Common Ground (98 page)

Tom Winship was as worried about the gunshots as anyone else; he was concerned for the security of his reporters, as well as by prospects of a prolonged feud with the city’s working-class Irish neighborhoods. But he wasn’t about to retreat from the battlefield. On October 8, the morning after the second volley of shots, Winship rapped out a quick note to Crocker Snow.

“Thanks for the memo to me and Dave. It’s a tight spot for all of us. But I’ll be damned if I think we should cave in, as you put it yourself, and call for a change in the plan the court ordered. That is premature…. We would lose respect of friend and foe to twist and turn at this point when a federal law is being flouted. I agree with Bob Healy that we have to stand fast now on the matter of principle, the way the
Globe
did back in 1880.”

The principle which Winship ascribed to his predecessors—defense of minority rights in a Yankee city—might have looked to others like enlightened self-interest, for the
Globe
of the 1880s had been a fragile enterprise, in dire need of a new constituency. Established in 1872 with lofty objectives, “the intelligent and dignified discussion of political and social ethics,” it found Boston’s aristocracy well served by the stately
Transcript
and indifferent to another quality journal. Only the persistence of merchant-prince Eben Jordan kept the foundering
Globe
afloat, and soon he launched a refitted version, shaped by his young general manager, Charles H. Taylor.

Abandoning the
Globe
’s carriage trade pretensions, Taylor turned to the city’s burgeoning working class, most of it now Irish, Catholic, and Democratic. Such readers had long received cold comfort from the Republicans who monopolized Boston’s editorial chairs. Taylor himself had been raised a Republican, serving for a time on the party’s state committee, but now he wasted little time in shucking that allegiance, labeling the
Globe
a “progressive Democratic newspaper” and “advocate [of] all liberal measures which will advance the interests of the masses.”

The
Globe
’s support for Irish rights—at home and abroad—was the natural corollary of its bid for a working-class audience. It gave lavish coverage to the Irish Land League’s campaign for reform of the landlord system and ran a
series on “rack rents.” On a matter of more immediate interest to its Catholic audience, the
Globe
demanded that priests be permitted to administer last rites in Boston’s hospitals. For years, dying immigrants had been forced to choose between hospital care and that ritual so critical to the repose of the Catholic soul. Ultimately most institutions capitulated, a famous victory long remembered by the paper’s grateful readers.

In refashioning his journal for a broader audience, Taylor broke with other hidebound traditions. Most Boston papers were aimed exclusively at men, but the
Globe
introduced household hints, recipes, and serialized novels for women. News was whatever interested people, and that included generous helpings of sports. Such frivolities helped the
Globe
transcend its politics. “If I had my way, I wouldn’t have a Democratic newspaper in the house,” grumbled one Victorian Yankee, “but I can’t keep the
Globe
out because my boy insists on reading the fool news about baseball.”

Despite his ardent support for the Irish, Taylor managed to avoid the shrill partisanship of Pulitzer and Hearst. Fair play was the
Globe
’s watchword, encapsulated in Taylor’s celebrated axioms which have been handed down through the years like stone tablets: “Try never to print a piece of news that would injure an innocent person”; “Always treat a man fairly in the
Globe
so you may meet him again and look him straight in the eye.” He wasn’t above pandering to the workingman’s taste for mayhem: one week began with “An Awful Crime” and ended “More Bloody Work.” But the grosser excesses of tabloid sensationalism were too sanguinary for his taste. He once suggested that Joseph Pulitzer would have “no appetite for breakfast if he did not find blood running down by the [New York
World
’s] column rules.”

