Tag Archives: City Hall

September 16, 2024

The Salem City Seal

By daseger

Last week, the Salem City Seal was an agenda item for a meeting of our City Council: apparently there are concerns about its representation and plans for its replacement. I don’t know much more than that, as I wasn’t able to attend the Council meeting or any of the previous subcommittee meetings that have brought us to this point. The Council sent the matter to another subcommittee, I believe, so hopefully a public process of deliberation will ensue. I do think it is appropriate and even useful for a community to reconsider past representations on seals, statues, and other expressions of collective heritage or identity, as long as those conversations are public, so I’m hoping to contextualize this discussion a bit. I’m also kind of curious about the history and reception of our city seal myself, as it always struck me as rather unusual. So I spent a few hours this past weekend digging into some primary and secondary sources—certainly not long enough! What follows is certainly an impressionistic history and a work in progress, but first, here IT is:

So as you can see, there are some variations of this image. The first seal is the official one, which I have taken from the city’s website, and it is accompanied by this description:

The City Seal was adopted as the insignia of the City in March 1839, three years after Salem was incorporated as a City and 213 years after its founding. The Seal depicts a ship under full sail approaching a coastal land in the East Indies. A native inhabitant in traditional garb stands in the middle, surrounded by plants of the region. A dove sits atop the scene, with an olive branch in its mouth. The City motto, “Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum” – “To the farthest port of the rich East” – is below. The Seal is ringed by the incorporation dates of both the Town of Salem, 1626, and the City of Salem, 1836.

The second seal is also from City Hall: I think it’s the watercolor image produced by Salem artist Ross Turner but the city’s art inventory is not very descriptive. An article in the Beverly Citizen from the spring of 1888 informs us that “Mr. Ross Turner, the artist, has made an interesting and handsome study of the city seal of Salem, designed half a century ago by Colonel George Peobody, who is still living. Mr. Turner adheres to the original design, which has suffered a great deal at the hands of engravers and others.” The third and fourth images are from a pediment carved for the President of State Street Bank which came up at auction a few years ago and the last is from a really fun book, Town and City Seals of Massachusetts by Allan Forbes and Ralph Eastman, which was published in 1950. If you browse through this last book, it’s immediately apparent how unusual the Salem seal is: it’s the only one recognizing a foreign identity and region as integral to the history of the city/town. Every other seal has a recognizable landmark or person or industry from that place—there are quite a few ships but Salem’s is the only one on the other side of the globe! I think it’s one of the oldest seals in the book, too: Massachusetts called for every town and city to come up with a seal only in 1899, when Salem’s was recognized as “ancient.”

The designer of the original seal in the 1830s was George Peabody, son of the wealthiest pepper trader in Salem, Joseph Peabody, and a city alderman. There were deliberations before its acceptance and commission, LOTS of deliberations due to “diversity of opinion”: you can read all about them in the March 1866 volume of the Historical Collections of the Essex Institute. There seems to have been universal agreement that the seal was to represent two things: Salem’s unrivalled prosperity and Salem as City of Peace. Given Peabody’s background, it’s understandable that he chose to depict the personage of a distinctly East Indian man from the Aceh province of Sumatra rather than a more generic “Eastern” figure: this region was the source of the pepper which had enabled Salem’s commercial ascendancy. Joseph Peabody alone is credited with 61 voyages (6.3% ot the total trade) to Sumatra alone from 1802-1844, and 100 voyages (or 10%) with his son-in-law John Lowell Gardner): this was the family business. The pepper trade was also Salem’s major business between 1799 and 1846, with 179 ships engaged on multiple voyages. The 1866 account of the Salem seal’s approval concluded that “it was her shipping, fitly typified by this design, carrying the fame of her merchants as well as the flag of the country into unknown areas, that made her name in the first half of this century, a synonym for commercial honor, enterprise and success, throughout the other hemisphere as well as this.” The second theme of the seal, peace, symbolized by the dove bearing an olive branch, is a bit more of a tough sell in this specific historical context, given the fact that the 1830s was the decade which saw two U.S. military interventions in Sumatra in retaliation for native attacks on American shipping. The connection between peace and commercial prosperity was often emphasized in early nineteenth century newspaper accounts as it was very clear to everyone that Salem’s era of prosperity began after the American Revolution. The pepper trade had been a dangerous one from its beginnings at the turn of the century, but the 1831 attack on the Salem ship Friendship certainly brought things to a head with the first Sumatram intervention, often referred to as the “Battle of Qualah Battoo” (now Kuala Batee) in the following year. The broadside below (from the Phillips Library’s digitized collection) is representative of the “war fever” of the era, but it was printed in Portland, Maine rather than Salem. The Salem accounts are a little less “patriotic” and a lot more detailed: they note the precise number and names of those who were killed or wounded (five and six rather than “all”), everything that was taken, and call for restitution.

George Peabody’s seal was designed a mere four or five years after this engagement, and both his family and his city wanted to continue this valuable trade. When I look at this solitary Sumatran, I tend to identify him with Peabody family friend Po Adam, a local dignitary who warned the Americans about the coming attack on the Friendship and helped them recover their ship. This was a sacrifice on his part: he wrote to Joseph Peabody afterwards that his acts had earned him the “hatred and vengeance of my misguided countrymen” and that “the last of my property was set on fire and destroyed, and now, for having been the steadfast friend of the Americans, I am not only destitute, but an object of derision.” This identification is only conjecture on my part, but the original figure on the Salem seal was certainly more respectful recreation than stereotypical figure. The connection between Sumatra and Salem endured through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, even into the twenty-first. It was referenced in regard to the new (well not really) heritage trail or “yellow line” just a few years ago, and much more significantly after the terrible 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, when relief efforts on the North Shore were organized in deference to the “old ties” between Massachusetts and Sumatra. Almost 20 years later, it seems like these ties are broken, or about to be.

