Chapter 30

Inside New England II

To my mind Maine is the most beautiful state we have in this country, but even more appealing is its homeliness.

—Booth Tarkington

MAINE, a sturdy state, has special characteristics all its own. For one thing it is much bigger than most people think; it is, in fact, almost as large as the other New England states combined (33,215 square miles for Maine, 33,393 for the other five); it is bigger than South Carolina, and almost as big as New York or Ohio. A single one of its counties, Aroostook, celebrated for its potatoes—its potato yield makes it the third wealthiest agricultural county in the whole country—is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together.

Maine’s chief distinction is, however, not size but character. One element in this is intrepidity. The state is largely marked by fingers of land poking out into the sea; in the most literal sense its lobstermen and other fishermen make their living by combat with the elements. Another factor is the complete simplicity and financial integrity of almost all old Maine citizens; money doesn’t count for everything in their scale of values; people will spend their last cent on a coat of pale yellow paint for their houses; drop a pocketbook in the streets of Augusta, and a dozen passers-by will return it. Another element is humor. This is not as wry and bitter as is humor in Vermont, say; it has a glow; it has been softened by the Atlantic fogs. Still, it can be sharp. For instance Bert Sinnett, an old retired lobsterman and a member of one of the ancient families of Maine, was once called as a witness in a lawsuit.

Q.	Your name is Bert Sinnett?
A.	Yes.
Q.	You live in Bayley Island?
A.	Yes.
Q.	Lived there all your life?
A.	Not yet.

Finally, Maine has great pride. Almost all its people are proud, from the marmoreally entrenched aristocracy of Bar Harbor to the lonely professor living in a shack on a deserted beach. Brunswick spells its main street “Maine” Street, and every school child is obliged to study for a specified time the state’s history and accomplishments. (Also, something unique in America, an old statute has it that every teacher must give ten minutes a week to instruction in kindness to birds and animals.) As to Maine’s history, it contains some little-known points and curiosities. A pamphlet called Facts About Maine asks us if we know:

That Sebastian Cabot visited Maine in 1497.

That in 1607, thirteen years prior to the landing of the Pilgrims, the Popham colonists settled at the mouth of the Kennebec.

That the first chartered city in America was York, Maine, in 1642.

That a gaol built in 1653 is the oldest public building in New England.

That the first pile bridge built in America was built at York in 1761 and is still standing.

Maine is the habitat of novelists like the late Booth Tarkington and Kenneth Roberts; it has fabulously cold winters and is also, by some strange paradox, the home of Palm Beach cloth; along its swift rivers the windows of its mills are painted blue, to keep sunlight out; 21,611 deer were killed in Maine last year, and there are estimated to be 150,000 deer still roaming at large, more than when the white man came; it produces more sardines than any other state, and more blueberries; Maine was part of Massachusetts till 1820, and the pull of Boston is still very strong; it was the first state to appropriate sums for tourist and vacation advertising, and the only eastern state with an official trade-mark, to distinguish “State of Maine” apples and potatoes; it is the state from whose ports, like Bangor, old-time sea captains went to the West Indies with cargoes of top hats and, believe it or not, ice; it has 17 million acres of forest, 2,500 lakes, 5,147 rivers, few leading families, and fewer millionaires.

To get from Portland, Maine, to the northern edge of Aroostook County, on the border of Canada, takes a full day by train. The farmers there are like few elsewhere in the union—individualists, fatalists, and gamblers, all at once. Too much rain or lack of it may seriously injure the potato crop, and Governor Horace A. Hildreth told me that it gave him quite a thrill, when he was campaigning in 1944, to hear a farmer say, “Well, if we don’t have rain this week, we lose thirty million dollars.” Of course, ideally, Maine agriculture should be more diversified. The state has what is known as a potato tax, installed in 1937 to promote potato sales and propaganda; the potato grower pays it himself, one cent per barrel. In 1943 the tax brought in $170,000, and it is a sidelight on New England character that the total cost of administering it was $102.

Politically, a unique item about Maine is that it holds its gubernatorial election in September, two months before any other state; thus arose the apothegm, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Of course Maine votes in November too for national offices. One reason for this anomaly is that the Republicans are pretty sure as a rule to carry state posts (though there was a Democratic governor as recently as 1933), and the Republican organization likes to flaunt a Maine victory to the country, before the national polls.

It would probably be a mistake, however, to assume that Maine will always remain impregnably Republican. Dewey only carried it by a narrow margin; Willkie likewise. The trend—in Maine as elsewhere in New England—is all toward urbanization, industrialization, which, as we know, usually means more Democrats. Maine has changed fast; consider for instance the great influx of war workers into Portland. The state used to be predominantly agricultural; now, what with boots, textiles, shipbuilding, it is not less than 60 per cent industrial. Potatoes are important—yes—but Maine’s most valuable industry by far is paper; the great paper mills in their massive half-hidden forest empires are the pivots of the state economy.

There are, it would seem, four chief elements in the political life of Maine:

(1) The propertied class, which, in general, has the power to give jobs and which almost always votes Republican.

(2) The French Canadians, called in Maine “Francos.” They are, as always, practically unassimilable, and they constitute a considerable political force. The French Canadian vote is split—some upstate Francos vote Republican, but in Portland and the big mill towns they are violently Democratic; they completely dominate Biddeford and Lewiston, and have roughly half the vote in Waterville. Biddeford is run by a French Canadian boss, Mayor Lausier, practically in the way Frank Hague runs Jersey City.

(3) The rural districts, which dominate the legislature and prevent any fair distribution of voting power because of their suspicion of “bigcity ways.” Portland, with 73,643 people and 8 per cent of the population of Maine, has only 7 votes in an assembly of 133. This is not only a typical New England phenomenon, but one characteristic of the country at large as we know.

(4) The Central Maine Power Company, a surviving fragment of the old Insull empire, which supplies power to most of the state, controls various enterprises, and maintains “legislative agents” who are a big influence in the legislature. Probably this company is the strongest single political factor in the state.

One Man of Maine

One of the most attractive and original men in American public life is Sumner Sewall, governor of Maine for two terms from 1941 to 1945. In 1942, campaigning for re-election, he won the greatest majority in the history of the state. He did not enter the 1944 race, largely because he needed to recoup his modest private fortune—once again we may note how this country loses the services of good men by not paying them enough—and, in part, because he thought “the job was done.”

Sewall, who is nearing fifty, is an explosively energetic man. He comes from an old and distinguished shipping family; his grandfather, a Democrat, once ran for vice president under Bryan. His remarkably interesting wife is Russian; though the wife of a Republican governor, she proudly kept on display in Blaine House—the gubernatorial mansion in Augusta—an autographed portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, which considerably titillated the local society. Sewall volunteered as an ambulance driver in France in World War I; then he joined the first American air squadron, and became an early ace. After the war he dug for oil in Mexico, grew sugar in Cuba, and worked in South America and Spain. Returning to the United States he reverted to his first love, aviation; he helped organize Colonial Airlines, and has been mixed up in commercial aviation ever since. He went into Maine politics “for the hell of it,” serving first in the local legislature, then the senate. He became president of the senate in 1938, and then governor.

Sewall first came into national prominence during the 1944 presidential campaign when he made a strong prolabor speech in Detroit. Previously he had been very active, like most of the young Republican governors, for a positive foreign affairs plank at the Chicago convention. His theory about the CIO—which dumbfounded his conservative supporters in Maine—was, and is, that nothing in the world was more sensible than that American labor, seeking more jobs and better wages, should directly attempt to express itself in politics. Sewall’s range of ideas and interests is wide, vivid, and provocative. He told me that during the war German prisoners in Aroostook got better “wages” in the potato fields than native farmhands, which he thought was a pretty crazy demonstration of how things can go wrong in American economy; that no one is ever going “to slip things over” on this country again as in the 20’s and 30’s; that there is just as keen a need for government-trained men to go into business as for business-trained men to go into government; that as a kind of dynamic substitute for war, Americans with hope and ideals still cryingly need opportunity for “adventure”; that the people by and large are a hundred miles ahead of the politicians; and that most citizens have “more than a dollar sign in their blood” and that if they really want good public services, they will be willing to pay for them.

Sewall’s administration was, despite his rambunctious irreverence, a model of solid government. He put the state on a clean financial basis (having inherited a mess of scandal), and most of his appointments were commendable. His chief trouble was finding good men. Maine pays no salary higher than six thousand dollars, and it isn’t easy to persuade successful young lawyers or engineers to give up their practices for that. One thing he is proud of is a minimum wage law for teachers; and it is something of a commentary on New England that he succeeded, after a gigantic fight, in raising this to—$720 per year! To get the money he proposed an increase in the inheritance tax (though his own family is wealthy), a cigarette tax, and a tax on electric energy. Perhaps Sewall included this latter item with tongue in cheek; he loved brawling with the power company. The company beat down his proposal, but at one point during the fight Sewall, obviously a wicked man, threatened to install his own electric generator in the State House, rather than use electricity from Central Maine.

On retiring from the governorship Sewall became president of American Overseas Airlines; then at considerable sacrifice he went to Germany as first civilian director of military government. That some day he will return to elective office on the domestic scene is almost certain. It is all but impossible to keep a man like this away from public service, and there is a flashing glint of tomorrow in his eye.

A Word About New Hampshire

Who runs New Hampshire? Answer: the voters. Who runs the voters? Answer: all sorts of things. This prickly and hardheaded little state is famous for elections with the closest kind of finish. In 1916, it went for Woodrow Wilson by exactly 56 votes; in 1944, a lady named Mrs. Mary C. Dondero became mayor of Portsmouth, the state’s only port, by a majority of exactly seven.

New Hampshire is ordinarily coupled with Vermont, but the illusion that it is invariably Republican is—an illusion. Manchester, the chief city, has been electing the same mayor for years—a French Canadian Catholic Democrat—and some New Hampshire towns are almost as solidly Democratic as towns in Alabama or Mississippi. In 1932 the state elected Hoover, but Roosevelt won by close margins in 1936, 1940, and 1944. In 1944 the whole local Republican slate came in, but Dewey himself was defeated by about 9,000 votes.

What distinguishes New Hampshire among all American states is its legislature, which is the largest deliberative body in the country. It numbers 443 men and women—in a state the total population of which is only 491,524!¹ The reason for this is, of course, that every local community insists on its own representation. Because the legislature is so enormous it is hard to control; the pressure groups can operate in the senate—membership twenty-four—to some extent, but the lower house is too unwieldy. In the early days the rural areas were solidly Republican. But this is changing now. Most of the French Canadian farmers are Democratic, and they control about one-third of the total vote. The Irish are split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats; there is a strong Polish enclave in Manchester, which votes predominantly Democratic; also in Manchester is a large Greek community, solidly Republican.

New Hampshire, which like most of New England has its cranks, has produced some strange attempts at crank legislation. For instance a bill was introduced in the 1923 session of the General Court (as in Massachusetts this is the name the legislature goes by) to regulate hours of sleep. Section I reads that “eight out of each 24 hours shall be the minimum of time for sleep”; Section 2 that “failure to observe this injunction shall be sufficient ground for the charge of negligence in case of sickness.” (The bill did not pass.)

Labor plays no great role in New Hampshire; nor, on the other side of the fence, is there much conservative pressure from corporations or entrenched family groups. I asked what “the interests” were. First, the Boston & Maine Railway. For years this organization had a completely dominant influence on the legislature, but now this is diminishing. Second, a utilities lobby. But the New Hampshire Public Service Company has nothing like the power of Central Maine, say, in Maine. Third and most importantly, Rockingham Park, the race track. Taxes on racing contribute about 15 per cent of the state’s total revenue.

When I visited New Hampshire—work on this book started a good long time ago—the governor was Dr. Robert O. Blood, who will probably return to politics some day. He has three careers—-politician, surgeon, farmer. While governor he kept up his medical practice, sometimes taking time off from the state house to do an emergency operation; also he worked hard on his farm, three miles from Concord, where he breeds “the best darned cows in the United States.” One of his prize Ayrshires gave more milk and butter than any other animal in the United States in 1943; another sold in 1944 for a record price. Dr. Blood is one of the few American governors who won both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre in World War I; he was once national vice commander of the American Legion, and, like almost everyone of prominence in New Hampshire, he went to Dartmouth. He is the best type of extreme conservative, and he gave the state a good administration, though some people thought that his economies were too stringent.

New Hampshire—Massachusetts and New York aside—has probably contributed more men to American public life than any other eastern state. Consider the late Chief Justice Harlan Stone, former under secretary of state Joseph C. Grew, and Ambassador John G. Winant. Probably the most conspicuous living New Hampshire resident is Dr. Ernest M. Hopkins, former president of Dartmouth. But the old Yankees say that men of this caliber are dying out, that progressive Republicans like the picturesque Winant are getting more and more rare; people told me that the incoming of foreign-born is changing the character of the state irremediably. Good Yankees describe urban labor as “all that slum stuff” and I heard more anti-Semitic talk in New Hampshire than anywhere else in New England; Dartmouth, in the summer of 1945, got into a noisy peck of trouble because it was applying the quota system to limit attendance by Jewish students.

New Hampshire was the first of the original thirteen states to declare independence from Great Britain, and the ninth and deciding one to ratify the federal Constitution. About 40 per cent of its people are engaged in industry, and though the fact is seldom realized, it is the third most highly industrialized state in the union in proportion to population. The biggest textile mill in the world, Amoskeag, functioned in Manchester until Christmas Eve, 1935, when the company collapsed—of hardening of the arteries—and the state has not yet fully recovered from this disaster.

New Hampshire is the state where the people vote every seven years to decide whether there shall be a new constitution, and where you may find some of the finest skiing country in the world as well as wonderful vacation opportunities in general—the novelist Robert Herrick once acidulously called the whole state a “summer boarding house.” It contains the house in which both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel F. B. Morse got married, and more old people in ratio to population than any other state except California and Florida; it produces fifty million dollars worth of shoes a year, and more magazines than any other state; it has two Shaker communities, and no saloons.

New Hampshire humor is a good deal like that of Maine and Vermont. A character witness at a trial refused once to answer a question. He was told that he would be in contempt of court if he refused to say exactly what he thought of the person involved. Reply: “He’s this kind of feller. He raises a lot of hogs. But he don’t fatten ’em up inside the way some do; he lets ’em run loose in the fields. Sometimes he wants to look ’em over in the barn. When he does, he has to have the hired man call ’em over, because them hogs don’t put any reliance at all in anything he says.”

The New Hampshire Yankee is, in fact, a special breed. I met one estimable official who kept talking about “Theodore”; I was puzzled until I realized that he was referring to Roosevelt I. Then he explained that he had hated Franklin too much ever to use the actual name “Roosevelt” aloud.

Note in Aesthetics

I have seen some lovely towns in New England; I have seen some appallingly ugly towns. Usually, it seems, when they are very ugly it is not because individual buildings are graceless or unsightly, but because the town as a whole was built with total disregard to uniformity or plan.

Concord, New Hampshire, has the ugliest state capitol I ever saw. Around the central square one may note the following types of architecture:

An old-style granite post office

Public library—a low building of whitish stone

State library—in brown stone, Italian style, with an amazingly hideous bell tower

A Pennsylvania Dutch town hall built of red brick with white windows

A & P supermarket

A dingy red Unitarian church, with tall steeple

An atrocity of a barn

A Christian Science church

A highly modern, functional office building, sleek and shining

A red brick schoolhouse down at the heel

The whole effect is that of a junk shop filled with jarring varieties of junk.

Vermont and New Hampshire: How They Differ

Half a dozen times I sat down in New England with wise men, like Ralph E. Flanders, the new Vermont senator, and James M. Langley, editor of the Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor. I asked them to pretend that we were in Buenos Aires, say, and to explain to me the differences between the New England states, their essential qualities and particularizing characteristics, with exactly the same perspective with which one might discuss how Chile differed from Argentina, or Peru from Ecuador.

So far as the “twins,” New Hampshire and Vermont, are concerned the main point of difference is that New Hampshire is much more heavily industrialized; Vermont is still an essentially rural state—the only state in the union that, in a way, the industrial revolution never hit. For another point we must go all the way back to the age of glaciers; the ice cap didn’t scrape off the top soil of Vermont as it did that of Maine and New Hampshire, with the result that Vermont is richer. In New Hampshire the mountains are, by and large, heavily wooded; 87 per cent of the total area is forest. But in Vermont, with better soil, the pastures run right up the sides of the hills, and the hills themselves are softer, friendlier. From the windows of the capitol in Montpelier one may see cattle placidly grazing; Vermont is the only state in the country with more cattle than human beings.

Generalizations are risky, but the Vermont Yankee is, one may say safely, the most impregnably Yankee of all Yankees. In New Hampshire many farms look run down and dilapidated; but in Vermont (as in Maine) almost everything is neat, spick and span. In New Hampshire the Puritan strain has been severely diluted, but in Vermont overwhelming evidence of nonconformist origin is still to be seen on every hand. And Vermont has fewer French Canadians, fewer foreign-born, fewer big towns; there are only three cities with more than ten thousand population: Barre (10,907), Rutland (17,082), and Burlington (27,686).

Charm and Virtues of Vermont

Vermont has smooth and gentle dulcet hills—yes. But underneath is slate, marble, granite. This granite is solid in the state character. Hit a man with an ax; he will practically chip off like a block of stone.

Most Vermonters live close to the soil and therefore they understand cause and effect; they know what two extra weeks of snow will do to crops; they have an instinctive cognizance of weather, seasons, and the cruelties of flood and frost; so, by and large, they are folk who anticipate, who know how to plan and prepare. The state is one of the poorest in the country; less money changes hands during an average year than in any other. But the triumph of Vermont is a kind of richness in character—richness that is nevertheless stern. The typical Vermonter is rugged, reticent, suspicious of outsiders, frugal, intensely individualistic, and with great will to survive.

A contrary characteristic is neighborliness. If a farmer gets sick, his neighbors will milk his cows. “Vermont is the cosiest state,” I heard it said. People (including servants) don’t work for you; “they help you out.”

Vermont, as almost everybody knows, was an independent nation for fourteen years from 1777 to 1791, coining its own money, running its own postal service, carrying on diplomatic relations with “foreign” governments. New York, New Hampshire, and its other neighbors coveted Vermont territory, but Ethan Allen, its greatest hero, kept it intact and free. It was the first American state to forbid slavery, and it sent more troops per capita to the Civil War than any other in the north. This attitude and spirit carry on to date. On September 11, 1941, for instance, two months before Pearl Harbor, the Vermont legislature officially declared “a state of belligerency with Germany” (!), in view of America’s “armed assistance” to Great Britain.² Before selective service, Vermont contributed more volunteers to the Army than any other state, in ratio to population.

Vermonters are really something quite special and unique.³ Ethan Allen once proclaimed, “I am as determined to preserve the independence of Vermont as Congress is that of the Union; and rather than fail I will retire with my hardy Green Mountain boys into the caverns of the mountains and make war on all mankind.” This state bows to nothing: the first legislative measure it ever passed was “to adopt the laws of God … until there is time to frame better.” Nor do its people bow to anybody; there is the story of the couple in Barnet who on their sixtieth wedding anniversary boasted that they had never in their married life bought one pound of meat, flour, or sugar. A list of eminent men born in Vermont is almost endless; this tiny state has produced 31 chief justices of other states, 33 senators, 144 congressmen, 60 governors, and 80 college presidents. Vermont was the first state to advocate civil service, one of the first to establish a normal school, and the first—we jump to modern times—to found a central plasma bank.

The instinct for continuity in Vermont life is considerable—to put it mildly. The first white child in Vermont, by name Timothy Dwight, was the son of Timothy Dwight, the first permanent white settler in the state. He was graduated from Yale in 1744, and he married the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, the theologian. Their eldest son—named Timothy Dwight also—became a president of Yale, and one of their daughters became the mother of Timothy Woolsey, who also became a Yale president; and so did one of their lineal descendants! But do not think that this state does not also produce types of people extremely divergent from the “typical” Vermonter. For instance both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the Mormon leaders, were Vermont born, strange as this may seem.

Vermont still has a fine spirited tradition of doing what it pleases. A sorority at the University of Vermont produced something of a national storm early in 1946 by admitting to membership a Negro student; it was penalized and put on probation by the national sorority organization, but refused to budge or compromise. Also Vermont can be superbly, enormously provincial. A college professor on holiday, with a Norman Thomas banner on his automobile, went to the movies one evening in the little town of Hardwick, near Greensboro. Inadvertently he parked next to a fire plug. A policeman went into the movie and called out what he thought was his name, “Norman Thomas!”

I have mentioned frugality. Let me quote from a recent news story, describing how new curtains, drapes, and furniture are being installed at the state house in Montpelier. “The drapes … will replace those hung 85 years ago [italics mine] when the State House was rebuilt following the fire of 1857. Cost of the new drapes … will be $760, slightly less than the $768.75 paid to curtain the same windows in 1859. Expense for the other windows will approximate that of the 1859 purchases. However, the 85-year-old drapery now being replaced is material … of a quality unobtainable at the present time.”

Vermonters are frugal in speech—or at least so it is always said. Actually they can be as loquacious as Texans if the conversation is on a point that interests them. But they have little “small talk,” nor are they particularly interested in people who have nothing to contribute; they pay absolutely no attention to rank, title, or position. President Coolidge once crossed a toll bridge near Springfield; this bridge, incidentally, is still operated under a-charter granted by King George III, as are many land titles in the region. “Fifteen cents, please,” the toll keeper asked the president. No one paid the slightest regard to the fact that he was (a) a Vermonter by birth, and (b) president of the United States.

Vermont is reticent, yes. But when it has a justifiable pride in something, it doesn’t necessarily whisper. In Montpelier I saw a bakery, on the side wall of which was neatly painted:

ESTABLISHED 1828 MONTPELIER CRACKERS

CROSS BAKING CO.

BEST IN THE WORLD

Vermont possesses—so it is usually said—the purest racial stock in America; in this stock, however, are various strains. There are three different quarrying industries, and each brought in a different foreign colony. With slate came the Welsh; Barre, in the granite area, was settled by Scots from Aberdeen; marble brought in Swedes and some Italians. Of course the war intensified industrialization—even in Vermont. The town of Springfield had a prewar population of 5,182; it has three machine-tool plants, and during the war the population trebled. And this town with exactly three small factories exported seventy million dollars worth of machinery in one year, 1943! So in the public library of Springfield, in its drugstores and on its busses, Vermonters heard accents they never heard before.

But the basis of life in Vermont remains agriculture; this in turn is based on fluid milk. Most Vermont dairy farms are small, worked by their own owners, and often held in the same family for generations. The farmers are well organized; most belong to the Grange. During the war many worked in war industry throughout the long winters; in summer, people who earn wages in village factories still go home in the evening to their own land, their own cow. In a way, like Maine in regard to potatoes, Vermont is too dependent on one commodity; its milk brings in thirty million dollars a year, and most of it goes to the great city markets, New York and Boston; but sensible Vermonters want to diversify their economy. The soil is getting thin on the hillsides; year by year, more farms become worn out and have to be sold, if any buyers are to be found. And deforestation is a problem; it is becoming more and more necessary to think in terms of the forests as a crop, not as a mine. But even though the typical Vermont farmer may be poor he will go through almost any hardship to educate his children. His interest in electrification, co-operatives, public health, is mature and serious; here the procedures of government really do begin right in the shallow dales and sparkling meadows.

The dome of Vermont’s state capitol is surmounted by a bulky statue of the goddess Ceres. The original, the work of a local sculptor, was blown off in a storm some years ago. It was replaced in 1938 by a copy hewn out of granite by the state sergeant-at-arms; it is somehow typical of Vermont that when he did this job he had reached the age of eighty-seven.

Green Mountain Politics and Men

In the 1946 primaries Governor Mortimer R. Proctor was roundly beaten for renomination, and for the first time in the modern history of Vermont a chief executive was refused a second term. Reason: a remarkable upsurge of modern-mindedness; the same positivist swing brought Flanders in as senator. Proctor was and is a civilized and able man. But the voters wanted something fresher. So they elected as governor a forty-five-year-old war veteran of solid performance and promise both, Colonel Ernest W. Gibson, who had once been senator for a brief time, who was severely wounded during long service in the South Pacific, and who, a political outsider, was practically unknown to the regular Republican organization.

Proctor himself belongs to the dominant family of Vermont, and was to the capitol born. His father, his grandfather, and an uncle were all three governors of Vermont, and one forebear was a senator and secretary of war. The Proctors, who have been in Vermont for six generations, founded Proctorsville; and thirty-three miles away, on the other side of “the mountain,” they developed the marble collieries near the town of Proctor. The ex-governor himself went to Yale and then into the marble business; his wife was a newspaperwoman who worked in the press bureau of the legislature. Some people, I found, though everybody respected him, were somewhat shocked at the amount of money that he, a rich man, spent on the 1944 campaign—$14,000. This to get a job that pays only $5,000 a year! Vermont is frugal.

It is typical of America that Proctor’s predecessor, the late William H. Wills, had a completely different background—yet one which is just as strikingly “American.” Wills spent fifteen years as a drygoods clerk; then fifteen more as an insurance salesman. His family lived in Vermont for three generations, but he himself was born in Illinois; his grandfather, it seems, invented a horseshoe nail-pointing machine, and sold the patent to a Chicago company which—I quote from the family records—“employed him as master mechanic in their works.” Young Wills came back to Vermont at the age of seven, after his father’s death; his mother had four young children to support. She scrubbed floors and washed windows in the town of Vergennes; the family lived in a house (rent, three dollars a month) with a roof so leaky that the children had to sleep under an umbrella. Wills left school at fourteen, and worked for a living from that date until his death in 1945. “My education is the world,” he told me. He was a liberal, and when he retired as governor, FDR gave him a job on the Federal Communications Commission. He thought the Republican party was doomed if it did not recognize its own liberating forces; he kept on saying, “the yeast is in the dough; let it work.”

The basis of political power in Vermont is, of course, the overwhelmingly Republican and rural legislature. This legislature is not so monstrously swollen as that of New Hampshire; yet it has 246 members, one for each “town” in the state. Burlington (population 27,686) has precisely the same representation as Stratton (population 8). As a result the senate has turned out to be a more representative and democratic body than the lower house, because it is elected on a more rational basis. The determination of each community in the state to retain its place in the legislature is fixed, fierce, and permanent; there are eight Vermont “towns” with a population of less than one hundred each—but each has its own stubborn legislator in Montpelier.⁴

The Green Mountains run straight down through Vermont, splitting it. The focus of the west side is Burlington; the east is more diffuse. By convention, to keep everybody happy, Vermonters choose senators and governors alternately from different sides of “the mountain’’ as it is always called. Of course the real struggle is always in the primaries, since the Republican candidate is bound to win. Usually the Democrats, in a race for governor say, choose a distinguished citizen simply as a gesture of honor; their recent candidate, a doctor in Barre, only accepted the nomination on condition that he would not have to make a campaign. Yet one should not ask idly who Democrats in Vermont can possibly be. There are plenty. Franklin County (with a considerable population of French Catholics) has voted Democratic since the days of A1 Smith, and Burlington went Democratic in 1944 largely because of the Bell Aircraft plant which brought in war workers by the thousand. Dewey carried Vermont by 71,000 votes to 53,000, but if industrialization proceeds further, if more foreign-born and more labor filter in, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Vermont, the most impregnable stronghold of Republicanism in the United States, might eventually go Democratic.

Vermont is one of the few states in the country that has no comptroller. Various governors have wanted to install this post; the people wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that the governor should be his own comptroller. In the entire history of Vermont, no official has ever filched a cent of graft.

Minuscule World of Rhode Island

Nothing could be in greater contrast to Vermont than Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union and—what is not so commonly known—the most highly industrialized. Rhode Island, it seems, has almost everything that Vermont has not: glacially aristocratic families, huge conglomerations of industry, government almost completely in the hands of the Irish, a Democratic administration, and a great substratum of foreign stock. There are fifty thousand first or second generation Italians in Providence alone, and of the population of the state as a whole, not less than 75 per cent is of foreign origin. In some respects Rhode Island seems to be an offshoot of Massachusetts; yet the pull toward New York is probably stronger today than that to Boston. Many people—at least those prosperous enough—go to New York rather than Boston to shop, though it is three times farther away; they read the New York Times more than the Boston Globe; and the Democratic hierarchy pays more attention to Mr. O’Dwyer than to Mr. Curley.

