A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1900-2000, Part I: The Turn of the Century Through Plan E

      With streetcars, electricity, and more, Cambridge was already a modern city by the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, it was in for a number of significant changes over the next several decades. MIT moved in, immigration continued but trends in sources of immigration changed, the Great Depression and the First World War made their mark, and the people voted in a new system for electing the city council and school board. Life in early twentieth-century Cambridge was characterized by factional tensions, discussion and debate, both cultural and political.

       The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861, but for its first fifty years, it was on the other side of the river, and many people called it Boston Tech. Appropriately enough, it was a technological change of sorts that caused MIT to decide to move: the land that had been created and groomed when Cambridge built seawalls on the Charles sat undeveloped. The school had been looking for a new campus, and while some MIT affiliates didn't like the proposed Cambridge location, the loudest protests came from Harvard. The older school's president, Charles William Eliot, had tried to absorb or buy MIT three times, and had failed. By the time the Cambridge move was in the works, the president was A. Lawrence Lowell, who worried that MIT would add to the city's tax burden. Since its inception, Harvard had not paid taxes on its ever-growing amounts of land, and Lowell feared that MIT would be the tipping point at which the city started asking for taxes. It wasn't until other cities started showing interest in enticing the school that the city of Cambridge made an offer to MIT. The university started construction in 1911 and moved in 1916. Cambridge never did start asking the schools to pay taxes, because they decided to pay the city an annual lump sum instead.¹

       Of course, many Harvardians saw MIT as competition for their monolithic status. Harvard did not stop producing important scientific and technological advancements, but ask any Cantabridgian today and you'll know which school has the reputation for that type of innovation. On the other hand, a Harvard-centric literary scene began to bloom in the early twentieth century. Writers from e. e. cummings to T. S. Elliot to Thomas Wolfe attended the school, and many had lasting connections to the area.² Both schools also educated modern architects like H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan, and in fact, Cambridge was one of the meeting grounds of several modern architectural styles.³

       While Old Cambridge was dominated by Harvard and East Cambridge gained its own university presence, the rest of the city was very much working class and populated by first and second generation Americans as well as immigrants. Early twentieth-century immigrants included Swedes, Russians, Portuguese, Poles, Armenians, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs.⁴ The Irish population that had once been marginalized in Cambridge became a significant force in local politics by the turn of the century. In 1901 Cambridge elected its first Irish mayor, John H. H. McNamee, and the city's government was dominated by the Irish for the next forty years.⁵

       Immigrants in Cambridge did not form distinct, homogeneous neighborhoods like Boston's North End or Chinatown. East Cambridge and Cambridgeport were settled by a potpourri of cultures, but a sense of community by national origin did exist, as could be seen in houses of worship (mostly Catholic, but separated by national group) and in voting patterns.⁶

       The newer ethnic groups faced serious prejudice from their neighbors. Russian Jews were particularly targeted, often by the Irish. In certain areas of Cambridgeport, Russian Jews could never be sure of their physical safety, and the police, who were largely Irish, didn't do enough to help. The Jewish community formed their own protective agencies to make up for the neglect.⁷

      While not a new group in the area, Cambridge Blacks probably suffered the worst discrimination. Many White factory workers refused to work alongside Blacks, so no one would hire them for fear of losing their other employees. Most Blacks commuted to Boston for work. While public schools in Massachusetts had been integrated since before the Civil War, and Harvard had been integrated not long afterwards, many poor Black families didn't feel it was worth it for children to finish high school because they would have so few opportunities to use their education.⁸

       During the First World War, Cambridge men from all walks of life enlisted, and some of the tensions between classes and races were very temporarily eased.⁹  Local factories produced materials for the war rather than for civilian markets. MIT taught engineering, aviation, and other skills that were essential to the war.¹⁰ The federal government established a Naval Radio School at Harvard and, once again, military barracks on the Cambridge Common.¹¹ The war provided a short-lived sense of unity in the city, but the one common belief that Cantabridgians held for several decades was that civic life and daily living conditions should be handled differently. How exactly they were handled was up for debate.

