Fitting in was hard for them. Sutton says the Yankees "automatically assigned the Irish to the bottom of the social heap," treating the Black population with greater deference. But the immigrant influx turned Cambridge into a manufacturing power--the more the factories expanded, the more immigrants arrived, and vice-versa. In 1845, there were 94 manufacturing firms in the city. Twenty years later, that number had grown to 173, and 20 years still later, in 1885, there were 578 factories in the city. From a work-force of 1269 in 1845, the number of employees grew to 14,258 by 1890.
One reason for the expansion, which occurred mainly in East Cambridge and Cambridgeport, was a lack of unions. The natural distrust of the divergent nationalities, combined with an easily accessible competing labor pool in Boston, discouraged organized labor--many strikes were launched and only a very few succeeded. The growth transformed Cambridgeport from "a homogeneous New England village to the beginning of a highly cosmopolitan industrial area. Its biggest industries were high class--the Riverside Press, the Athenaum Press, and Little, Brown and Co. publishers. The one factory that wasn't producing books--Mason and Hamlin Co.,--turned out pianos.
In East Cambridge, the industry was more diverse, but the John P. Squire, meat-packer, was clearly dominant. The company eventually encompassed 22 acres, on which 2500 hogs a day were slaughtered. The glass industry, which once dominated the area, moved out in the 1800s, but there were plenty of factories left--Revere Sugar, Goepper Brothers, which produced barrels, the American Net and Twine Co., Dow fertilizer, even Lockhart & Co., manufacturers of caskets. By 1846, East Cambridge had 4000 people, "a healthy balance of commerce, industry and professionalism, no one activity dominating the others," according to one historian.
North Cambridge, though it didn't grow as fast as the neighborhoods to the east, got its start in the 1830s when a cattle market settled there, soon spawning a stockyard, inns, taverns, and even a racetrack. Water shortages prevented much native industry from springing up, except for brickmaking concerns, which benefited from the clay in the soil.
In the midst of its growth spurt, Cambridge officially became a city. Over the protests of many upper-crust Cantabrigians, all the communities were officially joined. But, to borrow a phrase from Sutton, "the joining was strictly contractual, rather like a pre-arranged marriage of convenience in which the partners shared little love and continued to sleep in separate bedrooms." Actually, there was comparatively little for government to do--this was a boom era, and local government simply did not enact zoning regulations. It also refrained from planning, and even building codes were rudimentary. The look-the-other-way policy permitted fast economic growth, so fast, indeed, that the 1873-78 depression was scarcely felt in the city.
But by the end of the century, most of the city's territory had been developed, and the residents had noticed that Harvard occupied a lot of land, which could neither be used for factories nor taxed. Harvard knew its non-profit status was vital and tried to discourage the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from moving across the river from its Boston home, fearing that the new school would focus attention on the property tax issue and endanger Harvard's exemption. But MIT still moved--in 1916, with the president and trustees aboard the good ship Bucentaur, it ceremonially crossed the Charles into Cambridge.
Soon after, World War I, which drew 800 Cambridge men into uniform, had more effect on Harvard than MIT. Harvard was largely turned over to the Naval Radio School.
With the '20s came a new age of bureaucratic progressivism. The Planning Board, largely advisory when formed in 1913, conducted a number of studies in the '20s. And the building code adopted in 1924 included zoning power for the city government.
The next step for the city government, which had been dominated by the Irish for several generations, came in the late 1930s when reformers began to press for more professionalism. Their vehicle was "Plan E"--a city manager form of government with a weak mayor, citywide elections, and an incredibly complicated "proportional representation" system of voting. They lost their first campaign in 1938 but won in 1940 (perhaps aided by Mayor John L. Lyons, who--once asked about snowplows--said "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.") The first few Plan E elections established the power of the Cambridge Civic Association and the Brattle St. Old Cantabrigians.
World War II affected Cambridge more than most cities. About 15,000 Cantabrigians donned uniforms (401 were killed), and strong links between the universities and Washington were developed. Ever since, the Charles-Potomac shuffle has been routine for the brain trust of Cambridge.
Meanwhile, all the Northeast, including Cambridge, suffered as industry went South in search of cheap, unorganized labor. The exodus to the suburbs also shrunk Cambridge from a population peak of nearly 130,000 to about 100,000. But Cambridge fared better than many other cities; MIT and Harvard attracted a number of electronics, engineering and research and development firms to help ease the sudden loss of jobs.
The '50s were comparatively uneventful--Sen. Joseph McCarthy referred to Harvard as a "smelly mess," and the most serious trouble came when The Crimson championed Pogofor president in 1952, and a campaign rally set off a night of nasty fighting between students and police.
All that changed, in Cambridge and nearly every other college town, in the '60s, as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War triggered a rising crescendo of student protest. The anti-war sentiment spread from campus to city--though voters in 1967 defeated a ballot referendum urging a quick withdrawal, the city council by 1969 went on record asking for the return of U.S. troops to these shores.
Conflict escalated both in Southeast Asia and at home. by spring 1969, Harvard students were no longer content with messages of support from the City Council. Members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) captured University Hall, the campus' main administration building, and stayed there overnight until a coalition of police from Cambridge, neighboring towns, and the state evicted them in a bloody roust that set off a massive student strike. By the summer of 1970, the violence had proliferated, and protesters smashed windows and set fires throughout Harvard Square.
One student demand in the 1969 strike was an end to University evictions of city tenants; the demand reflected the increasing crisis in housing that in 1970 led the City Council to enact rent control legislation while hundreds of partisans looked on.
Attempts have already been made to write the Cambridge history of the 1980s. Officials hope to attract large-scale economic develpment, and some predict Cambridge will become an industrial city again. Other problems have not disappeared--rent control seems only to have whetted the appetite of landlords for turning their apartments into condominiums and high-priced cooperatives, and the city is attempting to stabilize the market with legal barriers to change.
But guesswork, if history be any guide, is unlikely to be productive. After all, Thomas Graves would never recognize the wilderness where he built his house.