Chapter 28

Inside New England I

God hath sifted a whole nation, that he might

send choice grain into this wilderness.

—William Stoughton, Governor of Massachusetts

1694–1701

New England is a … house divided against itself.

—Howard Mumford Jones

OF COURSE what the man from Mars will find out first about New England is that it is neither new nor very much like England. Nor does it much resemble nowadays the conventional concept of “New England,” that very special embodiment of tradition and culture established so firmly in most American minds by generations of observation and acceptance. New England is many things—an area, a congeries of precedent, a symbol, and, as has so often been said of Boston, a state of mind. Also, like every American region, it is full of the unexpected, infinitely complex and variegated. I never ran into anything in Costa Rica or Albania quite so exotic as Boston; I found that the Saltonstall-Tobin Axis, if one could have called it such, was almost as curious and intricate a political phenomenon as the old Popular Front in France.

What else is New England? It is both a region of entrenched Puritan conscience and of Sacco and Vanzetti. It is a region both of a fibrous aristocratic tradition and of a tremendous influx of the foreign-born. It is the region where for many years every Connecticut voter had to be certified as of good moral character, and where until 1820 Massachusetts had property and religious tests for officeholders. It is a region of the craggiest kind of civic virtue, made manifest by such institutions as the town meeting, and of characters like James Michael Curley, who represents a great many things of which civic virtue is not one. It is the region of enormously conservative financial power—and also of such majestic speculators as Joseph P. Kennedy. It is a region of wonderful rivers like the Housatonic, long winters so severe that they warp the character, octogenarian hotel clerks and bell hops, and more mildly crazy people than anywhere else in the nation. It is a region profoundly devoted to specialized skills in small craft industries; but it contains the biggest magazine press in the world, the biggest shoe factory in the world, and the biggest watch factory in the world. It is, as everybody knows, a region with a splendid self-reliance on the one side, and of a good deal of smugness, bleakness, and provincialism on the other, but it has a greater tolerance for eccentricity than any area in the country. It is a region where 190 savings banks in one state, Massachusetts, have deposits of more than three billion dollars, and where the same state announced in 1946 that it was preparing to take legal action to clear the names of those wrongly accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692. It is the region of antique furniture shops, glowing bowls of fruit on tightly curving narrow roads, and that well-known silversmith, Paul Revere. It is the region of red cherry jam from the Boston firm of S. S. Pierce, the first antivivisection society in the country, and of Plymouth Rock, the brothers James, William Dean Howells (born in Ohio), Emily Dickinson, Brook Farm, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and extraordinarily bright and industrious young men like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Also New England is still other things, if only because it is changing, and changing fast, and finally it is an extremely difficult section of the country to write about, because there is so much to say and so little space. Half the paragraphs that follow could easily be expanded into whole sections, and half the sections into chapters.

Some Basic Characteristics

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan, while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. … It is the first American section to be finished, to achieve stability in its conditions of life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.

—Bernard DeVoto

New England is the most closely knit group of states in the union; it has the dimensions of an entity, with sharp, concise frontiers. As we well know it is almost impossible to define the “West” conclusively; even such a comparatively homogeneous area as the “Southwest” leaks over state borders, and we shall see when we reach the “South” that no two authorities quite agree as to what it is. But every school child knows what the six New England states are, and what is the knifelike boundary of the region as a whole. Or compare New England with that loose and conglomerate geographical expression “the Middle West.” Among other things the Middle West has no single “capital.” But New England most certainly has—though the influence of Boston is, on the whole, declining, especially in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

This is not to say that the six New England states do not differ vividly among themselves. They do, as we shall see.

Three qualifying points arise. One is that, despite their geographical and historical affinities, the New England states only seldom express themselves in Washington with political unanimity. The “silver” senators from the West make a single dogmatic bloc; the New Englanders do not, which may be a result of Puritan individualism among other things.

Second, though the region may seem very closely tied and interlocked together, there are some staggering disunities in such a simple matter as, for example, transportation. One thinks of New England as a kind of Switzerland; one assumes that travel is easy from almost any point to any other point in a few hours, by road or rail. Which is a great illusion. To get from Augusta (Maine) to Concord (New Hampshire), say 130 miles as the crow flies, you have to ride two long sides of a triangle through Boston. To get from the capital of Vermont to the capital of Connecticut means a bus ride and three changes of train, on three different railway systems.

Finally, from the point of view of geography and industrialization, there are two New Englands. The north (Maine, Vermont, and to some extent New Hampshire) is predominantly rural—an area of solid forests and small diversified farms. The south (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island) is, on the contrary, very thoroughly and heavily industrialized (though, again, almost every sentence in a survey like this needs to be qualified); there is plenty of small industry in southern Maine and in New Hampshire. I heard an argument once made that Vermont should by geographical criteria belong to New York—any Vermonter will rise to arms at the suggestion—and that New Hampshire is in reality “part” of Maine. But debate on such points could be endless.

