A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1900-2000, Part II: The Second World War and the 1950's

   Even though much of the recruiting for the war in this area happened in downtown Boston,¹ Cambridge was very much involved in World War II. The U.S. Army Chaplain School, which had previously been located in Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana, was housed at Harvard from 1942 until 1944, when it moved to Fort Devens, near Fitchburg.² Life on the “home front” in WWII-era Cambridge was much like in any other American town – many civilians volunteered for the Red Cross, food was rationed and everyone had a book of ration stamps, women painted the seams of their stockings onto their legs instead of wearing silk, and the streets were periodically pierced with the sirens of air raid drills.³ Cantabrigians with backyards were able to plant large Victory Gardens to supply their families with fresh food during rationing. Many people, particularly immigrants, lived in crowded apartment buildings and did not have their own yards, so they divided the land by the river along Memorial Drive into small plots.⁴

    Jobs were plentiful for the first time since the Depression, as war-related industries boomed. Not all Cambridge workers stayed in Cambridge, as there were also war-industry jobs in Boston and in surrounding cities, such as Hood Rubber in East Watertown.⁵ Cambridge did have a a concentration of war-related jobs. Several local industries gained large federal defense contracts,⁶ and older East Cambridge factories converted themselves to produce materials for the war. A dozen Cambridge companies earned the Army -Navy “E” award for excellence in production. They included Polaroid, Raytheon, Boston Woven Hose, and more.⁷ Many middle and lower-middle class women who had never worked outside of the home took factory jobs, some of them taking a “housewives' shift” from 9 am to 2 pm.⁸ 

      One of the reasons that Cambridge had a high concentration of war jobs was that both Harvard and MIT played very important roles in technological innovation during World War II. One of the greatest examples is that half of the radar used in the war was designed at the MIT Radiation Lab. The Rad Lab, as it was called, employed almost four thousand people at its height.⁹ It closed in 1945, but the work done there strongly influenced postwar engineering. New high-tech industries continued to boom after the war, in close collaboration with the universities.¹⁰

After the war, the city's population swelled with returning veterans. This put additional pressure on the aging tenement buildings that housed low-income families. Central Square and much of Cambridgeport saw a period of decay, and had a real shortage of affordable housing with decent living conditions.¹¹ The G.I. Bill and federal housing subsidies helped many families move to single-family homes in the suburbs. In the 1950's, as the industrial and technological success of wartime started to flag, Cambridge's population declined again. saw another decline in population. Meanwhile, Harvard and MIT both expanded quite a bit in the 1950's, Harvard acquiring land in surrounding towns and MIT buying run-down industrial buildings.¹²

     The culture of Cambridge in the 1950's was diverse. Many residents, especially those involved in the high-tech industries who were doing well for themselves, were whole-hearted participants in that decade's brand of idealism. They believed in the “American Dream,” voted for Eisenhower, and did not have a great emotional investment in the Korean War.¹³ But, not everyone had the luxury of idealism, and the working class areas of Cambridge were dealing with the day-to-day issues of housing and jobs. Harvard, on the other hand, remained a place for active political discussion, so much so that Senator Joseph McCarthy took note, calling the school a “smelly mess” and accused it of “indoctrination by communist professors.”¹⁴ At the same time, the folk music revival, which encompassed not just music but the phenomenon of young men and women trying to make sense of their place in the world during the Cold War and society that valued homogeneity, was growing strong roots in Cambridge.¹⁵ Many of these diverse cultures collided and grew together somewhat beginning in the 1960's, united by student radicalism and the Vietnam War.

1Boyer, Sarah. Common Cause, Uncommon Courage: World War II and the Home Front in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Commission, 2009) 9.

2Both [Boyer 11] and the following website [http://simons_c.tripod.com/history.htm] stated that Harvard University used Fort Devens for student housing after the war, because there was an increase in the number of college students as a result of the GI Bill. I find this puzzling, since it is about 30 miles away.

3Boyer 11-14.

4Boyer 15.

5Boyer 33.

6Boyer 21

7Boyer 28.

8Boyer 30.

9Boyer 145.

10Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001). 52.

11Sullivan, 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) 7.

12Sullivan 7.

13Sutton, S. B. Cambridge Reconsidered: Three and A Half Centuries on the Charles. (Camgridge: The MIT Press, 1976)

14Sutton 110.

