Studying Brahmins, Baked Beans, and Baseball
New CAS class encourages students to explore Boston with fresh eyes, ready feet
East Coast newcomers may have only a foggy idea of who the Boston Brahmins were, perhaps born of videos like this one of two jovial elderly gentlemen speaking with a vaguely British accent. Or maybe they know of them simply as the elite whose last outpost in the city has been Beacon Hill.
But the city’s first families, as Boston Brahmins are commonly called, are much more than that, and Merry “Corky” White dedicates an entire class to them in her new course, Boston: An Ethnographic Approach (CAS AN309, or GRS AN709 for graduate students). The College of Arts & Science professor of anthropology typically studies contemporary Japanese society and culture (she has been honored with Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun for her body of work), but recently applied her ethnographic eye to her hometown.
“We will explore Boston as a set of ideas of identity, politics, and urban life, developing and placed in the spaces of a place called the Hub, Beantown, Bawston, and the ‘Athens of America,’” she writes in her syllabus.
White takes students on a tour—by lecture and on foot—of the city’s history, culture, and diverse neighborhoods. She examines how the city’s geography has influenced its people’s livelihoods, discusses the Hub’s crime, corruption, and cronyism through time, and looks to how various social initiatives—such as City Year and Walk Boston—will shape the city’s future.
With her guidance, students visit places like Boston’s waterfront to get a sense of its coastal geography, Fenway Park to explore the “space of fandom,” and East Boston, the North End, and Dorchester to learn how waves of immigrants have left their mark.
All the while, White teaches her students the art of ethnography—how to observe without being intrusive, take careful notes, and compile them into a thoughtful analysis.
The goal for students, “first of all, is to leave campus,” White says. She also wants them to acquire the keen observational and analytical skills essential to any ethnographer tasked with understanding a group of people, even if those people are neighbors. “Things are not always what they look like at first glimpse,” she says.
Just over a dozen students, including three from Metropolitan College’s Evergreen program, sit in an upstairs classroom in the still new-smelling Engineering Product Innovation Center. They take notes with pen and paper; White has banned computers, phones, and other electronic devices. The topic on this day is Boston’s 19th-century class of wealthy, educated, and elite citizens, the so-called Boston Brahmins.
According to White, doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was the first to call Boston’s “virtue elites” the Brahmins, after the highest class in the Hindu caste system. These families of Anglo Protestant origin, often descendants of the earliest Puritan colonists, liked to believe that they were a people set apart to guide the American experiment and pass on the country’s founding principles.
Like other elite groups, they were an exclusive, isolated bunch who preferred to marry one another and maintain their heritage through their names—the Lowells and the Cabots among them. Not all families were rich (and most who were tried not to show it), and they believed in the merits of hard work and social morality—or as White says, “the right way of doing things.”
Brahmins sent their children to prep schools to build character, and perhaps more important, to meet the right people and to prepare for a college education at the nation’s best schools (like the very old one across the Charles River).
“This was just the boys, right?” asks Jenna Blinkinsop (CAS’15).
“Oh, absolutely,” White says. “Women were responsible for maintaining social values and purity of class.”
Brahmin women attended what would now be called finishing schools. They learned to have “pure” conversations over meals of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower, White says. One hard and fast rule was to not talk about the food, which wasn’t all that exciting by appearance or taste anyway. She retells a story about one young lady who asked a school matron for pepper and received this curt reply: “Pepper is too heating for young ladies!”
And another student reportedly was suspended for surreptitiously entering, and then winning, department store Jordan Marsh’s teen model contest. Her picture in the Boston Globe blew her cover.
Once young women completed their training, they were presented to the larger society through a debutante ball and thereafter were allowed to represent the family at social functions.
Evergreen student Jan Engleman raises her hand to say she thought debutante balls were to announce that a woman was marriageable, “like in real estate—you are an open house.”
White smiles, her cheeks pushing her circular amber-rimmed glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. Marriage reinforced “this idea that you were a property,” she says, and the act was meant “to cement alliances between two families.”
Marriage outside the tight circle of Boston Brahmin families was considered scandalous, she explains. A woman’s purity—sexual and social—was to be maintained; no one wanted to be the topic of gossip at a well-established matron’s salon. After all, the afternoon salon was where women held their power in society as the managers of gossip and stories that could jeopardize another woman’s status.
“Shame and gossip were a system of social control,” White says.
In the greater world, Brahmin women were expected to do good works, such as helping immigrants assimilate to life in America. White cites letters from women who fretted over Italians’ refusal to set aside pasta and rich sauces for the more bland Yankee cuisine of baked beans and creamed codfish.
Meanwhile, the men helped establish Boston as “the cradle of civilization,” at least in the New World. They founded cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and took positions in government and universities. They were also merchants who specialized in textiles, mining, and the import and export of goods—among them opium, rum, and slaves.
White pauses here to comment on how Brahmins were deeply involved in the triangular trade connecting America, Britain, and Africa’s west coast. Looking back on it now, she says with a touch of sarcasm, “it does seem to compromise their image of virtue.”
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