Many chapters ago I quoted from an address by Professor Kenneth Murdock of Harvard. Perhaps I may insert here another passage from the same speech, because it describes aptly another New England characteristic. Most people think that the area is altogether drab and colorless physically. But listen to Mr. Murdock:

Outsiders … accept as an article of faith that it is always winter, always raining or snowing or at least cloudy, east of the Hudson River. Black, white and grey sum up for them the colors to which New England attains; they explain the colorlessness they discern in her poets by pointing to the Puritanism in their blood, and the drabness of their environment. Apparently the flaming New England salt marshes in October, the brilliant mosaic of inland hills at the same season, the riot of color when crimson maple buds and the yellow and green of a New England spring do their best to cheer the unfortunates who live among these scenes, the infinite variety of fruit and shade in a summer landscape in New Hampshire or Maine—all have nothing to do with color; to find it one must, apparently, go to Manhattan Island or the Pennsylvania mine fields.

That shrewd and courageous Yankee, Wilbur Cross, former governor of Connecticut, suggested quite seriously some years ago that all the New England states should combine to make one; he pointed out the saving this would entail in legislative expenses, the efficiency and directness in administration that would result. He was violently shouted down. But out of his idea came the practice whereby the six New England governors now meet regularly, two or three times a year. Once they all called on Mr. Roosevelt for a conference. Several of the governors had never met the president before, and some were shy. FDR broke the ice by counting them and saying, “What! All six! You’re not going to secede, are you?”

Perhaps oddly, close-packed and samesome as the region is, it has no outstanding newspaper that serves all six states, though the Boston Herald reaches fairly far. But there is no New York Times, no dominant paper with a pan-New England point of view. The Boston Transcript might well have seized this place, but when the Transcript died in April, 1941, of journalistic cirrhosis of the liver, its total circulation was exactly eighteen thousand.¹

Puritan Tradition and Nonconformist Conscience

What have Puritanism and democracy in common? Both respect the individual … both recognize the ultimate authority of reason … both respect the dignity of man. Both are equalitarian and leveling, for to the Puritan salvation was dependent on merit or grace, not on wealth or class or talents, and to the democrat equality was part of common humanity…. Both, finally, gave their allegiance to ideas or principles rather than to men or institutions.

—Henry Steele Commager

We proceed to a kind of tentative analysis of that quality known as “Yankee” or “New England” character. The dominating items are almost too obvious to need mention—frugality, individualism, hardiness, eccentricity. But perhaps our mythical reader in Johannesburg, South Africa or Asunción, Paraguay (or Chattanooga, Tennessee) is not so well informed.

“The courage of New England is the courage of conscience,” wrote Daniel Webster. And James Truslow Adams has a fine sentence in his Epic of America: “As time went on (in New England) the gristle of conscience, work, thrift, shrewdness, duty, became bone.” One jokes ancient but nevertheless apposite. “The Pilgrim Fathers fell first on their knees and then on the aborigines.” Other things being equal, this duality of attitude still applies today.

No one should forget three factors. First, the early New England settlers were men of the highest intellectual quality; the Calvinist tradition insisted upon and promoted not only such homely virtues as honesty and diligence, but also intelligence; the basic pattern was set early—brains count: no sloppiness; out with the mental riffraff. Second, the New England states (among the other original thirteen) had long experience of self-government before the federal union. The first thirteen had a really concrete adolescence; they learned how to make good government in practice. More than any other American region, New England owes its present to its past. Third, as has been many times pointed out, New Englanders love to be “agin things”; they still stand by Thoreau who said that the individual’s first duty is to “live his life as his principles demand,” and by Emerson who believed above all that there should always be “a minority unconvinced.”

Two details to illustrate nonconformity: (a) A good many New Englanders who believed violently in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti were blue-bloods; President Lowell was as vehemently attacked by some members of his own faculty as by members of any other group (b) It was the Atlantic Monthly which first gave Ernest Hemingway commercial publication after his story “Fifty Grand” had been rejected by every other magazine in America—just as it was the Atlantic Monthly that published Bret Harte’s “Luck of Roaring Camp,” after Harte’s own west coast had refused it.

We should have a word too about that celebrated New England phenomenon the town meeting, as an example of the Puritan tradition. In 93 per cent of the corporate communities of New England, the town citizens elect their selectmen and other administrative officers in the most direct and literal way; there are no primaries, no conventions, no balloting as a rule except by show of hands; this is immediate personal democracy, the immediate choice of a few individuals by another few. Of course the Town Meeting system can apply only where communities are small.² And of course the purity of the process varies with localities. Massachusetts for years fined qualified citizens who neglected to attend town meetings. Elsewhere they have become intermixed with elements of the bogus. For instance in at least one community the time and place of the meeting are only announced to the public in microscopic type in the most inconspicuous corner of the local newspaper; doors are closed instantly the meeting comes to order, and a local machine puts through its slate almost as in Kansas City or Chicago.

Brahmins and Middle Yankees

We are thin … we are pale, we are sharp. There is something meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness …

—Henry Tames

What is a Boston Brahmin? It isn’t easy to define the term, since copiousness of ancestry is not, as might be expected, the chief criterion. Mr. Conant, the president of Harvard, had three forebears on the Mayflower; but Mr. Conant is not a Brahmin. But his predecessor, A. Lawrence Lowell, who couldn’t trace many ancestors beyond the Revolution, most certainly was. The joke in Boston is that the Brahmin ranks closed in about 1820; nobody has been taken in since. People often assume that to be a lineal descendent of a Mayflower passenger means, ipso facto, that you are an aristocrat. But this isn’t true by any means; the Mayflower Pilgrims were mostly very simple folk. And the hallmark of aristocracy became subtly overlaid and underlaid with politics (for instance with such a consideration as what side a family took during the Revolution), with social pretensions, and of course with wealth.

