The Boston Evening Transcript: The Athens of America

by Charles W. Morton

THE Boston of the 1930s had two more newspapers than it has today, and the competition in the presentation of the local news was relatively lively. There was little or no solidarity on the part of the press: if one paper unearthed a good story, the others would play it down as far as possible and even ignore it altogether, a tendency which persists today. But the irresistibly big story brought big local coverage, and the Boston Evening Transcript was as energetic a competitor as any of the larger papers.

The community, then as now, was fantastically corrupt. Always, in one court or another, some wonderful “case" was unfolding: the Gillette case, the Dolan case, the Coakley case, the Jarvis case, the Rettich case, the Mackey case — cases involving judges on the bench, leaders of the business world, bandits of Alcatraz caliber, and a dependable succession of public officials. I am unable to find offhand the source of Boston’s description as the “Athens of America,”but America’s Athenians of the early thirties included some highly original performers, all operating sometimes under a set of ground rules and local attitudes that would take aback even the most easygoing moralist.

There was, for example, the “inspector” employed by the state to make an annual audit of local stockbrokers, one of whom was found to have dissipated some half million dollars of his customers’ money. The inspector, in turn, was found to have been bribed each year for not troubling to “inspect” the actual securities, long vanished, which the broker’s balance sheet showed as assets. It was, no doubt, a perfectly commonplace kind of larceny for that period, but the Boston twist was supplied by the inspector’s lawyer when I asked him if his client had been fired as a result of the disclosures.

“Of course not,” the lawyer replied. “They can’t fire him. He’s under Civil Service.”

A fine fragment of the Boston point of view comes to mind from another bribery case. The chairman of the Boston School Committee, a South Boston dentist, was on trial, charged with soliciting and receiving large sums for job appointments in the schools, and an eminently respectable witness had just testified that he had declined the offer of the position of Director of Music in the schools, subject to a payment of $5000 to the chairman. Counsel for the defense arose to crossexamine. His technique would scarcely have fooled a child, but it was plain that he fancied himself as embarking on a masterly entrapment of the witness.

“You knew that this job carried a salary of $7000?" the lawyer began. Getting an affirmative answer, he shot a meaningful glance at the jury.

“And isn’t it a fact that the man who is Director of Music buys all the musical instruments used in the schools?”

“I believe that is so.”

Another significant glance for the jury, and the lawyer put his next question so casually as to suggest that he hardly dared hope for another affirmative. “And doesn’t the Director of Music also buy all the textbooks and music used in the schools?”

“Yes,” replied the witness. “That is my understanding of it.”

The cross-examiner nodded sagely. He had got nowhere, but he seemed to feel that the encirclement of the witness was complete. All that remained was to pounce. The pounce:

“And do you stand there and expect this jury to believe that you wouldn’t be willing to pay $5000 for a job like that?”

Less visible to the community in general than the showier of the “cases” was Boston’s status as the national capital, more or less, of the “boiler rooms,” that is, rooms equipped with nothing more than a battery of telephones on which salesmen called prospective victims from coast to coast and persuaded them to buy worthless stock. Stock swindlers bobbed up and vanished in other places, but the Boston operators had a perennial quality, and it was no uncommon thing for one of their better coups to yield them a million or two for what amounted to eight or ten months’ work.

The secret of the Boston stock swindlers’ durability was twofold: they scrupulously avoided swindling any resident of Massachusetts, and federal and state authorities in the Athens of America amiably disclaimed any jurisdiction over what they did from their Boston base to the gullible in other states. I believe there was a tendency for the promoters to tread lightly in the other New England states and New York, the farmers of the Middle West and California being the most responsive to the flatteringly expensive long-distance calls all the way from Boston. A single month’s telephone bill for one of these promotions ran as high as $125,000, and the telephone company, with its customary efficiency, devised a system of “sequence calls” which enabled a salesman to proceed from one victim to the next with scarcely a moment’s delay. He simply provided the longdistance operator each morning with a list of the day’s prospects; the calls, beginning in the East and working westward through the time zones as the day wore on, would be dealing with the Californians by late afternoon.

Forecasting a sharp rise in the market price of the worthless stock was the gist of the telephoned sales talk, and a few days later the victim would receive the financial page of a Boston newspaper, proving by published figures of transactions on the Boston Curb Exchange that the rise had indeed occurred as predicted. It was quite easy to make a stock go up and down on the Boston Curb Exchange in those days by means of fictitious trades known as “wash” sales, and after a few weeks or months of correct forecasts over the phone, backed by those reassuring clippings from the newspapers — including the Boston Evening Transcript — investors from Ashtabula to Petaluma were ready to get in on the ground floor and stand by for the killing.