      The trend of Progressive-era social and community organizations continued steadily in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Groups such as the Cambridge Home Information Center ran cooking and housekeeping classes for women, and the Mothers' Club of Cambridge started vacation schools and built playgrounds.¹² Women took the lead in many movements for the betterment of society, from public health and good housing to education to prison reform.¹³ In part, this activism set the stage for women to push for the right to vote, with many claiming that voting would empower women to further their role as society's caretakers. Many other progressive-era trends, including campaigns to end corruption in government and in party politics, continued well into the twentieth century, and some people even called these and related reforms “The Cambridge Idea”¹⁴

      Spurred by discussions of the “political machine” and corrupt government, Cambridge debated a number of different changes to its political system in the early twentieth century. In 1911, voters shot down a proposal that included nonpartisanship (removing party names from local ballots), the right of referendum, initiative, and recall, and a new structure of voting.¹⁵ In 1915, the state legislature offered cities four options for structuring their local governments, called plans A, B, C, and D. Cambridge opted for Plan B, which included nonpartisanship and restructured some city administration with the hope of making it more transparent and representative.¹⁶

        For the next fifteen years, people debated less about the structure of government, but the underlying issues of the previous campaigns stayed on people's minds. Rising property taxes, more corruption, proportional representation, tenement housing, and other issues became the platforms for a plethora of groups, such as the Cambridge Housing Association, League of Women Voters, the Cambridge Charter Association and the Socialist Party.¹⁷ During the Great Depression, many concerns about wealth and housing in particular became much more dire. The city's population declined during the 1930's as industry stagnated. It was the first time Cambridge had shrunk since the early seventeenth century.¹⁸

        In 1938, some of the more radical of the reformers pushed the city to adopt Plan E, which included more administrative restructuring and also a voting system called Proportional Representation (PR for short, also called instant-runoff voting). Many people supported it, and many people called it Communism (although depending on who you asked, that wasn't necessarily a slur). The mayor and city council claimed that Plan E was concocted by Harvard's new School of Public Administration, and that they were using Cambridge as a testing ground. Papers reported that the city council planned to turn Harvard into its own municipality, an idea that generated more satire than change.¹⁹ Plan E was defeated that year by 1,300 votes.²⁰ In 1940, after aggressive campaigning on both sides, Cambridge voted on the plan again, and this time, PR and the rest of the plan were approved. A modified system of Plan E is still in place today.

       All of these changes in Cambridge took place before the Second World War. During and after the war, Cambridge's economy launched into the modern world, and even more changes were in store for the people.

1 Simha, O. R.“'Town and Gown in the Twentieth Century.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 165-166.

2Kenney, Michael. “Literary Cambridge: The Passage from the Past.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 245.

3 Fixler, David. “Cambridge Modern, 1930-1970: One Architect's View.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 60.

4Sutton, S. B. Cambridge Reconsidered: Three and A Half Centuries on the Charles. (Camgridge: The MIT Press, 1976) 96.

5Sutton 99.

6Sutton 97.

7Sutton 97.

8Sutton 99.

9Sutton 100.

10Simha 165.

11Sutton 100.

12 Moseley, Eva. “'The Absolute Majority of the Population': Women in 20^th Century Cambridge.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 95.

13Moseley 97.

14 Sullivan, Charles. “An Overview: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 4.

15Koocher, Glenn. “The Never-Boring Political History of Cambridge.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 130.

16Koocher 132.

17Cunningham, Bill. “A Hundred Years of Activism – Or Was It?” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 151.

18Sutton 101.

19 Sullivan 6.

20Koocher 132.

Time and Tide in Cambridge

     Picture Cambridge in 1637, or 1700, or 1776. What do you imagine? Perhaps churches, small houses, or the common. Now imagine looking to the east. What you should see in your mind's eye is a stretch of salty, tidal marshland, and then open water for over a mile before you see the town of Boston in the distance. The Charles River as it flows through Cambridge today did not begin to take shape until the early nineteenth century, and it did not take the form it has today until the twentieth. Both Cambridge and Boston underwent land fill projects in the nineteenth century, also called land reclamation, in which solid land is made from wetland or water. Boston's project was massive, doubling the size of the city, but Cambridge's land fill was also very significant, as changed our relationship to the Charles forever.

