Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [9]
And for a few decades, a rapidly growing town in New England seemed as if it might prefigure that earthly paradise—or at the very least, a better industrialism.
chapter 3
The Utopia Commercial
WELCOME TO LOWELL, Massachusetts, 1833—glittering jewel of early American industrialism and home to its largest factories. Imagine it is quitting time—the fourteen-hour day over. Thousands of women spilled out of the factories, walking two at a time with interlinked arms. Their dresses and faces were clean. They wore bonnets and twirled green and blue parasols as they streamed out of red-brick textile mills as big as the White House.
Lowell was a “commercial Utopia,” a vision of industrialization minus most of the bad stuff. The city of spindles was one of the most famous cities of the nineteenth century, and visitors came to see it from far and wide, including Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne; even Southerners like David Crockett; and a wide array of foreigners. One historian wrote that “They rejoiced in the prospect of a clean, prosperous, virtuous factory life that should stand out splendidly against the grime and poverty of the great cities of England.”1
In an America trying to make sense of what it was becoming, Lowell was a living, breathing model of what the country could be. In the new world, industrialization, nature, and society could live in peace. In just a few decades—overnight at the time—Lowell grew from a few farms into the second-largest city in Massachusetts.
Lowell, like the Erie Canal before it, was not just a massive engineering project. It was also part of an attempt to build a uniquely American “moral machine.”2 Much attention has been given to the employment model at the mills of Lowell. In an effort to avoid the ills of a permanent working class, young women from the countryside were supposed to cycle through the factories for a few years and then return, more worldly and more wealthy, back home. But waterpower was arguably as integral to the success of Lowell as being a happy place in the American imagination. The lack of smoke and soot was a key element of the place’s appeal. “On approaching Lowell, I looked in vain for the usual indications of a manufacturing town with us, the tall chimneys and the thick volumes of black smoke belched forth by them,” wrote one visitor. “Being supplied with an abundant water power, it consumes but little coal.... On arriving I was at once struck with the cleanly, airy, and comfortable aspect of the town.”3
And one British visitor averred, “There is no steam-power there, and consequently little or no smoke is visible, and every thing wears the appearance of comfort and cleanliness.”4
The utopian feel of the place coupled with the reality that people really still did have to work fourteen-hour days in clanging, loud factories got a young, abolitionist journalist, John Greenleaf Whittier, thinking about a man he’d once known. In Pennsylvania, he’d run into a “small, dusky-browed” German named Etzler who related to Whittier his “plans of hugest mechanism,” whereby humanity would be restored to a kind of Eden.
His whole mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery ; wheel within wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras of water-power; wind-mills with “sail-broad vans,” like those of Satan in chaos.... By the proper application of which every valley was to be exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom of the deep. Give “three hundred thousand dollars and ten years’ time,” and he would undertake to do the work.5
Greenleaf, just a few years later, could not help think: here was that