MASSACHUSETTS: Yankee Face

(see Cover)

This week the Massachusetts Legislature gathers in special session to perfect its soldier vote law. When the Representatives finish their deliberations beneath the Sacred Cod on the wall, and the State Senate concurs, Massachusetts willprobably have the most intelligent — and non-controversial — soldier vote law in the U.S. Anyone in the family can get a ballot sent to a serviceman. Even a constitutional requirement that new voters must be able to read the State Constitution in English will cause no trouble. Five lines of the Constitution will be printed on the ballot envelope. A sergeant on the remotest Pacific atoll will be witness enough that a soldier can read it.

The fact that this machinery is workable, constitutional and noncontroversial, is another demonstration of the plain horse sense of Massachusetts’ governor, Leverett Saltonstall. And the fact that it permits a maximum of servicemen to vote is in the let-everyone-speak tradition of New England’s time-crusted town meet ing. Massachusetts acts from three centuries’ experience of sending her sons to war. War got Massachusetts — and New England — her land from the Indians. War got New England its independence. Now war has given New England a new lease on life.

Past with a Present. Some $14 billion in war contracts are surging around in New England, thrusting the old land into one wave of prosperity after another. In the nationwide spread of the war bonanza, other regions may make more noise: the colossal doings of California’s giant air plants have been trumpeted in Hollywood style; Detroit’s auto manufacturers have four-colored their achievements; the war prosperity of the New South is an old story. But New England has done its mighty bit with hardly a buglenote or breastbeat.

The war and the recurrent shocks of prosperity have shaken New England out of a resigned preoccupation with its past. From the Penobscot to the Housatonic, shipyards clang. Spindles are singing again in textile mills, turning out Army uniforms. Pretty, white-spired New England villages, asleep in their history, have stirred themselves to produce millions of small war parts. Connecticut, aswarm with producers of firearms, propellers and engines, rightfully calls herself the No. 1 Arsenal in the Arsenal of Democracy. Small, bellicose Vermont was the first state to declare war on the Axis—nine weeks before Pearl Harbor, Vermont began paying soldier bonuses because the U.S. was “already in a shooting war.” In the green hills where Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain boys trod, lean, lank Vermonters turn out landing craft and gun-mounts in Burlington, aircraft ignition parts in Vergennes. The Massachusetts shoreline is one long row of shipyards and shipways, with convoys loading up. Its yards and plants produce everything from the $60 million aircraft carrier Lexington to G.I. shoelaces.

Perhaps nowhere else in the U.S. are the makings of this latest war shaped so fully within sight of a past American battleground. No tourist may now climb to the top of Bunker Hill’s grey shaft: he might see too much going on in the Charlestown Navy Yard below. Once it required a poet’s fancy to make the shots at Concord’s rude bridge heard round the world. Now, ten miles away, ammunition is being fashioned that will literally be heard the world around.

This grafting of the present on the past is most aptly symbolized by the life & times of one of New England’s first citizens, Leverett Saltonstall. By face, family and fortune, he is a symbol of New England’s yesterday. As three-time governor of New England’s largest state, he is a prime symbol of New England’s today.

Laden Family Tree. To those who sneer at First Families—a group that includes most of Lev’s well-trounced political opponents—a Saltonstall is open game. The family tree is conspicuously laden with riches and dignity. Saltonstalls have been as prominent as their long noses and lantern jaws, as far back as their carefully kept genealogies go—21 generations back, to Thomas de Saltonstall in 1343 in Yorkshire, England.

The first Saltonstall to reach the New World came here with an economic head start, and the family has never lost that advantage. The first American Saltonstall, Sir Richard, arrived with John Winthrop in 1630, and founded the Boston suburb of Watertown. He stayed in the New World only a year, just long enough to remember the infant Harvard College in his will. But his son got elected to the Massachusetts legislature and fathered the family’s first Harvard graduate, class of 1659. (This Harvard man, Nathaniel Saltonstall, was later a judge, and with enough of the family astuteness to dodge the job of presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials.)

The Governor’s one direct Saltonstall ancestor in the Revolutionary War did no fighting, but at least he favored the American side. Most of his contemporary kin were Tories.

The Revolutionary record is more aggressive in the other half of the Saltonstall line. Four Brookses (his mother’s kin) fought at Lexington Green. Old Abigail Brooks served hot chocolate to the minutemen coming home from the Revolution’s first engagement. A Brooks was a general at Valley Forge, and later governor of Massachusetts.* Other Brookses spilled their blue blood against the British at Lake Erie, and against the Seminoles in Florida. But the Saltonstalls fought in 1812 and 1861; one was cited for gallantry in the Civil War, as commander of an unseaworthy ferryboat converted into a gunboat.

Besides fighting, Saltonstalls and Brookses kept their rank up by good investments and better marriages, marriages which linked them with impeccable Yankee names: Boylston, Everett, Lawrence, Lee, Leverett. Lev Saltonstall can count eight governors of Massachusetts among his forbears. One of them was long-nosed Governor James Sullivan, a political asset which qualified Saltonstall for membership in the Charitable Irish Society two years ago. A Brooks married Charles Francis Adams, Civil War ambassador to Britain. This tied the Saltonstalls to the mighty Adams family, including Presidents John and John Quincy, and Historians Henry and Brooks. Great-Great-Grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks struck it rich in marine insurance and Chicago real estate before the 1820s, and his money is the base of most of the heavy Saltonstall fortune today.

