Boott Cotton Museum
Should we as a society, who fought for independence from Britain, willingly submit to another tyranny, the tyranny of the factory? This is the view that Thomas Jefferson presented. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, welcomed the progress of industrialization.
I visited the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, one of the many mills in Lowell that pioneered the American Industrial Revolution. This mill was a mill that was renovated into a museum about the Lowell mills. When I first entered the museum, I saw a large room with a lot of power looms that were not moving. A picture of a power loom is shown on the left. I was told they would be switched on later. So in the meantime, I started exploring the rest of the museum. I saw all the exhibits pertaining to the lives of the mill girls. I saw the exhibits about the history of Lowell. I learned about the frowned upon implicit partnership between the “lords of the loom and the lords of the lash;” basically, between mill owners and slave-owners. The mill owners would supply the slave-owners with cheap cloth to clothe their slaves in, and the slave-owners would supply the mills with raw cotton picked by their slaves to make new clothing.
I visited the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, one of the many mills in Lowell that pioneered the American Industrial Revolution. This mill was a mill that was renovated into a museum about the Lowell mills. When I first entered the museum, I saw a large room with a lot of power looms that were not moving. A picture of a power loom is shown on the left. I was told they would be switched on later. So in the meantime, I started exploring the rest of the museum. I saw all the exhibits pertaining to the lives of the mill girls. I saw the exhibits about the history of Lowell. I learned about the frowned upon implicit partnership between the “lords of the loom and the lords of the lash;” basically, between mill owners and slave-owners. The mill owners would supply the slave-owners with cheap cloth to clothe their slaves in, and the slave-owners would supply the mills with raw cotton picked by their slaves to make new clothing.
The mills have a very long history dating back to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. But the next major milestone was the invention of the power loom. This enabled the Industrial Revolution to start. When the Industrial Revolution started in England, England enacted laws to prevent anyone from spreading the Industrial Revolution to other parts of the world. But that all changed when a British mechanic immigrated to the United States. Then, along with a few other friends who were willing to invest in the American Industrial Revolution, he started the first mills in Waltham, Massachusetts, along the Charles River. But the Charles was too weak to power more mills, so for the next set of mills, the investors decided to move to present day Lowell, along the banks of the Merrimack, a much more powerful yet unharnessed river. There they established the mills of Lowell, trying to attract young women between the ages of 15 and 30 with the promise of independence and a paying job, which was very rare for women in those days.
But eventually these Yankee women workers grew tired of the abominable working conditions, and so started striking for a 10 hour day, better working conditions, and an acceptable wage. Before this, their workdays were 14 or 15 hours, their working conditions were horrible, and employers tried to lower wages frequently. So, mill owners turned to a new source of cheap labor: immigrants.
For a very long time, immigrants have been coming to this country to seek opportunities to better their lives. When they came to Lowell, mill owners took advantage of this cheap new source of labor. They also abandoned the boardinghouses in favor of houses that would pack immigrants into as little space as possible. Eventually, the immigrants also resisted, and started striking. This resulted in many mill owners selling the mill properties and getting out of the mill business. Lowell, which once was a leader in textiles, fell into decay for many years.
At some point, people debated whether to tear down the mills, or preserve them. Preservation won, and so the mill buildings were converted into condos, museums, office space, and everything in between. The Boott Cotton Museum is just the Boott Cotton Mill converted into a museum.
After we learned about the history of Lowell and the mills at the museum, we went into a large room with a lot of power looms, in time for them to be turned on. Though they were very loud, it wasn’t bad enough that I had to cover my ears in pain. A video of a power loom turned on is below. I could however understand how it could be painful and damaging to a person’s ears if that was in your ears all day and every day for an extended period of time. In addition, the power looms produced a lot of airborne impurities that affected the health of the workers. Many workers had lung ailments as a result of breathing in these hazardous fumes. But what did they know about hazardous fumes? Or rather, who cared? The whole thing was one big business.
We also saw an exhibit on Charles Dickens’s visits to Lowell. He wanted to write a travel book about America that did not agree with all the other British travel books of the time. So, he came to the US. Initially, his outlook on the US was very positive. He liked how factory workers here were very well treated, unlike in Britain. He donated large sums of money to help the blind read his books. He made many lasting friendships in America. Still, as he discovered the relationship between mill owners and slave owners, his outlook worsened. He hated seeing slavery in America, and avoided going further south than Virginia, changing his initial plans to do so. Eventually, when he wrote his travel book, he had the same opinion as all the others: that our country was a dismal place.
Coming back to the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson’s points of view, how much have we as a society really progressed almost 70 years since the end of the mill era? How different are we from that era? I think we aren’t that different, although we’d all like to think we are. The exploitation and greed of the wealthy still exist, even today. Even with all our advancements in technology, in this respect we are still as bad as we were then, maybe even worse. Instead of exploiting immigrants, we now exploit the poor overseas, forcing them to work almost 35 hours straight, paid only 31 cents an hour, just so we can get our iPhone 5 23% cheaper. All our politicians talk about bringing work back to America, yet they admit it is cheaper to open sweatshops overseas. Is this what the world has come to?
In summary, no matter how much we try to put the past behind us as we treat it like a relic that deserves countless museums and monuments, we are still facing some of the same problems that we faced in that era. I think that only when we put the problems of exploitation of workers and the greed of the wealthy behind us and completely abandon them, we can preserve these problems in museums as a thing of the past.