The recent coverage of Whitey Bulger’s trial might have you wondering what other salacious tidbits you don’t know about your native (or adopted) city’s history. And you’re right to ask! The older, nobler bits of the city’s history are well-known, but the 1900s saw some less savory entries in the city’s history. If you want to count yourself as a true Bostonian, though, you need to know why longtime residents have developed such a stoic cynicism when they think about their city and its past.
So, when you’re buying your beach books for this summer, think about adding a couple of these tomes on Boston’s sordid past. (As a disclaimer: I have read some of these books; in other cases, I’ve done what I can to pick the best overview I can find on the subject.)
Let’s start with a bit more information on James “Whitey” Bulger, who, to the untrained eye, is an old man who’s on trial for some unspecified crime or crimes he must have committed decades ago. He stands accused of several murders associated with his time running one of Boston’s most notorious crime organizations, the Winter Hill Gang, and was recently caught after decades on the lam. What’s so special about that? No, organized crime isn’t unique to Boston. Here, though, two facts about the situation make Bulger’s story uniquely Boston.
First, Bulger’s brother, Billy Bulger, somehow rose to be president of the Massachusetts Senate at the same time his brother was running the Boston mob! For information on that, check out Boston Herald blowhard Howie Carr putting his skills to good use in The Brothers Bulger. Also, Bulger’s case was especially egregious because he was serving as an FBI informant and using his relationship with agent John Connolly to take out his enemies and escape arrest himself. The story served as the basis for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed: read about how the truth was stranger than fiction in Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil’s Black Mass.
If you’re fairly new in town, you’re used to Boston’s golden age of sports, in which one of the city’s teams wins a championship every other year or so. This just wasn’t always the case, and the problem was best epitomized by the Red Sox, who went through 86 years without a World Series win, were famously the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate, and suffered huge stretches in which everyone on the team hated each other. To read more about how good you really have it, check out this warts-and-all history of the Boston Red Sox.
Perhaps Boston’s worst “moment” in history was the decade-long crisis that resulted from the state Supreme Court’s 1965 decision to end segregation in schools, and a district court judge’s decision nearly a decade later in 1974 that the Boston school district was still segregated, and needed to be forcibly integrated by busing students to different schools across the city. The decade-long crisis that ensued gave the city a permanent black eye, revealed problems in the city’s race and class relations, and has led any Boston family with the means to send children to private school, even 30 years after the crisis ended. Find out more by reading one of the many books on the subject.
The West End was a great, diverse neighborhood full of town-house buildings like much of the rest of the city. This was, however, only until the years after World War II, when the area was chosen to be demolished through the eminent domain process. Countless immigrant families were displaced, and the area now houses condos and bland mid-rise buildings. See what it once looked like in this book.
Whitey Bulger notwitstanding, read up on the scariest crime story in Boston’s history with this review of the Boston Strangler case, and the possibility that the man who actually confessed to the crimes wasn’t the culprit.
Finally, briefly, in a previous blog post we’ve already touched on the Cocoanut Grove tragedy, but for more information, check this one out.
If you’re like me, and you’re not a Boston native, the best way to integrate yourself into the city is by looking back at its history. If you want to understand the way the city is now, that means more than just the Revolutionary War-era history.
Did I miss any good books about recent events in Boston? Tell us in the comments.