     The watery gap between Boston and Cambridge was two miles at its widest point before any human interventions, which is three times the current distance.¹ Near the present-day site of MIT, there were once oyster beds so large that they posed navigational challenges for boats passing through the basin.² Just like the harbor it flowed into, the water had a tide; the difference in water level between high and low tide averaged nine feet.³ At high tide, East Cambridge became an island. Surrounding the river itself were salty marshes. Tidal marshes are divided into a higher zone and a lower zone, and it is typical for the low zone to be underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide. The tidal marshes in Cambridge included mudflats, which are created naturally by the buildup of sediment deposited in an estuary or other body of water. Such marshes are typically covered in grasses and rushes that have evolved to fit this unique niche, and they are also the home of a number of animal species, especially shellfish and migratory birds, that are adapted to their conditions.⁴

    Human alterations to the Charles River and its environs started slowly and snowballed through the nineteenth century. Early Cambridge settlers sometimes harvested the slender grasses growing in the marshes to dry and feed to livestock as “salt hay.” Harvesting salt hay didn't have much of an effect on the land or the ecosystem.⁵ In the 1790's, as part of an entrepreneurial boom of speculation and development, developers drained marshes and filled them with gravel, dug canals, and built wharves in the area that was becoming Cambridgeport.⁶ Unfortunately, increased construction created problems on the Charles River. In order to constructors bridges over the wide spans of water between Cambridge, Boston, and Charlestown, builders had to create causeways, altering the water flow. Now, local sewage was collecting in the narrowed river basin, and when the intertidal zone was exposed at low tide, the mud flats had a potent stench. In the following decades, human waste was joined by industrial waste.⁷ People began to recognize the altered marshes as a sanitary hazard as early as the 1820's, regarding clean, fresh air as a matter of the general welfare of the public.⁸ Construction and land fill on the Boston side throughout the nineteenth century changed the water flow considerably, making the problems even worse.

      In Cambridge, appetites for land were also growing. A group of property owners, seeking to develop the area for luxury residences, of the Charles formed the Charles River Embankment Company in 1881. and set out to develop the area in several ways. They constructed the Harvard Bridge in 1891. Afterwards, they attempted to build a sea wall on the Cambridge shore, using a suction dredge. The river bottom on the Cambridge shore was too hard for the dredge, but another company used the dredge on the Boston side. It caused a huge stench and a controversy over that stench by pumping up sewage, but the project was completed. ⁹ The luxury residences never materialized. Once the land was finished, new railroads in the area made it much more inviting to new factories.¹⁰

      The made land certainly boosted both cities' economy, but the loss of the marshes had long-term consequences. Wetlands aid in water filtration, including filtering sewage and industrial waste.¹¹ At low tide, when the mud flats were exposed, the smell was awful. It got worse and stronger as the river became polluted by industry.¹² The tidal current of the river itself had grown swift and dangerous since all the water from what was once a bay was now channeled into a smaller space.¹³ In 1873, the state Board of Health reported that Massachusetts had “no territory of equal extent... in so foul and so dangerous a condition” as Miller's River, which was a part of the Charles River area. In the same report, the Board speculated that if an epidemic disease was ever introduced in the area, the river would cause the disease to spread horribly. In 1878, the Board reported that “large areas have been at once, and frequently, enveloped in an atmosphere of stench so strong as to arouse the sleeping.”¹⁴

    To solve these problems, Cambridge and other municipalities took title to the shores of the river in the 1880's and 1890's. They built seawalls and scraped the river bottom with dredges, pumping the mud being dredged up into the areas where land was being created.¹⁵ Also in the 1890s, marshes west of the Charles were drained to become Soldiers Field.¹⁶ By the early twentieth century, the Massachusetts Legislature had gotten involved, forming the Committee on Charles River Dam and later on the Charles River Basin Commission. This bodies undertook the final steps to make that open stretch of water into the river we know today.¹⁷ They created a temporary dam by 1908, using locks and sluices to let water in and out. The permanent dam, by Lechmere point, was finished in 1910, and stood until it was replaced by the current Charles River Dam in 1972. The 1910 dam meant that the Charles would no longer have tides, marshes, or mud flats. ¹⁸ The land that had once been mud flats was soon built on for use by MIT, which moved from Boston in 1916.