9 Comments | tags: City Hall, Heritage, Local Events, Local History, maritime history, public history, Remembrance, Salem Heritage Trail, Salem History | posted in Culture, History, Salem

March 1, 2023

Ladies’ Choice: the “Boy Mayor” of Salem

By daseger

I know: why am I writing about a man on this first day of Women’s History Month? Arthur Howard was the short-termed 35th mayor of Salem, elected in late 1909 and serving through 1910. Despite the briefness of his term, he made a lot of news, before, during and after, and on more than one occasion the ladies of Salem came to his rescue and defense, excercising a form of political power (or political expression?) even before they were enfranchised a decade later. Howard himself is a captivating character, but his brief moment in Salem’s history also gives us an opportunity to see how women used their influence beyond/before the ballot box. I’ve had Salem mayors on my mind anyway: we’re presently in the midst of a special mayoral election here in Salem—something that hasn’t happened for quite some time—as our previous mayor has ascended to the office of Lieutenant Governor. Arthur Howard did not leave his mark on Salem in the same way that Mayor Driscoll did, but his story is interesting nonetheless.

Howard was born in New York City in 1870, the son of a prosperous jeweler and grandson of a Salem physician, whom he later described as a “classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s.” He was based in New York for much of his early life, and he seems to have been a bit of a wastrel: spending his father’s money on lavish living and gambling, and writing the occasional little book (on cooking, Wall Street, and Shakespeare “for the unsophisticated”). He was married in 1893 but separated from his wife (and their child) a decade later. Somehow he ended up in Boston, and after reading about the closure of the venerable Salem Gazette in the summer of 1908, decided to make his way up to his ancestral city to save it from becoming a one-newspaper town. He had very little money, but he was undaunted: he operated the new Salem Despatch with the press of the old Gazette, and hired a reporter who told him all about the political “gangs” of Salem. To make a name for himself and his paper, Howard became a “reformer,” attacking the powers that were, the Salem police, the “liquor licensors,” and his competitor, the Salem Evening News. With about a year’s residence behind him, he decided to run for Mayor: a bit of a lark that became increasingly serious. Despite two libel suits brought by a Salem alderman and the editor of the News and a brief stint in jail, Howard was elected and installed as Mayor in January of 1910: he attributed his victory to his ability to speak French to the residents of Ward Five. He vowed to clean up the city of “graft,” to dedicate his mayoral salary of $1500 to its playgrounds, to reform the Police Department (even to the extent of appointing himself Chief of Police), and to identify and close down all the locations where liquor was sold illegally (referred to as either “speak-easies” or “kitchen barrooms”). Howard’s “meteoric” rise, ambitious reform agenda, and “straight talk” attracted considerable press coverage in the first few months of his administration, and he was often referred to as the “boy mayor” even though he was 40 years old. Among his most notable early acts was the transformation of Salem Common into a skating rink at his own expense and the appointment of two of Salem’s most prominent society women, the active social reformers Aroline Gove and Caroline Emmerton, to the Board of the Plummer Farm School of Reform for Boys. And then the honeymoon was over.

Boston Globe stories about Arthur Howard, December 1909-January 1910. I’ll have to do a follow-up on the coverage of Howard by the(non-digitized) Salem Evening News: after all, its editor was suing him for libel!

In March of 1910, the man who had furnished Howard with funds for his bond while awaiting his second libel trial withdrew said funds (he was a liquor broker, and not happy with Howard’s crackdown on the 18 speakeasies he had identified in Salem) and the penniless Mayor was faced with jail: the ladies of Salem came to his rescue with a three-day campaign that raised the required $800 in $1 increments. Some individuals, both male and female, offered to donate the entire amount, but a certain circle of ladies (led by Charlotte Fairfield, who was taking on Salem’s coal cartel at about the same time) pushed for an expression of wide, feminine support. This effort captured national headlines: a United Press story appeared in nearly every newspaper in the country on March 31 and April 1. A week later in the New York Times, Mayor Howard admitted that he “owed a great deal to the women of Salem” who were “helping the cause of pure city government.” He was acquitted of the libel charges later in the spring: good fortune that was countered by his declaration of bankruptcy at around the same time. By the summer, he was publishing “woe is me” (very bad) poetry in his paper, which also attracted headlines. I had no idea what to make of another Howard headline from the summer of 1910, referencing his proclamation for the compulsory attendance of all Salem children at a circus parade through downtown, until I read his obituary: apparently it was an attempt at sarcasm by a man who was tired of the disdain directed at his other edicts.

It was all bad news after that. Howard did not serve out the entirety of his two-year term: he 1911 he stepped down, ostensibly to run for Congress but that campaign seems to have gone nowhere. He decided to run for mayor again the next year, but was not elected. His newspaper office sustained two serious fires in 1912; he was assaulted on the street in 1913. There are references to campaigns for both lieutenant-governor and governor (on the Temperance ticket) which were not sustained. He was divorced in 1916, after which he ended up in Vermont and then New Haven, where his ex-wife happened to live. He died there in January of 1920, aged 51 and handsome as ever, from complications following an intestinal operation.