The Brahmins today make a wonderfully close-knit archaic group, which nothing in the United States quite rivals. Harvard and trusteeships; the world placidly revolving around Back Bay; the Apley-Pulham spirit; aridity and charm and a Bloomsbury cultivation; above all, profound family interweavings. I met one eminent Brahmin who told me that his grandfather had 226 nieces and nephews, and one gentlewoman, whose husband is absolutely beyond dispute the quintessence of Brahminism, informed me quite seriously that, though she had lived in her exquisite house in Brookline for thirty years, and borne six children into the family, she was not yet finally “accepted”—because she had been born in Rhode Island!

One story pleased me; I hope it’s not apocryphal. A gallant old lady whose family tree is as thick with eminent ancestors as a hedgehog with bristles, was knocked down by a thug one winter night. She did not deign to rise; lying there in the snow she exclaimed simply, “My man! Do you not realize who I am!”

As typical a Brahmin as any is Charles Francis Adams, the most distinguished living Bostonian, the great-great-great-grandson of President John Adams, a former secretary of the Navy, and a director of some forty corporations. Men like Mr. Adams and women like Mrs, Homans, his sister, have every distinction, grace and elegance. Not should anyone be so naïve as to assume that the Adamses are old-fashioned or illiberal; let no one think that because a man is a Brahmin he may not be a rebel too. With absolute simplicity one member of the family told me, “We are rather a splendid people, don’t-you-know.” But the Brahmins as a whole realize that most of the finite world has passed them by; they concede that few of their fellow citizens appreciate their fastidiousness, their sophistication. They live in a shrinking backwater, and they know it. There are thirty-seven Cabots in the Boston Social Register; but there are forty-one Browns and Brownes.

Has the ancient blood itself run dry? Not quite. A Saltonstall is, after all, senator from Massachusetts; and an Endicott Peabody was an all American football player not long ago. I heard it said that “the Lowells and Adamses have run out biologically, but the Cabots are still prolific.”³ It seems that the life strain is still capable of bursting out after long periods of lethargy; consider for instance the contemporary entrance into politics and public affairs of some first-class Brahmin youngsters. A Choate is editor of the Boston Herald. Henry Parkman Jr. (descended of Francis Parkman) was head of OPA in Massachusetts, and then a state senator. One of the best men in New England, Robert F. Bradford, a lineal descendent of the Governor Bradford who wrote the History of Plimouth [sic] Plantation, became governor in 1947. In Springfield you will find Roger Lowell Putnam, a Bostonian who went west (that is, he went west one hundred miles), married a Catholic, and became—of all things!—the town’s Democratic mayor. I do not know what relation William Phillips is to Wendell Phillips. But when the contemporary Phillips went to India as Roosevelt’s ambassador, something in him, impeccable and intricate blue-blood that he is, made him break out in indignation at the injustices he saw.⁴ Many Brahmins are still abolitionists at heart.

The Melting Pot and How It Melts

Late one November afternoon I strolled across Boston Common; no site in the United States can have associations quite so stirring. A young ensign stopped me with “What place is this, sir?”

I said, “Boston Common.”

He said, “What’s that?”

I said, “Where we all come from, in a way.”

He looked blank a moment and then said, “Oh.” In twenty minutes I overheard a dozen foreign accents.

A few weeks later I visited Hartford, Connecticut. In three block on a single street I saw these shop signs:

Kutz Music Store

John Campo. Custom Tailor

P. O. Postma. Jeweler

P. J. Dooley. Rathskeller

Paul A. Zazzaro. Permittee

Calfas. Hatter

McCoy’s. The House of Music

Witkower’s Old Book Store

Gung-Ho. Chinese Restaurant

Donchian. Rugs

R. G. Sceli & Co. Radio & Electronic Parts

Gustave Fischer Co. Office Equipment

Dr. George E. Woerz. Optometrist

Leo Celio. Groceries

Here are German, Jewish, Greek, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Armenian, and Polish names.

In his indispensable and massive North America,⁵ Professor J. Russell Smith makes a list of some births recorded in one month in a New England factory town:

A daughter, Ida, to Quintu and Amelia Perline.

A daughter, Vittoria Luigia, to Antonio and Luigian Musante.

A son, Albert Joseph, to John and Amelia Kottman.

A daughter, Hilda M., to John and Elsie Balster.

A daughter, Stanislawa, to Wlodslow and Mary Dictk.

A daughter, Annie, to Joseph and Mary Groszek.

A daughter, Helen, to Nikolay and Sophia Smey.

A daughter, Sophie Justine, to John W. and Louise F. Kempt.

A son, Joseph, to Redolf and Mary Govin.

A daughter, Katie Mary, to Nicholas and Joseph Moriscato.

