Radio Script #52
Little Talks on Common Things
January 22, 1950
Allover the world legends and myths have long been taken for fact. Tell a story often enough and convincingly enough,’ and plenty of people will believe it. It is even possible to tell an imagined yarn so often that the teller comes to believe it himself.
Not even conservative, hard-headed Yankee Maine is immune from these ill-founded beliefs. For instance, ever since I can remember anything at all about Maine history, I have been told that Freeport is the birthplace of Maine, and like many of our listeners I have seen the marker in that town that so declares. But it just isn’t true.
That the story is a mere legend, a kind of myth, was first brought to my attention only a few months ago, in a conversation with our State Librarian, Mrs. Marion Stubbs. We had been chatting about Maine lore for ten minutes when she asked, “Can you tell me where the story started that Freeport is the birthplace of Maine? You know”, she continued, “the documents of the Constitutional Convention and of the meetings leading up to it do not mention Freeport.”
That was enough to set me off, and I was sure I had a good chance of success, for the wives of three members of the Colby College faculty all spent their girlhood days in Freeport. Sure enough, one of those women brought to my attention a book written in 1940 by Florence Thurston and Harmon Cross, a book entitled “Three Centuries of Freeport, Maine”.
Now local histories are not noted for their honest presentation of debunking facts, especially when such facts smash the old idols of local pride. This history of Freeport therefore deserves critical approval, for it bluntly declares that there is no truth in the story that the State of Maine was born in Freeport.
The story, persistently circulated for more than a hundred years, has been that the papers necessary to separate Maine from Massachusetts were signed in the old Codman Tavern in Freeport on March 15, 1820 by commissioners empowered to perform the act.
What are the facts? From 1784 to 1820 the separation issue was hotly debated. In 1791 a popular vote showed 2,084 in favor of separation and 2,438 opposed. Again in 1797 the people favored continuing the tie with Massachusetts. But, in a popular poll taken in 1816, ten thousand favored separation, against seven thousand opposed. Nothing came of it, however, until 1819 when elections for representatives from the District of Maine in the Massachusetts Legislature were campaigned almost solely on the separation issue. As a result every Maine man in the Massachusetts Senate and 114 out of 127 Maine men in the Massachusetts House of Representatives came out flatly and emphatically for separation.
The Massachusetts Legislature then voted to refer the subject to a joint committee of Senate and House, on which Maine itself was well represented. Upon recommendation of that committee, the Legislature voted to let the District of Maine cast a final, decisive vote on the question of separation. The vote provided that if a majority of 1,500 or more should favor separation, the Governor of Massachusetts should proclaim the result and Maine would then choose members of a convention to meet in Portland to draw up a state constitution. Pending the ratification of the new constitution by the people, the Constitution of Massachusetts would apply to the new state. But, whatever the result of the vote on the constitution, the District of Maine was to become a state on March 15, 1820, provided the consent of Congress was first obtained. By 17,000 voting in favor to only 7,000 against the District voted officially for separation. Governor Brooks of Massachusetts proclaimed the result, and on March 3, 1820 President Monroe signed the bill making Maine a separate sovereign state. So, the provisions of the Massachusetts legislative act having now been fulfilled, Maine became a state on March 15 of that year.
Meanwhile on October 17, 1819 the constitutional convention had held its first meeting in Portland, and after much debate had selected the name of Maine for the new state. They held other meetings before the constitution was finally drafted, but no meeting in Freeport. How then did the story ever bring Freeport into the picture? Irony of ironies, what actually happened was that a meeting of a group of men opposed
to separation was held in Freeport. Eighteen men from Cumberland, Kennebec and Lincoln Counties, m~n whose names are all recorded and include such well known persons as Jacob Abbott of Farmington, Stephen Longfellow of Portland (father of the poet), William Barrows of Hebron (founder of Hebron Academy) and Benjamin· Dunning of Bath. Those eighteen men met in a tavern at Freeport, drew up and signed a broadside against separation a few days before the matter went to popular vote in the fall of 1819. Far from signing any papers that made Maine a state, those men , who were not constitutional delegates or commissioners of any sort, signed, in their private capacities, a paper intended to prevent Maine from becoming a state. So, instead of declaring itself the birthplace of Maine, Freeport ought to proclaim itself as the town where Maine couldn’t be stopped from being born.
This is a census year. Again the census taker comes to our homes and asks a lot of questions. So efficient and so highly developed are the statistical services of the government that estimates are already being made of what the 1950 census will show. It will reveal that our nation now numbers 151 million people, an increase of 19 million in the past ten years. In 1940 we were told that population growth was slowing up, that the United States could not continue to increase its people nearly so rapidly in the future. Instead of seriously slowing up, the increase continued at such a rate that since 1940 we have added more people than there are in all Mexico and nearly half as many as in all France. It is an increase equal to the total population of five cities as big as Chicago. Never before have so many people been added to our population in any ten year period.
For the first t~e in our history the 1950 census will show more women than men. In 1940 the nation had 66 million males and 65i million females. In 1950 we have 75,200,000 males, but 75,800,000 females. The relative increase is in the number of women in the older age groups; there is actually a decrease in the proportion of unmarried women. There is no oversupply of marriageable girls. Today, on the average, women live longer than men, whereas in pioneer days men usually outlived their wives.