15Rahn, Millie. “Looking Backward: Club 47 and the 1960s Folk Revival in Cambridge.” A City's Life and Times: Cambridge in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Daphne Abeel. (Cambridge: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007) 258.

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.

A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900, Part III: Progress and Progressivism

     Cambridge's story in the later part of the nineteenth century follows the same pattern as that of many American cities. Rapid development in industry caused rapid growth in population and in the gap between rich and poor. The 1870's and 1880's saw a new culture of wealthy elite, but also an increase in philanthropy. Cambridge shared America's concerns about corruption in business and government that were the hallmark of the Gilded Age. By the late 1880's through the turn of the century, The Progressive Era had taken root in Cambridge, marked by many types of reform movements that tried to address the problems of an industrial society. The changes in these decades included more technological advancements, changes to higher learning, movements for greater social equality, and programs to improve the public welfare.

   

    In the previous A Very Brief History of Cambridge article, we saw how much of Cambridge became a modern industrial city. Meanwhile, Harvard was growing and changing in its own ways. Throughout the nineteenth century, the school made a number of additions that aided both research and their classes, and incidentally brought new ideas and experiences to the public as well – at least the sector of the public with leisure time. An example is the Botanic Garden, founded in 1801.¹ The Harvard Observatory was founded in 1839; four years later, the sky blazed with a comet that became known as the Great Comet of 1843. The event was frightening to many people who didn't understand that comets are natural and not supernatural, but to the scientific-minded, it was a sign that Cambridge needed to invest in a high-quality telescope. A group raised money to buy and install a fifteen-inch refracting telescope, which was at the time the second largest in the world.²

      Professor Louis Agassiz founded the school's Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859, to house a collection of objects that he felt was important to make available both for scientific advancement and for teaching purposes.³ The museum began as a personal project of his, and for some time, many people called it the Agassiz Museum⁴ (Since 1998, however, it has been a part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History).⁵ Then, in 1866, philanthropist George Peabody founded Harvard's Peabody Museum, one of the first-ever museums of anthropology.⁶ The educated and wealthy elite of Old Cambridge were able to collect from all over the world for their own pleasure, but this was also the era when people began to show real interest in cultural artifacts as things to be valued.

     Technological changes continued to modernize the city. In 1889, both Boston and Cambridge began work on electric street trolleys, making them the second and third cities in the country to do so.⁷ Additionally, some city-wide advancements in technology and engineering were performed specifically for the public good, like building sea walls on the dirty banks of the Charles.

      While technology, industry, and the spread of information all had noteworthy developments in the nineteenth century, social movements also made significant progress during this time. A few of the landmarks were that Cambridge public schools went co-ed in 1846, and they became racially integrated in 1855 in accordance with a new state law. In the 1880s Maria Baldwin, an African American who had graduated from a local teaching program, surprised the school committee by applied for a teaching position at a Cambridge school. At first, many were hesitant to give her the position, but she was qualified, and she became first female teacher in Cambridge.⁸

      Higher education was another matter. For many years, tensions grew between a faction of people who firmly believed that women should be admitted to Harvard alongside men, and another faction who found the idea of mixed-sex education abhorrent. In 1878, Radcliffe college was born as a compromise. At Radcliffe, women would be educated by Harvard professors with the school's blessing, but they would not be Harvard students and they would receive a “certificate” that was not a Harvard degree.⁹ By that point, there were already a number of coeducational colleges and a handful of women's colleges, but they were strongly in the minority.

     Progressive movements were, naturally, steeped in the culture of their times. Nineteenth-century advocates of women's rights in government believed that women would be a calming, humanizing force on an increasingly cold and brutal world. While the underlying premise of this belief is based on rigid gender roles, in some cases, the idea was right.

      In 1841, Dorothea Dix, a school teacher, visited the East Cambridge Prison to begin teaching women's Sunday school classes there, and found that the conditions were abjectly inhumane. The prisoners were neglected in damp, unheated cells, and sometimes they were beaten or left without clothes. She began what was to become a nationwide campaign to create separate institutions to care for the mentally ill. Before Dix's reform efforts, many mental illness patients who were not self-sufficient and whose families could not care for them had been put into prisons.¹⁰ This was one of the many reform movements that took place in that era, as people took stock of the new structure of society now that much of the nation lived in cities and much of the economy was industrialized.

