"Our country" at 249
Time, tech, and a view from Boston
I owe Abraham Lincoln an apology. While growing up in Springfield, Illinois, the historic sites preserved in his name struck me as boring. My parents loved history. They appreciated the fact, as one well might, that someone from Springfield of all places rivaled Shakespeare, Napoleon, Marx, Gandhi, and the like as the most famous secular figure in history.
In real time I couldn’t make that contextual leap. Even today visiting New Salem and especially catching one resonant whiff inside a cabin there triggers childhood memories of sprinting for the exit. In my mind’s eye there’s a predatory docent in period costume gaining fast on 10-year-old me and trying to lecture me on looms or lard.
I get it now, of course. The curiosity I should have lavished on Lincoln sites even as a youth is now showered upon our adopted Boston. We arrived two-and-a-half years ago.
Every Fourth of July the USS Constitution leaves its dock in Charlestown and embarks on a turnaround sail across Boston Harbor to Castle Island. At Fort Independence “Old Ironsides” fires its guns and receives a 21-gun salute on land in response. All of this takes place within easy walking distance of our place. (Castle Island was connected to the mainland a century ago.) This year the weather was gorgeous.
The world’s oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat very nearly didn’t make it this far. Old Ironsides was saved from the scrap heap in 1830 when 21-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. published a poem in its honor in one Boston newspaper. The poem went viral 1830-style, marking the onset of a 100-year period in which someone named Oliver Wendell Holmes, either Sr. or Jr., would be a national figure. Old Ironsides has been marking the Fourth in this manner since the 1970s.
This year I couldn’t help reflecting that we were all there in common celebration. Such a recognition hardly obviates the raging disagreements and contentions of our era, of course. Nevertheless, on the day itself I chose to draw a hopeful or at least qualifying conclusion. The very fact that thousands out of a crowd of thousands around me doubtless voted differently than I did last November struck me as affirming in its own paradoxical way. On this day, at least, we had all alike voted with our feet to celebrate. Maybe we could agree on other things too.
Politics and specifically the political internet and especially political social media is where we go when we want to argue or listen in on arguments and that’s fine. The differences matter, the outcomes have sweeping consequences. It can also be the case that we tend to understate the seismic transformations wrought by forces outside of what we code as strictly “politics.” Consider Boston. The Cradle of the Revolution is itself an excellent example of extra-political revolution across the centuries. That revolution continues.
For 400 years greater Boston has either flourished or withered according to the value the world at large places on intellectual properties coming out of “the Hub.” The nickname itself is still another legacy of Holmes Sr., who coined the term in the pages of The Atlantic in 1858.1 Boston’s the hub of the universe, it came to be said. But how?
The Hub is cold, its winters are long, and the soil is poor. The port of Boston could never hope to compete even with Philadelphia and the Schuylkill much less New York and the Hudson plus an Erie Canal. (The Charles is swell for crew but doesn’t really go anywhere except Dedham.) And while the fisheries offshore were legendarily bountiful, one didn’t have to live in or near Boston or even in the New World to fish here. In the colonial era when Virginia and Maryland ran huge trading surpluses, the Massachusetts Bay Colony always showed a significant deficit. Boston’s most valuable exports have always been of the intellectual variety. Old Ironsides itself is proof.
Launched in 1797 and celebrated for its exploits in the War of 1812, the USS Constitution was the battery-powered military drone of its day. The frigate represented a nimble bit of technology purpose-built to offset or even supersede larger and more powerful weapons deployed by far more formidable adversaries. The young United States had zero hope of rivaling the Royal Navy, but Old Ironsides was designed to outgun any fast ship and outrun any heavily-armed one. The Constitution and its sister ships were designed by a brilliant Pennsylvanian but built in and launched from the North End with indigenous seafaring know-how. Similar to the reigning tech hubs of today, the Boston of 200 years ago incubated cutting-edge talent.
