USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people > Part 3
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July 4-18
Wellesley
Wellesley College Summer Institute for Social Progress, Wellesley College. Italian religious festival, Old Fort section. North Shore Art Association, exhibits, East Gloucester Sq.
July
middle of Sept. nfd -to middle of Sept.
Gloucester
Gloucester Society of Artists, exhibit of members' work, near Hawthorne Inn.
July 4 wks
Northfield
Conference of Ministers and Missionaries, Northfield Seminary.
July nfd
Provincetown
Beachcombers' Ball, costume affair, by artists, writers and others. Art exhibits at galleries of Provincetown Art Association.
July 4 to Labor Day nfd
July
Rockport
North Shore Art Association opens three months' exhibitions concurrent with two months' showings of Rockport Art Association.
Aug.
Falmouth
Sessions at Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole.
Aug.
Falmouth
Sessions at Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole.
Aug.
Falmouth
Sessions at United States Bureau of Fisheries, Woods Hole. Sam-Sam Carnival, midway, flower show and fireworks.
Aug. nfd
Beverly
Aug. nfd
Boston
Aug. nfd
Boston
Mid-summer exhibition of Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Horticultural Hall, Massachusetts Ave. Products of Children's Gardens Exhibi- tion, Horticultural Hall, Massachusetts Ave.
Aug. 23
Brookline
Beginning National Championship Doubles and Mixed Doubles Tennis Tournament, Longwood Cricket Club.
July
nfd
Gloucester
July nfd-to
Gloucester
Provincetown
XXXV
Calendar of Events
Aug. * nfd
Gloucester
Aug. 2d wk
Aug. near 15
Aug. nfd
Aug. 10-28
Mattapoisett
Special events in connection with cruise of New York and Eastern Yacht Clubs in harbor.
Aug. nfd
Provincetown
Art Association Ball, costume affair, Town Hall.
Aug. near 15
Rockport
(2 evgs)
Aug. 3d wk
Rockport
Stockbridge
Sept. 2d wk
Boston
Sept.
3d wk
Brockton
Sept. Fri. & Sat.
Middlefield
before
Labor Day
Sept. 3d wk
Springfield Topsfield
Eastern States Exposition. Topsfield Fair, Treadwell Farm.
Sept. Labor Day week-end
Oct. Ist wk
Worcester
Worcester Music Festival, four concerts including one oratorio.
Worcester Horticultural Society, Chrys- anthemum Show, Horticultural Hall, 30 Elm St.
Dec. 24
Boston
Dec. near 24
Boston
Dec. or Jan.
Boston
National Winter Sports Exposition, in- door skiing, skating, reproductions of famous winter resorts, Boston Garden, North Station.
Dec. 2I
Plymouth
Forefathers' Day, observance of landing of Pilgrim Fathers.
Dec. last wk
Provincetown
Dec. Christmas Worcester Sun.
Portuguese celebrate with open house, oldtime parties and dances. Handel's 'Messiah' by Worcester Ora- torio Society, Memorial Auditorium.
Es al i- ts ip is
b.
Marblehead
Marblehead
Marshfield
Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Day Services at the site of the Gloucester Fisherman's Memorial.
Annual Cruise, Eastern Yacht Club. Marblehead Race Week, yachting. Marshfield Fair.
Cape Ann-North Shore Music Festival, Fort Park.
Artists' Ball, Rockport Art Association. Berkshire Symphonic Festival, three con- certs by Boston Symphony Orchestra. Late summer exhibition of Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Horticultural Hall, Massachusetts Ave.
Brockton Fair, held annually since 1784. Middlefield Fair.
Nov.
Ist wk
Worcester
Christmas Eve Carol Singing on Beacon Hill (principally in Louisburg Sq.). 'Open House' in many homes. Handel's 'Messiah' by Handel and Haydn Society, Symphony Hall, Huntington Ave.
1
f
Aug. near 15
xxxvi
Calendar of Events
SEASONAL
May - June
Boston
College Crew Races, Saturday afternoons, Charles River.
June - Sept.
Brookline
Federal Music Project concerts, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, Brookline Shell, Dean Rd.
July 6 - Aug. 10
Cambridge
Free concerts, Tuesdays at 8.15 P.M., Longy School, 44 Church St.
Sept. 1 - June Boston
Oct. - Nov. Oct. - Nov.
Boston Throughout State
Cambridge
Free concerts, Tuesdays at 8.15 P.M., Longy School, 44 Church St.
