Who stands for Massachusetts–Frasier or Spenser?

Visions of conventioneers–and not Shriners in fezzes–are dancing in Boston heads. Mayor Thomas Menino wants to host the Democratic Party’s national convention in 2004, and he’s put together an impressively united front of civic and business leaders to make the city’s case. His argument is simple and compelling: With all the money, votes, and operatives Massachusetts has contributed to the national ticket over the years, the least the Democrats can do is throw their big party here. But what does holding the convention in Boston say to the American public?

When serving as host for a national political gathering, reputation matters. (Boston is vying for the honor with Detroit, Miami, and New York; a decision is expected in November.) For example, the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco seemed to go smoothly, but the setting boomeranged on the party. Just a few weeks later, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick built her speech to the GOP convention around the phrase “San Francisco Democrats,” which she defined as left-wingers who “blame America first.” She could count on her audience reacting to stereotypes about San Francisco–birthplace of the hippie movement and unofficial capital of America’s gay population. Even today, occasional references to “San Francisco Democrats” pop up in conservative journals.

Would “Boston Democrats” carry the same rhetorical punch? Perhaps not–at least, not any more. Until recently, Massachusetts has had more to live down than dine out on, at least in that corner of public consciousness where politics meets popular culture. But the Bay State has shed some of its negative stereotypes, and it’s gained a reputation for being ahead of the social curve. When it comes to Boston playing host, there may be no time like the present.

1940-1959: The last hurrah

For the first half of the 20th century, Massachusetts seemed to have its best days behind it, making the Commonwealth, and the Hub in particular, ripe for putdowns. “I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there,” quipped acerbic radio comedian Fred Allen, a Cambridge native, in the 1930s.

By World War II, the pop-culture image of Boston was that of a fussy little town obsessed with genealogy. In the 1942 film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis (born in Lowell) is asked, “Are you one of the Vales of Boston?” With typically dry Yankee wit, she responds, “One of the lesser ones.” (The cliché gets a nasty twist in 1971’s A New Leaf, in which Walter Matthau asks some snooty party guests, “Excuse me, you’re not by any chance related to the Boston Hitlers?”) George and Ira Gershwin’s song “The Back Bay Polka,” written for the 1946 musical The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, lampooned the parochialism of Boston’s high society, as haughty as it was becoming threadbare: “Strangers are all dismissed/(Not that we’re prejudiced)/You simply don’t exist/If you haven’t been born in Boston.”

In the 1950s, with the high-tech economy still decades away, Massachusetts could be mistaken for a museum, trying to elevate its past as compensation for not having any future. The state was represented on Broadway by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a retelling of the Salem witch trials, and by the revue New Faces of 1952, which included two musical numbers about Massachusetts: “Lizzie Borden,” a jocular look at Fall River’s most infamous orphan; and Sheldon Harnick’s “The Boston Beguine,” in which a frumpy woman’s laughable description of the Hub as “exotic” is a tip-off that she’s overstating the intensity of an affair.

Massachusetts made the hit parade in 1957 with Patti Page’s rendition of “Old Cape Cod,” which oozes with nostalgia, describing the region as reminding you “of the place where you were born.” Two years later, the Kingston Trio made it big with “M.T.A.,” a folk song about “the man who never returned” from a ride on the Boston subway because he couldn’t afford the exit fare. “M.T.A.” was written in the 1940s for a communist mayoral candidate, but by the time it became a national standard, the satiric song had been transformed into kind of a paean to the colorful exaggerations of Boston’s Irish politicians. The Bay State’s reputation as a haven for political rogues had already been boosted by Edwin O’Connor 1956 novel The Last Hurrah (quickly made into a film with Spencer Tracy), based on the life of Boston Mayor James Michael Curley.

While Massachusetts became increasingly Democratic after World War II, it wasn’t yet predictably liberal. Anti-communist crusader Joseph McCarthy had his share of supporters here, and candy maker Robert Welch founded the right-wing John Birch Society in Belmont, just a few miles from Harvard University, in 1958. In fact, Massachusetts was a model of bipartisanship during the Eisenhower years, when it produced two speakers of the US House of Representatives–one Democrat (John McCormack) and one Republican (Joseph Martin). And in 1960, both major-party tickets had genealogically impressive nominees from Massachusetts: Irish Democrat John F. Kennedy for president and Yankee Republican Henry Cabot Lodge for vice president.

1960-1981: Camelot & Counterculture

That all changed–politics as well as image–in 1960. Though elected by a razor-thin margin, Kennedy quickly became enormously popular as president, a symbol of youth and sophistication that gave his home state a new shine. The cultivated Massachusetts mind was on display in his quick wit and appreciation of the arts, while his tough pragmatism (illustrated by his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not the Bay of Pigs) put a positive spin on the Bay State’s famously bare-knuckle politics.

