Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie & the MTA

Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie & the MTA

On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the brick plaza outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn’t there to deliver a speech or cut a ribbon. He was there to sing a song—something he did with gusto as he joined the Kingston Trio in a rousing rendition of “M.T.A.,” the well-known ballad about a “man named Charlie” doomed to “ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston” and become “the man who never returned.”

The purpose of this unusual concert was to launch the “Charlie Card,” an electronic fare card that has now replaced tokens on the Boston subway system. “I’ve always wanted to do that, since about the fifth grade,” said Romney, after singing the song that has become not only part of American folklore, but a proud part of Boston history.

History is a complicated business, though. Sometimes places, like people with selective memories, omit parts of their history to avoid inconvenient truths. There were signs of Boston’s historical amnesia at work that day.

One sign was that the ceremony was held outside a subway station now called Government Center, an assemblage of sterile city, state, federal, and private office buildings. In the “M.T.A.” song, the station was called by its original name, Scollay Square, a place teeming with burlesque houses, barrooms, tattoo parlors, and pawnshops. But after Boston secured federal urban renewal funds in the early 1960s to “clean up” its downtown, the entire area was razed and renamed.

A more telling sign was that the Kingston Trio was invited to perform. It’s true that the West Coast group had popularized “M.T.A.” in 1959, but it was a local Boston group, most of whose members are still alive, that wrote and first performed it ten years earlier. Why weren’t they on the stage that afternoon?

But the most revealing sign that Boston was forgetting its past was that the version of the song sung that day omitted the name of the Boston mayoral candidate for whom it was written—Walter A. O’Brien, Jr.

Romney and the mass-transit bureaucrats who organized the event were, no doubt, unwitting accomplices to this collective memory loss, and like most of those in the audience, unaware that O’Brien’s name was missing from the lyrics sung at the ceremony. But its absence reflected the fact that a chapter of Boston history has been torn out of the city’s collective memory. Few today remember a period of time barely sixty years ago when Boston was less like the “Cradle of Liberty” or “Athens of America” and more like nearby Salem during the time of the witchcraft tr...