On a rainy New England spring day in 1991, Paul Tsongas took to a stage in Lowell, Massachusetts, to launch his campaign for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Behind the stage loomed the red-brick expanse of Boott Cotton Mills Museum.Footnote 1
The setting was significant. Once a cradle of North America’s industrial revolution, the Merrimack Valley textile city of Lowell became, in the twentieth century, one of the first places in the United States to undergo prolonged industrial decline. Reflecting on this history while serving as Massachusetts’s junior senator, Tsongas had asked of twentieth-century Lowell, “How do you discard a city?”Footnote 2 But during the 1970s and 1980s, Lowell underwent a seemingly astonishing economic comeback. Described in 1975 as a city with “no hope,” less than a decade later it was hailed as a model for American “reindustrialization.”Footnote 3 Tsongas had cast himself in the starring role in his hometown’s revival, first as Lowell’s congressman, then as senator, and finally as an energetic booster once out of elected office. At the comeback’s center stood the old cotton mills: Lowell National Historical Park, established in 1978 to memorialize the city’s industrial past, became the wellspring of a unique mélange of placemaking and economic development that powered the city’s regeneration.
Lowell National Historical Park’s story conventionally reads as a narrative of cultural heritage, public history, and the pioneering use of historic preservation to renovate a decayed downtown.Footnote 4 Using it as a lens through which to view defining political developments of the late-twentieth century, however, Lowell’s story also illuminates, at local level, the making of the “New Liberals”: historical actors who sought to reform liberalism in response to conditions of industrial decline and political crisis, seemingly turning the Democratic Party towards a more market-oriented form of liberalism. Lowell’s postindustrial regeneration was a laboratory of this liberal reformation. Yet Lowell’s experience also demonstrated that these reformers’ defining goal was not the rejection but the reinvention of market-shaping economic-development programs. I describe this broad agenda as “developmental liberalism.”
Historians have recently started to free liberals from the defensive crouch depicted in early accounts of the “age of Reagan.”Footnote 5 They emphasize instead how liberalism was transformed: by consumer-focused, interest-group politics; by the growing centrality of a highly-educated, socially-liberal “professional class” to the Democratic Party’s coalition; and by a realignment of political geography around the suburbs.Footnote 6 Many political commentators depict the evolution of the Democratic Party since the 1970s as a narrative of liberal betrayal.Footnote 7 The agents of betrayal in this narrative came to be known at different times as “neoliberals,” “Atari Democrats,” or “New Democrats.” I use the term “New Liberal(s)” to describe these political actors across the period from the 1970s through the 1990s. They began their political lives in the 1970s, formed institutions and vied for intraparty control in the 1980s, and secured predominance over the Democratic Party by the early 1990s.Footnote 8
The “New Liberals” not only exemplified but helped engineer their party’s reorientation around the predominantly metropolitan “professional class,” especially at the elite level of Democratic activists, experts, and officeholders. Most emerging New Liberals came from this class background or had been elevated into it through the intercession of elite institutions of higher education.Footnote 9 These class politics explained both New Liberals’ dis-embeddedness from Democrats’ “traditional” constituency and interest group in organized labor, and their prioritization of business growth over meliorative social spending.
However, I argue that New Liberals’ political vision was defined by advocacy for developmental liberalism. (When describing proposals for national-level developmental initiatives, many New Liberals described this as “industrial policy.”) Moreover, political and demographic transformations coexisted with deeper continuities in the political economy of American liberalism. Lowell forms an underexamined showcase of how economic development and public-private partnership formed a durable thread connecting the liberalism of the New Deal era, its postwar apogee, and the twentieth century’s last decades.Footnote 10 Rather than emphasize their ideological dimensions, I argue that New Liberal politics were principally shaped by those conditions of industrial decline and stagnating growth that irrevocably undercut the political and economic foundations of the twentieth-century liberal order.Footnote 11
I also reinsert place at the center of the New Liberals’ history. While New Liberals were often misguidedly eager to promote specific “successes” as universally-applicable models for economic governance, their politics and policymaking were really formed by the experience of and response to particular conditions in particular places. In Lowell, New Liberals’ political orientation emerged as reconfigured growth politics in the deindustrialized urban northeast. The public-private political economy of the late-twentieth-century American city, moreover, was not simply imposed from above, but was shaped in the complex interplay between local actors—elite and grassroots—and structural economic change.Footnote 12
Focusing on Lowell and on Paul Tsongas helps to demonstrate the variety and contingency of New Liberals’ historical development. Usually, Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council take center stage in historical accounts of the New Liberals.Footnote 13 But rather than a single, ideologically-conditioned project, varieties of New Liberal(s) jostled against each other within a dynamic process of liberal reformation. Furthermore, bringing the “public” back into “public-private partnerships” offers a corrective to historical narratives that tend to emphasize the implacable advance of the “private” at the expense of the public good. Combined with their coming of political age amid the 1970s’ crisis of public faith in government, New Liberals’ “professional class” background infused their careers with wariness about the political viability of “big government.”Footnote 14 This wariness consequently undermined the expansive role for activist government contained within their own economic-development policies. Yet even as New Liberals themselves effaced the “public” from their own political record, Lowell’s experience reveals the extent to which effective public-private partnerships depended on an affirmative, expanded role for the state and on the anchoring of private-sector development with public investment.
