Douglass shand tucci biography of williams

None except their human form. They of the great list behave like our idea of the human being; they of the ignominious sub-stratum do not—because they are not. In contrast to all these figures, however, Cram actually approved of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In a word, it will be conditioned not by the quantitative standard but by the qualitative standard.

Cram married in , and the union, which ended with his death in , produced three children. The University Bookman Follow. Douglass Shand-Tucci, a Harvard-educated independent scholar, is founder of the extraordinary new history site www. Shand-Tucci's most recent book "magisterial" -- London's William Morris Gallery director Peter Cormack is the second volume of his study of the American architect Ralph Adams Cram University of Massachusetts Press, , the first volume of which, Boston Bohemia "brilliant, historic, profoundly relevent scholarship" -- Harvard professor Peter Gomes was published by the same press in Martin's, following on the Boston gay history theme of Boston Bohemia,has also helped to shape recent T.

Eliot studies. There had been "public" libraries in Europe even in ancient times, but they were never open to all classes — barefoot newsboys, for instance — and even for those classes who were welcome, none were circulating or lending libraries; rather, scrolls could only be read on the premises. The tax-supported circulating public library open to all, like its sister, the modern public art museum, is an Anglo-American creation of the 19th-century.

Hardly less important was the new thought and breakthroughs in several fields that occurred in Copley Squares institutions — the pioneering work of the father of brain surgery, for example, Harvey Cushing, at Harvard Medical School next to the Public Library — and the often seminal Lowell Lectures of the Lowell Institute in the square, under the auspices of which William James lectured free to all on his latest work on mental states and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr on the Common Law, the origin of his famous book on the subject.

Similarly the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It is true that business was no small thing to the Boston Brahmin. Nathan Appleton could say in that he knew of "no purer morality in any department of life than that of the counting house," evidence that "throughout the 19th century Boston's commercial and intellectual communities lived together in easy harmony.

Indeed, qualms about a too great emphasis on money-getting surfaced noticeably --according to Paul Goodman in his Ethics and Enterprize: The Values of a Boston Elite — when Boston was at its economic height, a generation or two before the city's late 19th-century business decline. Henry Lee Higginson was among the most scornful, finally judging "material success as a corrupter of his generation.

In , at the peak of his business career, he lamented" according to Russell Adams, "to his literary cousin, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 'I have become a money-getter. Ten years later Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony — and even the New York musicologist Joseph Horowitz in Classical Music in America , who entirely misunderstands most things Brahmin, credits that legacy so highly he calls Higginson "a colossus, an American hero.

Douglass shand tucci biography of williams

And of the literate world in the s — at least in the Atlantic world — that would be Boston! Recall Richard Hofstadter's declaration that "the Puritan founders had their terrible faults, but the Puritan clergy came as close to being an intellectual ruling class. There is a sure sign of Puritan values, and an economic one too! And it was as sure a sign of Brahmin values in the 19th century when British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in the mid 20th century pronounced at the end of the Brahmin era on what would be seen as its chief legacy, that "insofar as the world of learning posses a capital city, Boston with its neighboring institutions, approximates the position that Paris held in the Middle Ages.

How long is startlingly obvious when one considers the temple — the stately vestibule of the city's storied public library in Copley Square — 20th century Boston decided upon for the statue of the governor, Sir Henry Vane the younger — who presided over that "Great and General court houlden at Boston on October 28 … that passed the legislation" in Morison's words, "that founded Harvard.

More so the fact that its chief votary in the s was John Brooks Wheelwright, one of America's foremost Modernist poets--and a Marxist-- illustrating the sort of continuities Bostonians find so fructifying. The chief continuity, furthermore -- easy to miss because it becomes as it evolves two-fold -- is that the passion for leaning of the first Puritan generation was compounded within two generations, still in the 17th-century, by an increasing passion too for liberal learning.

Twelve generations of Wheelwrights preceded the poet at Harvard, spanning the three centuries we have just leaped. Furthermore, when Wheelwright XII, himself the son of one of Bostons leading architects, became the sort of activist at Harvard who could so chastise Boston's library, he was in his view emulating Wheelwright I, a Puritan ministerial ally of Vane three hundred years previously.

Both the Puritan governor and the Marxist poet haunt the BPL's vestibule-temple still, Vane most obviously, who as Erikson points out espoused "a brand of Puritanism. In this world view, Wheelwright's too, "the Antinomian controversy of the s, the abolitionist movement led by [William Lloyd] Garrison and [Wendell] Phillips and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau have to be assessed as expressive of leftward moving and more militantly democratic forces within the bourgeois revolutionary movements," each of which "wave of revolution," according to Wheelwright biographer Alan Wald, was led by men and women who "came from the upper strata of society.

Indeed, what stands out historically about the governor is also what stands out about the poet. Was there ever more elegant, more confident a cavalier than this booted, spurred and plumed figure putting on his riding gloves? A convinced Puritan — Vane would ultimately be beheaded by the royalists — he nonetheless never tried to hide where he came from, that he was an aristocrat.

In the s it was not plumes but a raccoon coat that conveyed Wheelwright similar stand. Indeed, when he was once pulled out of a Depression bread line where he was proselytizing by a policeman who noticed how well dressed he was, he protested "I am a poet. It would become characteristic of the Puritan-Patriot-Brahmin continuum, highlighting the trajectory of Boston historically as an intellectual center.

