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HIDDEN HISTORY Banned in Red Scare Boston The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the “M.T.A.” Peter Dreier and Jim Vrabel 1959, but it was a local Boston group, most of whose members are still alive, that wrote and first performed it ten years earlier. Why weren’t they on the stage that afternoon? n a clear, chilly day in Novem- But the most revealing sign that Boston was ber 2004, then-Massachusetts forgetting its past was that the version of the governor Mitt Romney stood in- song sung that day omitted the name of the sideO a large white tent set up on the brick plaza Boston mayoral candidate for whom it was writ- outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn’t there ten—Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. to deliver a speech or cut a ribbon. He was Romney and the mass-transit bureaucrats there to sing a song—something he did with who organized the event were, no doubt, un- gusto as he joined the Kingston Trio in a rous- witting accomplices to this collective memory ing rendition of “M.T.A.,” the well-known bal- loss, and like most of those in the audience, lad about a “man named Charlie” doomed to unaware that O’Brien’s name was missing from “ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston” and the lyrics sung at the ceremony. But its absence become “the man who never returned.” reflected the fact that a chapter of Boston his- The purpose of this unusual concert was tory has been torn out of the city’s collective to launch the “Charlie Card,” an electronic fare memory. Few today remember a period of time card that has now replaced tokens on the Bos- barely sixty years ago when Boston was less like ton subway system. “I’ve always wanted to do the “Cradle of Liberty” or “Athens of America” that, since about the fifth grade,” said Rom- and more like nearby Salem during the time ney, after singing the song that has become not of the witchcraft trials. only part of American folklore, but a proud part of Boston history. alter A. O’Brien, Jr., was a good- History is a complicated business, though. looking, broad-shouldered, charming Sometimes places, like people with selective W Irishman. He combined a gift of gab memories, omit parts of their history to avoid with a passion for progressive politics. Born in inconvenient truths. There were signs of 1914, O’Brien was raised in Portland, Maine, Boston’s historical amnesia at work that day. where his ancestors had fled from the potato One sign was that the ceremony was held famine in their native County Tipperary. At age outside a subway station now called Govern- twenty, he graduated from the Gorham Nor- ment Center, an assemblage of sterile city, mal School (now part of the University of state, federal, and private office buildings. In Southern Maine), but immediately shipped out the “M.T.A.” song, the station was called by to sea as a deckhand because, he later ex- its original name, Scollay Square, a place teem- plained, “They were paying teachers $12 a ing with burlesque houses, barrooms, tattoo week.” It was at sea that O’Brien discovered a parlors, and pawnshops. But after Boston se- taste and a talent for politics, and he became cured federal urban renewal funds in the early a union organizer. He married the former Laura 1960s to “clean up” its downtown, the entire Manchester, also from Portland, in 1939, then area was razed and renamed. served as a radio operator in the Merchant A more telling sign was that the Kingston Marine in the Second World War. After the Trio was invited to perform. It’s true that the war, Walter and Laura moved to Boston, partly West Coast group had popularized “M.T.A.” in for the opportunities offered by a bigger city DISSENT / Spring 2008 ■ 81 M.T.A. Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. Photo courtesy of Julia O’Brien-Merrill 82 ■ DISSENT / Spring 2008 M.T.A. and partly to escape the conservative politics naïve, a dreamer, and worse, while lauded by of Maine and of Walter’s parents, who were others as a champion of the New Deal and a not happy with the increasingly liberal views visionary. Some early polls showed that Wallace of their son and his wife. had the support of more than 20 percent of Their first apartment was on Myrtle Street, the voters. Democratic Party officials, as well which straddled the line between the Beacon as some left-leaning union leaders, feared that Hill of Boston’s bluebloods and its polyglot, even if he couldn’t win the election, Wallace working-class West End. The pair immediately might attract enough Democratic voters so that plunged into politics. Walter got a job as port the White House would fall into the hands of agent of the American