Modern Times

The Immigrants Arrive

After the Civil War, the Golden Age of Sail gave way to the Age of Steam, as the railroad emerged to transport goods long distances. Increasingly isolated in the corner of a vast and growing country, New England gradually gave up its advantages in trade and manufacturing. New York City [1] surpassed Boston [2] as the nation’s largest port, and the opening up of the West and California decreased New England’s dominance in the China trade. Even so, New England’s Brahmin class continued to preside over vast amounts of wealth from their factories, and they began to show it in more and more elaborate ways. In addition to travel to other parts of the country, the railroad opened up many parts of New England to tourism, and grand Victorian “summer cottages” (read: mansions) and hotels were built along the coasts of Rhode Island [3] and Maine [4], in the mountains of New Hampshire [5], and in the valleys of the Berkshires.

By the turn of the century, however, changes were occurring in the population. The first waves of immigrants from Ireland began in the early 1800s, but they intensified during the Great Hunger of 1850, during which two million people emigrated from the country. Many of them found their way to Boston [2], the closest major American city, and from there dispersed throughout the region. Poor but hard-working, many of them were welcomed in the mills. As their numbers swelled, however, a violent anti-Irish backlash began to coalesce among traditional Yankees anxious to hold on to their power and influence. In the mid-1850s political groups called Know-Nothings burned Catholic churches and terrorized Irish communities.

The Irish won out by sheer numbers. By 1850, they comprised one-third of the city of Boston, with other cities boasting similar percentages. The new immigrants also organized themselves politically, forming a network of patronage politics in urban wards. Within just a few generations, they completely changed the political make-up of the region, as represented in Boston by the colorful politician James Michael Curley. Curley spent almost as much time in prison as in political office in his early years—but eventually worked his way up to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911. After failing to get reelected, he returned to Boston, where he presided over the city as mayor or governor for 30 years. A hugely popular and hugely corrupt politician, he was eventually convicted of mail fraud and pardoned by President Truman in 1947.

Waves of other immigrants followed the Irish, including Italians and French-Canadians who also found work in the factories of the region. Not as complacent as the mill girls of a century earlier, the new immigrants helped push for improvements in working conditions. A 21-year-old Irish woman led her fellow female immigrants of more than two dozen different nationalities in walking out of a mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts [6], to perpetrate the Bread and Roses strike, one of the most significant watersheds in the labor movement. On the darker side, two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were unfairly accused of robbery and murder in 1920. Their case became a national cause célèbre, stirring up strong sentiments and prejudices about communists, immigrants, the labor movement, and the death penalty. Despite shoddy evidence and the intervention of prominent intellectuals such as Upton Sinclair and H. L. Mencken, however, they were found guilty and executed in 1927. Exactly 50 years later, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation exonerating them.

Decline and Rebirth

By the time of World War II, New England was already in a period of slow decline. Many of the mills and factories that generated New England’s wealth had become obsolete, and companies left the region in search of cheaper labor in other states and countries. At the same time, the urban centers that thrived in the previous century were abandoned by the middle class, who settled in streetcar suburbs on their outskirts. Despite various schemes to resurrect their cores, “urban renewal” was mostly a disaster, further hollowing out cities by bulldozing neighborhoods and erecting lifeless skyscrapers in their wakes. The sole bright spot in the postwar era was the election of one of New England’s native sons, the charismatic war hero John Fitzgerald Kennedy as president in 1960. Even that hope was dimmed, however, when Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet three years later. After struggling with the rest of the nation through the 1960s and 1970s, however, the region rebounded in the 1980s by playing to one of its strengths: knowledge.

New England was one of the first regions of the country to realize the potential of the computer to transform American society. Led by a wealth of well-educated engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology [7] and other area colleges, small technology firms grew into huge computer companies within a decade. The so-called Massachusetts Miracle revitalized the region and began a reversal of fortunes that injected wealth and self-confidence back into the cities. Since then, New England has been at the forefront of other technological revolutions, including the Internet and biotechnology, which has further bolstered its population and industrial base and left it well-poised for the 21st century. Indeed, when one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history hit the country in 2008, New England fared better off than most regions due to its diversified economy and its scarcity of housing that kept up demand.