Massachusetts, 'Bulwark Against the Kingdom of the Anti-Christ'

A brief guide to the most important state in the union

(Michael Sloan for the Boston Globe)

During the Depression, the Works Progress Administration commissioned writers to pen guides to the states. A new book, "State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America," edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, seeks to be a modern version of that project. The following is adapted from the Massachusetts chapter.

IN THE WEST, the state is as straight and uncomplicated as a flag, its little valleys sheltering what passes for our farm belt. The center gives way to the semicircle of former paper mill towns and textile mill towns crowding up to the capital. And then we are on the eastern shores, ragged and tangled in history, the Maine-like hump of the North Shore stretching down and curving up into the weird withered arm of Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims landed and started the whole thing.

The effect is such that, if you look at a map of Massachusetts and squint your eyes, you might imagine you are looking at the nation itself, only with no Texas, and a horribly deformed Florida. You might be tempted to believe that the whole country shaped itself in Massachusetts's honor. Certainly many in Massachusetts have believed so.

From its beginning, Massachusetts was self-importantly aware of its own self-importance, its special place in the history of our country. Outlining the divine mission of the colony he helped to found, Puritan John Endicott would call it the "Bulwark Against the Kingdom of the Anti-Christ." I still call it that today - it's better than the "Bay State."

Liberty, as they say, was cradled here, largely in the Green Dragon Tavern, where Sam Adams (Brewer, Patriot) roused his friends to dump East India tea into Boston Harbor and blame it on the Indians. The first shot of the Revolution was fired in Lexington, and the first American Army was raised in Cambridge. Massachusetts offered the first state constitution, and it served as model for the rest of the country. And in my own lifetime, it was Massachusetts that gave birth to the first gourmet food shop that served only pudding, and, yes, it was called "Pudding It First."

After independence, however, something changed. Massachusetts became unnecessary. Its farming population left for the newly opened west. Its trading fortunes foundered, giving way to textile and paper mills and small factories. For a while we were making half the nation's shoes - and many of those were made by children! So don't say we couldn't compete!

But as the mills were shuttered throughout the 20th century, so Massachusetts's influence on the nation waned. Quincy was once known as the City of Presidents. Specifically, the City of Two Presidents: John Adams, and then, by astonishing coincidence, John Quincy Adams. But now the very idea that a national leader might come from Massachusetts is routinely and cruelly rebuffed. So when you are growing up there it is difficult to escape the impression that you are lingering too long in a story that has long been over.

. . .

The Pilgrims came in 1620, of course, but they were looking for Virginia. Tired of dying on the open sea, they decided to settle Plymouth and die on land for a while. A Native American named Samoset welcomed them to what was, like it or not, their new home. And with the aid and friendship of the Wampanoags, and their chief, Massasoit, they stopped dying, started farming, and invented Thanksgiving.

But this new land was not any kind of melting pot. By 1630, the Puritans had come and settled the lumpy isthmus we now call Boston. As you know, the Puritans left England, angrily, because (a) they were dissatisfied with Elizabethan accommodation of Catholicism, and (b) they thought they knew everything. Dissent was not tolerated within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that is why Roger Williams, who thought the Puritans should actually compensate the Indians for their land, had to leave, and founded Rhode Island. You could do that sort of thing then: just go ahead and form a new state. And so all of New England was built on the long-lasting foundation of an absolute inability to be near anyone who disagreed with you.

It continued this way in Massachusetts, over many long and lonely winters. Towns would gather by necessity around a central green and turn their backs on one another. We would sit by the fire and brood and make brooms and bridles and such, and since familiarity among neighbors was scarce, we would instead, through sheer Yankee ingenuity, breed contempt from unfamiliarity. The result of this contempt: an ironic "commonwealth" of closely knit groups of isolationists.

I guess that I am from Massachusetts. But I never felt at home there, and, really, no one ever does. There are Texans and there are Minnesotans and even Californians, though that is a state as geographically and culturally motley as the entire eastern seaboard. But no one calls himself a "Massachusettsean," in part because it is impossible to say, and in part because ours is a tradition of exclusion.

Often, now, when I tell people I am from Massachusetts, they ask me: Why don't you have an accent? That is when I have to explain to them that that accent - the one they know from "Cheers" and "The Departed," with its flinty dropped r's and inexplicably fancy-pants long a's, is specifically a Boston Irish accent, primarily South Boston, but ranging throughout the working class suburbs where things were once built or made.

And then I must explain that even though my father came from the paper mill town of Fitchburg and still says "ahhnt" for "aunt," he switched vocal gears into a kind of upper middle-class neutral when he left to go to college, just like my mom did when she left her working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.

In the mid-'70s, at least, Brookline was a place where a young married couple from working class Fitchburg and working class Philadelphia with one child could scrape together the money to buy not only a home, but a home with 16 rooms, in a beautiful neighborhood, surrounded by doctors and heirs to department store fortunes. And there the three could wander in that gigantic house, 16 gigantic rooms away from everything else in the world, the child completely unaware that this was in any way unusual.

But by then, they are looking at me doubtfully, like I am lying about being from Massachusetts. They are looking at me as though I come from no place at all.

Another reason I did not feel at home was because I do not like sports. Boston has much to offer any visitor. There is of course a fine symphony orchestra, world-famous universities, and the Mother Church of Christian Science, which has a truly boss reflecting pool. However, if you do not like sports, Boston does not have much to offer you. The local sports teams - which I am told are the Baseball Red Sox, the Football Patriots, the Basketball Celtics, the Hockey Bears, and of course the famous Boston Lobsters of the World Team Tennis League - are an obsession.

