WHERE
I COME FROM
Our
seemingly interminable presidential campaign is safely behind
us now, but I’m not willing to let it go just yet—at
least not until I hear an apology from someone about the most
egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. I’m not talking
about the notorious “Swift Boat Veteran” lies, or
“flip-flopping,” or anything perpetrated by Michael
Moore. What I mean is the decision to transform my old home state
into an epithet.
I
didn’t have the privilege of being born in Massachusetts
but I did grow up there, and I never thought I would hear one
of our thirteen original states used as an insult during a presidential
debate. Yet there was President Bush, throughout his third go-round
with Senator John Kerry, telling us that “only a senator
from Massachusetts,” or “someone from Massachusetts,”
could believe this or that. The charge that Mr. Kerry was from
Massachusetts was repeated again and again throughout the election—the
implication being that no more need be said; that simply hailing
from such a bizarre, addled, liberal place as Massachusetts
ought to be enough to disqualify anyone from the presidency right
then and there.
Well,
as George Washington Plunkitt once said, “Politics, it ain’t
beanbag.” But I thought that if no one else is going to,
I might write a few words myself in defense of Massachusetts.
I
had thought of pointing out that Massachusetts is not nearly as
“liberal” as Mr. Bush would have it—either by
the traditional meaning of that word, or the perjorative that
assorted right-wingers have tried to make it. The state is currently
working on its fourth straight, Republican governor—and
a Utah Mormon, at that. It was also one of the first states to
launch a tax revolt back in the 1970s. Of course, a much earlier
Massachusetts tax revolt produced results that even Karl Rove
might appreciate.
I
considered writing about that revolutionary heritage. About how
many of the fathers of our freedom hailed from Massachusetts,
Samuel Adams and James Otis, and John Hancock and Paul Revere.
Of how the first battles of our war for independence were fought
by those gun-toting, yeoman farmers on Lexington Green, and Concord
Bridge, or of how Massachusetts was not only the cradle of liberty,
but the birthplace of presidents from all parties: John and John
Quincy Adams, and John Kennedy—and our forty-first president,
George H. W. Bush (paging Dr. Freud).
I had thought of tracing my state’s ancient history of tolerance,
and open-mindedness. Of mentioning how Massachusetts was the first
state to elect a black, U.S. senator after Reconstruction, Edward
Brooke—another Republican!—and how it was Massachusetts
that raised the first black regiment in the Civil War, the gallant
54th, so well commemorated by Saint-Gaudens’s famous sculpture
on the Boston Common.
To
be sure, tolerance was not exactly at a premium in 2004, as voters
in one state after another chose to preserve the sanctity of marriage—for
themselves. Massachusetts was much excoriated for not engaging
in this curious intellectual exercise. But in fact, as a rash
of studies after the election showed, the Bay State is a veritable
paragon of “moral values”—with the lowest divorce
rate, the lowest percentage of suicides, and the highest percentage
of individuals with bachelor degrees in the country (Okay, okay,
it also has the second-highest percentage of New Yorker
readers. Nobody’s perfect.)
I
even considered waxing rhapsodic about the sheer beauty of the
place. The winding, cobblestoned streets on Boston’s Beacon
Hill—America’s original, “shining city on a
hill”—or the beaches and cranberry bogs of Cape Cod;
the rolling hills and fields of the western half of the state.
But who doesn’t think their home state is a beautiful place?
And who really knows their whole state—even if
it’s the size of Delaware, or Rhode Island?
Instead,
I thought I would tell you something about the specific corner
of Massachusetts where I grew up—where I’m coming
from, so to speak. It’s a small town called Rockport, up
on Cape Ann, which it shares with the old fishing port of Gloucester.
A stretch of rocky coastline and deep woods that is located about
forty miles north of Boston, and which I feel is about as fine
a place as there is in this world.
It
is a small place, as I mentioned. No more than seven thousand
permanent residents now, and only five thousand when I was growing
up. There were fifty-eight students in my high school graduating
class, and we didn’t even bother to put locks on our lockers.
There’s still not a single traffic light in the whole town,
nor a drink to be bought. Back in 1854, a 31-year-old seamstress
with the incomparable name of Hannah Jumper led three hundred
of her fellow townswomen on a “liquor raid” against
the local grog shops, chopping them up with hatchets decades before
Carrie Nation got the same idea. Rockport has been a dry town
ever since.
