The Patriot Post® · The Fenway Culture

I ran across a video clip (a compilation from a film) of baseball Opening Day in Boston from the 1950s, originally shared by the Fenway Park account on X.

Tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/JHs7eblKDp

— Fenway Park (@fenwaypark) April 3, 2026

In the racially charged times in which we live, some people will no doubt say that the first thing that they notice is that there are nothing but white people, and, representative of those times when segregation was common, that is true. Yet if you look at the observable cues (actions, conditions, and behaviors that can be observed and measured to provide insight into a circumstance or situation) in the video, other important characteristics are evident.

If you look deeper and focus on the people and their interactions, you will see people of every social and economic strata, they are all well-dressed (most men in coat and tie and women dressed to the nines), orderly and well behaved, courteous, and in the background shots of the city and Fenway there is no trash, no homeless camps, the landscaping is manicured and well maintained and the vendors were operating in the open from simple tables, not behind steel cages or bulletproof glass. The wide shots of the city invoke images of community, activity, and prosperity.

For lack of a better descriptor, I’m going to call the culture in that video the “Fenway Culture.”

Hold that image in your mind, then compare it with experiences at public events today.

“Times were different,” people will say. “Racism was the order of the day, and blacks were second-class citizens,” others will say. Both of those statements are true, but why would all races and economic classes not want a society that exemplifies those values and the characteristics seen in that video?

What happened in the past 70 years or so to get us to where we are today?

People will want to make this about race, but that is just an easy way out, a way to avoid some hard questions, and to do so completely ignores something I think is vastly more important — the matter of culture.

Certainly, Western culture is predominated by white-skinned people of primarily European descent, but as I have learned from the more I study, being white never did and still doesn’t necessarily mean having the same values, same religious views, or same cultures. The initial settlers came from different areas of England and often had pretty divergent views on many things.

Based on my reading of the writings and letters of America’s Founders, race is never mentioned in their discussions of how a new nation should be designed. I don’t believe America was unified as a nation because of melatonin content; it coalesced around a core set of shared values that were judged more important than outward appearances.

A working theory is that the society and culture shown in that video overcompensated for its faults and, as a form of penance, refused to hold other cultures (not just races) to the same standards of behavior to which they held themselves. Somehow, they rationalized that this wasn’t a form of patronization and that other cultures would eventually join them because they believed their culture was correcting itself and was obviously preferable to any other.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead of recognizing the failures of other cultures to adopt, adapt, and assimilate, forces within the Fenway Culture doubled down with even lower expectations, featuring even less enforcement of standards and values (and now, law) that were important to them and to the maintenance of society and culture.

And the failure is not only continuing but has accelerated and become the basis of policy for the left-wing Democrat Party. In an inversion of reality, “progressives” now claim the Fenway Culture is the real evil and that everything it stood for should be destroyed and forgotten. It should be punished, not for its sins, but for recognizing those sins and trying to atone for them.

The Fenway Culture was wrong about race. It was also wrong about the way to solve that problem, but it is hard to imagine that a respectful melding of cultures, united by the principles and values seen in that video, wouldn’t be the contemporary version of what America’s Founders did.