One in an occasional series on the forces that shaped the current political landscape.
WILMOT, N.H. - Whose woods these are they think they know.
This is a classic New Hampshire upland in winter, a frosty mountain meadow and a hillside cemetery covered by the dust of snow from a hemlock tree. Up here on the northwest shoulder of Mount Kearsarge, amid the roar of trees and the crack of branches, and with snow falling and night falling fast, is a grand glimpse of Mount Sunapee, of Ragged Mountain and of the land below - the complex, confounding, contradictory and contentious state that on Tuesday holds the first presidential primary of the political season.
The pollsters, with their nightly tracking surveys, think they know the subtlest impulses of the voters milling beneath the spruce and fir. The candidates, with their open forums and their jaunty walks along Elm Street, think they know the temper of the people in the towns. The commentators, with their first-class upgrades on nonstop jet flights into Manchester's shiny airport, think they know the lay of the land.
And they do, more or less. They know more of this state - a barnicle on the coast of America, extending like a wedge, thick end to thin, all the way to the mountain frontier with Quebec, an industrious colony of 1,185,048 souls - than they do of other states, like, say, Michigan, which has eight times the population and a dozen times the diversity.
That's the more. Here's the less. The New Hampshire that is the setting for Tuesday's primary - the New Hampshire that now has the greatest concentration of high-tech workers in the nation - was shaped by the land, whose contours challenged white settlers as early as 1642; and by the state's constitution, which has made an income tax an impossibility for generations; and by the mills, most of which closed in the mid-1930s but whose shadows (and sober lessons of the limits of technology) dominate the towns and give them a gloom even in an economic boom; and by poets who, as Robert Frost remarked in a poem he called ''New Hampshire'' in a 1923 book he titled ''New Hampshire,'' sometimes seem ''so much more businesslike than businessmen.''
New Hampshire is America's Canada, with most of the population hugging the Massachusetts border (the way that most of Canada's population is within four hours' driving distance of the American border), with a simplistic image that belies the complexities, with a great backyard of woods and hills that shapes the views and perspectives of people who haven't even ventured there, and with a sense of place so firm, so robust, so large that it works its will on newcomer and native alike.
New Hampshire is a place, but it is also an outlook.
''As the North Country weaves into the souls and minds of its men those patterns of ruggedness, of sturdiness and individuality and self-expressive independence,'' Dartmouth College president Ernest Martin Hopkins said in 1923, ''so these men in turn weave it back into the fabric of the life of the society and the groups and the environment within which they live.''
Some 77 years later, reflecting on his state in the new century and millennium - a state whose biggest employers now are a defense contractor and a manufacturer of high-speed, high-tech connectors - former senator Warren B. Rudman has a remarkably similar view: ''We're independent. We're self-reliant,'' said Rudman, who was born in Boston and moved to Nashua at age 4. ''It's even true of the people who move into the state. They take on the character.'' It's what draws them here, and what keeps them here.
But with all the change, with all the plants making print and circuit boards and Calloway golf clubs, with all the mutual-fund managers and the thermal heat-sink manufacturers, New Hampshire is still a product of its history and its geography. And of the two, geography has prevailed every time.
''Geography is the foundation of this sense of localism and autonomy,'' said John L. Frisbee, executive director of the New Hampshire Historical Society. ''People everywhere say they are different. People here really are. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century and we're finally developing a decent connector between Portsmouth in the east and Keene in the west.''
The beginning of knowledge in New Hampshire is the recognition that all of the movement in the state - goods, services, people - is in a north-south direction. As a result, the Connecticut River Valley (with its market in Springfield, Mass., and Hartford) and the Merrimack River Valley (which looks to Boston and Worcester) and the North Country (which is oriented to Portland, Maine, and Canada) are separate entities.
The roads and rivers (and, not so long ago, the railroads) carried goods in and out of the state, but they also carried people, and with the exception of the great influx of French-speaking Canadians in the last century, mostly the people left. The situation grew so grave at the last turn of the century that a visionary governor named Frank West Rollins came up with a phrase that is now lodged in the American imagination and with an idea that changed the face of New Hampshire:
Old Home Week.
In 1899 the governor delivered an invitation - no, perhaps a summons - to those who had left. He bid them to return, and in so doing bid New Hampshire to return to its heritage. Indeed, Old Home Week helped build the idea (and image) of New Hampshire that is so prominent now: the Yankee farmer, the sturdy individual, the church steeples, the town greens, the long white afternoons.
In a series of addresses Rollins made around the state in 1900, he delivered what Yvonne Stahr Fried described in the journal Historical New Hampshire as ''a strong heart-felt attempt to rekindle feelings of local pride and state patriotism.''