Communications Asso- the Republicans. ciation, a union affiliated with the left-leaning O’Brien was a delegate to the Progressive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Party national convention in Philadelphia in Laura did secretarial work for the various po- July 1948 that nominated Wallace for presi- litical organizations in which they became in- dent and Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho for vice volved. Both joined the Massachusetts chapter president. O’Brien campaigned energetically of the Progressive Party, which held its found- for the ticket, and even became a candidate ing convention when three thousand delegates himself. Running for Congress in Massachu- crowded into the Hotel Bradford in Boston in setts’s Tenth Congressional District, O’Brien April 1948. lost by a two-to-one margin to the Republican incumbent (and future Massachusetts gover- he national Progressive Party had been nor and U.S. secretary of state) Christian Hert- formed a year earlier by a fragile coali- er. Although he received fifty thousand votes, T tion of independent radicals, commu- pundits attributed O’Brien’s showing less to his nists, and left-wing Democrats who were stands on the issues and more to his Irish sur- unhappy with the Truman administration. On name and the fact that he also ran on the Dem- domestic issues, they criticized Truman’s un- ocratic ticket when that party declined to field willingness to challenge Southern Democrats’ a candidate. Wallace, whose campaign had be- support for Jim Crow and his tepid support for gun with such high hopes, received fewer than labor unions. They advocated an end to segre- 40,000 votes in all of Massachusetts and just gation, full voting rights for blacks, and uni- 1.1 million (2.4 percent) nationally. versal health insurance. Wallace’s poor showing had little to do with On foreign policy, they attacked Truman’s his stand on domestic issues. It was the Pro- get-tough policy with the Soviet Union and his gressive Party’s foreign policy positions that support for loyalty oaths to root out commu- many found troubling, in particular its uncriti- nists and radicals from government jobs, cal support for the Soviet Union and the Stalin unions, and teaching positions in schools and regime. That support, and its failure to bar universities. They opposed the Truman Doc- Communist Party members from its ranks— trine, which aimed to contain communism as the newly formed Americans for Democratic through military intervention if necessary. They Action did—led to charges that the Progres- even refused to support the Marshall Plan to sive Party was infiltrated, some said controlled, rebuild Europe, which they considered an in- by the Communist Party. strument of the cold war. They preferred a As John Culver and John Hyde write in multilateral aid program that would be admin- their 2000 biography of Wallace, American istrated through the United Nations. Dreamer, “Only the most rabid Red-baiters The party was formed primarily to support thought Wallace himself a Communist. But the 1948 presidential bid of Henry Wallace, millions came to believe he was a ‘dupe’ or a an Iowa farmer, inventor, and crusading pub- ‘fellow traveler’ or a ‘pink’ or the naive captive lisher who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s of leftist radicals.” Wallace would resign from secretary of agriculture, vice president, and the party two years later over its failure to sup- secretary of commerce. As a candidate for port the U.S. intervention in Korea, and sub- president, Wallace was denounced by some as sequently say, “You know, I didn’t actually DISSENT / Spring 2008 ■ 83 M.T.A. realize how strong the Communists were in the But O’Brien and his fellow activists under- Progressive Party.” stood that the best way to energize a party and promote issues is through an election cam- fter Wallace’s poor showing in the paign, so in 1949 he became a candidate 1948 campaign, most of the state chap- again—this time for mayor of Boston. O’Brien’s A ters of the Progressive Party disbanded. opponents included the incumbent, James However, thanks largely to O’Brien, who was Michael Curley, a legendary figure in Boston named its executive director, the Massachu- politics who had already been elected mayor setts Progressive Party kept going. “He was a four times in four different decades; City Clerk wonderful person to work for,” recalled Anne John B. Hynes, who had served as acting mayor Alach, now eighty-four but then the office sec- for five months in 1947 when Curley was serv- retary, “although knowing Wally, he would have ing time in federal prison for mail fraud; Demo- said ‘to work with.’ ” O’Brien, she said, “was cratic ward-heeler Patrick J.