A daughter, Victoria, to Mathew and Joanna Styfcka.

A daughter, Eugeniusz Jo, to Volente and Mary Borcz.

A daughter, Cecilia, to Peter and Anne Nasiadka.

My friend Edward A. Weeks Jr., editor of the Atlantic Monthly, took me to lunch in Boston; he said he’d show me “the real New England.” I thought I would meet Cabots and Lowells, and, since I had seldom met any Cabots or Lowells, my curiosity was pleasantly aroused. Mr. Weeks introduced me to his friends. One was a Greek importer, one the brother of a Jewish judge, one an Irish businessman. Not a Brahmin in the lot.

All over New England the foreign-born have laid themselves on the land; this fact is paramount and basic. No visitor can avoid the generalization that the “Yankee-land’’ is no more “Yankee-land”; the old stock has been inundated with waves of Irish, French Canadians, Italians, Polish, Portuguese. In Manchester (New Hampshire) there is a solid block of Greeks; in Waltham (Massachusetts) a solid block of Armenians. Providence (Rhode Island) has practically the texture of an Italian town, and so have parts of New Haven (Connecticut). The Polish-language newspaper with the biggest circulation in America is published in Boston, and so is the biggest Armenian paper, which incidentally was the first in the country to print William Saroyan; the biggest Finnish paper appears in Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and the biggest French at Fall River, Massachusetts. There are towns in New England named Berlin (but pronounced Ber-lin), Calais (pronounced Callus), Paris (pronounced Pay-rus), and Peru (pronounced Peeru).

Figures for Massachusetts are particularly relevant; one out of every five persons is foreign born. Some details as to country of birth:

Eire	103,000
Northern Ireland	10,500
Sweden	28,000
Poland	53,000
Russia	64,000
Lithuania	20,000
Italy	114,000
Portugal	24,000
Syria, Palestine & Turkey	18,700
Canada (French)	81,000
Canada (other)	142,000
Azores	12,000
Greece	15,000
Hungary	1,100
Germany	16,000
France	4,600
Finland	10,000

One thing that surprised me was that, by and large, the foreign communities do not mix much—at least in the towns. The new archbishop of Boston, Dr. Cushing, told me with great pride that his chauffeur, Lithuanian born, had married an Italian girl; but such marriages are quite rare even when Catholicism is a common denominator. Inter-marriage across both a religious and a racial frontier—say between Irish and old Yankee, or between Portuguese and Swede—almost never happens. There have been no marriages between Saltonstalls and Vanzettis. The melting pot does melt in that the foreign-born most certainly do become American citizens, their children learn the American language in American public schools, they are unchallengeably American in mores, style and spirit. And Poles, Czechs, French Canadians (the most parochial and unassimilable of all racial groups), and Jugoslavs do of course meet professionally and, to a certain extent socially, at least in the upper brackets. But in the great towns they don’t intermarry much. In rural districts the case is somewhat different; in villages, a lone Spaniard or Turk has a better chance to be absorbed.

Most people think of the foreign-born as predominantly urban and industrial, but plenty of immigrants and sons of immigrants are New England farmers; the countryside is fairly choked with them. There are splendid farms near Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the Irish, and the French Canadians have pitched camp in rural Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. Most of the farming on Cape Cod is done by Portuguese and Spaniards; in Rhode Island by the Portuguese; and in the Connecticut Valley by Italians and Poles.

The tremendous influx of foreign-born has certainly changed the face of New England. But also New England has changed the face of the foreign-born. The equation works both ways. There are Polish shop-keepers in Westport, Connecticut, and Irish gardeners near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who, in a generation or so, have become more Yankee than the Yankees.

Paragraph About the French Canadians

Probably this unique minority group, almost unknown to the nation at large, is the most tenacious in the entire country. There are 908,386 French Canadians in the United States, of whom the great majority are Roman Catholic; and almost all are clustered in New England. Most of them came to the United States for the same reason that the Irish did—they were hungry, they needed jobs. And (I mean no offense) they represented communities in Quebec which for two hundred years had had extremely little opportunity for social or intellectual development. Look at parts of Quebec itself today. The French Canadians now in this country almost never intermix; they hold with the utmost stubbornness and obstinacy to their own folklore, customs, language. A good many are farmers, but some are urban dwellers; almost all vote Democratic, and they are a considerable source of power to the political machines in Maine and New Hampshire towns. I heard many stories of French Canadian adhesiveness. Let us choose only one. About ten years ago the head of the Catholic church in the Rhode Island diocese was compelled to excommunicate some sixty laymen in the Woonsocket area—where the French Canadians constitute what is practically a state within a state—because of a bitter struggle over teaching of French in the parechial (not the public) schools; the community had insisted on holding onto French and keeping English excluded. The bishop (of Irish extraction) took the line that American citizens of no-matter-what origin must learn English! But the French Canadian leaders had refused to agree; hence the excommunication. Thereafter, English was duly taught.

