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This week the Massachusetts Legislature gathers in special session to perfect its soldier vote law. When the Representatives finish their deliberations beneath the Sacred Cod on the wall, and the State Senate concurs, Massachusetts will probably have the most intelligent — and non-controversial — soldier vote law in the U.S. Anyone in the family can get a ballot sent to a serviceman. Even a constitutional requirement that new voters must be able to read the State Constitution in English will cause no trouble. Five lines of the Constitution will be printed on the ballot envelope. A sergeant on the remotest Pacific atoll will be witness enough that a soldier can read it.
The fact that this machinery is workable, constitutional and noncontroversial, is another demonstration of the plain horse sense of Massachusetts' governor, Leverett Saltonstall. And the fact that it permits a maximum of servicemen to vote is in the let-everyone-speak tradition of New England's time-crusted town meet ing. Massachusetts acts from three centuries' experience of sending her sons to war. War got Massachusetts — and New England — her land from the Indians. War got New England its independence. Now war has given New England a new lease on life.
Past with a Present. Some $14 billion in war contracts are surging around in New England, thrusting the old land into one wave of prosperity after another. In the nationwide spread of the war bonanza, other regions may make more noise: the colossal doings of California's giant air plants have been trumpeted in Hollywood style; Detroit's auto manufacturers have four-colored their achievements; the war prosperity of the New South is an old story. But New England has done its mighty bit with hardly a buglenote or breastbeat.
The war and the recurrent shocks of prosperity have shaken New England out of a resigned preoccupation with its past. From the Penobscot to the Housatonic, shipyards clang. Spindles are singing again in textile mills, turning out Army uniforms. Pretty, white-spired New England villages, asleep in their history, have stirred themselves to produce millions of small war parts. Connecticut, aswarm with producers of firearms, propellers and engines, rightfully calls herself the No. 1 Arsenal in the Arsenal of Democracy. Small, bellicose Vermont was the first state to declare war on the Axis—nine weeks before Pearl Harbor, Vermont began paying soldier bonuses because the U.S. was "already in a shooting war." In the green hills where Ethan Allen's Green Mountain boys trod, lean, lank Vermonters turn out landing craft and gun-mounts in Burlington, aircraft ignition parts in Vergennes. The Massachusetts shoreline is one long row of shipyards and shipways, with convoys loading up. Its yards and plants produce everything from the $60 million aircraft carrier Lexington to G.I. shoelaces.