Kennedy’s assassination put a sudden end to the “Camelot” era of American politics, however, and afterward Massachusetts seemed to take a step to the left –symbolized by the 1968 presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy, who was more outspokenly liberal than his brother had been. Massachusetts also became known for leftish irreverence on the pop-culture front. In 1964, Harvard alumnus Tom Lehrer gained fame through the NBC series That Was the Week That Was, for which he wrote sarcastic verses such as “Send the Marines” and “The Vatican Rag.” A few years later, Arlo Guthrie–son of “This Land Is Your Land” labor troubadour Woody Guthrie–wrote the hippie epic “Alice’s Restaurant,” about draft dodgers battling with small-town cops in Stockbridge.

As the era progressed, the popular image of a stuffy Puritan state was eclipsed by the idea that Massachusetts was one big college campus, as shown in such hit films as Love Story and The Paper Chase. If young adults weren’t going to school here, they were at least reading the works of Bay State writers– not just Hawthorne and Melville, but contemporary authors like Lowell-born Jack Kerouac, who wrote the beatnik bible On the Road; Jamaica Plain native Sylvia Plath, whose poetry seemed to become more popular after she killed herself in 1963; Worcester’s Abbie Hoffman, founder of the Yippie movement and author of the anarchist Steal This Book; and Cape Cod resident Kurt Vonnegut Jr., whose satiric novels savaged the free-enterprise system.

Massachusetts was the only state to vote for Democrat George McGovern in 1972, filling the Commonwealth with smug satisfaction when President Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal. (During the roll call at the 1976 Democratic Convention, a spokeswoman for the state’s delegation proclaimed Massachusetts the “I Told You So State” to viewers across the country.) In 1979, US Sen. Edward Kennedy’s presidential bid tried to push the country to the left, but failed. Kennedy recovered from that defeat to become one of the most effective members of the US Senate, but in right-wing direct-mail pitches and Saturday Night Live skits alike, he was portrayed as the personification of big government.

Earlier in the decade, riots against school busing, imposed by the courts to end racial segregation, fueled the perception that Massachusetts liberalism was tainted with hypocrisy. Tensions were so bad in 1975 that Boston’s ABC affiliate refused to air the innocuous sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, about a racially mixed Brooklyn high school, for its first six weeks. The racial climate has since improved, but the image of a city unwelcoming toward African Americans persists in outsiders’ minds–as evidenced by Democratic National Committee members who reportedly complained about a lack of diversity when they scoped out the Hub as a convention site.

1982-2000: Head of the class

In the early 1980s, a strong dose of pragmatism returned to Massachusetts politics. The state twice voted for Ronald Reagan, albeit narrowly, and Democrats such as US Sen. Paul Tsongas fashioned a more business-friendly form of liberalism. Perhaps because Massachusetts was now associated with yuppies instead of yippies, characters from the Bay State became much more noticeable, if not always more palatable, on TV.

In 1982, NBC premiered the sitcom Cheers, which would become the most popular TV series set in Massachusetts. Set at a pub owned by an ex-Red Sox player, the series portrayed the Hub as having something of a split personality. There was the sense of Boston as a tough, working-class town with never-say-die sports fans, epitomized by waitress (and widow of a hockey player) Carla Tortelli. But the show also traded on our egghead image to create several pretentious and overeducated characters. In particular, would-be writer Diane Chambers and psychiatrist Frasier Crane were so taken with their own intelligence that they lacked common sense. Debuting that same year, the medical drama St. Elsewhere featured a gifted heart surgeon whose arrogance often crossed the line into cruelty. (A few years earlier, when the producers of M*A*S*H decided to add a brilliant surgeon who happened to be a pompous ass, they made him a Boston Brahmin.)

Both Massachusetts traits of pragmatism and intellectualism found their way into the 1988 presidential race, but not in the desired combination. From the beginning of his campaign, Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, tried to distance himself from the liberal idealism associated with the Kennedys, instead touting his stewardship of the “Massachusetts Miracle” of economic growth. At the Democratic convention in Atlanta, he tried to send a message of moderation when he declared, “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence.” But that pitch also reminded viewers of every know-it-all from Boston they had ever seen on the TV screen. And Dukakis’s infamous joy ride in a military tank resembled nothing so much as Frasier Crane’s gullible participation in a “snipe hunt” on an episode of Cheers.

