A Southerner Discovers New England
I
MEN do not make their travels as straight as crows. Roads twist to go by farms, around barns, over hills, and to the narrowest crossings of the brooks. Even some city streets in New England, they say, twist among the offices and the banks as the cows wandered in the lost green grass. The Pilgrims when they landed in Massachusetts were headed for Delaware. It was a long time later that Nathaniel Bowditch, the Navigator, sent the ships of Salem straight on their enriching courses in a system which swung about the certainty of the sun. And still sometimes neither the Yankees nor the stranger among them can be quite sure where they are going. They may not even be in entire agreement about the way they have come. I remember that when I first went North as a Southerner I was lost in Boston, and I wondered whether I was any more lost than Boston was. A little Italian boy set me straight for a dime.
Maybe, then, what I have to report is not the travel but the traveler, a traveler from the antithetical South which New Englanders understood was gallant, perhaps, but thriftless certainly, gracious in legend but violent in fact. From such a land I came with the secret respect that all Southerners have learned for the Yankees. It was the recruit before the fighting and the politician after it who said that one Reb could beat ten Yankees. The veterans of Alabama perpetuated a reticent respect for the boys from Vermont.
Undoubtedly some Yankees came down whose departure from points North must have occasioned as much rejoicing as fury was occasioned by their activities in points South. Some such still come, and they are not always labor organizers. They may be, indeed, men who talked in loudest indignation about underpaid Southern labor before they themselves began to underpay Southern laborers. And some of the gentlemen who stayed in Boston, courteous, honorable, cultured gentlemen, have sometimes been difficult to bear. They talked of Southern thriftlessness in a South their tariff system had impoverished and whose poverty a Northern credit system milked. Some ladies even in the Back Bay contributed funds, to help the poor Negro tenants under the wicked white landlords, out of incomes which came from interest rates which kept the landlords hot after the Negroes and the Negroes hot over the cotton.
They were details which did not destroy respect. The Yankee schoolmarms long ago gave us what little learning we had. And some of them stayed to become the mothers of Confederate soldiers. Even today Harvard is not so much the name of a university as a word which chills us in the warm South with a sense of inferiority. We honored Eli Whitney even if we stole his cotton gin and got paid for our plunder by a slavery to cotton which included us all, white and black. We sat in the shade and talked with admiration of the energy of the Yankee in the snow. We appreciated the Connecticut Yankee’s skill (it was a Southerner who wrote the best book about it), but we learned to holler for a Negro when there was work to be done with hands. That is, some of us did — a very few of us really. Most of us white Southerners were working hard through that whole legend and not getting much further than those Yankees who let the forest run back across the cow lot and departed for the West.
Out of such a South I came North secretly respectful. I rode the highways, and I went out of New England over the same Merritt Parkway upon which I had entered it (I rode in for nothing; they charged me a dime to get out), openly and frankly full of admiration. On the most difficult land, the men of New England made a great civilization. They maintained it. But the very greatness of their accomplishment is the measure of their problem. They never had any reason to hope to be so rich. I expect it is gallantry now, and not skill or thrift or industry, which is the basis of determination to continue to be.
The fish and the forests which were what they had to begin with were depleted long ago. The water power which now runs by so many less productive mills is a resource no longer unique. The region has to spend a billion dollars or more every year to feed itself. A million of the eight million eaters within the land were, when I rode it, people who wanted work and could not get it. There were more old people and fewer young ones in the old land than in most other American regions. Twice as many freight cars—and probably twice as many trucks — brought food and fuel and materials in as took products out. And the more valuable products which went out had, in an America which New Englanders had helped spread to the Pacific, a longer way to go.
But the land remained rich. Not only did it have more dollars than its share in the banks, it had more education than its share in the heads of its people. There was, as a Southerner counts, little heartbreaking poverty apparent in the land. Not only were Yankees rich in Milton and Newton, also the poor were fed (and well, by Southern standards), even in bankrupt Fall River. Most of the people live in the towns, where their poverty can be articulate, where their distress must be met or seen. Furthermore, in the great industrial states the rich did not seem ruthless nor the poor driven (there were exceptions, as wageand-hour prosecutions showed; also there were factories which employers said labor regulations had shut up). On holidays the beaches are crowded, the circuses filled. Recreation in New England is not industry for outsiders alone. Neither bread nor circus is lacking. And a good deal more is provided.