    Creating land to build on and to eliminate the sanitary problems also meant destroying the marshes. This may not have seemed like a loss at the time, but we now understand just how vital marshes are. As mentioned above, salt marshes are a unique habitat, and the plants and animals that make their homes there are unlikely to thrive anywhere else. One example of an ecological disruption is the American Shad, a large herring which used to spawn in the Charles. Shad disappeared from this area early in the 20^th century, probably because of pollution and the construction of the 1908 dam. They were reintroduced in the 1980's.¹⁹

     One of the biggest environmental and human consequences of making land on the Charles was not revealed until the 1950's, when a few significant hurricanes struck New England. Instead of the absorbent marshland, the river was surrounded by asphalt.²⁰ The city embarked on a difficult and expensive project to replace the 1910 dam. The new dam included sophisticated pumps to prevent future floods, and they were very successful. In 1984, the region faced serious floods, but Cambridge got off lightly: the city had to deal with flooding from the rain, but not from an overflowing river.²¹ More importantly, the concept of “natural valley storage” began to emerge around the 1970's. This is the idea that we should preserve wetlands because they store water and help to prevent floods, an idea that is now well-established in environmental science.²² In a 1994 study, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found that wetlands along the Charles that had been saved prevented flooding that could have caused $17 million in damage.²⁴ Now that Cambridge has learned first-hand the good and the bad that comes of altering a wetland area, we can carefully consider the potential effects of any future project. Today, Massachusetts has strict regulations on how wetlands, including the kind surrounding the Charles River, can be altered.

Earth Day 2011 was this past Friday, April 22. Happy belated Earth Day!

1Haglund, Karl. Inventing the Charles River. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), xvi.

2Hall, Max. The Charles: the People's River. (Boston: David R. Godine, 1986), 24.

3Haglund 7.

4http://water.epa.gov/type/wetlands/marsh.cfm#tidal [Accessed 4-22-11]

5Haglund 8.

6 Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001), 23.

7Haglund 1.

8Haglund 35.

9Whitehill, Walter Muir. Boston: a Topographical History (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1959), 182.

10Hall 38.

11“Fact Sheet on Functions and Values of Wetlands.” Environmental Projection Agency. September 2001.

12Hall 36.

13Hall 36.

14 Massachusetts Board of Health reports, 1873 and 1878. Quoted in Haglund, 110.

15Hall 38.

16Hall 64.

17Hall 47.

18Whitehill 188.

19Hall 86.

20Hall 68.

21Hall 72.

22Hall 74.

23“Fact Sheet on Functions and Values of Wetlands.” Environmental Projection Agency. September 2001.

24http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIX/Chapter131/Section40

Media set in Cambridge

Dear readers,
I'd like to make up for lost time from March and post every Saturday in April, but too much Puritan theology at once will tire both you and me out. The following is a sampling of media set in Cambridge. It isn't intended to be an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination; it's just for fun. (If you're looking for a good Cambridge filmography, another blogger can provide you with that).


Parts of the music video for the lively Born with a Broken Heart by The David Wax Museum take place in Harvard Square, and parts take place on the Red Line. (I don't know about you, but I recognized the Red Line by the upholstery on the seats and the color of the car's floor before the exterior shot of the train...)


This Good Asian Drivers' humor video, a tale of internet dating to the tune of Colbie Calliat's song "Bubbly," is set in Cambridge. One of the characters is seen in a local public park, and when the two finally set up a blind date, they choose East Meets West, a bookstore on Mass Av near Central Square. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the duo, the guy is fully aware he's not the best singer in the world -- he's actually a slam poet, and the woman has her own act as a singer/songwriter. They're both excellent).


You've probably all formed your own opinion of the 2010 movie The Social Network by now... and yes, much of it is set at Harvard, which means lots of shots of Cambridge. Many scenes take place in front of recognizable Harvard buildings, such as the Harvard Lampoon building.


In my opinion, if you're looking for a movie about larger-than-life college antics and ridiculous sums of money that's based on a true story and set partly in Cambridge, The Social Network isn't the best that Hollywood has to offer. The 2008 film 21 is based on the story of an MIT-based team of blackjack card counters, and of course, it has shots of the other famous campus in town.


Of course, Cambridge has also been home to an impressive number of influential poets, including e.e. cummings. Cummings was born in Cambridge and received both a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard. His childhood home, at 104 Irving Street, still stands, but it is privately owned. Here's an e.e. cummings poem from 1922, painting a beautiful portrait of "unbeautiful" people.


the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
by e. e. cummings
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy