Massachusetts Author:Richard D. Brown Massachusetts is famous for pilgrims and patriots, for presidential families from the Adamses to the Kennedys, for whaling ships, baked beans and the Boston Red Sox. But the Bay State’s story also has much to do with a fundamental American dilemma: how to reconcile liberty of conscience with the need for public order and virtue. — The... more » early colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay faced the difficulty of maintaining piety amid the plenty of a new land. In the eighteenth century, their severe Puritan ideal was challenged by another culture – English, cosmopolitan, and committed to rule by the best. After the Revolutionary War, which had begun at Lexington and Concord, Federalists in Massachusetts continued the old tradition of moral leadership, but in a republican setting that required new attitudes toward the old contest between liberty and virtue. Later, as the state industrialized and as new immigrants swelled its population, economic development extended the range of diversification and put the old Puritan commonwealth on the leading edge of a new kind of pluralism. As the twentieth century began, several generations of Massachusetts citizens had already wrestled with the problem of reconciling diversity with order and accommodating old truths to new realities.
Today, the specific issues that confronted the Winthrops, the Adamses, and the people of Lowell and Waltham have changed, but the historical dilemma remains. How far Massachusetts has come toward securing both liberty and virtue is reason for pride, but it is also good to remember how hard a job it has been and how much remains to be done.
THE STATES AND THE NATIONS SERIES, of which this volume is a part, is designed to assist in a serious look at the ideals espoused and experiences undergone in the history of the nation.« less