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The Amiable Baltimoreans
The first umbrella in America and a Washington monument that predates the one in the nation's capital were raised in Baltimore. A renowned beauty of the city, Betsy Patterson, married Jerome Bonaparte, but was forbidden by her brother-in-law, Napoleon, from ever setting foot in France. A century later, Wallis Warfield, another Baltimorean, made her own assault on European royalty. Baltimore is the city of Babe Ruth and H.L. Mencken and the final resting-place of Edgar Allan Poe. "The gastronomic metropolis of the Union," according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is also the home of Bromo-Seltzer.First published in 1951, The Amiable Baltimoreans presents 250 years of anecdotal history about the city—its buildings, its institutions, its customs, and most of all, its people. Informative, amusing, and sometimes discomforting, it offers an incomparable look into the city's past and revealing insight into the way it seemed to one informed observer thirty years ago.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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October 18, 2016
“Amiable” is a good word for describing Baltimore. It may be the 30th-largest city and 21st-largest metropolitan area in the United States of America, but Baltimore sometimes feels like a big small town. A clerk in a store, or a waitress in a restaurant, may still call you “hon” when giving you your change or bringing you a crab-cake sandwich. The buildings of the residential neighborhoods, with their Formstone façades and white marble front stoops, give off a sense of age and permanence. And former Baltimore Sun editor Francis Beirne pays eloquent tribute to the character of Maryland’s largest city in his 1951 book The Amiable Baltimoreans.
Beirne proceeds in a relatively traditional way about his task of describing Baltimore, with a focus on great men and great deeds. A chapter titled “Baltimore ‘Firsts,’” for example, chronicles the time when Samuel Morse came to Baltimore with his idea for a telegraph that would transmit messages by electricity. Louis McLane, president of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, dismissed Morse’s ideas as the ravings of an insane man. Prominent Baltimorean John H.B. Latrobe warned McLane that “The day when you and I are dead and forgotten this man will be remembered” (p. 302).
A chastened McLane instructed the B & O to cooperate with Morse in stringing up the telegraph wires between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. And on May 24, 1844, the message “What hath God wrought” was successfully sent from the old Supreme Court chamber in Washington to the B & O’s passenger terminal at Pratt and Light Streets in Baltimore, hard by where the Harborplace shopping complex sits today. As Beirne puts it, “Baltimore in 1844 was still riding high, for there was taking place probably the most momentous event of the whole 19th century. Yet so blind were contemporaries to its significance that the Sun dismissed the story in a few lines on page 2 in a column headed ‘Local Matters’” (p. 303).
Part of what makes Beirne’s approach somewhat different is the way in which he emphasizes the seeming ordinariness of the Baltimoreans who in fact did extraordinary things. A chapter titled “The Four Merchants,” for example, talks about the legacy of Johns Hopkins, George Peabody, Enoch Pratt, and William T. Walters – “four men…who were destined to become merchant princes and, through the generous use of their money, to leave a lasting imprint upon the city of Baltimore” (p. 45).
You don’t have to be from Baltimore to know that Johns Hopkins founded one of this country’s greatest universities, along with what is probably the best research hospital on Earth. But in Baltimore, the other three names are remembered with equal reverence. Pratt founded one of America’s first free public libraries, along with a pioneering psychiatric hospital; Peabody founded a library of his own, along with the oldest conservatory in the United States of America; Walters left his massive art collection to the city, as what is now the Walters Art Museum.
Other chapters may cause the modern reader to reflect upon how much things have changed in Baltimore since Beirne wrote his book in 1951. A chapter titled “The Monumental City,” and dealing with Baltimore’s many historical monuments, describes, among other statues, the Francis Scott Key monument at Eutaw Place in the Bolton Hill neighborhood. Beirne provides a whimsical tribute to the statue: “A bronze Francis Scott Key, in a stone rowboat rowed by a bronze sailor, addresses his song to a bronze Columbia who holds aloft a gilded banner. Although it may not rate high as a work of art, it is an unending delight to little boys who keep an eye out for the cop while they join Key and the sailor in the boat” (p. 102).
Of course, Beirne could not have imagined that in 2017 – 203 years after Key witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry and wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” – the monument would be vandalized. An unknown protester objected to a little-known line in the poem’s third verse – “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave” –a reference to enslaved African Americans who fought on the British side in the War of 1812 in return for the promise of freedom. To make his, her, or their objection clear to all, the unknown vandal poured red paint onto the monument, and inscribed the words “Racist Anthem” on it for good measure. When the noble equality-based ideals of American democracy run up against the realities of the nation’s often difficult history, a certain tension inevitably results.
A series of chapters on the various cultural groups that have contributed to life include chapters on Baltimore’s German American, Jewish American, and African American communities, as when Beirne focuses on the great contributions that African Americans have made to Baltimore life since the city’s founding, and praises how the African Americans of Baltimore “have contributed generously to the support of those amenities of life which characterize a civilized community” (p. 269).