Lowell Before the Park
In some ways, Lowell was ripe to become a policy laboratory for New Liberals. The mid-sized New England city had long been a site of economic innovations. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century, the Boston Associates, investors who established Lowell’s textile production, helped spur North America’s industrial revolution and prefigured the development of modern corporations even as they strove to maintain a traditional social order.Footnote 15 As the century drew on, Lowell’s Boston-dwelling business elite developed a planned company town that would paternalistically regulate life, worship, and recreation. The original “Mill Girls,” young women from New England farming communities who signed on for short stints as wage laborers in Lowell’s great brick mills, were, in the 1830s, some of the first American labor activists. (Their temerity encouraged mill management to seek less recalcitrant employees among Irish, French Canadian, and, later, Eastern European immigrants.)Footnote 16 At the turn of the century, the Lowell Machine Shop became a pioneer in mechanization and efficiency, anticipating the elaboration of “scientific management” as a coherent theory of industrial production. It was in this context that Lowell’s textile firms began to turn the flow of capital away from development of new products and towards shareholder dividends.Footnote 17
This change was among the reasons, together with manufacturing flight to the American South, that Lowell broke new ground with a particularly unhappy sort of innovation in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Along with other New England manufacturing hubs such as Manchester, Fall River, Lawrence, and Pawtucket, Lowell became one of the first American cities to undergo deindustrialization.Footnote 18
By midcentury, almost nowhere in Lowell, its downtown especially, was a fun place to be. “I remember it being pretty bad,” longtime city official Robert Malavich later remarked, “If you were from Lowell, some people took a step backward because…you [must have been]…just a punk.” His abiding memory of the city of his youth was of “a lot of vacant factories.” A fellow city official, Fred Faust, concurred: “before we started [the national park]…people would ask me where I’m from and I would say ‘north of Boston’—not Lowell.”Footnote 19 Paul Tsongas wrote that growing up in postwar Lowell had felt “like watching a fire dying out.”Footnote 20
Efforts to rebuild a sustainable economy in Lowell began in the early postwar years. City business leaders attempted to attract new manufacturing industries such as electronic engineering and plastics, but these efforts lacked an institutional framework from local or state government. As it already had to many other American cities, the urban renewal wrecking ball then came to Lowell in the late 1950s. The nadir of renewal was the 1964 razing of Little Canada (once home to French Canadian transplants), a process comparable to the clearing of Boston’s historic West End a few years prior.Footnote 21 Combined with the lack of economic results, this precipitated a new, more strategic approach to regeneration.
Dubbed the “educative city,” this approach was spearheaded by a local public schools official, Patrick J. Mogan. In 1968, Mogan and the city council secured federal funds for a Model Cities initiative in Lowell.Footnote 22 The federal Model Cities Program had been unveiled in January 1966 and provided funding for local initiatives developed by municipal governments, businesses, and other community and civic groups. The program, advocates believed, would avoid the failures of urban renewal while still ensuring that locally devised social programs could be overseen by municipal elites, and the scope of public access to decision-making limited.Footnote 23
Through Lowell’s Model Cities initiative, Mogan began to promote the idea of creating an “urban heritage park.” But the principal Model Cities goal was delivering a range of local social programs focused on the Acre, an impoverished neighborhood abutting the razed Little Canada that had historically been home to Irish and Greek immigrants before becoming the center of Lowell’s Puerto Rican diaspora community after the Second World War. (Following the 1979 Refugee Act, the Acre would become a regional hub of immigration from Southeast Asia.)
With federal support phased out during the Nixon Administration, Lowell’s Model Cities initiative was superseded in 1971 by the Human Services Corporation (HSC), a nonprofit under Mogan’s leadership.Footnote 24 Mogan made his “urban heritage park” the new group’s overriding objective. Mogan saw a social dividend as one of the park’s important benefits: by recovering Lowell’s significant historic role in the North American industrial revolution, its citizens’ civic pride could be rekindled.Footnote 25 Moreover, the heritage park could become a staging ground for festivals and public history programs that promoted Lowell’s ethnocultural diversity alongside its dramatic industrial history. Mogan made a special point of soliciting business support for the HSC’s park campaign, with its fruition promising to spur growth in tourism. Lowell City Council approved a preservation district around the disused mills in 1972 and the campaign scored a major success in 1974 when Massachusetts legislation established a state historical park based around the disused mills. In January 1975, federal legislation created the Lowell Historic Canal District Commission to study the case for a National Park Service historical park.Footnote 26
Mogan’s cultivation of business support and the HSC’s shift away from social programs towards a marquee cultural project suggested the way in which, from its inception, the campaign for a historical park was a campaign driven by local and regional elites rather than by grassroots social and political activism. The same was true—indeed, amplified—when it came to the developmental programs that were folded into the push for a park from the mid-1970s onwards. At all stages, direction of local initiatives was undertaken by Lowell’s “grass-tops”: its local civic and business elite.Footnote 27 Lowell’s developmental programs therefore tended to be partially insulated from popular input.