“Reverse Lend Lease”

Now to another field. Plenty of conspicuous New Englanders, particularly the Middle Yankees, are of basic American stock but they were not born in New England. For instance Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was born in Ohio, and Van Wyck Brooks, the distinguished historian of New England literature, comes from New Jersey. Edward A. Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly was also New Jersey born; so was Charles E. Spencer Jr., the president of the First National Bank of Boston, the behemoth that is the sixth largest bank in the country. Or take Donald K. David, the dean of the Harvard Business School, one of the ablest men in Massachusetts. He came to Harvard from Moscow, Idaho! And John P. Marquand, no less, was born in Delaware.

This brings up an astonishing contributory point. One thinks of Harvard as the essence and incarnation of New England. Yet, Mr. Conant told me, eleven out of twelve Harvard deans never went to Harvard College! (On the other hand, all twelve are graduates of a Harvard graduate school in the specialties they teach.) To name a few—Dean Paul Herman Buck (Arts and Sciences) comes from Columbus, Ohio; Dean Alfred Chester Hanford (Harvard College) from Makanda, Illinois; Dean Edmund Morris Morgan (Law) from Mineral Ridge, Ohio; Dean Charles Sidney Burwell (Medicine) from Denver, Colorado. A point on the other side—no president of Harvard has ever come from outside Massachusetts.

During the last century New England went, as it were, west; it sent people out, everywhere in the United States, as we well know from many passages in this book. It became a kind of concentrated breeding ground of human resources, fertilizing great cities like, for instance, Cleveland and Portland, Oregon. As a result Kansas is today, in some respects, more “New England” than New England itself; just as parts of California are more Kansaslike than Kansas. As the New Englanders energetically pushed out, their own area became necessarily drained of much vitality and talent. When people talk of the alleged “decay” of New England this is what they usually mean. Like a blood donor who gives too much, it got weak.

To fill the vacuum, other people of course came in; the process was a kind of reverse lend lease in the human sphere. Hence men like the Comptons, the Spencers, the Davids. “We have a way of life here a hell of a lot of people crave,” one sage New Hampshire editor told me. But he proceeded to point out that most of the blood that comes nowadays to New England is old rather than new blood. People settle in Boston or Cambridge after having made their fortunes, after having reached the highest distinction in science or the professions. Hence, they are not so vitalizing a force to the community as younger men might be.

Another able editor suggested that the test of modern New England will be whether or not the “new” American from South Boston or Aroostook County will measure up to the old. Will the sons of the Irish be frontier builders like the Yankees? Will the Portuguese and Greeks and French Canadians send their children out to create new business empires in the West—or even blast or chip their way through granite to make small tidy farms in Vermont? The answer I got in the main was—no.

Hypodermic Needles, War, and Cranberries

Quintessentially New England is, as everybody knows, a region of small varied industry and small varied agriculture; this naturally arises from the physical characteristics of the area—from the inflexible juxta-positions of land, geography, climate. What are the natural resources of New England? Answer: very few, except woods and water power. There is no coal, iron,⁶ or oil in any of the six states (though quarrying is an important industry in Vermont).

The soil is sparse and frugal, the climate rigorous. So New Englanders had to count on what they did have with special emphasis: (a) access to the ocean; (b) lusty rivers. As a result came the tremendous nineteenth century growth of textiles, as well as shipping and commerce generally. The area must import food, fuel, raw materials, to live. So the people perforce learned to be good traders, lively businessmen, and manufacturers of almost everything.

Even agriculture in New England is of a very specialized and sub-divided kind. Consider potatoes in Maine, wrapper tobacco in Connecticut, apples in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, cranberries near Cape Cod, fluid milk and maple sugar in Vermont. But a disconcerting recent phenomenon is that much New England agriculture is declining. Whole villages—for instance in New Hampshire—once dependent on a single crop have collapsed into decay, as the soil wore out. Thousands of small holdings have had to be abandoned, with resultant social transformations at once profound and, so far, comparatively little observed. As a consequence some slight pressure has arisen for a Valley Authority in New England like TVA. Shades of the Puritan nonconformists! Congressman Thomas T. Lane of Lawrence, Massachusetts, introduced a bill for a Merrimac Valley Authority in July, 1946. It didn’t get very far.

As to industry, most New England plants are very small; the great majority employ five hundred men or less. The emphasis is, and always has been (except in textiles) on quality, precision, craftsmanship, durability. Many concerns have remained in the same family for generations; they rigidly resist mergers and combinations, and their emphasis is still on individuality of enterprise. Later we shall mention superlative New England accomplishments in producing everything from hypodermic needles to woolen socks.

The war naturally gave New England’s economy a monumental boost—something that was very welcome and useful considering what had been a serious progressive decline in such things as boots (many of the great shoe manufacturing companies had moved west) and textiles (which as a rule were not successfully passed on from generation to generation). In the winter of 1944–45 New England held 9.2 per cent of the total war supply and facilities contracts of the entire United States; the amount involved was roughly sixteen billion dollars. Of this, aircraft accounted for four billion, shipping three billion, ordnance three billion.

