Urban Exodus

...He assumes from two letters that he quotes in detail that Pacelli had a decades-long "secret antipathy toward the Jews," that Pius believed there was an intrinsic link between Jews and Bolshevism, and that assisting the Jews would enable them to move more actively against the church...

...Maps of Boston's Roxbury and Dorchester districts vividly illustrate these demographic shifts, which, by the 1990s, reinvigorated parishes such as central Dorchester's Saint Peter's...

...Cultural differences, it's often been said, explain why city-dwelling Catholics tend to fight turf wars, while Jews lean toward flight...

...It's an intriguing argument, one almost provocative in its simplicity-though not without a few holes of its own...

...Already a learned crowd of reporters, novelists, and scholars have deconstructed socioeconomic conflict in Boston--none better than the late J. Anthony Lukas, in Common Ground in 1985--to the point that the topic might seem as exhausted as battle-weary Bostonians themselves...

...And, while Gamm's intense localism is his book's strength--particularly the touching letters from parishioners he quotes--this also precludes consideration of the wider world...

...But the Catholics who fled seem at least as revealing a story as those who stayed...

...At times it feels as if Urban Exodus could have been bulked up to incorporate a broader analysis, or slimmed down into an excellent journal article or two...

...Most damning, Cornwell contends that the pope was a hypocrite in attempting to claim "retrospective moral superiority" in defending the Jews...

...As McGreevy has noted, the civil rights battle between liberal clergy and conservative parishioners (and clergy) was particularly intense in Boston, a development Gamm only touches on...

...Synagogues and parishes, Gamm contends, essentially dictated who stayed in Boston's neighborhoods, who left for the suburbs, when, and why...

...Gamm agrees, but sees different causes...

...Three decades later, Gamin writes, there were "no significant socioeconomic differences between Dorchester's Jewish and Catholic districts"-undermining the oft-cited theory that Jews migrated simply because they were more affluent or educated...

...To paraphrase that eminent Bostonian, Tip O'Neill, we're finally learning that a good deal of American history is local...

...In New York at this time, frightening, if bizarre, coalitions developed between Catholic-dominated Christian Front groups, the German-American Bund, and even the antiCatholic Klan...

...Perhaps what could ultimately be said is that some Boston Catholics stayed longer, particularly in areas like east Dorchester, which remains not only white, but also (perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not) most remote from black neighborhoods...

...There is scant mention of the Great Depression, the World Wars, or even city politics...

...The church and clergy may have stayed, but most of the Irish who dominated Saint Peter's just two decades ago are gone...

...Particularly valuable in Urban Exodus, however, is Gamm's treatment of the controversial Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG), which provided mortgage funds to low-income black families and was widely considered a pernicious scheme by real estate speculators who were targeting Jewish areas and exacerbating racial tension...

...Eerily, Judge W. Arthur Garrity, whose rulings brought forced integration to Boston, died just months after the vote to end busing...

...This, at least in part, may explain the post-1960s drain of whites from central Dorchester parishes...

...Distinguishing himself from Jonathan Rieder, John T. McGreevy and other urban chroniclers, Gamm notes, "Jewish institutions could survive by moving out of a declining neighborhood...but Catholic institutions have been permanently tied to their original location...

...to Yonkers, which seriously consider the intricacies of geography (not to mention religion...

...Gamm also stresses that the much-discussed ethno-racial battles of the 1960s have their roots in the 1920s...

...Surely some listened, but others as easily decided they were more white than Catholic, and had no qualms severing ties to priests who (as they saw it) preached racial politics from the pulpit...

...The book's subtitle contends that Boston Catholics stayed...

...Catholics, Gamm adds, have "a different attachment to territory," not "a different capacity for racist behavior...

...He takes a brief look at the Association of Boston Urban Priests, and describes meetings "at which priests attempted to teach racial tolerance and urged whites to stay...

...Gamin provides illumina~ng quotes on Catholic anti-Semitism from native Bostonians Theodore H. White and Nat Hentoff, yet fails to mention the rise and fall of Father Charles Coughlin...

...But in Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed, Gerald Gamm says there are still holes in the story, most significantly in the divergent connections Catholics and Jews maintained with their religious institutions...

...Gamm, an associate professor of political science and history at the University of Rochester, does consider broader factors--the automobile, for one--in his valuable look back at suburbanization in the 1920s...

...Religious tension in Boston was so high on the eve of World War II that (as Gamm notes) Wallace Stegner criticized the city's Catholic leadership in the Atlantic Monthly...

...Then "Jewish neighborhoods began their long unraveling, and...Catholic neighborhoods began their resistance," hence the reason migrating blacks moved almost exclusively onto formerly Jewish blocks following World War II...

...Frustratingly, Gamm doesn't consider whether these developments also spurred middle-class Jewish flight...

...Pivotal surrounding areas, such as South Boston and Charlestown, are not discussed...

...But, just as Saint Peter's is a neat snapshot of Gamm's thesis, it also presents wrinkles which Urban Exodus never quite irons out...

...Urban Exodus takes its place in an increasingly impressive collection of books on urban conflict from L.A...

...Gamm coolly debunks the case against BBURG especially important since, as he writes, "many scholars have inferred that similar banking programs contributed to the Jewish exodus from other cities...

...Yet, even in recent decades, as Gamm intriguingly notes, blocks nearest churches have remained white and Catholic as the rest of the parish changed...

...McGreevy's Parish Boundaries still seems to provide fuller insights into religious (and racial and class) tensions, not just for the whole of urban America but also for Boston...

...However, I do not believe that the documentation Cornwell presents proves his case, Tom Deignan ~ ext September, twenty-five years after putting a face--usually an angry Irish face--on post-1960s backlash, Boston's busing era will officially draw to a close, interring once and for all the rancor and tribalism that marked this particularly American crucible...

...More broadly, Urban Exodus is a study not of "Boston," but of Roxbury and Dorchester...

...Offered as a symbol of Catholic vitality and endurance, Saint Peter's celebrates Mass in three languages, and more than 80 percent of its grade school students are black or Hispanic...

...But which Catholics...

...These are weighty and sobering charges that cannot be dismissed out of hand...

...Gamm also forthrightly confronts the violent crime, redlining, and blockbusting that affected residential behavior in the late 1960s and 1970s...