But as wealth and prestige went up, the Saltonstall political fortunes went down. Great-Grandfather Leverett Saltonstall (1783-1845) was president of the Massachusetts Senate, member of Congress, first mayor of Salem in the Golden Age of Emerson and Thoreau. Grandfather Leverett Saltonstall, a member of the then-flourishing species of Yankee Democrats, was a good friend of Democrat Grover Cleveland, and thus became Collector of the Port of Boston. The present governor’s father, also a Yankee Democrat, couldn’t even get elected to the state legislature in his try for office.

The decline & fall of the Saltonstall political fortune was typical of the political decline & fall of the whole proud line of New England’s first families. Leverett Saltonstall did not so much inherit a political tradition as resuscitate it.

Red Hat Y. Red Tie. Republican Lev Saltonstall made his way in a day when the red hat of Boston’s Catholic Cardinal O’Connell has had vastly more political power in Massachusetts than the crimson tie of Harvard. Yankees may control the Massachusetts purse strings, but Irish Democrats control the ballot boxes. The Old Stock has long since been flooded under by successive waves of immigrants who rapidly became voters; the Irish (70% of the Boston vote), the Italians, French Canadians, Poles, Russian Jews. Boston’s best can and do keep the whip hand over bank directorates, and in the overstuffed gentlemen’s clubs on Boston’s near-sacred Beacon Hill. But what political power they still possess comes strictly from Yankee trader ingenuity. Thus, by enactment of the conservative state legislature, Boston cannot choose its own police chief—the governor picks him. And bluebloods.cannot elect a mayor in Boston, so they pack behind the Irishman most agreeable to them (like present Mayor Maurice Tobin).

Lev Saltonstall broke up this defeatism.

Class of 1914. His beginnings were as alien to the usual necessities of vote-getting as his ancestry was. He grew up in an oak-paneled, 15-room red brick house high in Chestnut Hill, a fashionable Boston suburb. The place has a greenhouse, a swimming pool, tennis court, a gardener’s cottage, a barn. Today Lev Saltonstall’s mother—a matriarch of 76 and reputedly the richest woman in Massachusetts—still lives there. Leverett lives next door, in a plainer frame house that needs a new coat of grey paint. As a boy, Lev rode ponies and played in the fields with his neighbor, Jimmy Lowell. Lowell, one of the Lowells, and a fellow Harvardman, is still Saltonstall’s best friend and neighbor. Lev went to Boston’s Noble and Greenough private day school, then on to Harvard.

Saltonstall worked doggedly in college, achieved a B average in law school (his Phi Beta Kappa key is honorary, 1939). He also worked hard to make his clumsy frame athletic. Everyone else at crew turnouts rowed three hours in the afternoon; Lev doggedly rowed an additional two each morning. By his junior year he was a sub on the varsity; in his senior year he captained the Jayvee crew that won the Henley Grand Challenge in Eng land. But the high spot of his athletic career was his triumph over Princeton’s great hockey star, Hobey Baker. Salton stall came on the ice late to score the winning goal, ending 38 minutes of extra play — longest deadlock in Harvard’s hockey history. He graduated in 1914—a great Harvard class, whose other luminaries include Harvard’s President James Bryant Conant, Diplomat Sumner Welles, Richman Junius Morgan, Producer Vinton Freedley, Writer Gilbert Seldes. Saltonstall who made the exclusive Porcellian Club, never forgets his Harvard heritage. His Chestnut Hill telephone and an automobile license carry the numerals 1914. On his class’s 25th reunion (he was class marshal) he reassembled his old crew for a workout, contributed a biography for the class yearbook in the heavily casual, cozy manner of a J. P. Marquand hero:

“My life has been that of a typical beantown Bostonian. After college . . . three years of law school, tempered in the last year by a marriage which neither of us regretted. Plattsburg and a first lieutenancy . . . France for six months, but no actual conflict except ‘ those following strenuous evenings in Bordeaux. . . .”

He married pretty Alice Woesselhoeft, belle of his dancing school. He fell in love with her at 14 and hardly looked at any one else thereafter. They have three boys and two girls. His three oldest children are at war. Lev Jr. (Harvard ’39), is newly commissioned in the Airborne Engineers. Emily is a WAVE radioman, 2nd Class. Peter, 22, left Harvard as a sophomore to join the Marines. He got malaria at Guadalcanal, recuperated in Australia, and is now back in action as a platoon sergeant. Peter sends his dad $50 a month.