Harvard and Yale: Presumptive Influence

These great universities do not belong merely to New England; their influence is national. Locally, their most important contribution—aside from an overriding dedication to national service during the war—is that New England is intellectually the most reasonable area in the country. Of course, dozens of smaller universities and colleges have assisted in this process. You can have temperate and rational and detached discussion about anything under the sun with most educated New Englanders; they will take up with calmness the pros and cons of almost any subject, no matter how startling or controversial. They will not get red in the face if you mention Bolshevism or the Ku-Klux Klan; they like to look at both sides of every question; in fact, they are quite capable of taking either side in any argument, and supporting it with clarity and vigor. For this beneficent climate of mind, Harvard and Yale are probably the factors most responsible.

Harvard is a national university, yes; but as I heard it said, it is a “provincial college.” That is, roughly 75 per cent of students in the graduate school are not New Englanders; roughly 75 per cent of under-graduates in Harvard College are. Harvard is run by its president and the six members of the corporation, who are a kind of self-perpetuating oligarchy unique in the world. One interesting and little-known point⁷ is that only about 12,000 out of roughly 62,000 Harvard alumni regularly vote for the board of overseers, or subscribe to the alumni bulletin. The president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, is one of the ablest, most intelligent, and most useful men in American public life, though many younger scientists thought that he took too conservative and conventional a line on postwar developments attending the atomic bomb. With the bomb itself Conant, like Vannevar Bush, had much to do.

In mid-1945 came publication of General Education in a Free Society, a book sponsored by Harvard and written by a group of faculty members who gave two years of research and study to the job. It made a considerable impact in the world of education all over the country; its contents are both too tightly knit and too ramifying for discussion here. What it appealed for most, in its earnest endeavor to broaden the basis of American education as a preparation for true citizenship, was, first, less strictly vocational education in high schools; second, broad compulsory courses emphasizing root subjects—the humanities, science, and the social sciences-—in the universities. Harvard itself prepared to modify its elective system, under which a bright student had previously been able to study almost anything he chose, and so did Yale.

How do Harvard and Yale differ? For one thing, Harvard is a good deal bigger, with 8,500 students⁸ as against Yale’s 3,331. But Yale has 1,052 teachers to Harvard’s 1,871. Again, Harvard is more closely interlocked with Boston and Cambridge than is Yale with New Haven. Without Harvard, Boston wouldn’t be much more than a provincial town; Harvard permeates every line of Boston’s better being. But Yale seems less tied up with New Haven and the neighborhood. Finally, I heard it said, “they teach better at Yale, but Harvard is more cosmopolitan and it spreads a richer feast.”

The president of Yale, Charles Seymour, is a distinguished historian and editor of the Colonel House journals. On his faculty, as at Harvard’s, are seasoned and bright rebellious spirits both, and the Yale University Press is one of the most discerning in the country.

The New England Senators

These are a formidable miscellany of extremely distinctive individualists, and most are very able. Of one, Saltonstall, I shall talk in detail in the chapter following, not because he is the most typical but because he illustrates best the tensions within his own great state. Almost all deserve much fuller treatment, and I hope to return to several in another place. This summary attempts nothing more than the briefest kind of composite sketch.

Wallace A. White of Maine is titular leader of the Republican party in the Senate; a pleasant, mild, and pious man of seventy, he is popular on all sides; his chief function is to hold the balance between two much more dominant and vivid men, Taft and Vandenberg, especially since the 1946 elections. Everybody likes White; few people pay much attention to him. Owen Brewster, the junior Maine senator, is a totally different matter. Colorful, ambitious, hard-set, he has a complex voting record, and a career that may go almost anywhere. Brewster was a valuable member of the old Truman Committee; on the other hand he was a moving spirit of the Pearl Harbor investigation. Brewster had an isolationist past; but he voted to lift the arms embargo and for both Lend Lease and selective service. He has taken a strong pro-Zionist line on Palestine, and on most domestic affairs he is liberal. For instance he voted to confirm Henry Wallace for secretary of commerce in 1945 (so did five out of the eight Republican New England senators), and he thinks that for his party to tie itself to the extreme reactionary Democrats of the South is a painful form of slow suicide.

No two men could be in greater contrast than the two Rhode Island senators, Peter G. Gerry and Theodore F. Green, though both are very rich men and both are Democrats. Gerry is a Bourbon of Bourbons, one of the most reactionary men in Congress, a man of enormous inherited wealth and withal a very civilized old gentleman. He announced his retirement in 1946. Theodore F. Green, though seventy-eight years old, is junior to Gerry in point of service; just as Gerry is one of the extreme reactionaries in the Senate, Green is one of the extreme liberals. I have mentioned that his voting record on progressive legislation was recently judged 100 per cent perfect by the New Republic. Green is an out-and-out New Dealer; some Yankees practically think of him as a traitor to their class. His family is one of the most distinguished in Rhode Island; he is that rarest of things, a Brahmin Democrat. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson asked him to handle the Rhode Island campaign in 1912; he chose Wilson. Once he was president of the American Bar Association; and he is a celebrated connoisseur of Chinese painting and ceramics.

Brien McMahon (Democrat) of Connecticut is still another quite different type of man, a young politician (he is only forty-three) who did a good job as a gang-busting attorney, and who saw the Atomic Energy Bill through the Senate. McMahon went to Fordham and Yale, and became a protégé of Attorney General Homer Cummings; he helped prosecute remnants of the Dillinger gang in Chicago and in Kentucky investigated the Harlan County coal operators who were accused of violations of the Wagner Act. McMahon reached the Senate in 1944 by beating John A. Danaher, a Republican wheel horse and well-known isolationist. In 1946, McMahon, an ambitious man, was supposed to have been a chief force in breaking up the movement to run Chester Bowles for governor of Connecticut.