The largely fruitless attempts by local businessmen to attract high-tech manufacturing to Lowell in the 1950s and the purposelessness of postwar urban renewal had together shown that regeneration would require collaboration between public and private stakeholders. While he realized that business buy-in was crucial, Patrick Mogan’s conception of what a national historical park would be was more about cultural reflorescence than economic development. Mogan was enormously proud of Lowell’s industrial past, but he did not necessarily believe that it could be the driving force behind future economic growth; or at least, not beyond growth for tourism. After all, most people did not view a national park as a principally economic project. But Paul Tsongas saw things differently.
Making Postindustrial Regeneration, 1975–1990
By his own admission, Paul Tsongas’s political awakening began not in the Merrimack Valley, but in Ethiopia. The son of a Greek immigrant who owned a successful dry-cleaning business, Tsongas grew up cosseted by provincial Republicanism in Lowell and in suburban Chelmsford. Until his early twenties, Tsongas had never ventured farther afield than a high-school debate meet in Maryland. Following graduation from Dartmouth College in 1962, however, he volunteered for what became a two-year spell with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. It was there, Tsongas later wrote, that he decided to pursue a career in public service.Footnote 28 Tsongas volunteered on the 1965 New York mayoral campaign of the liberal Republican matinée idol John Lindsay, and subsequently, while a student at Yale Law School, worked for Representative F. Bradford Morse (R-MA). Tsongas met his wife (herself later a member of Congress) at a party for Beltway interns; according to Nicola Tsongas, this was the first and last party her husband would ever attend.Footnote 29
When Tsongas ran for Lowell City Council himself, it was as an anti-graft Democrat, with a fashionable sense of disillusionment at the war in Vietnam. He was, according to his aide Fred Faust, “somewhat of a fair-haired boy because he was a reformer.”Footnote 30 From the city council, Tsongas won a seat on the Middlesex County Commission in 1971 before vaulting into Lowell’s congressional seat in 1974, carried aloft on that year’s wave of anti-Republican sentiment. Tsongas was one of the “Watergate Babies” who would make their mission institutional reform of Congress, driving antediluvian creatures like Representative Wright Patman (D-TX) out of committee chairmanships.Footnote 31 Tsongas was then elected to the Senate in 1978, retiring in 1984 upon his diagnosis with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
All this lay in the future, however, when Tsongas interviewed Faust for a job on his congressional campaign in early 1974. Starting the interview, Faust told Tsongas, “…first of all, you have no chance to win.” But, Faust said, “if you do win, I would like to be able to come to Washington and work on the urban cultural park.”Footnote 32
What Tsongas thought about the HSC’s park project at this time is not clear. The state park was established during the time when Tsongas was running for Congress, and the federal legislation that created Lowell Historic Canal District Commission was also drawn up before Tsongas took his seat. What is clear, however, is that revitalizing his hometown’s economy was Tsongas’s fundamental preoccupation. And he quickly came to see the park project as a vehicle for economic development. After decades of industrial decline and the failure of postwar regeneration efforts, most outside observers doubted Lowell’s fortunes could be turned around. “Lowell has no future,” commented a senior Bank of Boston executive in 1975, “[and] government officials should stop wasting their time trying to save the city—it has no hope.”Footnote 33
If Tsongas wanted to leverage his new position in Congress for stimulating Lowell’s regeneration, the project with momentum behind it was the push for a national park. Tsongas and his local collaborators’ efforts culminated on June 5 1978, when federal legislation was signed into law that created Lowell National Historical Park. The park was the centerpiece of a broader, economic development-focused regeneration program, a program that required not only business buy-in but the embedding of public-private partnership institutions within municipal government. To Tsongas and his aides (several of whom moved between his Congressional and Senate offices and positions in Lowell), the national park was central: the piece that had to be in place before the rest of the regeneration jigsaw could be put together. Even this, however, understates the park’s real significance to regeneration. It did not merely provide the foundation on which private development could be built. Rather, the reliable flow of federal money and a new public institution (the park) underwrote continued private development.
Even though its 1978 establishment came after that of one major public-private partnership agency, the Lowell Development and Financial Corporation, the national park sat at the regeneration ecosystem’s center. By virtue of its permanence and the statutory reliance on it of other organizations, such as a historic preservation commission, the park was the basis for the sustainability of future private investment. In Lowell, in other words, was the essentialness made plain of the “public” in public-private partnership.
Local officials in Lowell, working as needed with partners on Beacon Hill and in Washington, created three institutions between 1975 and 1980 that joined with the national park itself to form regeneration’s public-private partnership framework. For all of them, Tsongas’s leadership or advocacy was crucial. First came Lowell Development and Financial Corporation (LDFC) in October 1975 (originally called the Lowell Redevelopment Finance Corporation). Second, the 1978 legislation creating the park also created the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission. Finally, in 1980, the city established the Lowell Plan, Inc., a nonprofit that remains one of the city’s core economic-development agencies as of 2024.
