MAGA in Boston: 1974

No analogy is perfect.

History doesn't repeat. But the 1974-1976 populist revolt in Boston rhymes with MAGA.

Today's post is a follow-up on Saturday's guest post by Boston civic leader Larry DiCara. He wrote about the populist revolt against court-ordered busing of students to achieve racial integration of schools in Boston's racially and ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods.  

I illustrated Larry DiCara's post with these photographs:

The Boston revolt had ugly elements, including an angry White man using the point of a flagpole to stab at a restrained Black man. The photo is all-too genuine. But it is the worst, a caricature of the era, and one could draw an overly-simple conclusion. There was plenty of anti-Black racism, but outsiders would misunderstand the protest if they concluded it was mostly about race. It was as much or more about neighborhood. That wasn't phony or pretense. Neighborhoods were a tribe, although in part a racial or ethnic tribe. Busing broke the boundaries of neighborhoods.

I lived in the Dorchester neighborhood during this era. I took the Red Line subway spur into City Hall for work, a straight shot. There were zero Blacks in my neighborhood, nor along the one- mile walk to the subway station, nor getting onto the subway car with me, nor at the eight or so stops into the city center. I never entered "Black neighborhoods," not even when driving a car on a weekend, exploring the city. My then-wife, a woman of Polish ethnicity and a Boston native, warned me against going into them. They were "dangerous," and we risked some generalized menace if we entered their turf. I felt the same way about the ethnically-Irish neighborhoods of South Boston and Charlestown. White street-toughs might somehow sniff out that I was an outsider from Oregon and my wife Polish, not Irish. I would have been unwelcome, I thought, and it made me uncomfortable. I wasn't part of their neighborhood.

Part of the rhyme in this 50-year-old mirror is the sense of invasion by outsiders. Democrats scoffed at Fox News and Trump's characterization of uncontrolled immigration as an "invasion," but that is how a great many Americans feel about it. Too many of the wrong people, some of whom are dangerous, want in, and then they are conspicuous in their presence. Boston protesters thought they were defending themselves, their values, and their identity.

Another rhyme is the protest that rules and sensibilities of the managerial class were being imposed upon working people. The rules were burdensome and asymmetric. A financially and physically comfortable federal judge was making rules that working people were forced to live under. They were the deplorables, condemned for being "racist" when all they really wanted was to keep a safe neighborhood where their own kind of people could live their lives. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. lived in the wealthy Boston suburb of Wellesley. His neighborhood wasn't affected. He could afford that era's equivalent of "woke values." Two hours on a bus each day was not his problem; it was the kids'. A rich, educated guy with 24-7 security could impose disruption on others for the greater good of a social justice experiment that pushes new boundaries. Well-educated policy advocates who shape Democratic politics can defend, and even insist, upon pronoun-pronouncements, indigenous land recognition statements, mass-immigrant asylum claims, diversity statements as part of job applications, and trans "invasions" of traditionally women's spaces in bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletics. Those policies reflect elite sensibilities. 

MAGA doesn't have a single federal judge to blame, but it can blame the entire weight of modern culture and the people who read and write The New York Times and other "fake news" media -- educated, secular, cosmopolitan, diverse, and judgmental people -- which is to say Democrats.

Boston busing opponent Louise Day Hicks was elected to Congress. Mayor Kevin White, the moderate Democrats who tried to hold things together, lost his chance for higher office.

It rhymes.

Boston is a different, better place now. What fixed it? The simplest answer is prosperity. Boston's position in education, health care, and technology changed it from a working-class, blue-collar city to a magnet city for highly-paid educated people.  

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