      Another example of a national reform movement having direct implications in Cambridge was the temperance movement. Anti-alcohol activists cited the effect of drunkenness on families on communities, pointing to many incidents of saloon violence and a few local murders, but also the phenomenon of saloons wielding a big and corrupt influence on local government.¹¹ When Massachusetts gave cities the option to stop providing liquor licenses in 1881, Cambridge debated the subject for five years, but in December of 1886, the temperance advocates won, and they continued to win in yearly votes on the subject until 1933, at the end of Prohibition. If nothing else, the “no-license law” did dramatically decrease the number of arrests from drunkenness – because people drank in Boston and the Boston police arrested the rowdy ones on their way home.¹²

    In the 1870's, some cities in the United State and England began experimenting with the idea of a systematic organization or association of charities. Cambridge's Associated Charities was formed in 1881 and incorporated in 1883, with the aim of ending poverty by addressing its causes. It had offices throughout the city, trying to identify the needs of the population and inform related charities.¹³ One such charity was the Cambridge Young Women's Christian Association. The book Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors, which includes several essays I have cited in Cambridge Considered, was published in 1895 by the group as a fund-raiser and an awareness-raiser while they attempted to secure a building of their own. The YWCA provided shelter for women, and taught girls and women of all backgrounds domestic and workplace skills.¹⁴

      From the 1870's through the 1890's, Cambridge saw a blossoming of public-minded organizations. The groups founded during those years included two hospitals, two medical clinics, a home for orphans, the Home for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, several kindergartens, several homes for senior citizens, and numerous religious and civic organizations.¹⁵ Perhaps the most interesting of these groups is the Cambridgeport Union Flower Mission, which provided flowers to the homes of people who could not afford luxuries.¹⁶

    The Progressive Era continued in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and Cambridge was to change in many more ways as the years went on.

1Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Agassiz Museum.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 143.

2Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Harvard Observatory.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 133.

3Leavitt, Henrietta. “The Botanic Garden.” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 126.

4Leavitt 126.

5Harvard Museum of Natural History website. <http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/about_the_museum.html> Accessed 6-21-2011.

6 Peabody Museum website. Accessed 6-21-2011.

7 Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976),62.

8 Sutton 79.

9 Gilman, Arthur. “A Chapter of Radcliffe College” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 183-4.

10Sutton 53.

11 Foxcroft, Frank. “Cambridge as a No-License City” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 229.

12Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976), 82.

13 Houghton, Elizabeth. “The Charities of Cambridge” Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), 238.

14Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896), xii.

15 Houghton, 240-3.

16 Houghton,  243.

A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900, part II: Immigration and Industry

      As noted last time, I am dividing the 19^th century into several posts. I want to stress that no century is more important or more worth studying than another, but it happened that it was most convenient to do it this way for the 19^th century. The subjects of immigration and industry in Cambridge in the nineteenth century are closely related, as immigration provided a new workforce, and they are also the main reasons that Cambridge changed size and shape over that century. Most immigrants to the city settled in Cambridgeport or East Cambridge, and these areas were also the centers of local industrial growth. Now, let's take a closer look at these topics.

     Nineteenth-century immigration changed and diversified the character of the city because it was different from previous immigration. Generally speaking, early immigrants to Cambridge were English. In the first part of the nineteenth century, almost all immigrants to Cambridge were Irish or English.¹ In the second half, immigrants also came from Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Armenia, and Lithuania, and Canada, particularly French-speaking Canada. The ethnic makeup of the city also included some Asian immigrants, some African Americans, and a small number of Native Americans.² The new residents of the area came looking for new economic opportunities. One of largest immigrant groups was the Irish. Ireland had long been impoverished, and in 1845, a blight struck the country's potato crops, causing widespread devastation known as the Great Hunger or the Irish Potato Famine. 

