Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort

2 “The Perfect Compromise”:Provincetown’s Portuguese Pilgrims

2 “The Perfect Compromise” Provincetown’s Portuguese Pilgrims Provincetown itself has of late, indeed, been seized by a new band of Pilgrims, the Portuguese, who succeeded the Yankees in the fisheries, and who now themselves are finding other lines of effort more attractive . One finds himself as much in a foreign land as is possible here in America, in Provincetown, in spite of the lofty monument which commemorates the first landing of our fathers. . . . There is something good to be said for the Portuguese which is not so marked in the natives of Cape Cod. [The Portuguese] are rather notably courteous and lively and have added a note of joyousness and vivacity which may be more superficial than the sturdy graces of the English character, but is, nevertheless , agreeable as met by the traveler. —Wallace Nutting, Massachusetts Beautiful, 1923 WALLACE NUTTING’S POPULAR TRAVELOGUE, Massachusetts Beautiful, enhanced the colonial revival project.1 Its portraits of New England life described the area in such detail that tourists could easily find villages by train, steamer, and, later, automobile, and they encouraged Americans to take pride in their homeland by promoting the historic and cultural landmarks of the Northeast. But Provincetown presented a unique conundrum. How could Nutting romanticize this quintessential colonial village—the landfall of the Mayflower Pilgrims— when it housed an increasingly influential population of Portuguese immigrants, the very kinds of people that xenophobic travelers from congested urban areas were trying to escape? In the end, Nutting solved what many Anglo-European Americans regarded as the immigrant “problem” by tapping into tourists’ desires 46 not only for excursions to historically noteworthy sights but also for trips that promised “authentic” yet harmless experiences of ethnic life. These jaunts typically included some form of “alienated leisure” that allowed tourists to distance themselves—ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically —from those they toured. Alienated leisure gave white middle- and upper-class tourists an opportunity to reassert their cultural , racial, and class privileges and to reaffirm their faith in an American hierarchy of bodies, ethnicities, and labor.2 Drawing on tourists’ turn-of-the-century desire to celebrate an American past and present, Anglo-European Yankees promoted Land’s End in “sense-of-place” guidebooks. Although Nutting’s Massachusetts Beautiful may have been New England’s most popular early-twentiethcentury travelogue, other books offered equally detailed descriptions of Provincetown and its emerging racial complexity. In her 1918 Cape Cod: New and Old, Agnes Edwards encouraged white middle- and upperclass tourists to commemorate the landing of the Mayflower with a visit to Provincetown, in her words, the “home of our forefathers” and also of recent Portuguese immigrants. In a tone meant to tempt rather than dissuade, she dared tourists to “descend from the [Pilgrim] monument . . . [to] see in a graphic exposition the amazing preponderance of this quiet, comely race,” whose members present “every shade of color from almost black to creamy olive, and every grade of refinement in [their] foreign countenances.” The Portuguese residents, she explained, are “smiling men and women [who] without any spectacular ovation [have] silently, persistently, inconspicuously achieved occupation of Provincetown.” Portuguese immigrants “are the fishermen, the storekeepers . . . their daughters are waitresses in the hotels and teachers in the schools. . . . There are Portuguese women who cannot speak English; Portuguese men who marry the daughters of Cape Cod stock.” They emigrated, Edwards continued, from “the Azores, and some from Portugal , and there is more or less a feud between them, and more or less resentment against them all by the natives.” Lest this tension threaten middle- and upper-class sensibilities, Edwards quickly reassured her readers, “But they are thrifty and law-abiding people and here, as elsewhere on the Cape, their industry and picturesqueness contribute something not without value to the general life.”3 Edwards recommended Provincetown by reminding visitors of its place as a historic landmark, by patronizing and racializing Portuguese residents, and by promising an exciting but harmless brush with working-class ethnic “THE PERFECT COMPROMISE” 47 48 A 1908 postcard entitled “Children on the Beach” uses Portuguese residents— in this case, children—as tourist spectacles to promote Land’s End. Postcard courtesy of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. life. In short, she exposed the complex racial and ethnic dynamic whereby white people simultaneously appreciated and degraded those who are seen as not white.4 Many travelogue writers attracted visitors to Provincetown by portraying its...