These qualities served Massachusetts better in the music world during the ’80s and ’90s, even if some of its exports seemed a bit too cool for the room. The Cars, Boston’s most successful rock group other than ’70s survivor Aerosmith, offered a sleek, detached sound. A slew of other sophisticated rock bands–the Pixies, the Lemonheads, Morphine–were popular on college radio stations even if they never made it into the pop music mainstream. Today, the band best representing Massachusetts may be They Might Be Giants, which consists of two Lincoln natives who deal in irony and wordplay. As a recent profile in The New Yorker put it, “their music doesn’t sell sex; it sells smart-kid whimsy.”

“Smart-kid whimsy” would serve as a good description of Republican Bill Weld, who succeeded Dukakis in the governor’s office. Alas, his higher ambitions were extinguished by humorless US Sen. Jesse Helms, who blocked his nomination to become ambassador to Mexico. Thus Weld never got the chance to prove that a winking intellectual from Massachusetts could go further on the national scene than a wonkish one.

In the 20th century, then, a Bay State pedigree had questionable currency in the rest of America. But at the dawn of the 21st, there may be ways for Massachusetts, as well as its favorite sons, to capitalize on its past images, as well as project new ones.

Take John Forbes Kerry, our junior US senator whose 2004 convention dreams include strolling down from his Louisburg Square home to the FleetCenter to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. One might say he represents the best of the Bay State’s public profile from each era. His initials and his good looks recall John F. Kennedy, and he literally lives in the past–that is, on historic Beacon Hill. He first gained fame as a Vietnam vet turned anti-war protester, coming out of that divisive era with stripes that could satisfy all camps. And Kerry’s cool demeanor, coupled with his stance as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, fits the postmodern tradition of the 1980s.

The GOP would play the Massachusetts card differently. President George W. Bush’s boast that he wasn’t spending his summer vacation “in Martha’s Vineyard, swilling white wine,” was meant as a dig against former president Bill Clinton, but it also suggested he’d love to follow in his father’s footsteps, running against liberalism, Massachusetts-style, in 2004. With or without Kerry, a Democratic convention in Boston–the American city least hospitable to country music and NASCAR racing–would be mocked by conservatives as a clueless confab of blue-state elitists.

Then again, when it comes to a Boston, the Republicans’ “just plain folks” rhetoric could backfire. Some people in middle America might aim a bit of reverse snobbery at Harvard, but not many would object to their children going there. And while ivory-tower nincompoops may abound in popular culture, Massachusetts is also represented by some fictional figures who combine the state’s liberal intellectual tradition with a tough, unsentimental outlook on life. Robert Parker’s “Spenser” detective novels, for instance, have popularized this brains-as-well-as-brawn kind of hero. The title character, who lives in Boston’s Back Bay, can solve crimes and beat up bad guys as efficiently as any other private eye, but he’d rather read a book than go to a wrestling match, and his respectful relationship with girlfriend Susan makes him a “liberated” male.

And what better showcase for gritty intellectualism is there than Good Will Hunting? In this 1997 film Matt Damon played a 20-year-old janitor from South Boston who’s a genius at solving math equations–when he’s not getting into bar fights or attracting the attentions of women like Minnie Driver. (Damon and co-star Ben Affleck, both raised in Cambridge, shared an Oscar for co-writing the film. Despite the proletarian nature of their breakthrough project, both have made names for themselves as ridiculously attractive leading men in Hollywood. When they drop into Boston, they’re more likely to show up at a glitzy Ladder District restaurant than at a Southie bar.)

Massachusetts may still not be quite in step with the rest of the country politically, but in most ways the rest of the country is becoming more like us: not just more educated, but also more urbanized and more culturally diverse. Or trying to. Other states are struggling to expand industries that already dominate our economy: health care, higher education, and high-tech research-and-development.

It’s not so bad that movies and TV shows imply that everyone in Boston is a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. (You can credit Belmont resident David E. Kelley–the producer of The Practice, Ally McBeal, and Boston Public –for the impression that we spend most of our time arguing about the ethics of bizarre legal cases.) It’s certainly better than what comes to mind about work life in the other cities competing for the Democrats. To much of the country, Detroit is full of auto-assembly workers whose jobs are headed overseas, and New York–despite the justifiable glow of heroism and sacrifice following 9/11–will always be known for Wall Street sharks and unemployed actors as much as brave cops and selfless firefighters. As for Miami, the drug dealers of Miami Vice may finally be fading from memory, but the new TV series CSI: Miami is once again playing off the city’s reputation for criminal behavior. In comparison, Boston comes off pretty well.

Besides, if the convention is held in Boston, we’ll have a couple of allies in the image department. Remember that two former Bay Staters set the tone, if not the agenda, for political debate in the United States–Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien–and more people will watch them than watch the convention itself. The late-night jokesters can be counted on to razz the convention proceedings, but the host city will have the hometown advantage.