Boston's Closed Corporation

THE PROPER BOSTONIANS (381 pp.)-- Cleveland Amory--Dutton ($4.50).

Most of Boston's 2,550,000 people are apt to regard the city's Social Register as a catalogue of the select, and nothing but the select. But to the few dozen "First Families," the Register's 8,000 names are far too many. Some have refused to let their names be used; one, who called the Register a "damned telephone book," tears each year's edition in half and sends it back.

In The Proper Bostonians, young (30) Cleveland Amory, a Social Registerite himself, has set out to examine his peers. The book is the first of a series which Button will publish about U.S. society (others to come: New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Santa Fe). Culled largely from First Family writings and conversations with Beacon Hill contemporaries, Amory's smoothly phrased findings are not likely to ruffle the poise of the Cabots and the Lowells. Still, many a less proper Bostonian will find much here to delight him. Says Amory: "Besides not being Mayflower-descended, Boston's First Families of today are, with few exceptions, not those families which rose to prominence early in the city's history. Almost all today's Families enjoy thinking of themselves as such, but they are, strictly speaking, no more entitled to the thought than they are to the coats-of-arms many of them have freely adopted."

Piratical Past. The founders of these families were almost invariably shrewd 19th Century merchants who bought cheap and sold dear: "... a Cabot, a Derby, a Sears, an Endicott, a Peabody, a Crowninshield and many others. All represent First Family names today and yet all were men who, if not actually pirates, were at least vikings in their methods." If some were above the slave trade, "they were not averse to an occasional sally into the opium trade." Merchant T. Jefferson Coolidge confided to his "Day Book" that "money was the only 'real avenue' to social success in Boston."

In the 1870's, when enough First Family candidates, presumably, had become rich, the little inbred society called a halt: "All of a sudden, as it were, the Golden Gates to Boston's First Familyland clanged shut, and, generally speaking, they have remained shut ever since. Even the word 'merchant' . . . died out in the Boston language."

Those who were inside when the gates slammed have often behaved as if all of Boston were a closed corporation and they the only stockholders. In a sense, their view was justified. "These institution men did not themselves necessarily run the mills and the railroads and the banks and the insurance companies, but they ran the men who did. To a somewhat smaller extent, but still to a considerable one, the inheritors of their positions continue to do so and thus continue to give Boston Society its appearance of permanence." Groton Headmaster Endicott

Peabody once wrote to the president of the Boston & Maine Railroad demanding more heat in the cars that carried Groton boys. His successful argument: "The parents of many of our boys are prominent railroad people. . . ."

Cabot Wives. Poet T. S. Eliot rated Boston Society as "quite uncivilized--but refined beyond the point of civilization." One Proper Bostonian told Amory that such families as the Lowells, the Jacksons and the Higginsons were "social and kindly people inclined to ... mingle with the world pleasantly. . . . But they got some Cabot wives who shut them up."

Cabot and other Proper Bostonian wives received identical training in etiquette. In 1838 the authoritative Young Lady's Friend defined a "gentlewoman" as the "daughter of a rich man." The infallible mark of a gentlewoman was to remain unflustered. A much-admired instance cf poise was Daniel Webster who, skidding a bird he was carving into a lady's lap, calmly said: "Ma'am, I will thank you for that goose."

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