His was a sunnier disposition, summed up by a paragraph which became the
Globe
’s credo and still hangs on a bronze plaque in the newspaper’s lobby:

For nearly two decades, this geniality paid off, helping the
Globe
become the region’s dominant newspaper. Its symbol was now a beaming, rotund gentleman in a top hat with a broad sash around his middle proclaiming: “The Largest Circulation in New England.” The Globe Man, as he became known, appeared daily on the front page and often elsewhere in the paper, shaking hands with friend and foe alike. Fat and prosperous, cheerful and complacent, the
Globe
grew increasingly disinclined to offend any segment of its hard-won readership. Taylor’s sympathy for the Irish did not signify a lasting commitment to the underdog. Oswald Garrison Villard of
The Nation
described him
as “a simple, sweet-natured person, undiscriminating, conventional, ignorant that there were such things as deep economic currents and terrible economic injustices.” As the years went by, the
Globe
’s fairness descended into timidity, its benevolence into sanctimony.

A crescendo of circumspection was reached in 1896 as Western radicals were assailing the gold standard, much beloved of Eastern conservatives. When William Jennings Bryan rode the “free silver” stampede to the Democratic presidential nomination, he posed a dilemma for New Englanders that was particularly excruciating for the
Globe
, which had long stamped its approval on any full-blooded Democrat.

A perplexed Taylor cabled James Morgan, his editorial director, at the convention: “What do we say now?”

“Don’t say anything,” Morgan wired back.

All that fall the editors kept their opinions to themselves, a high-minded impartiality that soon became a habit. Not for three-quarters of a century did the
Globe
again endorse a political candidate.

Increasingly, Taylor and Morgan shunned unequivocal stands on any issue. The
Globe
began signing its main editorials “Uncle Dudley,” after a popular tag line of the day, “Take it from your Uncle Dudley.” Rambling, philosophical disquisitions, “Uncle Dudleys” expounded lofty principles, embroidered with classical esoterica.

A retreat to the high ground proved especially convenient as Boston politics were appropriated by pugnacious Irishmen. The
Globe
’s Yankee executives were repelled by Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley, but the voters who elected such demagogues were the heart of the paper’s constituency, and for years the
Globe
went out of its way not to offend them. When a City Hall reporter exposed some of Curley’s shenanigans in
The Nation
, the publisher sternly admonished him, “You’ll lose all your following.”

The
Globe
played it just as safe on the biggest story of the twenties, the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Its reporter, the former war correspondent Frank Sibley, concluded that the pair was innocent, but the
Globe
kept him on a tight leash; on execution day he was covering a flower show. Another reporter, Gardner Jackson, unable to find an outlet for his indignation at the
Globe
, quit to edit the official bulletin of the Defense Committee. Editorially, the paper was even more skittish. Uncle Dudley’s only comment came the day the jury was impaneled, when he proclaimed that juries “work amazingly well. Human nature has a way of rising to unavoidable responsibilities.” It remained for
The Atlantic Monthly
to publish Felix Frankfurter’s trenchant analysis of the evidence, and for the conservative
Herald
to crystallize doubts about the verdict in a withering editorial that won the Pulitzer Prize. Through seven years of international debate, the
Globe
remained a timorous bystander.

The Great Depression only intensified the paper’s caution. By then, Charles Taylor had given way to his son, William O., a pallid figure who had majored in biblical history at Harvard and who could produce a scrap of scripture for every occasion. In 1932—when the
Globe
came within $30,000 of
going into the red—he blithely invoked Romans 8:18, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

But salvation was a long way off. By 1930, the
Globe
had to remove its pudgy symbol of preeminence, for no longer could it claim Boston’s largest circulation, much less New England’s. Both distinctions now belonged to the resurgent
Post
. Gaudy and flamboyant, it once gave away a motorcar a day, and won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing confidence man Charles Ponzi. Ultra-Democratic and super-Catholic, it unashamedly took up cudgels for the dispossessed as the
Globe
hadn’t dared to do in sixty years. Mixing campaigns for free streetcar transfers and lower gas rates with stories of sexual aberration and outrageous felony, it rapidly replaced the
Globe
as Boston’s working-class Irish newspaper.

The Hearst papers plied essentially the same trade, but somehow their enticements never matched the
Post
’s. For years, they gained much of their circulation by printing the daily Treasury number (known in Boston as the “nigger number”), an essential for those who played the policy game.

While the
Globe
’s old readership was eroded by the
Post
and Hearst, Boston’s upper-class constituency was preempted by the
Christian Science Monitor, Transcript, and Herald
.

