BOSTON AND MASSACHUSETTS
Boston, settled by Puritans who preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), but imposed a demanding obligation on the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism lodged the powerful Elect at the state-level, tasked with “guiding” private shareholder-based New England town democracy. In the Puritan system, town democracy and Puritanism were co-existed in the town church—unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, Puritan church and state were united. Structurally and culturally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.
John Winthrop
Boston’s equivalent to Penn was the former English country squire John Winthrop (as founder of the town of Boston in 1629).4 Winthrop established a Puritan policy system that distinguished between the roles of private and public in the Puritan community. Puritanism may have combined church and state, but it divorced/separated the state from private profit and economic growth. Instead Winthrop’s Puritanism believed private profits should benefit the community’s disadvantaged, and business elites be distanced from policy-making. In his famous A Modell of Christian Charity Winthrop advocated that:
under a due forme of government, both civill and ecclesiastical in which the concern for “the publique” must outweigh all private interests. We must bear one another’s burdens … We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality … For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. (Winthrop, 1630) If this “modell” were applied to municipal governance—as Winthrop meant it to be—the model of Christian charity would be Philadelphia Privatism turned upside down, inside out or both. Winthrop’s Puritanism perceived government as primary, to be an instrument to make men holy and provide for the needs of the community’s most desperate. This primary use of government to care for the disadvantaged are two critical divides between Privatist and Progressivist political cultures. They are as evident in the seventeenth century as they are today. If private sector success is key to community economic growth or if community economic growth is tasked to ameliorate inequality, then Progressive and Privatist cultures pursue different economic development goals.
Massachusetts’ Political/Administrative Structures and Relationships
Winthrop stressed the unity of church and state less in his municipal corporation than at the state level. The state, led by the Elect, was entrusted to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in local policy-making. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that towns and their residents be moral, hard-working, prosperous citizens deserving of a future with God in heaven. Municipal government was thus held accountable not only to the will of the shareholder town meeting (established in 1636 Massachusetts) but to God and his Elect in the state capital as well.5 Accordingly, in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court (state government) instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments.” In 1647 the General Court required towns of 50 inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade,” and a town of 100 to set up a “grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was that each individual was expected to read the Bible. Literacy was essential, a prerequisite for self-governance at the town level. The role of the Massachusetts General Court in municipally relevant affairs was significant then, and remains so today.
As intense as their desire to practice their religion, Puritans emigrated to unleash their middle-class entrepreneurial spirit—reflected in the “business” purpose of town meetings and democracy. The Puritans secured their charter from the crown as a “trading company” owned by shareholders. City-building in early New England was a legal, economic enterprise, closely regulated by the state. Town shareholders included investors as well as residents. Each town formed an agreement/contract with its shareholders to perform tasks for the maintenance of the commons and designating tracts of land the proprietor solely owned and paid taxes on. Originally, most of the land went unused, and a function of town government was to attract and sell such unused units to new residents. This may be the earliest expression of Puritan town economic development. The town, as a private corporation, left to the discretion of the General Court most public policy areas. With few exceptions, this tightly controlled unit of sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the country.6 The town evolved into a pure service delivery unit (Russo, 2001, pp. 10–11).
Wealthy families invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and the 1640s respectively) and contested New York’s borders (Russo, 2001, pp. 49–52, 7–10). By 1700 nearly all of New England, excepting the most northern areas, was incorporated. During the seventeenth century original towns sold off land to form smaller towns. Commercial centers developed (Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Providence, Springfield and Boston). Most were ports (on the Atlantic or rivers), and nearly all were grid-platted. Dramatic growth occurred post-1700 with “clustering” of town centers. From that time, New England’s population growth lacked a “place to go,” and “pent up”—it awaited a future Yankee Diaspora.
The now-famous New England town democracy was not formalized by state legislation until 1660 (Massachusetts Open Town Meeting Law), and the first town that practiced town democracy in the current sense of the expression was Ashfield (Robinson, 2011). Over time, town meetings offered an opportunity for rival elites to crystallize; it is no accident that a Boston town meeting (1772), not the Bay State legislature, voted into existence the first Committee for Correspondence (including John Adams, Sam Adams, James Otis, Joseph Warren and Josiah Quincy Sr. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 148).
The Evolution of Puritan Elites
After Winthrop, Massachusetts Puritans softened the tough edges of his original system. As the Bay Colony matured, the religious intensity of Massachusetts Puritan governance wilted and a secular humanism displaced the harsh and demanding Puritan value system. This new mentality, however, left untouched critical values associated with Winthrop’s “city on a hill” passage. Commitment to community, a distrust of profit in public policy, the sharp separation of business from government, moral elite leadership of state government, the use of government to address needs of the disadvantaged, and the almost evangelistic function of the city on the hill as the “modell” of civic duty for others to imitate remained at the core of New England’s system of policy-making. The transition from a Puritan Elect to Boston Brahmin took nearly 150 years,
The shift from raw Puritanism (Congregationalism) to Unitarianism commenced in the late eighteenth century.7 Long before Unitarianism was first preached at King’s Chapel in Boston (1784), however, generational change prompted by Puritan intolerance and inflexibility, and the development of a maritime sector to balance agriculture, weathered the old Puritanism. Authority, formerly derived from religion and morality, shifted to more secular foundations. Substituting for Calvinism was a Weberian Protestant ethic (hard work, a moral life) and commercial success.