The only thing more astonishing than the idea was its success, and as a result New Hampshire built new roads, took new steps toward preserving its northern forests, and cultivated an image that remains with us still. And the pride it generated led directly to the New Hampshire primary, which began in 1916 and, since 1920, has always been the first in the nation. The primary was also a product of the progressive impulses that were sweeping the nation and that, between 1906 and 1916, were especially prominent in New Hampshire.
These local reformers, known as Progressive Yankees, fought the power of the Boston and Maine Railroad, which controlled politics here, instituted controls on lobbying, created the first important regulatory board, pushed through child-labor laws - and instituted a primary election law.
The Progressive Yankees were attracted by the new idea of direct primaries in part because they believed it would help them elect a reform governor, and it set the stage for the presidential primary that has become such an important part of the American political landscape.
And though in decades to come New Hampshire officials of all stripes would fight fiercely to retain the state's position as the staging ground for the first presidential contest, an element of Yankee thrift also prevailed: For years the primary was held on the second Tuesday in March, which is Town Meeting Day. No one wanted to have to heat the town hall twice.
Of all the New Hampshire myths that have been turned into sturdy truths, none is sturdier than the idea that the road to the White House runs through the byways and community halls of this state. The myth-become-truth is that, with one exception (Bill Clinton, who was defeated by Massachusetts neighbor Paul E. Tsongas in 1992, an extenuating circumstance if ever there was one) no modern president has been elected without first having won the New Hampshire primary.
''That shows that this one-on-one political style of ours pays off,'' said Hugh Gregg, who served as governor between 1953 and 1955. ''We pick the candidate with an open mind. We don't always concentrate on the issues. We always concentrate on the character of the candidate. It works here. We serve the nation in the way no one else can.'' And, of course, no one but the voters of New Hampshire could have persuaded Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, dressed impeccably in a suit, tie, and overcoat, to clutch a chicken close to his breast. That scene, immortalized in 1952 by an Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph, remains perhaps the classic campaign picture of all time.
Though the New Hampshire primary remains at the head of the parade, so much else has changed, and most of the state now has a modern, suburban, and sometimes even antiseptic feel to it. State game wardens, for example, no longer pay a bounty on porcupines (25 cents per nose, one of the ways the legendary White Mountain guide Joe Dodge earned his way in the 1920s), so now, when the phrase ''counting noses'' is heard in New Hampshire, the meaning is assumed to be purely political. Life here now is less ambiguous, but it's less colorful, too.
In the first half of the last century, the Upper Valley on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River was dominated by Claremont, a mill town that had its own trolley system, an opera house, and a Roseland Dance Hall, where Tommy Dorsey and others of the big-band era used to play regularly. Now the region is dominated by Hanover (in the early days a sleepy college town with one movie house, called the Nugget) and Lebanon (in the early days a dreary mill town), which together now form an education, high-tech, and medical center near the intersection of two interstate highways.
The entire profile of Manchester, the main urban center since it was planted on the Amoskeag Falls of the Merrimack River by Boston developers in 1837, has changed, too. In the early 20th century, the Amoskeag mills made up the biggest textile plant in the world, employing some 17,000 workers in 30 major mills and accounting for 8 million square feet of floor space along two miles of the river. It was, wrote Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, the editors of a compelling oral history of the mills, ''a total institution, a closed and almost self-contained world.''
But the 74 cloth-making departments, three dye houses, three steam power plants, and the hydroelectric power plant fell victim to competition, mainly from the South. The mill shut down in 1936. ''The death of those mills was catastrophic,'' said Frisbee, the executive director of the historical society. ''New Hampshire went into a depression and pretty much didn't come out of it.''
Even in the time when Gregg occupied the governor's office in the Concord capitol, roughly a half-century ago, the economy of the state was dominated by the remnants of the shoe, textile, and wood products industries - in short, the very factors that dominated the economy in 1850.
None of those is dominant or even prominent now. The fastest expanding business today is Fidelity Investments, followed by HADCO Corp., which makes printed electrical circuits.
''This state has gone from low tech to high tech, from a work ethic to a learning ethic, from basic manufacturing to sophisticated software entrepreneurship,'' said John Crosier, president of the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire. ''Thirty-five years ago we boasted of low taxes and low labor costs and the work ethic. Now we talk about productivity and the office economy.''
Even so, the political culture has remained remarkably stable - even after searing 1970s conflicts over the Seabrook nuclear power plant and a doomed Aristotle Onassis proposal to build a $600 million oil-refinery project at Durham Point. Remarkably stable - and remarkably misunderstood.
At the heart of the political culture is the state's long and stubborn resistance to income and sales taxes. Vermont adopted broad-based taxes seven decades ago, after a major flood washed out most of the state's bridges. New Hampshire didn't have a similar disaster and its Constitution requires a two-third's majority to pass an amendment permitting a nonproportional tax.
