How We Choose Which Historical Stories to Tell?
By 
I published an essay not long ago in Where Are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites about the lack of labor history in National Park Service sites. One of the points I learned in researching this is that the Lowell National Historic Park wasn’t created as some brilliant idea to tell the story of America’s industrial past. Nope, it was a scheme by Massachusetts politicians to bring tourist dollars into depressed Lowell. Now, I think the NPS does a great job with that site, but the origins of it really interested me. It was a Tip O’Neill deal as much as anything.
I thought of that when reading about another key part of our public history–Boston’s Freedom Trail. This run-down of its creation and the choices it makes says a lot about how profit matters more than a real telling of history when making these decisions.
The Freedom Trail’s simplicity makes it effective. For little more than the cost of paint and a few signs, Boston bought itself a national landmark celebrating the birth of America—one that is simultaneously its own destination, map, and tour guide. No devices needed. For some families, the Freedom Trail is an entire vacation.
As a historian of memory, I too was impressed by Boston’s Freedom Trail. But the Freedom Trail, it turns out, wasn’t created by historians. It was actually drawn by a backroom confab of businessmen and real estate developers. In fact, the Freedom Trail succeeds as public history only by making us forget that little about it is actually public.
Boston newspapers first pitched plans for a proto-Freedom Trail in the 1930s. But the idea didn’t catch on until after World War II. By that point, most of the city’s once-massive textile industry had fled to the nonunion South. The Great Depression eroded what remained of the city’s other traditional labor markets. When John Hynes became mayor in 1949, he aimed to revive Boston’s downtown economy by using new federal housing laws that created big incentives for private developers. Their goal: spur growth by replacing “slums” with fun attractions that might lure well-heeled white tourists from out of town. In historic Boston, then, the question was how to make the past profitable.
Boston Evening Traveler editor Bill Schofield had an answer. Beginning in March 1951, Schofield used his daily column to resurrect the notion of a Revolutionary walking tour, what he called a “liberty loop.” “THE PEOPLE would like it,” he insisted, and “it would add to the looks of the city.” Schofield framed the trail as a tool to help respectable tourists avoid what he considered to be less-than-respectable aspects of Boston’s Italian North End and the bawdy amusements of adjacent Scollay Square. Schofield noted how pro-development pundits expected that “such a plan would pay dividends almost beyond belief.”
Schofield’s gambit worked. Mayor Hynes called him personally to endorse the idea. Soon the Boston Chamber of Commerce stepped in and, within months, erected 30 painted plywood signs pointing “toward Old Boston’s most famous historical shrines.” Forty thousand visitors walked the trail by 1953, the year that Boston issued new metal trail markers each featuring a gold silhouette of Paul Revere.
In drawing the line, as it were, this coterie of newspapermen, politicians, developers, and businesspeople expressed ideas about history that are hard wired in the Freedom Trail today. These ideas silently filter into how thousands of vacationers learn about American history in Boston every day, just by following that famous red line.
Foremost among those ideas is the notion that doing history is about gathering up only the most important events and putting them in the right order. But what are the most important events? And what is the right order?
What tourists don’t learn in Boston is that the answers to those questions for Schofield and his compatriots had little to do with history and everything to do with turning a profit. Laying out a clear route was essential, they reasoned, not because it made for good history, but because as Schofield opined, doing so would increase the time visitors had “for pleasure and incidentally for spending money” at businesses that would spring up along the trail.
In their minds, it also meant drawing the line carefully away from histories that might confront prosperous white tourists with urban poverty or ethnic and racial difference. They didn’t include a stop at the site of Boston’s famed Liberty Tree, for instance, because it was deemed to be too close to Chinatown. Schofield worried too about insolent street kids, and the problem of suburban tourists being “greeted with mobs of urchins at Paul Revere’s House.” And though Crispus Attucks—the formerly enslaved man celebrated as the first American killed in the Revolution—could just as well have been the trail’s mascot, it’s worth noting that by the 1950s Paul Revere had become a beloved symbol of white entrepreneurial manhood. Mark Bortman, the wealthy plastics magnate who chaired the Chamber of Commerce’s committee on historic places, was a Revere fanatic. He and the other men who drew the line loved seeing Revere on his horse.
Telling our history by not telling our history is the perfect encapsulation of these issues.