Created with the assistance of the Center Cities Committee, a regeneration-focused nonprofit, LDFC was formally established via state legislation in 1975. It had ten local banks, which invested a total of $337,300, as institutional shareholders.Footnote 34 Using this money, LDFC was designed to provide stable loans (fixed at 4% interest) for existing or new businesses to either set up an office in, or relocate to, the central business district in downtown Lowell, which surrounded the old textile mills. Rather than being paid back to the stockholding banks, repaid loans were to be placed towards future loans to other businesses looking to renovate and locate in downtown buildings. As Tsongas put it in testimony to the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Commerce and Labor, the proposed LDFC “provides an avenue for the participation of interested groups…[to] play an important role in the revitalization of Lowell.”Footnote 35
LDFC’s creation did build on existing regeneration initiatives; not just the state heritage park created in 1974 but, more similarly, Lowell’s use of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grants for “downtown improvements.” However, it marked a fundamental shift in terms of how formally it bound the Greater Lowell business community into regeneration efforts. It also presaged how the national park would be used to support commercial reuse of historic buildings; reuse that would, innovatively, be allowed only when businesses agreed to abide by historic preservation requirements. As Tsongas averred, the LDFC would be “a vehicle for the private-sector commitment without which no redevelopment can succeed.”Footnote 36 “Remember,” a Lowell business group enjoined its members in 1979, “Downtown Lowell is a fun place to be.”Footnote 37
Yet, at first, uptake on the available loans was relatively slow. In January 1978, a little over two years after its establishment, the organization’s treasurer informed stockholding banks that nine LDFC-financed redevelopment projects were underway—with “many applications pending,” he hastily added.Footnote 38 Certainly, LDFC established an important precedent for the business community’s investment in regeneration. Innovative as it was, however, LDFC was only promissory of sustained regeneration until the national park was established. Following the establishment of the park, the historic preservation commission, and the Lowell Plan, investment and redevelopment picked up. Peter Aucella, who worked in Tsongas’s Senate office before being appointed successively as Lowell’s planning director and as the historic preservation commission’s executive director, reported in October 1996 that LDFC had financed the renovation of two hundred and fifty downtown buildings and had approximately $21 million in assets (a figure that likely did not include active loans on then-underway redevelopments).Footnote 39 To give a sense of change, LDFC’s original 1975 stock ($337,300) would have been worth approximately $985,000 in 1996.
When New Liberals were responsible for governing cities, according to historian Lily Geismer, their focus on public-private partnerships offered “market-based solutions” to socioeconomic inequality as a way to abrogate the “traditional” liberal commitment to direct public investment.Footnote 40 In one sense, Lowell’s story bears out Geismer’s argument. While long-term deindustrialization had created a great deal of poverty in the broader Lowell region, the stated priority of those engaged in regeneration efforts from the mid-1970s on was not ameliorative social spending. But nor is Lowell’s story a straightforward one about privatization per se. LDFC was intended to create market incentives where hardly any existed. And, in fact, to do so it needed direct public investment in the form of the national park—investment that brought a greater level of federal government involvement in the city than ever before. Putting the national park at the center of regeneration, Lowell’s “grass-tops” decision-makers built up private-sector development around a robust public institution.
Of course, there is no doubt that Tsongas conceived of social spending as the longer-term outcome of growth politics. Since the 1960s, Tsongas argued, liberals had focused on how to distribute “golden eggs”—social programs—rather than tending to “the health of the goose,” i.e., economic growth. In the context of long-term industrial decline, others engaged in Lowell’s regeneration efforts broadly agreed with focusing on economic revival, and with the especial imperative for public-private partnerships. In written testimony to the state legislature in October 1975, the Greater Lowell Central Labor Council’s secretary stated that to revitalize an “economically shattered” city, “the private sector must participate and involve its own talent and resources.” LDFC, he opined, would “maximize the participation of the private sector in the stimulation of the Cities [sic] economy.”Footnote 41 LDFC typified an effort for government to work with nongovernmental actors (especially businesses) in pursuit of economic growth.
The notion of this sort of partnership was not, in the 1970s, a new one in U.S. politics. Indeed, it was generally in keeping with what has long been seen as the “associational” character of all scales of American governance.Footnote 42 LDFC’s regional novelty was that it embedded this approach within a specific organization and, additionally, joined it to a wider public project (the national park) that would establish a formal framework within which private businesses would work separately towards a shared goal of regeneration. Without a doubt, this represented a new approach to public-private partnerships in Lowell itself. Previously, as in the period between 1945 and 1966, there had been non-joined-up efforts by business leaders to attract new employers. Or, in the case of the HSC (undoubtedly successful in starting the park project), the private sector had bought into public goals without a more formal sort of institutional commitment. LDFC’s creation suggested that the focus of regeneration efforts had shifted away from the “educative city” and towards business development.
Lowell’s political leaders demonstrated that this goal was being further incorporated into the park project itself when they succeeded in having the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission established as a sort of adjunct to the park. This new agency associated “historic preservation” with economic development. Tsongas made this association as soon as he came onboard the extant park project as a freshman congressman. In 1975, he and his congressional staff enlisted the help of an executive at Massachusetts’s Raytheon Company to prepare a presentation for the U.S. House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee on the “Economics of Historic Preservation.” “The urban park,” Tsongas’s presentation began, “provides an exciting opportunity for the economic rebirth of the city.” It then surveyed the renovation and repurposing of historic urban areas in Sacramento, Seattle, Savannah, and San Antonio, as well as in several New England cities. Considering the potential of Lowell’s historic canal-ways, the example of the “San Antonio River Project’s” waterways renovation was of particular interest: there, approximately $3.5 million in public financing had leveraged $20 million in private-sector investment.Footnote 43 None of the cities discussed in the presentation, Tsongas may have noted, seemed to have a public-private partnership framework embedded in municipal governance comparable to that which would soon take shape in Lowell.