‘We are living on fat,’ said a lean, rich young New Englander. And I expect the poor would say, ‘What is fat but food?’ Between them, I think, is an old problem which exists not only within the region but outside it. At home, Puritan morals remain strong in defense of possession: the rich have because the rich did; thrift must be protected from the thriftless. But there is also a new — and always new as the other is always old — morality of indignation: the rich got because the rich grabbed; pity is more important than profit. It is not necessary to choose between them to know that taxes have gone up at home (as also in Washington), and that much New England capital goes far away (much of it always did), to make profits and jobs elsewhere than in New England.
II
That old conflict, under a multitude of philosophies (ideologies is the word now), between the rich who want desperately to keep and the poor who need desperately to get, is not restricted to men in New England or anywhere else. It applies to nations and regions also. New England was on the poor side once. Some of that conflict went into the revolutionary patriotism of the American Revolution, It entered the fight between the planters and the infant Yankee industrialists about tariffs. And generally the poor men and the poor lands are more active about the business. The rich scream vociferously at every threat, but it is the poor who act in the streets, in the Congresses, and now around the factories. (These poor, of course, are by no means always hungry. They may be rich men, strong men, but there is generally a sharp stick of hunger behind the lands or men they lead.) The new rich are always the old poor.
New England lacks that sharp stick. It did not always lack it. I suspect that the greatness of New England grew less directly from the high morals of the Puritans than from the inhospitality of the land to which they came. Time and winter dramatically pointed the need for energy. My back still aches from the stones they pulled out of the fields. The long shut-in winters turned the man to the tool and the book. (In the South, in the winter sunshine between cotton picking and cotton planting, there were open fields, gun and dog.) And there was the sea: we remember shining sail and forget stinking forecastle. The history of men on the sea has been the history of men who could not make a living on the land. Not everybody got rich in New England. The Southerners had some sharp things to say about the girls who came in from the farms to the mills in the towns while the abolitionists were talking about slaves in the South. (New England spokesmen were proud of the small number of illegitimate children they had.) The West was not opened and the New England farms abandoned by men who went off in frolic. They departed from backbreak and poverty. After them men came into New England from the poverty of the world. Most of them are still poor.
We are better informed about the succession of the successful. They move in the books; they sit in the portraits of Gilbert Stuart, the snuff-grinder’s son. They lived in the houses of McIntire and Bulfinch. They went to Harvard. They began to write books. They were concerned with good causes. And they made — and make — I think the truest aristocracy America ever possessed. They would have distrusted such romanticization of themselves as surrounded and surrounds still the planter aristocrats of the South. But they were more durable. They had a better sense of values. Even at their richest they themselves were closer to the stones and the snow and the sea. Generally, though not always (there were the waistcoats and houses and yachts of Salem), they distrusted display. They believed in God and education, blood and money. Even now they retain standards which are admirable in a puzzled world. I am not sure they will be standards which will suffice.
These aristocrats are not New England. Only a little more than a third of the New Englanders now are native Americans of native parents. A good many of those have an Irish grandfather or a French-Canadian grandmother. A great part of the Yankees who do survive in New England from the ancient days are poor men, still scratching little Vermont farms or leaving them when grandfather dies. But the New England money aristocrat and the Connecticut Yankee who is the aristocrat of skill do still make the patterns of the land. Thrift and skill, industry, ingenuity and independence, are virtues which a polyglot people profess even when they lack the powers to participate in them.
Sometimes, indeed, they seem words. Thrift is real, billions are in the savings banks; but the rich aristocratic Yankee Governor of Massachusetts found very little of it in the people’s government of Massachusetts. Skill and ingenuity are in New England, but no monopoly of them is there. The Connecticut Yankee is often a Pole. The skills of modern industry are learned elsewhere also. Many more would like to be industrious for wages than are. And independence: a fifth of the people of Massachusetts were receiving relief. Sometimes the words sounded like a Southern shouting about bravery and honor and gallantry to a Southern people who needed clothes and shelter and bread.
And that was very strange. For New England had the only two things the South has seemed to lack: wealth and education. Not only do the rich maintain well-dressed armies of bankers and trustees and investment counselors to guard fortunes. Also the workers of New England get wages well above those of men and women working at the same jobs in the South (above them even when cheaper living in the warmer region is considered). That still continues true under the wages-and-hours law which lifted the wages of many in the South. For a long time even WPA workers received pay far above Southern levels. Families on relief in New England towns are much more secure than similar poor folk in the South.
