Hyams’ greatest expenditure had always gone to settlement houses and other neighborhood centers—a direct legacy of Robert Woods’s pioneering work at South End House. Like Jane Addams in Chicago, Woods believed that the urban poor could best be helped by strengthening their neighborhood institutions, “securing the local identity and local loyalty out of which the feeling of social responsibility springs.” Appropriately enough for a philanthropy so influenced by Woods’s thinking, Hyams had long supported the United South End Settlements, a social agency which had grown out of South End House. It had also helped to fund settlements in East Boston, Dorchester, South Boston, and Roxbury, and in 1971, shortly after Joan went to work, it made a major new commitment—to the Lena Park Multi-Service Center, which served the burgeoning black populations of Dorchester and Mattapan. By the mid-seventies, it was giving Lena Park $45,000 a year.
Unlike the Permanent Charity Fund, Hyams had decided to continue its annual operating grants, which were the lifeblood of places like Lena Park and United South End Settlements. Joan and Hyams’ trustees debated long and hard on this issue. They could see powerful arguments for abandoning these grants to concentrate on more innovative projects, but Joan felt—and the board ultimately agreed—that because so few other foundations provided unrestricted funds, Hyams had an obligation to go on doing so. Moreover, she reasoned, such grants might in themselves become a spur to innovation. Many of the settlement houses, now called multi-service centers, were trying to develop new techniques to meet the pressing social problems of their communities, but how could they experiment with new programs unless they knew where their annual operating expenses were coming from?
After John Moore died in 1972, the trustees promoted Joan to executive director and authorized her to hire an assistant director. This allowed her to concentrate still more of her time on evaluating applicants and assessing how Hyams’ money was spent. By then, she had become the linchpin of Hyams’ operations.
As she made a name for herself in Boston philanthropy, she was invited to join other undertakings. Responding to mounting criticism, the Massachusetts Bay United Fund had at last gone through a major overhaul, designed, in part, to make it more responsive to “inner-city needs.” In early 1973, the United Fund and United Community Services were merged into a single organization—the United Way of Massachusetts—which assembled a new set of review committees. Joan was named to the Committee on Social Services for Families, Individuals, and Children, which evaluated all applicants and recommended allocations in that area. It was a field in which she had considerable experience and quickly she became one of the committee’s most influential members. She played a major role, too, in the Associated Foundation of Greater Boston, the league of philanthropies which she had first approached for a job in 1969. Founded by Bill Bender to enhance the effectiveness—and social activism—of Boston’s foundations, Associated examined the city’s problems and tried to nudge its thirty-two members into a coordinated approach to a solution. As the league’s largest members, the Permanent Charity Fund and Hyams often set the pace, and Joan eventually was named a vice-president.
The early seventies were heady days for the Divers. Colin was rising within the Mayor’s office, assuming new responsibilities, rapidly becoming one of Kevin White’s principal aides. Joan was moving just as quickly at Hyams, advancing from secretary to executive director in barely three years, becoming a leading figure in Boston philanthropy. For a time they both found their work enormously rewarding, precisely the kind of service they had hoped to perform for their community. And somehow the fact that they were grappling with the same issues made it even more satisfying. At times they joked with each other about their overlapping responsibilities for the city’s condition: with Colin handling the public sector, and Joan the private, how could Boston go wrong?
But they had frustrations in common too: the sheer intractability of the problems they confronted, the relative paucity of their resources, certain unintended consequences of their actions, the difficulty they faced in assisting one group without seeming to injure another.
By 1974 the three Hyams trusts made grants totaling $1,917,530—a lot of money by most people’s standards, but very little indeed if one was trying to help stem the torrent of urban ills which cascaded across Joan’s desk every week: alcoholism, drug abuse, mental retardation, crippling diseases, congenital handicaps, truancy, vandalism, juvenile delinquency, gang warfare, rape, overcrowded prisons, overburdened courts, deteriorated housing, ill-managed projects, broken families, wife beating, child abuse, unemployment, untrained workers, discrimination, and racial violence. Everybody had a program designed to meet one of these problems, but there simply wasn’t enough money to go around.