Boston Public Library Lectures and Con- certs, Sundays at 3 P.M. and 8 P.M., and Thursdays at 8 P.M., Lecture Hall, Boston Public Library.
Community Church of Boston, Sundays at 10.30 A.M., Symphony Hall, Hunting- ton Ave.
Ford Hall Forum, Sundays at 8 P.M., Ash- burton Pl.
Ford Hall Youth Forum, Mondays at 8 P.M., Ashburton Pl.
Old South Forum, Sundays at 3 P.M., Old South Meeting House, Washington St. Symphony Concerts, Saturday and Mon- day evenings and Tuesday and Friday afternoons, Symphony Hall, Hunting- ton Ave.
BI-ANNUAL
Jan. I (odd years)
June
nfd (even years)
nfd (even years)
Boston
Inauguration of Governor, State House.
Democratic Convention. Republican Convention.
Fenway Court Concerts, Sundays, 1-4 P.M., Isabella Stewart-Gardner Mu- seum, Fenway. Professional football games. College football games.
Oct. - May
Oct. - April Boston
I. MASSACHUSETTS: THE GENERAL BACKGROUND
CLUES TO ITS CHARACTER
TO THE seeker of a clue to the character of Massachusetts people, the rubric of the east wind may be useful. Time and again a salty breeze has blown through this most conservative of commonwealths. It wafted the first rebels to Cape Cod, dying down soon after. It burst forth again to blow steadily through most of the eighteenth century, when victories were won not only for political freedom but for education and religious toleration. During the period of Federalism it abated, but by the 1840's the faint whisper which had fanned the cheeks of mill girls in Lowell, mechanics in Boston, and scholars in Cambridge and Concord was roaring in a gale that shook the rafters of the nation. It blew fitfully throughout the later nineteenth century, dying to a flat calm at the beginning of the twentieth. From about 1909 to 1927 it let loose a window-rattling blast or two before subsiding again.
Many symbols have been devised to explain the Bay Stater. He has been pictured as a kind of dormant volcano, the red-hot lava from one eruption hardening into a crater which impedes the next; as a river, with two main currents of transcendental metaphysics and catchpenny op- portunism running side by side; as an asocial discord consisting mainly of overtones and undertones; as a petrified backbone, 'that unblossom- ing stalk.' To these may be added the cartoonist's Bluenose, the de- bunker's Puritan, the Gentleman with a Green Bag, Aunt Harriet with her Boston Transcript, and the late unlamented Little Waldo of the spectacles and painfully corrugated brow.
That so many symbols have been created for the State hints at the complexity of its people. Any almanac or book of facts can inform the clue-seeker that the population is roughly three-fifths native, one-eighth from other states, and a quarter foreign-born or of mixed foreign-born and native parentage; that half the land area consists of farms, yet only a tiny proportion of the four and one-third million inhabitants are farmers; that about half the residents are church members, of whom three-fifths are Catholics; that an Indian boldly figures on the State seal, but only 874 residents today report themselves as descended from Massachusetts' first families. Stumbling on the fact that the State has more public libraries than any other save New York, and more volumes per capita
4
Massachusetts: The General Background
than any other, the seeker cries Aha! - only to learn a few moments later that Ohio, with one-third fewer library books, has at least as many library readers. Told that no non-native resident ever feels at home for his first twenty-five years, the seeker is surprised to discover that more than a third of the State's residents were born outside its borders. At long last he is likely to emerge from the almanac with the information that citizens of the State live a little longer than the dromedary, rather less than the ostrich, and for a much shorter span than the fresh-water mussel; or that from the State came three Presidents, seven Secretaries of the Navy, a host of cabinet officers, and the man who first went over Horseshoe Falls in a rubber ball.
Clearly a symbol is necessary. Let it be, then, the east wind, and let the east wind blow to these shores in the early 1600's, not companies of large-minded and open-handed gentlemen-adventurers, but small, close- knit, compactly organized groups. 'God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness,' wrote William Stough- ton in 1668, and this 'sober and judicial statement,' as Calvin Coolidge called it, indicates how the first-comers viewed the rest of the world in terms of themselves. The peculiar combination of individualism and conformity which still marks the State was given divine sanction by the theology brought by the first inhabitants. Calvinism, which had deposed heaven's hierarchy of saints, increased the prestige of the individual; but the doctrine of Providence, which taught that God's gifts must not be used for selfish ends, permitted the individual to act only as the group decreed. Individuals outside the group were feared and combated. Since conformity breeds non-conformists, rebels appeared and split off from the main group - they in turn to conform and to breed rebellion.
With the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and their followers, the inhabitants of the Bay Colony proved, at least to them- selves, their right to be winnowed grain. Succeeding Roger Williams at Salem in 1636, however, came an even more radical minister, Hugh Peter. Master Hugh, a member of the first Harvard Board of Overseers, while still in London had advocated State employment relief, slum clearance, and prison reform. In the New World he proposed the wholesale abolition of English law and the substitution therefor of a new concise legal code understandable by the common people. Perhaps it was as well for the peace of mind of the colonists that he returned to England, where un- fortunately he got himself beheaded for his plain speaking. But the east wind blew; the Church of England was granted toleration, and a wider freedom of worship slowly followed. Yet worshipers still sat in their
5
Clues to Its Character
pews strictly according to rank; democracy was highly limited; and a large section of the people, including indentured servants, women, and the propertyless, remained disenfranchised for more than a century.
The gale of pamphleteering, musketeering, committee organizing, speech-making, and political scribbling which blew throughout the eighteenth century ceased abruptly late in the 1790's. A lone voice rose but was unheard, that of William Manning, Billerica farmer. 'I see,' wrote this Jeffersonian radical, painfully forming his letters, 'almost the first blood that was shed in Concord fite and scores of men dead, dying and wounded in the Cause of Libberty .... I believed then and still be- liev it is a good cause which we aught to defend to the very last.' The editor of the Independent Chronicle of Boston, to whom Manning sent his appeal, was jailed on the Federalist charge of 'seditious libel.' Meanwhile Daniel Shays and his lieutenant Luke Day had armed their cohorts of impoverished farmers near Worcester, and had been dispersed by a militia subsidized by Boston merchants. A new cloud big with wind, the rising of which farmers such as Manning and Shays could not foresee, was bulking in the sky: the young 'mechanick' class of the industrial towns.
Against the background of the demands of the skilled mechanics and factory operatives for popular education, legislative reform, and political representation which characterized the 1840's, rose transcendentalism, a kind of neo-puritanism which symbolized, on the plane of ideas, the conflict going on in the real world between the Colonial system of small self-sufficient industry and the new mode of factory production. On the social field transcendentalism had a single watchword: harmony. Not through hatred, collision, the war of class against class, transcendentalists insisted, could come social adjustment, but only through the reconciling of interests. In this belief the Unitarians founded Brook Farm and the Universalists Hopedale. Josiah Warren was holding his 'parlor conver- sations' and opening his 'time stores,' in which goods were paid for in scrip representing labor-time. Brisbane, aided by Horace Greeley, was moving his paper The Phalanx to Brook Farm and renaming it The Harbinger. It was a time of optimism, of revolt against tradition and convention, of faith in the infinite perfectibility of the human race - and the particular perfectibility of the Yankee. It was the glorious adolescence of the most precocious of the states.
Throughout the three hundred years of the State's history the east wind blew steadily among its women, producing such champions of women's rights as Mary Lyon, Mary Livermore, Lucy Stone, Susan
6
Massachusetts: The General Background
Anthony, Lydia Maria Child, and Margaret Fuller. The first attempt of women to exercise the right of free assembly was made by Anne Hutchinson, who after being tried on a joint charge of sedition and heresy was banished from Boston in 1638. Mary Dyer, twice banished, returned to Boston in 1660 to test the legality of the law which sentenced to death Quakers who visited the colony after being expelled, and was publicly hanged. An early rebel against the discrimination suffered by women in industry was Louisa Morton Green, who refused to do man's work at a spindle in a Dedham woolen mill unless she was paid man's wages. Working fourteen hours a day for two dollars a week and board, she found time to study to be a school teacher, and later became active in the anti-slavery cause, industrial reform, and woman suffrage. An early organizer of the Red Cross, and its first president, was Clara Barton. In medicine, religion, astronomy, physics, education, and the arts, scores of Massachusetts women battled for their sex. Phillis Wheat- ley was one of a long line of Negro women of Massachusetts who con- tributed to the State's literature, art, and social movements.