The official name of Rhode Island is “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” and it takes its somewhat cantankerous history very seriously. It refused to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787; it held on to its colonial charter until 1842, refusing to create a state constitution instead; in the same year it had to suppress a lively insurrection, the Dorr Rebellion, by mild force of arms; it maintained a property tax as a qualification for voting till 1888. Rhode Island is the birthplace of the textile industry in the United States, and the biggest jewelry-manufacturing community in the world.⁵ It contains Brown University and the Narragansett race track; it is the most densely populated of American states and, perhaps because it is so small, the state capitol in Providence, built by Stanford White, is not only one of the most handsome but the biggest capitol building in the nation, with the possible exception of that of Texas.

The uniqueness of Rhode Island lies in its size; Bryce wrote that it might become the first American “city-state.” Everybody is packed close together; almost everybody knows everybody else. An administrator—the governor, say—is at the beck and call of anybody; he must go and see for himself in an emergency, because everything is within fifty miles of his office. Yet, though their state covers only 1,214 square miles, the Rhode Islanders—who are as particularistic as any people in New England—have had no fewer than four different capitals. For a time (like Connecticut) they insisted on having two at once, Providence and Newport, with the legislature holding alternate sessions in each. Newport (which was once a bigger city than Providence or New York!) was the center of colonial culture; Providence represented the expanding energy of a new and more restless age.

When I visited Rhode Island the governor was J. Howard McGrath, who subsequently became solicitor general of the United States; in 1946 he won the Senate seat being vacated by Peter Gerry. McGrath was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1903; he began his public career as an attorney, and was governor three times; once he beat William H. Vanderbilt (now an able member of the Stassen brain trust) for the job. He is a Democratic machine politician of a conventional but superior type: urban, of Irish descent, Catholic; he is a serious man, with big gray eyes, balanced and concise. The dominant note in all three of his administrations was close attention to politics and progressive social legislation. After I talked with him he said that I must call at once on the Republican state committee, to “get their side of the picture”—a pleasant example of the fairmindedness of much in American public life.

Originally the struggle for power in Rhode Island was that of Yankee versus Yankee. The state was dominated by Brown & Sharpe, one of the greatest machine tool factories in the country, and by far the biggest enterprise in the state; by tremendously entrenched families like the Metcalfs and that of John Nicholas Brown (who when a boy was known as the wealthiest child in the world); by old-time millionaires of almost mythical conservatism like Nelson W. Aldrich who for thirty years “ran” the United States Senate; and by the Hope Club which like the Somerset Club in Boston is the irreproachably sacrosanct and impenetrable inner citadel of the aristocracy. (Once ex-Governor McGrath made a somewhat pointed allusion to this Hope Club saying that there were clubs in Rhode Island to which he, the governor, was not admitted. Someone told me, “The Hope die-hards will keep McGrath dangling. But if they have to take him in, they will.”)

After the Yankees came the Irish. And for a time Yankees and Irish struggled. The only direction in which the Irish could express themselves was politics—the story is roughly the same as that of Boston—since “society” life and big business were barred. Then came Portuguese, Italians, French Canadians—all, like the Irish, predominantly Catholic. Rhode Island is about 50 per cent Catholic today. At first the powerful Irish resented the newer and more Mediterranean breeds; they still tend to call the Italians “black fellows.” Inevitably, however, the Italians and south Europeans will in turn reach their share of power; indeed, the governor who succeeded McGrath is named John Pastore. One can almost predict how long the time lag will be. For instance the first “Irish” mayor of New York City (which is like a Providence enormously intensified and magnified) was Gaynor. This was in 1910. Twenty-four years later came LaGuardia. Now in Rhode Island the pace seems to be accelerated.

The Yankees are a diminishing political force today; they co-operate freely with the Irish because otherwise they would get no share in politics at all. Consider the situation. The chief justice of the state is Irish. The presiding justice of the superior court is Irish. The judge of the federal district court is Irish. So is the attorney general, and so are the mayors of both Providence and Newport. Also the Irish are closely knit, with fewer schisms than in Massachusetts, say. As a result the Yankees have no recourse but to get along. They like someone who is efficient and whom they can deal with: so they vote for people like McGrath. The Providence Journal, one of the worthiest—and most conservative—newspapers in the United States, supported him in both 1942 and 1944; it advocated a split ticket in 1944, coming out for McGrath and Dewey. Incidentally Rhode Island furnishes an illuminating instance of the so-called power of the press in contemporary America. Rhode Island is overwhelmingly Democratic; yet there is no Democratic daily in the entire state.

The Nutmeg State

Connecticut … the little spot … that makes the clock peddler, the schoolmaster, and the senator. The first, gives you time; the second, tells you what to do with it; the third makes your law and your civilization.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Probably Connecticut is the least “typical” of the New England states. Its southern border is only twelve miles from New York City, and the shoreline from Greenwich up to Westport belongs in almost every respect to the New York area. Part of Connecticut is in the New York Federal Reserve district, and the frontier region near Rye is a kind of peaceable American Alsace-Lorraine.

Connecticut is coterminous with Massachusetts for roughly ninety miles, and it has, as is natural, many resemblances to its northerly sister. But there are differences too:

(1) Connecticut has no mass industries as big or as profoundly interlocked with the community as the textile mills of Lowell, say, or Lawrence.

(2) There is much less church influence in politics, and less dominance by a single city.