Both the New Hampshire senators are vigorous men too, with such highly variegated records that they are hard to classify. Styles Bridges (Republican) was born in Maine, and went to New Hampshire to devote himself to scientific agriculture. He had political interests from the beginning, and in 1934 became governor of New Hampshire at the age of thirty-six; at that time he was the youngest governor in the country. Bridges is an aggressive reactionary on most issues. In 1946 he introduced a bill for a constitutional amendment the upshot of which, if ever carried through, would be to throw off the Supreme Court bench the four justices most recently named. He hates pressure groups: he was one of the very few senators who voted against “neutrality” legislation before the war; and he is pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the CIO, the Roosevelt family, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Charles W. Tobey (Republican) is a much more reasonable man, whose voting record has been consistently progressive; he is an old-style craggy individualist. Though a Republican senator from New Hampshire, he speaks widely under the auspices of the National Citizens Political Action Committee; and although he has an isolationist past he believes firmly now in good relations with Russia and full co-operation. It was Tobey, more than any other man, who blocked Ed Pauley’s nomination as under secretary of the Navy; for this Mr. Truman among others has not forgiven him.

Vermont has two splendid senators. Warren R. Austin, one of the most useful men in Washington, was appointed in 1946 to succeed Edward R. Stettinius as American representative on the United Nations Security Council. In the Senate Austin was a kind of George Norris in reverse; very liberal on foreign policy, much more conservative on things domestic. He is a lawyer by profession, born in 1877. In Mexico in 1945, he saved the Chapultepec Conference from disaster singlehanded—mostly by being sane. George D. Aiken is almost the precise inverse of Austin. He was an intractable isolationist (before Pearl Harbor) and in domestic policy is a very strong liberal. But Aiken, like so many Vermonters, is full of idiosyncrasy. In December, 1944, he was one of three senators to oppose all the nominations made by Stettinius, who had just become secretary of state, for assistant secretaries; he voted “Nay” not only to MacLeish and Clayton, but also to Dunn, Holmes, Grew, and Rockefeller. What kind of State Department Senator Aiken wanted is unknown. Austin’s record, incidentally, was exactly the opposite. Who says that Vermont isn’t an individualistic state? For Austin was one of the very few senators who voted for all six Stettinius nominees. Senator Aiken is a farmer, specializing in fruits and wild flowers; he is the author of two books, Pioneering with Fruits and Berries, and Pioneering with Wild Flowers. During one Vermont election campaign he reported his expenses as exactly thirty cents; in another, he spent exactly nothing. Early in 1945 he came out for an overhaul of the whole structure of federal government and suggested the creation of four new cabinet posts (Transportation, Banking and Insurance, Social Welfare, and Public Works); early in 1946, searching out a way for peace, he said that our foreign policy was too pro-British. This man is a character.

Vermont, a lucky state, has as successor to Austin a new senator, Ralph E. Flanders, self-educated and self-made, a machine tools manufacturer who is supported by the CIO, and who is one of the most remarkably sound and able men in America. Flanders worked on the precursor of the War Production Board for a while, handling machine tool priorities (he probably knows more about machine tools than any other man in the country) and quit because he couldn’t get along with the bureaucracy. Later Roosevelt made him a member of the Economic Stabilization Board (though he is an emphatic Republican) and in time he became president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, chairman of the New England Council, and a major actor in the Committee of Economic Development. Flanders was a strong Willkie man, and is a stout liberal with closely trained and productive brains who knows his way around.

David I. Walsh, Democratic senator from Massachusetts from 1918 to the end of 1946, is a wholly different type of person. He was born in 1872; he is old, burdened with an awkward past, disappointed, and rejected. But for years his Massachusetts popularity was so great, among Brahmins and Irish both, that he was unbeatable; in 1940 he even ran ahead of Roosevelt. But young Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had previously resigned a Senate seat to go into the Army, ran against him in 1946 and beat him soundly.⁹ I heard a friend say of Lodge once, but with admiration and affection, “Cabot thinks that only two people exist in the world, Cabot Lodge and his grandfather, Cabot Lodge; and of these two, one is dead.” His voting record in the Senate was very mixed. I quote Time (July 7, 1942): “He voted to limit the use of U.S. forces to the western hemisphere, to restrict transfer of naval craft, to make a two-billion loan instead of Lend Lease. Then he voted for Lend Lease, then to retain the neutrality act, then to declare war, thus taking all sides.”

New England has or had some remarkable folk in the House of Representatives too. Consider Congressman Joseph W. (Joe) Martin Jr., of Massachusetts, for long the minority leader and scheduled to be the new Speaker in 1947, who has as purely negative a record as any important man in Washington; consider a group of men and women like Chester E. Merrow of New Hampshire, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Charles A. Plumley of Vermont, Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, and Robert Hale of Maine; consider John W. McCormack, the ex-majority leader and the first Roman Catholic in history to have held that post, whose brother is a South Boston publican with the nickname Knocko; and consider that lovely, spectacular, and very useful lady Clare Boothe Luce.