Not that there haven't been attempts - more than a dozen votes, referenda, and commissions since the 1920s. None prevailed.
''New Hampshire hunkered down and decided to go bare bones,'' said Peter Haebler, a historian at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester. ''It decided to have the leanest possible government. New Hampshire looked at Massachusetts, thought it might be the future, and decided to go in the other direction.''
The antitax orthodoxy was strengthened as William Loeb, the maverick publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, the only statewide paper in New Hampshire, called on political candidates to take what he called ''the pledge,'' a vow of eternal opposition to income and sales taxes.
Loeb has been dead for 19 years and yet the pledge still lives, and a measure of its health is that a Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen of Madbury, has taken it and lives by it.
More than any elected official, Loeb dominated the politics of the state, an extraordinary reign of power and fear. He rewarded his allies (he described Meldrim Thomson, who served three terms as governor in the 1970s and campaigned on an ax-the-tax platform, as ''one of the best things that happened to the State of New Hampshire since its founding'') and punished his enemies (he described Henry J. Kissinger as a ''spoiled marshmallow'' and one of ''the biggest, stupidest suckers the world has ever seen.'')
''The method was the megaphone - the biggest voice in the state and the wider reach the New Hampshire primary gave him - and the word - his ability to turn a phrase that stuck in people's mind,'' said Mike Pride, the editor of the Concord Monitor.
In truth, the state's aversion to taxes meshed comfortably, even seamlessly, with the state's natural impulse toward limited government and local control.
''We don't fund state government - not because we don't want state government, but because we don't want to feed the government and waste money and take away individual freedoms,'' said Michael York, the state librarian. ''This is our natural philosophy here. We keep government under control and assure that individual citizens don't lose any liberties.''
That view, embedded so deeply in the hard soil of New Hampshire, is at the heart of the Republican revolution that Ronald Reagan began (merchandising it first in the New Hampshire primary in 1976) and that Democrats now no longer fully reject.
''The decentralizing impulse that is sweeping the United States has been part of the New Hampshire landscape for a century,'' said Jere R. Daniell, a Dartmouth College professor who teaches New England history. Indeed, New Hampshire, geographically at the center of New England, is surely the most decentralized state in the region - and perhaps in the nation.
And though the folk wisdom is that New Hampshire is a deeply conservative state, the impact of the Progressive Yankees, who disappeared by World War I, never wore away. Their populist impulses, along with the primary, inculcated a soak-the-rich brand of politics that remains hidden but hearty in the state. The state may have no income or sales tax, but it does possess an 8 percent business-profits tax, a business-enterpise tax, and an interest and dividends tax - plus an 8 percent meals, rooms, and rental-car tax aimed at wealthy vacationing outsiders.
The wallet of New Hampshire may be in the southern part of the state, but the soul of it (and, come to think of it, the lungs of it) are in the northern reaches, beyond Crawford Notch and Pinkham Notch, in the vast and, in winter, terrible mountain peaks where the winds are brutal, the temperatures subzero, the air crisp, the views unrestricted. And though it is no longer reached only by foot, or stage, or rail, it remains remote and rugged.
''There's a point of pride in being part of the North Country,'' said Thomas L. Havill, a retired geographer at Keene State College. ''It is harsher there. The winters are harder, longer, colder. You have to be tough to live there. Down here in Keene we look at those guys up at Dartmouth and say: `They get less sunlight than we do.'''
Robert Frost, who lived in Salem, Derry, Plymouth, Franconia, and Hanover, whose father was born in Kingston and whose first teaching job was in a district school in the southern part of Salem, spent much time in Vermont but kept his heart in New Hampshire.
In the rare books collection at Dartmouth College there rests a slender volume of Frost poetry, the first issue of the first edition of ''Mountain Interval,'' and there, in ink in Frost's own hand, are annotations he made for his friend Edward Connery Lathem, who later edited the standard volume of Frost's poetry.
Sit in the Rauner Library in Webster Hall on a cold New Hampshire winter afternoon and turn the pages slowly, and it becomes clear that ''Christmas Trees'' is rooted in Franconia, ''The Cow in Apple Time'' in Derry, ''Out, Out - '' in Bethlehem, and ''Brown's Descent'' in Plymouth.
In ''New Hampshire: A Guide to the Granite State,'' assembled by the Federal Writers' Project in 1938, is the personal testimony of Frost:
''Not a poem, I believe, in all my six books, from `A Boy's Will' to `A Further Range,' but has something in it of New Hampshire. Nearly half of my poems must actually have been written in New Hampshire. Every single person in my `North of Boston' was friend or acquaintance of mine in New Hampshire.''
Frost, who thought of himself as a Grover Cleveland Democrat, proclaimed, in the poem ''New Hampshire'': ''I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer.'' Perhaps. But that, like everything else in and about New Hampshire, is only part of the story.
