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fire-and-brimstone preachers Increase and Cotton Mather. The March sisters and Ethan Frome were fashioned from the same soil. The Yankee peddler, a master hoodwinker, and the upright Yank, straight-spoken and unflinching, were both home-grown. New England was gritty factory towns as well as manicured village commons, the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake as well as the
Saturday Evening Post
covers of Norman Rockwell, the pure lines of white clapboard churches set against maples and oaks in brilliant foliage.
    The industrialization of the Northeast dated from 1793, when Samuel Slater opened the first successful cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Manufacturing soon joined fishing and shipbuilding as the area’s leading industries. By the 1930s, just about every American was dressed in cotton woven in New England towns and stepped out in shoes manufactured there. Most of the workers who labored in the textile and leather factories were immigrants straight off the boat.
    Although such affluent enclaves as Napatree and Watch Hill went on much as they always had, by 1938 New England’s mills and quarries were staggering.
    For the haves, the thirties were a time of afternoon tea dances, waiters in swallowtail coats, and gleaming soda fountains with mirrored walls and marble counters. For the have-nots, there were poor farms, orphan asylums, and unthinking prejudice. Blacks were called “inkspots,” and the upper balcony of movie theaters was referred to as “nigger heaven.” Telephones were mostly party lines, and although TWA’s
Sky Chief
was offering the first cross-continental flight from Los Angeles to New York, most people still thought flying was for the birds. If their destination was Europe, they traveled by transatlantic steamer, and it could take better than a week to make the crossing. There were almost no televisions then.
    Newsboys hawked papers, shouting the day’s headlines from street corners. A paper cost two cents, and most cities of any size had two. New York City had more than half a dozen papers. There were no freeways, either, no frozen or fast foods, and no supermarkets. Butchers in straw boaters and bloody aprons, sawdust on their meat market floors, cut up sides of beef while the customer waited. Ballpoint pens, nylon stockings, and the forty-hour week were just coming in. Night ball games were a novelty, and airconditioning a rarity. In New England striped awnings kept out the summer heat and storm windows kept out the winter cold.
    Banks were vaulting stone edifices, hushed sanctuaries for savings scrimped from a twenty-five-cents-an-hour minimum wage, if you were fortunate enough to be earning a paycheck. One in four workers was unemployed. But if you happened to have a quarter, you could buy four pounds of mackerel. For another nickel, you could pick up two packs of Lucky Strikes. In those days, lighting a woman’s cigarette was tantamount to an act of seduction. If she inhaled, you could book a room with a private bath and radio at the Hotel Taft in New York City for $2.50, or cruise the Caribbean for $10 a day.
    If you were one of the millions looking for work, you might ride the rails south. It could take a week to reach the Keys from New York. If, on the other hand, you were one of the lucky few who managed to keep your shirt through the crash, you wouldn’t make the trip to Florida until January or February, when winter settled into the Northeast, and then you’d have a couple of comfortable options.
    If you had a sturdy car, a Lincoln, say, or a Pierce-Arrow, you might drive yourself, flying down the two-lane blacktop roads, pushing forty-five miles an hour with the accelerator to the floor, and stopping overnight every three hundred miles or so — West-erly to New York; New York to Richmond; Richmond to Pinehurst, North Carolina; Pinehurst to Sea Island, or maybe St. Augustine. Then on to Palm Beach or St. Petersburg. Getting there was half the adventure.
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