From the Bay to the Corner

Before the Pilgrims arrived, the people living along the shores of Massachusetts Bay were semi-nomadic.  They moved with the season from place to place where food was most abundant.  In the summer they might pick berries and in the autumn hunt for deer or game bird.  Whole families would travel together along the same circuit every year.  Every autumn they would meet the same neighbors at the hunting grounds, and in the winter each family would go their separate way.  Then they would join the same neighbors they had known the previous winter fishing along the rivers or bays.

In this way families would maintain networks of friends who they could turn to in times of need.  If one autumn the hunting was poor, then they could send word to the families they fished with in the winter.  Each family had incentive to help one another because they knew that next year they might need help in return.  The best defense against a precarious food supply was a reputation as a reliable neighbor—a good person to know when you need a friend.

This was something the English colonists never understood.  They also built strong communities, but centuries of agriculture had taught them a different relationship with the land.  They built farms, homes and cottage industries—all of which meant staying in one place, which in turn meant they could store food for the winter and accumulate material goods.  They saw that their lifestyle meant physical comfort and a reliable food supply, and they couldn’t understand why the native people wouldn’t just settle down.

The English couldn’t understand that the native people were dependent on a network of alliances that could only be maintained through constant movement—that they were asking the natives to abandon the only security they had known.  If one farmer is struck by a bad harvest, then the farmer’s neighbors will likely be struck as well.  Who could they turn to then?  The English had more material comforts, but they couldn’t see the assumptions implicit in their own way of life.  Their emphasis on self-reliance and independence stood in contrast to the native people’s interdependence.  They thought the natives were just lazy and lacked ambition.  

Roughly three hundred years later this same misunderstanding arose again as the descendants of the English colonists encountered new waves of immigrants from Europe.  At the end of the Great Depression, William Whyte described the difference between “college boys” and “corner boys” in Boston’s North End:

“The college boys fit in with an economy of saving and investment.  The corner boys fit in with a spending economy.”  A college boy must save his money to pay for education; “In order to participate in group activities, the corner boy must share his money with others.  If he has money and his friend does not, he is expected to do the pending for both of them.”

Like the colonist storing food for the winter, the college boy saves his money to achieve independence.  The corner boy spends his money to build a network that he can rely on in times of need.  This distinction can affect all aspects of their social lives.  For example, the corner boys were criticized for gambling what little money they had despite the low chance of winning.  However, there’s little incentive to save money if one is expected to share it, but a sudden windfall, however small, creates an opportunity for public displays of generosity.

Of course, this does not mean that Depression-era Italian immigrants were a hunter-gatherer culture.  The strategy of interdependence has been used throughout history and around the world to deal with periods of unreliable resources.  Rather, the feature that has remained consistent over all this time has been the mutual misunderstanding.  The corner boys saw the college boys as selfish and unreliable while the corner boys were seen as lazy and impractical.  Neither group fully recognized their own assumptions, so they couldn’t understand each other’s way of life.