They’re all interesting, but we have to tell visitors about why they are threaded together.
So they come up with some ideas. Um, one of the ideas is to deal with the theme of revolution broadly.
You know, many of the sites in the park speak to the american revolution that we could then fold in Charlestown Navy Yard by talking about revolutions in technology and you know, um naval history so forth and so on.
So there’s that idea, there are ideas floating around too.

[1:11:47] To not worry so much about the,
the details of say wars and battles and,
innovations, but rather focus on broad themes such as freedom and think about how american experience across the variety of lives in this place contribute to the larger idea of freedom.
There are some people who really think what’s important about the park is not any of this, but rather that it’s a partnership park and that the message should,
be partnership and that you know, americans can do great things when they think about new ways to work together.
A lot of that is pie in the sky thinking though, because the congressional mandate is pretty clear and at the end of the day what they have to do is make a park about the american revolution and,
you know, again they have a very convenient template,
already in place, which is what we call the freedom Trail.
So in many ways the way the park gets made is to mimic the rhythms and habits of the freedom trail.
But what does happen that’s very important is that the planning.

[1:13:04] Group insists that however, you know the park gets made, there has to be an independent advisory commission created to guide the park for the first decade.
So there has to be a group of people from the community who knows something about the revolution and knows something about boston, who come together periodically to consult with the park and and provide guidance for it.
And that was an addition that I think was critical and ensuring that despite some of its struggles, the national park could be a good neighbor.

Jake:
[1:13:42] Now that the National park is actually becoming a reality, will you introduce us to Hugh Gurney, the first Superintendent of the?

Seth:
[1:13:49] Yeah, Hugh Gurney is an interesting guy and I had a chance to interview him, which is really wonderful Hugh Gurney came to that work with some history background.
So he was a history major in college and he had either super intended or worked at a variety of military history parks throughout the United States.
So that shows you immediately that it already had been pretty much decided that this would be a military history park.
But Gurney had also gone to college in boston. He had family in boston and as a kid had done some work,
for his family business running around and carrying um receipts and other paperwork paperwork to businesses in the north end.
So he kind of knew the fabric of that space, uh, and and understood it and important ways.
And so when he came to the job, it kind of immediately realized how impossible it was gonna be because the Navy yard and in downtown boston, just two different worlds at that moment,
and he understood why and how and so he got the physical problem, the intellectual problem and the logistical problem.

[1:15:07] And so what he did, that was so brilliant is um,
that he tried to bring people into his circle that understood these problems better than he ever could and could be his liaisons with his neighbors.
So for instance, he hired a number of folks who had worked at the old Navy yard back into the Park service’s employ to work at the Navy yard and these are maintenance crew.
Um, maybe a couple of law enforcement folks, people who already had relationships or family ties through the area and could be diplomats as it were for the National Park Service.

Jake:
[1:15:48] Which is especially important because there was a very sudden transition data, january 1st transition date when he was going to own the Navy Yard, whether he was ready or not.

Seth:
[1:15:53] That’s right, Right.
That’s absolutely right. So he needed that expertise at the same time because he knew the navy yard was going to be so complicated.
He worked really hard to not spend too much time at the navy yard.
So he kept his office on the other side of the river.
So he wouldn’t inadvertently forget that the park was more than just the Navy yard.
And so keeping a foot in town made it so he could develop a good relationship,
with folks like Richard Berenson, who was an important figure in the history of the freedom trail, uh, and was also a member of the advisory commission and the fellow who made things work in City Hall for,
for Gurney, he’s able to meet other local political actors.
So I think you had a real good sense of the problems he was going to encounter and the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to solve these problems alone.

Jake:
[1:16:57] How did Gurney and the rest of the park officials try to promote the park and make it more visible after it was open, and that we moved into the late, late 70s, sort of after the hullabaloo around the bicentennial?

