Yankee - Yankee Cultural History

Yankee Cultural History

The term Yankee now may mean any resident of New England or of any of the Northeastern United States. The original Yankees diffused widely across the northern US, leaving their imprints in New York, the Upper Midwest, and places as far away as Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu. Yankees typically lived in villages consisting of clusters of separate farms. Village life fostered local democracy, best exemplified by the Open Town Meeting form of government which still exists today in parts of New England. Village life also stimulated mutual oversight of moral behavior, and emphasized civic virtue. From the New England seaports of Boston, Salem, Providence, and New London, among others, the Yankees built an international trade, stretching to China by 1800. Much of the profit from trading was reinvested in the textile and machine tools industries.

In religion, New England Yankees originally followed the Puritan tradition, as expressed in Congregational churches; beginning in the late colonial period, however, many became Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, or, later, Unitarians. Straight-laced 17th century moralism as described by novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne faded in the 18th century. The First Great Awakening (under Jonathan Edwards and others) in the mid-18th century and the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century (under Charles Grandison Finney, among others) emphasized personal piety, revivals, and devotion to civic duty. Theologically, Arminianism replaced the original Calvinism. Horace Bushnell introduced the idea of Christian nurture, through which children would be brought to religion without revivals.

After 1800, Yankees (along with some Quakers and others) spearheaded most reform movements, including those for abolition of slavery, temperance in use of alcohol, increase in women's political rights, and improvement in women's education. Emma Willard and Mary Lyon pioneered in the higher education of women, while Yankees comprised most of the reformers who went South during Reconstruction in the late 1860s to educate the Freedmen.

Politically, Yankees, who dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest, were the strongest supporters of the new Republican party in the 1860s. This was especially true for the Congregationalists and Presbyterians among them and (after 1860), the Methodists. A study of 65 predominantly Yankee counties showed that they voted only 40% for the Whigs in 1848 and 1852, but became 61–65% Republican in presidential elections of 1856 through 1864.

Ivy League universities, particularly Harvard and Yale, as well as "Little Ivy" liberal arts colleges, remained bastions of old Yankee culture until well after World War II.

President Calvin Coolidge was a striking example of the Yankee stereotype. Coolidge moved from rural Vermont to urban Massachusetts and was educated at elite Amherst College. Yet his flint-faced, unprepossessing ways and terse rural speech proved politically attractive: "That Yankee twang will be worth a hundred thousand votes", explained one Republican leader. Coolidge's laconic ways and dry humor were characteristic of stereotypical rural "Yankee humor" at the turn of the 20th century.

The fictional character Thurston Howell, III, of Gilligan's Island, a graduate of Harvard, typifies the old Yankee elite in a comical way.

By the beginning of the 21st century, systematic Yankee ways had permeated the entire society through education. Although many observers from the 1880s onward predicted that Yankee politicians would be no match for new generations of ethnic politicians, the presence of Yankees at the top tier of modern American politics was typified by Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and by Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean (as well, to some observers, by 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Forbes Kerry, descendant through his mother, of the Scottish Forbes family, which emigrated to Massachusetts the 1750s). President Barack Obama is of Yankee descent on his mother's side; his high school was Punahou School, founded to serve the children of Yankee missionaries to Hawaii.