The Company Town (5 page)

With the arrival of the Irish beginning in the mid-1840s, immigrants came to Lowell in waves, precipitating a political struggle that reflected changes in the town's composition. Slowly the political dominance of the mill managers gave way, with the first Irish Catholic mayor being elected in 1882. After the turn of the century, middle-class reformers, agitating against ward-heeler machine politics, got the city charter rewritten to provide for citywide elections. But it wasn't long before Irish Catholic politicians regained control of the city.

Following waves of immigrants included French Canadians in the 1860s and '70s, then Greeks, Poles, and forty other national groups in the 1890s and 1900s. Neighborhoods tended to be segregated by nationality, and each one established its own separate institutions, including churches. And as would be common elsewhere, the companies pitted one group against another, using the more desperate newcomers to undermine efforts to limit the working day legislatively and to serve as strikebreakers.

Numerous strikes occurred in the late nineteenth century. In 1867, skilled mule spinners struck three mills in an unsuccessful attempt to limit the workday to ten hours. The same group again struck in 1875, this time in protest of a wage cut. They were locked out and fired. Three years later, female operatives struck over another wage cut, and they too were fired.

The first citywide strike came in 1903, when skilled operatives walked out in pursuit of a 10 percent wage raise. All the mills but one immediately closed down, reopening two months later with Portuguese, Polish, and Greek workers taking the place of the strikers. Then in 1912, several unions united in a walkout as they sought a 15 percent pay increase. (The companies agreed to a rise of 6 percent to 8 percent.) This militant effort was led by the radical Industrial Workers of the World, fresh from their legendary victory at Lawrence, where they had overcome national divisions by reaching out to workers in various languages and where a
highly publicized campaign for strikers' children had drawn emotional public support across the eastern seaboard. Manufacturers in other cities had already granted more than the Lowell companies were offering—and after a few weeks, the New England Association of Textile Manufacturers criticized Lowell for not offering 10 percent. The Lowell companies capitulated, and the unions accepted the offer.

But Lowell's very slow decline continued. Prosperity during World War I gave way to numerous mill closings thereafter. Among the disappearances: Middlesex, Bigelow Carpet (formerly Lowell Manufacturing Co.), Hamilton, Tremont, and Massachusetts. Appleton mills moved to South Carolina, and the Lowell Machine Shop, now called the Saco-Lowell Shops, relocated to Maine.
²⁶

The late 1920s and the 1930s were a very difficult time in the city. The New England textile industry was already depressed when the Great Depression hit, and shortly 40 percent of the town's population depended on government relief. Reporting for
Harper's Magazine
, left-leaning writer Louis Adamic visited Lowell along with other New England mill towns in 1930. He found that two-thirds of Lowell's population was either unemployed or employed only part time. The town's devastated streets were dominated by eight enormous mills with tall unsmoking chimneys, “all idle for years,” and in the main business district, only the five-and-ten stores seemed to be doing any trade. Butchers told him they sold only the cheapest cuts of meat; doctors, that their patients couldn't pay their bills; and dentists, that they conducted a disproportionate number of extractions instead of preventive care. Charity, he reported, was the biggest industry in Lowell. Rather than applauding his findings, the Lowell city fathers trashed Adamic: He was denounced in scores of editorials and condemned in city council resolutions.
²⁷

Of the original mills, by 1940 only three were still in operation—Merrimack, Boott, and Lawrence—and the first two would close in the 1950s. There was a brief rise in textile production during World War II, but soon thereafter millwork all but disappeared in the city that had pioneered it.

There was a twofold spur behind the closings and exodus: wages and technology. First, while management perceived labor in Lowell and elsewhere in the East as relatively costly, these same managers had allowed the
town's mills to become technologically obsolete. The South had cheap labor, and its mills, which didn't really get going till late in the nineteenth century, featured modern high-speed machinery.
²⁸

Bear in mind, though, that there was another side to Lowell—one independent of the mills. As in any other city, there were professionals and middle-class citizens who must have known about the plight of industry, but whose lives weren't wholly shaped by it. For example, Beat writer Jack Kerouac was born and reared in Lowell as part of a middle-class French Canadian community. Kerouac's portrayal of the local scene in his 1950 first novel,
The Town and the City
, makes Lowell (fictionalized as “Galloway”) seem much like any other New England small town—and life for young people there seem focused on the usual run of school, sports, romance, and nature. “She lived in the southern part of Galloway,” he writes of one character, “in an old ramshackle farm-house on the banks of the Concord River there . . . with its vines over the porch and its drooping trees, with the dark river beyond, and the aura of pastoral simplicity all around, it never failed to cast a spell of fearful enchantment.”
²⁹

The town has recovered somewhat in recent decades, with the slow population decline reversing. In the early 1970s, local government and business labored to transform the former mill district—or at least what remained of it after some demolition—into what became the first urban national park in 1978. Hundreds of thousands of visitors tour the site each year. Moreover, the local branch of the University of Massachusetts has tried to attract high-technology enterprise. But that sector has shown itself to be as vulnerable as any other: Computer maker Wang Laboratories expanded into Lowell in the 1970s, but by 1990, that company was extinct.

