Bay Stater: Volcano or ‘unblossoming stalk’

From The WPA Guide to Massachusetts. The WPA did many such guidebooks during The Great Depression as part of the Federal Writers Project. There have been a few demographic changes since then!

“Many symbols have been devised to explain the Bay Stater. He has been pictured as a kind of dormant volcano, the red-hot lava from one eruption hardening into a crater which impedes the next; as a river, with two main currents of transcendental metaphysics and catchpenny opportunism running side by side; as an asocial discord consisting mainly of overtones and undertones; as a petrified backbone, that ‘unblossoming stalk.’’’

—The WPA Guide to Massachusetts (1937)