Mini-Review: Common Ground

To most people, the history of Boston ends shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill. Once the American Revolution winds down, Boston disappears from the historical consciousness of all but a few history buffs and Red Sox fans. What happened in Boston during the 1830s? Or the 1910s? Do you know? Does anyone?

Yet Boston's history has lessons to teach, even though we might not be aware of them. As proof, I present J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground." Much respected in its day--it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award--nowadays it is read but rarely. Historians scorn it as mere journalism. Lay readers don't even know it exists. Yes, it has its own Wikipedia page, but so does the "Numa Numa" guy.

Beginning moments after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and ending a decade later, "Common Ground" follows three "typical" Boston family through ten years of forced busing, racial tension, and urban decay. Our subjects are the Irish McGoffs, the black Twymons, and the WASPy Divers. Chapters flit from one family to another. In between, Lukas examines other prominent Bostonians: Mayor Kevin White, Judge Arthur Garrity, Councilwoman Louise Day Hicks ("the northern Bull Connor), Boston Globe editor Tom Winship, and Cardinal Humberto Medeiros.

Before we even meet these people, Lukas takes us way, way back; not quite to the level of protozoa, but close. We learn about a Virginia slave family named the Bennefields gave rise to the Twymons of Boston; how Butchy Kirk of Ireland fathered the McGoff line; how enterprising colonial doctor John McKechnie was related to Harvard law student Colin Diver. We learn about the Atlantic slave trade, Catholic-Protestant tensions in Ireland, and 19th century New England abolitionism.

Thanks to Lukas's propulsive prose, these history lessons never devolve into dry-as-dust fact recitals, and the past blends slowly but surely into the story's present: Boston, circa 1970, where our three families live in very different circumstances. Rachel Twymon is a single mother, living on welfare, struggling to raise her brood in the heavily black Roxbury neighborhood. Alice McGoff, similarly single, lives with her equally large family in the fanatically Irish Charlestown neighborhood. Upwardly mobile professionals Colin and Joan Diver move into Boston's gentrifying South End neighborhood as an experiment in urban living.

Boston was hardly tranquil in the 1960s--witness the riots that followed King's assassination--but the imposition of school busing cracked what little racial peace that existed. Buses were attacked by white mobs. White and black students brawled in the hallways. Blacks walked out; whites walked out. Basketball teams had to play the entire season without spectators, so great was the fear of violence.

Our three families lose themselves in the howling storm of urban warfare. Rachel Twymon, crippled by lupus, loses control of her daughters as they rebel against their new school. Alice McGoff joins a militantly anti-busing organization called Powder Keg; peaceful prayer marches alternate with bloody street fighting. And Colin and Joan Diver, dedicated as they are to the cause of integration, find to their horror that their own son might have to board a cross-town bus.

One thing in particular I took from "Common Ground." Historians of modern conservatism often portray the movement as pure backlash. To them, the right had no ideas of its own. It simply exploited white working class resentment, directing it against the Great Society and tax-and-spend welfare programs. This, unsurprisingly, delegitimizes the right. It is not a real political movement. It is nothing but lizard-brain twitching.

No doubt there is truth in this hypothesis. "Common Ground" makes that very clear. White ethnics like the McGoffs turned away from liberalism in part because they hated the idea of co-existing with blacks. But, as "Common Ground" also demonstrates, that hatred began to ebb within a few years. By 1975 many whites had resigned themselves to integrate schools. Mobs gave way to muttered epithets, and then to nothing.

The more instructive lesson for historians of conservatism comes at the end of the book. The Divers, disgusted by the urban decay cankering their South End neighborhood, sick of dodging muggers on the way to work, leave Boston for a suburban neighborhood. Their neighbors guilt them terribly. But Colin thinks to himself, "What was wrong with wanting to live in a community where he could walk the streets without fear...where he could send his children to public school with confidence that they were getting a sound education?"

These simple demands, much more than racist backlash, are what helped conservatism develop from a marginal movement into the dominant American philosophy. "Common Ground," ostensibly about busing in Boston, is really a tale of long-lasting change in American culture.