Once Joan had hoped that Hyams could meet the needs of disadvantaged homes and deteriorating neighborhoods across the city. But gradually she had scaled down those expectations. Philanthropy was not generally effective in two areas critical to a just society—public schools and jobs. In other fields, only the federal government had the requisite resources. At best, foundations like Hyams could supplement federal spending, fill in some of the gaps, point the way toward projects which deserved government funding, and take calculated risks on a few ideas which might bear fruit.
Joan was disheartened when some of the programs for which she had the highest hopes ultimately proved unworkable. And to her chagrin, more often than not, it was the black agencies and institutions which were unable to make a go of it—not because they were black, but because the individuals involved had little experience in running such programs. Among the casualties were the Roxbury Federation of Neighborhood Centers; the Ecumenical Center in Roxbury; Open Ear Associates, a program for black alcoholics; and the Black Heritage Camp. She learned to resist the emotional tug of such programs, to look coolly at their prospects for survival. It was all very well to help a worthy black effort get off the ground, but if it didn’t last out the year, the money could probably have been used more productively elsewhere.
Joan was particularly eager to find some effective instrument for easing the racial tensions which stemmed from Arthur Garrity’s desegregation order. Boston’s philanthropists—although generally sympathetic to the judge’s stand—had remained aloof from the problem. As the Associated Foundation described its members’ original position in an internal memo late in 1974: “Desegregation was perceived as a responsibility of the school system, the police, and City Hall. Because it was regarded as a racial problem, it was viewed as a problem between the Irish and black residents of Boston and one that the commuting white suburban population could not affect. For these reasons, the philanthropic community felt it could not play a significant role …”
Eventually Associated itself helped break the logjam. In a memorandum to the league’s members, Executive Director Janet Taylor warned: “The problem is not simply the responsibility of the public sector … It requires a re-direction of many of the services already funded by Associated’s members to focus on the school setting. A concerted effort, of which our members are a part, can have a real impact.”
Not everyone was convinced by Miss Taylor’s argument: twenty-five of Associated’s members were quite content to leave the busing question to the public sector. But eventually seven of Boston’s most socially committed philanthropies allocated $198,000 in 1974–75 and $242,500 the next year to fourteen separate programs designed to reduce racial tensions and violence during the desegregation process. Determined to avoid a partisan stand on so divisive an issue, Hyams trustees made no grant the first year. Later, at Joan’s urging, they concluded that they couldn’t turn their back on the crisis. Yet finding an appropriate grantee was difficult. Joan conducted prolonged talks with a coalition of black social agencies, but the negotiations fell through when the group failed to submit adequate data. Ultimately, Hyams provided $45,000 to three organizations—the Citywide Educational Coalition, School Volunteers for Boston, and Freedom House—which sought peaceful complianc
e with the court order and “quality education” in the city’s schools. Meanwhile, the United Way—in the middle of its 1974 campaign—committed $200,000 to several “special projects” intended to “reduce tensions and help guarantee the safety of our children in all neighborhoods.” They included an effort by the South Boston Committee of Community Agencies to get students back into school, a counseling service by the People’s Task Force of Hyde Park, and “sensitivity training” by the Greater Boston YWGA.
The action by Associated’s members had attracted little public notice, but the United Way’s special grants prompted an outcry in Boston’s white neighborhoods. ROAR and its ally, the Home and School Association, called for a boycott of the United Way. A ROAR representative toured comfortable suburban communities urging residents not to contribute to the fund drive, but instead to give directly to their favorite charities. Hundreds of pledge cards were returned defaced with anti-busing slogans. The United Way was compelled to extend its campaign by several weeks in a vain effort to meet its target.
This protest crested on April 13, 1975, when three hundred cars streamed from the city to the Wellesley home of William C. Mercer, president of the New England Telephone Company and chairman of the United Way campaign. More than a thousand demonstrators pressed against the green privet hedge around Mercer’s colonial house, located not far from Arthur Garrity’s. Barred from the driveway and lawns by a platoon of helmeted Wellesley police, the protesters chanted anti-busing slogans, sang patriotic songs, and waved miniature American flags. A ROAR speaker, Adam Kasprzak of Brighton, said the United Way had “clearly misused the money given to it by the people.” And Kasprzak added a warning which struck at the heart of Boston’s philanthropic tradition: “If those who control our city’s charities think they can also control our lives, they are very much mistaken.”
