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SINCE THE EARLY 1700s, Boston has been the site of more than 100 episodes of violent social upheaval. In the 18th century, Puritan moralists ransacked brothels. Pope Day festivities — which celebrated the failure of Guy Fawkes to blow up the English Parliament in 1605 — repeatedly led to smashed windows and bodily assault in colonial Boston. The 19th century saw vicious anti-Catholic attacks by working-class Yankees who feared the threat posed by an influx of Irish Catholics willing to work for low wages. In 1902 and 1912, Jewish housewives in the West End erupted into violence over the price of kosher meat. In 1919, Boston’s largely Irish and Democratic police force — starved for funding by a hostile Republican police commissioner — went on strike in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as socialism gained increasing appeal and as the city faced a massive influenza epidemic; bedlam ensued. Amid the social ferment of the late ’60s, economically disadvantaged blacks who were frustrated by years of powerlessness and poverty laid waste to their neighborhoods in Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End. And, of course, the entire nation remembers the infamous mid-’70s busing riots in South Boston and Charlestown.

Perhaps such discord was inevitable. From its beginnings, Boston has been shaped by hugely dissimilar groups: the Puritans and their Brahmin heirs (who maintained hegemony for centuries); the legions of Irish poor (who eventually usurped the Yankees’ political power); and minorities, who were displaced by urban renewal (and who have since made tentative claims on power in the Hub). With such a diverse and socially stratified population crowded onto such a small spit of land, constantly shifting balances of power have fueled cycles of frustration and rage that have repeatedly led to violence.

Jack Tager, professor of history at UMass Amherst, is the author of Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Northeastern University Press, 2001), a book that traces the history of insurrection in this city and the roles that race, class, and the distribution of power have played in it. The Phoenix spoke to Tager recently about this city’s unique social character and the violence it has often engendered.

Q: First of all, why do people riot?

A: Obviously there are many reasons, but mainly it is people using violence who can’t otherwise express themselves. They feel stifled, repressed, angry, even joyful. Breaking the law is a means of expressing one’s self, sending a signal of discontent. I call it the language of the unheard. The powerless, the ignored. Violence used by the dispossessed is a tool to articulate grievances.

Q: Boston has a peculiar history of rioting. Cities like New York and Philadelphia had similar ethnic make-ups, and are bigger than Boston. But they didn’t they see violent upheaval on the same scale. Why? Is Boston predisposed to this behavior?

A: You’ve got to remember how these places were settled. In Pennsylvania, you have settlement and governance by the Quakers. They are considered dissenters by most Protestant groups. So in order for them to rule, they had to be extremely tolerant of other groups. And, indeed, they made other groups, who were not accepted elsewhere, welcomed into Pennsylvania.

New York was first a Dutch colony. Then the British take over, but the ruling-class Dutch remain and become allies with the English. These people agree to establish a European-type aristocracy ... and it becomes very difficult to rebel against these old European ways.

In Boston, people are more predisposed to rioting because they hold deep ideological drives related to self-government. It’s also predicated on intolerance of outsiders who don’t share the same views and background — they won’t accept Quakers in Massachusetts. In fact, they hang some Quakers in Massachusetts. These are different places that have different origins.

Q: Boston is a city where power and ethnicity have always been intertwined. Talk about the cycles of authority and resistance over the centuries, and how upper- and lower-class Yankees, immigrant and assimilated Irish, and blacks played into them.

A: We see Yankees ruling for a long time: from about 1620 to about 1910. During this period, the Yankee poor were reacting with violence when they couldn’t realize goals because of the Yankee elite. Then you have the Irish Catholics who appear. You have to stress the fact that the Yankees were terrible to the Irish for a long period of time. So once the Irish come to power, they monopolize it just the way the Yankees did.

What we have now [is] slightly more openness than ever before in Boston society. First of all, we have other ethnic groups sharing more in power. We have the first Italian-American mayor. That never happened before. That’s a major thing. You have the presence of blacks where, for the first time, they have some political power — not a lot, but they have some. Before the busing situation, they were never on the City Council. They had no legislative power. And now you have [city council president] Charles Yancey! This is a great move forward.

Q: How do social advancements like this affect the conditions for violent collective upheavals?

A: I think this lessens the possibility of violence. We have found, in studies of cities that had riots and cities that didn’t have riots in the 1960s, that the ones that didn’t had an integrated infrastructure for governance and for the police department. [Boston’s infrastructure] was all white. And that, of course, increases the tension between whites and blacks.

Now we have a society in which the ethnic enclaves are disintegrating. And there’s much more social mobility and greater suburbanization. As the neighborhoods lose their ethnic content, they become watered down. People move into other neighborhoods based upon class — how much you can afford for the house — instead of where the Irish are or where the Italians are. As long as you have poorer neighborhoods that are locked in and have no social mobility, you will have the possibility of violence. Everybody denigrates the return of elites to the city, and gentrification; you get city planners and urban romanticists who deplore the loss of the neighborhoods and the creation of anonymity. But all of this is very good when it comes to mitigating violence.

Boston remains one of the smallest cities, which means people are cramped together and see each other face-to-face more often, which is not a good thing if you want to avoid contact with groups you don’t like. [But it] is the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the nation. That’s all very good in promoting what I call this dispersal, or the diaspora of the poor, so that they become absorbed into the metropolitan area and there’s less possibility for people to crowd together and assemble.

Q: How did urban renewal in the ’50s and ’60s contribute to the ghetto riots of ’67 and ’68 and, further along, the busing chaos of ’74-’76?

A: Urban renewal was an attempt by the white power structure to revitalize Boston’s downtown and selected neighborhoods [and] promote investments in properties. The West End [now the site of the Charles River Park apartment complex] is a perfect example, because it is tangential to the central business district.

