History of Massachusetts

As the Colony grew, businessmen established wide-ranging trade, sending ships to the West Indies and Europe. Britain began to increase taxes on the New England colonies, and tensions grew with implementation of the Navigation Acts. These political and trade issues led to the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684. The king established the Dominion of New England in 1686 to govern all of New England, and to centralize royal control and weaken local government. Sir Edmund Andros's intensely unpopular rule came to a sudden end in 1689 with an uprising sparked by the Glorious Revolution in England. The new king William III established the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691 to govern a territory roughly equivalent to the modern states of Massachusetts and Maine. Its governors were appointed by the crown, unlike the predecessor colonies that had elected their own governors. This increased friction between the colonists and the crown, which reached its height in the days leading up to the American Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s over the question of who could levy taxes. The American Revolutionary War began in Massachusetts in 1775 when London tried to shut down American self-government.


The commonwealth formally adopted the state constitution in 1780, electing John Hancock as its first governor. In the 19th century, New England became America's center of manufacturing with the development of precision manufacturing and weaponry in Springfield and Hartford, Connecticut, and large-scale textile mill complexes in Worcester, Haverhill, Lowell, and other communities throughout New England using their rivers for power. New England also was an intellectual center and center of abolitionism. The Springfield Armory made most of the weaponry for the Union in the American Civil War. After the war, immigrants from Europe, The Middle East and Asia flooded into Massachusetts, continuing to expand its industrial base until the 1950s when textiles and other industries started to fade away, leaving a "rust belt" of empty mills and factories. Labor unions were important after the 1860s, as was big-city politics. The state's strength as a center of education contributed to the development of an economy based on information technology and biotechnology in the later years of the 20th century, leading to the "Massachusetts Miracle" of the late 1980s.

Prosperity decades: 1900–29[edit]

Massachusetts entered the 20th century with a strong industrial economy. Despite a lack of agricultural progress, the economy prospered between 1900 and 1919. Factories throughout the Commonwealth produced goods varying from paper to metals. Boston, in the year 1900, was still the second most important port in the United States, as well as the most valuable U.S. port in terms of its fish market. By 1908, however, the value of the port dropped considerably due to competition. Population growth during this period, which was aided by immigration from abroad, helped in urbanization and forced a change in the ethnic make-up of the Commonwealth.


The largely industrial economy of Massachusetts began to falter, however, due to the dependence of factory communities upon the production of one or two goods. External low-wage competition, coupled with other factors of the Great Depression in later years, led to the collapse of the state's two main industries: shoes and textiles. Between 1921 and 1949 the failure of those industries resulted in rampant unemployment and the urban decay of once-prosperous industrial centers which would persist for several decades.


The industrial economy began a decline in the early 20th century with the exodus of many manufacturing companies. By the 1920s competition from the South and Midwest, followed by the Great Depression, led to the collapse of the three main industries in Massachusetts: textiles, shoemaking, and mechanized transportation.^[89] This decline would continue into the latter half of the century; between 1950 and 1979, the number of Bay Staters involved in textile manufacturing declined from 264,000 to 63,000.^[90] The Springfield Armory, the United States' Military's munitions producer since 1777, was controversially shut down by the Pentagon in 1968. This spurred an exodus of high-paying jobs from Western Massachusetts, which suffered greatly as it de-industrialized during the last 40 years of the 20th century.^[91] In Eastern Massachusetts, following World War II, the economy was transformed from one based on heavy industry into a service and high-tech based economy.^[92] Government contracts, private investment, and research facilities led to a new and improved industrial climate, with reduced unemployment and increased per capita income. Suburbanization flourished, and by the 1970s, the Route 128 corridor was dotted with high-technology companies who recruited graduates of the area's many elite institutions of higher education.^[93]


On Thursday, October 1, 1903, the city of Boston made history by hosting the inaugural World Series at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. The Boston Red Sox won the best-of-nine series and launched into a baseball dynasty in the following years by capturing five championships in fifteen years behind Hall of Famer Babe Ruth.


Massachusetts also endured class conflict during this period. In the 1912 general strike in Lawrence, almost all of the town's mills were forced to shut down as a result of strife over wages that sustained only poverty. The Commonwealth was confronted with issues of worker conditions and wages. For example, when the legislature decreed that women and children could work only 50 hours per week, employers cut wages proportionally. Eventually, the demands of the Lawrence strikers were heeded, and a pay increase was made.