Richard Arenberg, a legislative assistant to Tsongas in the late-1970s, later explained that Tsongas, his staff, and local political leaders saw the proposed national park as a project extending beyond what would be the official boundaries of museum and historic sites. The park itself was “an economic development project.…Lowell’s history is a tremendous asset, and…we’re going to…use it as the engine of economic revival of the city.”Footnote 44 To effectuate this economic-development aspect of the park project, Tsongas and his staff sought to get the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission incorporated into the federal legislation (H.R.11662) that established the national park in June 1978. The National Park Service had administered the National Register of Historic Preservation since its creation as part of the National Historic Preservation Act (1966). In 1976, federal tax credits were introduced to incentivize preservation by indirectly funding historic buildings’ rehabilitation. The Lowell project was thus advanced at a time when political support for historic preservation was strong. However, Lowell evinced less an effort to prioritize preservation for its own sake than it did the use of preservation’s tools to craft an economic-development agenda.
This agenda required that the national park be spatially expansive. William J. Whalen III, director of the National Park Service from 1977 to 1983, was known for promoting urban national parks and initially proposed that Lowell’s national park would be made up of five buildings around Boott Cotton Mills.Footnote 45 Tsongas rejected Whalen’s proposal, arguing that “The city is the park.” Instead, Tsongas insisted on including all of the downtown historic district in the remit of the historic preservation commission. “We didn’t want just five nice national park buildings standing in the middle of 20th-century urban decay,” Tsongas opined later.Footnote 46
The historic preservation commission was formally constituted as an advisory agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior (the National Park Service’s parent department). However, as the commission’s Preservation Plan outlined, it was unlike traditional advisory commissions: “the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC) was designed as an entity that would be funded to actively carry out its legislative mandate.…[it] was authorized by Congress to develop a number of properties within the Lowell National Historical Park.”Footnote 47 The commission’s fifteen-member board was made up of three city councilors; three private-sector members representing the city’s businesses; three state appointees; the president of the University of Lowell (the University of Massachusetts Lowell from 1991); and five federal representatives.Footnote 48 By keeping its staff at an operational remove from the park, the historic preservation commission was more firmly embedded in economic regeneration efforts which required the national park to be successful while functioning independently.
Lowell Historic Preservation Commission was allocated $21.5 million out of the total $40 million budget for the national park’s first decade, with a remit to attract private-sector investment for redevelopments by businesses moving into downtown, conditional on redevelopers respecting the architectural integrity of historic buildings. The commission’s fourteen staff members administered loans (functioning in a similar way to LDFC) and also worked to secure grants from federal, state, and nongovernmental sources for downtown redevelopment.Footnote 49 In Faust’s words, the commission filled “a need to have an entity other than the National Park Service, more free willing [sic; free-wheeling], more flexible, more able to deal with the private sector.” Its role was “really to use public funds to leverage private investment.”Footnote 50 The commission was therefore designed specifically to draw private investment into downtown and, in a significant break with usual National Park Service practices, to push for buildings around the park to be renovated and used by businesses. In May 1979 testimony to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on the Interior, Representative James Shannon (D-MA), who had succeeded Tsongas in Lowell’s congressional seat, stated that “easements, grants, loans, and technical assistance [delivered by the commission]…will save federal funds and encourage continued private ownership.”Footnote 51 During the 1980s, the public-private partnership collaboration between LDFC, preservation commission, and Lowell Plan focused on attracting high-technology companies amid statewide economic growth in tech industries.Footnote 52
For Tsongas, leveraging the longstanding goal of an urban national park in Lowell for an economic development agenda was “such a shining notion” that he assumed it would naturally attract support. His congressional staff “came to learn,” in Faust’s words, “that this was exactly the wrong thing to be saying.” Encountering skepticism over the redevelopment agenda, Tsongas’s team decided to tell park representatives that “this is not about economics”—something Faust mischievously characterized as “a little bit of a white lie.”Footnote 53 Instead, Tsongas’s office concentrated on selling “the notion of a National Park in a[n] urban environment” and on emphasizing preservation rather than economic redevelopment.Footnote 54
The park’s economic-development dimensions met with skepticism from both National Park Service liaisons and some of Tsongas’s colleagues on the U.S. House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Parks and Insular Affairs. This skepticism arose because of a perception that the regeneration efforts cohering around the park represented a reinvention of postwar urban renewal. Indeed, cognizant of such a perception, Lowell’s political leaders agreed with William Whalen that the establishment of the park would be accompanied by some sort of official affirmation that the national park was not “an ‘urban renewal’ program in disguise.”Footnote 55
Faust, who left Washington to become the historic preservation commission’s executive director, explained that skepticism was voiced especially by the Parks and Insular Affairs Subcommittee’s ranking minority member, Representative Joe Skubitz (R-KS), who was “concerned about the Urban renewal aspect, and…that within the Park there’d be private [redevelopment]…they were not in favor of [the commission].” Opposition persisted even after Tsongas officially introduced the legislation; during committee hearings in April 1978, an aide to Skubitz again raised concerns with Faust “about private (_____) [transcript blank; from context: redevelopment] and Urban Renewal concepts.”Footnote 56 Peter Aucella described skeptics’ views as being that Lowell National Historical Park would function as a form of “urban renewal in disguise.” Aucella commented that ensuring local membership of the historic preservation commission’s board had shielded its economic-development agenda from such skeptics—while allowing these locally-based stakeholders to effectively rework its official role as a preservation agency into one geared towards citywide economic growth.Footnote 57
It is easy to see why perceived similarities to postwar urban renewal would have unsettled people in the late-1970s. By that point, policymakers across the ideological spectrum perceived renewal as having been a failure.Footnote 58 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Tsongas distanced Lowell National Historical Park from association with urban renewal. Furthermore, it is hard to argue that the Lowell project entirely represented urban renewal redux. Focused on downtown business development, those engaged in Lowell’s 1970s regeneration had no interest in driving the federal bulldozer into residential neighborhoods.
