boston vs philadelphia--2/3/25

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Today's selection--from Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia by  E. Digby Baltzell. The cultural differences in early America between Boston and Philadelphia:

“The preeminent families of both Boston and Philadelphia traditionally refer to themselves as clans. In our increasingly atomized society, where even the nuclear family is being questioned, what they mean can be best understood if we view their familial values as not too different from those of the Italian-American family portrayed in The Godfather. The tremendous popularity of the two films based on Puzo's novel may suggest that the restless and divorcing members of the Protestant middle and upper classes in American have a nostalgic appreciation of the lost traditions of their ancestors. In none of the 334 biographies in the Boston and Philadelphia samples, incidentally, was there recorded a single divorce.

“The clan is a historical as well as a biological unit. It is also the bearer of cultural and familial values. As the Puritan ethic was infinitely historical, whereas the Quaker ethic was definitely not, one would expect the clan idea to have more force in Boston than in Philadelphia. ‘Philadelphia,’ rightly noted Amory, ‘asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.’ I should add that what counts in Philadelphia is largely the wealth of one's parents; in Boston the undoubted importance of wealth is balanced by pride in ancestral achievements. This is in accord with what we found statistically, that the Bostonians not only were men of greater distinction but also came from families with longer traditions of leadership. The fifty Boston families were of English stock with the exception of the Agassizes from Switzerland, the Wendells from Holland, the Forbeses from Scotland, and the Jacksons from Ireland. Though English stock predominated in Philadelphia, the Lloyds, Cadwaladers, and Robertses were originally from Wales; the Wistars and Peppers, from Germany; the Bories and Markoes, from France; the Duanes, Careys, and Meades, from Ireland; and the city's most famous modem banking family, the Drexels, was founded by an itinerant portrait painter from Austria. Almost all of the fifty Boston families were Puritan Congregationalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The largest number of Philadelphia families were originally Quakers; some were Anglicans from the very beginning; and others, like the Ingersolls and Meigses, were originally Congregationalists from New England who became Presbyterians after settling in Philadelphia. This difference can be explained partly by the fact that whereas nearly all the Boston families originated in Massachusetts (mostly in the seventeenth century), many of the Philadelphia families came from other colonies in the course of the eighteenth century. (The reasons for the contrast in settlement patterns will become clear in later chapters.)

“Upper-class endogamy has been extremely strong in both Boston and Philadelphia from the outset. As we shall see, Lloyds, Logans, Norrises, Morrises, Pembertons, Fishers, Cadwaladers, and Biddies were all intermarried in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and the pattern has continued down to the present. In Boston, the rate of interclan marriage was even higher, especially among the Essex County families who came to that city in the eighteenth century. Joseph Cabot, for instance, married Elizabeth Cabot and built a great house in Salem in 1748. From their eleven children descended many of the Cabots, Lees, Jacksons, Winthrops, Lodges, Lowells, and Holmeses of Boston. Bishop Lawrence's daughter Marian described the marrying habits of late nineteenth-century Brahmin Boston in her memoirs: ‘Harold Peabody's name kept coming up in my diary more and more frequently .... He and I had worked together at Sailors’ Haven and on other projects, and we had come to know and admire each other very much.’  She then quoted from her Christmas Day, 1905, entry.

“Grandpa Peabody had five children, Jack, Cotty, Frank, Martha and George. Jack, Frank and Martha all married Lawrences, and Cotty married his first cousin, Fanny Peabody. George was the only one who married out of the family, but his marriage did not last long. When the second generation began to marry, Marian married her first cousin, Jim Lawrence, and so we were the fifth such combination without any break, and what then was the use of fighting fate?

“The extreme clan consciousness of the Boston Brahmins is reflected in their institutions. Part of the reason for the excellence and completeness of the Bostonians' DAB biographies as compared to those of the Philadelphians, for instance, is that the first and best supported local historical and genealogical societies in America were founded in Boston. The Massachusetts Historical Society was established in 1791, over a quarter of a century earlier than the Pennsylvania Historical Society (1824). Furthermore, being a member or an officer of the Boston society carries far more social prestige than does membership in the Philadelphia society. Thus, James Winthrop was a founder, Robert C. Winthrop was president for thirty years, and the membership included a Winthrop every year from 1791 to 1940, the close of our period. The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, not only was the first in America but also is by far the most thorough in its research, according to no less an authority than British Royal Genealogist Anthony Richard Wagner, who wrote that ‘few problems of genealogy anywhere have had closer and more extensive study than those of the New England settlers' origins.’ Surely, pride in family, clan, and class in Boston is very much in the Old Testament tradition of Calvinism, with its emphasis on the duties of God's elect, chosen to rule as ministers and magistrates over the whole community.

“One learns a great deal about the values of any culture through its myths and folklore. The myth that ‘when a Biddle gets drunk he thinks he is a Cadwalader’ is firmly rooted in the folklore of Proper Philadelphia. Similarly, in Boston, everybody knows that ‘the Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.’ Whereas the Biddle-Cadwalader tale suggests the convivial snobbery of a friendly and tolerant class, its Cabot-Lowell counterpart reflects the more serious (and humorless) hierarchical aspirations of a far more authoritarian class. Both myths, incidentally, place their more stolid (Cabot-Cadwalader) clans on a higher plane than the creative ones (Lowell-Biddle).

“Just when the Puritan-Federalist bred authority of Boston's Brahmins was beginning to wane in 1878, Boston's best founded the notorious Watch and Ward Society. Though strongly backed by local Catholic potentates, the society has been dominated ever since its founding by Brahmin leaders, from the First Family preacher and Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks down to Bishop Lawrence and Endicott Peabody of Groton. As late as 1940, its patron saint and main source of financial support was Godfrey Lowell Cabot, the richest man in the city. What else would one expect from the patriarch of a clan whose members speak only to each other and to God? One cannot imagine a Biddle or a Cadwalader bothering about the purity of the reading habits of his fellow citizens.”