Letter From New Hampshire

 

Hampton, is one of the five towns which dot the 18 mile stretch of seacoast belonging to New Hampshire. The southernmost is Seabrook, then Hampton, North Hampton, Rye and finally Portsmouth, in roughly ascending order of wealth and political liberalism.

On the night of November 7, 2008, I watched the election results on the downstairs T.V. in our Hampton home, while my wife took to bed upstairs, pulled a pillow over her head so her ears were firmly plugged and refused to get up, even as I ran upstairs with bulletins from the TV election night news, threw open the door and shouted, "Looks promising!" and later "Looking good!" and finally, "He won!"

She refused to leave her room despite my exhortations--Obama was coming out to speak in Grant Park but she was sure he would be shot and, in any case it could not be true.

Ophrah Winfrey was weeping on TV, but she was not alone, as members of the Hampton Democrat Committee were gathered in front of a TV in the home of its chairman about a mile from my house,  and they were weeping copious tears of joy. 

Ten miles up the Coast, in Portsmouth, the Leftist Marching Band (real name) took to the streets and played "Happy Days Are Here Again!" and various other celebrations deep into the night. There was dancing in Market Square, on Bow Street at Tugboat Alley,  and in front of North Church and inside the liberal Universalist/Unitarian (U-U) Church ("Don't believe in God? Don't be a Stranger. There's a Place Here for You.")

Up the Piscataqua River, and on to the Great Bay and Oyster river near Durham, home to the University of New Hampshire and on north to Dover, the rejoicing was loud and long.

New Hampshire, like so many states, is those liberal towns with Alabama in between.

I had moved to New Hampshire in 2008, and was quickly recruited to hold an Obama sign at the main intersection in town, finding myself standing next to a seventy something woman in a blue wool Talbot's suit, white hair perfectly coiffed, and learning I was new to town and hailed from below the Mason/Dixon line, she said, "Well, you'll find Republicans up here are more refined. You'll disagree with them about things like taxes and real estate development, but then you can eat lunch with them at the Old Salt and talk about the Winnacunnet football team."

Not more than five seconds after she said that, a man leaning out of the passenger window of a Ford F150 gave us the middle finger and shouted, "Nigger lover!" as the truck roared off.

Redux of 2008, four years later

This did not surprise me much, as I had driven up to the lakes region the week before and saw a big lawn sign, "Somewhere In Kenya, A Village Is Missing Its Idiot." My Talbot lady might have been harboring a nostalgia for a time long gone.

On the other hand, maybe that part of New Hampshire had always been there, and thinking about the dark secret of "Peyton Place," the real shameful secret had nothing to do with all the subterranean sex but with the founding of the town, which the white folks living there in the 1950's could not abide: The town's founder and benefactor was a Black man, an escaped slave. (And remember "Peyton Place" was published before "To Kill A Mockingbird.") It does seem still true that you don't hear much racial animus expressed in New Hampshire, but that may be because there are so few Blacks the topic of race rarely comes up.

When there was the Pease Air Force base at Portsmouth, there were more Black students at Portsmouth High School and teachers who were there then say that infused the experience of high school with a "broadening" of perspective, but that hasn't been seen since the base closed in 1991. Now you don't see many Black faces in New Hampshire. My wife, who kept her Washington, D.C. job for the first five years we lived in New Hampshire would fly down to DC every six weeks to work in the office and she said, "I'd see a Black man on the Metro and just beam at him, and he'd slide away from me, down the seating toward a far end of the car, thinking I was some sort of nut. But it was just nice to see some people who are not so...White."

It's not that New Hampshire has always been insulated from the greater issues of the country. In 1968, North Hampton's Peter Fuller bred a wonderful horse, Dancers Image, and when he won a stakes race on the way to the Kentucky Derby, and he gave his winnings to Coretta Scott King after her husband was assassinated. When Dancers Image won the Kentucky Derby the Derby officials were apoplectic. This Yankee commie, who gave his winnings to Martin Luther King's widow, wins the Kentucky Derby!  Somehow, weeks later the Derby hoo-haws discovered a banned substance in the horse's urine, and stripped away the title but everyone knew what had happened and why, even in New Hampshire. 

When Donald Trump won, in 2016, the New Hampshire Democrats decided to hold seminars to draw together folks to talk about what values we thought ought to bind Democrats together, and I drove over to the library where it was happening with Mary McCarthy, a longtime officer in the Democratic Committee. She had taken me canvassing, knocking on doors, to try to turn out the Democratic vote, and like so many politically active New Hampshire residents, she had met all the big names who came through New Hampshire for primary season year after year.  

The joke was you would never consider voting for someone if  they'd been over to your kitchen for coffee only once.  Joe Biden had shaken Mary's hand for a long time, staring into her azure blue eyes and he said, "I see a lot of people on these grip and grin lines, but those eyes are really gorgeous."