Renewal and Lowell-style regeneration did, however, share a sort of thematic similarity. Renewal had in practice been a dynamic process that evolved in the decades between the Housing Act of 1949 and the retreat from federal intervention in cities under President Richard Nixon’s “New Federalism.” Urban renewal looked very different in the late 1960s than it had in the early postwar years, with a more generative role for the local “grass-tops” evolving as renewal experts were met with opposition to purely top-down plans. Renewal also encompassed significant (albeit varying across different cities) roles for private developers; renewal often broke down especially badly when these public-private partnerships included failures on one side of the partnership, either too much top-down planning by nonexpert public agencies, or short-sighted profit-seeking behaviors by private developers afforded too much implementational autonomy. Even Lowell’s particular emphasis on historic preservation had antecedents in postwar renewal’s late stages: it could be compared to the emergence of Boston’s “negotiated cityscape,” wherein planning chief Edward J. Logue gradually incorporated preservation into downtown revitalization.Footnote 59
Viewed this way, Lowell’s regeneration shared thematic continuities with postwar renewal. Furthermore, such continuities suggested a deeper continuity between what liberal reformers such as Tsongas liked to claim was a “new” political approach, and the pattern of postwar liberal state-building. To deliver on its promises of growth, the “new” approach would require a more muscular role for activist government than its advocates claimed.
Despite being pledged $21.5 million for the period of its initial ten-year mandate (renewed for an additional eight years in 1987), the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission at first had to hustle for its budget year-to-year. When drawing up executive branch budgets for 1980, for example, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget proposed funding the commission out of National Park Service funds rather than as a separate line item in the Interior Department’s budget. This occasioned resistance from Tsongas, Representative Shannon, and Faust, who argued for “maximum flexibility” in the commission’s budget allocation.Footnote 60 By the early 1980s, however, the commission had secured financial stability and was accepted as an important constituent institution in Lowell’s regeneration program.
The commission’s innovativeness and its importance for jumpstarting physical regeneration in downtown Lowell are well summarized by the National Park Service. The commission was “unlike other park partners in that it…develop[ed] major projects. It had been given the power to lease and acquire properties; in contrast, the Park could only acquire property by gift.” Footnote 61 The commission’s first major project was a development called Market Mills. Working with private developers, the commission rehabilitated two disused mill buildings near Boott Cotton Mills (which is the center of the park). The Market Mills project showcased the varied nature of what Lowell officials sought from regeneration. After development, the two buildings contained a park visitor center, an art gallery and studios run by a local artists’ cooperative, the media nonprofit Lowell Telecommunications Corporation, a food court and retail space, and two hundred and thirty units of affordable housing. The commission and the National Park Service itself each contributed $1 million for the redevelopment, attracting $12 million from private-sector contributors who incorporated as Market Mills Associates.Footnote 62
By 1988, a year after its tenure was extended, the commission had loaned $660,000 and secured grants totaling $1,385,025 for thirty-five completed redevelopment projects. Significantly, according to the commission’s 1990 Preservation Plan, this public investment had also attracted $14,547,635 in private redevelopment investment.Footnote 63 The commission’s tenure was not extended again in 1995 and its responsibilities pursuant to historic preservation design review and to the Canalway project (creating walkways and generally rehabilitating Lowell’s canal system) were handed over to park administration. But Aucella, who became the park’s assistant superintendent for development after the commission was dissolved, estimated that by the mid-1990s the park and commission had together drawn approximately $1 billion in “public and private investment” not just to downtown but to the overall Greater Lowell area, by creating a conducive environment for redevelopment.Footnote 64 By spurring the first major phase of redeveloping historic buildings, the commission also generated momentum for the activities of LDFC and the last of the interlocking organizations set up between 1975 and 1980.
