![]() ![]() As historians Carl Prince and Seth Taylor documented in 1981, Congressman-and-private-attorney Daniel Webster had arranged the transfer of at least a million dollars from the federal government to Associates-owned insurance companies (part of a settlement with Spain to cover Napoleonic Era commercial losses). Interestingly, the Associates never mentioned that their East Chelmsford risk was underwritten by an 1820 windfall from the federal government. Today we would call this kind of thing “trickle-down economics.” They work the secret springs, which keep the life blood of community in motion and communicate vital warmth to the extremities of the body politic.” ![]() East Chelmsford’s town minister, for example, had long believed that “on the enterprise, public spirit and religious example of the more wealthy and influential the prosperous state of society depends. And a number of Americans praised them for their efforts. The Associates portrayed themselves as bold risk takers working in the public interest when they spent a million dollars or so on their 1821 development at East Chelmsford (renamed Lowell in 1826). The Associates employed and provided wholesome, paternalistic care for young New England women (the famous Lowell “mill girls”), and theirs, they said, was a uniquely American undertaking: humane and socially beneficial, far different than the brutal English system and its dark satanic mills. The people who claimed responsibility for all of this were wealthy merchants known as the Boston Associates. During the early 19th century, Lowell was America’s most heralded industrial city: the model for other manufacturing enterprises throughout New England and the place where Andrew Jackson, Charles Dickens, and many others came to see the future firsthand. Historians, of course, knew all along that Lowell’s history was never really obscure. Soon afterwards, on June 5, 1978, with enthusiastic support from state and local governments and the Massachusetts congressional delegation, Jimmy Carter signed the bill authorizing Lowell National Historical Park. Lowell, he said, was a place in which the good and bad in history could be preserved “rather than flattened or denied” and a place in which Americans could “rediscover a much neglected past.” So did Paul Tsongas, who argued before Congress that Lowell’s textile mills, canals, and especially its generations of immigrant workers were important, not just to Lowellians, but to the nation. Mogan, though, was the city’s superintendent of schools, and he appreciated Lowell’s educational potential. ![]() Nothing there resembled Independence Hall or the Statue of Liberty, and there were no battles or presidents to commemorate in such a seemingly undistinguished factory town. Mogan was crazy when, during the 1960s, he proposed the creation of a national park in Lowell, Massachusetts-then one of the most depressed cities in America. More than a few people thought Patrick J. ![]()
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