Has New England always been at the front of progressivism

I’m looking at a history of child labor in the US (abolishing it was a progressive goal)

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html

And some of the earliest reforms were in New England. I believe the same thing happened with abolitionism, the first states were northeast or new england.

Now with gay marriage New England is at the front again.

So is New England usually at the front of the nation in economic, social and political progressivism (or is this selection bias)? If so, why?

I really don’t see how an area known for working class hardasses (yeah, I’m talking to you Boston) or rural dwellers (like Vermont or Maine) would be so progressive.

I think I once heard the lack of diversity makes people more progressive. In areas where there are large amounts of diversity (mississippi, which is 60% white and 40% black for example) people try to keep the ‘others’ down. But if you look at the white vote, they tend to become far more conservative when the black % of the population goes above 15%. Fear of ‘the other’ can be used as a wedge issue.

http://blog.prospect.org/blog/ezraklein/Obama-Kerry-Race.jpg

However I don’t know if that is just a fluke due to the south being heavily black, or a sign that people are only progressive when they aren’t exposed to diversity. Either way, I get the impression New England is fairly culturally and racially homogenized. And the conservatives I do know from the northeast tend to be more moderate libertarians rather than the kinds you see in the south.

Will racially and culturally homogeneous nations like Sweden become more right wing as their Muslim immigration numbers keep going up?

I’ve heard it said that fashion trends go east to west but legal trends go west to east.

I would assume it is the opposite.

My guess is that the Northeast has always been one of the wealthier parts of the country, and that wealth affords economic progression. The US in general preaches morals to the poorer parts of the world in the same way, telling them that their labor practices are all wrong. You should be paid more money. You should eliminate sweatshops. You shouldn’t put children to work. These things are easy to do when you’re rich, not so much when every precious penny counts. This is what I believe happened in the early part of the 20th century when the comparatively rich Northeast began campaigning for better working conditions and pay across the country.

I think that’s the story for economic issues at least. I think diversity is the key for human rights issues. We can see how relatively rich Europe, while quite progressive economically, has been scared shitless by the influx of Muslims to the point of banning minarets and head scarves. Hopefully it doesn’t get any worse.

David Hackett Fischer, in Albion’s Seed, developed a theory of regional sociopolitical cultures. It is discussed in Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind, Chapter 4, “The Fall of Washington”:

New England was deliberately populated by religious progressives in the first place.

Albion’s Seed, by the way, is one of the most impressive books I’ve read, truly a wonder IMHO.

New England was also the first region in the country to have its economy convert from agriculture-based to manufacturing-based, and therefore to have to deal with the substantial changes in social order that the Industrial Revolution caused.

I have heard this said in the context of California being very innovative and “cutting-edge” but, at the moment, I cannot think of a concrete example.

I believe strict liability for product liability had its genesis in California

I think there is some selection bias at work here. Massachusetts and Maine were highly active in abolition and the Civil War, to be sure. However, they also have a history of discrimination against Irish immigrants. Boston saw some antisemitic violence during WWII and major racial tension in the 1970s.

For decades, Boston was such a stronghold of artistic censorship that “Banned in Boston” was a well-known catch-phrase.

Massachusetts has legalized gay marriage, but note that the impetus for doing so was judicial (although the people seem content not to overturn it). Maine voters of course recently rejected gay marriage.

Massachusetts has implemented certain important health insurance reforms, but Olympia Snowe of Maine was one of the principal roadblocks to a public option, a stance that she presumably thinks is acceptable to her constituents.

Rhode Island had no state income tax until 1971, and New Hampshire still doesn’t.

None of this is to say that there’s no difference between Mass. and Miss., of course. :smiley: I’m just suggesting that any generality is going to be pocked with exceptions.

That’s one way of looking at the Puritans, I guess. :wink:

Even the Irish situation has played a role in it. They did achieve a serious amount of political power of their own, thanks to some career pols who played up existing (well-founded) resentments to create a big-government system that catered to them. As much as the “something in the air” argument is attractive, a history of strong leadership by a relative-few individuals to create that atmosphere has to be considered, too.

Agreed. I live in a small town near Boston and remember ‘Blue laws’ (things you can’t do or buy on Sunday) and ‘dry’ towns. You wouldn’t believe the difficulty getting the first restaurant license for sale of beer and wine (no ‘hard likker’ mind you!).

I agree. New England/the Northeast were at the forefront of abolitionism in the early part of the America’s history when they’re weren’t any states away from the Atlantic, but the Northeast was happy to profit from shipping cotton out of New York and Boston. This might be biased by my Midwestern upbringing, but I tend to think that abolitionism as a political movement really took off in the Midwest. This is where the Republican party was formed and Lincoln came from, after all.

Also, women’s suffrage got its start in America in the western states in the late 19th century.

I was taught something similar in high school, but it the opposite from what you heard. Basically, most of the massive immigration in the 19th century went to the Northern (Union) states because there was plenty of open land in the West and Midwest to farm and large cities with industrial jobs in the Northeast. The South only really had one big city, New Orleans, and was mostly agriculture. Most of the farm land had been taken up by large plantations.

So while the North had new waves of populations of Germans, and Italians, and Scandinavians, and Irish Catholics and the like to shake up the political landscape in the North, the South continued for generations with the same British and Scots-Irish plantation aristocracy and black underclass and one around to no push for change.

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What was New England’s stance on Prohibition? That act was a classic progressive one, but if I remember correctly NE had an economic stake in brewing, which might tilt the balance somewhat.

I think the answer is that its always been that way. New England has a history of being very highly educated and high levels of education usually corellate with more progressive outlooks. I’ve often seen it claimed (I’m not sure how you prove this) that 18th century New England was the most literate society in the world at that time. New England also enacted compulsory public education very early on. So its probably no surprise that this level of education carried over into a progressive populace.

Except education doesn’t correspond directly with liberalism. Remember that the uneducated poor vote overwhelmingly Democratic, while the middle-class up to the moderately rich vote Republican. (By contrast, Obama carried the super-super-rich.) Similarly, education generally increases conservatism as you start from the bottom; only when you hit the elite college graduates and doctoral students do you get a leftward effect.

That means that having “the most literate society” or “enacting compulsory public education” won’t move the population leftward in any significant manner. What it will do, however, is inflate the size of the educational elite, the tiny fraction of the population that is considered an “intellectual” - college professors, etc. That won’t swing many elections by sheer numbers, but if the educational elite has disproportionate political influence, then that will make a difference.

Damn straight. Just look at the Waltz of the Chestnuts.

By 1855 New York and every state in New England had full statewide prohibition. By 1920 most of these states had repealed their state bans, but all still had strong local prohibitions that effectively left the states “dry.” CT, MA, NY, VT were all made completely dry by the 18th amendment.

On a similar note there are 11 states which have decriminalized pot (to one degree or another). New York is one. But no New England state has.