New England is rich and educated. Not only do the Saltonstalls go to Harvard; also even the boys from relief families in the NYA work-experience project at Quoddy in Maine had as an average almost completed high school. New England had the first public school in America, and the first college. Its colleges are richer. A full fourth more is spent by New England on its publicschool pupils than the rest of the country spends. The public libraries are open in almost every little town.
But the land seemed to me to be as plagued with problem as the poor, less educated South. Not only did it seem so to me. There have been moments when both labor unions and bankers were frightened together. Mill treasurers and investment counselors, governors and college professors, have spoken about the threat to New England from other new competing industrial regions, particularly the South. Sometimes they have spoken about Southern competition in such high, hot moral indignation as their fathers used about slavery, but I doubt whether their chief concern was with the welfare of the new, eager, white, prolific Southern slaves.
III
The sharp stick was behind the South. And the anger in New England seemed comfortable even when it was choleric. In its wealth and education New England was also confused. He was a New Englander, employed by the governors of New England to speak for New England, who recorded the fact that when the Southerners started in textile manufacturing, to beat the ‘ damnyankees’ on a new kind of battlefield, Yankee machinery manufacturers came to their assistance by selling them machines in exchange for stock. The biggest bank in New England devoted to developing New England has also lent money in the South for plants which would compete with New England. The United Shoe Machinery Corporation, by its leasing system, has made the migration of industries from the shoe towns a much simpler matter. Business is business, undoubtedly. But such business, sound as it may be, is not vastly different from the action of labor in pushing up labor safeguards and wages in New England which, say business men of some of the same institutions that sell machines and lend money beyond New England, has forced some industry out of New England (or pushed it from crowded Massachusetts to rural Maine). Both the labor leaders and the business men are about legitimate business for the money or men they represent. All are right, or none of them are.
None of them, nor all of them together, can build a wall around New England — not short of another war. Indeed, if they could build a wall it would only fence in starvation. But, without benefit of wall, money and men in New England must save it or suffer in it together. Money has learned how to go far off to make its profits while it makes jobs for men far from Manchester and Fall River and Lawrence. But the people of New England have found their way by taxes to wealth. And maybe they have only begun. Certainly where there is much wealth they do not mean that there shall be much distress. If wealth — and the education it can command— in New England does not find a way to work in wage-paying jobs in New England, that money had better make enough in Michigan and Carolina to feed an increasing dependence in Massachusetts. (Of course, federal spending will modify the process, but Massachusetts spending has towered, too.)
Wealth and education have, I think, a bigger job than that. An aggressive, militant, raiding regionalism may serve the South, which has little to lose and much to gain. But New England has much to lose and much to save. Its hand would grow weary slapping down the hungry states beyond it. The only possible chance it has lies in helping the hungry up. I think that last is not only the hope of its security but the test of its civilization. We think a great deal of education in America. We count on its promises with faith in its results. We have the reputation of thinking much of money, too. Indeed, the American faith can almost be summed up in free enterprise and free education. No part of this land has had so much, or so much faith in both, as New England.
Through all his troubles, I believe the rich man like the poor man in New England has wished to use the wealth of the land to keep the living standards of New England intact, to keep the promise of its schools high, though mills might fail and incomes fall. In great measure that has been done. Even with a million men and women unemployed, the living standards of New England seemed to me along all the ways I went, with few exceptions, to be held higher than the standards in the whole land around it, hill-high above the standards of the South. This will be a better America if they stay there. But I think they can only stay there if Harvard and Yale and the schools behind them and the money around the schools can produce a leadership out of an old civilization capable of national creativeness in this time. They must be such men as can help the South come up to New England. Otherwise New England must come down toward the South. Beyond the South, maybe; there might not be a bottom for a crowded land of old people, with a falling birth rate, that cannot feed itself. Unless the process which has already begun in the stress upon recreation should proceed to a park, and trees come back across the little hills. It will be lovely forever, whatever happens.
‘. . . The Yankees were here and left their monuments in old brick mills beside the streams a long time ago. . . .’
The road does not run that way. Certainly it does not go straight as the crow flies. There will be frost heaves in it and turns and twists. But it must come at last to a destination in decency which will include North and South together. And North is not merely Saltonstall, but Salem Street, also; South is rich man, white man, black man, together. The Yankees once fought a war upon the sensible proposition that this could not be one nation, half slave and half free. They were right and they proved it. But neither can this nation be half rich and half poor. With a sharp stick behind us, uncertain and undirected in the South, we are fighting about that now. And I count it that the sensible Yankees will be on our side. This time we shall all win or lose together.