I
have to admit, too, that the town is about as choc-a-bloc with
churches as any “red-state” community—Congregational,
Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Unitarian,
Christian Science. I was brought up mostly in the Pigeon Cove
Chapel, an Evangelical church which billed itself as “A
friendly little chapel by the sea.” There used to be even
more places of worship, but these were Scandinavian-language churches
that went out of business and were converted into private residences
as their congregations learned English. For years, men from all
over Scandinavia—and from Italy, and Ireland—came
here to cut the granite that became part of the base of the Statue
of Liberty, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; the Holland
Tunnel, and the Philadelphia Public Library—among many other
public structures and streets throughout the United States. The
granite-cutters were an irascible, independent minded lot, as
might be expected of men who spent much of their time blasting
out forty-ton slabs of granite from the hillsides. A wonderful
old picture survives of some of them, mad as hornets, on their
way down to Granite Pier to throw a company official there into
the water. The granite quarries they dug are closed now, but they
make invaluable swimming holes, especially as ocean swimming in
northern New England is a sometime thing. I believe I could still
feel my way blindfolded up the ridges of Pine Pit, to the bluffs
we used to spend a whole summer’s day diving from.
Cape Ann is an old place, by American standards, and a considerable
amount of history runs through it—or at least has touched
upon it. Champlain stopped here, and John Smith, and being a town
full of Scandinavians, we like to think a few Vikings did, too.
Emerson and Thoreau, T.S. Eliot and Charles Olsen have written
of its beauties, and Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam
and Fitzhugh Lane have painted it. A local tool works, recently
closed, built some of the parts that went into Lindbergh’s
plane, The Spirit of St. Louis. Some of the nation’s
earliest art and literary colonies were founded here, and there
is even an old, red fishing shack known as “Motif No. 1”
that is supposed to be the most painted building in America, though
none of us understand why, exactly.
The
first permanent settlers arrived in 1690, and their family names—Tarrs
and Pooles and Babsons—are still well-represented in town.
There was even an accused witch, the wife of John Proctor, of
Crucible fame, who fled the hysteria down in Salem. Her
house still stands, next to a pond where I caught my first frog,
and where we used to skate in the winter. Ghosty rumors about
the place abounded, and we boys probably drove the people who
lived there crazy, peering in their windows for signs of any supernatural
goings-on.
It
has been a fortunate place, my old hometown, largely free of the
ravages of war, or natural disaster. During the War of 1812, the
British frigate Nymphe did show up to fight what must
surely rank as one of the more ludicrous skirmishes in American
history. Marines from the Nymphe managed to capture the
town’s entire, redoubtable garrison of “Seafencibles”
while they slept, then tried to storm the beaches. A cannonball
from one of their barges actually managed to hit the steeple in
the Congregational “Old Sloop” Church. No mean shot—but
the recoil from the blast also blew their boat apart, and the
invaders were captured by townspeople armed with muskets, pistols,
and homemade slingshots fashioned from their stockings. After
what must have been a red-faced truce, and exchange of prisoners,
the Nymphe sailed off again, with no loss of life and
the less said all around the better.
More
seriously, men have gone from here to fight in all our wars. We
honor their memory every Memorial Day with a solemn procession
to the town graveyards, then down to lay a wreath on the water.
The march is always headed by the American Legion band, led by
my old junior high school teacher and baseball coach, George Ramsden.
On the Fourth of July, he dons a long red nightshirt and a plumber’s
helper, and leads the same band, similarly attired, in the “Horribles”
parade—another New England tradition; a sort of charivari,
sponsored by the town’s volunteer fire department. The parade
always concludes with a bonfire down by the beach, and a concert
from the gazebo outside the Legion hall.
I
could go on, but I’m aware that these sorts of reminiscences
make my old hometown sound like a modern version of Our Town,
and I don’t mean to idealize it. Things change, and Rockport
has its problems and limitations, just like anyplace else. It
has never been as diverse as many American places—certainly
not as much as the Manhattan block where I’ve lived for
the past quarter-century, and which I also love dearly.
That
is, I suppose, the point. America is a country that was founded
on a principle, but most of us know some part of it we are uncommonly
attached to. As I understand it, there are even some people who
are very fond of Texas.
I
never like it when people call the South “redneck country,”
or when news commentators flippantly refer to our great, industrial
heartland as “the Rust Belt.” I think if we really
are to pull together as a nation, we need to restore at least
a basic respect for how we all live, and where we come from. An
apology would be a good start, but I’m not holding my breath.
As an old New Englander, I know the worth of the place I come
from, and that its values and its character will endure, long
after the noise of another campaign has receded.
