I came across the following in a book of Fairfield Porter's art criticism -

"The Boston of the end of the nineteenth century was created by Sargent as an Anglophile Boston that considered itself a province of London....Boston, which felt itself to be (and with some justice), certainly the equal, and possibly the superior to any other American city as a capital of culture. The Bostonians who admired and lionized Sargent identified themselves with English civilization: they had no awe of France....In Boston there may have existed a small climate of opinion as to artistic standards that did not exist in New York or Philadelphia"

What struck me is how far this popularized, culturally influential image of Boston - the Brahmins, the James's, of a refined sensibility and cultural tastemaking - is so far from the popularized, but no less influential image of Boston we have today - the dominance of 'the Southie,' a city whose privilege is seen as foreign, and whose heart is the working class, the uneducated, the proud and clannish, the uncouth. Certainly demographics and economics play a large role here, but there's more to it, I think. Something about the democratization of cultural elitism, and the authenticity associated with representing the working class experience in the arts.

But as I always say, don't hate the player - hate the game.