Maine

C

Government and Politics

Maine is governed under a constitution that became effective in 1820, the year in which the state entered the Union. The chief executive, and the only popularly elected executive official, is the governor, who is elected to a four-year term. The governor may serve no more than two consecutive terms. The legislature elects the secretary of state, state treasurer, and attorney-general.

Legislative authority is vested in a legislature consisting of a 151-member House of Representatives and a 35-member Senate. All legislators are elected to two-year terms. At a national level, the state elects two senators and two representatives to the US Congress. Maine has four electoral votes in presidential elections.

The Republican Party dominated politics from the 1850s to the 1950s, when the Democrats began to show considerable strength at the state and local levels. In 1968 Edmund S. Muskie, a US senator from Maine, was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. His party carried Maine that year.

In the 2006 elections, two Democrats were returned to represent the state. Senators Susan M. Collins and Olympia Snowe (both Republican) represent Maine. Incumbent Democrat governor John Baldacci was elected to a second term in office in 2006, beating Chandler Woodcock (Republican).

IV

History

At the time of the arrival of the Europeans, Maine was inhabited by some 20 related Algonquian tribes, united in a loose organization known as the Abenaki or Wabanaki (“people of the dawn”). Only the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy remain today. Many were converted to Roman Catholicism by French missionaries in the 17th century and fought on the side of the French in their wars against the English.

A

Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Laying claim to all of New England, based on the explorations of John Cabot a century earlier, King James I of England authorized the Plymouth Company to colonize the area in 1606. The following year the company founded a settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River on Sagadahoc Peninsula, but it lasted only a year. French settlements on St Croix Island and on Mount Desert Island also failed.

In 1620 King James named John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges proprietors of lands between the Merrimac and Kennebec rivers, but they did little to develop the region, and in 1658 Massachusetts asserted its jurisdiction over Maine; in 1691 it became part of Massachusetts.

Although there was some land speculation before the American War of Independence, Maine remained primarily a source of furs, timber, and forest products. During the Revolution the British established a base near present-day Castine, on Penobscot Bay. The Penobscot expedition (1779), in which a Massachusetts force tried to expel them, was a disastrous failure.

B

Independence

The movement to separate from Massachusetts began in 1785, but it did not pick up momentum until 1816, when the Brunswick Convention popularized the separatist movement. In 1819, when the Massachusetts General Court agreed to an Act of Separation, a state constitutional convention was held in Portland. Maine petitioned Congress for admission to the Union in December 1819 and was admitted under the Missouri Compromise as the 23rd state in 1820. Maine was first prominent in national affairs for its leadership in the temperance movement in the 1820s and its adoption of a prohibition law in 1851.

By the time Maine won independence, about half its total land area had been distributed; much of the remainder was still unsurveyed, and a dispute developed about the boundary separating Maine from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. By the late 1830s both Canadian and Maine forestry workers sought control of disputed territory in present-day Aroostook County. The so-called Aroostook War was ended by US forces under General Winfield Scott, and the boundary issue was resolved by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842.

C

Maine’s Changing Society

Before the American Civil War, Maine’s economy expanded as it supplied the nation with timber products and with ice for food packing. Other emerging industries were lime and granite quarrying, textile milling, fishing, and shipbuilding. Transport needs encouraged railway construction. After the American Civil War, the emergence of steel-hulled ships and the movement of the textile industry out of New England contributed to economic decline. Maine increasingly relied on the paper and pulp industries, and beginning in the 1880s tourism became a major industry.

The state remained predominantly Republican in the first half of the 20th century. By the mid-1950s the Democrats began to be successful, twice electing Edmund Muskie as governor. He achieved national prominence as a US senator and later as Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter. Another prominent Maine Democrat, George Mitchell, was elected majority leader of the US Senate in 1988.

Maine suffered from both rural and urban poverty after World War II. Issues involving energy and the environment aroused major controversies in the 1970s and 1980s, as citizens’ groups repeatedly tried and failed to revoke the licence of the state’s lone nuclear power plant. The 1980s brought an economic boom to Maine, as to most of New England; between 1980 and 1989.