19
McGoff
Alice McGoff stood at the hedge, gazing up the sweep of lawn toward the handsome house on the hill. Thickets of ash and silver birch partially screened it from Falmouth Road, but she could make out the broad façade of red brick, punctuated by a graceful white doorway and two rows of windows with bright green shutters. It was a grand house, all right, just where you’d expect to find the president of the New England Telephone Company, her boss, the illustrious William Chauncy Mercer.
Suddenly there was a movement at one of the narrow windows flanking the door. The gauzy curtain was pulled aside and a tall, silver-haired man appeared for a moment behind the glass. My God, Alice thought, it’s Mercer! In the eight months she’d worked for the telephone company, she’d met the president only once—when he came through the operators’ room at Christmas, shaking hands and expressing appreciation for all the overtime they’d put in during the holidays. He’d smiled at her then, that toothy smile she’d come to expect from Yankees of a certain class, and Alice had nodded back respectfully. But now, as he peered through his window, Alice wondered, “What if he recognizes me, one of his own operators, demonstrating in front of his house?” Oh no, she thought, that’s silly—the company had hundreds of operators, thousands of repairmen and clerks. Why would Mercer remember her face? If he noticed her there at all, she would look like just another overweight Irishwoman out from the city to trample his bushes and scuff his lawn.
Well, she thought, that’s what I am. She had nothing personal against Mercer—he was probably a decent man—but he was the United Way chairman, and $200,000 of the money he had raised was going to support forced busing, much of that money collected from people like herself, the very ones who were bearing the brunt of such social engineering. Indeed, the telephone company had put pressure on its own employees to support the fund drive, but Alice had flatly refused to contribute and she had urged her co-workers to boycott as well, spreading the word through a letter to the Charlestown Patriot. “I will not give any of my hard-earned monies to an organization that is so dramatically opposed to my beliefs. I would like to suggest to my fellow Townies that they make their contributions directly to the organizations of their choice.” She had sent her ten dollars to the Charlestown Girls’ Club, whose funding had been cut off by the United Way after its parent organization was accused of “financial irregularities.”
In years past, Alice—like many of her neighbors—had usually given the United Way a few dollars. But Charlestown had never thought very highly of philanthropy controlled from downtown by Yankee bankers and businessmen. It was too remote from the Town, too lofty and condescending, too dedicated to its own social agenda (John Boyle O’Reilly, the poet who lived in Charlestown for many years, called it “Organized charity, scrimped and iced / In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ”). Besides, Charlestown had long prided itself on its self-sufficiency, and it resented charity as a badge of dependency. When the United Citizens’ League, a Protestant reform organization, opened an unemployment relief station there during the Depression, a letter to the Charlestown News complained that “this intrusion of soup-eating benefactors” was needed in the Town “like we need smallpox.” The writer, an old Townie, asserted: “The needs of the poor in Charlestown have always been looked after in first-class shape by our St. Vincent de Paul Society.”
In short, Catholics would take care of their own, without meddling from Protestant do-gooders. For traditional Catholic philanthropy had never shared the Yankee predilection for social reform. To the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Charitable Bureau, charity wasn’t a lever for change, but a balm to make the Catholic worker more content with his meager lot on earth. “It is through alms-giving on the part of the wealthy and gratitude on the part of the poor that we are saved the dry rot of communism or a war of the classes,” the Reverend William G. Byrne, a Boston priest, wrote in 1880. And three years later, Pope Leo XIII put his imprimatur on that doctrine when he declared: “Christian charity … unites the rich and poor by sweet bonds of holy affection.”
