A Tale of Two States

In many ways, they are the yin and yang of the American experience, poles of the national character. One is "back East," a little overbred and intellectual for a Texan's taste. The other is "out West," big and rough and physical. Massachusetts evokes Calvinism and Brahmins and John Kennedy. Texas is the fenceless dreamland of American individualism, where the native exuberance went to herd cows and sling guns and strike oil. It means Giant, Lyndon Johnson and everything bigger and louder than it ought to be.

The destinies of the two states sometimes worked in counterpoint, almost seemed to leapfrog each other. In the 1970s, for example, Massachusetts appeared to be threadbare and obsolete, a ghost town of the Industrial Revolution, its people shivering through the winters of the oil shortage. Texas boomed with energy--the kind it pumped out of the Permian Basin and the kind that came from its adrenal glands. Now it is Texas that is chastened and Massachusetts that seems, for the moment, to belong to the future. Two reports:

MASSACHUSETTS

Back in the Vanguard

Massachusetts has always been ahead of its time. The Pilgrims of Plymouth engendered an idea and a commonwealth. The Minutemen of Lexington and Concord triggered a revolution and a republic. High-minded, contrary and steadfastly liberal, Massachusetts either led the parade or refused to march. It is the cradle not only of liberty but of imagination: John Harvard conceived of a college; Emerson and Thoreau inspired the intellectual flowering of New England; William Lloyd Garrison sparked the abolitionist movement that split a country. The state's hybrid heritage--Puritan and Pilgrim, fisherman and farmer, Yankee and immigrant--combined to form something greater than the sum of its individual strains.

Economically, Massachusetts seemed to be the first to benefit from good times or bruise from bad. Watching the Bay State's skyline was a way of marking the economic evolution of a nation: the graceful masts of 18th century sailing ships gave way to the red brick smokestacks of 19th century textile mills, which in turn made way for the steel-and-glass towers of 20th century corporate power.

Only a decade ago, however, Massachusetts was moribund, the archetypal Frost Belt state frozen in a dead-end past. Its jobless rate was higher than any other industrial state's; plant closings and layoffs were epidemic; deficits deepened. Textile mills and shoe factories became abandoned shells, their great machines rusting. Taxachusetts became the state's unofficial nickname, and businesses, feeling oppressed by heavy levies, were clearing out for more hospitable climates.