Warning Out in early New England, with Jonathan Beecher Field (episode 359)

In this episode, Clemson professor Jonathan Beecher Field helps us explore the history of poor support in early New England and the surprising practice known as “warning out.” In the 17th- and 18th-century, Boston and other New England towns tied public relief strictly to legal inhabitancy, a status similar to the modern concept of birthright citizenship, but on a hyperlocal level. Those without established local ties or the financial capital to post a cash bond were routinely “warned out,” given two weeks to leave, and escorted beyond town borders to prevent them from becoming a financial burden on the town and its residents.

The conversation draws parallels between early colonial policies and modern approaches to poverty, examining how historical residency restrictions rhyme with contemporary anti-homeless architecture, municipal sweeps, and broader debates over who deserves social support. From the systemic exclusion of Black and Indigenous residents to the way early New Englanders decided who was deserving of poor support and who deserved to be warned out, Professor Field’s research reveals how early New England town structures and Calvinist mindsets mirrored and continue to shape our modern attitudes toward poverty, displacement, and public responsibility.


Jonathan Beecher Field

Jonathan Beecher Field is an Associate Professor of American literature at Clemson University in South Carolina, but don’t let that fool you, he’s also a transplanted Cantabridgian. He’s the author of Errands into the Metropolis, about religious dissent in a seventeenth-century New England dominated by theocracies, and Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation, which explores the way cheap imitations of New England town meetings allow politicians, corporations, and universities to paper over popular dissent. He is currently completing a manuscript that explores how infrastructure and kitsch sustain feelings of settler innocence in the contemporary United States.

Warning Out

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Welcome and Episode Setup

Jake: Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe. This is episode 359, Poverty and Warning Out in Early New England with Jonathan Beecher Field.

Hi, I’m Jake

In just a few moments, I’m gonna be joined by Clemson professor Jonathan Beecher Field to explore the history of poor support in early New England and the surprising practice known as warning out

In the 17th and 18th century, Boston and other New England towns tied public relief to legal inhabitancy, a status that was similar to the modern concept of birthright citizenship but on a hyperlocal level without established local ties or the financial capital to post a substantial cash bond were routinely warned out.

They were given two weeks to leave and then escorted beyond town borders to prevent them from becoming a financial burden on the town and [00:01:00] its residents. Our conversation draws parallels between early colonial policies And modern approaches to poverty, examining how historical residency restrictions rhyme with contemporary anti-homeless architecture, municipal sweeps,

and broader debates over who deserves social support from the systemic exclusion of Black and Indigenous residents to the way early New Englanders decided who was deserving of poor support and who deserved to be warned out, Professor Fields’ research reveals how early New England town structures and Calvinist mindsets mirrored and continue to shape our modern attitudes toward poverty, displacement, and public responsibility

Support the Podcast

Jake: But before we talk about warning out, I just wanna pause and say thank you to everybody who supports Hub History financially. As we close in on the 10th anniversary of this podca- as we close in on the 10th anniversary of the podcast this fall, I like to reflect on some of the ways the podcast has improved over the [00:02:00] past decade.

I use better mics than I did when we started, thanks to our financial supporters. I have access to paid newspaper and research databases to help me source my scripts better, also thanks to our supporters And while I can’t credit our supporters for this, I have learned to write better episodes and slow down when I’m talking into the mic.

One thing I can credit our listener supporters with is letting me use a new editing tool for our interviews. This week, I’m basically out of time to get this episode ready for air while also preparing to give a talk at History Camp Boston the same weekend and not completely dropping the ball at my day job

That’s why I was happy to upload the audio of this interview, letting AI transcribe it, and then edit that transcript like a Google Doc to edit the… And then edit the transcript as if it was a Google Doc to edit the audio.

While I still directly edit the audio waveform for most [00:03:00] of my episodes, in a casual conversation like this one, having a quick editing tool was just perfect. And our listeners made that possible too. So to everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy.

Just go to patreon.com/hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link.

Meet Jonathan Beecher Field

Jake: And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors I’m joined now by Jonathan Beecher Field. He’s an associate professor of American literature at Clemson University in South Carolina, but don’t let that fool you.

