The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

movies such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Pawnbroker, and Blow-Up were reaching unprecedented levels of explicit sex and violence, bursting through the boundaries of acceptability like a runaway car chase. At the same time, horrendous images of the war in Vietnam came home to everyone with a TV set, increasingly in “living color” – which only added to the confusion of what was right and what was real, which black-and-white film had somehow made clearer – stirring up even more anger at the administration and confusion about America’s role in Southeast Asia. In the face of LBJ’s vision of The Great Society, and with the success of his considerable legislation to further that end, frustration and anger were nevertheless widespread, unmitigated by a new and seemingly un quenchable sense of entitlement. Violent crime was on the rise, a fact that many attributed to racial tension and the conditions of poverty in the cities. In Boston, the 1960s was a decade of enormous growth in terms of its black population, which nearly doubled, while many of the Jewish communities left Roxbury and Jamaica Plain for the wealthier neighborhoods of Newton and Brookline, and the working-class Irish of Charlestown and South Boston now competed with African Americans for jobs and resources in the decreasing domain for small industry. Ethnic neighborhoods drew their battle lines and lived in precarious hostility.

      The city Rathbone served as a museum director was giving way to upheavals of every kind. With the rise in violent crime, he feared for the Museum’s safety, given its proximity to the poor neighborhoods of Roxbury. City politicians struggled with a growing population of the needy, while the well-to-do fled to the suburbs. New interest groups – blacks, women, local artists – began to make themselves felt in the cultural scene and were not shy about making their demands widely known.

      There were changes in the physical landscape as well. An ongoing building boom surged recklessly over town and country, devastating old neighborhoods and historic monuments. The 1960s was a time of rampant new building projects, thanks to a zealous and often misguided group of second-generation modernist architects, and also the destruction of sacred monuments of American culture, many an architectural treasure, old neighborhood, and park landscape. In 1960 the historic West End of Boston was demolished, the old neighborhood replaced by anonymous high-rise apartment buildings with billboard signs advertising “If you lived here, you’d be home now” to the drivers of gas-guzzling American cars stuck in rush hour traffic on their way home to the northern suburbs. It took charismatic cultural leaders to stem the tide where they could. Jackie Kennedy’s preservationist mission and high standards of taste left their indelible impression. Lady Bird Johnson followed with a campaign to limit the spread of billboard advertising that was spoiling the view from the highways. In the same way that these women served a key role in Washington in the way of enlightened restoration programs, Rathbone took on the struggle in Boston.

      America’s increasing dependence on the automobile had made the development of the interstate highway system under Eisenhower a priority since the 1950s. In the early 1960s the plan for the construction of the so-called Inner Belt in Boston threatened to cut an eight-lane superhighway through working-class neighborhoods of Cambridge, Somerville, and Jamaica Plain and through the heart of Boston, including the parkland along the Fens just across from the Museum. City politicians perceived the Inner Belt as a way of bringing life and commerce to their dying inner city, but underestimated the devastating effect it would have on the city itself as a livable option. As the Inner Belt plans were gradually revealed to the public, a storm of angry protests from local residents followed. By 1965 these had reached their peak. As director of the MFA, Rathbone was a key spokesman for the opposition, addressing business and civic leaders at meetings, and leading the loudest and angriest interest groups at the public hearings in Boston. The highway’s presence would isolate the Museum, he argued, and sever its connection with the city’s thousands of university students. One proposed route would take over the Museum’s parking lot, another its museum school. First its construction, and later its constant activity, might also endanger the Museum’s collections. A study group, including seismologists, worked for months on the possible effects of the highway on the Museum’s structure and contents. Most of all, stated Rathbone at one such hearing, it would ruin the fabric of the city and everything that was unique about Boston, turning it “into a precinct of no more distinction than downtown Tulsa or Wichita.” The whole idea, he argued, was an unmitigated disaster, a product of “bulldozer psychology.”¹⁰ After a ten-year struggle lasting through the 1960s, the opposition won their case in one of the first successful grassroots preservation campaigns in America, but not without a titanic effort.

      In a similar spirit of misguided urban improvement favoring the car, the city of Cambridge made plans to widen Memorial Drive along the Charles River, which would mean destroying the stately avenue of sycamore trees that had been there as long as anyone could remember. Civic-minded Cantabrigians raised an organized protest, with Isabella Halsted, secretary of the MFA Ladies Committee and a resident of Memorial Drive, among its most ardent participants. Known as “the Battle of the Sycamores,” it waged on until the plan was defeated and the sycamores left standing. This was an early and therefore significant victory in the ongoing battle between city residents and politicians for the highway, and it bolstered the Inner Belt opposition.

      As much as these issues were an unwanted distraction from his day job, Rathbone was a cultural figurehead in Boston, if not in all of New England, and there was no getting out of it. His journal of the mid-1960s is rife with complaints about the calls on his time and the distractions from the Museum. It dampened his spirits and drained his energy, but he rose to the challenge, for it was in his nature to be wary of any enterprise that threatened to destroy the heart of an old city. Truth and Beauty were on trial, and it was up to a museum director to set them right. “Inner Belt, BRA,¹¹ Fund-raising problems give me sleepless nights,”¹² Rathbone admitted in his journal on October 19, 1965.

      Rathbone was especially sensitive to what was going up and what was coming down, in Cambridge and Boston. As much as he was devoted to Harvard, his alma mater, by the 1960s he deplored how the university was changing the physical fabric of Cambridge, which was now his permanent home. In 1965, at the first sight of the completed Peabody Terrace, a new residence for married students at Harvard, he was dismayed at the way these buildings permanently marred the river view of his beloved undergraduate years. Much of the responsibility for this lay with Josep Lluís Sert, the Catalan architect who was the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Rathbone liked the Serts personally – Josep and his wife, Mancha, were small and slight, urbane and intelligent – and particularly enjoyed the modern European element they brought to Cambridge. He also admired Sert’s architecture – in theory – but context had everything to do with it. He strenuously objected to Sert’s guiding principle that “Cambridge must rise!” As he mused somewhat bitterly, “the smaller the man the bigger his ambition to impose himself.”¹³

      Sert’s Holyoke Center now towered ten stories over Harvard Square. And with the erection two years earlier of the first and only Le Corbusier building in America, the Carpenter Center (also thanks to Sert’s strenuous advocacy), Rathbone was outraged. He especially resented that the Carpenter Center, which eventually became the home of Harvard’s studio arts, had taken up the only available space on Quincy Street long designated for the Fogg Museum’s inevitable expansion. The new building destroyed the unity of Quincy Street, “having no relationship whatsoever to its surroundings. Nor has this tortured pile of concrete designed by Corbusier have any apparent logic within or without.”¹⁴

      While he bemoaned the erection of new buildings around the Harvard campus, Rathbone also witnessed the University’s neglect or misuse of hallowed historic houses, especially Elmwood, the federal mansion at the far west end of Cambridge that is now the official residence of the University’s president. In the 1960s the Harvard Corporation seriously considered the idea of tearing the house down rather than admitting to the need and expense of restoring and maintaining it. In the midst of this debate, the dean of faculty, Franklin Ford, lived at Elmwood in its somewhat neglected state of repair. After going for drinks one evening with the dean and his wife, Rathbone was shocked at the state of its interior. “The heart of Elmwood has been carved out and thrown away,” he mourned. “Elmwood, home of Lt. Gov. Oliver, of Eldridge Gerry, of James Russell Lowell, of Kingsley Porter,¹⁵ has been ‘suburbanized,’ brought to a level of mediocrity that