Seth:
[1:17:10] A few ways. Gurney was interested in expanding partnerships wherever he could.
So he already had a number of partnership relationships to build by merit of the legislation.
But he was also interested in working with schools, local public schools and developing education programs as a way to do outreach.
He realized early on also that ranger tours were going to be really important and that,
the park was going to have to put mps folks with uniforms out on the street, walking around talking about boston and its history because the park is in many ways invisible.
It’s, you know, a loose affiliation of sites. So Gurney was very willing to work with, you know, even community organizations.
And I say even because I think this was not entirely common for the park service of time, even organizations that were engaged in the social turmoil that was happening around boston.
So to give you an example of this, he made the parks early visitor center, which is not much of a visitor center, but it had, it had bathrooms.
Um, he made that space available to the guardian angels, which is a kind of.

Jake:
[1:18:31] Almost a paramilitary organization or like a vigilante force?

Seth:
[1:18:31] Yeah, like, um,
you know, sort of a grassroots vigilante good guy group or you know, at least they, that was the idea kind of keep the streets safe, you know, through careful applications of violence.

Jake:
[1:18:42] Uh huh Good guy ish. Yeah.

Seth:
[1:18:50] But you know, he made the visitor’s center available to them.

Jake:
[1:18:54] That’s really reading the writ of a partnership park pretty broadly to partner with the.

Seth:
[1:18:59] I think so. I mean, I, I really truly believe he was very,
open to that and realized that he, you know, he had to meet Bostonians where they were jimmy carter was,
was pushing a lot of work programs for, especially for black americans and underprivileged americans.
And Gurney worked very hard to put people across the spectrum of color into jobs at the park to fulfill that mandate. And he was very proud of that in hindsight.

[1:19:29] On the other hand, you know, Gurney also faced racial tensions that I would have liked to see him and the park be more proactive about.
There are lots of reports about harassment of black people within the staff of the park and visitors throughout the park,
That the the MPS took a fairly sort of casual approach to until, you know, this really just exploded in violence.
And there’s this terrible moment in 1977 when,
school teacher from pennsylvania, a man named Charles battles who,
who was black and teaching at a black school in pennsylvania brought a school group,
to visit the park and were touring bunker hill,
when a group of white thugs jumped out of a car and just beat them for an excruciatingly long amount of time, like a few minutes until somebody intervened.
And it really showed like how this sort of race war was still exploding within the park.
And, you know, to look back at how that moment was discussed in the meeting.
Minutes of that park is it’s troubling to me because it was very sedate and and somewhat milk toast. And you know, there wasn’t a prevailing sense that the National Park Service had to intervene in those problems.

Jake:
[1:20:55] Yeah, it sounds like it wasn’t until The 1980s that the park tried to deal with the racism problem.

Seth:
[1:21:02] Right. It took a long time. And and even the response wasn’t fantastic.
Um I mean, the most remarkable moment in this regard happens in 1980 when, and and a completely surprised move, Congress authorizes a whole new park within boston National Historical Park.
And and that’s the boston African American historic site which essentially codified the Black history Trail, the Black Heritage Trail that cuts up across Beacon Hill.
Um and that Byron rushing was involved in creating and rushing was on the Parks Advisory Commission.
So it was a good connection. But when Congress created this separate unit to deal with the history of black Bostonians,
you know, in some ways, I sense in my research that the folks who are running boston National Historical Park thought that that would take care of all the problems.

Jake:
[1:22:01] Right sort of excuses them from having to consider race at the.

Seth:
[1:22:04] That’s right. You know, that will be the place.
We talk about race and history and elsewhere we can talk about paul revere, you know, that kind of approach.
And that’s a gross overstatement. I mean, certainly there’s good programming throughout those years that was mirroring in some ways the new social history and its interest in and broadening um are historical gays.
But, you know, at the same time, rushing and his crew are doing really interesting work at boston African American.
The park is contending with problems at Dorchester Heights, not by doing history there, but by sending police, thereby sending law enforcement there.

Jake:
[1:22:47] Sending law enforcement there to try to contend with the legions of stone throwers and and folks who are trying to physically assault and intimidate black students who are trying to attend school at nearby South.

Seth:
[1:22:52] That’s right. That’s.

