States in Crisis: Politics in Ten American States, 1950-1962 by James Reichley

Author:James Reichley [Reichley, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, Political Science, State
ISBN: 9780807836446
Google: WPTGDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 16194183
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 1964-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MASSACHUSETTS CAULDRON BUBBLE

The melting pot, not surprisingly, has appealed to many observers as a peculiarly apt symbol for American society. Into the crucible of the United States, the image implies, have been poured the races and nations of mankind, producing a new and distinctive species. The best qualities of all prior national types, it is suggested (assuming the observer to be a patriotic American), have blended to create the character of the new breed. If the baser aspects of the older nationalities are admitted, they are presumed to have been boiled off in the process of amalgamation. The resulting American race is a miraculous alloy, combining all of the superior characteristics that have previously been exhibited by the various divisions of humanity.

Upon examination, this symbol—as even its more rapturous proponents are likely in their calmer moments to agree—is found to be in some ways seriously misleading. The process of amalgamation has thus far been made available without substantial limitations to only a few, though no doubt the largest, of the national groups. To the extent that it has occurred, the process has usually taken the form —in language, manners, customs, and laws—of conquest by one culture, the British, of all others. (Contemporary differences between British and American cultures can be explained by the experience of the New World almost without references to the effects of other national influences. The popularity in the United States of haciendas, sauerkraut, Negro jazz, spaghetti, and the like seem minor and almost pathetic exceptions to the prevalence of British ways.) In the cases where non-British cultures have made a serious impact on American society—as, for instance, the influence of the Irish on state and local politics—the action has often more closely resembled an explosion of warring elements than the peaceful bubbling of a metallic stew.

Nowhere in the United States have nations and cultures mingled in more variety and proximity than in Massachusetts. The historic port city of Boston (which dominates the state as few American cities dominate their hinterlands) has in turn provided entry into North America for hordes of Puritans and related British stocks, Irish, Portuguese, Italians, Germans, Greeks, and Russian Jews. At the same time, French Canadians and Negroes have migrated to the state after first settling in other parts of the continent. With the exception of the earliest arrivals, who received a warm welcome from the Wampanoag Indians (whom they subsequently exterminated), few of the newcomers were greeted with great cordiality by their predecessors. Each national group claimed, and sometimes later relinquished, available portions of the tough, unfertile land—Yankee descendants of the Puritans moving out from Boston Common to Cambridge, Belmont, Lexington, and Lincoln, to the far reaches of the Berkshires and to Cape Cod, all the while maintaining salients on the coast north of Boston at Newburyport, Gloucester, and Salem; French Canadians drifting down the Merrimack Valley to the mill cities of Lawrence and Lowell; Irish piling into the North, South, and West Ends of Boston, later spreading westward to Cambridge,

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