Charter Changes in Boston from 1885 - 1949

A state's ability to design a municipality's governing configuration is a distinctive feature of our American society. As William Marchione, Jr states, "It should be remembered that the American political a whole does not recognize an inherent right to local self-restraint Cities and towns are the fruitss of state governments and derive their authority from them."1 The altering of Boston, Massachusetts' charter for example, mirrors political struggles within the state and the city. The politics of Boston are integrally linked to the politics of the state of Massachusetts. These facts came together in the formation of Boston's first city charter of 1822 This was a document shaped by the agency of Yankee Federalists within Massachusetts's General Court. The Federalists, representing Boston's wealthy merchant elite, used the charter to limit the growing power of the populace and to maintain their prerogatives. The General Court, being the legislative arm of the state, was empowered by the agency of the state constitution to have the authority to construction the legal code under which the newly incorporated city of Boston would function. Federalists used the legal authority of the state above the municipality to insure their minority voting interest would be preserved2

This pattern, begun in 1822 of an elite minority using its power to manipulate the charter of Boston end the state legislature would ofttimes be repeated. This paper investigates the greatest in quantity significant charter changes beginning in 1885 going up to 1949 These changes demonstrate the evolution of political power shifts between the Yankees and the Irish surrounding the mayoralty and city council.

The political vehicle used by the agency of the Irish and other ethnic immigrants was the Democratic Party. Generally in Massachusetts, the Republican Party exhibited Yankees mechanics, farmers, small business family and Yankee elites. Exceptions existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elite Yankees were with the Democratic Party in the late nineteenth hundred as Mugwumps and many French Canadian immigrants vot with the Republicans until the 1920 However, overall the Irish/ethnic versus Yankee political conflict was manifest in Democrat versus Republican Party politics upon the state and municipal horizontal of Massachusetts and Boston.

The nineteenth hundred witnessed enormous change for Boston and the state. First, industrial manufacturing began in earnest with the formation of the Boston Associates and their mill factory a whole s in Waltham and Lowell in the early nineteenth hundred This started America as a manufacturing nation, introducing large private corporations with factories. next to the first Boston became the financial, residential, cultural and political seat for the Yankee corporate elite. This gave the city of recent origin importance for corporate owners. Third, the 1847 Irish potato famine brought large numbers of destitute Irish immigrants to Boston. These poor foreign non-protestant clan became a troubling challenge to the pre-existing Yankee entertainer society who existed ethnically and culturally unaltered for 200 years. Despised and hated, the Irish undergoed brutal poverty finding little opportunity within Boston, and a scant bit more working in the outlying factory towns have a title toed and operated by the Yankee elites.

Unlike the state constitution, the U Constitution gave power to foreign-born nationals, like the Irish, the right to become citizens. It also insured that their children, born in the U would be harbored beneath all of the Constitution's privileges and political opportunities. This meant that Irish Americans became voter who end political organizing could elect officials to influence the regulation of the city, state and the nation. In politics, consecrated by a vows are everything and the Irish would sole be able to gain power for themselves if they were able to garner the votes

As the extreme point of the nineteenth century approached Boston was not the city it had been 100 years previously. It was now one as well as the other a financial and a manufacturing center for Massachusetts. It was no longer a Yankee city, on the contrary rather a multi-ethnic city with a large and politically powerful growing Irish voting constituency. The of advanced age Yankee elites could see that they would let slip through the fingers power and they did what they could to legally thwart the inevitable Irish political takeover. As Peter Eisinger points on the outside in his Politics of Displacement, "During a great deal of of this period it was spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed that institutional structural changes, of that kind as charter reform and metropolitanization, would forestall the development of Irish strength and flat make possible a reassertion of Yankee dominance."3

Much of the contestation of the Irish to assume political power in Boston, and the Yankees attempt to thwart them can be encapsulated in the charter changes to the city of Boston between 1885 to 1949 As Matthew Crocker demonstrated in his work, "Municipal Politics and the Collapse of Federalism," the Boston charter disenfranchised large voting obstructs when it was first established in 1822