[1:22:58] That’s absolutely right. The park has struggled no matter what the interpretation is that it has offered over the years, it has nonetheless struggled to think,
about its responsibility to people who remember, you know, the position it took during the days of urban renewal.
Um, and and that’s that’s one of the big messages of the book, that it doesn’t so much matter how you,
retell the story or who you hire, necessarily until you confront, you know, the deeper history of how you’ve related to those folks and that that park still needs to do that work.

Jake:
[1:23:39] It’s a gurney leaves the stage in 1984, and it sounds like that Period of sort of early and mid 80s is is a really transitional period for the National Park Service on a large scale, and also for the park in boston.
What changes here when john Birchall takes over as the superintendent? And what changes with the NPS more generally, as we get into sort of the period of of reaganomics and austerity from the federal.

Seth:
[1:24:06] Yeah, well, you know, those changes had really begun to kick in by the early 80s.
Um, the Department of Interior is headed up by James watt for a couple of years and what is,
famous for being a kind of anti environmentalist that’s in charge of stewarding the environment and also just contracting funding for all National Park Service programming.
So Now the park service is really a big government concept that since the late 70s for sure, definitely by the early 80s has been trying to live in a small government world.
And so money money was tight throughout the system, boston was struggling because of that navy yard and how difficult it was to manage.

[1:24:57] It’s also dealing with lots of internal changes and new bureaucracies. And Gurney was struggling along with all of that.
As you mentioned, he, he leaves and a new fellow comes in. A guy named john Birchall and Burchill is a very different superintendent.
He’d come from local national historic site was very successful there.
Lowell was the site that was built up also around partnerships also about urban redevelopment kind of tailor made for sort of urban experience economy.
And birch hill learned there that, you know, in the Reagan era.
The trick to running a park and being successful beyond using these public private partnerships is through fundraising and finding ways to deliver big money,
through the government, especially through what we might call, you know, blockbuster programs, especially preservation programs, pick an iconic historic site,
take advantage of public investment in it, get a lot of money, have a victory go forward.

[1:26:08] And so that was the model that he brought to boston.
Um, you know, Birchall wasn’t trained as a historian like Gurney.
Uh, he was, he went to law school, he was much more of a business person. You know, you look at photographs of, Of Birch Hill nine out of the time, nine out of 10 times he’s wearing a business suit.
Uh, you know, whereas Gurney would always have his uniform on and this is the model. He, he used birch Hill had a friend in joe moakley.
Um, and they had experienced together in low, it became a kind of fundraising friendship that produced incredible results.
And before long, suddenly boston was pouring lots of federal money into preserving places like Faneuil Hall.
And so after a long time of seeming in activity, all of a sudden we have a superintendent who’s making big things happen in the park.

Jake:
[1:27:07] Mhm. He’s not so interested in making small things like maintenance and maintaining partnerships happen, it sounds like.

Seth:
[1:27:14] Is, I mean, again, I don’t want to overstate problems.
Birch hill knows that his model of success isn’t going to hinge on helping necessarily the organizations that manage his partnership sites to do their work.
His success is going to hinge on winning big amounts of money that get a lot of attention.
And so that’s what he aims for.
And what’s interesting about this is that it works, you know, the park gets a lot of money to do a lot of preservation on buildings that hadn’t received much attention for a very long time,
but it’s the way that money gets used.
That is really surprising given the history of boston National Historic Site, I’ll give you one example, going back to Faneuil Hall.
So Birchall gets loads of federal monies to renovate Faneuil Hall and to create some new spaces within it, to engage the public.
And one of the ideas there that he loves and that the money supports is,
turning the first floor back into a space that looks like an old marketplace.

Jake:
[1:28:35] But more like more like a colonial Williamsburg marketplace than butchers.

Seth:
[1:28:40] Absolutely right. So so Burchill essentially takes The Mark Bartman Playbook from the 1950s and funds it.
Which is another way of saying that Burchill,
rewinds the clock and goes back to that model of patriotic post war preservation that is guaranteed to get a lot of support from a lot of privileged people,
and uses it as a way to leverage resources for boston National Historical Park.

