Why Do They Hate Us?
No state makes the rest of the country squirm like ours. Is that because we're a bunch of Kennedy-votin', stem-cell-lovin', clergy-bashin', gay-marryin' human clones?

By Charles P. Pierce  |  December 18, 2005

All right, let Us -- the elect of Massachusetts -- tell You -- everyone else -- what you should do.

And that's how it starts, isn't it?

We think these Colonies should be independent, and that You should all get rid of your slaves.

Why do They hate Us?

They hate Us because we just . . . won't . . . shut . . . up.

It's been a remarkable couple of years for Us and for Them, hasn't it? The United States declined publicly to promote our junior senator to the senior executive level. Of course, before rejecting his application, the country watched as the junior senator's party held its quadrennial fandango right here in and around the FleetCenter. Even though we did the nation an immeasurable favor by collecting all the pundits in one place where we could keep an eye on them, the rest of the country was treated to one of our curious provincial spectacles in which Boston lands a large and important event and then complains about every minor inconvenience. Meanwhile, all the people who came noticed that, because of laws and traditions dating back to the stocks and the dunking stool, all the parties wrapped up just after the sun went down, leaving the streets awash with dissatisfied drunks wearing plastic donkeys on their heads.

And, of course, gay people started having weddings here, which was said to have such a deleterious effect on marriages in places like Ohio and Kansas that they were moved to defend themselves against such nuptials at the polls. Science marched on, and it scared people elsewhere, and an image formed Out There of Us as a city full of gay-marryin', stem-cell-lovin', Kennedy-votin' human clones, which, truth be told, didn't do the junior senator much good, either, largely because it wasn't completely off the mark.

Even in sports, wherein Massachusetts has had a spectacular run of late, the country got an earful not only of how our heretofore woeful football team has won three Super Bowls through an application of saintly ownership and family values, but also of how the long-awaited World Series victory of our baseball team was, even more than a triumph over the St. Louis Cardinals, a resounding defeat for the kind of jinxes, curses, and hoodoos that afflict only the best people -- namely, Us.

"I always felt that the Red Sox fan considered himself a far more interesting and cerebral fan because he'd link himself to a team that suffered," muses Mike Francesa, a prominent sports-talk radio host in New York who nonetheless confesses a sweet tooth for Boston's teams. "It was as though 'I'm a better fan because I root for a team that doles out nothing but suffering. I'm more intelligent.'"

And, of course, we turned up our noses this fall at those arriviste White Sox, who'd actually gone longer without a World Series winner than we had. But, we reasoned, that was just a result of bad baseball. Primal forces of nature couldn't be bothered with, you know, Chicago.

And that notion of cosmic suffering is so deep in the Calvinist soul of the city that it informs far more than the history of the baseball teams. The original settlers here had to scratch a society out of stony farmland. Then, later immigrant families came, and they had to scratch a society out of the original settlers. In a survey of scholars ranking this country's all-time best and worst mayors, conducted by historian Melvin Holli, Boston had both a best, Josiah Quincy, and a worst, the inevitable J.M. Curley. If you did the poll among Boston's Irish population, Quincy and Curley might well find their positions reversed.

In short, we always have been a city in which a half million people are likely to hold 3 million opinions -- and that's just on one issue. No matter where you live elsewhere in the country, sooner or later, somebody in Boston is going to do something or say something that makes your blood boil. Hello, Larry Summers. Are we liberal in our attitudes toward free speech? Yes and, of course, no. Boston is the city where the Watch and Ward Society banned books and chased "indecent" entertainers out of town for decades. And for all the huffing and blowing on the political right these days about liberals who want to "ban Christmas," it should be recalled that Massachusetts is one of the few places in the country that actually did it, back in 1659, and for conservative religious reasons. The Puritan fathers thought the celebration too redolent of the Church of England from which they'd fled.

Almost a third of African-Americans in Boston polled by Harvard in 2004 said they were denied a job in the past decade because of discrimination. At the same time, white Southerners still harbor resentments toward Boston that go back past the city's involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s all the way back to the abolitionists who helped kick-start the Civil War. And while the city's undeniable role in cutting-edge biotechnology has led to developments that have caused some anxiety elsewhere, at the same time, Harvard's president stands up in front of a conference on women and minorities in the sciences and "opens the debate" about whether some innate inferiority in women might possibly account for their underrepresentation in the math and science fields. Thus did Boston become the symbol not only of Frankensteinian genetic dabbling and of academic elitism, but also of hidebound academic sexism, and all at the same time. It's a not inconsiderable achievement.

Why do They hate Us?

Because We won't . . . shut . . . up.

