‘A new species of monster’

The real story of how Massachusetts spawned the gerrymander-and immediately tried to kill it

September 11, 2011|By Christopher Klein

Massachusetts, like other states across the country, is gearing up this year to redraw its political boundaries, fitting electoral districts to America’s shifting population and reshaping its political map for the next decade. In Massachusetts this means losing a valuable congressional seat; the proposals for how this might shake out are expected to emerge from the State House this fall.

Inevitably, redrawing districts does something else as well: It dredges up Americans’ disgust over insider politics. Redistricting gives the party in power the chance to shape the political map to its advantage - which everyone in politics likes to do, but nobody wants to be seen doing. The last redistricting effort in Massachusetts, in 2001, resulted in former House Speaker Tom Finneran pleading guilty to obstruction of justice after claiming under oath that he had nothing to do with the process. As politicians work in secret to carve their states into bizarrely shaped districts to protect their parties’ seats, they invariably confirm the public’s worst fears of shady back-room deals designed to squeeze voters themselves out of the political process.

This kind of partisan redistricting has been a part of American politics since the days of the Founding Fathers. The word we use for the process, “gerrymander,” was coined in Boston nearly 200 years ago to describe a contorted, amphibian-shaped state senatorial district in Essex County. Its creation earned Massachusetts an early reputation for underhanded political manipulation, and ensured that Governor Elbridge Gerry’s name would endure as a synonym for partisan trickery.

The real history of the original gerrymander, however, isn’t quite so simple, and reveals that both reputations carry a whiff of injustice. Gerry himself did not engineer the radical alterations to the state’s political map, let alone invent the idea of partisan redistricting. And far from being shut out of the process, the Massachusetts electorate, at least in 1813, fought back. While this monstrous creation of Massachusetts politics might expose the shameful flaws of our political system, the little-known fate of the original gerrymander offers another legacy as well, one that speaks to higher ideals.

In the early 19th century, Massachusetts congressional districts were generally compact collections of contiguous towns. State Senate districts were even simpler: As enshrined in the 1780 state constitution, they strictly conformed to county borders.