The voice of the Christian Science mother church—and free, therefore, from other papers’ truckling to the Catholic Archdiocese—the
Monitor
consistently produced the city’s best municipal reporting. But, never truly a Boston newspaper, it was read more assiduously in Washington and Los Angeles than it was in its own backyard. Its prissy abstention from crime, disease, death, alcohol, and tobacco denied it a popular audience.

While the
Monitor
never quite found its niche in the city, the
Transcript
was, if anything, too secure in its. Every evening just at teatime it was placed—never thrown—on the doorsteps of proper Bostonians. For a century it had been scrupulously edited for “our kind of people,” offering departments like “The Churchmen Afield,” and “Ripples,” a yachting column which once expressed “the inability of the sailboat man to understand why anyone in his right mind should want to own a motorboat.” Releases from the Anti-Vivisection Society were published verbatim, invariably concluding: “Tea Was served. John Orth rendered several selections on the piano.” Well into the thirties, the
Transcript
cherished the old traditions, publishing a football extra a half hour after the Harvard game ended, dismissing its managing editor for permitting the term “sexual intercourse” to creep into a story. But its blood was running perilously thin. By 1936, the paper’s circulation was down to 31,000, barely enough to fill Harvard’s stadium.

By then, the majority of the Anglo-Saxon audience had shifted to the meatier
Herald
. The voice of State Street’s financial community and the Republican Party, it was owned by the First National Bank and the United States Shoe Machinery Corporation. Once linked to the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, the
Herald
was still anathema in Irish neighborhoods. But to old
Yankees, its prize-winning editorial page was the champion of fiscal responsibility and civic progress. Its more rambunctious evening companion, the
Traveler
, still sold well in the city, but the morning
Herald
increasingly found its readers in comfortable suburbs like Wellesley and Dover (while the
Herald
was delivered to the front door, the
Globe
often came through the back with the Irish help, becoming known in some circles as “the maid’s paper”).

Journalistic diversity is said to encourage aggressive reporting and bold advocacy. Yet in a city so fragmented by class, race, and ethnicity, competition often produced quite the opposite. With thirteen newspapers contending for Boston’s market—five in the morning, four in the evening, and four on Sunday—there were only two ways to play the game: either batten on one class or ethnic bloc, pandering to its every preconception, or strike the lowest common denominator, placating all, offending none.

Squeezed between the patrician and the proletarian, the
Globe
struggled to keep a foot in each camp. “We’re putting out a paper for the bottom half of the upper class, the middle class and the top half of the lower class,” an editor of that era once explained. “We try to give everyone a chance to be heard in our pages. When I make up page one, I try to find a story for everybody: a crime story for Joe Blow, a woman’s feature, something for the businessman, something for the kids.”

The papers’ commercial strategies revealed the same stratification. With its vast working-class audience, the
Post
monopolized national advertising—the cigarette, beer, and soap-flakes contracts from the big New York agencies. The Transcript and Herald took the fashionable retail trade. The
Globe
, on its broad middle course, cultivated classified advertising, a morsel for every want and need.

Demography and technology ultimately conspired to reduce this journalistic smorgasbord. As Boston’s gentry decamped for the countryside, their traditional provisioners went out of business altogether or followed them to the new suburban shopping malls, so undermining the
Transcript
’s advertising that, in April 1941, it decorously expired. Then, as radio and television drew national advertising from the
Post
, its owners sold the paper to John Fox, a South Boston Irishman turned Wall Street wheeler-dealer, who wielded it as a bludgeon in his personal crusade against Communism. Through the mid-fifties, the paper beat a relentless tattoo (“Red Hordes Storm Dienbienphu,” “Man Beaten by Red Gang”), relishing any opportunity to find an old Yankee enmeshed in the conspiracy (“Miss Anne P. Hale, 46, a social registerite, whose ancestors helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was suspended tonight by the [Wayland] School Committee because of illegal Communist activities”). Fox himself contributed a series on the “Christ-like devotion” of Senator Joseph McCarthy.