MASSACHUSETTS: The Kids of Dorchester

He was running down the street of Boston’s Allston section, a fine-looking kid of seven, perhaps eight. He was slashing with a stick, shouting “A Jew, a Jew, let’s chase him!” The Jew, a lad of seven, perhaps eight, was scuttling off, hard as he could go. The Christian Science Monitor man, passing by, had seen it all before, this aggressiveness, this haunted fear, these ugly cramps in the fine faces of boys, born in Boston, raised in Boston, slugging it out in Boston. But neither the Monitor nor any other Boston paper had talked of the childish misery—not until New York’s PM (and John Roy Carlson’s national bestseller, Under Cover) had given Governor Saltonstall “a rude awakening” (TIME, Nov. 1).

Four weeks later the awakening had deteriorated into routine politics. Shrewd, ambitious Attorney General Robert T.

Bushnell saw a superb chance to settle old accounts with Boston’s Police Commissioner Joseph F. Timilty. Policeman Timilty’s popularity had survived ugly rumors of police corruption, of criminal incompetence in connection with last year’s Cocoanut Grove fire (492 burned to death).

The Commissioner, who until November lived as though he had never heard of an anti-Semite in Boston, warned “my Jewish friends” to beware of the Attorney General.

What began as a sincere inquiry into why the people of Boston do not love their neighbors ended with their getting a new Police Commissioner. Last Friday the Governor appointed 65-year-old Colonel Thomas F. Sullivan, a South Boston Irish Democrat, to succeed Timilty. Commissioner Sullivan’s first statement on Boston antiSemitism: “Kid stuff. . . .” His first official act: to suspend six police officials indicted for conspiracy with gambling operators.

But nothing was done about the operators who for years have gambled with Boston’s civil peace and civic dignity. There were still the Jews on Dorchester’s congested Blue Hill Avenue, living in inimical neighborhood to the Irish on Codman Square. Jewish and Irish kids were still tense when they met. In a few years the city will be theirs, and it will still be the same city of Irish and Jews and Yankees. But there was no one who really knew how to make them like to live together. The Governor seemed tired and drawn, the victorious Attorney General was still suspected of trying to “out-Dewey Dewey,” the ex-Police Commissioner was mending his fences for a comeback, and there was still the ugly tension in the fine faces of the kids of Dorchester.