He’s also a transplanted Cantabrigian. He’s the author of Errands into the Metropolis, about religious dissent in a 17th century New England dominated by theocracies, and Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation, which explores the way cheap imitations of New England town meetings allow [00:04:00] politicians, corporations, and universities to paper over popular dissent.

We followed each other on social media for many years, first on Twitter and now on Blue Sky. And when he started looking into the practice of warning out as a corollary to his new book project on kitsch and settler innocence, he reached out about the possibility of talking about it on the show, which brings us here today

Jonathan Beecher Field, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Who Deserved Relief

Jake: I’ve had a line item in my giant spreadsheet that runs this podcast for most of a decade reminding me that I want to learn more about the idea of poor support in early New England and who Boston as a town felt like they were responsible for. And I came across this concept of the deserving poor that intersected with one of your areas of study, which is the, this concept of warning out.

So before we get to specifically what warning out means, can we talk about who [00:05:00] counted for getting relief if they encountered hard times in early New England?

Jonathan Beecher Field: Yeah, thanks, and thanks for having me on. It’s a real treat. It was actually simpler and less morally driven in the early days the question of deserving was not sort of a question of the difference between, an indolent drunkard and a a widowed mother or something like that as much. It was simply a question of being from here or not. The responsibility for the care of the poor devolved to the individual towns, and the towns responded to this by restricting any aid that they offered to residents.

And then later, they, there emerges this kind of legal idea of being an inhabitant, which is sort of an official member. So you were an inhabitant of the town you were born in, but establishing inhabitancy somewhere else could be difficult. It’s sort of like citizenship on a more micro level.

How Warning Out Worked

Jonathan Beecher Field: And so what [00:06:00] towns would do if there was somebody who was in the town who was incapable of supporting themself or sometimes just a difficult person or they would warn them out, which means basically you have I think usually two weeks to leave. And then you would be escorted from the town. And very similar to what we see a lot of communities approaching homelessness in the present day you’re not solving the problem you’re moving the problem somewhere else. I mean, you see this in– reflected in the sort of aggressive anti-homeless architecture. I think the last time I was in Central Square, I noticed that they’d really gone big on things you could sit on but not lie on which is one, one telltale. You see these a lot on subways and other public transit, the the armrests. So as somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about 17th century New England, I see something that rhymes from the 21st to the 17th, it gets my [00:07:00] attention. And unfortunately, one of these things is a kind of criminalization of poverty and treating the poor as kind of, a category that are just sort of abject

Jake: Yeah, you hear rumors, I don’t know that it’s ever been true, but it’s a trope in TV and things like that of, the local police putting the town drunk or the town crazy person on a train to the big city and saying, “They’ll take care of you there.” And that almost feels like whether that’s something that truly ever happened or not, that almost feels like it has a parallel with warning out in the olden times.

Jonathan Beecher Field: I certainly have heard those stories. I know that, for instance, before Olympics before Democratic or Republican conventions, I was living in Chicago, I think during the 1996 Democratic National Convention, if I remember correctly. And there was a big sort of sweep of the areas of the town were, visiting dignitaries would be to create this [00:08:00] kind of, it’s like a Potemkin village, but instead of building structures, you’re getting rid of people or putting them somewhere that they weren’t

Jake: And coming back to the idea of who was– who might have been warned out, you brought up this distinction between residents and inhabitants, and even before that, the idea of who was born in a town and not. So if you’re born in a town, it sounds like you could be a resident, be considered a legally an inhabitant.

But what did it take to move to a new town? Or what did it take to be considered as potentially belonging to, possessed by a new town?

Buying Belonging Bonds

Jonathan Beecher Field: You have usually these laws there’s a book, it’s avail– I think it’s available for free online, the internet archive called The Warning Out in New England. It’s an early 20th century book. But usually you can post a bond for a certain amount sort of to guarantee your support, or you can have current wealthy inhabitant vouch for you. [00:09:00] so there’s a kind of combination of financial capital and social capital that could entitle you to be, basically if you could demonstrate you didn’t need the support, then you could be eligible for the support. So, just often the way these things seem to work.