During the 1946 debate on the British loan McCormack had a slight brush with Representative Gordon L. McDonough of California:

Mr. McDonough: Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. McCormack: I yield.

Mr. McDonough: What I have in mind is this: There is more of a desirability to have an association between the British and the Americans, politically and financially, than with any other nation on the face of the earth: is that the gentleman’s contention?

Mr. McCormack: What does the gentleman think?

Mr. McDonough: I am asking the gentleman.

Mr. McCormack: What does the gentleman think?

Mr. McDonough: The gentleman from Massachusetts is speaking.

Mr. McCormack: What does the gentleman think?

Mr. McDonough: I am asking you.

Mr. McCormack: What does the gentleman think?

Mr. McDonough: I think there is.

Mr. McCormack: Then all right. I will not challenge the gentleman’s answer to his own question.

Mr. McDonough: The gentleman ought to be fair and give us his opinion.

Mr. McCormack: I said I did not challenge the gentleman’s own answer to his question.

Mr. McDonough: Then there is a political significance?

Mr. McCormack: There is no political significance about this as intended. The gentleman, I am sure, is capable of drawing a distinction between intent and results.

Mr. McDonough: Is this a gift?

Mr. McCormack: Why, the gentleman now shifts. Of course, it is not.

Mr. McDonough: Is it a loan?

Mr. McCormack: Why, the gentleman knows it is.

Mr. McDonough: In the hearings Mr. Will Clayton, of the State Department, referred to it not as a gift, not as a loan.

Mr. McCormack: Is my friend going to vote for the agreement or not?

Mr. McDonough: I will decide that when the roll is called.

Mr. McCormack: Then I have hopes that I may convert my friend because if ever in the last several hundred years we needed a spirit of constructive conversion it is today, not only in America, but elsewhere, based upon those truths in which we believe.

The Chairman: The time of the gentleman from Massachusetts has expired.

What New England Was and Is

First, the New England states—a kind of long-time working laboratory in the procedures and techniques of practical government—helped to father most American political institutions. Second, its contributions to literature and science have been literally without parallel. Third, it gave financial brains and managerial capacity to the nation. The Burlington and Union Pacific railroads were largely financed by Boston; for years both AT & T and General Electric had their head offices in Boston; so, still, have such corporations as United Fruit, now run by that fabulous outlander, Sam Zemurray. The First National Bank of Boston still helps to finance Hollywood, and New England money still dominates traction in Houston, textile mills in Memphis, and shoe factories in St. Louis.

But there are two more serious contributions that, perhaps above these others, New England may be said to make today. Both, it is interesting to note, embody concepts which particularly distinguish the New England character; both have a strong symbolic significance. One is insurance. Hartford, Connecticut, is still the insurance capital of the world. The other is education. I have mentioned Harvard and Yale. But think also of Radcliffe, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley, of Amherst, Williams, and MIT (Mass.), of Dartmouth (New Hampshire), Bowdoin (Maine), and Brown (Rhode Island). Think also of the great boys’ schools—Deerfield, Andover, and Groton in Massachusetts, Putney in Vermont, Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire, and a round dozen in Connecticut. Boys from all over the country get their basic character patterns out of the New England way of life.

So to conclude this general summary. If anyone should ask “Where is New England?” the answer might well be “in the bodies and minds of men everywhere in the nation.”

¹ A famous limerick is to the point:

There was a young maid from Back Bay

Whose manners were very blasé;

While still in her teens

She refused pork and beans

And once threw her Transcript away.

² Towns of greater population than 5,000 have what is called the “representative town meeting,” in which the procedure is not quite so direct. Cf. Fortune, February 1940.

³ I take the following from the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, April 15, 1945. “It seems that some Russian with the unpronounceable name of Furnoffsky or something that sounded like that applied … to be allowed when he took out his papers as an American citizen to bear the honored name of Cabot. As he had become a hundred percent American he wanted to be known by a Yankee name with the American name blown on the bottle, so to speak. So he selected the name Cabot…. But a fellow named Cabot interpleaded and said it would be an insult to let the noble name of Cabot be borne by a Russian immigrant who had never heard of Plymouth Rock…. Finally the court held that the Cabot who objected had no legal monopoly on the name.”

⁴ Exactly the same kind of spirit brought men like Francis Biddle out of the swamps of Philadelphia.

⁵ New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1925.

⁶ But a small iron mine near Salisbury, Connecticut, operated from pre-Revolu tionary times till about 1900.

⁷ Another point not generally recognized is that Cambridge, the city, is not quite what one would imagine from photographs of Harvard Yard. Mostly it’s a slum. A curious item, according to Fortune (February, 1940) is that a resolution was once adopted by the Cambridge city council “banishing from the sacred precincts of the city all printed matter in which appear the words Lenin or Leningrad.”

⁸ Up to 11,700 late in 1946. Of the total 75 per cent are war veterans.

⁹ His brother, John Davis Lodge, won a Connecticut seat in Congress in the same election.