Alas, the economic potency of seafaring mastery declined precipitously in the age of steam and railroads. By 1980 Boston had long been in decline and even its very harbor was filthy. Edward L. Glaeser has noted that 45 years ago there was little reason “to suspect that Boston would be any more successful than Rochester or Pittsburgh or St. Louis over the next few decades.”
Then there was yet another plot twist. While systemic factors plainly helped a number of big coastal cities all at the same time, in the case of Boston pure politics surely did play its additional part. For starters the harbor was cleaned up at a cost of some $4 billion. Seeing Old Ironsides on the Fourth is a much more pleasant olfactory experience now than it was previously. “I like to pay taxes,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said in 1927. “With them, I buy civilization.”
How would Holmes have felt about his taxes paying for the Big Dig? Good question. The Central Artery Project really was managed abysmally and it truly did cost way too much. Much of what critics said turned out to be correct. And today the project’s enduring impact really is epochal and borderline utopian, perhaps especially so in South Boston. Much of what proponents said turned out to be correct.
Southie was connected to the rest of the world by the Big Dig. Where once the only ways into and out of the neighborhood were surface streets like Broadway, Dorchester Avenue (Dot Ave), and the Fourth Street bridge, in the 21st century those venerable portals have been joined by Interstates 90 and 93. In 1980 the median home value in South Boston was $24,000. Today it’s $765,000.
The British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, a fortuitous coincidence that spawned the local holiday observed not only as St. Patrick’s but also as Evacuation Day. The traditionally Irish and now fast gentrifying Southie neighborhood has hosted the parade since 1901. Attendance has rebounded quickly since the pandemic, to the point where estimates clock in around one million. With all due respect to Old Ironsides, the hardy band that shows up at Fort Independence on the Fourth is dwarfed many times over by the mass of humanity that makes a pilgrimage to Southie for St. Paddy’s. It’s an amazing rite.
To be sure, the parade does bring in its wake what economists term negative externalities. The time is 1:15 in the afternoon one recent year when I’m still with ESPN. Once again, the St. Patrick’s parade and Selection Sunday are falling on the same day. Though resplendent in green, I’m closeted inside our place as I owlishly monitor the Atlantic 10 title game. I hear thousands of people outside my door, a first even for a peripatetic Gasaway family that’s made its home in seven states and two foreign countries. Yet I stay focused.
At this same moment my indefatigable wife is taking in the action from our front steps. Soon she’s assisting a young woman marking Evacuation Day in the most literal sense. The woman is wracked by dry heaves and sporting a neon-green “ZERO% IRISH, 100% HORNY” T-shirt. On this day my “Honey, I’m working” line does not fare too well.
As of 2025 the start time of the parade was moved up by 90 minutes, a simple apolitical step which nevertheless proved to be the very essence of life-changing genius. Giving one million people 90 fewer minutes in which to pre-drink brought forth relative peace and harmony for revelers and residents alike.
The parade fairly goes out of its way to ascend Dorchester Heights, where General Washington positioned the artillery pieces that succeeded in chasing the British out of Boston. Washington was still new to the title of Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. For their part the locals felt they had been warring with the detested redcoats for years, certainly since the Boston Massacre.
In March 1775 on the fifth anniversary of the Massacre, an observance was held at the Old South Meeting House. If anyone’s ever felt pressured by both political and non-political forces, it was that day’s featured speaker: Dr. Joseph Warren. The clashes with the British at Lexington and Concord were still a month in the future. Warren was addressing an audience that included far more experienced and eminent figures, up to and including Samuel Adams. Also in attendance were uniformed British officers and soldiers. They could and might elect to throw the physician behind bars if he uttered anything deemed too incendiary.
Warren was 33. His wife had just died. He was raising four children as a single parent.
The doctor addressed the crowd. “Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of.”
Plus ça change. As Warren would say, we must act worthy of ourselves.2
Holmes Sr. actually referred to the State House as the hub of the solar system. The universe replaced the solar system and the term was applied to all of Boston.
“On you depends the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rests the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”