More Than Blue, More Than Yankee: Complexity and Change in New England Politics. Edited by Amy Fried and Erin O'Brien

A high schooler skimming Robert Frost's “Mending Wall” thinks at first that the poem's message is its most famous line: “good fences make good neighbors.” With more reading, or teacherly prodding, they notice that Frost is quite ambivalent about blunt stone walls and stoic Yankee sayings. In More Than Blue, More Than Yankee: Complexity and Change in New England Politics, the political scientists Amy Fried and Erin O'Brien try to teach us the same lesson. Their collection argues that modern New England politics cannot be reduced to being electorally blue and culturally Yankee. Like neighbors mending gaps in a wall, the contributors build a more nuanced concept of New England politics—one stone at a time.Fried and O'Brien are driven by a clear scholastic imperative: New England's remarkable transformation from rock-ribbed Republican territory to a Democrat bastion has received relatively little scholarly attention compared to, for example, the south's transformation from Democrat to Republican. They make two main arguments, that New England's electoral allegiance must be understood as “more than blue,” and that the Tocquevillian archetype of town meetings and local democratic traditions has faded in a region that is “more than Yankee.”The collection is divided into three sections. Part I traces the two strands of “blue” and “Yankee” at a regional level, reviewing the history since the early national period and focusing on the recent events that brought about New England's Democratic affiliation and the changing state of its Yankee political culture. Part II discusses each New England state separately, laying out heterogeneous paths they took to reach today's apparent regional homogeneity. Part III considers the forces shaping a complex region that defies easy characterization.In Part I, Fried and O'Brien—along with Douglas B. Harris, who co-wrote the historical overview chapter “From Red to Blue: New England in American Political Development” with Fried—argue that although New England appears as a simple blue corner in the national electoral map, just beneath the surface lies a region that elects the occasional Republican and more than its share of iconoclastic Democrats and independents. Even if the six New England states pick something close to an all-blue congressional delegation each November, they have very different ways of getting there. Part I—and several contributors throughout the collection—also add nuance to the myth of the New England Yankee. Fried and O'Brien summarize the insights of the collection in the volume's conclusion, as they remind readers of the value and limits of the Yankee ideal. For example, they point to the quintessential New England Yankee Robert Frost—“thrifty, pragmatic, blunt-talking but civil, caring for one's community, and civically involved while also respecting others’ choices”—as someone whose values retain considerable meaning and remain a source of local pride (252). But they also point to the stubborn and persistent limits of Yankee culture as a basis for democracy, such as its “exclusivity rooted in whiteness and maleness” (252). Demographic and social changes have diversified New England's political life; new generations have not chosen to make old Yankee myths constituent to their new realities.Each chapter in the second section reveals shading within New England's “blues” and adds new dimensions to Yankee stock characters. Scott L. McLean highlights Connecticut's unique “challenge” primary system and how it enables wealthy maverick candidates. James Melcher and Amy Fried discuss the split electoral formula that keeps Maine in play during presidential elections, highlighting how the state's residents resist national forces (“from away”). Jerold Duquette describes how a tripod of professional politics, progressive ideals, and pragmatic dealmaking dominate and ossify Massachusetts politics. Christopher J. Galdieri explains that New Hampshire is best understood as not only more complicated than blue and Yankee but as fundamentally weird. Maureen Moakley reminds us that iconoclastic Rhode Island has never been particularly Yankee and is better understood by the statue atop its State House dome, the “Independent Man.” Paul Petterson explains how profoundly un-Yankee outsiders, like the Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders, have dramatically reshaped Vermont.Section III engages regional topics. Rachael Cobb notes that a region famous for its participation and progressivism is surprisingly passive when it comes to promoting early voting. Dante J. Scala considers why New England Republican presidential primaries largely pick the national candidate while Democratic primary voters tend to pick insurgents who don't end up atop the ticket. Luis Jiménez examines the long history and the uneven recent impact of Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in a region that is still disproportionately controlled by white men. Jane Jakyung Han and Erin O'Brien argue that women's electoral success is inversely related to the degree of professionalism (such as power and pay) of the state legislature for which they are running.Beginning at a meeting of the New England Political Science Association, Fried and O'Brien organized scholars to flesh out this dual thesis. The resulting collection, comprehensive and concise, surely achieves its editors’ goal of being “a good read and reference work on the political developments of this region” (xi). Good reads make for good teaching, and a solid bibliography in each chapter makes this text a good starting point for undergraduate and even graduate research. This is not a work of history, but it is not quite a typical work of political science either. Although aimed at teachers of political science, it should be of interest to historians who are looking for a single volume upon which to base lectures, discussion, and research. The paperback edition, modestly priced and physically compact, will appeal to the reading habits of contemporary undergraduates.