Untitled Document

WELCOME: New citizens recite the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in 1998.

12.19.99

1. The biggest change in Rhode Island in the 20th century has been the people who call it home.

In 1900, a small group of rich Yankees -- descended from the whalers, traders, farmers, and slavers of the state's early days -- presided over an industrial powerhouse that sent textiles and tools around the world -- the Silicon Valley of its day.

Today those industries are mostly gone, and the Yankees have been joined by a melange of cultures that changes, almost by the decade, as immigrants arrive with distinctive foods, customs, music, and art.

Early in the century, it was mostly country people from Europe -- Germans and British, Poles, Italians and Swedes following the trail laid by the Irish in the 1850s. Some were Jews from eastern Europe, Russia, and Germany.

Earlier still than the Irish were the first Portuguese and Cape Verdeans, mariners who settled here and brought family members to join them in a steady trickle. French Canadians came and went for decades before coming -- for keeps -- in serious numbers near 1900.

After World War I, the sheer numbers of newcomers fueled anti-foreigner sentiment. The state passed a law in 1922 requiring all children to be taught in English at schools, which upset some immigrant groups, particularly French Canadians.

Congress voted to limit immigration in 1924, a barrier that was not lifted until the 1960s.

As the century ends, Rhode Island is again drawing immigrants. Since the late 1970s, Southeast Asians, Jews from the former Soviet Union, Hispanics from Latin American countries, and Africans have settled here.

Many of the newcomers are living in the same communities -- and even the same houses -- as earlier generations of immigrants.

2. The Blackstone Valley, hub of New England's industrial revolution, changed drastically by 1900. The once-Yankee population had shifted to include Irish and French; new arrivals came from Poland and Italy to work in the mills. In North Smithfield alone, 13 languages were spoken.

3. One of the first huge changes of the new century was the rise of the trolleys , fast and reliable transport that nobody could resist. A trolley ride was a democratic experience, the rich jostling for space right along with the poor.

The usual gang of insiders, smelling money, pounced. The Union Street Railroad Company, Providence's first mass-transit monopoly, was snapped up by Nelson W. Aldrich and financier Marsden Perry, who became known as ``the man who owned Rhode Island.''

It worked out well for Perry, who was able to afford the John Brown House on Benefit Street, the state's premier Colonial-era mansion. Trolley employees had a tougher time of it, with longer hours and pay cuts culminating in a violent 1902 strike.

The workers lost, but organized labor got a toehold in Rhode Island.

4. Rhode Island, the only state founded on the promise of religious freedom , saw some lively conflicts early in the century as it adjusted to its new status as the nation's most Catholic state.

Things got so hot that the police had to keep order on the night of Oct. 13, 1920, when two groups of parishioners sparred at the Church of the Holy Ghost on Federal Hill.

The huge influx of European Catholics -- added to the earlier migration of Irish fleeing the potato famine -- outnumbered the old-line Protestants by 1905.

The church set up ethnic parishes and parochial schools to help immigrants from Italy, Portugal, and French Canada assimilate.

The tradition continues today, as parishes offer Mass in Spanish to new Hispanic arrivals. Rhode Island is also the home of the first First Baptist Church in the nation, as well as the oldest synagogue -- Touro, in Newport.

5. Immigrants didn't earn much, and food ate up more of their budgets than it does today. So when the price of pasta jumped by two-thirds in 1914, the Italians on Federal Hill staged a macaroni riot, spurred on by Socialists.

When the smoke cleared two days later, stores had been wrecked, 18 people were hurt -- and pasta prices were back to normal.

6. Most immigrants clung to their languages and customs for as long as possible in the New World, but the French of Woonsocket were more successful than most.

Visiting French Canada was much easier than crossing the Atlantic, so they stayed in closer touch with their former lives; a strong, conservative French-language church and church schools kept the culture alive well into the century.

In the picture at left, a child poses as St. Jean Baptiste for one of the religious parades that gave Woonsocket its special French flavor.

7. First generation immigrants may have toiled without complaint in the state's textile factories, but the long hours, rough conditions, pay cuts, and frequent layoffs led second-generation immigrants to organize unions.

Rhode Island became a hotbed for volatile union-management battles. The state militia was called out in both 1922 and 1934 during textile strikes .

At left, two National Guardsmen arrest a man after violence erupts Sept. 10, 1934 outside the Sayles Finishing Co. in Saylesville.

8. It took just 14 minutes on New Year's Day, 1935, for the Democrats -- long sneered at by native Yankees as a bunch of grubby immigrants -- to eviscerate the Republicans in the coup called the Bloodless Revolution .

By the time they were done, they controlled the General Assembly, replaced the Supreme Court, swept away more than 80 boards and commissions, and fired the Republican appointees who had run state government for years.

The man behind the plot was the decidedly patrician Theodore Francis Green, a Yankee lawyer from Providence's East Side. He united the warring Roman Catholic ethnic groups -- Italians, Irish, French-Canadians, and Portuguese -- under the Democratic banner.

Much as his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt had done in the 1932 presidential campaign, Green rode popular resentment over the Depression to victory in the 1934 election. It wasn't entirely on the up-and-up; State House Democrats used their muscle to award disputed state Senate races in South Kingstown and Portsmouth to Democrats.

One of Green's key allies was his Irish lieutenant governor, Robert E. Quinn of West Warwick, a rough-and-tumble lawyer who later became governor himself.

Green expanded the powers of the governorship and went on to a long career in the U.S. Senate. Born in 1867, two years after the Civil War ended, Green died in 1966 in the midst of the Vietnam War. Green airport is named for him.

