We can be
proud of many things in Massachusetts, especially those attributed to our fair
city Boston. In Boston Firsts (2006), author Lynda Morgenroth describes forty
of the “feats or innovation and invention that happened in first in Boston and
helped make America great.”
Among the
most admirable was the bravery of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment in
the Civil War. Over 1000 African American men from Boston and beyond fought
courageously as Union soldiers in South Carolina. Another first, of course, was
the passage of the Same-Sex Marriage Law in 2003, leading the nation in
marriage equality. The YMCA, Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook, the
USS Constitution, and the Public Garden are all Boston innovations. Boston is also famous for inventions of
shipping ice around the globe, the Boston Cream Pie, and the Gillette Safety
Razor.
In the
early 1700s, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston began inoculating patients against smallpox.
The first surgery performed painlessly on a patient under the influence of the
anesthetic, ether, was performed in Boston at one of its many famous hospitals,
Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846.
Another
medical first was a kidney transplant nearly a century later. Twin brothers
from Rutland, Massachusetts came home from duty in the armed services at the
age of 23. The younger, Richard, was dying from kidney disease. His brother,
Robert, asked to give him one of his kidneys. The ethical questions of such an
operation, putting one healthy brother at risk to save the life of the other,
were debated. In the end, Doctors Joseph Murray and John Merrill performed the
risky surgery at what is known now as the Brigham. Both patients did well, and
although Richard died eight years later of recurring kidney failure, his donor
brother Robert lived until 2010, dying at the age of 79. Dr. Murray shared a Nobel Prize in 1990 for
his life-long work transplanting cells and organs. Born in Milford, he died at
the age of 93 in 2012.
Another
Boston first was the opening of the Boston Subway in 1897. There were already
underground railroads in other cities in the world, particularly in London,
Glasgow, and Budapest. And there were elevated railways in New York and
Chicago.
I invited
author Doug Most to be a part of the Stuart R. Plumer Author Night Series,
2015-2016 on November 12 at 7 pm, He
will be here to describe the details of his book, The Race Underground
(2014). It’s the fascinating story of
the “rivalry between Boston and New York” to build America’s first subway.
The story,
of course, is full of political intrigue in both cities and the regional
rivalry that spurred such fast advancement. Central to the story told in The
Race Underground is that of two brothers living two hundred miles apart from
each other. Henry Melville Whitney and William Collins Whitney were born in
Conway, Massachusetts (today the town, just west of I91 and Greenfield has less
than 2,000 inhabitants). In the late 1800s, older brother Henry and his wife
lived in Brookline. Henry was successor to his father as president of the
Metropolitan Steamship Company, linking Boston to New York on water.
Younger
brother, William, served as Secretary of the Navy under President Cleveland. He
resided in New York and rather than matching his brother’s career as an industrialist,
he excelled in politics and finance. William died in his early sixties as a
wealthy man. Older brother Henry lived another 19 years and died nearly
penniless.
The Race
Underground will soon be a part of the PBS documentary featuring subways in the
American Experience. Doug Most spent many hours talking on film about a subject
that fascinates him. He did, after all, spend five years researching and
writing the story in the Race Underground. He spent countless hours in
libraries and archives pouring over written accounts and records and studying
photographs. While Most was born in Boston, he grew up in Barrington, Rhode
Island. Both of his parents were from New York, and he admits he spent a
confused childhood wondering which “sports teams to root for.”
Today,
Boston is fourth in the United States for ridership of its rapid transit
system. Over 174 million riders use the “T” that includes the blue, orange and
red lines of 38 miles of track. There are 53 stations where 560,500 riders
daily board the trains.
These
numbers pale in comparison, of course, to the New York City subway with its 469
stations and 233 miles of track and over 9 million riders each and every
weekday. Nearly 3 billion riders boarded the New York Subway trains in 2014.
The Washington Metro and the Chicago “L” also beat Boston for ridership, but
they cover many more miles of track by three times.
In a
chapter titled “Breaking New Ground” in his book A City So Grand (2010),
Stephen Puleo* describes the movement in Boston away from horse-drawn vehicles
to an electrified railway that unclogged the streets. In dedicating South Station in 1898, Mayor
Josiah Quincy gave credit for the vision of so great a terminal to New England
characteristics of courage and strength and enterprise. In doing so, Bostonians
were also applauded for successes that marked an entire half-century of
technological risks, advancements, and growth. (*Puleo is also the author of
Dark Tide which chronicles the Great Molasses Flood in Boston on January 15,
1919.)
Even
children’s books have captured the story of the race to build the subway. A
Subway for New York (2005) by David Weitzman and Beneath the Streets of Boston
(2005) by Joe McKendry tell simpler tales.
In 2012,
the trustees of the Morrill Memorial Library set aside funds to honor retiring
library trustee, Stuart Plumer. Mr.
Plumer served as a trustee for 33 years from 1979 until 2012. Author Doug Most
is the second author to visit the library. Please call the Information or
Reference Desks of the library to register for this program and learn more
about The Race Underground.