A very great deal has been written on Lowell, much of it emphasizing the specialness and impermanence of the town's early years. For example, historian John Coolidge has written, “Nothing of Francis Cabot Lowell's utopia has stood the test of time.” He asserts that the textile cities of central New England, including Lawrence and Manchester, were “sports
in the general line of American industrial evolution, transitory as ideal communities, unimportant as models.”
³⁰

Coolidge is one of the most insightful of Lowell's chroniclers, and his
Mill and Mansion
stands as a model of architectural history and social and economic analysis. But these statements are not altogether accurate. Certainly, further Lowell-like major industrial hubs arose later, including Gary, Indiana, founded by U.S. Steel in 1906 on Lake Michigan swampland, and Ford Motor Co.'s giant River Rouge facility in Dearborn, Michigan.

If Coolidge has in mind simply the use of workers drawn from the countryside and housed in dormitories, where they became the object of a watchful paternalism, he is largely right: That part of the Lowell experience was driven by a labor shortage that became less pressing after 1850, when waves of immigrant laborers started coming to the United States. Still, neither corporate paternalism nor the capitalist utopian impulse disappeared. These would remain themes throughout following decades and even into the twenty-first century.

One thing is certain, though. There can be no such utopias without prosperity. Once the New England textile industry entered a period of decline, and its corporate masters began seeking ways of squeezing the labor force, they abandoned utopian ideals. It would not be long before they resurfaced elsewhere.

—EDWARD BELLAMY,
Looking Backward
(1888)

 

 

 

 

B
y the late nineteenth century, American cities were growing at a vertigo-inducing pace. In 1850, around 30,000 people lived in Chicago; by 1870, there were 300,000. New York's 1875 population of just under 1 million made it the world's third-largest city; over the next twenty-five years, that population would double.
¹
Civic activists grew concerned, not merely due to this population explosion but also because of the accompanying, very visible division of society into extremes of wealth and poverty. “The rich are richer, and the poor are poorer in the city than elsewhere,” wrote Reverend Josiah Strong in
Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis
, an 1885 pamphlet that sold 130,000 copies among concerned churchgoers. “Is it strange that such conditions arouse a blind and bitter hatred of our social system?” he asked. In
The City: Hope of Democracy,
urban reformer Frederick C. Howe observed: “The humanizing forces of to-day are almost all proceeding from the city.” Yet, he continued, “along with the gain there is . . . a terrible lost account. The city has replaced simplicity, industrial freedom, and equality of future with complexity, dependence, poverty and misery close beside a barbaric luxury
like unto that of Ancient Rome.”
²
The confluence of such factors might lead to the degradation of the populace, if not to social revolution.

For many social reformers, the new class of Gilded Age capitalists was composed of prime villains. So it is a surprise to find that many industrialists shared the concerns of Strong and Howe and were themselves moved to take action.

The first whiff of social revolution came in 1877, as a massive railroad walk-out turned into a national conflict. When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad cut wages for the second time in a year, a strike of company workers broke out in West Virginia and, after federal troops intervened, the insurrection spread. Within days, crowds of workers were fighting state militias in the cities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with at least forty-five people killed in Pittsburgh. Soon 100,000 men from numerous industries were on strike as far away as Chicago; St. Louis; Kansas City; Galveston, Texas; and San Francisco. It took federal troops armed with Gatling guns two weeks to quell the uprising. The upper classes were deeply alarmed. “Any hour the mob chooses it can destroy any city in the country—that is the simple truth,” wrote Assistant Secretary of State John Hay to his father-in-law.
³

Chicago newspapers reported events in articles headlined “Horrid Social Convulsion” and “Red War.” Department store mogul Marshall Field suggested that the danger of further riots required a large standing army to be permanently on guard. Field and his friend, railroad sleeping-car magnate George Pullman, felt the squalor that underlay the working-class uprising was due to workers' own profligacy and intemperance.
⁴
Within a few years, Pullman would take steps to change things.

Pullman was a prototypically American self-made man. Born on a farm in western New York state in 1831, he took his first job, in a country store, at age fourteen. By seventeen, he was a cabinetmaker's apprentice, and it was there he gained an appreciation for elaborately carved wood and woven fabric. Three years later, he was helping to move buildings out of the path of the expanding Erie Canal. These house-moving skills would prove essential to his first business success as an adult, when in the late 1850s he led the way in showing how Chicago buildings might be raised above the water level and thus avoid having their cellars flooded with Lake Michigan water. Of average height and possessed of a youthful
appearance accentuated by his round face and bright eyes, Pullman was simultaneously bold and cautious in business matters—striking the perfect balance of capitalist instincts.
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In 1853, a punishing overnight train trip between Buffalo and West-field, New York, made clear to Pullman that there was much room for improvement. He determined to enhance sleeping cars by installing actual beds in them. And by the 1860s, the project of transforming cross-country train travel from a dirty, jolting misery into a pleasurable, middle-class outing had made him a rich man. Both ornate and comfortable, the Pullman Palace Car Co.'s sleeping cars contained plush carpet, brocaded fabrics, carved and polished wood, and hinged berths that could be folded away during daylight hours. The “Pioneer,” first built in 1864, came with shock-absorbing coiled springs and cost five times the price of an ordinary railcar.