(3) By and large it is much better run—at least according to Connecticutters.

Connecticut is a very worthy little state, compact, efficient, and with a splendid history. Proudly it claims that its “Fundamental Orders” of 1639, embodied in a charter issued by Charles II in 1682, was the first democratic document of the kind in American history; by terms of this charter Connecticut’s western “boundary” was, as all its citizens know well, the Pacific Ocean! Here are some other things Connecticut is first in:⁶

1640. First American public election in defiance of royal courts held at Wethersfield.

1670. First survey made for first turnpike to be completed in America.

1680. First American carding mill established and (1727) first American copper coins minted.

1738. First American theological seminary established.

1775. First American warship, the Oliver Cromwell, with 16 guns, built at Essex.

1789. First American juvenile publication, the Children’s Magazine, published; ditto (1796) the first American cookbook. (This latter was republished in 1937.)

1794. First cotton gin patented by Eli Whitney.

1817. First American school for the deaf founded.

1830. First American hoop skirts made.

1844. First use of nitrous oxide gas as an anaesthetic.

1848. First cylinder lock invented and (1856) first commercially successful condensed milk produced.

1861. First American degree of Ph.D. conferred by Yale, and first American boys’ camp established.

1863. First American accident insurance issued.

1878. First commercial telephone switchboard installed.

1899. First tackling dummy for football practice invented by A. A. Stagg at Yale.

1901. First American speed limit for automobiles put in force: twelve miles per hour (but eight in cities).

Above all today Connecticut is the home of specialized industry; it is the gadget state par excellence. It produces revolvers, typewriters, submarines, and a multifarious variety of objects that demand immense precision in manufacture, immense skill in labor. It is a tremendous state for work in brass, as witness the city of Waterbury, and various Connecticut communities are famous for auger bits, clocks, hooks and eyes, gold leaf, bedsprings, toothbrushes, coffins, ball-bearings, hats, and saddlery. Though it is forty-sixth in the union in area and thirty-first in population, it is not less than eighth in industrial production.

Also Connecticut is an exceptionally well-governed state; like the rest of the original thirteen, it learned the art of government by actual trial and error. Nowadays, like much of the rest of New England, it suffers from disproportionate representation. For instance the city of New Haven has only two representatives in a legislature of 278, though it is Connecticut’s second biggest city (population 160,605); but the rural county of Tolland (population 31,866), the smallest county in the state, has 22. The rural folk justify this by saying that they must watch that “none of that crazy stuff’’ from the towns “gets by.”

Who runs Connecticut? Historically it was once divided between two rival “city-states”; then came the era of railroad dominance, emergence of a handful of big families, and the utilities. But today there are no financial octopuses of markedly aggressive nature and no big pressure groups. The people have a strong community sense, and the basic struggle is the same as elsewhere in New England—rural Republicans versus urban Democrats. Connecticut did have a boss until quite recently. He was a spectacular example of the old wheel-horse titan. His name was Roraback; he controlled the legislature and the lobbies; he killed himself in 1937. From 1931 to 1939, for four terms, Professor Wilbur Cross of Yale University was governor. This salty old Democrat—he was sixty-nine at his first inaugural—had unique quality. Read Connecticut Yankee, his autobiography, which he published at eighty-one. People thought that Cross was a joke, a crank, a “dear old gentleman” down from Yale. The crusted worthies laughed at this venerable upstart, but he was elected again and again because he believed in a practical conception of people’s government, practically applied; he was supported by Republicans who were sick and tired of the “machine” as well as Democrats. Once in office, as I heard it put, “the politicians couldn’t get at him,” and this became a basic source of his strength and popularity. One of the strangest American paradoxes is that though the power of politicians depends on people, the people don’t like politicians.

Connecticut is a nip and tuck state politically. It voted for Hoover in 1928 and 1932, and for Roosevelt in 1936, 1940, and 1944. Raymond E. Baldwin (Republican) was governor for three successive terms; he was re-elected in 1944 even though Dewey lost the state. This was the more remarkable in that the voting machine used in Connecticut makes it comparatively difficult for a citizen to split his vote. Yet enough people wanted a Democratic president and a Republican governor to say so. Similarly Hartford elected a Republican mayor (a liberal) although it went for Roosevelt. In other words—as we have found elsewhere in New England—Connecticut voters are discriminating. The fact that Baldwin should have won whereas all other state offices went to the opposition (except the attorney generalship which was held by a Republican holdover), also reflects another familiar contradiction, that very often an American governor is not the head of a real cabinet, but has to work with associates belonging to the rival party.

Clare Boothe Luce and Baldwin are the two Republicans of consequence in the state. Baldwin ran for the Senate in 1946 and won; the nomination could have been Mrs. Luce’s, but after long consideration she decided not to take it. She would almost certainly have won the senatorship easily, and would thus have become the first woman in American history ever originally elected to the Senate (a lady from Arkansas, Hattie Caraway, was once appointed, and then re-elected); but for a variety of good reasons she did not become a candidate. Few people, unless they read the Congressional Record carefully, realize what a good congresswoman Mrs. Luce was; she was at a disadvantage most of the time in that she became a victim of her own reputation, versatility, and beauty; her long hours of conscientious work never got in the papers; the wisecracks did. She certainly has blind spots, but even so she was a much better legislator than many people give her credit for.

Baldwin is a big man in his early fifties, hearty, straightforward, and agreeable. He was a leader among the young Republican governors, and his record was progressive in most respects. To have remained in public life has been a considerable sacrifice for him; he has no private fortune, and several times he has wanted to go into the insurance business, out of the direct necessity to support his family. I asked him once what he thought of Willkie; he replied that Willkie was not only the greatest American of this century, but “the greatest man since Lincoln.” One thing he is proud of is the Connecticut labor record during his governorships. Next to that of Michigan the state’s manpower problem was the most difficult in the country, but its record of man hours lost by strikes since 1941 is the lowest in the nation.

