Scott MacKay: Finding a thematic thread sews up 20th century

3.1.2000
Scott MacKay: Finding a thematic thread sews up 20th century

      This essay capped the Rhode Island Century Project. The idea came from the fertile mind of Metro Editor Tom Heslin, who suggested that we find a compelling way to sum up the 20th century for our readers.
      The challenge was to do this in an essay of reasonable length; a book could easily be written on this topic alone. I came up with trying to find a thread that is woven through the state's long and florid history. After spending a year focusing on the 20th century in Rhode Island, the one thing that struck me is how the state and its citizens have been forced to change to survive.
      They may still grow corn in Iowa, drill for oil in Texas, and mine ore in Minnesota, but Rhode Island has no such natural advantages. It is the smallest of states; it has no natural resources, except perhaps Narragansett Bay. So Rhode Islanders have been forced to live by their wits, evolving from a farming community to a trading community to an industrial powerhouse to a tourist destination.
      But we do not live by economics alone. Any essay that focused solely on economic change would have lost the essential elements of what makes Rhode Island Rhode Island. We are less a distinctive place that we were a century ago. In a global Internet Village, this is inevitable. But the state that was forged in the crucible of immigration is still a magnet for people from around the world; immigrants from the Third World have flocked to the state in the last 20 years.
      The other interesting aspect of the past 100 years is how different the elite in the state appears. It has become fashionable (some say politically correct) to decry how little things have changed and how a white-male group still runs most meaningful organizations.
      But a study of history shows this is at once a facile and demeaning point of view. Things have changed -- not as dramatically as many would like -- and the history of the century can be viewed as the erosion of the power of a tight, male, Yankee, and Protestant elite and its dispersal to the sons and daughters of the Irish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Jewish, and Polish immigrants who flocked here around the dawn of the 20th century.
      I would like to thank my story editor, Jean Plunkett, for her smart editing and general patience as this essay went through its various permutations. Her suggestions made it better.

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