Jake: and one of the articles I was reading in preparation for this interview, I think it was in the mid-18th century, but it referenced a 100-pound bond that somebody would have to post. And that, I think this is an era when that was like a laborer’s salary for the year 100 pound sterling. So it wasn’t a small token payment

Jonathan Beecher Field: at

Jake: to try to join a town

Jonathan Beecher Field: I think that I mean, there are obvious echoes with, I think the way– when some of the ways that some people are concerned about migration is that you’ll have these hordes arriving that will then be, create expenses for people. This is certainly discourse that is not hard to find these days. And [00:10:00] whether or not it’s true, a lot of people feel that way and accordingly, unfortunately, from, in my opinion. I think the idea I mean, we were talking before we went– we started recording that, there’s, what is it that qualifies you for being deserving deserving of shelter and food? And my contention would be being alive, being a human being, and not whether, not what it says on your passport, not what your address is. And I– that’s a, some people feel that way. Other people feel differently about the, the kind of oblig– the kind– the– their exposure to financially responsible for somebody else’s welfare

Deserving Poor Then Now

Jake: Yeah, there’s a– that seems like a running theme in American culture. I know in the 17th and 18th century, there was this idea that the lazy who just wouldn’t work, the indolent, the degenerate town [00:11:00] drunk, these were people who didn’t deserve that relief if something terrible happened in their life. But then they’re happy to support a virtuous widow or a disabled veteran or somebody with a severe developmental disability.

And I hear that reflected in the rhetoric of people who, who rail against, welfare queens or something today. Well, I’m happy to support somebody who’s a hard worker who’s down on their l- their luck. I just don’t wanna support these, this other group, this mys- mythical group of welfare cl- queens or the undeserving poor,

Jonathan Beecher Field: I remember hearing a PSA for a personal injury lawyer saying that he believes that everybody has a God-given desire to work. This is in South Carolina, not Boston. But I think it does speak to this idea that it’s, natural and normal to, the, the old, Protestant work ethic, whether you’re Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim.

But yeah, this idea of a, it being natural and normal to, to want to work and I think as, the modes of [00:12:00] social welfare have changed, I think this put more emphasis on the idea of deserving versus undeserving, because it’s, what I s- from what I’ve seen in the case and this early book, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but the Warning Out New England book has, it’s basically just a compilation of instances of people getting warned out, and I don’t see– there’s no documentation of like, “Oh, this, this widow with her child showed up in Haverhill after her house burned down and, we took pity on her.”

It’s like, “Sorry, you’re not from here.”

Jake: Yeah

Jonathan Beecher Field: the Henry Benton is the author of Warning Out in New England. And it’s, yeah, it is available if you’re curious. It’s a strange book because he’s, he gets interested in the topic when he’s a g- he’s a genealogist. He’s one of those like

Jake: Okay

Jonathan Beecher Field: early 20th century… I feel like he probably had mutton chop, sideburns.

Jake: Yeah

Jonathan Beecher Field: and he was a big genealogy guy, and he found evidence that one of his, rel- relatives had [00:13:00] been warned out.

Jake: I saw his book referenced in the footnotes of a couple of the articles I read to try to get ready for this interview

Jonathan Beecher Field: He concludes that, yeah, warning out was a good thing because as we see now with the flotsam and jetsam of Europe, or no, sorry, of the Caribbean up.

Jake: somebody with an ancestor who was actually warned out landing on… with this flotsam and jetsam today, we must have warning out

Jonathan Beecher Field: when I saw that, I was reminded of what David Lynch said in a different context about fix your hearts or die. And I think,

Jake: pretty much

Jonathan Beecher Field: being capable of recognizing the humanity of people who are different than you are is, I think, part of being human.

I think my, in my job as an English teacher, I think sometimes think of what we’re doing when we’re reading these stories about different people is em- get-getting in reps in the empathy gym. And, it’s a I hate paying taxes just like everybody else, but I also I will I don’t mind the part that goes to support people who are less fortunate than I am.

there’s that line in Garth Brooks’ Honky Tonk Bar [00:14:00] Association about you don’t mind most of the time when Uncle Sam dips in your pocket except when it goes in the hands of the man on the welfare line. Now, it’s been argued that Garth Brooks doing a bit or it’s her persona, but it just it rubs me the wrong way I would rather spend my tax dollars on that than some of the other things we’re spending our tax dollars on these days.

Jake: Certainly these days, yes.