Although on the all important surface, custom reigned, the overtones, so to speak, disclosed not a narrowing, but a broadening of attitude; not a more and more rigid conservatism, but a more wide-ranging liberalism. Indeed, by as early as in the s Bostonians counted among their leadership a growing number of liberal Puritans. Nor is there any secret how this came about really.

This liberalism first appeared in England, Samuel Eliot Morison pointed out, and it was Morison who elsewhere explained the differences between Harvard and Yale's development, "New Haven was a small place, Connecticut a rural colony. Evidence of this 17th century liberalism abounds in both the arts and the sciences. Boston's reception of the Copernican revolution, for example..

Edward J. Pfieffer, the historian of science, in Thomas Glick's The Comparative Reception of Darwinism in America , casts his mind back to an earlier century and recounts "American acceptance of new scientific thought — for example, Galileo's at 17th century Harvard," an acceptance Pfeifer writes that has "been taken by historians as the mark of a sophisticated but still colonial culture.

What Harvard inherited from the English collegiate scene architecturally was the typology of the cloister — serene, harmonious, but also insular, introverted, discouraging contact with the world. However, when a new architectural form emerged in the English Cambridge — the open three-sided court, seen at Gonville and Caius College and then at Emmanuel, John Harvard's college, only 45 years before Harvard was founded in far away Boston — Harvard was quick to take it up.

Interestingly, in Bainbridge Bunting's and Margaret Henderson Floyd's architectural history of Harvard, they refer to the same John Coolidge who so unusually well understood deliberately Balkanized Boston to explain why Harvard was in this respect so innovative. It was another aspect of liberalism. Coolidge's conclusion was that it was a desire for "interaction with the city.

Historian Rick Kennedy in the American National Biography testifies to the importance of "the example of [Brattle] gave to his students of an orthodox Puritan committed to the ideals of the founders of New England, but open to the beginnings of the Enlightenment. Max Savelle details the matter: "it was Thomas Brattle … and his brother William who together with John Leavertt, later president of Harvard, organized the liberal Puritan dissidents in Boston by the creation of the Battle St.

Church in The organization of the Brattle … indeed, marked … the beginning of the liberalization … of Puritan doctrine. Of course liberal does always equate with patriot. But to peruse the membership lists of the Brattle Church is to discover therein Abigail and John Adams and John Hancock, patriots all on the verge of becoming Brahmins, and nimble enough Brahmins that the Torys had hardly fled to England before the triumphant patriots were seen to be moving into their Boston mansions.

Like the new Napoleonic nobility whose riposte to the old Bourbon one was that they were their own ancestors, thank you, Boston's now sole and unrivaled patriot aristocrats were a case of what one can only, again, call "liberal conservatism. Though he believed that all were created equal, Adams saw that as "a statement of personal rights" according to Richard Brookhiser, "not that all are approximately or potentially equal in condition and therefore equal in their political rights.

They were beauty, wealth, birth, genius and virtues. He argued too that any of the first three can at any time overbear the. He possessed himself only the last two, and had many times been defeated by the first three, thus foreseeing Roosevelt's and Bushes and Kennedys and Clintons and Gores alike. It is the tribute democracy pays to aristocracy.

It remains the oldest written constitution in the world still in use. It would be too much to call the Massachusetts Constitution a Brahmin constitution, or even a Unitarian constitution, I suppose, but Adams was certainly both, and Jefferson the first, he of the "Jefferson Bible," out of which Jefferson had razored out all miracles! In post-revolutionary Boston there was no need for such discretion, and the equivalent of Jefferson's very private Bible were the very public services of King's Chapel, from the old Anglican liturgy of which all Trinitarian references were removed by America's first Unitarian Church, itself become the flagship of what historian M.

DeWolfe Howe called "the Boston religion," consolidated in Boston in with the founding of the American Unitarian Association after the new philosophy had established its dominance at Harvard Divinity School. Led by a saintly Christian humanist, William Ellery Channing, Unitarianism's thrust was that "to understand God we begin," in Channing's words, "by looking inside ourselves.

What Diarmaid McCullough observed of the 17th century Baltzell observed of de Tocqueville in the 18th, when he reported that the Bay Colony must contain the highest proportion of educated men the world had ever seen. There is the underpinning of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Holmes is a hugely misunderstood and undervalued figure today, more often judged by his poetry than his prose, and as entirely a literary and not at all a medical figure.

Charles Bryan, a medical school professor at the University of South Carolina, can help us here. He sees, as does William Dowling in his recent study of Holmes' years in Paris, that far from being a being a provincial, Holmes was a cosmopolitan, one reason he ended up Dean of Harvard Medical School. Writes Byran: "Holmes had a hand in every great medical advance of the 19th century; in aseptic practices and articulation of germ theory.

I think at once of a friend who insisted to me that the Boston Brahmin must be understood as not just a "custodian of taste, but an agent of thought. It is not for another year, untill , that a learned aristocracy arises significantly in The Professor's Story. About the first aristocracy, "merely the richer part of the community," Holmes writes that "some of these great folks are well-bred, some of them are only purse-proud and assuming," but, he continues, "the millionocracy" — note the sarcasm — "is not at all an affair of persons or families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element.

An "aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence," Holmes pronounces it "a caste, not in any odious sense, by the repetition of the same influence generation after generation. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside.

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale.