Making a Post-Industrial New England

WHEN in 1939, boosters of Youngstown, Ohio, set out to promote their thriving industrial town far and wide, they created a fold-out packet of postcards that billed it as "The City of Steel Mills and Parks. " The accompanying text took particular pride that "strangers riding through Youngstown at night are startled and thrilled" by the spectacle of "flames suddenly leaping to the sky, throwing the outlines of the city into relief. " With miles of mills and "thousands of men turning out thousands of tons of steel, " they continued, "Youngstown is one of the great steel centers of the world. " After praising the commitment citizens had made to Youngstown, "linking their future with that of the community, " the text goes on to make a surprising claim: "The history of Youngstown is really a continuation of the story of New England. "1The region, it was said, was settled by pioneers "largely from Connecticut, " as part of the state's Western Reserve. According to these Youngstown promoters, Yankee shrewdness and work ethic had shaped this newer territory, implying a straight line from the textile manufacturing mills hugging New England's waterways to the great iron and steel plants lining Ohio's Mahoning River. But what these local business leaders did not know, or did not acknowledge, was that by the late 1930s, New England was providing more than a historic model for Youngstown's industrial development—it was also the harbinger of its ultimate manufacturing decline. As I embark on an in-depth study of the experience of deindustrialization in the United States from the 1970s onward, with a focus on the rustbelt of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania in which Youngstown and Pittsburgh are major centers, New England's transition from birthplace to graveyard of American industrialism reveals key insights. Although the Youngstown boosters of the 1930s may have taken pride in the way New England's know-how had positively shaped their city and region, there are also significant lessons to be learned from the decline of New England's industrial economy that would bear on the fate of the Midwestern industrial heartland later in the century. In order to root the investigation of the twentieth-century transformation of New England in a particular place, this essay will provide a case study of a New England community that transitioned from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Sadly, there were many struggling, deindustrialized cities to choose from. In Massachusetts alone, a state generally considered prosperous, options included (in alphabetical order) Chelsea, Fall River, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, North Adams, Pittsfield, Springfield, and more. I ultimately decided to focus on Fitchburg, a small, formerly industrial city about forty miles northwest of Boston that has not been investigated nearly as much as the better-known cases of Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn. As will become clear shortly, studying Fitchburg also meant considering the neighboring town of Leominster, as their stories became inextricably entwined over time. Into the first two decades of the twentieth century, Fitchburg was a fast-growing manufacturing town. Its population and local employment increased rapidly as the town became a regional manufacturing and retail hub. Although textiles, cotton and wool employed slightly more than half the town's workers in 1900, its economy was—and would continue to be—fairly diverse, with machine tools and especially wood-related products playing a significant role. 2 Not long ago, in fact, the CEO of a rare surviving New England paper mill told Forbes Magazine that "Fitchburg, Massachusetts used to be the paper mill capital of the world" until the Midwest took over. 3 But starting in 1920, the town's fortunes began to turn. The deindustrialization of Fitchburg, much like many other nineteenth-century New England manufacturing centers, was underway. The decline of industrial Fitchburg, alongside many nearby cities that experienced similar fates, reveals several dynamics that are not always a part of the standard story of the region and can serve as useful reminders for a study of late twentieth-century deindustrialization. The commonly accepted narrative of New England's deindustrialization attributes the region's hollowing out to manufacturers who, in the 1920s and 30s, fled the high labor costs of New England (which in many cases had been achieved through the hard-fought organizing efforts of workers) for the cheaper labor of the American South. There, too, employers found fewer regulations and expectations to provide for workers' safety and welfare, as well as many financial incentives to transplant their operations. Moreover, as steam and then electricity increasingly powered their mills, manufacturers had much less need to stay tied to the New England rivers that had once been so fundamental to their nineteenth-century founding. 4My first discovery was that rather than one key turning point in Fitchburg's deindustrialization—the pivotal moment when textile manufacturers picked up and went south and paper makers went west—there was instead a steady erosion in at least two, and likely more, phases over the course of the twentieth century, with a few occasional rises. Figure 2 reveals how in the 1920s and again in the post-World War II era, particularly after the 1960s, employment in Fitchburg lagged significantly behind the rest of the nation. But it is noteworthy that bleeding took place gradually, as plant operators failed to invest in new equipment and let production quality and quantity deteriorate, which goes a long way toward explaining why workers hold on in deindustrializing communities, and even in some cases take wage cuts in hopes of keeping their employers afloat. Fig. 2. —Manufacturing Workers in Fitchburg, Leominster, and the United States, 1904–2012. Sources: United States Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Census of Manufactures, 1919, Biennial until 1939; then relevant years 1947–1992; after 1997, Economic Census of Manufacturing and American Survey of Manufactures, relevant years, 1997–2012. Credit: Uday Schultz. Another surprising discovery was that rather than a simple, dramatic shift of operations from old northern to new southern, or in the case of paper, western, plants, there was substantial movement within New England, with municipalities competing against each other for capital investments and jobs. Certainly, many textile manufacturers moved their operations to southern states. But over the course of the twentieth century, Fitchburg both gained and lost employers as corporations aggressively sought better municipal incentives, larger and cheaper labor forces, and greater profitability within the New England region. In fact, there was a near-constant churn of businesses across multiple scales of movement, national but also regional and local. Historically, Fitchburg often benefited from companies relocating from more rural places to the comparatively more urban Fitchburg. For example, in 1893, a suspender manufacturer moved from Shirley to a new plant in Fitchburg; a newspaper article noting the move explained that Fitchburg's Board of Trade had been trying to attract the company to the town "for some time. "5 In 1916, the Sprague Company, a manufacturer of children's clothes, moved from Orange to Fitchburg in search of a better labor market. The company had had to reduce its workforce from 208 to 125 due to a lack of available workers in Orange. The Fitchburg Sentinel reported that "Mr. Butterfield of the Fitchburg Board of Trade hustled to make known the advantages which Fitchburg enjoys, with the result that the city will be a great gainer by his efforts. "6 In 1935, the Hedstrom Company, manufacturer of baby carriages, moved its operation to Fitchburg from East Templeton, adding a few hundred jobs. The Fitchburg Sentinel credited the joint efforts of the Chamber of Commerce Industrial Committee and the Bankers' Industrial Committee of Fitchburg for the recruitment. 7However, Fitchburg could also be on the losing end of intra-New England factory mobility. A notable loss came in 1928 with the acquisition of the Parkhill Company, a Fitchburg textile outfit, by New Hampshire's Amoskeag Company. Amoskeag closed Fitchburg's Parkhill plant and relocated its spindles to the company's facilities in Manchester in search of greater economies of scale. The New York Times in fact commented that "cotton mills have moved from one New England state to another. "8Most significant in this intra-regional competition, however, was the contest between Fitchburg and its neighboring community of Leominster. Leominster had earned its own distinctive industrial identity as "Comb City" in the nineteenth century, the home of comb production made from animal horns and hooves. By the 1870s, technological innovation had shifted comb production to an early kind of plastic: celluloid. By the 1930s, injection molding improved plastic making further, expanding plastics manufacturing far beyond combs. Given Leominster's moniker as the "Pioneer Plastics City, " it is not surprising that it was here in Leominster that Earl Tupper founded Tupperware in 1938. In 1900, Fitchburg's economy had far surpassed Leominster's, with 7000 manufacturing workers, twice the number of Leominster's, but over time that picture would change dramatically. By the post-World War II era, particularly from the 1970s on, Leominster would offer unique advantages that took it far beyond its comb-to-plastic manufacturing days. By 2017, when Fitchburg employed 1700 in industry, Leominster could claim 2700. Many other measures mark the greater prosperity of Leominster in the twenty-first century compared to Fitchburg. To name only a couple of examples, the median household income in Leominster is slightly more than the national average of 65, 000, while Fitchburg's lags at 60, 466. Even more telling, 37% of Leominster's students qualify for free or reduced lunch, compared to 59% of Fitchburg's. 9A search for the origins of Leominster's greater appeal to manufacturers in recent decades marks another important finding. It turns out that a major reason for Leominster's rise alongside Fitchburg's fall was the former municipality's better ability to accommodate the kind of industrial plants that employers sought to build and operate after World War II—those single-level, sprawling, factories that required large plots of land to build on and easy road access and parking lots for workers' cars and for the trucks now transporting goods from factories to warehouses and stores. Whereas the classic, multi-story, brick mill buildings built in Fitchburg in the nineteenth century had usually been squeezed cheek-by-jowl into crowded commercial districts in order to be walkable from workers' residences, these structures were considered inappropriate for streamlined mass production and car-oriented employees by the mid-twentieth century. Rather, those anachronistic industrial behemoths proved more adaptable, in Fitchburg and elsewhere, for apartment living, where the big windows that once had brought daylight to sewing machines and looms now appealed to residents whose livelihoods were mostly dependent on a postindustrial economy. The Fitchburg Art Museum has also made good use of some redundant industrial buildings in its complex close to downtown. Moreover, Fitchburg's easy access to major railroad lines that once had moved supplies in and finished products out made less difference by the mid-twentieth century, as trucking increasingly prevailed. Leominster's proximity to highways—Routes 2 and 12 both pass through, and Interstate 190, Route 13, and Route 117 all start or end in Leominster—gave it a strategic advantage. What was happening between Fitchburg and Leominster, it becomes clear, mirrored the dynamic in many older industrial cities over the postwar period, where nearby suburbs were gaining capital investments at their expense. Industry and other corporate entities, not just middle-class residents, were forsaking urban density for more suburban-like sites. A few examples support the point. In 1964, the Selig Company opened a new plant in a Leominster industrial park, consolidating its existing operations in Fitchburg and Leominster at this new location. 10 In 1967, Yankee Plastics moved from downtown Fitchburg to a more suburban-style facility in Leominster. 11 Other new Leominster-based factories were recent arrivals to the area. Rand-Whitney and Lockwood Plastics both built new plants in a Leominster industrial park during the 1960s. 12One unusual case of a company that actually left Leominster for a new factory in a less built-up part of Fitchburg highlights another important insight revealed by this investigation: that business leaders in a community like Fitchburg did not necessarily share the same point of view. Rather, voices and interests were much more diverse, and the major dividing line often was between locally oriented business leaders who had deep ties to the city and the more nationally oriented corporate executives whose loyalty was more to their bottom lines and stockholders than to any community in which they operated. When in 1968, Gettens Electric Supply bucked the trend and relocated from Leominster to Fitchburg, the company president credited the Fitchburg Industrial Commission, and particularly Mayor William G. Flynn, for having been "so cooperative that we felt the change to Fitchburg will be advantageous to us. "13In fact, the historical record shows that Fitchburg's homegrown business leaders have always worked actively to recruit industries to set up shop in their city. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Fitchburg Board of Trade took the lead. In 1910, the Christian Science Monitor reported that this group was "hustling in an attempt to find a site" for a new cloth manufacturer which had displayed interest in locating in the city. 14 By the late 1920s, the Chamber of Commerce had formalized an industrial recruitment department to aggressively seek out manufacturers and provide them with information about available space for plants. 15 In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, that department reported having contacted twenty-nine manufacturers over the last year to try to sell them on Fitchburg and claimed one success. 16 In 1935, the Chamber of Commerce went further and created a promotional booklet that it sent out to industrial concerns across the country, leading to thirty-seven inquiries and five wins. 17Following World War II, as the threat posed by neighboring Leominster grew, the Fitchburg Chamber of Commerce began to collaborate with the city under the aegis of a Fitchburg Industrial Development Commission. With their city's shortage of developable land posing an increasing problem, local business leaders cast their desperate eyes on the one obvious source of open space, the 376-acre municipal airport, whose closure and transformation into an industrial park they would unsuccessfully seek for many years. 18 Despite these efforts, the airport remains today, hosting the hobbyist Fitchburg Pilots Association and served only by charter airlines and air taxis, but no scheduled commercial airline flights. 19 While employers with national orientations were fleeing Fitchburg, business leaders with closer ties to the city were trying everything within their powers to keep it viable. Meanwhile, Leominster's local business elite was actively taking advantage of its larger stretches of undeveloped land. The city's Chamber of Commerce and Industrial Development Commission successfully collaborated to draw new and expanded factories into the city. 20 The Commission presided over the groundbreaking when Yankee Plastics relocated from Fitchburg to Leominster in 1967, and it had played a key role in luring the Rand-Whitney and Lockwood Plastics companies to a Leominster industrial park a few years earlier. 21One final lesson emerges from this Fitchburg investigation with relevance to the deindustrialization process more broadly. It is tempting to view a deindustrializing city as at the end of its life, an empty shell of what it once was, when the economy was more robust and jobs were more plentiful. But in reality, cities like Fitchburg go on to reinvent themselves, over and over again. They are less dying than transforming, sometimes successfully, but too often into a poorer, more struggling city. Moreover, although we tend to think of those residents enduring deindustrialization as a static population, a city's reorientation often attracts new inhabitants, drawn there by cheaper housing costs and the availability of less skilled work. Long before mills were converted into apartments or artists' studios, Fitchburg's factories had been reborn into second and third lives, bringing new demands for labor. In 1928, a manufacturer of rayon cloth moved into part of the abandoned Parkhill mills, reusing not just the space but its former managers as well. The Fitchburg Sentinel applauded that three "experienced and practical Fitchburg textile men, all heretofore with the Parkhill organization" would be involved in running the new concern. 22 In 1936, a lumber milling company moved into a section of the old Beoli woolen mills, promising to employ up to one hundred people. 23 Part of the same woolen mill became a workshop for bomb fuse manufacturing by the Independent Lock Company during World War II, and in 1949, a firm that made television sets occupied multiple floors within the same mill. 24 Wartime demands likewise led a former machine tool factory to shift to producing turbines for ships. After the war, it was sold to General Electric, who manufactured power plant turbines there until 1998. Over the next decade, part of this large site was reincarnated as "Putnam Place Business and Industrial Center" for small tenants looking for cheap space near Boston, and in 2008 it attracted yet another turbine maker. 25 Other former mill buildings in Fitchburg became warehouses, retail showrooms, a vocational school, and mixed residential and commercial properties. 26Even more influential in reshaping Fitchburg have been public investments that have brought a more service-sector oriented postindustrial economy to the city. Most notable has been the transformation of what had been a small state teacher's college into Fitchburg State University, with its 4700 students on a sixty-acre campus. Similarly, the Fitchburg campus of UMass Memorial Health—HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital is part of a not-for-profit, full-service acute care medical facility serving the communities of north central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. These outposts of Massachusetts' university and medical care systems have attracted middle-class professionals, students, and patients, as well as created many low-level service jobs. The periodic reorientation of Fitchburg's economy and its related built environment has been accompanied by frequent shifts in who lives and works in the city. Although Fitchburg's total population has been relatively stable over the century (at almost 42, 000 in 2020), that seeming stability hides some crucial changes in makeup. 27 Reminiscent of the repeated waves of white immigrants who had flowed into Fitchburg during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today the city's Latinx population is growing. Whereas in 1980, 95 percent of Fitchburg's population were non-Latinx whites, today, that number has declined to 60 percent, with 30 percent being Latinx of any race. 28 Although Leominster, too, has gained Latinx residents, it has done so on a much smaller scale, at a slower pace. The Latinx path to Fitchburg has not been well documented, but with most identified as Puerto Rican, it is likely that Fitchburg has followed the pattern of other gateway cities in Massachusetts. Communities like Lawrence have become majority Latinx, as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans seeking to escape the economic and social challenges of New York City have followed friends and families northward. 29 Not surprisingly, these fairly dramatic shifts in Fitchburg's population have created social tensions revolving around charges of discrimination in schooling, policing, and political representation. 30Changes in Fitchburg's economy and residential makeup have also altered connections between home and work. Whereas once Fitchburg workers lived where they could easily walk to nearby factories, getting to work today usually requires transport by car, bus, or train, particularly since the university and medical facilities are located high on the hills above downtown. As late as 1980, 56 percent of the city's 17, 000 workers labored in Fitchburg itself, with another 16 percent employed in nearby Leominster, which meant that three-quarters of Fitchburg's work force lived and worked very locally. The average travel time to work was seventeen minutes. By 2020, forty years later, that situation had changed dramatically. Only 30 percent of Fitchburg residents worked in Fitchburg itself and the mean time of commutes had shot up to twenty-six minutes. More than a quarter of Fitchburg residents actually worked outside of Worcester County. 31 This very different home-to-work geography resulted from both industrial decline and Fitchburg's recent economic development strategy of selling itself as a refuge for Boston-region firms, many in high-tech, seeking cheaper office space and for Greater Boston residents in search of more affordable housing as they get priced out of towns closer to the big city. 32 Loft-style apartments in repurposed old industrial buildings hold special appeal to these consumers. 33 In an effort to support this regional development strategy of tying Fitchburg closer to Boston, the city's politicians and business leaders have actively pressured for service improvements on the Fitchburg commuter rail line. 34In conclusion, this brief dive into New England's history of deindustrialization suggests several important dynamics which will continue to be relevant in assessing the causes and impact of the sharp decline in Midwestern manufacturing that would take place in the latter decades of the twentieth century. First, New England's experience indicates that the crisis of deindustrialization usually lasts much longer than the one key turning point commonly indicated. For example, popular local lore surrounding the closing of the Youngstown steel mills focuses on the sudden shutdown of Youngstown Sheet and Tube on "Black Monday, " September 19, 1977. But in reality there was a much longer history of company disinvestment and reorientation that preceded that one dramatic day. Second, competition for capital and jobs is often with rivals much closer to home than it is generally assumed. Although the culprit usually charged with undermining American steel production is China, in fact the amount of steel produced in the United States today is not that different from 1990, with the Midwestern states of Indiana and Ohio still dominating steel manufacturing. 35 What has declined precipitously, due to automation and other efficiencies, is the number of workers employed in the industry—from estimates of 600, 000 to 700, 000 in 1960 to approximately 65, 000 today. 36Third, deindustrialized cities don't just disappear. They adapt—sometimes well, other times poorly. Today, the Youngstown area has reinvented itself as home to the postindustrial mainstays of warehousing and prisons, where pay is far lower than in the manufacturing employment which once dominated the local market. But the area is also pursuing quite successfully the production of electric vehicles, batteries, and microchips. And similar to Fitchburg, Youngstown State University and Mercy Health-St. Elizabeth Hospital attract new residents and patrons and provide a wide range of employment opportunities, while also aiming to train students to work in the new economy. 37 Finally, on a daily basis, the Youngstown-based online Business Journal Daily records how deeply-rooted local business leaders now carry much of the responsibility for Greater Youngstown's economic revival, at a time when the big national steel and auto companies that once had prevailed have long gone. 38The 1980s and 1990s, when Youngtown's industrial economy visibly collapsed, was surely not the same era in American manufacturing as the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, when New England's industry began to falter. The Midwest has unique features that distinguished it from New England, but there are, nonetheless, important lessons to be learned from investigating a different place and time that can bring to the fore dimensions of a crisis that might otherwise be overlooked.