Religion Charity and Towns

Jake: I didn’t grow up with religion, but I grew up sort of on the periphery of one of the Anabaptist faiths the Brethren Church, I’m not a believer. I have a lot of things I would critique a church for, but they have a real commitment to care for the poor.

That is a deep tenet of that faith. And I feel like while, again, I’m a secular guy, but that somehow I inherited that part,

Jonathan Beecher Field: Yeah, I mean

Jake: Our, our tax money is the mechanism we have to care for people, and

Jonathan Beecher Field: I mean

Jake: the homeless encampments are full of people who should have some sort of support for their mental [00:15:00] illnesses.

That’s seems to be the biggest on-ramp to homelessness. And if we had a functioning health system, maybe we wouldn’t have

Jonathan Beecher Field: sure.

Jake: the homeless population we have.

Jonathan Beecher Field: definitely. I’ll note in terms of this intersection with religion that the idea of 1,000 points of light

Jake: The elder Bush.

Jonathan Beecher Field: Bush

Jake: Yeah

Jonathan Beecher Field: it’s basically saying, “Okay, we’re not gonna take care of this, so we need– we’re gonna farm it out to some loose network of churches and other organizations because it’s not our problem.” And there are many organizations that do a really good job and, are really committed to helping poor people.

But also there are various, you know, like they may not welcome queer people or they may not welcome other people, or they may have some kind of, “Okay, but you have to go to these church services,” things like that. so I think that the, And as you mentioned it, it’s interesting. The town is a church and the church is a town in 17th century Massachusetts pretty much.

Jake: And it has a parallel to the late 17th or 18th century [00:16:00] where, yes, the churches in a town like Boston or a New England town would have their own form of poor support. But then the town of Boston had all the churches who would provide some relief for members of that church.

They’re drawing a small circle around who’s deserving of that relief the way some religious groups would today. And then Boston had the public overseers of the poor who allegedly at least had a responsibility for everyone else, or at least every other inhabitant

Jonathan Beecher Field: Yeah.

Jake: the town

Jonathan Beecher Field: I think there are serie- it’s a series of hoops that you have to jump through or a series of to access for this care that, you kinda wish was just there for people who need it.

Jake: And coming back to your comment about, drawing some parallels between people today who believe that certain forms of public support should only be available to those who are born here,

Then that was a concept in early New England of somebody who was born in a town sort of automatically being considered an inhabitant and others maybe having to earn their way in.

Losing Status and Banishment

Jake: [00:17:00] Was there a way for somebody who was born in a town to lose eligibility for that support or to be- go outside the circle of who could qualify for public support?

Jonathan Beecher Field: I’m, I– It means I can talk about one of my favorite people, who’s Anne Hutchinson, who you could be banished, from a town. So, I mean, the reasons for Anne Hutchinson a 17th century religious leader who, by virtue of being a woman, was not a people have written many whole books about this situation called the Antinomian controversy.

But, basically her crime was being more popular than the ministers in her town. I, I tell my students in Clemson, it’s like, imagine if the lady who ran small group was more popular than the pastor. a problem. So eventually, after a civil and an ecclesiastical trial, along with some other people, were kicked out of not just the…

Well, she was excommunicated from the church in Boston and kicked out of the colony. Hutchinson went to Rhode Island and then ended up in [00:18:00] basically Westchester County, where her family was massacred by Indians, which is why

If you drive to New York which I don’t

Jake: Yeah.

Jonathan Beecher Field: The Hutchinson Parkway. But so that’s why and there’s a statue of her on the, State House lawn, showing her looking piously up to heaven. That, that’s a, a whole, that’s a whole other thing. But yeah, you can get kicked out of Massachusetts

Jake: Hutchinson was kicked out for her dangerous ideas, but if somebody was an orphan or if their parents became indigent or, was somebody who was born in a town whose circumstances… Like, would somebody in straightened circumstances like that still qualify for poor relief?

Jonathan Beecher Field: If they were an inhabitant

Jake: Yeah, I guess so. Wrapping my head around the idea of who can be an inhabitant

Jonathan Beecher Field: it’s kind of like birthright citizenship on a small scale. As far as I

Jake: Okay

Jonathan Beecher Field: as I understand the answer would be yes, if you and I and our families lived in Cambridge, let’s say, and we, well, we kinda, we say, [00:19:00] “I saw this pasture over out west by 128.”