      Immigrants brought their own cultural traditions, including religion. In 1831, a group of Catholics in Cambridge began to raise money to build their own church, so they would no longer have to cross into Boston to attend Mass. In 1842, their project, St. John's Roman Catholic Church, was finally completed.³ The Catholic church took care of the Irish population with charities and social programs, but as its constituency was mostly poor, its efforts had mixed success. Irish immigrants were sometimes passed over for jobs because of widespread anti-Irish prejudice. Irish Catholics were viewed as drunk, stupid, unskilled, and sick. “Paddy” became a standard buffoon character in popular jokes and in newspaper humor columns.⁴ In both Boston and Charlestown, the early nineteenth century saw anti-Irish rioting, and in 1834, a mob burned down the Ursuline convent and Catholic school in Charlestown. In Cambridge, people acted with as much prejudice, but less violence – the city never had an anti-Irish riot.⁵

 

      The waves of immigration also caused new diversity in the economic makeup of the city. In the first two centuries that Cambridge was settled by Europeans, most immigrants, even the somewhat ascetic Puritans, were at least moderately well-off. However, the majority of immigrants to the area in the mid- and late nineteenth century were poor.⁶ Like much of the American North, Cambridge was swept by industry in the later part of the 19^th century. ⁷ Immigrants filled a need for cheap unskilled industrial labor. They also took jobs as domestic servants. All but the poorest of native New Englanders refused to take jobs with such low pay and equally low social status.⁸

       Industrialization in Cambridge rescued Cambridgeport and East Cambridge from floundering attempts at becoming centers of trade in the early part of the nineteenth century. The major industries in these areas included soap making, furniture making, and meatpacking. As the century progressed, the areas developed even further. Migration from rural areas increased as people gave up their small-scale farms in the rocky New England soil and took jobs in factories instead.⁹ In 1860, Cambridge was one of the forty largest American communities.¹⁰ The Panic of 1873-78, which at the time was the worst economic depression in American history, didn't hit Cambridge very hard; the city's economic growth paused, and then resumed at its regular rate.¹¹ The growth was not limited to major industries. Cantabrigians bound books, made musical instruments, engines, industrial-scale boilers, and cars, laid railroad track, and built bridges.¹² However, industrialization was a mixed blessing. For example, in the 1890s, East Cambridge typified a dirty modern city. Meatpacking and fertilizer were among the most offensive of the many industries that contributed to the odor and uncleanliness of the area.¹³

 

        By 1896, the population density in Cambridge was greater than in Boston.¹⁴  Apartment buildings of varying quality sprung up all over the city by the end of the century. Many of them were the crammed, sometimes rickety buildings we think of as tenements.¹⁵ Cambridge developed big-city Industrial Age problems, such as dangerous workplace conditions and living conditions. By the late nineteenth century, many people began to try to correct these kinds of problems, through legislation, charitable organizations, and other methods. 

Coming next at Cambridge Considered: A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900, part 3, Progress and the Progressive Era

1Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001),  100.

2Seaburg 100.

3Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976), 57.

4Sutton 58.

5Sutton 58.

6Sutton 55.

7Sutton 55.

8Sutton 56.

9Sutton 55.

10Seaburg 98.

11Sutton 75.

12Seaburg 101.

13Sutton 64.

14Sutton 55.

15Sutton 65.

A Very Brief History of Cambridge: 1800-1900, Part 1 -- Cambridge Changes Shape and Size

I would hate to imply that one century had more to it than another century, or that the history of one period is worth telling at a greater level of depth than another. Still, I am dividing the 19^th century into several posts. The story of Cambridge in the 19th century includes a few large concepts, and while they are interrelated, they also deserve detail on their own.

Cambridge Changes Shape and Size

      Cambridge started out sprawling but barely settled. As centers of population emerged in the outlying areas of the village, they began to break off and form their own towns. The areas of Shawnsin and Cambridge Village became Billerica and Newton, respectively, in the seventeenth century, and Cambridge Farms became Lexington at the beginning of the eighteenth.¹ By the nineteenth century, Cambridge's outline roughly resembled what it is today. Yet, the town's population was growing: it went from around 2,000 in 1810 to around 8,000 in 1840.² This speedy growth rate was three times the growth rate of Massachusetts during the same period. At the beginning of the century, if you had told a local that the population would be growing that way in his or her lifetime, he or she would probably have assumed – incorrectly – that Cambridge was finally going to take off as a center of trade, like Boston.