On the Democratic side the most interesting event lately was the squeezing out of Chester Bowles as candidate for governor. As a side-light on the way American politics are operated behind the scenes, I quote the following from a letter to the New Republic (September 30, 1946):

Chester Bowles lost at Hartford. He lost—and this is the real reason—because the delegates sized him up and decided that although they thought he was probably a first-rate fellow, they would rather have Snow as their candidate. Oh, the bosses ganged up on Bowles, but not in any cutthroatedly efficient fashion. There was a business of putting up favorite sons to keep Bowles from getting a majority on the first ballot; but if he had got the majority they would have backed him.

He lost the nomination on Monday afternoon, the day before the voting. The candidates had set up headquarters along Asylum Street in Hartford: Snow and Dodd at the Bond, which is the biggest hotel, and Bowles a few doors away at the Hotel Garde. He came into the real campaign too late to rent headquarters at the Bond; that was his first mistake. The second mistake was that his campaign was being run by amateurs. The crowd went to his headquarters first, sampled his excellent liquor, nibbled at or wolfed his sandwiches, then found that there was nobody to talk to, yes, nobody. Bowles himself appeared, with a nice shy smile and a firm handshake, but after having smiled and shaken hands, he had nothing to say. The crowd drifted over to the Bond, went into the Snow headquarters, sampled his liquor, ate his sandwiches and were buttonholed and pledged by Snow himself. …

The delegates figured this way: Snow is our sort; he’s campaigned at one time or another in every one of the I think it is 167 Connecticut towns, including Bozrah; while Bowles is a nice guy, but an outsider, and some people will vote against him on account of the OPA. In the background there were dickers for delegates—probably if Bowles had been nice to the Hartford bosses or promised the lieutenant-governorship to the mayor of Waterbury, he still could have been nominated.

On the floor of the convention, Bowles had another piece of bad luck. All his strength was concentrated in the big towns of the 3rd and 4th Congressional Districts. But the roll was called beginning with the little towns of the 1st and 2nd Districts, where Bowles had practically no strength at all. … The lucky thing for us Connecticut Democrats is that we got a candidate as good as Wilbert Snow, as intelligent and as liberal. It’s one of the few times on record when the party bosses and small politicians went down the line for a liberal college professor.⁷

Is Connecticut changing? Yes—profoundly. Before the war it had 370,000 people in industry, Baldwin told me; today the number is 600,000 or more, of whom from 30 to 40 per cent are women. Year by year more foreign-born pump in; and as far back as 1930, only 34.1 per cent of Connecticutters were of native American stock. Another item—a cardinal point almost everywhere in southern New England—is the growing decentralization of cities. The well-to-do go out into the suburbs; big parking lots disfigure empty blocks in the towns, where buildings have been torn down because the owners cannot pay taxes; and the towns spread out voraciously into the mellow, undulant countryside.

Every once in a while a territorial dispute between states comes up in American politics, and the metropolitan dailies have great fun writing about “plots for territorial revision” and the like. A recent example was a petition by residents of Fisher’s Island, New York, for annexation to Connecticut. The island is a small one near the end of Long Island, three miles off the Connecticut shore; its natural links are across the Sound. Baldwin took the matter up with Dewey. He explained that no defection in loyalty to New York state was intended by the inhabitants of Fisher’s Island, and that New York itself must of course agree to this “less of sovereignty,” before he would consent to take the island in.

Finally Connecticut has other things. It is the state of place names just as dramatic as any in the West (for instance Dark Entry, Jangling Plains, Cow Shanty, Dodgingtown); it is the state of twenty-six daily newspapers including the Hartford Courant, founded in 1765, the oldest American paper of continuous publication; of ten billion dollars worth of insurance in forty-five insurance companies; of the graves of J. P. Morgan, Tom Thumb, and Noah Webster; of a host of New York writers, artists and millionaires who escape New York in the vicinity of West-port; of strong Jewish influence (Hartford has more Jews per capita than any American city except New York) ; and of the only important city in the nation, Bridgeport, with a Socialist mayor, the picturesquely named Jasper McLevy.

Some other Connecticut developments recently have been (a) a successful strike in Norwalk by the schoolteachers, who had been shockingly underpaid; (b) vivid emergence in local elections of war veterans, like Captain Emilio Quincy Daddario (who bears a nice melting pot name), a hero of the Italian campaign who became Democratic mayor of Middlesex in 1946; (c) suppression in both New Haven and Bridgeport of performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a result of Negro protests, and (d) bitter opposition by lush landowners in the Greenwich-Stamford area to the possibility of the United Nations moving in.

¹ Jonathan Daniels has calculated that if Congress were chosen on the same basis there would be over one hundred thousand Congressmen in Washington. Cf. A Southerner Discovers New England, p. 69.

² It is extraordinarily striking that Texas, also an extremely militant state, should have been the only other to have had an extended period of independence.

³ For the material in this and the next paragraph I am indebted to ex-Governor M. R. Proctor.

⁴ Two “towns” were, however, legally voted out of existence recently, because their populations had diminished to the point of consisting of a single family. The two had, and have, the fine old English names of Glastonbury and Somerset.

⁵ Some of these details are from Rhode Island, in the American Guide Series. Another uniqueness is that Rhode Island officially celebrates Independence Day on May 4 instead of the Fourth of July.

⁶ As listed in Connecticut: A Gtiide to Its Roads, Lore, and People, in the American Guide Series, p. III.

⁷ This letter, signed only by initials, was written by Malcolm Cowley incidentally. Professor Snow, a teacher for many years at Wesleyan University, was defeated for the governorship by its former president, Dr. James L. McConaughy.