We could, approach the General Court of Massachusetts and ask for a charter, which would then entitle us in the eyes of the, the c- the colony, Massachusetts Bay Colony, to settle that town. And that would be a charter in the same way if you chartered a corporation, that would be, you would have it, it would be a sort of limited group. And then there would be, there could be, there would be various kinds of negotiations with local indigenous people, which is whole other can of worms. But the, the town itself would be basically a group of, sort of self-selected group of people who could control their membership.

Jake: It sounds more like a country club membership than residency in a town today. Like the, the idea of town inhabitancy or residency in that 17th, 18th century sounds like a country club

Jonathan Beecher Field: it, I think it’s a really a country club with probably more wol- more wolves and bears than, most

Where the Warned Went

Jake: Well, that raises a good point of [00:20:00] what happens to somebody who’s warned out at that point? Do you go to the next town over and try your luck there? Do you go to the sort of John Lockean frontier wilderness? What happens if you’re warned out of a town?

You have to imagine that carried some stigma if it was known that you were warned out of a town before,

Jonathan Beecher Field: You see even, moving into the more contemporary a stigma and, kind of itinerant people, including Roma people. My mom, who grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, would tell me stories about being wary of the gypsies that would sometimes congregate.

They– she– they were called gypsies. We call them Roma now.

Jake: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Beecher Field: and, just the idea of, a hobo or a transient

Jake: Yeah, even the way we talk about carnies as a punchline now, carnival workers like that is a transient, small but transient population. But it’s people who don’t belong here, right?

Jonathan Beecher Field: yeah, and in a kind of Anglo-Saxon culture, there’s this sort of suspicion of trans– You know, the the English were [00:21:00] sedentary. The indigenous people were more mobile in the way that they moved through the year. And, There’s an idea that you can’t trust somebody who doesn’t have one place to stay.

And think to return to, I think your country club analogy is pretty apt because there’s a combination of social capital and financial capital that sort of gets you a spot

Race Exclusion and Praying Towns

Jake: coming back to that analogy, Was that country club an exclusive country club? Did a town board of overseers of the poor or the town selectmen feel like they had the same obligation to a Black or Indigenous inhabitant of a town as they did to white residents? Or was this a benefit that only was available to white people?

Jonathan Beecher Field: I think in practice only available to white people. There were– indigenous people, there were praying Indian towns. John Eliot, who was the apostle to the Indians and translated the Bible into Wampanoag created [00:22:00] towns, including Natick is the most famous one, that were initially sort of, kind of like proto Indian reservations, with the idea it’s like, okay, if we can get these Indians going to church, if we can get them staying in one place and not just roving all over the country, then will be on the way to civilization.

Unfortunately the concentration of indigenous people in these towns meant that when King Philip’s War came along, even though these were the Christian Indians, the the good Indians as opposed to the bad Indians, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts took all of those, the people from those praying towns and put them on Deer Island in, in Boston Harbor in what I would argue is a sort of proto concentration camp.

Jake: was exposed to the elements. There was very little food. It w- I mean, it was hard. That’s another line item that’s been on my podcast topic to-do list for about a decade is the– I’ve talked about Confederate prisoner, prisoners of war on the Harbor Islands. I’ve talked about Italian prisoners of war on the Har- Harbor Islands, but I need to talk about [00:23:00] the people who were interned there during King Philip’s War

Jonathan Beecher Field: I would say the closest analogy would be something kind of like the Japanese internment camps during–

Jake: Right

Jonathan Beecher Field: War II. these are people who are not known to be threats, but they look like the people we’re fighting, so we’ll round them up and put them somewhere where we– they won’t be able to hurt us.

Beulah Speen and Freeman

Jake: You brought up Natick and the Praying Indians of Natick, as I was getting ready for this episode, I was chatting with my wife and occasional co-host, Nikki, and she told me about a figure that they– So Nikki works at Old North Illuminated that runs Old North Church as a historic site, and they’ve been doing over the past few years a lot of research into their early Black and Indigenous congregants.