But now we were seated around a table in the Exeter Library to talk about the direction we wanted to see the Democratic Party go.  The Party felt it important to provide us with a facilitator, who began the discussion by asking each person to say something about what we might need to know to prepare for the next election. A sixty-something woman I'd never met held a textbook she had filched from her grand daughter, and when her turn came, she opened the book and briefly reviewed her notes and informed us she had learned that the federal government has three branches. 

My mouth dropped open, and almost instantaneously, a stinging pain in my left shin, Mary having kicked me, seeing my mouth open, and she was sure I was about to say something she knew would be inappropriate. She narrowed the gorgeous blue beamers at me and I held my tongue.

Obadiah Youngblood, Pink House

Afterwards, as we were driving home, she asked me, "What would be the point of humiliating that woman?"

"That woman graduated from  Winnacunet High School. Granted, 40 years ago, but she is a product of the New Hampshire public schools," I protested.

"And my son, who also graduated from Winnacunnet, would know all about the three branches."

"Are you sure?"

That elicited a shoulder thump. Blue eyes aside, Mary has a pretty potent right cross. 

The next year, Mary took me to a meeting where candidates for an open U.S. Congressional seat were speaking.  The deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had already happened, and Trump had commented there were very fine people on both sides of that nasty event.  

Terence O'Rourke: Opportunity Missed

"I'm looking for that woman," I told Mary, as we settled into our seats. "You think she knows which branch of the government these folks are running for?"

Another right shoulder thump. Some back and forth about public schools, and we were getting smug and catty about a couple wearing cowboy hats two rows in front of us, which is simply not done in New Hampshire, when I heard, filtering through from the podium, "We live in divided times. But even in these times, I would have thought one thing we could all agree upon is that there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi."

"Wait! Who is this guy?"

He was a lawyer named Terence O'Rourke and he continued on saying, "We always get warnings from the Republicans about socialized medicine, but I grew up in a military family and we had Army medicine, which is socialized medicine and my father still gets VA medicine, which is government medicine. And I can't think of any better medicine in the world."

I invited O'Rourke to do a house meeting at my house, a local custom,  where he fielded questions from about forty local Hampton citizens filling seats spread out from my fireplace across the first floor. We learned he had fought in Iraq as an infantry captain.  He had not mentioned it in his opening remarks, but someone asked him how he earned his Bronze star and he said, "Oh, you know: Combat."

 Most of the citizens who attended that session were women in their sixties. They thought he sounded too angry and too aggressive. He was beaten by Chris Pappas, a restaurant owner from Manchester.

 When I asked  Papas how he intended to deal with Jim Jordan and the other macho men the Republicans were sending to Congress, he said, "Well, I'm not going down there to get into a food fight."

I got into trouble with Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party for calling Papas a house cat. I thought he was going down to Washington to a knife fight, and he was bringing a butter knife. Buckley controlled electronic voter lists and had a lot of other strings to pull, and Papas got the seat. Apparently, if you want to win in New Hampshire it's best not to look too confrontational. 

Which is not to say New Hampshire politicians are cut from a cloth of "New Hampshire Nice." 

We are not Minnesota.

Dudley Dudley is, to my mind, the prototypic New Hampshire politician of choice.

Dudley Dudley

In 1973, she discovered that Aristotle Onassis had decided to use his fleet of ships to bring oil to the New Hampshire seacoast, where he planned to off load the black sludge into a depot at the Isles of Shoals, and pump it 15 miles in an underwater pipeline to the coast where another pipeline would run another 20 miles up the coast to Great Bay, where he would build the world's largest oil refinery.  The estimated expected annual oil leakage into the ocean was 8000 gallons, which would have killed the lobsters. And the seals would have been none too happy. 

Joined by two women, a newspaper owner and a local housewife with organizational skills,  Dudley managed to introduce legislation which blew Onassis out of the water, at least temporarily.  This incensed the owner of the Manchester Union Leader, William F. Loeb, who railed that these three small breasted women had no business raising objections to a business deal, and, for that matter women had no business being in the legislature--he always called Dudley "MRS Thomas Dudley"-- and he thought it offensive that a woman would  own a newspaper, and they were jeopardizing a huge win for New Hampshire which would make automobile gasoline cheap in the state and which would provide 10,000 new jobs. 

Of course, neither of those claims had any basis, even remotely, in the truth, but those were different times and the truth mattered then. 

In 2022, not quite the 50th anniversary of the triumph of right over might, Dudley was honored with a town meeting at the U-U Church, where she warned of a new threat from an planned cargo plane airport at Pease airport, which would fill the skies with continuous airplane roaring day and night.  She had opposed the building of the nuclear plant at Seabrook in 1977, four years after she beat Onassis, but she lost that one.  She was beaten by the governor and his attorney general, David Suter--yes, that David Suter--who rushed down to the seacoast when he heard that local judges were releasing arrested protesters on their own recognizance, and he insisted they be jailed. These protesters were disrupting commerce occupying the construction site, and they were mostly hippies mostly interested in having sex in their tents and sleeping bags and they were getting in the way of a safe source of power. Two years later, in 1979 the nuclear power plant at Three Miles Hour blew up and nearly melted down.

