Welcome . . . YANKEE

BOTH THE NAME and the purpose of Mr. Sagendorph’s new magazine,Yankee, have a strong appeal to me, personally and officially, and I am glad to say a word of welcome, in behalf of the state of New Hampshire, to this new arrival among us. May it live long and prosper and “grow up with the country” in that new life of New England of which its editor and publisher sees the need and for which he and his publication can and will render valuable service.

With generations of Yankee ancestors behind me, with a Down East farm my birthplace and with all my life spent in Yankeeland, the title Yankee means much to me and is an appellation which I am proud to claim by right of birth, education, residence and occupation.

Read the history of the United States from cover to cover and in every chapter you will find something of which Yankees can be proud. Our own state of New Hampshire witnessed the first overt act of the Revolution. It was her representative body which gave the vote in favor of the Constitution of the United States which made from British Colonies an American Nation.

From New England and her Yankees came the spirit, indomitable in peace as in war, which took our flag around the world on merchant ships and spanned the continent with the rails which meant the vastest and richest internal development in history. Yankee statesmen and jurists, soldiers and sailors, preachers and teachers, authors and artists, inventors and scientists, engineers and capitalists led the long line of American accomplishment through the nineteenth century.

But today we cannot disguise the fact that the Yankee and his Yankeeland are not what they were, in fame or in fact. The West and the South, to whose development New England has contributed so much, are forgetting their debt. Our section is out of favor at Washington. Less has been done to restore prosperity by federal government acts in New England than in any other part of the country. Our national influence has lessened. Our industrial situation is precarious.

More than ever before we need to take pride in the name of Yankee and to work to restore its significance in the matter of patriotic, yet individual, courage, determination, enterprise and resource.

In its own way this issue of the first number of Yankeemagazine testifies to a faith in New England which should be the first article in the civic creed of all of us.

H. STYLES BRIDGES, Governor of New Hampshire.