The Importance Of Being Boston
Critics of Massachusetts sometimes describe the state's political traditions as coming out of left field, reports CBS News Anchor Dan Rather. But in reality, they were born in the squares of small towns across the state -- not unlike the one recreated at Old Sturbridge Village.
Says historian Tom Kelleher, "The first English people who settled here wanted to build a new Jerusalem, a new city on a hill. They had a vision of what they wanted to be."
People here have been hammering out the details ever since in raucous debates over local matters large and small at regular townhall meetings. For 300 years, the give-and-take has produced challenges to the status quo: From advocating revolution in 1774 to legalizing gay marriage in 2004.
Author James Carroll says, "America is a country that is not broken by difference, but has a way to resolve difference through the structure of politics, and Boston epitomizes that tradition."
It is an inheritance proudly accepted by the people who live in the cramped city that they call -- "The Hub".
As comedian Jimmy Tingle puts it, "It's a big city and a small town at the same time. The people are smart, they are funny, they are aggressive. Have you driven here lately?"
The traffic on Boston roads is an appropriate metaphor for the city's relentless flow of new ideas that stream from the universities that line the Charles River. Its graduating students carry the export of ideas around the world.
Ellen Goodman, syndicated columnist, says, "Ideas are to Boston as oil is to Houston, and that will get me in trouble with Houston. But I think that it is one of our most important products."
By some estimates, 75 percent of the world's leaders are educated in Massachusetts. President Bush got his MBA at Harvard. Senator John Kerry went to law school here too, in what has become a unique training ground.
Carroll says, "That's one of the reasons Boston keeps providing to the nation powerful political leadership."
John Adams, Louisa May Alcott, W.E.B. Du Bois and Tip O'Neill, Frederick Douglas and the Kennedys. The list weaves through the history of America.
Massachusetts State Senator (D) Dianne Wilkerson says, "There is this sense that leaders beget leaders, beget leaders."
But Massachusetts can also be a state of contradictions. The Democratic Party remains an overriding political force -- but the state's last three governors have been rising Republican stars.
The Roman Catholic Church is the region's most powerful institution -- but there remains a political commitment to secularism. Massachusetts was the first to ban slavery -- but it was also the site of the painful Boston busing crisis of the mid 1970s.
Wilkerson says, "While that may embarrass somebody, I think that's what makes this such an incredibly proud city and one that is steeped in the principles of democracy that that is what democracy encourages. We fight it out here."
This comfort with conflict supercharges the politics. Old institutions are reformed. New ones are set in their place. Then in time, they too become the foundation for something else. It is the nation's oldest political laboratory.
Tingle says, "Every generation since the pilgrims has tried to improve upon what's there."
As Kelleher puts it, "It continues to capture part of the American imagination about what the country is, what the country could be, and what the country should be."