It is a historical fact that, every decade or so, we generously offer up one of Us to be president of the United States. It is also historical fact that, with the exception of Jack Kennedy -- who was less from Boston than he was from Vegas, but never mind -- the country notably has declined the offer. First, there was Senator Edward Kennedy, whom Democrats around the country rejected in 1980 in favor of the hapless Jimmy Carter. Eight years later, Michael Dukakis got the nomination, only to have the country decide that he was less competent and (astonishingly) less charismatic than George H.W. Bush. Undaunted, Paul Tsongas tried for the nomination four years after Dukakis got it and, after a brief run of success, found himself the place horse behind Bill Clinton. And that, of course, brings us to the junior senator's unfortunate autumn of 2004. At the very least, the country seems to have decided that Massachusetts Democrats are the New Coke of national politics. You can spend all you want marketing them, but nobody's buying.

And then there is the great global theory of Boston that emerged last July, courtesy of Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania. It seems that, back when the scandal of clergy sexual abuse was breaking, Santorum, a famously conservative Catholic, told a website: "When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm." Asked later by the Globe's Susan Milligan to explain his comments, Santorum refused to climb down.

"I was just saying that there's an attitude that is very open to sexual freedom that is more pre-dominant [in Boston]," Santorum told Milligan.

Boston, it seems, not only was to blame for wrecking the Catholic Church by exposing the crimes of its clergy, it also was to blame for wrecking the Catholic Church by creating an environment that led to those crimes in the first place. Which would certainly come as a surprise not only to the founding Puritans but also to the waves of Irish Catholics who came along later. In fact, it was one of the immigrant heirs, Attorney General Thomas Reilly, who summoned up some of Santorum's other erratic rhetorical forays in an op-ed that Reilly dispatched to a Pennsylvania newspaper.

"It's hard not to notice an elected official who publicly equates homosexuality with 'man on child' or 'man on dog' sex," Reilly wrote. "In today's media environment, the easy way to get attention is to be as outrageous as possible. That may be what Senator Santorum had in mind when he put Massachusetts and the victims of sexual abuse in his rhetorical cross hairs."

No telling how it played in Altoona or Scranton.

But, rest assured, at least some people wanted Us to, well, shut up.

"In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?" -Mark Twain

What is it about this place?

Well, truth be told, we were insufferable from the start.

In 1630, John Winthrop sailed toward a countryside filled with rocks, distinctly non-arable farmland, and hostile indigenous tribes, and he saw for himself the biblical city on a hill. "When hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions, the lord make it like that of New England," Winthrop said.

And, with that, we were off, having arrived quite full of ourselves, and spending the succeeding three centuries and change topping off the tank of our considerable self-esteem.

(In fact, Sun Belt Republicans who sneer at Massachusetts liberals ought to remember that it was from Winthrop that Ronald Reagan's staff copped old Dutch's tear-dimmed paean to the "shining city on the hill." And you're welcome, too.)

Much of the city's pride in itself, however, came from a university founded on the other side of the Charles. Harvard always has provided Boston with a healthy portion of the city's intellectual ego, daunting even as formidable an intellect as Benjamin Franklin. Writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lewis Simpson points out that, in one of his famous letters as "Silence Dogood," Franklin described a dream in which learning is set free from the restrictions of social and cultural class, a satire aimed at Harvard, which had declined to admit Franklin. Of course, in 1749, Franklin went on to establish what would become the University of Pennsylvania, which today regularly beats the living legacy out of Harvard in both football and basketball, so there we are.

Still, there never has been in Boston a conspicuous reticence about telling the rest of the country what to do. This came to some sort of a peak in the mid-19th century, when Boston became the center of the abolitionist movement. The apotheosis came on May 22, 1856, when, fed up at having his home state used in the same paragraph with the word "harlot," a South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks walked into the chambers of the United States Senate and beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner over his head with a cane.

"I don't want to get into the business of perception versus reality," says Horace Seldon, a Boston College faculty member who has been working on a retrospective on abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Afro-American History. "But," he says, "Boston really was seen as kind of the hotbed of abolition," especially in the South.

A LITTLE MORE THAN a year ago, Bobby Harrell was sitting with a boisterous claque of his fellow Gamecocks in a dead-plumb line straight away from the podium in Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention was being brought to a respectable boil by Mitt Romney. The delegation from South Carolina -- where Harrell is the speaker of the House of Representatives -- lent an attentive ear and then mustered up some more-than-respectable applause for the handsome, Michigan-born, Mormon governor of Massachusetts.

"At the same time," Romney told the hall, "because every child deserves a mother and a father, we step forward by recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman."

"The test for a guy from New England in South Carolina is always the cultural issues," Harrell said later. "I think we know the kinds of things he's been through up there."

So, after so many Massachusetts Democrats taking a run at the White House, why not a Massachusetts Republican? At the very least, they're, well, a novelty.

