Mill-billy
Paul Marion
Recycled from the RichardHowe.com blog, 12/28/16
Women workers in the Lowell textile mills in the nineteenth century (web image courtesy of Lowell National Historical Park)
I’m not insensitive to the condition of the White Working-Class today, which as an identity politics category seems accepted by chin-stroking pundits in comparison to Environmentalists, which is now some kind of No Go Zone for political strategists if you listen to the opinion writers (Don’t pander to those Green people.). After the immigrant ancestors from cold Quebec in the 1880s, I’m a product of the Northeastern class of white workers who didn’t make much money in the 20th century, just to be clear. That said, I’ve read and heard my fill about hillbilly woes and the various justifications for the Rust Belt votes for president-elect Donald Trump. Whether it is another review of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy or semi-academic essays about why West Virginia turned against the national Democrats, the public conversation is saturated with talk and writing about one slice of the electorate. The demographic slice under the microscope is in danger of becoming as much of a cartoon as the 1960s TV show The Beverly Hillbillies.
Poverty and social resentment are not exclusive to the upper central United States. Poverty and resentment are not exclusively white in racial terms. Lowell and the Merrimack Valley of Massachusettss went through de-industrialization in the 1920s. The cliché here is that the Great Depression (not Great Recession of recent) took hold here earlier and stayed longer than almost anywhere in the country (1920s to 1980-ish). While the city in those decades leaked about 20,000 people (many to close suburbs) from its population high of 112,000 to a low of 92,000 around 1970, the community retained enough grit, drive, and imagination to find a way forward (matching some clever, sensible ideas with private and public money).
In the mid-70s, Lowell’s official unemployment rate was twelve percent, the highest in Mass. and one of the worst in the nation. The unofficial figure, including “discouraged workers,” people working under-the-table, part-timers, and the underemployed, could have been another ten percent. The economic circumstances of millworkers (I’m choosing that occupation because it was common) were as difficult if not worse than those of former steel workers, miners, small-scale farmers, appliance makers, car business workers, and energy company employees in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. There are people today struggling financially in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Illinois, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota (next door to Wisconsin), and everywhere, really.
While Greater Lowell is known to display at times a strong Republican streak, the larger river-valley communities and some towns pull for the Democrats. A lot of those “D” voters are descendants of mill workers from the classic red-brick factories along the river, offspring of the survivors of cold-blooded financial moves of long-ago corporate deciders.
The old mill towns, Gateway Cities in the new vocabulary of social-and-economic analysts, constitute a key piece of the current Democratic base in our state. I realize Massachusetts is not Kentucky. My fifth-generation American cousins mostly stayed around and found their ways to being cops, nurses, business owners, teachers, dentists, accountants, sales executives, technology industry workers—and their kids are computer engineers, landlords, soldiers, fire fighters, lawyers, software trainers, movie industry managers, and more. Several from the current generation have gone away farther than their parents to school and jobs. Some of my cousins chose Trump over Clinton, which would be worth hearing more about. But I don’t see them acting out of desperation or anger in the most negative way, which has to be factored in. Some people simply voted for a big change or against the entire federal government system and its inhabitants. Some of them were through with the Clintons—I get it. Vice President Biden said something similar about the motivations of the people he grew up with in Pennsylvania.
However, instead of another elegy for the hillbillies, how about a deeper dive into “mill-billy” culture and its trajectory? Is the Rust Belt’s post-industrial process now in a comparable situation as 1950s Lowell-Lawrence, and can the miners learn from the Mill Belt experience? (My father was a tradesman in wool production during that time, regularly “laid off” because of business ups and downs. In the mid-1960s, his prospects were so bad here that for several years he took a much better paying job in California and was a migrant, in effect, for seven months each year, working as a wool grader for a huge sheep ranch cooperative in the Great Central Valley. My mother, a women’s clothing store salesclerk, flew out every few months to stay with him a while. It was like he was in the U.S. Army again.)
Does it make a difference that the Merrimack Valley’s early industrial growth was immigrant-fueled? Regarding the response to newcomers as job competitors, is there a qualitative difference between the original Yankee human stock here (from 1620s) and the Scots-Irish stock prevalent in Appalachia and surrounding states? We have had our share of tribalism and group prejudice here, too. There used to be Democratic votes a-plenty in some of those places that are deep Red for the GOP. Culture and religion come before politics most of the time. What’s the saying? Politics is downstream from culture? Did our modern-era religious mix in this region set us up for different outcomes compared to the fundamentalist practices in coal country? Are we noticing things now that were there all along in the hills? The hillbilly votes have given us an unexpected political future. The pattern could hold for a while. We should look for commonalities, for lessons.
2 Responses to ‘Mill-billy’
New England mill towns are in an economic region dominated by Boston, the greatest idea factory in America. We don’t merely attract industries; we invent them. Entire industrial sectors. It has always been so.
What used to happen is that those industrial sectors would hit the big time and move out to the Midwest for large-scale production. That process has been interrupted; now they move overseas, while our forge stays cold.
We, mill towns in New England, can keep thriving and revitalizing based on New England hi-tech and culture, the ideas economy. But cities Indiana and Michigan and Ohio need that transmission belt started back up.
Paige says: December 28, 2016 at 6:59 pm
“Regarding the response to newcomers as job competitors, is there a qualitative difference between the original Yankee human stock here (from 1620s) and the Scots-Irish stock prevalent in Appalachia and surrounding states?”
Maybe. The excellent blogger Abagond did a post summarizing the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. The author, Colin Woodard, described New England as being founded by Puritans who believed strongly in using education, laws, and organized communities to create an egalitarian democratic society that benefits everyone. Meanwhile, Greater Appalachia was founded by people from the north of the British Isles who were suspicious of educated “elites” and prized individual freedom for White men over the greater good. Hmm, I wonder why one region consistently performs better than the other in education, technology, healthcare, and social justice?