Leverett’s career began inconspicuously as a lawyer. In 1923 he was elected to the state legislature (known since 1629 as the General Court). For 16 years he was a representative; for the last eight years speaker, a record unexcelled in the Bay State since 1802. He spent much of that time trying to stop the budget extravagances of ambitious Democratic governors. Then, in 1938, Republican Saltonstall won the governorship from tempestuous Democrat James Michael Curley. Some said that the unpopular Curley beat himself, but Saltonstall was re-elected in 1940, although the Democrats that year carried the state for Franklin Roosevelt by 137,000 votes. And since his re-election to a third term in 1942, Lev Saltonstall has been governor of Massachusetts for the longest stretch in 93 years.

The American Antique. Saltonstall’s political charm is that he strikes people as old shoe rather than old tie. His engagingly homely face is his No. 1 political asset, with its drooping eyelids, lean cheeks, long nose, wide-spaced teeth, and the famed “cowcatcher chin.” That reassuring face has been termed “a well-worn American antique” and “the most distinctive face in U.S. public life.” Deviousness would have a hard time finding a hiding place there. It is a face New Englanders trust.

Lev Saltonstall’s style as governor is in keeping with the weathered plainness of his Yankee squire’s face. He dispensed with the limousine and motorcycle escort his predecessors affected. Saltonstall is driven around in a two-door 1941 Chevrolet. The Governor rides up front, and Chauffeur Al Larrivee—not uniformed—is careful to keep a cache of chocolates and nuts for his boss in the glove compartment.

But he is no mere rotogravure rube. On weekends he bolts out to his 89-acre farm at Dover, 15 miles southwest of Boston. He knows that his “I’m just a simple Yankee New Englander” is good politics. But it is no pose; on his farm, he puts on old clothes, pitches hay, saws wood, beds down his horses. He “turns over” four pigs a year; sells two, eats two. Last year he sold 1,600 dozen eggs.

Plain Man, Plain Truths. Lev Saltonstall is no intellectual giant. He plods through his work. He spends too much time relaxing with his family and working in the field to get in much reading; and he takes much of his intellectual coloration from his college friends. Sometimes he goes out to Harvard to listen to the Keynesian big-spending economists. He returns wearied by such complexities. In office, he is slow to act. Many Democratic hacks are still on his payroll, and his own appointments have not been outstanding. Removals have usually been accomplished, not by sensational charges, but by a simple resignation, asked for and received. Reporters, journeying out to his farm for an explanation, have returned with a brief statement (“the case is closed”) from the Governor, and a couple of dozen eggs from his wife.

Most Saltonstall speeches sound like the last one. Yet the words that turn to platitudes in the mouth of a slick politician somehow sound like plain truths from this plain man. Some of his recurrent credos:

¶”My slogan has been jobs for the young and security for the old [a guarded endorsement of the Townsend plan helped elect him in 1938] . . . but I’ll be damned if I’m going to assure young people about jobs and the old about security when the Government can’t provide them.”

¶”A spectacular governor is a gift from heaven to newspapers, but too expensive a luxury for the citizens.”

Truisms, caution, simplicity and all, Lev Saltonstall has given the Bay State six years of respectable government, after years of storm and scandal. In doing so, Blueblood Saltonstall has become the Republican Party’s No. 1 asset in New England. Accordingly he has been mentioned as a Presidential possibility—but more often for the vice-presidency. An internationalist long before Pearl Harbor, Saltonstall was a Willkie man in 1940. Now he is cautiously neutral, and will go to the G.O.P. convention unpledged. He well knows that if either Willkie or Dewey—both New Yorkers—gets the nomination, they will likely seek as a running mate a Westerner such as California’s Governor Earl Warren. Saltonstall’s only avowed candidacy is for the U.S. Senate, for the seat of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who is off at the war. (Saltonstall’s ’14 friend, Sinclair Weeks, was handpicked by the Governor to warm Lodge’s place until the election in November.) At 51, Leverett Saltonstall’s political eyes are not bigger than his stomach. But as a shrewd Yankee, he never discounts the possibility that a platter might be handed him.

Second Revolution. Like all wartime governors, Saltonstall has benefited from bulging coffers and full employment. But even before Pearl Harbor he had begun a project which may be his major contribution in office: a planning board for a postwar revolution of Massachusetts’ entire manufacturing economy. As an early bird measure, it bore the now strange title of a “post-defense” program. Its aim: to restore Massachusetts’ once-privileged industrial position. Its board members knew that if New England insisted on standing “where she always stood,” she would be standing still or going backward. Short-sighted Yankee businessmen had lost their factories to the South and West because newer plants had better machinery and cheaper labor. The Governor’s planners have what is perhaps the best state-sponsored program in the nation.

One basic decision has been made: New England can never compete with other sections by lowering its wage levels; cheap-goods industries are probably gone for good. Instead, uses must be found for skilled, high-priced hands. The planners hope that their region’s slow and cumbersome transition to diversified, top technological industries will have been telescoped by the war. Already, plastics, radio, radar and rubber are key New England war contributions—industries which spend heavily in research and look boldly into the future. If Leverett Saltonstall’s planners, on a plant-to-plant level, can help speed New England’s second Industrial Revolution, revitalized New England may keep her stacks smoking long after the guns are silenced.

*The first Brooks arrived on the same ship, theArbella, as the first Saltonstall.