“Let the buyer beware” might reasonably have been the motto of the Boston Curb Exchange, which felt strongly in behalf of the constitutional right of one American to swindle another. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 incurred its immediate disapproval, and the Curb’s spokesman, on eventually receiving the first expression of interest in its affairs from the SEC, said to me, “It’s like living under the dictatorship of a Hitler.” But the Curb was not to live long, dictatorship or no: it went hastily out of business the very next day.

BOSTON’S stage censorship seems to generate fewer causes célèbres nowadays than it did during the tenure of John M. Casey, a former trap drummer in a burlesque theater who had the misfortune to lose an arm and who became clerk of the city’s licensing division and ex officio the sole arbiter of what could or could not be said or done on a Boston stage. He was widely hailed for what was called “The Casey System,” which few of his admirers ever troubled to explain: it consisted, in brief, of threatening to withdraw the license of any theater, on the grounds of fire hazards or other menaces to the public safety, in which a producer refused to follow Casey’s censorial dictates. On occasion, when he regarded a show as too dirty to be tolerable, even with all sorts of deletions and changes — Strange Interlude, for example, The Children’s Hour, and many others — the show was forbidden to open at all. Juno and the Paycock was prohibited on the grounds that it portrayed a priest in an unfavorable light. Attempts by producers to circumvent Casey, in various courts, were invariably unsuccessful: the theater owners had no choice but to sit tight and say nothing.

It fell to me to cover in the early thirties a vast banquet which the grateful city tendered Casey on the occasion of his retirement. One phrase in particular stands out from the torrent of city hall oratory which “paid tribute,” as the newspapers like to put it, to the guest of honor, describing him, at the end of his long career, as “a man whose heart is sweet and clean and whose accounts are in perfect order.” The climax of the banquet came when the manager of the Old Howard burlesque theater, which had presented without molestation from Casey and with only brief tiffs with the police some of the nastiest shows imaginable throughout Casey’s tenure, handed over to him $1000 in gold as “a token of esteem,” etc, etc. Casey’s successor, incidentally, was a son-in-law of a brother of Mayor Curley’s, who said he had no real experience in the theater and no “system” such as Casey’s. “I guess I’ll just hafta use my head,” was his statement to the Transcript.

The city censor needed no assists from anyone and held his theater prerogatives strictly for himself, but the New England Watch and Ward Society kept a sharp eye on misdeeds elsewhere, or at any rate, it purported to. Somehow, it never seemed to concern itself with the more substantial criminality of the community, but rather with small moral lapses, a questionable book, an indecent photograph, or the possibility that not all the Mr. and Mrs. John Smiths registered at “overnight cabins”—precursors of the motel—were in truth man and wife. It was, in short, a livelihood for its executives and one which was easily perpetuated by frightening a sufficient number of donors — usually embittered spinsters — with the proposition that things were rapidly going from bad to worse. I am embarrassed to recall the innocence with which I went to its offices one day, just as a matter of curiosity, to ask why the Society did not move against a massive situation in the police department in which a lieutenant in charge of the Prohibition unit was just about running the city.

I was turned over to one of the Society’s principal figures, a man who looked like a caricature of the prurient snoop, with a great air of false piety about him. The phrasing of my initial inquiry was careless and rather vague, and I simply asked why the Society had not taken action against “the big stuff” — hardly the language for a Transcript man, I must admit. But to the Watch and Ward man, a really big situation could mean only one thing: Women. I did not know this at the moment, and it took me some time to realize it.

“You don’t understand,” he began. “It’s not like the old days.”

I could not see what the old days had to with Prohibition, but I nodded. “No, it’s all different from what it used to be. These women are scattered all over the city. They work by themselves. They have a small apartment, or maybe even a single room, and there’s no way of keeping track of them.

“Now, in the old days,” he went on, “you simply went around to one of these places. Everyone knew where they were. Big places. You simply rang the bell — ” His voice hoarsened. “They showed you into a parlor. A number of young girls would come in. You’d take your pick — and you’d go upstairs with her!”

The Watch and Ward man seemed to realize suddenly that a highly enthusiastic note had crept into his recital. “So I’m told,” he added, primly.

THERE were, of course, other phenomena of the period in the Athens of America that were neither heinous nor detestable. The event known as the Horses’ Christmas Tree, for example, was designed to gladden the heart of the Boston work horse, to ply the animal with perhaps unaccustomed delicacies, and to share with it the sense of well-being enjoyed by others at Christmastime.

Handsomely decorated and well supplied with sugar lumps, apples, carrots, and various goodies, the horses’ tree was raised each year in Postoffice Square, shortly before Christmas, by the Massachusetts S.P.C.A. A great drive was put on to induce the ever-diminishing number of peddlers and draymen still using horses to bring them around to an afternoon of jollification, and no horse went away from the square with the sense of having hung up a stocking that never got filled. The Society’s men bustled around from horse to horse, with buckets of water for the thirsty and distributing the gifts. A real old-time horse-drawn traffic jam filled the square.