[1:29:18] And for preservationists. That’s a big victory.
The problem is though, that vision continues to expand this gap between the way that the park,
talks about the past and the way that people who have been excluded from that past for so long.
I want to talk about that past and we see these icons of revolutionary memory being reinforced as sites of white privilege once again.
And, uh, you know, the question is, is there any other way to survive in the Park service in the age of fiscal austerity? And I’m sure virtual, if you’re with us today, would say no.
But it really, you know, presses us to raise some hard questions about, well, then, you know, is that the kind of history that the National Park Service should really be doing?

Jake:
[1:30:11] It does sound like by the 1990s, there was an effort to interpret history more broadly, to be more inclusive of who had a place in the city’s history.
And I don’t know if that is due to to management changes or bring in a new historian for the park named louis Hutchins during that era, or what started to change.

Seth:
[1:30:32] So a couple of things are happening, a lot of that change is coming from outside.
So, you know, organizations like the paul revere historic association, you know, they’re doing fantastic cutting edge history,
By the 1990s and they’re committed to inclusivity and they’re thinking broadly about the narrative and they’re doing the kind of work that we in the university would have been impressed by in that in that moment.
And so I think there is, there is clearly an effort within boston to do better.
And some of that pressure is coming toward the Park service, which is sort of, you know, uneasily situated between all these partners.

[1:31:14] And so I think some of that has to do with why the park hires Hutchins.
Um, and then marty Blatt, this park had always had a historian on staff.

[1:31:28] Which is rare for for many national parks, but it didn’t always use that resource, well so much of the time throughout the 1980s, the historian Paul Weinbaum was,
being put to the task of doing sort of the odds and ends of preservation work, a lot of paperwork, a lot of compliance work, that kind of thing.
And not really being put to the task of broadening the story.
And so, but pressure mounts. And I I think Hutchins was brought in to do that work and to engage with those voices.
But you know, what he found out was that just because there was pressure to do that didn’t mean the Superintendent really was comfortable with the results.
Hutchins only ended up staying for maybe a year or so. It was a short period because he just felt that he couldn’t be his work, wasn’t going to be taken seriously.
And he was often being pressured to do work that he didn’t think was legitimate.
So Hutchins left marty Black came in also another fantastic historian and really pushed hard,
to broaden the scope to work with his partners marty especially focused with, you know, like laser like vision on black history and,
thinking hard about the meanings of freedom within that.

[1:32:56] That unit within the nation.
And he clashed with birch hill and I recount some of this in the in the book.
But it was clear that what was going to make the park succeed in the eyes of the Superintendent was,
an old way of imagining patriotic revolutionary white memory and historians pushed back against that and in the end had some successes for sure.
But you know, as a very recently, the park was still deeply uncomfortable about talking about issues such as the history of enslavement in close proximity to where it handed out visitor literature.
You know, during the 90s, there’s a remarkable opportunity to make important changes some occurred. But I I don’t I don’t sense that the culture changed dramatically as a result.

Jake:
[1:33:53] It seems like maybe a high watermark or a key moment was the rededication of the Shaw Memorial, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Beacon Hill in 1997. What what signal did that send about who the park was for and whose stories could be told at the park?

Seth:
[1:34:07] Well, you know, that was an effort by black and friends to very clearly send a signal that it’s not only white people that own America’s history.
And it was an attempt to reach out and as part of that, there was, you know, we should keep in mind this is like still in the age of ken Burns civil war documentary.
Right? So you know, you know, these things may not seem innovative now, but at the time they were.

Jake:
[1:34:27] Right?

Seth:
[1:34:31] There was as part of that a civil war and cat mint hosted near the park with black people portraying black veterans and talking about race in the civil war.
And that was very progressive programming at the time.
There was progressive programming at the bunker hill monument,
with the famous installation addressing domestic violence and street violence and some great work coming from that moment, but even then considerable pushback, not just from the superintendent, but also from,
his officers, especially the chief of interpretation,
who is deeply tied with Charlestown Navy yard and surrounding community and ongoing problems with Dorchester Heights.

Jake:
[1:35:17] It sounds like some of that promise may actually have turned into an opportunity loss.

