I’ve spent a lot of time in the rural South and rural North and I like to joke that the only difference between the rednecks is the accents.
Thanks–“rednecks” is a better term for what I was trying to describe than “hicks.”
Also, there’s also the racing of the trucks up and down Main Street - preferably without mufflers.
The term in Connecticut is “swamp Yankee”
Curtis, I believe you’re wrong about New England being progressive a hundred years ago. Back in the early twentieth century, pre-Depression era, New England was predominantly Republican and conservative, very pro-business, anti-labor union, it was in many respects the heart, soil and brain of the national Republican party. The first GOP floor leader of the Senate was Henry Cabot Lodge (the elder) of Massachusetts, the Speaker Of the House for many years was Frederick Huntington Gillette, also from Massachusetts. The quintessential Republican president of that period was yet another Bay Stater, Calvin Coolidge. As to the Democratic party, it was somewhat less conservative but not by that much.
A lot of things began to change after 1930, and not just due to the Depression. The percentage of Roman Catholics in Massachusetts and other New England states, especially the three southern ones, was rising dramatically, due in part to immigration and also to Catholics tending to have larger families, while the Protestant population wasn’t increasing at nearly so rapid a pace. This is significant inasmuch as the Republican party in New England was notoriously xenophobic, and many of its members as well as leaders were anti-Catholic, thus it was clear to many Catholics in the region, starting with the Irish, that they had to become Decmorats if they wanted to gain political power; and so they did. This had less to do with ideology than with clan vs. clan, thus regionally speaking the Republicans were the party of the Protestants, the Democrats the party of the Catholics,
When FDR was elected president and it became clear, as the years went by, that the Dems were here to stay, locally and nationally, the New England Republicans realized that they had to adjust to the changing times or perish, thus they began to gradually drift leftward, with only New Hampshire, of the six New England states, remaining staunchly conservative. Then there were was the international front. The Yankee Republicans tended to be Anglophile, thus extremely anti-German, pro-interventionist 1939-41, while the local Irish-dominated Democratic party was more in the isolationist camp (this was true nationally as well, with Americans of Irish and German descent heavily isolationist in those years, and not because they sympathized with the Nazis but because the Irish were anti-Brit on principle, wanted to see England lose, the German-Americans afraid of a backlash of the sort they suffered through during the First World War,–but I digress). It was around this time that such prominent local Yankees as Sumner Welles and Joseph Grew joined the Roosevelt administration. For the first time since before the Civil War it was “alright” for an upper crust Yankee to work for a Democratic president. The times were a-changing.
By the postwar era the once Protestant dominated Yankee GOP was opening up to “ethnics” (Catholics, Jews), and continuing its leftward drift; and the Democratic party wasn’t so loathed by the Yankees as it once was; while prejudice based on religion (and eventually race) in general was on the decline. This trend tended to favor the by now liberal dominated Democratic party in New England, and as the years went by the boundaries began to blur. The election of John F. Kennedy, a preppie, a Harvard man and an internationalist (Yankee credentials), also an irish Catholic, led to an meltdown of the regional Republican party, against which there was great hostility among many groups, especially the Irish, for their having been excluded from the “party of the elites” for so long. Then came to 1964 presidential election, as ultra-conservative GOP candidate Barry Goldwater went down to defeat in a landslide for Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, in the last presidential election in which “coat-tails” mattered (“coat-tails” is a term that meant that the local elections followed the national ones, thus if the Dems carried a state by a landslide in a presidential election, they’d win big locally as well, and vice versa). Alas, for the Yankee GOP, Johnson carried all six New England states by huge margins, and in Southern New England especially, this was the death knell for the local Republican parties so far as their ever gaining a workable majority in the state legislatures was concerned. Add to this the burgeoning counter-culture of the late 1960s, plus the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, both popular among white Yankee Republicans, and the local drift to the left was neat complete. Add to this the fact New England as a region has become over the last forty years a place people are as inclined to move to as from (reversing the old pattern), places like Massachusetts and Vermont have a large percentage of their populations comprised of out-of-staters, not to mention people from other parts of the world. The end result is that New England as a whole has become very liberal and cosmopolitan, and in many places the demographics have changed dramatically, as the local accent is dying out, as are regional expressions, turns of phrase, attitudes. All these reasons add up as the answer to why New England is so different from the way it used to be.
But there are definitely areas with little opportunity, like where mills have shut down. I think there is real poverty there, but you’re right it’s a different kind from in the city.
I agree Gigi: Vermont has become rather well to do, New Hampshire is far more middle class and less conservative than it used to be, however there’s still a good deal of poverty in Maine; and yes, mill towns, if they haven’t been “rehabbed”, tend to be poor, even in southern New England. The changes in the region are of a patchwork variety, enormous in some places, non-existent in others.
I think its funny that about 200 years ago the people in Massachusetts, and New England started a war, resisting gun control, when General Gage marched from Boston and tried to confiscate arms and ammunition, and now today, the people of Massachusetts can not even carry an empty flintlock in a reenactment parade in Lexington and Concord.
Flip / flop.