blogbrainsmallSeacoast History Blog #62
August 18, 2009

If you stick your face on the front page of the local newspaper, you can count on getting slapped. So I wasn’t shocked to see a half page article in the OPINION section of last week’s Portsmouth Herald. It wasn’t the first time someone has taken umbrage over one of my history columns, and hopefully, it won’t be the last. My reply appeared almost a week later, and is reprinted below, along with links to the letter and the column that started the ruckus. Since both appeared in August, a month when only tourists are in town, the whole exchange seems to have gone unnoticed. (Continued below)

 

To the editor
Portsmouth Herald
August 17, 2009

Mark Brighton certainly handed me my hat in his recent response to my July 20 article about the destruction of the North End and "Little Italy". It reminded me of the fiery editorials by his father Raymond Brighton back in the day. Right or wrong, Ray spoke his mind and took no prisoners.

Mark strikes back against what he perceives as my suggestion that Ray Brighton, an editor and part owner of the Portsmouth Herald, somehow profited from the urban renewal project that largely obliterated the ethnic neighborhoods of the North End. I have no evidence of that, and from the few occasions I had to chat with Ray, don’t see any likelihood of it. Ray seemed to me an honorable guy, passionate about Portsmouth, and quick to take on any injustice he uncovered. Yet my reporter’s instinct tells me there is much more to this story than has come to light.

Mark notes, with perfect accuracy, that the worst thing an historian can do is judge the past in terms of present day attitudes. But at the same time, one of the great uses of history, is to point out how the past differs from the present, and in doing so, to learn from it. If we just let history pass, we go blindly into the future. I merely pointed out a number of troubling details, particularly how little coverage, if any, was given in the Herald of that era to the hundreds of displaced residents of the North End. I also noted that the only positive coverage I could find about the architectural value of the historic North End structures appeared in newspapers like the Manchester Union Leader and the Worcester Sunday Telegram. Many people over the years, historians and nonhistorians, have pointed out to me that the newspaper offices moved in this era from Congress Street to a new (now former) plant on Maplewood Avenue in the newly commercialized. North End. It isn’t an accusation, but it also isn’t a coincidence. Part of the job of the historian and the reporter is to publish these details in hopes that future researchers will follow up. Ray Brighton, I can guarantee you, would have done the same with much more gusto. He delighted in hanging historians like Dorothy Vaughan out to dry whenever he spotted an inaccuracy in her very personal interpretation of Portsmouth history.

Mark takes a final swipe at my history-writing abilities and mentions two "definitive" histories of Portsmouth. The fact is, there is still no definitive scholarly history of the Port City. Charles Brewster’s 19th century "Rambles About Portsmouth" is just as it implies, a rambling series of essays strung together from newspaper columns in the Portsmouth Journal where Brewster was editor. Brewster’s work is often enormously inaccurate and, though we historians love him, he must always be read with a giant saltshaker handy. Ray Brighton’s "They Came to Fish" is a lively, often highly opinionated, chronological overview of nearly 400 pages. The second volume is even larger (almost 500 pages) and is made up entirely of footnotes and commentary on the first volume, a confusing format that has bedeviled readers for decades. Both Brighton and Brewster, like myself, were professional journalists who also loved to write about local history. Each of us does the best we can to reinterpret the past for our contemporary readers.

I didn’t grow up with Mr. Brighton, but I did follow in his footsteps. I’ve read hundreds of his articles and essays, borrowing from his research, as he borrowed heavily from others, and correcting his inaccuracies as future historians will correct mine. Other readers have noted in these pages that my article did not go far enough and that I did not cover the plight of Greeks, Poles, Russians, African Americans and others who were kicked out of their homes.

In 1985 I videotaped a reunion of North Enders at Yoken’s and listened to their heartfelt stories, wondering again how such human drama had gone unreported at the time. A few years ago, I proposed a book on the story of the North End and attempted to locate funding. I told potential benefactors that my goal was to spend a year or two digging into the story from every angle. I wanted to know what happened to a neighborhood that turned into a parking lot. My attempts to raise capital went nowhere. The story was too fresh, I was told, too controversial and it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.

I did, to my regret, back off. Except for the occasional newspaper article, I rarely take on the North End story. Instead, I spent three years looking into the South End and the origins of Strawbery Banke. So today, the backstory of the North End remains fuzzy and downright fishy to me. I welcome any new information, including Mark’s digging into the background of the Herald during this period. The more details we can uncover and bring to the light of day, the better, including the still untold stories of displaced North End residents. We should know more about what was going on with city government, with urban renewal, with Portsmouth Housing Authority, with residents of the neighborhood and the preservationists of the era. The spotlight long focused on the history of Puddle Dock should also shine on the North End.

And I think Ray Brighton would agree that the public is better served when we publish the truth, rather than hide it. "It’s healthy," Ray Brighton once wrote in the Herald after a contentious stockholder’s meeting at Strawbery Banke, "to see some of the laundry hanging out on the line and rediscover that mere human beings, not demigods, are trying to run the show."

Perhaps Mark Brighton or a future Portsmouth historian will finally haul the whole North End story out into the sunlight. If so, whatever that research churns up, we will all be better for it.

Copyright © by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.

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