Nowhere has the east wind blown so vigorously in the State as through the schools. The spirit of the famous Act of 1647, which required each township of fifty families to have a primary school and each township of one hundred families to establish a grammar school, remained in force for two hundred years. An early governor of the State, James Sullivan, urged its citizens to throw off 'the trammels they had forged for us' - they, of course, being the English - and called for an American system of general public education, remarking, 'Where the mass of people are ignorant, poor and miserable, there is no public opinion excepting what is the offspring of fear.' As late as 1834 the Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Workingmen demanded at its convention a better quality of instruction in the public schools. Not until Horace Mann fought his bitter battle as Secretary of the Board of Education did the State acquire a decent system of graded schools, with properly qualified, trained, and compensated teachers.
For more than two centuries the State has been predominantly in- dustrial and commercial. As early as 1699 Edward Ward complained: 'The Inhabitants seem very Religious, showing many outward and visible signs of an inward and Spiritual Grace: But tho' they wear in their Faces the Innocence of Doves, you will find them in their Dealings as Subtile as Serpents. Interest is their Faith, Money their God, and Large Pos- sessions the only Heaven they covet.' Although the nineteenth century, with its wind of liberalism, proved these strictures one-sided, it is worth
7
Clues to Its Character
recalling that the Massachusetts Bay Company was a joint stock com- pany organized solely for profit, that the State early became a centre for the accumulation of capital employed in the South and West, and that the first corporation as the term is understood today arose in the State.
The essentially urban character of the people is emphasized by the fact that every citizen literally lives 'in town,' as the 316 towns and 39 cities comprise the total area of the State. At the town meetings, still held in ninety-three per cent of corporate communities in New England, qualified voters elect their selectmen, the chairman or moderator, and administrative officers. Under pressure from large and mixed popula- tions, certain towns still unwilling to adopt representative city govern- ment have devised the 'limited town meeting,' attended by elected delegates chosen by vote according to precinct. Although the town meeting is supposed to favor the perpetuation of what has been called 'a sort of untitled squirarchy,' its champions maintain that this method of government at least keeps public officials under constant public scrutiny.
In spite of the 'town' character of its political life, there are farmers in the State - 163,219 of them. Regardless of their low birth rate and in the face of no growth of the farming population in the United States as a whole, they are increasing. The value of their holdings is slowly going up, and most of them own their farms. Here the Massachusetts tendency to smallness is manifest, as the farms are of few acres and well distributed, just as the State Forests are more numerous - and smaller - than in any other state.
When Boston was Tory, rural Massachusetts was Whig. When Boston was Federalist, rural Massachusetts was Republican and radical. Even today a rural resident of the State when not a Republican is a different breed of Democrat. The hinterland's distrust of the political power of the metropolis is apparent in the fact that the Boston police force is under the control not of the mayor but of a commissioner appointed by the Governor - who, although he no longer need be certified as 'a Christian worth £rooo,' receives a lower salary than the Mayor of Boston. But the farmer, with all his political difference, partakes of the racial ad- mixture and the turn of mind of other residents of the State. He, too, is very likely to be a trader, though he may do most of his trading with 'summer people' visiting the Berkshires or the Cape.
Making a campaign speech for Lincoln at Philadelphia in 1860, Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, facing what he termed 'the most con-
8
Massachusetts: The General Background
servative city in America,' half apologized for coming from 'a more excitable community.' The State has always been full of stimulating cross-winds. Life within its borders has never been conditioned by the slow swing of the seasons, the easy tilling of an abundant earth. Ma- rooned on a rocky soil, Massachusetts men had to be ingenious to survive, and they early became skilled at devising shrewd 'notions,' commercial and intellectual. Used to dealing with people, they learned to think in small and individual terms rather than in broad geographical concepts. The ideal supposed in Europe to be the tenet of all Americans, that be- cause a thing is bigger it is somehow better, was never adopted by Massachusetts.
Skillful of hand, sharp at a bargain, stubborn of mind, the Bay Stater possesses a character which with its mixture of shrewdness and idealism is often labeled hypocrisy. He exhibits a strong tendency to conform - provided he thinks conformity is his own idea. But let conformity be thrust upon him, and the east wind again begins to thrum! The blowing of that wind brought to the State much early social legislation: the child labor law in 1836, a law legalizing trade unions in 1842, the first State board of health, the first minimum wage law for women and children, and the first State tuberculosis sanatorium. Against general opposition, first use was made of inoculation and of ether as an anesthetic within the State.
