MASSACHUSETTS

The first Europeans to exploit resources in the state of Massachusetts were fishermen who came from England, France, Portugal, and Spain in the mid-sixteenth century. They went ashore to process their catch; soon a flourishing fur trade was established with Native Americans. Religious persecution later drove a group of English Puritans who wished to separate from the Church of England to the New World in 1620. They settled in a Massachusetts village, which they named Plymouth. In 1630 a non-Separatist Puritan group settled to the north in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The group was headed by patriarch John Winthrop (1588–1649). Winthrop believed strongly that the material success of the new colony would be a visible sign of God's blessing. Between 1630 and 1640 around 20,000 English people settled in Massachusetts.

Migration of the English to Massachusetts slowed around 1640, because in that year a civil war brought Puritans to power in the mother country and removed religious persecution as a reason for immigration. Towns like Salem, Gloucester, Marblehead, and Boston, however, afterward remained important centers of the fishing industry; but as time went by, fishing and fur trading began to decline. As the supply of valuable beaver skins was being exhausted, the settlers turned to farming the rocky soil as means of sustenance. In the face of white encroachment upon the land, Native American tribes steadily declined, and many were wiped out in King Philip's War (1675–1676). As a sign of European dominance, Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were merged in 1692 by royal decree.

Settlements spread across the colony in the eighteenth century. By 1730 Boston reached a population of 15,000. The city soon became a center of shipping and commerce. It also evolved into a hotspot of political unrest, since colonists were becoming more and more dissatisfied with tight political and economic controls imposed by the British. The cry of "taxation without representation" accompanied resentment caused by British control of trade and political rights. In 1773 the citizens of Boston expressed their frustration by dumping tea into the harbor. By 1775 the time was ripe for the beginnings of the American Revolution (1775–1783) in Lexington and Concord.

Massachusetts required some adjustments after the defeat of the British. The Shays' Rebellion (1786–1787) occurred when central and western farmers challenged the power of eastern commercial leaders; but the rebellion ultimately failed to change the status quo. Massachusetts went on to become the sixth state of the Union in 1788. The Federalist Party soon became dominant in Massachusetts. They represented the governing commercial interests.

By 1800 it became evident that an agricultural economy was not viable in Massachusetts. In addition to inhospitable, rocky soil, land was depleted of its resources. For years farmers had paid little attention to conservation. More and more farmers moved westward to find better land and better opportunities. The Erie Canal made it easier for western farmers to find markets in the East. Massachusetts began to look toward other economic horizons. For a time the whaling industry in Nantucket and New Bedford was the most profitable in the nation. With the decline of the whaling and fishing industries the state also became a center for the textile industry. That was especially true in the mill towns of Waltham, Lowell, and Lawrence. The mills were originally built because of the unavailability of British textiles during the War of 1812 (1812–1814). Mills flourished since there was ample waterpower available on Massachusetts rivers.

The best-known of the mills was at Lowell. The "Lowell system" included a large capital investment and the concentration of all processes in one plant under a unified management. It specialized in a kind of coarse cloth easily worked by unskilled workers. Most of the workers were young women from surrounding farms who came to supplement their families' meager incomes. They worked from sunup to sunset for very low wages. The well-designed Lowell community provided supervised housing and activities for the girls. Other mill towns copied this paternalistic system. Yet by 1840 Lowell mirrored other mill towns in its over-crowded, dirty conditions.

One positive development in the 1840s was that Massachusetts enacted the nation's first child labor law. It allowed a maximum 10-hour day for children under 10. While this law may seem inadequate by today's standards, it was quite progressive in an era when children were routinely exploited in the workplace.

Other industries that sprouted up in Massachusetts during that period included the manufacture of metal products, leather goods, whale products, and shipbuilding. Shoe factories were particularly prominent. Although most of the shoe factories fled to other states Massachusetts remained the center of shoe workers' unions for a long time to come. By 1850 steam engines were produced in Massachusetts. A network of railroads that was begun in 1826 helped open new areas for industrial expansion. The American Civil War (1861–1865) spurred industrial growth, which was also helped by the many immigrants who flocked to Massachusetts from northern and southern Europe and from French Canada.

As one of Massachusetts' major urban areas, Boston faced a major challenge in the mid-1840s, when a potato famine precipitated a mass migration from Ireland. These desperately poor immigrants were willing to take any menial job in order to survive, but they were greeted in their new country with a widespread disdain that was based upon ethnic and religious bigotry. After 1865, however, the Irish became politically powerful as mainstays of the Democratic Party and economically successful throughout the state. They helped Massachusetts become one of the most industrialized states in the nation by the end of the nineteenth century. The family history of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) is a good example of the rags-toriches stories of some Irish immigrants.

Conflicts between immigrants and their descendants, and the entrenched Republican Yankee conservatives in Massachusetts continued to plague the state into the new century. Class conflicts were largely responsible for a devastating strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence in 1912. The various factions eventually learned to accommodate one another. According to historian Richard D. Brown, there was a "pragmatic willingness" to accept diversity and, "haltingly, people adjusted to the multiethnic, urban, industrial character of Massachusetts."

The Great Depression of the 1930s nearly devastated Massachusetts. Unemployment in some localities reached as high as 40 percent. Massachusetts embraced Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1882–1945) efforts to stimulate the economy, but only World War II (1939–1945) brought any real increase in employment. The state's economy began to revive around 1950. While many of the old industries and mill towns were in decline, high-technology businesses began to develop in the suburbs of Boston. Industries oriented toward electronics, computers, and defense systems sprang up. That led to an increase in service sector businesses like banking, insurance, health care, and higher education. White-collar employment in the middle-class suburbs was on the rise.

By 1989 Massachusetts was again in a serious economic decline. It lost 14 percent of its jobs in three years. The general recession of the early 1990s was aggravated by a collapse in the real estate market in the late 1980s. Employment in construction dropped 44 percent between 1988 and 1991. Wholesale and retail trade lost 100,000 jobs. Voters blamed then current governor Michael Dukakis for the state's economic woes. In 1990 they elected Republican William Weld as the new governor. Weld then privatized a number of state operations in an effort to economize. By the mid-1990s the state's economy was improving greatly. Per capita income reached third place in the nation by 1995. Local industries like software and mutual funds led the upturn in the economy. The fishing industry was still the eighth largest in the nation in 1995 though not as important to the state's economy as it once was. Tourism was also important to the state, bringing in well over $8 million annually. Boston, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, and the Berkshire Mountains were popular vacation spots.

At the state level the Department of Economic Development continued making attempts to promote business, increase employment, and generate economic activity. In 1993 the Massachusetts Economic Development Incentive Program (EDIP) was launched to aid existing and new businesses. It provided 34 Economic Target Areas (ETAs) in the state. The Target Areas, along with local initiatives, provided attractive incentives to prospective businesses.

MASSACHUSETTS

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