And she was telling me about the story of Beulah Speen, who was warned out of Boston in 1767 and they’re talking about her as an example of how arbitrary racial categories can be, ’cause she was considered white on her birth records, but she [00:24:00] was born in Natick in 1743. Later historians have discovered that her grandfather at least, and maybe more of her ancestors her grandfather was a Nipmuc minister.

Was the granddaughter of a Nipmuc man, white on her birth certificate. She gets married in Boston at the age of 24. She’s classified as mixed race on her marriage certificate, and then three months later she’s warned out, and the warning out record lists her as a Black person. So it’s, sort of the intersection of the two of the threads we were just pulling on.

One of the discoveries you shared with me while we were getting ready for this interview was that Elizabeth Freeman, whose 1781 lawsuit under Article 1 of our Body of Liberties here in Mass helped end slavery in the Commonwealth, that Elizabeth Freeman had been warned out of Stockbridge.

And you note that was along with half the town’s Black residents, but you can’t help but notice that [00:25:00] Stockbridge is traditionally home to a large Native American community. We call them the Stockbridge Indians around the time of the Revolution. So what does that tell us? What did you find about Elizabeth Freeman and her experience of warning out?

Jonathan Beecher Field: It struck me that, there are what are called sundown towns in parts of the United States where basically the idea is if you’re Black, you need to be out of town by sundown. This is a charming tradition.

Jake: Yeah, and I’ll, I’ll interject for our listeners. As I, I think our listeners know that I’m not originally from Boston or New England. I grew up in deepest Appalachia, and the town where I went to elementary school, my, my actual elementary school building was built by a, a team of Black masons where they had to sleep in the construction site all throughout the work, and they had to have a white armed guard because it was technically considered a sundown town.

Jonathan Beecher Field: It’s funny you should mention that because most of Clemson University’s campus was built by convict labor after emancipation [00:26:00] in the late 19th and early 20th century. So it’s a, unfortunately it’s something that happens in a lot of, in a lot of places. But historically speaking, very generally there were times where, African Americans and Indigenous people found common cause in the theft of their bodies and their land.

It is possible that she may have felt that she’d be treated better there than she would in a whiter community. I know that, that Sari Edelstein has written about Elizabeth Freeman and, she would be somebody who would probably be able to shed a little bit more light on that

Jake: I know in my other project right now, I’m working on a podcast with Queer History Boston, and one of the topics that we discussed in the first episode is Francis Lewis, who was probably born as an intersex person and then later in life, I think around age 30 transitions from being Deborah Lewis to Francis Lewis publicly when they have [00:27:00] a child.

But they their family moved to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s seen as a very deliberate attempt to find like a smaller, quieter place. We have somebody who doesn’t fit with some of the larger New England towns. A reaction in that era could easily be to move someplace smaller and quieter.

Modern Echoes and Sweeps

Jake: So thinking about the town as the corpus that’s responsible for its residents, its inhabitants, they’re responsible for their welfare if they fall on hard times, how does that translate into the modern era? Not even through the idea of relief for the poor, but just as the decision-making body, the, the group that would select who is in and out of the circle of protection.

Most towns now don’t have the same sort of town meeting structure. A few do, but how do we see that same town meeting reflected today?

Jonathan Beecher Field: I [00:28:00] don’t think anybody who’s involved in working with unhoused populations, is gonna go to Boston Common and then say, “Oh, you’re not from here.” And then, “Oh, you’re from here.

We’re gonna take you and give you a, a, a bed and a shower and a, a hot meal.” But on the other hand, there might be if you have one, Boston-born person who’s homeless sitting on a bench in, in Boston Common next to somebody who was born somewhere else I don’t think that the treatment is gonna be different, but the treatment might be to put them both on a bus or, harass them, take their stuff. So the support and the harassment of homeless people, is not as tied to residency as it once was

Jake: The– when they clear the camp at Melnea Cass or wherever it crops up next they’ll clear everybody out, not just the non-residents. Terrific.

Jonathan Beecher Field: And my understanding of contemporary homelessness in Boston is that there just, there aren’t enough resources or beds for [00:29:00] that population. I feel of it is through agencies like the Pine Street Inn who that’s their mission, but that’s, you know I know that’s a private organization because sometimes for Christmas I’ll make a donation to them instead of giving a present to my in-laws because they– it’s hard to find stuff that they want. A lot of that support has been privatized. You could say that Pine Street Inn and Boston Food Bank are points of light in in George Bush the elder’s phrase. And points of light are great, but it’s not a holistic solution to the problem,

yeah.