This last organization was the Lowell Plan, established in 1980, and an extension of the public-private partnership that LDFC had inaugurated. Local political lore told how Tsongas sat down at a riverfront Greek restaurant with Lowell’s city manager to sketch out the Lowell Plan “on the back of a placemat” as “a blueprint for a collaboration between the public and private sectors.”Footnote 65 A Senate office memorandum detailed the focus of the regeneration program: “Investments of public funds [to]…enhance opportunities for private investment,” incentivizing direct private investment in the redevelopment of downtown buildings for commercial space, and diversifying Lowell’s industrial base, primarily with new technology companies such as Wang Laboratories.Footnote 66 The Lowell Plan was a “way to unify this development and to make it part of an overall community effort;” this meant levering the private investment that had begun to flow to Greater Lowell into broader areas of social concern.Footnote 67 The memo included a detailed proposal for establishing funds first for housing-stock creation (both new builds and repurposed historic sites), and second for an affordable home-financing mechanism for new buyers. The Lowell Plan was capitalized by companies investing at gradated levels based on their total assets.Footnote 68
By 1983, three years after the Lowell Plan was established and less than a decade into the new regeneration program, more than $170 million of public and private investment had poured into Lowell; Michael Dukakis’s gubernatorial administration estimated that every public dollar spent had “leveraged” ten to fifteen dollars of private investment.Footnote 69 Private-sectors firms had raised $846,000 to fund the Lowell Plan. Unemployment had decreased to 3.7%, from 12.6% a decade before.Footnote 70 The regeneration efforts required, as well, some old-fashioned flexing of political muscle. When, for example, developers of a new Hilton Hotel contemplated locating outside city limits, Tsongas persuaded local businesses to threaten a blacklist of the hotel unless it was situated in downtown Lowell.Footnote 71
While the regeneration program enjoyed buy-in from Massachusetts labor leaders, Tsongas and his allies proved particularly interested in building political alliances with business. This preference was magnified in one of Tsongas’s national initiatives. The High Technology Morrill Act constituted an elaborate scheme to spur regional reindustrialization and expand science and technology education through new public-private partnerships between universities, private firms, and multiple layers of government.Footnote 72 The legislation (shrunk by Republicans into a small experimental program) sought to shape sectoral economic development.Footnote 73 Tsongas devised the legislation “in conjunction with regional business,” consulting closely with the then-influential Massachusetts High Technology Council.Footnote 74 Thus cultivating allies in preferred economic sectors, Tsongas drew business actors into his political project beyond Lowell.
Tsongas, indeed, intended Lowell’s regeneration to be a “national prototype.” In early 1980, Tsongas, the city manager, and local business leaders hired the American City Corporation to help devise a strategic framework for Lowell’s economic development.Footnote 75 Following a meeting, one American City Corporation vice president wrote that he understood Tsongas’s “desire to see the ‘Lowell Plan’ become a model approach for downtown revitalization of small and medium-sized cities across the country.…[It] provides the basis for a revitalization model that may be replicable.”Footnote 76 Carolyn Schwenker, director of a 1980 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development study on economic development in eleven northeastern cities, likewise commended Lowell as a national example for successful regeneration. She described Lowell as “one of the most exciting [cities] we’ve studied.”Footnote 77
Making the New Liberals, 1980–1992
Paul Tsongas had begun to see Lowell’s regeneration as a model for the nation even before the ink was dry on his placemat sketch of the Lowell Plan. Lowell’s regeneration was not just to be a national model for regeneration, however, but a national model for how liberals ought to respond to economic crisis and GOP electoral gains. Tsongas was only one of a number of political actors engaged in fashioning a Democratic response to these challenges in the 1980s. But in June 1980, he seized an early chance to make a national splash.
Tsongas was scheduled to deliver the keynote address on June 14, 1980 in the high temple of postwar liberalism: the annual conference of Americans for Democratic Action. The keynote, republished and expanded upon in The Road From Here (1981), described liberal legislation in the 1960s as “practical” and “realistic” responses to exigent problems. Liberals were categorically not, as conservatives caricatured them, “dreamers” or “ideologues.” The problem was that new “realities” required new political approaches. Stagnant growth and foreign economic competition, energy shortage, and a lack of fruitful cooperation between government, business, and labor: all of this undermined liberalism. Tsongas claimed that younger Americans had “not grown up reading about the ever expanding American economic pie; they have grown up reading about America’s balance of payments problem and the demise of the auto industry’s capacity to compete internationally.”Footnote 78 Challenges of deindustrialization and foreign economic competition ought to be met by orienting Democrats towards targeted public investment.