When a game is on, it will be broadcast in every bar, home, and taxi cab. In the finest restaurant the waiter will be checking the scores and passing news of the game between the busboy in the kitchen and the Harvard professor at the table. The professor will tell you that, in a city largely stratified by class, race, and ethnicity, sports erases these distinctions and reminds us of our common humanity. And if you tell the academic that you don't happen to like sports, he will ask what is wrong with you, nerd? And then he will punch you in the face.

I once frequented an eccentric coffeehouse in a small town in Western Massachusetts. It hosted literary readings and served vegetarian food and a small selection of wines. It had a small TV that showed only a closed circuit feed of the baby eagles that had recently been hatched at a local bird sanctuary (which seemed perfectly reasonable to me). Unless there was a Red Sox game on, in which case, sports would actually preempt live baby eagles. Who wants to live in a world like that?

. . .

I live in New York City now, largely because the woman who would become my wife told me she was moving here. We've been here for 13 years, and I have not regretted my betrayal, though I do not call myself a "New Yorker."

You may be surprised to learn, though, that I still live part time in Massachusetts. I certainly was surprised to learn it.

Our place is in the Pioneer Valley, a cluster of little towns and farms and closed mills that follow the twining routes of the Connecticut River and I-91 North from Springfield. I had been coming out to these Hill Towns for years. My mother had a good friend who had grown up in Greenfield, and from time to time we would visit her little three-room house that hung over the North River at the end of a condemned bridge. On one side of this house was a path cutting steeply down to the river, its banks of solid rocks cut over millennia into "potholes," natural round basins full of dark water and little files. On the other side of the house were her only neighbors, a family who seemed to collect stray dogs and snowmobiles.

I am not trying to give you the impression that this was charming. Rather, I mean to say that as beautiful as the area was, and as much fun as I had there, it was all tinged by the reasonable fear that I was going to fall off a bridge, be bit by a dog, or crack my head open on a slippery rock, and drown. This was not the Berkshires, with its quaint inns and twilight picnics where you would listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a soft lawn surrounded by fireflies. This was a cluster of anxious, struggling little towns full of failed and failing businesses, badly constructed houses, and people sitting outside them, staring at you as you drove by.

From time to time, my mother's friend would ruefully comment that the area was being invaded by New Yorkers, buying up weekend homes and studio space on the cheap. But I never saw any evidence of it, and even as a teenager I thought she was insane. Why would someone from New York drive four hours to come here for the weekend? Didn't New York have its own depressed former mill towns to visit?

It made more sense that the hills would be invaded by moneyed folk just two hours away, from Brookline, for example.

About 20 years ago, my parents sold the 16-room house, and as you might guess, this gave them enough capital for two normal houses and a college education for me. They found one normal house in the eastern end of Brookline, the very last block of the town before Boston, right in the shadow of Fenway Park, if you can believe it, because I guess they had a sense of humor.

The other was a small, 1970s-era cabin with a sloping roof and unfinished solar heating system on the side of a hill next to what had been a pond, until the beavers dammed it up into a bog. She and my dad would spend weekends there. And I would visit with the woman who was now my wife. And some years later, my mother died, and my dad lost interest in the place, or could not bear it any more. And I once again found myself with a home in Massachusetts.

It was not a very good or big house, and at nights the bugs came up from the bog fiercely. But we were not rich, and the night stars were bright and dazzling and free. We had children, and we began carting them up there for the better part of the summer out of the feeling that they would benefit from the opportunity to run around in a space larger than a living room.

The time came though, not long ago, when our two children were growing larger, and the house was growing more junky than ever, and the sentimental pleasure of keeping up my mother's failed colony in the hills was beginning to wear off. We were about to give up and sell it, when something happened.

Our neighbor came over. It was amazing. He just walked across the street, Samoset-like, to say: "Welcome, strangers." He had his daughter with him, a year older than my own. He and his wife were locals, but they had just bought the land across the street and built a house there. I told him I hadn't even noticed. By then our two daughters were playing. I stood there, not knowing what to do.

"Would you like a ginger ale?" I said.

And he said yes, and luckily I had some ginger ale, and for the first time in the dozen years my mother and I had had the house, we had company.

I explained to him that we were probably going to move, because the house was too small and falling apart. We watched our daughters playing. And he said, "Did I mention I build and renovate houses?"

Then another thing happened. Looking for Internet access, I found myself in a used bookstore 30 minutes south, in a converted grist mill. They had free wireless there, and a cafe. The cafe had been started by a young couple, she from Amherst, he from Texas. They both had nose rings and big ideas about having readings and concerts in the cafe, and selling vegetarian food and carefully selected wines.

But just to be clear, they were not jerks. They were lovely and smart, and they sold "Cowboy Coffee" with the grounds left in the bottom. Every time someone bought a cup and finished it, they would take a Polaroid and put it on the wall. I looked around and saw dozens and dozens of young people, old people, locals, college kids, and dozens more, all holding up their empty cups, grinning through the caffeine haze, initiated into their own little coffee utopia.

"I would like to have some of that coffee," I said. "I would like to be on that wall."

"OK," said the young couple.

And I drank it, and it was terrible. And then I had my picture taken. I was a New Yorker now, and I had invaded. But I felt more at home in Massachusetts than ever.

"What is that television show?" I asked, pointing to a tiny TV.

"We have a closed circuit link to the baby eagles that have just been hatched at the local bird sanctuary," they said.

"That sounds perfectly reasonable," I said.

"That is," they said, "unless there is a Red Sox game on."

And I stopped and I thought about it for a moment. And then I said, "That sounds perfectly reasonable, too."

John Hodgman is the author of "More Information Than You Require" and a contributor to "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

There will be an event celebrating "State by State" at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, at 7 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets are $10; call 617-661-1515.