Poor neighborhoods felt the brunt of urban renewal with the elimination of cheap housing. At the same time, blacks are migrating to the city, and they’re looking for opportunities for decent housing. Usually, the only places they can find are the poor neighborhoods. So they begin to make some entrée in poorer white neighborhoods inhabited by ethnics.

But this partial integration is soon wiped away [by] urban renewal. Urban renewal takes neighborhoods that are somewhat integrated, and destroys them. In the process, blacks are herded into all-black neighborhoods. That’s due, of course, to racial discrimination. What you have is bigoted realtors and landlords further segregating the city by establishing racial boundaries for neighborhoods, thus intensifying race separation.

When you create these high-density black ghettos, you increase the propensity for crowd assembly. People find it easy to get together. And these dense ghetto crowds feel impervious to the police once they organize a riot, because there are so many of them and geographically it’s such a big area the police can’t do anything to control it. When you have powerless people, who suffer daily affronts to their dignity, this gives vent to rioting.

The same thing happens with the whites, when it comes the busing riots. Urban renewal hurts white communities as well. Charlestown is badly hurt. And other communities: East Boston and the South End.

Q: Race riots occurred nationwide in the late ’60s. But busing riots like Boston’s occurred in only a handful of cities. How did the “Athens of America” sink so low?

A: The Irish and other working-class ethnics finally achieve political triumph in the 20th century, but this triumph is very focused. That is, there are only very, very small gains in personal prosperity and social mobility. But ideologically, while these people are not doing that well, they feel that they have triumphed over the hated Yankees. They feel vindicated in this long struggle — and you’re talking about 60 or 70 years of Irish control over the city of Boston, if you look at all the mayors. It gives them the notion of a kind of an inviolability.

And this is rudely shattered, first by urban renewal. And then you have the busing decision of this federal judge who is carrying out a national Supreme Court decision. You have been fighting for so many years, against great odds, to achieve local self-government, and what is the result? You find yourself powerless again. This is too much to bear, particularly if you look at the Irish as a kind of fatalist, clannish people.

So here you have this Judge Garrity decision — a correct decision, but a very insensitive busing plan — that they can’t take. But they have no choice. And the Irish who are anti-busers say, “We have the right to determine where our kids go to school.” Oh, no. Nobody buys that. They don’t get popular support, [and] their sense of impotence forces them to use violence. They have to.

Q: The few violent expressions of dissatisfaction the US has seen recently, like the protests in Seattle and DC, were the perpetrated by educated upper classes, ostensibly acting on behalf of the voiceless and dispossessed. Why do you think this is?

A: There are psychological and cultural reasons. [Certain groups of people feel that] if they work to benefit others, for altruistic purposes, this eliminates any charge of self-interest. These groups define themselves when they select the instrument to carry out their program. Many people use civil disobedience and demonstrations. A few people use civil disobedience and violence. This is very idealized, youth-oriented, anti-authoritarian — that is to say they’re really reacting against their parents — antiestablishment, and it’s recreational as well.

Violence is absolutely necessary in order to demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment. In other words, they need to use violence to justify the cause and therefore to justify their participation in it. Did anybody in the United States ever hear of the World Trade Organization or know what the hell it was doing? In order for these people to demonstrate that they really have a popular cause, they had to use violence so they signal to the rest of the country, “This is important, and we are important individuals who are doing this for you.”

These privileged kids are not powerless in their lives, because they’ve got money. They’re involved in what I call the ultimate narcissism. When the poor riot, they have nothing! They riot because they have substantial reasons. These people riot in order to demonstrate or feel good about themselves.

Q: Getting back to Boston, you quote a journalist who covered the busing riots who writes that “[the city] is, and always has been, a city torn apart by extremes, a city both liberal and conservative, both enlightened and parochial and stifling. At times in history, it has been very hard to be an Irishman in Boston, or an Italian, or a Jew, or a black or, lately, a Yankee. It has always been difficult to be a moderate.” Talk about the social extremes in this city and how they may lend themselves to communal violence.

A: Boston is one of the most stratified and caste-ridden cities in the nation. There is no other city like this. Politics in the city and the state are [now] largely the venue of middle-class assimilated ethnics, but social prominence is [still] monopolized by the WASPs. They are the ones who control society. The cultural life of the Boston metropolitan area is based upon charitable giving to the symphony, the opera, theaters, museums, historical societies, and there are some assimilated ethnics in it, but it’s largely controlled by the old families, the Brahmins. They created the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Athenaeum, Symphony Hall, the Boston Public Library, all these institutions. And they control the boards of directors, and they come from the old families. No other city is like that. There’s a little bit of that in Philadelphia, but nothing is like this anywhere else in the country, where you have the prevalence of a Yankee elite that goes back to Revolutionary days.

Their presence — let’s say their monopoly — over the social system is a reminder to everyone else that equality of opportunity still does not exist. You can become a lawyer if you’re Irish. You can own a company, you can make money, but you can’t go where these people go. You can’t be on the boards, you can’t marry into their families, you can’t do any of that. In other words, it’s very clear that there are perceived barriers [that] keep alive resentments and impinge upon advancement based upon talent rather than breeding. The myth of social mobility is tainted in Boston. And this generates angst among those people who believe in the American dream.

If you add to this discontent with one’s lot because of poverty, and then you have this sense of inferiority as evidenced in the maintenance of insuperable social hurdles, this increases anger and frustration at the injustice of society. Now, I’m not saying this causes riots, but it’s in the pot. And should another issue be thrown in the pot, like busing, this can lead to the cauldron overflowing.

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com.