Nobody has been so securely caught in the brambles of local reputation over the past year as Romney has. He has hopscotched the country, often through its Southern latitudes, talking to the Republican base wherever it gathers. He told a South Carolina audience that, as a Republican in Massachusetts, he often feels like "a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention." He has made Big Dig wisecracks in New Hampshire, and he's jabbed at John Kerry's suntan. More seriously, he's told audiences in Salt Lake City that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision legalizing gay marriage engaged the possibility of "the collapse of the family here at home" and, in Missouri, he denounced the cloning of human beings for research purposes as "simply wrong," which, while not altogether an extreme position, did put Romney's bona fides at stake with Massachusetts's lucrative biotechnology industry.

He's already banked favorable pieces in both the National Review and The Atlantic Monthly, the latter a magazine that recently abandoned Boston for Washington in much the same way that Romney seems to be doing. In short, he is running for president in 2008 as hard as anyone is right now. Of course, local Democrats have flown into high dudgeon about the incumbent governor pulling a Preston Brooks and taking a cane -- however figuratively and/or jovially -- to the state's noggin. Treasurer Tim Cahill was agog, and Reilly, perhaps warming up for his bout against Santorum, and certainly warming up for a 2006 gubernatorial campaign, publicly fumed.

"I probably got the best perspective of how the state's perceived, because I was in the consulting industry and the investment industry," Romney explains in a recent interview. "I don't hear as much as the governor, because people tend to be more polite. The negatives we have is that we had a team that couldn't win the World Series, so we fixed that, and lousy weather, and the cost of living, which is all about housing.

"People do recognize that we have been the place where gay marriage was established, and the place from where the expansion of cloning has emanated, and that, in some respects, has led to a backlash against us in other states. The president, in a speech or two, has mentioned Massachusetts in that regard."

And, of course, Romney has, as well. On November 10, as part of officially not running for president, Romney gave a speech in Washington to the Federalist Society, an influential group of very conservative lawyers, where he shared the stage with, among others, Karl Rove, the prosecutor-beset White House political boss. In the speech, to considerable applause, Romney again condemned the Supreme Judicial Court for overreaching in its decision to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. However, what stuck in the public mind was the introduction of Romney delivered by Federalist Society board member Gerald Walpin, a lawyer from New York.

(A New Yorker? That figures.)

"Today, when most of the country thinks of who controls Massachusetts," Walpin said, "I think the modern-day KKK comes to mind -- the Kennedy-Kerry Klan."

And, well, wow.

Romney, who, reports said, chuckled at the remark by Walpin, whom he thanked for a "generous introduction," spent the next few days backing and filling and deploring. For his part, Walpin was unrepentant.

"Certain people in Massachusetts," Walpin told WBZ radio, "have no sense of humor."

Us?

You have to be joking.

"I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday." -- Raymond Chandler

Pat Moscaritolo is having none of it. People love us, he tells you. L-o-v-e us, despite what the court said about marriage, and what Mitt said about the court, and what Rick Santorum said about the state, and what Tom Reilly said about Santorum, and what Larry Summers said about women scientists, and despite whatever it is that our scientists are cooking up in the labs over there around Kendall Square, and all the rest of it. And he's even saying it in the face of the fact that, in an annual reader survey by Conde Nast Traveller, Boston has dropped from eighth to 10th among the nation's most desirable tourist destinations, a slippage that came to the attention of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, of which Moscaritolo is the president.

"People from out of town are surprised by how friendly Bostonians are," he says. "I can't necessarily prove this statistically but through items that come back to us about how friendly Bostonians are, because people had heard so much about how New Englanders are so standoffish. They find that revolutionary."

Which is a word, of course, at the very heart of why people continue to come here, no matter whether or not they think we're a collection of snobbish, liberal elitists who spread baby stem cells on croissants with our "life partners," who then go off and egg the residence of the president of Harvard. History is a permanent industry. It cannot be outsourced the presence of London Bridge in Arizona notwithstanding. Nobody is going to discover one day that the Boston Tea Party took place in Charlotte or that the Adams boys were a couple of Masons from Omaha. Bunker Hill is going to stay right where it is, thanks, and the bell in the Old North Church isn't likely ever to be wafting its chimes over the Bellagio and down the Strip any time soon.

"Awhile back, we bought some data," Moscaritolo says, "and we talked about things where Boston owns the brand. The first was history and the other was they all thought of Boston as a city with lots of parks, with lots of green and open spaces.

"Boston wasn't on everybody's must-do list the cities that appeared on the must-do lists, for glitter and glamour, were New York City and Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Then we started asking, 'Where's the real America?' That's when Boston started popping up. We own the brand on history and culture."

And, of course, it is exactly Moscaritolo's enthusiasm that sends those people living in The Other 49 straight up the wall. Boston is the Real America, you say? Who's getting married there again?

Boston owns the brand on history, you say?

Well, let's see how that helps all those candidates you keep running past us every seven or eight years.

And, of course, in reply, we get our own backs up all over again, and we give them the one irrefutable answer that's always been immediately at hand.

You think we're bad?

Hey, at least we're not New York.

Works every time, too.