"We lost that fight," Dudley told me, "But we found Renny Cushing." Cushing, a twenty something, eventually became a Representative in the New Hampshire legislature, and after years of campaigning, he managed to get New Hampshire to eliminate the death penalty. His own father had been murdered on the doorstep of their home and Renny had a lot of credibility when it came to the death penalty.

Hampton continues to be a purple town: Trump lost by just 60 votes out of 3,000 cast in Hampton in 2024. 

The town continues to vote an allocation, a slush fund really, to the town's Catholic Church school despite the obvious violation of the first amendment.  Every year speeches are given at the town's "Deliberative Session" where arguments about the obvious violation of church and state are made, and people listen politely, if indifferently.

Someone usually quotes John F. Kennedy: "I am for the absolute separation of church and state. I believe no public funds ought ever be granted to any church or to any church school."  This is said to appeal to the Catholic congregation which constitutes the bulk of those who vote for the fund. It has never worked.

And then someone gets up to say what a wonderful school Sacred Heart is, and the warrant article gets voted through. 

The Constitution, the first amendment, none of this matters. We know the families who send their kids to Sacred Heart, and we like them. 

One man said that just because someone says giving taxpayer funds to a church school violates the first amendment, doesn't mean it really is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, he said, knows a lot more about the Constitution than we do, and we ought to defer to them. If the justices say separation of church and state and the First Amendment are unconstitutional, then they probably are.  And, anyway, there are lots of examples of the government funding religious institutions and churches, although he did not cite a single instance. It was enough to just say it.

 When an amendment was offered saying that a similar fund ought to be available to any school that wants it, any school religious or not,  another man rose to say, "But then we might have a Church of Satan come to town and demand funds for its school."  So the amendment got voted down. 

We vote taxpayer funds only for churches we like.

New Hampshire once had the first primary in the nation, until Joe Biden came to New Hampshire in 2020. 

Mary McCarthy dragged me off to see him speak at a restaurant to about 150 people. When the time came for questions, someone asked about the Middle East and he said that was an interesting question and the he said we ought to be taking a moon shot to beat cancer, which is the disease which took his son.  Sometimes he seemed to be headed in the general direction of an answer to a question posed, but he invariably lost his way and go lost in the undergrowth of his own neurons.

"Oh," Mary said. "This is not the same man."

You did not need four years in medical school to know Joe Biden had entered into some phase of dementia. 

As it turned out, dementia was not necessarily such a bad thing in a President. His four years were remarkably successful. Like Reagan before him, whose dementia was better concealed, being President turns out to be a job which does not require full faculties.  Wouldn't want that in a brain surgeon or an airplane pilot or an HVAC guy, but for President, maybe not so bad.

New Hampshire voted for four other Democrats ahead of Joe Biden, but he went on to win in South Carolina, and he was off to the races, because New Hampshire should never have been determinant in national politics in the first place. Too white. Too rural. Too 1950's. 

Maybe also too close to the candidates. There's something to say for seeing politicians close up.

But when Joe Biden came in 5th in New Hampshire, he made sure that state would never be the "first in the nation" primary again. That lost the state millions of dollars: all those news organization, campaign organizations buying air time on TV, filling hotel rooms, restaurants.  Biden was right, of course. New Hampshire has no business choosing national candidates. We are too much of an anomaly.  We are Iowa wearing plaid shirts and suspenders with our belts. In the general election New Hampshire forgave Biden and voted for him by about a thousand votes. 

The state is something of a time capsule, but its citizens are engaged. They go to meetings and they listen and they judge. 

When Thornton Wilder set "Our Town" in New Hampshire, he knew what he was doing. There is a certain timelessness about small town life and apart from Manchester, that's what most of New Hampshire is, small towns. I can walk from my front door to the hardware store, the dry cleaners, the grocery store, two coffee shops, the library, town hall, five churches, two pizza places, four barber shops, seven restaurants, the post office, two drug stores, two car washes, four gas stations, a garage mechanic,  and the beach is 3.4 miles.  

There is a seawall running more than a mile along the shoreline, and high school girls sit in their folding aluminum chairs and their bikinis on top of that, while boys buzz around.  Traffic and population quadruples in the summer, and seals flop up on rocks a hundred yards offshore. Lobster trap buoys bob a little farther out. 

When the summer ebbs and autumn drifts in, there is sometimes a warm interlude, which  was best described by one of New Hampshire's best known authors, and for my money, nobody has ever written a more evocative or better description:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. in norther New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an uncharted season which  lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of the winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for  a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

--Grace Metalious  Peyton Place, 1956