      On January 11, 1805, Congress certified Cambridge as a port of entry, the idea being that trade could be conducted up the Charles River, and not just from the Boston Harbor. The “Cambridgeport” area, as it came to be known, briefly became the focus of economic energy in the town, with speculators buying up land in anticipation of a boom. The area's population began to increase in that decade, and soon there was a schoolhouse, fire society, and church for the residents. However, in 1807 Congress passed a trade embargo, banning trade with foreign countries. The isolationist move was a national controversy, with most of the opposition coming from the trade-oriented North, and its effects were felt strongly in Cambridge. Speculators fled from Cambridgeport as land values plummeted.³

      As more bridges were built for trade with Boston, and as industry began to overtake trade as a leading economic force, the areas of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge raced for development. For the rest of the century, Old Cambridge, Cambridgeport and east Cambridge were distinct sections of town and rivals for importance.⁴ Cambridgeport, after being crushed by the Embargo Act, got an early start on developing industry, beginning with furniture and glass factories in the first few decades of the century.⁵ East Cambridge development was boosted by the construction of the Canal Bridge in 1809, approximately where the Museum of Science is today. Estates and marshland gave way to industry and denser residential settlement. Many new residents of the area commuted to jobs in Boston over the bridge.⁶ In 1816, the Middlesex County Courthouse moved to East Cambridge from Old Cambridge, because Andrew Craigie, a speculator in the decline of his career, donated the land for a new building.⁷

      Many in Old Cambridge felt that their area was the proper center of the city, even though this was becoming less and less true. Central Square, which was more a part of Cambridgeport, was becoming the true commercial downtown.⁸ In 1830, Old Cambridge had a successful movement to enclose the Common, meaning that the roads going through it became pedestrian paths, making the Common more like a public park. Its original purpose had been for grazing animals, but that was less of a public need by that point. In the early 19^th century, people in other areas of the city used the roads that went through the Common for transporting goods.⁹ North of Harvard Square was sparsely settled, but there were very productive clay pits and brickyards in that area,¹⁰ and the Common contained good routes to other towns in Eastern Massachusetts, so most of Cambridge was upset at the old section of the town for the enclosure.¹¹

      The major enterprise of Old Cambridge was Harvard. Students and professors patronized local businesses, and the school itself was a major employer. Where religious leaders and prominent Loyalists had once been the big names in Cambridge, many prominent Harvard personalities rose to fame in the 19^th century. The list includes poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, professor of modern languages, scientist and philosopher Louis Aggasiz, professor of natural history, poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did his undergraduate and theological studies at Harvard, and Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who introduced the smallpox vaccine to the United States and taught at the Harvard Medical school.

     By the early 1840's, many residents of Old Cambridge were so frustrated with the feuding with the other two sections, and felt so different from the rest of the town, that they petitioned to separate. Their proposition failed, and made other Cantabrigians aware of a need for a more efficient local government. Cambridge incorporated as a city in 1846, and so the three areas stayed under one government.¹² However, that same decade was when immigration to the city began to rise. The flood of new national groups and expanding industrial character of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge provided new energy to the neighborhood tension as it continued through the rest of the century, quieter than it had been but still somewhat present.

Coming next at Cambridge Considered: A Very Brief History of Cambridge, 1800-1900, part 2, Industry and Immigration.

1Sutton, S.B. Cambridge Reconsidered: 3 1/2 Centuries on the Charles. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976), 20.

2Sutton 53.

3Sutton 40.

4Sutton 45.

5Martin, Mary L. and E. Ashley Rooney. Cambridge, Massachusetts Past and Present. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2008), 9.

6Rooney 9.

7Sutton 45.

8Rooney 12.

9Sutton 47.

10Rooney 9.

11Sutton 47.

12Sutton 54.

A Very Brief History of Cambridge: 1700-1800

The Early Eighteenth Century

      Cambridge in the early eighteenth century grew slowly, continuing trends established in the 1600s. Until the middle of the century, most of the residents were descendants of Puritan settlers.¹ Most of them were farmers, with some traders and artisans. Voters had not been required to be church members since 1691, which indicates that the government was beginning to depart from its religious roots, but in the first half of the 1700's, there were no major religious controversies and not much religious diversity.² During this period, Cambridge's public schooling system became more organized. Administration of the local grammar school had originally been a duty of the town selectmen, but in 1744, the town appointed a separate school board.³ The largely rural village saw some development in the first ten years of the 1700s and again in the 1750s, with larger, improved courthouses and meetinghouses built in both decades.⁴ Harvard participated in this trend, and some of the oldest Harvard buildings that still stand, were built during this period, starting with Massachusetts Hall in 1720.

