In this episode, Sara Fitzgerald joins us to discuss her new book The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime. It is the first book-length biography of Emily Hale, the longtime love and secret creative muse of poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote Emily Hale over 1100 letters over the decades of their complicated relationship. However, their relationship was mostly forgotten by history after their letters were locked away for 50 years after their deaths, to protect the innocent. By the time the archive was opened in January 2020, few scholars understood the depth of their relationship. This book reestablishes Hale, not only as a major influence on T.S. Eliot’s body of work, but also as her own woman. From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.
Tag: WWII
General Patton Invades Boston (episode 302)
On the first anniversary of D-Day, Boston was feeling festive. Yes, there was a somber editorial cartoon in the Globe picturing an allied cemetery in Normandy to remind people of the sacrifices that the nation had made, but Germany had just surrendered, making the sacrifice seem worthwhile. Now, on D+1 (or was it D+366?), the city would turn out to hail a conquering hero, as General George S Patton, Junior set foot on American soil for the first time in two and a half years. His speech in Boston honored the city’s wounded veterans but managed to deeply offend gold star families whose sons, fathers, and brothers had died under Patton’s command. Was this a simple slip of the tongue or a symptom of a deeper and more concerning malady, a closely guarded and dark secret?
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JFK and PT-109, 80 years later
80 years ago this month, on a tiny Pacific island, a legend was born. In the darkness before dawn on August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank a small, plywood boat commanded by a 26 year old Lieutenant Junior Grade named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In the hours and days that followed, young Jack Kennedy would prove to be a true American hero, swimming mile after mile through shark and crocodile infested waters, while towing an injured crew member by a strap clenched in his teeth. In the ensuing decades, PT-109 has become one of the most famous small craft in US Navy history, largely due to Kennedy’s actions. However, it also became a craven political ploy, when JFK and his father Joseph Kennedy used the story of PT-109 to launch a political career that would carry Jack Kennedy to the Oval Office.
The Nazi Spy Ship (episode 259)
When it came steaming into Boston Harbor 81 years ago this week, the fishing trawler Buskø was escorted by a Coast Guard cutter, with armed guards watching over her crew. The next day’s headlines declared that the US had captured a Nazi spy ship manned by Gestapo agents who were setting up secret bases in Greenland, but the truth turned out to be more complicated. The Busko was sailing under the Norwegian flag and manned by a Norwegian crew, yet their peaceful voyage to deliver supplies to isolated Norwegian hunters in the arctic was used to cover up Nazi intelligence gathering, so what would the fate of the ship be? And while war was raging in Europe, the United States was technically at peace, so on what charges were the Norwegian crew held at the East Boston immigration station?
The Nazis of Copley Square, with Professor Charles R Gallagher (episode 258)
Professor Charles R Gallagher’s recent book The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front is an in depth accounting of an organization that was wildly popular in Boston and beyond in the years before the US entered World War II. The Christian Front was deeply rooted in Catholic doctrines, but the value at its core was a form of anticommunism that members treated as interchangeable with antisemitism. Professor Gallagher will tell us how the group was founded and how the doctrine of Catholic Action and the Mystical Body of Christ theory enabled their hateful ideology. He’ll also introduce the intellectual leaders of the group, the streetfighters who led it down the primrose path to paramilitarism, and the Nazi spymaster who turned the group toward treason.
Continue reading The Nazis of Copley Square, with Professor Charles R Gallagher (episode 258)
The Boston Harbor Hermit (episode 241)
For about 12 years, the eccentric Ann Winsor Sherwin and her son William made a cozy home on an abandoned four-masted schooner that ran aground off Spectacle Island. Against all odds, she managed to hold off agents of the ship’s owners, the health commission, the Coast Guard, and the Boston Harbor Police. Abandoned by her no-good husband who thought he could make it big in Hollywood, Ann and her three children were destitute and homeless until they set up a home on the schooner, riding out the Great Depression rent-free on Boston Harbor. They were a family out of time, until the world (in the form of the US Army) came calling for young William.
POWs in the Boston Harbor Islands (episode 231)
Since the earliest days of the Bay Colony, prisoners of war have been held on the islands of Boston Harbor. This week, we’re sharing two classic stories of the Harbor Islands POWs from past episodes. One of them is about the Confederate prisoners who arrived at Fort Warren on Georges Island in the fall of 1861, fresh from the field of battle in North Carolina. They’d be joined by Maryland politicians who supported secession, the supposed diplomats Mason and Slidell, and eventually even Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, who didn’t seem to much appreciate Boston hospitality. 81 years later and a mile away on Peddocks Island, a group of unruly Italian prisoners were confined at Fort Andrews after starting what may have been the only soccer riot in Boston history at a South Boston prison camp.
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Blazing Skies: Boston’s Nike Missiles (episodes 226)
For almost 20 years, Nike missile batteries formed a suburban ring around Boston that ushered the city into the 1950s and the atomic age. The Ajax missile and its successor, the Hercules, were intended to defend Boston and its many military assets from Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole to rain nuclear destruction on the Hub. The ring of bases stretched from the South Shore to the North Shore and far inland, always ready to fire in 15 minutes or less. The Nike program was an open secret, with base gates sometimes thrown open for the public and reporters alike. But there were more closely guarded secrets, as well. Like the fact that the Ajax missile wasn’t really equipped to engage modern jet bombers. Or the fact that a successful interception by the later Hercules would result in a nuclear detonation in our own backyards, with tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured.
Continue reading Blazing Skies: Boston’s Nike Missiles (episodes 226)
Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)
At the outbreak of World War II, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services. Not the CIA, which would come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services. Before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service. And before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS, young Julia McWilliams was recruited by the OSS, where she traveled the world and fell in love with Paul Child and exotic food. Listen to this week’s episode to learn about Julia Child at war: how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the Asian theater of war, and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen.
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Literal Nazis (episode 215)
They stockpiled guns and ammunition. They built homemade bombs. They had a hit list of a dozen members of Congress who were targeted for assassination. They believed themselves to be patriots, with soldiers and police officers among their ranks. They rallied under the motto of America First, but they planned to overthrow our Constitutional government and install a fascist dictatorship. Believe it or not, I’m not talking about the insurrection on January 6, 2021, but instead a plot that the FBI uncovered in January 1940. The subsequent investigation threw a spotlight on a group called the Christian Front that made its headquarters at Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel, promoting violent attacks on Jewish Bostonians while accepting covert funding and support from a Nazi spymaster who flew the swastika proudly from his home on Beacon Hill.