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A century of travails, triumphs for R.I.
By JODY McPHILLIPS
Journal Staff Writer
Each time I find myself, flat on my face,
I pick myself up and get back in the race.
-- "That's Life" recorded by Frank Sinatra
Small, feisty, and doggedly ethnic, Rhode Island emerges from the 20th century with the sweaty relief of a fighter who wins when he secretly expects a pounding.
In the last 100 years, the state has been up, and down, and over, and out. In 1900, Rhode Island workers made some of the best products in the world, and immigrants lined up to get a toehold here.
By the 1970s, the state's jobless rate was chronically high. The air was dirty, the water smelled, the famous oysters were tainted, schools were bad, and an honest official was rare.
The mills and factories that had generated fortunes for some Rhode Islanders were increasingly abandoned, leaving great stony carcasses along the rivers and streams.
What went so wrong?
Time, and technology. When it came time to update the textile mills, it made economic sense for the owners to move south, closer to the cotton. No single industry arose to replace textiles, which meant fewer unskilled jobs to give an immigrant that crucial first leg up.
During those dark years, Rhode Island really seemed like an island, cut off from the rest of the country. An inconsequential splotch on a map, left behind by the March of Progress. A joke.
Stagnation had its points, however. No money to burn meant the old buildings weren't torn down and replaced by shoddy new ones (except, of course, for those that were actually burned down by the state's healthy crop of arsonists).
So when, halfway through the century, the tide began to turn, there was a lot left in Rhode Island that was worth saving.
You can't pinpoint the moment a people realize that something precious is in danger. Certainly we don't all get it at once; in Rhode Island, a gifted few like Antoinette Downing, Katherine Warren, and architect William D. Warner first opened our eyes to what was moldering around us.
Some of it was luck. One of the world's richest women occasionally spent time in a shabby little former resort with a great harbor; when Doris Duke began to restore Colonial Newport, suddenly the dullest of us could see the possibilities.
People joke about the Rhode Island reluctance to travel more than 20 minutes in any direction. But that kind of centeredness, those mulishly deep roots, also mean Rhode Islanders will not allow their home to be despoiled.
They're not going to take a quick profit and move on, and they'll fight to make sure nobody else does.
They proved it in the second half of the century, voting down superhighways and nuclear plants, gambling casinos and oil refineries -- enterprises they feared would damage the environment or the society.
They faced up to the crimes committed in the name of profit earlier in the century, as factories and sewage polluted the rivers and the Bay. The fact that many of the companies responsible bailed out, leaving us to clean up their mess, was a bitter lesson that cut deep.
Environmentalists worked to clean the Bay, the rivers, the air. Preservationists created the kind of textured and varied cityscapes that artists appreciate. Artists pouring out of the Rhode Island School of Design began to stick around. Housing got better. Food got better. Tourists discovered that they like the place.
Residents discovered -- to their surprise -- that they like it too.
If Rhode Island were alone in the universe, this would be a great place to end this essay happily. But we're not alone. In fact, in an increasingly wired world, there's probably no such thing as "alone" anymore.
New England was once a loose collection of six states so distinct that a person from Craaanston could barely understand one from South Bahston -- not to mention those aye-yuppers from Maine.
Today we work, and shop, and travel across the region, the country, and the world with little thought to borders; on the Internet, Providence is as close to Southeast Asia as it is to East Greenwich.
The same economic forces that buffeted us during the 20th century are moving into the developing world, as the corporations that once left us high and dry move ever farther in search of cheap labor and weak environmental laws.
Scientists from the University of Rhode Island are already at work in the Third World, trying to help those governments cope with the pollution and congestion that rapid development brings. We can only hope they will learn from our mistakes before the whole world ends up looking like Elizabeth, N.J.
Rhode Island faces the next century with some weaknesses. Our schools aren't doing a great job preparing kids for college. Our capital city has an inadequate tax base. The state has not attracted the kind of high-tech businesses that are driving the stock market boom and pushing up house prices in California and the state of Washington.
But the most revolutionary change we face may be something that affects not just Rhode Island or the United States, but, increasingly, the whole planet.
The most powerful cultural force in the fading century was the homogenization of the American people (and, in recent decades, much of the world) by mass media.
American movies, songs, books, magazines, sports, ads, ideas, and technology fanned out across the world and broke down barriers between immigrant groups at home.
Some of those American ideals were grand -- democracy, impartial justice, innovation and hard work, opportunity for all. Others were less admirable, such as greed, wastefulness, a tendency to use force when persuasion fails.
Today, thanks to the Internet, we're spinning 180 degrees from homogenization to fragmentation. It's conceivable that some day, we will all march to a different drummer.
Increasingly, we don't all listen to the Top 40: we download individual CDs. We don't read Life magazine, but micro-market 'zines; we watch DVDs or videos alone instead of trooping off together to the latest Disney flick.
The upside is, groups of enthusiasts form mini-communities on-line; the downside is, hate-filled loners find each other too.
The bottom line is, Rhode Island isn't an island anymore.
Copyright © 1999 The Providence Journal Company
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