As a news story, the Horses’ Christmas Tree was a punitive assignment, given only to a callow newcomer or to a veteran staff man who the cityeditor thought needed taking down a peg or two, but it was one of those Boston phenomena involving “our kind of people” — not including, of course, the peddlers and draymen — and it had to be covered. Inevitably, like a college commencement, or the arrival of the departmentstore Santa Claus, or any other annual fixture, the Horses’ Christmas Tree had a certain sameness from year to year. To be assigned to it was an indignity, and the news staff, when I first went to work at the Transcript, still enjoyed recounting the tale of the reporter who had covered, a few years earlier, the long salvage operations off Provincetown required to raise the submarine S-4, sunk with all hands in a collision. It had been a hard and sometimes dangerous interval. The reporter had judged his work to be excellent, and there was a tinge of pomposity in his manner when the story ended and he finally returned to the city room. The city editor, a fire-eater whom I am glad to say I never knew, looked at him coldly. “Down to Postoffice Square,” said the city editor, “and cover the Horses’ Christmas Tree.”

As in the case of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, on Staten Island, whose supply of indigent old seamen reportedly became so low that it was necessary to ransack the Great Lakes for prospective beneficiaries, the Horses’ Christmas Tree was a waning benefaction. Only two horses put in an appearance at its final occasion, shifted by this time to Boston Common, in 1946.

THERE were other odd assignments, especially when the news was slack and the city editor — the one we disliked —could indulge himself in them. They took us to many a “service club” luncheon, no worse and no better than the same occasions anywhere else in the country: the members sang the same songs — Jingle Bells, Smiles, Moonlight Bay, and such — and there was the same 25-cent line for the Kiwanian failing to remove his coat on a hot day and lunch in his shirt sleeves. I don’t know why I might have expected better, but the food was the same too: fruit cup (canned), cold ham and potato salad in the summer and hot ham and scalloped potatoes in the winter, with a slab of chocolate-vanilla-strawberry ice cream at all seasons to wind it up.

Interviews were another great outlet for the stray thoughts of the city editor, and the Transcript always covered at great length the revivalists who appeared every year or two at Tremont Temple, where they usually set up their base camp. I remember one in particular, whose posters described him as “ The Man Who Looks and talks Like Abraham Lincoln.” He was backstopped by his brother, who sang and played a “genuine goldplated hand saw.”I have heard West Indian café musicians evoke the subtlest and most charming sounds from a hand saw, but the evangelist’s brother made it sound like the howl of a coyote or the wailing of the damned. Both men, artfully dressing the part, did have a somewhat Lincolnesque appearance, and neither was at all backward in explaining to the reporters and photographers the points of resemblance. Frank Colby, the Transcript’s photographer, had no more liking for evangelists than he had for the police, and he had worked out a formula for making pictures of them that was on a par with the great Furniture Moving Act (mentioned in the February Atlantic) as a matter of self-entertainment. The genial fraud in this case was to insist on a pose showing the evangelist “in action,” so to speak, rather than in spiritual meditation or repose or exhibiting his preferred profile, like a Barrymore. The action shot called for raising the right hand, forefinger extended, in a minatory gesture, and cupping the left hand, at about elbow height, as if to receive the coming vigorous downstroke of the right. “And none of that big old smile,” Frank would order. “You’ve got to look serious.”

All the evangelists that we ever covered were glad to concur with Frank’s suggestions, some of the veterans even striking the prescribed attitude without coaching. In these cases Frank would ask the reporter to correct, slightly, the angle of the left (or right) arm of the subject on the grounds that the hand was too high (or too low). On one occasion we managed to make a picture of two young evangelists of college age — apprentices, one might call them—facing each other in the classic cliché pose, threatening each other with the brandished forefinger.

It was taken for granted that interviews with the evangelists, or the harangues they delivered at their public meetings, would yield nothing substantial in the way of news, and the reporters enjoyed concerting a sequence of behavior that reflected this circumstance and at the same time seemed to befit the occasion. Whether we were taking notes from an interview or sitting at a press table directly in front of and below the speaker at a meeting, the routine was the same: all the reporters would begin writing at top speed with the evangelist’s first words. This would continue for two or three minutes. Apparently, every word was being taken down for use in extenso, and the evangelist, who had never before found himself talking to so diligent a group of note takers, was beaming with satisfaction. “Now, the main purpose of my coming to Boston,” he would be saying, “is to —” At this point, by prearranged signal, each reporter would stop writing, lean back, and conspicuously return his pencil to his pocket. All would look politely, even hopefully, at the speaker, but the note taking was plainly over, and the whole group would get up and leave a moment or two later, giving a friendly nod or smile to the speaker as they left. The objective, so amiably realized, was the complete and abrupt melting away, for no reason, of a press activity that had seemed to be going great guns.

(To be continued)