For generations, Charlestown’s Catholics had lived comfortably with such passivity. Whatever they might expect from City Hall, the State House, or the White House, the parishioners of St. Mary’s, St. Catherine’s, and St. Francis de Sales’ looked to their churches not for reform but for solace. As one Townie put it: “When I saw Christ bleeding on his cross, I knew he was there suffering for my sins. That was good enough for me. I didn’t expect him to climb down and start lobbying for a minimum wage, urban renewal, and peace in Vietnam.” When the Church began reinterpreting its position in regard to social issues in the 1960s, that created a new source of conflict for many Townies.
Alice had been raised a devout Catholic, but the Kirks differed widely in their attitudes toward the Church. Resentful of ecclesiastical power, her father, Bernie, rarely attended Mass. Bernie Kirk respected priests so long as they stuck to theological issues, but he wasn’t about to let the Church instruct him in his temporal duties. This ambivalence was evident at the dinner table, where, in one breath, he would inveigh against Cardinal Cushing, “that red-hatted old politician,” and, in the next, would command his children to obey the good pastor of St. Mary’s, Monsignor Frederic Allchin.
Alice’s mother was more conventionally religious, perhaps to eradicate the Wolfberg in her. It hadn’t been easy growing up half Jewish in a relentlessly Irish Catholic town, and Gertie Wolfberg soon recognized that the quickest route to acceptance was full immersion in the Church. By the time Alice was born, her mother had adopted all the rituals of Charlestown Catholicism. The Kirks always ate fish on Fridays, fasted on Ash Wednesday, and occasionally even joined the Cardinal in his nightly recitation of the rosary, kneeling side by side on the hard parlor floor as Cushing intoned the familiar phrases over the radio. On hot summer nights, Alice could hear that harsh voice droning from back porches and parlor windows up and down Breed’s Hill, uniting the Town for a few moments of obeisance to “God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.”
But even Gertie Kirk performed these rituals more by rote than by feeling. The religiou
s center of the family was Alice’s aunt Mary, whom the priests at St. Mary’s liked to call “the most devout woman in the parish.” Mary attended Mass daily—on weekdays, walking from her job at City Hall to a church in the North End, and on weekends, joining her family and neighbors at St. Mary’s. From her modest salary, she contributed regularly to both parishes, but her favorite charity was missionary work among the American Indians. Bernie Kirk liked to say that his sister had “built half the tepees between here and the Rio Grande.”
From these diverse strands, Alice wove her own tapestry of devotion. What stirred her most was the Catholic aesthetic—the ritual, the pageantry, the sensuous feel of faith. Her favorite ritual was the May Procession, in which the children of St. Mary’s School marched through the Town’s streets to honor the Virgin Mary—the boys as Swiss Guards carrying pikes; the girls in long white gowns and flowing headdresses. Religious devotions were as important to her childhood as hopscotch or jumping rope. Every day at St. Mary’s School began and ended with prayer; and every Sunday morning the Kirk children trooped to the church for nine o’clock Mass. Never much of a Latin scholar, Alice couldn’t follow the liturgy, but the sonorous phrases, the sweet smell of incense, the rumble of the organ as it swelled beneath the vaulted ceiling, the morning sunlight shimmering through the stained-glass windows filled her with a sense of peace and harmony.
Those were palmy days for the Church in Charlestown, its authority still largely unchallenged. Priests like Monsignor Allchin, pastor of St. Mary’s from 1937 to 1955, brooked no disobedience from their parishioners. In 1951, when Allchin discovered that youngsters were sneaking out of his Masses to play street hockey, he ordered a curate named George Schlichte to stand guard at the door. Sure enough, as the Mass was only minutes old, a kid named Ryan scuttled down the aisle. “Where are you going, son?” asked Schlichte. “None of your business, Father,” snapped the boy. When Schlichte recounted the story at lunch, the other curates laughed, but the pastor only nodded. Two months later, the boy came to the rectory looking for Schlichte. “Father,” he implored, “please call my parents and get them off my back.” It seemed that every morning for years, Allchin had walked by the family’s home, invariably greeting them with a “Good morning, Mr. Ryan” or a “Fine day, Mrs. Ryan.” But after the incident with their son, he had marched past without so much as a nod. The Ryans were deeply distressed, and when Mr. Ryan found out what had happened, he gave his son a beating, then told him, “Get up to the rectory and square us with the pastor.”
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