Massachusetts is parochial, yet it is never long out of the main cur- rents of American life. It is a State of tradition, but part of its tradition is its history of revolt. Its people are fiercely individualistic, yet they have fierce group loyalties. It is noted for conservatism, yet it exports not only shoes and textiles but rebels to all corners of the earth. Its sons and daughters live in small houses, worship in small churches, work in small factories, produce small things, and vote in small political units, yet time and again their largeness of spirit has burst beyond State borders.
NATURAL SETTING
THE land of Massachusetts is a product of millions of years of wearing down and building up; erosion by water, wind, and ice; lifting of plains and seashore; filling in of valleys and troughs; eruption of volcanoes; intrusions of lava; and the invasion of continental glaciers. Rocks that must have had their origin thousands of feet below the surface may be found cropping out all over the State. Formations that once were simple and deposited on level planes are now complex and metamorphic rocks, warped, truncated, and steeply dipped - the results of physical and chemical changes that could have taken place only under extreme heat and at times of terrestrial cataclysms. Everywhere is the evidence that once-lofty mountains have been worn down to plain-level, and that one- time deep valleys have been filled in and raised to great heights.
At the beginning of known geologic time, three mountain masses of granitic rock, alternating with sea channels, extended northeast across the State. Strata were deposited on the shore of the Champlain Channel west of the Hoosac Mountain, in the narrow gulf which ran from Gaspé Point to Worcester, and in the trough from Rhode Island to the Bay of Fundy. Then came the period of the making of the Appalachian Moun- tains, of which the Hoosac Mountain and its continuation in the Green Mountains represented the axis. As a result of this cataclysm, the older Paleozoic clastics were metamorphized - limestone into marble, muds and gravels into slate and schist, and some of the sandstone into quart- zite.
This raising of surface was followed by a renewed activity of the streams in wearing down the land masses. By the carboniferous era, the whole State had been reduced to a peneplain, and coal measures had been deposited in the Rhode Island-Nova Scotia basin, and in the Gaspé- Worcester trough.
In the next geologic era, the rock formations of the Connecticut Valley region had slipped down, and the sea had inundated the latter up to the northern boundary of the State. This twenty-mile-wide estuary gradually filled from the higher levels with materials that later were to become the sandstones, shales, and conglomerates of the valley. But during the formation of these rocks there occurred great outflows of lava,
10
Massachusetts: The General Background
which covered in some places the older weak formation and, forming the traprock, resisted erosion so that they stand today as the prominent elevations of the valley.
All New England in a later period was reduced by erosion to a base- level, with the southeastern margin of Massachusetts submerged under a shallow sea. But by the end of this geologic era, the whole of the Ap- palachian region was uplifted, and Massachusetts was raised to a plateau of moderate elevation. The rivers again appeared to repeat the process of erosion, and the dissected topography of the uplands of the State is a present indication of that activity.
In recent geologic time, the continental ice-sheet, originating in the Laurentian region, crept down over New England, advancing as far south as Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Long Island. During its advance, it picked up rocks which became embedded in the ice, and with these it scraped the soil and ground the mountains. It dammed rivers and changed courses, formed lakes, and deeply altered the character of the land. Upon its retreat, it left behind a terminal moraine which made and shaped Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. Over the whole land it spread glacial débris of soil, rocks, and boulders.
The complex geologic history of Massachusetts has resulted in a widely varied landscape patchwork. Within a small area, the State offers a great variety of terrain - rugged coasts, barren sand beaches, wild mountains, green valleys, and upland plateaus.
The State as a whole, however, may be divided into four physiographic types : coastal lowlands, interior lowlands, dissected uplands, and residuals of ancient mountains.
The coastal lowlands spread out at Narragansett Bay, cutting through the middle of Rhode Island and across Massachusetts to the New Hamp- shire line near the Merrimack River. Thus they take in the eastern part of the State, including the Cape Cod peninsula and the islands off the mainland. The whole coastline of Massachusetts, with its rugged mountainous shore and deep indentations, is evidence of an early sub- mergence and a later uplift of the area. The submerged river mouths, the many good harbors and bays of Boston, Buzzard, and Narragansett, are prominent features of the topography of Massachusetts. Farther inland, the effect of the lowering of the coastal plain is found in the falls and rapids of the rivers.
In the northeastern section of this division the bed-rock is near the surface, and rock-outcrops are found in many places. It is this out- cropping along the coast that gives the North Shore of Massachusetts
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