Literary favorite sons Edgar Allan Poe and H.L. Mencken receive respectful mention in the “Literary Interludes” chapter. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore,” spent virtually his whole career in the city, and therefore it is no surprise that Beirne lionizes Mencken as the “national literary figure…who since 1910 has dominated the local literary scene” (p. 360). Poe came from an old Baltimore family, but throughout his life wandered among the major cities of the East Coast, desperately poor and seeking work. Yet Beirne emphasizes Poe’s local connections with the city: the poet, through the intercession of friend and fellow writer John Pendleton Kennedy, got his literary start in Baltimore; he married his beloved Virginia Clemm at the city’s historic Saint Paul’s Church; and of course, he died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in 1849.
Republished in 1984 as part of the Johns Hopkins University Press’s “Maryland Paperback Bookshelf” series, Beirne’s 1951 book, as mentioned above, may be relatively old-school history; but for the modern reader, it provides a helpful look back into the history of an important American city.
Beirne proceeds in a relatively traditional way about his task of describing Baltimore, with a focus on great men and great deeds. A chapter titled “Baltimore ‘Firsts,’” for example, chronicles the time when Samuel Morse came to Baltimore with his idea for a telegraph that would transmit messages by electricity. Louis McLane, president of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, dismissed Morse’s ideas as the ravings of an insane man. Prominent Baltimorean John H.B. Latrobe warned McLane that “The day when you and I are dead and forgotten this man will be remembered” (p. 302).
A chastened McLane instructed the B & O to cooperate with Morse in stringing up the telegraph wires between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. And on May 24, 1844, the message “What hath God wrought” was successfully sent from the old Supreme Court chamber in Washington to the B & O’s passenger terminal at Pratt and Light Streets in Baltimore, hard by where the Harborplace shopping complex sits today. As Beirne puts it, “Baltimore in 1844 was still riding high, for there was taking place probably the most momentous event of the whole 19th century. Yet so blind were contemporaries to its significance that the Sun dismissed the story in a few lines on page 2 in a column headed ‘Local Matters’” (p. 303).
Part of what makes Beirne’s approach somewhat different is the way in which he emphasizes the seeming ordinariness of the Baltimoreans who in fact did extraordinary things. A chapter titled “The Four Merchants,” for example, talks about the legacy of Johns Hopkins, George Peabody, Enoch Pratt, and William T. Walters – “four men…who were destined to become merchant princes and, through the generous use of their money, to leave a lasting imprint upon the city of Baltimore” (p. 45).
You don’t have to be from Baltimore to know that Johns Hopkins founded one of this country’s greatest universities, along with what is probably the best research hospital on Earth. But in Baltimore, the other three names are remembered with equal reverence. Pratt founded one of America’s first free public libraries, along with a pioneering psychiatric hospital; Peabody founded a library of his own, along with the oldest conservatory in the United States of America; Walters left his massive art collection to the city, as what is now the Walters Art Museum.
Other chapters may cause the modern reader to reflect upon how much things have changed in Baltimore since Beirne wrote his book in 1951. A chapter titled “The Monumental City,” and dealing with Baltimore’s many historical monuments, describes, among other statues, the Francis Scott Key monument at Eutaw Place in the Bolton Hill neighborhood. Beirne provides a whimsical tribute to the statue: “A bronze Francis Scott Key, in a stone rowboat rowed by a bronze sailor, addresses his song to a bronze Columbia who holds aloft a gilded banner. Although it may not rate high as a work of art, it is an unending delight to little boys who keep an eye out for the cop while they join Key and the sailor in the boat” (p. 102).
Of course, Beirne could not have imagined that in 2017 – 203 years after Key witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry and wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” – the monument would be vandalized. An unknown protester objected to a little-known line in the poem’s third verse – “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave” –a reference to enslaved African Americans who fought on the British side in the War of 1812 in return for the promise of freedom. To make his, her, or their objection clear to all, the unknown vandal poured red paint onto the monument, and inscribed the words “Racist Anthem” on it for good measure. When the noble equality-based ideals of American democracy run up against the realities of the nation’s often difficult history, a certain tension inevitably results.
A series of chapters on the various cultural groups that have contributed to life include chapters on Baltimore’s German American, Jewish American, and African American communities, as when Beirne focuses on the great contributions that African Americans have made to Baltimore life since the city’s founding, and praises how the African Americans of Baltimore “have contributed generously to the support of those amenities of life which characterize a civilized community” (p. 269).
Literary favorite sons Edgar Allan Poe and H.L. Mencken receive respectful mention in the “Literary Interludes” chapter. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore,” spent virtually his whole career in the city, and therefore it is no surprise that Beirne lionizes Mencken as the “national literary figure…who since 1910 has dominated the local literary scene” (p. 360). Poe came from an old Baltimore family, but throughout his life wandered among the major cities of the East Coast, desperately poor and seeking work. Yet Beirne emphasizes Poe’s local connections with the city: the poet, through the intercession of friend and fellow writer John Pendleton Kennedy, got his literary start in Baltimore; he married his beloved Virginia Clemm at the city’s historic Saint Paul’s Church; and of course, he died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in 1849.
Republished in 1984 as part of the Johns Hopkins University Press’s “Maryland Paperback Bookshelf” series, Beirne’s 1951 book, as mentioned above, may be relatively old-school history; but for the modern reader, it provides a helpful look back into the history of an important American city.
May 21, 2015
"Through most of its existence Baltimore society has been ruled by a hierarchy so subtle that nobody quite knows just where the power lies, or, in fact, if there actually is any central power."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews