Some historians in central and western Massachusetts think we’ve gotten it wrong for 250 long years. The American Revolution didn’t start in Lexington and Concord in 1775. It actually started a year earlier, when thousands of colonists stormed courthouses in western and central Massachusetts in open rebellion to Britain’s takeover of the state’s judicial system, they say. GBH’s Sam Turken has more. … It’s actually quite interesting history. I hadn’t known about the courthouse rebellions until reading Turken’s piece. … I guess I’ve long suffered from a bad case of eastern-Massachusetts bias. …
Btw, it seems they’ve been trying to set the record straight for a while now about where and when the Revolution really started.
At one point last decade, I sort of assumed Boston Scientific had become a perennial loser, one of those has-been companies whose best days were permanently behind it, sort of like Digital Equipment, Wang Laboratories, GE etc., etc. But guess what? Boston Scientific is back. And it’s now Massachusetts’ most valuable public company, helped by a 19 percent stock price gain since the start of the year and a corresponding loss of 21 percent by reigning local king Thermo Fisher, as the BBJ reports. … Take a gander at BS’s stock performance since 2000, starting the new century at a low of $6.44 a share, then experiencing a brief bump around 2004 before collapsing again to $5.14 in 2012. But it’s been a mostly steady-eddie climb since then. Impressive. … BSX stock chart via Yahoo Finance.
Update – Here’s a look at BS’s revenue numbers since the mid-1990s. Notice the 2008-2013 revenue slump, followed by a subsequent rise fueled most recently by a major acquisition spree. They threw money at the growth problem — and some of it stuck.
Update II — 5.22.25 – And some things never change. From the BBJ: “Boston Scientific CEO buys Palm Beach County mansion for $17 million.”
Ray Flynn and family, election-night victory party, 1983.
As promised, here’s the last of Brighton Reader’s thoughts on former Mayor Ray Flynn, who BR argues wasn’t the father of modern Boston progressivism as recently portrayed in this Globe op-ed and later discussed by Hub Blog here and here. Simply put, Flynn was more complicated than any single label. He was part liberal, part populist, part deeply conservative Catholic, as Brighton Reader remembers him. From BR:
“During Ray Flynn’s first campaign for mayor in 1983, Peter Lucas labeled him the ‘Lech Walesa of Boston politics.’ He was sometimes called a populist, given his working class background, focus on neighborhoods, support for unions, and for rent control, too. He was out in the neighborhoods as a city councilor, and a publicity hound. Both traits continued as mayor, sometimes going into the ridiculous (grabbing a fire extinguisher from a Santa Claus!?). But Ray first made his mark as a state rep with relentless opposition to legal abortion. That issue gave him the attention that got him onto the Boston City Council and ultimately led to his the candidacy for mayor. …
“During Flynn’s first winter storm as mayor, he hopped in a plow alongside the driver, reporters from the then robust Boston media corps (tv stations! Newspapers! Radio stations!) went along for the ride. It was a hallmark of his mayoralty, the streets were plowed, the parks improved, street cleaning and resident parking expanded, abandoned cars were towed.
“There were two ‘factions’ in the Ray’s first term, those on the left were called ‘Sandinistas.’ The other didn’t have a name, as I remember, but were the South Boston/Dorchester people who had supported him for years, also the pro-life people from across the city. The Sandinistas were mainly activists, not from Boston, who supported him based on things like rent control and linkage, and had gotten to know him after he became a city councilor. Ray Dooley, Flynn’s campaign manager, seen as the leader of them, became head of a the Department of Administrative Services. At the time, this role made him the most important department head, overseeing the budget, with lots of influence on city policy. Having been campaign manager, he had a good relationship with Flynn, which gave him even more influence. He could get people hired throughout city government.
“Joe Fisher, Flynn’s trusted confidant, was the most influential of the other group. His desk was just outside of Flynn’s office. He was another person with lots of influence on policy, hiring, who got what. He didn’t oversee any department directly, he was a ‘special assistant’ to the mayor. He landed in jail for taking bribes.
“Btw – Ray Flynn and Billy Bulger were both from South Boston. They did not much care for each other.”
And, yet again, here’s another example of the Trump 10/90 Rule at work, i.e. when Trump may hold a view that has a 10 percent kernel of truth to it, but then he goes 90 percent overboard in reaction to it. The NYT’s John McWhorter explains why, for example, Trump may have legitimate complaints about doctrinaire aspects of DEI and woke-ism – but then he gets it completely wrong when he goes after the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History (see image above). … Btw: McWhorter heaps high praise on how the museum handles Black history, saying its “teachings are never strident or rhetorical.”
The Globe’s Christopher Gasper and the Herald’s Zack Cox provide the postmortems on the end of the Celts season – and the end of an era due to the CBA and likely dismantling of the team to avoid further luxury-tax hits. … I particularly liked Jaylen Brown’s appeal to Bostonians not to give up on the team moving forward (see Gasper’s piece). I also liked Derrick White’s comments at MassLive. He knows major changes are coming. From Derrick:
“I just love playing with the guys that we have in that locker room,” White said after game 6. “Just a great group of guys that compete at a high level. Off the court we just had a lot of fun. And I think that’s just what I’ll probably (be) the most proud of, is just being able to say that I put on a Boston Celtics uniform with some amazing group of people, you can go down a list of every person who has been on the Celtics since I’ve been here. That’s probably what I’m most proud of.”
Ezra Klein at the NYT hosts a fascinating discussion with Zack Beauchamp, who recently wrote a piece in Vox called “Trump Is Losing,” and Andrew Marantz, who recently wrote “Is it Happening Here?” in the New Yorker. The topic: whether Trump is winning in his quest to reshape American democracy, creating a strongman like government along the lines of what’s happening in Hungary. … After witnessing the administration’s latest we-don’t-like-your-politics attack on an institution and so many other outrageous actions, I’m with Marantz, who has studied Hungary under Viktor Orbán and who argues the evolution toward a form of autocracy isn’t a straight line from here to there, one heavy-handed assault on democracy after another. It’s more gradual and piecemeal, one many people don’t recognize as it happens because they’re not immediately effected. … The end result isn’t a clear-cut case of dictatorship replacing democracy, Marantz says. It’s more like a “hybrid regime,” part democratic, part autocratic, or what some call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elements of democracy survive alongside strongman-style government. That’s where we’re headed, I fear, and I don’t see future presidents giving up the new powers that Trump has grabbed. New precedents aren’t easily reversed.
As promised, here’s some more of Brighton Reader’s thoughts on whether former Mayor Ray Flynn was really some sort of seminal figure who first lit and then passed the torch of progressivism to Tom Menino, Marty Walsh and ultimately Michelle Wu, as Don Gillis asserts in this Globe op-ed. Brighton Reader doesn’t think so, as he mentioned earlier this week on Hub Blog. The term ‘progressive,’ as it’s understood today, simply doesn’t apply to mayors prior to Michelle Wu, he argues. But if there was such a past pioneering progressive mayor, Brighton Reader argues it wouldn’t be Flynn:
“Who was the mayor who instituted strong rent control, hired the first Black commissioner of a city department, hired one of the first liaisons (maybe the first?) to the gay community in the country, established a network of offices in neighborhoods to make city government more accessible, opposed a major federal highway project when such opposition was to put you in the path of ‘progress,’ fought Logan Airport’s expansion, and sponsored summer events (Summer Thing) in the neighborhoods? Kevin White. Ray Flynn’s predecessor. Oh, and by the way, he also hired Fred Salvucci, Barney Frank, Peter Meade, and many other ‘liberals,’ as those on the left were called back then. Not sure where any of them would fall on today’s ideological spectrum, then or now.”
Are angry MAGA Republicans on the cusp of seizing control of the Mass. GOP? They sure sound like it, based on the ruckus they’re constantly creating within the party. But the Herald’s Joe Battenfeld has a good column in which he argues that uber-moderate Charlie Baker — the former Massachusetts governor, in case you’ve forgotten – still holds sway over the state party, as evidenced by the fact that two of his non-MAGA “disciples” are currently running for governor. … As Joe notes, Baker’s poll numbers continue to run high in Massachusetts, more than two years after leaving the Corner Office, thanks largely to his moderate positions on issues. …
Not to give MAGA types advice, but they should stop focusing on statewide races. The statewide numbers simply aren’t there for pro-Trump types. Instead, they should be focusing on district races in western and central Massachusetts, as I suggested earlier this week (scroll down). But as I also noted, political purists, such as MAGA types, rarely think in such practical political terms.