9. The nature of college -- and who got to go -- changed tremendously during the century. When it began, just 7 percent of college-age Americans attended.

In the 1903 photo above, taken when the University of Rhode Island was called the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, students learn to pluck chickens.

World War II changed everything, as the G.I. bill put higher education within the reach of most veterans. Brown University and URI teemed with young men who shed their uniforms to become students. And between the mid-1950s and 1970, U.S. college enrollments tripled.

Brown swelled from 4,000 to 6,000; URI jumped from 3,500 to 10,000; Rhode Island College grew from less than 2,000 to 6,000; Rhode Island School of Design increased from about 800 to 1,100 and Johnson & Wales College (it was not yet a university) went from 450 to 950.

The state founded the Rhode Island Junior College in 1964, a two-year school that started with 250 students. The school shed the unfortunate acronym RIJC -- instantly dubbed Reject -- when it changed its name to the Community College of Rhode Island, which by 1980 had 12,000 students.

10. During the war, people were earning good money in the service and in the factories. With most of the economy producing war materiel, there was little to spend it on.

Once the war ended, however, a generation primed by mass advertising set out to acquire the good life . Cheap government mortgages and the invention of tract housing started the move by thousands of Rhode Islanders out of city tenements and into the suburbs.

In the photo at right, children check out Reddy Kilowatt inviting potential home buyers to visit a development in Cranston in the late 1950s.

World War II meant women who had expected to spend their lives as wives and mothers only, suddenly found themselves in overalls on assembly lines. At least 3,000 women worked at the Walsh-Kaiser Shipyards, in Providence, and perhaps 4,000 at the Naval Torpedo Station, in Newport; many came to enjoy enjoyed the rewards of a paycheck and the freedom of their new lives.

11. The 1950s were the Last Fine Time for political machines, a period of party patronage and torchlight parades. Every Rhode Island governor elected from 1940 until 1958 was a Democrat, as the party's coalition of New Deal voters held strong. In the '60s a new generation of politicians used television to bypass party leaders and speak directly to voters, many of whom had moved to suburbs. Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell, first elected in November 1960, and Republican John Chafee, first elected governor in November 1962, were avatars of the new politics.

12. The 1950s were the eye before the 1960s storm -- the decade of the suburb, the cocktail party, and the triumph of conformity and consumer culture after the shortages of World War II.

But some of the well-paid executives began to question whether the leafy comfort was worth the price in the loss of freedom and control over their lives. The alienation of the new junior executive class was portrayed by Sloan Wilson , a onetime Providence Journal reporter, in his best-selling 1955 novel, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

13. It was nothing like the violence that marred school desegregation in Boston, but there was turmoil when Providence started integrating schools in 1967. Black parents were angry because the plan required busing black children into mostly white areas -- but not white students to black neighborhoods.

The black parents boycotted schools and held a sit-in at school department headquarters. Eventually a compromise was struck; the school department created a ``model school'' for white and black children at Flynn, an elementary school in a mostly black South Providence neighborhood.

The photo above illustrates how Rhode Island has transformed itself from a gritty, industrial state to a bonafide tourist destination.

The picture was taken in 1908, during Providence's industrial prime, looking west from College Hill from atop the Christian Science Church. The square building in the center is the Federal Building; behind it to the left is City Hall.

That blackened steeple to the right of the Federal Building is the First Baptist Church, begrimed by the coal smoke that lay in a haze over the city. Further to the right is the old Union Station and the tangle of tracks that sliced the city in two.

That area has become architect and planner William D. Warner's elegant Waterplace Park, with its nicely planted walkways along the relocated rivers. The park in turn sparked artist Barnaby Evan's WaterFire, the fire sculpture that gets bigger and more popular every year.

The huge new Providence Place Mall and the sparkling Fleet Skating Center continue to draw people into the city by the thousands. And it doesn't hurt that about 14 million people see glossy scenes of the city each week on the NBC-TV Friday night hit, Providence.

That kind of transformation has been taking place across Rhode Island. Newport was the first to pretty up, after the Navy pulled out in 1973. And while it remains one of the state's biggest draws, other communities are increasingly attracting visitors: Wickford. Tiverton. Little Compton. South County. Watch Hill.

Tourism is now the second biggest business in the state.

15. When the FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, it ignited a social revolution that continues to this day. Relations between men and women changed, and people are still debating whether those changes have been for better or worse.

Birth control had not been easy in the nation's most Catholic state. When Planned Parenthood opened its doors in 1931 as the Rhode Island Birth Control League, it would only help married women -- and they had to bring a note from their doctors saying they could not safely bear children.

Now, for the first time, women had the option of pursuing the same sort of commitment-free sex life some men had always chosen.

Before the Pill, if a woman became pregnant, there was strong social pressure to marry; today, that pressure is all but gone.

With fewer unintended pregnancies, there were fewer forced marriages, and many women went on to get more education and land better jobs. But those who did get pregnant were less likely to marry; and many of the growing numbers of single mothers faced grim economic futures, juggling jobs and difficult-to-find child care.

The legalization of abortion in 1973 stirred strong passions, with each side determined to prevail.

The personal nature of the issue seemed clear in 1986, when Catholic Rhode Island voted by a 2-to-1 ratio to keep abortion legal; today activists like Dr. Pablo Rodriguez of Planned Parenthood work to prevent unplanned pregnancies by providing better access to birth control.

A yearlong Providence Journal series about life in Rhode Island.
Produced in cooperation with the Rhode Island Historical Society.