Liberal establishment on Tory Row.

Liberal Establishment on Tory Row

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.--Number 113 Brattle Street is a large white gabled house with green shutters and leaded glass around the doors. It stands surrounded by million-dollar houses in the middle of an historic neighborhood just west of Harvard Square. In fact, its next-door neighbor is a national landmark, and the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

But the 150 or so demonstrators who, one evening a few weeks ago, marched from Harvard Square to the Brattle Street house in a candlelight procession might have recalled the street's old nickname. In the days after its wealthy residents flet to Canada at the start of the Revolutionary War, it was called Tory Row.

The demonstrators were protesting the departure of 113 Brattle Street's most recent owner, the Commonwealth Day School. Almost from the moment the school bought the property in the summer of 1988, the local residents had put on a full-court press to rid themselves of this unwanted neighbor. A petition with over two hundred names opposing the school was presented that October. When the Cambridge Zoning Appeals Board overrode objections and allowed the school to move in, a suit was brought in Massachusetts Land Court, where it languished for a year, during which time the school was prevented from holding anything more than kindergarten classes in the building. Garbage removal was reportedly held up for several weeks. The school's lawyer claimed it had received "harassing phone calls." One neighbor was seen peeking through hedges and taking photos.

Obviously the residents of Brattle Street are used to having their way, and if it hadn't been for one fact their efforts would probably not have caused much of a stir. That fact is that the students of the Commonwealth Day School were about 90 per cent black.

Who were these people who were so outraged at having a minority private school in their midst? They were members of one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most liberal communities in Massachussets (and therefore the country). Among the names on the petition opposing the CDS were a U.S.-appeals-court judge; a member of the board of directors of the Boston Globe; the president of WGBH-TV, David Ives, famour for his bow ties and his fundraising stunts; TV chef Julia Child; the local city councillor and many member of the Cambridge Civic Association, which ardently supports one of the strictest rent-control laws in the nation; the architect Graham Gund; and several Harvard professors, including Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe.

At the start of the current school year, still unable to hold full classes, the Commonwealth Day School threw in the towel. When it sold the property, the story hit the newspapers.

In the uproar that followed, public responses tended to come in two varieties: solemn headshaking editorials on "The Racism in Us All," with calls to "heal this terrible rift in human relations"; and derisive hoots at the "brahmins of Brattle Street" and their stuffy hypocrisy. The master of the second variety is the Boston Herald's hired gun, Howie Carr, who in two columns called the CDS's old neighbors "rich liberals honkies" and "melanin-impaired millionaires."

The calls-in shows picked up on the controversy, with callers momentarily redirecting their raillery away from Boston sports teams and Governor Dukakis. The radio talk show is, of course, now an accepted outlet for middle-and working-class rage. And the rage runs against elite communities such as Beacon Hill, the town of Brookline, and (parts of) Cambridge. It goes back to long before the busing fights of the Seventies. Pronouncements seem to issue from these sheltered precints as from on high (and usually through the medium of the Boston Globe) against bigotry, greed, and "mean-spiritedness" (i.e., lower taxes). They are directed at the ruffianly neighborhoods of Dorchester, Charlestown, and (boo! hiss!) South Boston as well as the suburbs. Catching the folks on Brattle Street in an act of bigotry was like catching Cotton Mather in the bushes with Hester Prynne.

Those of the petition-singers who have come out of hiding to defend themselves are claiming that their real concerns were traffic and safety. But for almost fifty years before the CDS came along, the building housed a prep school, not to mention that the venerable (and lily-white) Buckingham, Browne & Nichols school is only a few blocks away. The neighbors have since welcomed with open arms something called the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, which bought the property from the CDS, even though the city contends that the Institute may cause more traffic problems that the school would have done.

The man catching the most flak is Laurence H. (nicknamed by Carr, "Lost") Tribe, the noted authority on liberal jurisprudence and scourge of Robert Bork. Tribe, who lives in a house assessed at $807,381, is the only one so far who has asked that his name be removed from the petition. He now says he was misled, being told only that the building was unsafe for children. But Tribe is caught in a classic Catch 22. Did he, a lawyer, sign a petition whose implications he was completely ignorant of? And why did it take him a year, while the CDS was fighting for its life--in fact, until the story made the Boston papers--before he did anything about it? After Bork, Tribe knows that a blot on one's past can strip one up on the stroll to the Supreme Court.

Why, then, were these august citizens of Cambridge so blind to how their actions would be received? Quite apart from the question of racism, why weren't their progressive guilt detectors turned on?

Liberal Globe columnist Mike Barnicle may have put his finger on it when he suggested the whole controversy was a matter of "class war." It all goes back, you see, to Cotton Mather.

There are two strains of liberalism in Massachusetts: ethnic Democratic populism, and Yankee reformism. The former appeals to the temperament of the average voter; its most famous practitioner was the legendary Mayor James Michael Curley. Because of the reign of Michael Dukakis, the latter strain is currently in the ascendancy; it has always been the driving political force among the intelligentsia and the old-money types.

The trouble with Yankee reformism is that its Puritan ancestry is always lurking not far beneath the surface gloss of sociology and "good government." Like John Winthrop, the patrician liberal (whether or not patrician socially) secretly believes that he is a member of an elect; an elect with a superior political consciousness. The concept of judicial activism subscribed to by Tribe, after all, presupposes an enlightened class of legal professionals. This enlightened class goes forth to do battle against the materialistic crassness and bigotry of the middle classes and the nouveau riche. For them, that is what it means to be a liberal. From their cockpits in the media and the academy, they sit above the herd. And their dwelling places are sanctuaries of tolerance and sophistication.

Like the minister so intent upon rooting out sin in the souls of others that he cannot see the iniquity in his own, the residents of Brattle Street are astonished at the accusation of racism. After all, they're the reformers. (By the same token, to this day, Michael Dukakis doesn't understand why the people of the Commonwealth are so furious to have discovered that his administration has been even more wasteful and corrupt than the "old-style" Democratic regime of Ed King.) And it should come as no surprise that two of the signatories to the petition are members of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Committee.

The folks of Brattle Street have thus far gotten off easy. Not so their victim. The Commonwealth Day School has left Cambridge for good. It has no permanent home and is renting space in Boston as it can find it. From a hoped-for enrollment of 150, the school is down to eight students. No one should underestimate the clout of the political aristocracy of this city. The next time it is wielded, it will be on the side of rent control and against the small landlords of Cambrdge, or perhaps against housing discrimination in neighborhoods like Dorchester where folks' worries run not to traffic noise but to drugs, crime, and the value of their life's investment in their homes. That is when the hypocrisy of the brahmins of Brattle Street will be thrown back in their faces.

Mr. Wagner is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.