New England Celebrates

...The Puritans who came over in 1630 brought with them and planted here the germ of every state constitution and of the federal constitution, and hence of the whole political theory of the United States...

...Boston, of course, is the official centre of the celebration, though the Puritans did not land at Boston but at Salem...

...New England has become more and more the Mecca of the tourist, and even of the millionaire settler...

...In these constitutions the idea is not merely the evolution from a germ, but is in language and in fact pretty closely adherent to the origins of Salem and Boston...

...What operates to defeat the success of that idea is that in the other New England states there is an impression which will not down—that if New England is to be regarded as one, Boston will be the one...

...and outside Massachusetts, and even in parts of Massachusetts, Boston is not wholly loved...

...There is very little about them written by outsiders and we get our ideas of them mostly from what every Tom, Dick and Harry among them wrote about themselves, but among the extremely few things left on record by visitors is one by Father Gabriel Druillette, a Jesuit missionary...

...However that may be, the fact on which the New England tercentenary rests is that beyond a doubt the Puritans founded the institutions on which the United States today, in spite of its late divagations, rests...

...The supposedly hard-boiled Puritans made him at home, and took pains not only to furnish him with a fish dinner on Fridays but to leave him privacy for his own devotions...

...At the same time, it is possible to conclude that if there is more native enthusiasm in other places than in Boston, it is because the ancestral feeling is stronger in those places...

...In the second place, there is about it no element of the customary "exposition" or "world's fair" flair...

...It is that 1930 is the 300th anniversary of the foundation of American institutions...

...and the hymns were such as might be sung by any Christian or Jew...

...This foundation of American institutions was by the Puritans, not by the Pilgrims...

...But that is about the extent of the concession to human nature...

...A perfectly sincere attempt is being made to put all New England on view exactly as it is, without puffery...

...It was, for instance, a reproach to Calvin Coolidge, when he began his political career, that no born Vermonter like him could get the Massachusetts habit of thought or be representative of it...

...The headquarters of the various commissions which, although they do not exactly give direction, at least supply the main ideas, are in that city...

...the intention is to introduce the country to a section...

...It was as early as 1643 that Massachusetts announced, "Our allegiance binds us not to the laws of England any longer than while we live in England...

...Yet, curiously enough, the chief enthusiasm for the celebration is outside Boston, and it is in other places that the real bang and swing and go have been imparted...

...there is only good will for it even in the other New England States where the feeling is somewhat languorous and not incited by ancestral memories...

...That was the principle which reached fruition in 1775 at Concord and Bunker Hill...

...The central idea is that New England has been misunderstood or misrepresented, or both, and that this year the right way to meet that situation is to welcome the visitor and then let him do his own observing...

...The purpose of this article will be to consider these peculiarities and how far they have been successful, although, as the "finis" will not be written until late in the fall, any such attempt is tentative...

...For instance, the celebration was opened on Boston Common on Sunday, June 1; and the addresses were made by a Catholic, Senator David I. Walsh, a Jew, Justice Irving Lehman of New York, and Miss Ada Louise Comstock, president of Radcliffe College...

...but what outsiders do not understand is that each New England state has its own characteristics, and each has a strongly marked character of its own, which is not that of Boston or even of Massachusetts...

...this is due to an unreasoning kind of literature which has become fashionable lately in the widely read magazines and even in books, in which New England is pictured as a degenerate ruin, notable chiefly for abandoned farms...

...In the fourth, it is the first wholesale attempt to combine the differing sections of New England into one and present those sharply varying communities as a whole, having characteristics of its own...

...At the time of this writing, it seems as if all New England looked on the tercentenary with a friendly eye, but as if the vim and vigor were supplied chiefly in Massachusetts...

...it is rather political and social...

...One of the most striking of these is "the absence of all sectarian prejudice and even of sectarian feeling...

...There are pageants, to gratify the general human love of display, and things have been so arranged that any visitor to New England will find something going on, if not at the place he happens to "light on," then at some easily reachable place nearby...

...Vermont, for instance, is historically closer to New York than to Massachusetts, and Rhode Island was settled by such exiles as Roger Williams, who did not merely leave Massachusetts but were driven out...

...its great natural beauties have become more and more known, and it is no longer regarded as merely a place where the country gets pretty as you come near the Canada border...

...Not, of course, that the original settlers were devotees of either liberty or tolerance...

...Religion, in fact, does not figure at all in the celebration, except the essential element of all religion, the reverence for God and thankfulness...

...To explain this, it is necessary to correct the widespread misconception that Boston is New England...

...and something similar may be said of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut and above all Rhode Island...