Knicks fans were out in obnoxious force last night after their team lost at TD Garden. … Even their corrupt mayor got into the sore loser act: “B—K FOSTON” … The response of Boston fans to the uncouth ruffians in their midst? Typically polite, calm and considerate. Saintly, even.
Don Gillis, who served in Mayor Ray Flynn’s administration back in the day, has a new book out on the Flynn years at City Hall, “The Battle for Boston: How Mayor Ray Flynn and Community Organizers Fought Racism and Downtown Power Brokers.” He also has an op-ed at the Globe on the Flynn years (“Boston wasn’t always a progressive bulwark. Then came Ray Flynn.”) I have a few quibbles with some of Gillis’s assertions in his op-ed. But let me say first: I think Ray Flynn’s legacy will indeed be tied, as the book title suggests, to how he handled the city’s awful racial tensions when he first became mayor in 1984, following the start of court-ordered busing in the 1970s. In a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of way, Flynn’s South Boston roots and his prior anti-busing stance gave him a form of political cover to reach out to a Black community that understandably had little trust in the white establishment. He wasn’t totally successful. But Flynn’s first term in office, in my mind, is when the racial healing truly began in Boston. Ray Flynn was the right mayor at the right time for Boston.
So, without having read his book, I think Gillis is right to emphasize Flynn’s fight against racism as one of his great legacies. But Ray Flynn as some sort of seminal figure who first lit and then passed the torch of progressivism to Tom Menino, Marty Walsh and ultimately Michelle Wu, helping the “city to become the progressive bulwark it is today,” as Gillis asserts in his Globe piece? I don’t know. Sounds like he’s stretching things a bit. I always viewed Flynn as a rather complicated man who, yes, had a progressive streak, if you want to call it that, but he also had a very conservative streak, such as his staunch anti-abortion stance and his deep religious beliefs that led to his becoming ambassador to the Vatican and later to defend Cardinal Law even after the church sexual-abuse crisis erupted in Boston. In between those two extremes was a rather pragmatic pol bordering on populist pol, or so I recall.
To get a more insider-ish take on Flynn, I turned to a long-ago contributor to Hub Blog, Brighton Reader, a true Boston political junkie. Brighton Reader’s response to my query about Flynn’s alleged progressiveness:
“I would not call Ray Flynn a progressive. The term meant nothing when he was in politics. People would either say someone was a liberal, a la Mike Dukakis, or a conservative, as in Ed King. Or today pundits might proclaim him a Pope Leo XIV Catholic, maybe? … ‘Progressive” is a label. It is irrelevant to describing anyone other than Michelle Wu. She is the only ideologue who has served as Boston’s mayor, and it shows. All the others since Kevin White were pragmatists. …
“I would not call any Boston mayor except Michelle Wu a progressive as the term is understood today. While perhaps Menino, and likely Walsh, would say they are, it would more be as a way to position themselves than a commitment to an ideology. Neither was an ideologue.”
Brighton Reader has more fascinating thoughts about Boston’s modern string of mayors. I hope to share some of those observations in coming posts.
Update — From a Hub Blog reader: “I saw Ray Flynn on TV last week interviewed about the Pope – he looked and sounded great.
“Ray Flynn did not govern as a Progressive. He was a type that has become nearly extinct in Boston politics and entirely extinct in national Democratic politics – a moderate, with strong liberal approaches on some issues and traditional culture on others. I do not know the man but I think his Catholic faith was central to how he worked with people throughout all of Boston. He believed in human dignity and acted upon it.
“Agree with Brighton Reader that neither Flynn, nor Menino nor Walsh, were Progressives. They were much more like each other than Mayor Wu. However, the work of Flynn, Menino and Walsh making Boston a more inclusive and attractive place to live did pave the way for the current era of Progressivism – because young affluent educated professionals attracted to government in this part of the country tend overwhelmingly to be Progressive. ”