Seth:
[1:35:21] I think. So. I don’t know that this park is unique in that regard. This is a common story during the 1990s for national parks.
And unfortunately, it’s also a very difficult time to retrieve,
historically because it’s the moment at which park records shift the email,
and, and you know, to date, there’s no useful way to really work through the daily correspondence that surrounded those events, except for,
sort of random batches of documents that got archived.
So the challenge for people who do what I do is try to understand how the story happened in a moment when the documentary record really just fundamentally changed.

Jake:
[1:36:08] Well, speaking of missed opportunities, there seems to be a theme running through the book of missed opportunities.
If you had a time machine, if you could go back to 1938 and sort of the genesis of the idea of national park For boston, what would you change?

Seth:
[1:36:25] I can give you boring answers. I can give you interesting answers.

Jake:
[1:36:29] Well, I’ll take one of each.

Seth:
[1:36:30] The boring answer is in some ways a policy answer.
So I’m an outsider. I study the Park service. I don’t, I don’t understand its policies and laws perfectly, but I have a sense that in creating a national park in boston,
the Park Service never achieved more than it could have,
simply under the provisions of the Historic Sites Act of 1935,
which gave it all the power it needed to help these local historical organizations do the work they wanted to do.
The National Historic Sites Act provides the federal authority bit too channel money in the preservation and provide interpretive guidance and expertise.
So, you know, I think, you know, the boring answer is,
you know, I don’t know that boston needed a national park and,
maybe there were some other opportunities to think about ways to support those organizations, but also hold them accountable for, for doing good history,
in other innovative ways that didn’t have to get bogged down in the politics of profit in boston.
And boston is interesting in this case because it’s local politics are so, so dynamic and so mercurial in some cases and.

Jake:
[1:37:59] Mhm and parochial in a lot of ways, with one district pitted against another often.

Seth:
[1:38:05] You’re right, you’re absolutely right. And so, you know, if this story is unique in any way, I think that might be the way it’s unique and in that environment, I don’t know that a national park is what you want because it adds just another layer to the politics.
So that’s, that’s the boring answer. Maybe early on try other approaches to doing this work the more.
Um I don’t know if it’s an exciting answer, optimistic or naive answer is maybe the obvious one which is to have avoided if they were in any way possible,
pitching the work of the National Park Service in boston to the story of the american revolution alone.
This goes back to our maybe the very first question you asked me about why the revolution.
And simply by beginning with that conversation.

Jake:
[1:38:59] Mhm.

Seth:
[1:39:00] The Park Service immediately determined a set of very, very narrow limits in which it was going to be able to do its work over time.
And you know, the thing you discover when you study institutions and cultural organizations is that, you know, the exigencies of their founding moment cast a very, very long shadow.
So if there had been a way to organize that park with a more capacious view of the american past that would have benefited everybody.
Ironically, I think of all people Ed logue was on that track.
I say that cautiously because I’m not a great,
fan of urban renewal’s vision beyond that necessarily as as articulated by Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, but but.

Jake:
[1:39:54] Right, Good, good. I think urbanists today would speak of a lot of the urban renewal practices as basically ruining, said he’s rather than reviving them.

Seth:
[1:40:06] Yeah, right. And and I agree there is a, you know, there’s debate within the field about what the benefits and costs were.
And and and you know, some folks point out well, hey, you know, on paper at least it looks like you know, urban renewal really did revive cities.
Um and then you know, many of us on the other side are saying, okay, but at what cost.

[1:40:29] And I think one goal of the book was to make the point that when you’re telling the costs of urban renewal, we shouldn’t forget the damage that is done to americans ability to understand their past.
And it has achieved that not just through the erasure of,
historic landscapes, but also through the privileging of a,
vision of history making in this case, public private model through urban renewal that itself builds an eraser,
eraser after eraser, right?
We never even think to question why it is, we’re only talking about the revolution until we step back and do it and that’s part of that, that problem.
So in that regard at least Loeb’s interest in thinking about boston’s past broadly across chronologies is pretty interesting.
And if I can ever do it, I would love to go back and dig a little harder to learn more about these people who charged with doing it.
Like Gladys Lyons who was one of the few women whose voice gets preserved in that story in the archive.
So more people doing the history, broader engagement with, you know,
all of its audiences, broader chronologies and you know, doing that helps us get away from the problems of profit.