...and John Eliot, the Puritan "Apostle to the Indians," urged Druillette to spend the winter with him...

...How many visitors pass through New England every year cannot be statistically stated, though the usual vague generalization never stops short of "a million...

...and while it still remains uncertain whether this can be an entire success, it has been successful up to the time of this writing...

...NEW ENGLAND CELEBRATES THE tercentenary of the founding of New England, the celebration of which began on June i and will continue through October, is different from any historical celebration heretofore recorded in America— different in numerous ways, in fact altogether...

...and it was not more than a few years after they had founded their state that they were unconsciously laying the foundations of the American Revolution by asserting their independence of the laws of England...

...In every town and village, at least in Massachusetts, the whole population has been put on notice to greet the visitor without self-advertisement but to give him all the chance in the world to look around...

...For this reason all attempts to tout the country on its commercial and manufacturing merits are frowned upon and hurriedly hushed...

...There is, of course, a central idea...

...The truth is that the whole section was never so wide awake, so busy, so fruitful, even in what such writers would call its palmiest days...

...It was also noticeable that it was hard to raise money for the celebration in Boston after the beginning, and that something of a "drive" had to be inaugurated, whereas in the smaller cities and towns people seemed ready and anxious to give...

...This is a generalization, of course...

...Their purpose was to escape from a tyranny in their own land and fashion the new settlement according to their ideas and for their best interests...

...they had no political purpose at all...

...A confounding thing about that last is that though Boston takes the lead, the vim and vigor have come more largely from other towns...

...Thompson says in the following paper, the celebration differs in several interesting respects from the usual patriotic centenary...

...Happy in the thought of a great past, New England now seeks to weld states, which have marked characteristics of their own, into a unit adapted to the tasks of the future.—The Editors...

...In the cities, at any rate, one creed gets along very well with the others, and whatever bigotry there is seems to be an importation brought by Protestant immigrants, chiefly from the British Isles and the Canadian provinces...

...The Pilgrims came here from a religious motive in 1620, the Puritans came in 1630 with the deliberate purpose of founding a commonwealth...

...they were purely religious refugees...

...In the third, the ambitious aim of it is to have the whole population take part, instead of having it governed and mainly made by a set of committees...

...It is unique among celebrations...

...As Mr...

...Salem, where the Arbella landed with her Puritan cargo, started things off with a whoop, whereas Boston was quite decorous and in the towns near Boston and surrounding it there was always more spontaneous enthusiasm than in the capital itself...

...Despite the fact that this is a Puritan celebration, there is a gratifying absence of all sectarian prejudice and even of sectarian feeling, and credit for this belongs to all creeds...

...In the first place, it is the celebraBy CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON Three hundred years ago the Puritans set up a commonwealth in the new world, and New England has worked hard to observe the occasion appropriately...

...Nevertheless, the celebration is sure to be a success...

...The present celebration is a physical demonstration of that attempt, though the New England Council is not directing it...

...The idea back of it tion of the landing of the Puritans, but it is not is, although it would not be admitted by any New sectarian or even religious...

...In fact it is only the largest and most important city in that section, and in other Yankee states it is nearly as foreign as Charleston or Philadelphia...

...The Scripture readings, the prayer and benediction, and the invocation were by a Jewish rabbi and by Protestant ministers of differing sects...

...That last was not in the Pilgrim mind...

...and it is as a political and not a sectarian event that their landing is celebrated...

...Yet there is a New England character, which is as pronounced in such states as it is in Massachusetts, and wholly different from the character in other parts of the Union...

...At the same time, they were neither so undemocratic or so intolerant as a late fashion depicts them...

...Arkansas and Virginia are both in the South, but not in the least alike...

...Now, how far have the celebrants been successful in these purposes of theirs ? It is rather early to say...

...The Puritans, however, had definite political intentions...

...A great many of them come with a curious prejudice, or at least an instinctive agnosticism, about the country...

...Englander, that each of these states is small and has become of less importance as the nation has become swollen, and that New England will exercise more influence if its internal divisions of character can be subordinated and the section presented to the Union as a unit—not exactly as one state, but as something like that...

...The New England Council has been struggling to abolish these differences and to make the rest of the country look on New England as a whole...

...The United States of today takes the slant it does because of the landing of the Arbella at Salem in 1630...

...that Boston is now a Catholic city in which the Irish are the predominant strain, and that however great may be its good will toward the historic environment in which it lives, it is bound to lack something of that ingrained feeling of love for those who are not really its forefathers which can be found in the places to which the descendants of the early settlers have moved...

...The tercentenary, therefore, aims to let the visitor see New England for himself rather than to advertise it, in the confidence that seeing is believing...