End of Warning Out Era

Jake: did the practice of warning out f- stop? When did we start to rely more on institutional help for, whether it’s an almshouse, a workhouse, a manufactory house? When did we rely more on those institutions as a place to put poor people, I guess, rather than warning them out of town?

Jonathan Beecher Field: First half of the [00:30:00] 19th century, you see, that kind of shift. A transition to a more institutional and I, what…

your question makes me realize I don’t think anybody objected to this process of warning out, which is,

Right. I don’t I, my unders- the people who c- you know, the white people who came to Massachusetts presumably came there because they cared a lot about Jesus, and I’m not a biblical scholar, but I c- I don’t recall any instances of Jesus warning out people in, in the Bible.

Warning out seems like it would be unbiblical, but I’m not aware of any pastor or minister or s- civil leader who said this practice is wrong and we should stop it. I imagine there were kindly individuals who tried to help people, but again, if somebody came to your house in Dedham who was indigent and you took them in out of the kindness of your heart [00:31:00] presumably the town fathers at some point would say, “Okay, you need to post a bond for them or we’re gonna warn them out.”

Jake: W- which is a far cry from, “I was a stranger and ye took me not in,” and thus getting, you know, cast into the, the fire at the left hand.

E- exactly opposite of what the guy said that they said they were following

Jonathan Beecher Field: Yeah, there is I think it was William Apess who’s in the eulogy for King Philip who says, “O ye nominal Christians,” which is something I find myself thinking quite frequently in terms of what I understand the precepts of that faith to be and how it is enacted these days

Jake: Yeah. Probably a rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down here, lest I get myself in trouble with some of my listeners. But yes, I hear you. What I see in, like the Book of Matthew that I grew up with is not what I see being practiced in this country that claims to be so very Christian

Jonathan Beecher Field: Because I’m interested in kitsch for work I’m doing now on, on settler innocence and how [00:32:00] things like pilgrim salt shakers make it hard for us to think about settler colonialism my interest in kitsch has led me to– I have a, a sh- a thing I wrote Homeland Security kitsch, which is the the way that the Department of Homeland Security has leaned, in its Instagram, has leaned very heavily into kind of Thomas Kinkade pictures, fake travel portraits saying “Free flight to Haiti,” and also a lot of very explicitly Christian iconography, which, I can’t make, I can’t make it make sense

How to Research Warning Out

Jake: This is a whole realm of Boston history and New England history that I didn’t know much about, that I was curious about but didn’t know much about. And it was really hard to think about how to learn more until you offered to come on the show and teach me a little bit more about it. So if somebody has listened to our conversation and wants to take their own deeper dive and learn more about s- relief for the poor in early New England, but also more specifically about warning out, where, [00:33:00] what should they do?

Where should they go to read more? Are there records of warning out in the Boston City Archives I should look for? How could somebody start to research warning out if they want to learn more?

Jonathan Beecher Field: the, the book by Benton called Warning Out in New England is available in– from the Internet Archive. And that has a lot of… I mean, it’s not a primary source, but he has basically compiled a lot of primary sources about out. So for somebody with kind of specific interest in specific towns, but that would be one place. as far as publicly accessible stuff, I mean, there there’s some articles on JSTOR. There’s one by Sarah Edelstein that we talked about earlier.

Jake: It seems like for somebody who was poor or indigent or marginal, a birth record, a death record, and maybe a marriage or warning out record may be the only time they show up in what we call history, the documentary record of New England. So it would be interesting to seek more of that out.

Jonathan Beecher Field: [00:34:00] Because the people getting worn out were transient, they in some cases might not even show up there. And just in general, the approach I teach as– take as a teacher and why I love teaching early American literature broadly defined is If you’ve ever been to restaurant with an old person, and they hold the menu out at arm’s length so they can read it I think sometimes there are things that are easier to see when they’re further away from us.