Jake:
[1:41:59] Toward the end of the book, you conclude something along the lines of that’s something still lost in boston’s public history landscape. Then you ask whether we’d be be lost without the Freedom Trail.
So as you look at how stories about history are being told today,
in boston National Historic Park on the Freedom Trail, do you think that we’re living up to the Parks mission, I guess, and then to the the larger promise of what the park could be?

Seth:
[1:42:28] The most complicated, problematic and fascinating object in the collection of the boston National Historical Park is the Freedom Trail, right.

Jake:
[1:42:41] Yeah.

Seth:
[1:42:43] The park doesn’t own the trail, but it is the trail in many ways.
And the trail is a thing that can be interpreted.
And until it is right until the park steps back and asks along with its visitors and its neighbors, how did this trail get here?
Who drew it? Who makes the decisions about what gets on it?
What doesn’t And how have we used it Like until the park actually does that publicly and consistently, I don’t think it can achieve its its potential because anything else simply avoids,
the obvious problem of this trail, doing the remembering for us and preventing us from asking why why we should.
So it’s got to contend with the trail and by, you know, contending with the history of the freedom trail by making the trail of these sites of interpretation. The object of interpretation.
What you end up getting is a really fascinating history about urban renewal, about race, about gender, about all these stories that we’ve been talking about over the last two hours,
that generally don’t find much of a place anywhere in the park’s interpretive programming.

Jake:
[1:44:07] So speaking of two hours before I wrap us up, is there anything that I didn’t ask about here today that you wish I had?

Seth:
[1:44:08] Yeah.

[1:44:14] Oh well, you know, I should say invariably, people who aren’t crazy about my argument will say, but don’t you, university historians have some guilt in all of this to you must be guilty of something,
and we absolutely are part of the goal is to show that people who do history,
have for too long segregated themselves across spaces of class and prestige and identity.
And university historians have done that too. And you know, we should have been more deeply involved in all of this work and we should be better partners with the park service and its neighbors.
And we’re just not very good at doing it and we’re not great at preparing our students to do that either. So, so a lot of this work, it sounds very critical and in some ways it is, but a lot of it is self criticism too.
And um, I don’t know how powerfully that comes through in the book, but learning about the freedom trail and this park made me want to be a better historian. So, so this part could do better history.

Jake:
[1:45:18] So the book again is lost on the Freedom Trail and after folks pick that up and read it.
If they have questions they want to try to learn more about you about your work or follow you online, where should they go to do that?

Seth:
[1:45:33] They can find me on facebook, they can find me on twitter, they can search me out at the Center for Public History at Temple University.

Jake:
[1:45:41] Mhm.

Seth:
[1:45:42] Um, and I direct the center and we uh we and our students are often engaged in a variety of projects that pursue themes not unlike what you’ve discovered in the book. So, you can learn about us there.

Jake:
[1:45:56] Well Seth Bruggeman I just want to say thank you one more time very much for joining us today.

Seth:
[1:46:02] This is great. Thank you.

Jake:
[1:46:03] To learn more about Seth Bruggeman and his book Lost on the Freedom Trail.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 251.
We’ll have a link where you can purchase the book and support the show as well as a link to a city archives tumbler post where you can read the entire 1963 comic book put out by the greater boston chamber of commerce to promote the freedom trail that Seth and I talked about,
because it’s just a lot of fun.
Plus I’ll throw in a link to the mass History Alliance Awards page so I can brag about our star Award just a little bit more,
if you’d like to get in touch with us perhaps to congratulate me on that star award, you can email podcast at hub history dot com.
We’re hub history on twitter facebook and instagram although mostly twitter where you can go to hub history dot com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site. Hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode.
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Music

Jake:
[1:47:15] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.

[1:47:38] Covid.