Cape Cod’s Chamber of Commerce, born 100 years ago
All about fishing and farming, soon their hallmark phrase to attract tourists emerged: “Rural Seaside Charm.”
(The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce has a new CEO, Paul Niedzwiecki, no stranger around here. By my reckoning he’s only the fifth person to lead the chamber in 75 years, Wendy Northcross ably holding down that fort for the last 24. The timing of the transition is fortuitous, because of a little-known fact: This month marks exactly a century since the birth of the chamber. Here’s how it happened:)
In April, 1921, 75 people gathered in a Hyannis hotel, bound by a mission:
Do something, anything, to try to improve the economy of Cape Cod.
The Cape was in a depression that anticipated the Great one, but the local reasons were sandspit specific, economic body blows:
· Fertile land out West, and improved transportation, had made small farms here uncompetitive.
· Salt mines in Syracuse and Michigan had turned salt production from seawater into an obsolete relic.
· Inshore fisheries were depleted, forcing fishermen to gear up and head to Georges Bank, driving the industry toward Boston and New Bedford.
· Whales had been nearly wiped out, ending the hunt that had brought much wealth to Cape towns, while in Pennsylvania, black ooze bubbling out of the ground was being refined into oil and gas that would power the economy beyond the dreams of whaling captains.
· Steamships had replaced sail, demanding fewer hands on deck, supplying far fewer jobs.
These economic realities emptied the place. In 1860, a census showed 36,000 Cape inhabitants. By 1920, that number was 25,000, a 30-percent drop over a 60-year span.
The group that gathered in 1921, creating the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, focused on fishing and farming rather than the bulwark that would soon emerge – tourism. The opening of the Cape Cod Canal a few years earlier seemed opportunity incarnate, a faster and safer way to get Cape produce to the New York market. Attempts to build an infrastructure and economy to take advantage of this literal breakthrough continued into the 1930s, with little success.
But what the canal couldn’t do, the automobile could. As the 1920s roared, the Cape saw its own mini-boom. While it would be satisfying to say that the 75 people who created the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce were essential to the revival, that would be an exaggeration verging into lie; forces far bigger than them were driving the situation. They weren’t behind the wheel.
By the summer of 1925, the Boston Evening Transcript noticed. “Cape Cod the Wonderful,” announced a special section on August 15. Under the headline “Remarkable Development Now Under Way,” the reporting began as follows:
Several sprightly, well-dressed real estate operators from afar stood chatting in a Hyannis hotel. They were a picture of nervous energy. There was a Klondite expression in their eyes. “I tell you, gentlemen, this is the Florida of the North,” one of them remarked, with a sweep of his arms to the South and East. An equally keen-eyed stiff-jawed companion, with hardly a moment’s pause, ejaculated, “Yes, fortunes will be made here shortly, and the wonder is that the Cape was not discovered many years ago.”
Once the discovery was made, familiar problems created by popularity surfaced too. By December, 1927, the Cape Cod Chamber, meeting in Hyannis, was upbraided by a state consultant urging them to “stop, look and listen!” The Cape was developing into “an auto slum,” the planner declared. A development outline was urgently needed, and as a headline in the New Bedford Standard Times announced, “Residents Should Return to Ideas of Making District Beautiful Instead of Growing ‘Miserable Mess of Pottage.’”
Again, outside forces dictated the Cape’s fate. Depression and war knocked the bottom out of “Florida of the North” talk, returning the Cape to backwater status.
But by the late 1940s, national prosperity was lifting all boats. The Cape Chamber of Commerce had gone dormant, but in 1947 a young man by the name of Norman Henry Cook was approached by several local businessmen and asked if he might be willing to get involved. Fresh out of the service, Norm Cook was running a gas station in Barnstable village, and this seemed like an interesting opportunity.
His mandate was “to find a way to use the resource to create job opportunities,” and it was Cook who focused the Chamber on tourism. For the next quarter century, he walked a fine line in the sand, as he explained in an interview in the early 1980s:
“We promoted tourism, but at no time did the Chamber of Commerce ever advocate the building of a new motel. If you want to look at it from a selfish point of view, the motel owners were putting up the money and they didn’t want to see any more competition. But also, they didn’t want our seaside charm destroyed.”
Right there is two-thirds of the famous descriptive phrase Cook coined for the Cape: “Rural seaside charm.” And in that quote also is the fundamental contradiction that the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce has grappled with for 100 years:
How to be all about business promotion without “killing the golden goose,” as Cook used to say, meaning destroying the environment and ambiance that is the economy’s true calling card.
NEXT: BARNSTABLE COUNTY SHERIFF JAMES CUMMINGS ON HOW IT IS FOR WOMEN IN THE “HOUSE OF CORRECTION.”