And I think you might you learn a little bit about warning out, and then you notice, “Gee, the railing in front of my bank is covered with spikes,”

Jake: right

Jonathan Beecher Field: that. And I think sometimes going into the past and seeing how these things happened in the past can sort of defamiliarize and refamiliarize you to things like that are happening in the present

Follow Fields and Wrap Up

Jake: Well, moving from learning more about warning out to learning more about you and your work. If somebody wants to follow your work or learn more about what you do, where should they look for that?

Jonathan Beecher Field: I have a website which is jonathanbeecherfield.net, which has links to my [00:35:00] socials. I’m a pretty active poster on Blue Sky, not always about early American history. I have a, a Substack called Sausage Season, which you can also link to from there, which started out being a- about making s- sausage as a kind of weekly writing prompt.

I make charcuterie. And it’s become now I’m more focused on how the sausage is made in academia and things like that. So, I’ve been having some fun writing, writing there. And both of the books that I’ve published are available open access. There’s a link there. I wrote a book called Errands into the Metropolis about New England dissidents going to London and basically saying, “Massachusetts is being mean to me,” and various governments in England said, “Okay, here’s Rhode Island.”

Which is– that’s the TLDR version. Then second book I wrote is Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation from Minnesota. Also, you can read for free, thanks to Manifold, about the sort of iconic form of democracy of the town meeting becoming a name of the town hall meeting where your CEO tells you he’s laying half the staff off or [00:36:00] things like that.

the developer tells you about the project that’s going up in your neighborhood that you really have no way of stopping, but here’s our official meeting we’re having so we can listen to your feedback

so corporate p- political, you have your town hall meeting debates, and then academic. You will have, an incident happens at your school, and the– there, there’s a town hall meeting where the leaders say, “This isn’t who we are,” when there’s an incident. and I’m– as I mentioned, I’m working on a book on settler infrastructure, settler kitsch, and settler innocence in terms of the things that make it possible to go through our daily lives. To be as minimally aware of possible of the violent expropriation of this, of New England, of North America, of Massachusetts, however you wanna scale it, Native American people. And my argument is that the town creates this infrastructure that makes it seems like, okay, – you can buy a magnet of this sign that says, “Entering Boston established 1630.”

And it was– there, there was something there before then, it just wasn’t called [00:37:00] Boston.

Jake: Right

Jonathan Beecher Field: on the other side, you have, I think it’s the things like sexy pilgrim costumes and Marilyn Monroe in a pilgrim costume and pilgrim salt shakers that again, make it kind of shift the focus away from, land theft and genocide.

so but yeah, jonathanbeecherfield.net, you can sort of keep up with all of those things.

Jake: Well, it’s funny, as part of my wrap-up almost every single week, I tell my listeners that Blue Sky is the only social platform where I’m still kind of actively engaging and talking to people, and this is a perfect example ’cause this conversation we’ve just had was born out of an exchange on Blue Sky. So come follow us both over there

Jonathan Beecher Field: it’sit’s it’s better than other social sites. You know, it feels a little bit like being in a Whole Foods parking lot. But it it’s, a lot of cool people like like me and Jake are there

Jake: Yeah.

Jonathan Beecher Field: and other

Jake: Yeah Well, Jonathan Beecher Field, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for talking about poverty in early New England and this practice of warning out specifically, and I have learned a lot from [00:38:00] this

Jonathan Beecher Field: I really appreciate the opportunity, and yeah, I’m happy to come back whenever.

Show Notes and Farewell

Jake: To learn more about warning out and poverty in early New England, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com/359. I’ll have links to Jonathan Beecher Field’s website and his Blue Sky, where you can find out more about him and his work I’ll also make sure to link to Professor Fields’ books. We’ll also link to Josiah Benton’s book, Warning Out in New England, 1656 to 1817, and the book Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership by Brenna Bendar. I’ll also link to some journal articles where you can read more about how towns worked in early New England, about Elizabeth Freeman, and of course, about early New England poverty.

If you wanna get in touch with me, you can email podcast@hubhistory.com. I still [00:39:00] have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and over on Mastodon as at hubhistoryatbetter.boston. not really posting at any of those sites with regularity, but as we talked about in the interview, I am active on Blue Sky.

If you wanna follow me there, just search for hubhistory.com. As always, the simplest way to get in touch with us is to go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the Subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode.

If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’d love to send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners

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