Fifty years after its initial settlement the Puritan religious Elect was replaced by a new Elect composed of morally bound, highly educated commercial elites most of whom financed or sailed the seas of the planet. Their new-found wealth, used for investment in maritime initiatives, was accumulated through the land sales associated with New England town-building. Post Puritan, pre-Unitarian business elites had evolved into a “codfish” aristocracy based on fishing, whaling, and trade with Europe and the Far East. But success in business carried with it an obligation to serve the community by helping the disadvantaged and the general public welfare through service in government—noblesse oblige: “The pulpit and the quarterdeck were the sacred and secular symbols of authority in the family, in society and in politics … Boston federalism was a secularized version of the Puritan ethic” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199).
So, unlike Quaker elites, post-Puritan elites accepted responsibility for governmental leadership. Governors after 1688 were drawn from this codfish aristocracy:
They modeled themselves not only on the Puritan ideal of authority, but also on the old Roman ideal of gravitas: self-interest yes, self-indulgence no … They stood rather than ran for office, they listened to their own consciences, not to the voice of the people … were collectivists rather than individualists, believing in family and class as organic communities and society as the family writ large. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199)
These men presided over what Baltzell calls a “deference democracy,” one where aristocratic elites made policy on behalf of the “best interests” of its citizenry: “the best people were elected to office, time after time, in town after town for over two hundred years” (1979, p. 199).8
Transcendental Unitarianism replaced the fire, brimstone and sinners in the hands of an angry God with concern for humanity, a separation of church and state, a tolerance for religious diversity, and the essential goodness for mankind that, if protected from the evils of civilization, would “live long and prosper.” Education, always a first-order Puritan priority, became the key vehicle to achieve both moral and economic ends. Education enabled, enlightened, empowered and was core to addressing needs of the disadvantaged. Almost imperceptibly, economic growth meant transforming “people.” Improving business profitability was separate and apart from government’s purposes—it was the responsibility of businessmen themselves. Boston-style Progressivism entrusted policy-making to a business elite, but sharply divorced private and business profit from policy-making as harmful to the overall community, and a bane to the community’s disadvantaged.
With the arrival of the Early Republic Boston’s agricultural and maritime economic base was disrupted by an emerging entrepreneurial business elite: textile manufacturers. As early as 1810 this manufacturing elite accumulated wealth from factories built in Lowell, Andover, Salem and southern New Hampshire. Using a new form of business structure (the corporation), textile entrepreneurs made fortunes quickly, moved into Charles Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston’s high-status neighborhoods and, by the 1830s, not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy but also increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, resulted.9 The Brahmin Elect carried with it the old Winthrop mission:
[An] obligation on the part of older families to the welfare of “their town” and new determination to participate actively once again in local political affairs … Boston could be saved if members of the “better class” took over their responsibilities and regained positions of social and political leadership in the community … [They] emphasized the responsibility of “the happy and respectable classes” to watch over those laws that affected “the less prosperous portions of the community.” Their obvious desire for political control of Boston carried with it a sense of responsibility for the prosperity of the town and the welfare of its less fortunate classes—a sort of moral stewardship, a form of noblesse oblige—that would continue to be an integral part of Boston’s political heritage. (O’Connor, 2002, pp. 87–8)
Josiah Quincy
Only in 1820 did Boston petition the state legislature to change from town into city. By then Boston, a thriving cosmopolitan trading city of 18,000 in 1790, had increased to 43,000. Boston desperately needed modernization of its infrastructure to accommodate its population, and a fishing industry that needed dredged harbors and rebuilt wharfs. Towns, however, lacked the authority to accomplish these tasks. City status, achieved in 1822, brought with it a charter that permitted a bicameral city council and a strong Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested.
Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor, Brahmin Josiah Quincy stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis.10 Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old town elites, he established a municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him. Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex-officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions, and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status (O’Connor, 2002, p. 93). While Philadelphia’s Privatist, weak, committee-dominated municipal government neglected its infrastructure and services, Quincy hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from the city’s streets; established a municipal garbage pickup service; established municipal-level police and fire departments; created a department of corrections for youth offenders; acquired control over the city’s sewers and minimized their pollution; oh, and in case you missed it, conducted Boston’s first municipal-level urban renewal program—building on the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market (ironically Edward Logue’s initial 1960 urban renewal project rebuilt both). The Boston that Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated the healthiest city in America—and the most indebted.
Traveling on a time machine to 1898, we would see his great-grandson Josiah Quincy IV (son of yet another mayor, John Quincy Jr.), the last of the Quincy dynasty, as the Democratic mayor of Boston, a political party which included Boston’s immigrant Irish. Still very much a Brahmin, Quincy IV supported:
extension of the powers of government and in the rights of organized labor and as mayor employed settlement worker Robert A. Woods, the social worker Alice N. Lincoln, and the founder of the playground movement, Joseph Lee … [Quincy as mayor] made Boston’s city government for a brief time the cutting edge of urban reform in America. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 373)
In short, the first Josiah Quincy was no exception: his Progressive style of governance and economic development persisted through the nineteenth century. Boston Progressivism stressed local governmental executive leadership by a Brahmin elite pursuing the community’s greater good with an emphasis on education and people-related services. Called “Yankee” and “secular Puritans” by Woodard, our Progressives exhibited from the earliest days of the American Republic:
the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives … For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process and aggressive assimilation of foreigners. (Woodard, 2011, p. 5) Its discomfort with unbridled capitalism, corporate conflicts of interest and persistent efforts to assist the disadvantaged through municipal policy distinguish the approach. Government … could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. (Woodard, 2011, p. 60)
Boston infused into Progressivism its sense of “mission,” its propensity to “impose its ways on everybody else”: “For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world” (Woodard, 2011, p. 61). This sense of mission overlaps profoundly into contemporary ED, most evident in our Policy World composed largely of Progressive-inclined academics—setting it apart from the more Privatist Practitioner World.
Ron W. Coan 