Anglicans Arrive

       Beginning in the 1740s, and picking up considerably in the next few decades, there was a small but influential influx of wealthy English settlers. Some of these came directly from England, and others had previously settled on estates in the West Indies.⁵ They were Anglicans, belonging to the Church of England, which made them the de facto rivals of the original settlers. In 1761, they opened Christ Church, and the original building is still standing and still an Episcopal church. The wealthy Anglophiles were concentrated in seven elegant manors, along with their farms and gardens. The families who lived there were closely interconnected through blood, marriage, and social ties. William Brattle, a Brigadier-General in the British army, built one of those manors in 1740, and the street where the Anglicans lived is still called Brattle Street.⁶ However, put off by the Anglicans' religion, ostentatious displays of wealth, extravagant private parties, and perhaps most of all their Loyalist political alignment with the King of England, the locals viewed the street as its own miniature community, an island of Englishness in a New World village. They called the street Tory Row, Church Row, or sometimes, the King's Highway.⁷

Cambridge and the American Revolution

      You've heard of Paul Revere's ride, on April 18, 1775. Revere was in fact one of several riders who alerted the countryside that the British troops were on the move. As a part of the same journey, William Dawes rode out Massachusetts Avenue to alert Concord. The next day, the Battle of Lexington and Concord occurred. It was immediately evident that the war would be very present here in Cambridge. The Committee of Correspondence, a provisional government, confiscated many loyalist properties, especially from “Tory Row,” and many loyalists fled the area, feeling unsafe. Harvard classes were canceled on May 1. Students who didn't join the militia resumed classes that October in Concord; the Harvard campus wasn't used as a school again until June 1776.⁸ More than 20,000 militiamen from around New England camped in Cambridge in April of 1775. They took over Loyalist homes, Christ Church, and Harvard for various military uses, and the Common served as a training ground and a site where soldiers camped out. In fighting the war, Cambridge established the first state arsenal in what is now Arsenal Square, and an important magazine (a location for storing gunpowder) by what is now Magazine Street.⁹

       On July 3, 1775, George Washington formally took command of the Continental Army, as the militia was now called, in the Cambridge Common. The site is now commemorated with an archway on the side facing Mass. Ave. For nine months, in 1775 and 1776, Washington used one of the Tory Row manors as his home and headquarters, even bringing his family to stay with him.¹⁰ That manor had been inhabited by several prominent locals, but its most famous owner, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had not yet been born.

Cambridge in the Early Republic

       In 1779, Massachusetts held a convention in Cambridge in order to decide upon a new constitution for the state. John Adams presided, and had a big hand in writing the document. This constitution, adopted in 1780, is still in effect, and it is the oldest written governing constitution in the world.¹¹ Modern Cambridge residents would likely be very comfortable with most, but not all, of the original document. It included Enlightenment ideas about equality and natural rights; the first article begins, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” Seven years later, when the federal Constitution was created, the framers looked to the constitution of Massachusetts as one of their models. The Massachusetts constitution includes several provisions about religion, permitting citizens to worship the way they chose, but also authorizing the government to require and support Protestant churches and schools. In 1781, a Massachusetts court ruled that slavery was not permitted in the state because of Article I, and in 1783 the state supreme court agreed.

       After the war, Cambridge's resources probably looked somewhat spent. The use of so many public and private spaces for military needs took its toll.¹² However, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the city saw improvements that set a good precedent for industrialization in the years to come. In 1793, Cantabrigians created a Fire Society – a formal way of organizing their corps of volunteer firefighters. This was essential to protecting homes and other buildings, as there was not yet a professional fire department.¹³ In the same year, the West Boston Bridge was constructed, connecting Cambridge and Boston in a very convenient location, where the Longfellow Bridge is now.¹⁴ This proved to be a boon for the local economy, allowing an increased flow of trade with the Port of Boston. 
 

1 Martin, Mary L. and E. Ashley Rooney. Cambridge, Massachusetts Past and Present. (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2008), 7.

2 Seaburg, Alan. Cambridge on the Charles. (Cambridge: Anne Miniver Press, 2001),  18.

3 Seaburg 130.

4 Seaburg 19.

5 Rooney 7.

6 Douglas, Adeline. "Tory Row." Merrill, Estelle, ed. Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors. Cambridge Young Women’s Christian Association. (Boston: The Pinkham Press, 1896),  26.

7 Douglas, 25.

8 Rooney 7.

9 Rooney 7.

10 Rooney 8.

11 Seaburg 22.

12 Rooney 8.

13 Seaburg 65.

14 Rooney 9.