Skip to main content

When Cotton Was King

By

The historical note on the 1912 Lawrence Strikes brought back memories of my time in Lowell.  I read Arthur Eno's book Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts, along with Kerouac's The Town and the City, to help familiarize myself with the place.  I had gotten a job with the Lowell National Historical Park, or "histerical park" as we sometimes called it.  They had revitalized several of the old mill structures that were now national monuments.  The old mill city was undergoing a renaissance.  Persons were turning some of the old mill buildings into private loft apartments, with their great views onto the Merrimack River.

Lawrence still seemed in a recessionary slumber.  It is a much bigger city.  There was no compact center like in Lowell.  But, historically this was the heart of the textile industry in New England.  Reading about the attempts to unionize the mill workers was disheartening, as time and again they were foiled by the workers bitter racism.  The Irish spinners wanted nothing to do with the more lowly Italian and Portuguese workers.  Eventually, broader unions were formed, but by then much of the industry had moved South to be closer to the source of the cotton.

Unfortunately the only link I've been able to find for Cotton Was King was at amazon.  But here is a piece on Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell.

Comments

  1. avrdsJanuary 11, 2011 at 4:38 PM

    I was just reading about Lowell yesterday:

    http://books.google.com/books?id=h146tsHgI0UC

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonJanuary 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM

    Of course there is Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,

    http://books.google.com/books?id=eZJ75BaA6-AC&pg=PA68&dq=confluence+of+concord+and+merrimack&hl=lt&ei=R1EtTZWvB5CSOoPSqNIK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

    ReplyDelete
  3. CarolJanuary 13, 2011 at 1:22 AM

    That's my favorite Thoreau book.

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonJanuary 13, 2011 at 10:01 AM

    I enjoyed it very much too. I had a great time in Lowell. I even took part in a major clean-up of the Concord River banks at the time. Brought me a little closer to Thoreau.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more