Elderly people past 65 made up 6.7% of the population in 1940; today they account for 7.5%. Young people under 20 likewise, though increasing in absolute numbers, have just held their own percentage wise. Now 52 million of them account for 34% of the total population, exactly as only 45 million of them did ten years ago.
The trend which must receive increasing, hard-headed attention is the ever-lessening proportion of the working age group. Considering the usual working age from 20 to 64, those persons, who formed 60% of the population in 1940, have now fallen to 58%. It is members of that working group who must support most of the people over 65 and under 20. As the working group forms a smaller and smaller fraction of the total population, ‘their financial burden becomes individually greater. Here is the heart of a major economic problem in the United states. In the face of these shifting age groups, how shall we finance old age pensions and increased costs of educating the young without placing a crushing burden on the individual wage earner? Somehow in America we must find the answer to that question.
Quite a change has taken place in family incomes during the past ten years. In 1940 only two families in five had an income over $2,000 a year; today three families in four have that income. The family income group from. $2,000 to $3,000 has remained about the same proportion, 21% in 1940 and 20% in 1950. But, where only one family in ten had income from $4,000 to $5,000 in 1940, the proportion is now two families in ten. In 1940 only one family in twenty had income over $5,000; now one family in five has that income.
Figures, however, can be misleading. A lot of people insist that many families are little better off than they were before, when they had lower income. When a skeptic and debunker of historical legends once said he doubted whether George Washington ever threw a dollar across the Rappahannock River, he was reminded that it might have been possible, because a dollar went farther in those days. We won’t take any more time on that point tonight, but in a week or two we shall show you that the facts clearly indicate that in relative income — that is, income related to prices — we are actually better off today than we were twenty years ago.
Another thing the 1950 census will make alarmingly clear. We are very rapidly becoming a nation of city dwellers. Probably we need have no fear of becoming wholly such, for wherever we live we must somehow eat, and somebody must raise food to feed us. Of the hundred and thirty million people in the United States in 1940, thirty million or nearly a quarter of them lived on the farms. Today only 28 million out of 151 million are farm dwellers, or less than a fifth.
What about homes? Have we made any dent in the housing problem in these ten years? In 1940 we had 34,800,000 dwelling units; today we have 48,800,000, an increase which is more than double the increase in the number of families. As for home equipment, the 21 million homes having bathtub or shower in 1940 have now increased to 31 million, and the 28 million homes with radios are now 40 million.
Yes, indeed, the 1950 census is going to show a lot of interesting and challenging things about this America in which we live.
A few weeks ago I mentioned an old record of Massachusetts masonry which had recently come into my possession. The donor, Mr. Chester Hussey, has now favored me again, this time with a book which answers a question that had long puzzled. me — why are masons called “Free and Accepted Masons”? The marshal of my own masonic lodge at the time of my initiation was a Civil War veteran who had held the office of marshalmar in that same lodge for forty years. I once asked him why the term ‘~Free and Accepted Masons”? He had no idea.
One of America’s most interesting and controversial clergymen of a generation ago was Joseph Fort Newton, a man who rather late in life left the ministry of the Universalist Church and became an Episcopalian. Newton was always deeply interested in Masonry. In 1914, when he was pastor of a church in Iowa, Newton wrote a book called, “The Builders — a Story and Study of Masonry”. Then years later, when he was pastor of the Church of the Divine paternity in New York City, Newton revised and extended the book. It is that revised edition which I recently received from Mr. Hussey. In it Newton makes completely clear the reason for the two. adjectives qualifying the name of masons. Free masons were originally operative masons, members of masonic lodges who practiced the trade of construction with stone and brick. For many years perhaps for centuries — masonic lodges contained only operative members. Then in the seventeenth century, in England at least, what were called speculative members were admitted — men Who were not masons or in any other building trade, but men who were interested in the principles and ideals for which masonry stood.
The operative members — the free masons — were called free because as master workmen they were free to journey from town to town, to sell their services to any who would employ them. In medieval and early modern times that was a rare privilege. Most men had to stay put, in the towns where they were born or were placed in apprenticeship. Only the master workman in a building trade had the free right of travel.
Such men became members of masonic lodges as free masons. Then when the speculative masons were admitted, they were called accepted masons, not masons by right of trade and the master mason’s mark, but by virtue of being acceptable to those operative masons, for association with them in the common principles and common social tasks of the masonic fraternity. Hence to this day the masonic order, now spread allover the world, is called “Free and Accepted Masons”.
A hundred years ago a thriving and significant part of this community was the section still called Ten Lots. Now there must be many of our listeners who know interesting items about the Ten Lots neighborhood. Please write me or call me, if you know any such items. Mr. H. F. Sturtevant, who is one of the present residents of that section, tells me that the neighborhood originally consisted of 2,000 acres of land, divided into ten lots of 200 acres each. He says the grant was made about 200 years ago. Does anyone know the exact date, and who were the original owners of the lots?
Mr. Sturtevant lives in one of the oldest houses, the lumber for which was sawed at an old up-and-down saw mill on the pond back of· the house, a pond fed by what is now called Red Brook. Much of the stone work of the old dam still stands. Mr. Sturtevant’s house truly goes back to colonial times. It has hand-made hinges and latches, and the huge hand-made locks with which our Revolutionary fathers were familiar. In its construction both hand made nails and wooden pegs were used.
Now let us see, in the next few weeks, how much information we can gather about Ten Lots.
Year: 1950