Books: The Pleasure of Hating

LIBERTY’S CHOSEN HOME

by ALAN LUPO

330 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

The question has become a shibboleth: Why has the North’s most violent resistance to integrated schools arisen in Boston, the place John Greenleaf Whittier called “Christian liberty’s chosen home”? Alan Lupo, a onetime reporter (the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Boston Globe) and dogged historical researcher, provides some thoughtful answers.

Lupo writes out of sympathy and sadness for a city afflicted by tensions that stretch far beyond its precincts. Boston failed to cope peacefully with its school-busing crisis of 1974 in part because Boston had never been a unified city. It was schizophrenic: “A chic Boston, of specialty shops and bars and steak houses with hokey names” and “the old Boston, increasingly angry at the threats to its life-style and existence, convinced that somebody else was getting everything, while it was getting nothing more than the shaft.” Boston’s cursing, stone-throwing resistance to busing was not the reaction of “a liberal city being hypocritical.” Instead, it was “a parochial city with a long history of ethnic and racial distrust and bigotry” integrating its schools with fear, anger and some violence—but with remarkably few deaths or serious injuries.

With a storyteller’s gift for narrative and vivid detail, Lupo enlivens the somewhat familiar history of poor, brawling Irish immigrants invading the Boston of the 1800s and suffering harassment from the threatened Yankees. He readily accepts Henry Adams’ description of the Puritan-descended New Englander, who “in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few.”

As the Yankees retreated to the suburbs, the Irish learned to organize the wards, seize power and dispense the meager benefits of city hall patronage. But in the interests of city growth and a progressive image, they yielded in the 1960s to wrecking-ball blitzes, which savaged homogeneous neighborhoods, displaced the poor and forged a distrust of city hall and all governments beyond.

It was in that febrile setting that a school-integration plan ordered the busing of children between the city’s most antagonistic neighborhoods (Irish Catholic South Boston and black Roxbury). It was resisted by every defiant or foot-dragging means possible by a Boston School Committee that exploited the town’s inherent bigotry and fear. Lupo contends that Mayor Kevin White, a progressive but hard-nosed political pro, saved Boston from chaos in 1974 by pleading, cajoling and threatening the city’s many factions—including its antibusing police—through wearying hours of public meetings, private coffee klatches, telephone calls and stormy sessions with top aides. White even assailed President Gerald Ford for expressing personal opposition to busing at the height of Boston’s agony. For all that, the mayor wound up sitting “alone on a bench on Boston Common with his head in his hands. He could no more hide his emotions from the city than it could from him.”

The strengths of Liberty’s Chosen Home do not lie in the narrative but in its careful dissection of conservatives who latch onto factional tensions for political gain—and liberals who preach urban change from the safety of manicured suburbs. The author contends, a bit too harshly, that many class-conscious suburbanites “really think they are better than the people they left be hind.” Yet America will not have an integrated society, Lupo argues, until “those artificial lines” between city and suburb no longer block urban minorities from better jobs, better housing and, yes, better schools. It is one thing to warn, another to prove the point with precept and example. The placards have gone, the level of the polemic has dropped several decibels, and Lupo’s tocsin carries the ring of melancholy truth: without the compassion of their surrounding neighborhoods, it is not merely cities that are doomed.

Ed Magnuson