Tsongas mused that some might balk at such an orientation. “If it is necessary to revive our economy,” he asked the Americans for Democratic Action audience, “to provide tax credit to industry as opposed to individuals, how will liberals respond?” He answered his own question: “They will probably vote against it.” Tsongas did not ask Americans for Democratic Action to leave traditional liberalism behind; he implored that it be adjusted to meet new challenges, lest Democrats permanently lose ground to the GOP. “Congress,” he said, “is increasingly sounding like Ronald Reagan…totally unfettered private enterprise is unacceptable.”Footnote 79 Tsongas’s solution was to learn from his hometown’s example. “Lowell’s rebirth,” Tsongas explained, “is mostly a result of private-sector investment…[but] government acted as catalyst…working with the private sector, by spending time cooperating with businessmen and bankers, a Democratic public official is serving…[Lowell’s] blue-collar constituency.” By 1980, Lowell’s employment had already increased by 7.7%, even amid a national stalling-out of the American economic ride.Footnote 80
The speech landed like a bomb on the altar of postwar liberalism. The conservative-leaning Lowell Sun opined that Tsongas was offering “pragmatic, non-dogmatic” solutions to political and economic realities.Footnote 81 After Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election and the GOP forged their first Senate majority in a quarter of a century, “Paul Tsongas, blasphemer, became Paul Tsongas, prophet.”Footnote 82 He received national media attention for identifying the challenges facing Democrats; the Washington Post later described the Americans for Democratic Action speech as having established Tsongas as “one of the new breed of Democrats” reorienting the party to roll back the GOP wave.Footnote 83 Tsongas’s credibility to assume this national role was based on the perceived success of Lowell: its “remarkable rebirth,” a July 1980 Boston Globe article declared, made it a “beacon to the whole new movement of urban revitalization.” Tsongas opined that the city’s regeneration ought to become a national, perhaps even an international, “prototype.”Footnote 84
While there was not a single, monolithic project of making the New Liberals, Tsongas shared an outlook and interests—profoundly influenced by the political experience of 1970s economic crisis—with other nascent party reformers. Following Tsongas’s splashy intervention at the Americans for Democratic Action conference, an institutional base for reforming liberals was created in 1981: the Committee on Party Effectiveness (CPE), which sat within the U.S. House Democratic Caucus. While designed to encompass a range of intraparty views, CPE became the nerve center of the emerging New Liberals.Footnote 85 Prominent CPE figures such as Representative Richard Gephardt (D-MO) and staff director Al From would go on to cofound the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, although CPE was not simply a precursor to the latter group.
CPE’s economic-policy task force, whose co-chairs Gephardt and Representative Timothy E. Wirth (D-CO) Esquire identified as members of a “neoliberal club” alongside Tsongas in a famous cover story, published a menu of policy proposals in September 1982 under the title Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity.Footnote 86 CPE’s proposals constituted a blueprint for a new American industrial policy. But as with the defining role played by federal investment in Lowell’s regeneration, rhetorical state-skepticism in Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity masked the expansiveness of its proposed government intervention in the economy. The proposals’ centerpiece was the Economic Cooperation Council, an entirely new federal agency with interdepartmental reach. This would be composed of representatives from government, business, labor, and research universities, with a fully-staffed data analytics bureau. One of the agency’s primary objectives would be “Identifying and promoting…technological advances,” subsidizing or incentivizing investment in research and development of new technologies.Footnote 87 CPE proposed a “broad-based investment program” to develop “new technologies” and subsidize or incentivize private-sector acquisition of new manufacturing plants and equipment for what the group’s economic advisor Lester Thurow termed “sunrise industries.”Footnote 88 Wirth advocated for the federal government to commit investment equal to 3% of annual GDP into civilian research and development of technological innovations for industries such as computing and biotechnology. Adopting attractive if strategically vague terms like “worker democracy,” the CPE called for a “new era of cooperation” between C-suite and labor unions.Footnote 89
These proposals were linked to parallel calls by policy academics, unofficially but closely affiliated with CPE, for a U.S. industrial policy.Footnote 90 The Wall Street Journal labeled CPE’s members as “‘growth’ Democrats” who sought to use “industrial policy, research and development, and [investment in] high tech” to expand the private sector, in turn providing a base for funding liberal social programs.Footnote 91 With its enjoinment to move beyond what the group in 1984 labeled “the myth of the free market,” CPE was predictably accused by conservatives of repackaging New Deal-style economic-development policies.Footnote 92 The New Liberals were formed through their advocacy for industrial policy. Rather than emerging locked into an ideological embrace of “neoliberalism,” these first New Liberals sought to revive and reinvent liberalism’s commitment to an activist state that would shape and manage markets.
Alongside CPE’s national policy proposals, the New Liberals developed through regional, state-level, and local developmental programs, which constituted industrial policies in miniature. These programs, rooted in specific places and economies below the bird’s eye view of national policy discourses, proved just as important as CPE in giving tangible form to the emerging New Liberals. Tsongas’s initiative in Lowell—self-professedly formative of his political identity as a New Liberal—was only one example.Footnote 93 Southern New Liberal-aligned governors such as Charles Robb in Virginia, James Hunt in North Carolina, and Bill Clinton in Arkansas oriented the Southern Growth Policies Board, a regional-development policy forum, towards “public venture capital pools” that would fund higher-tech, “future growth” sectors.Footnote 94 Lowell itself was caught up in the “Massachusetts Miracle,” a decade of growth seeded by technology firms and nourished by a rich brew of state agencies and public-private partnerships established by Democratic governor Michael S. Dukakis.Footnote 95 Sincere belief in both public-private partnerships’ fiscal efficacy and their ameliorative social effects characterized the nascent New Liberals’ understanding of political economy—what Atlanta’s New Liberal-aligned mayor, Andrew Young, evocatively described as “public-purpose capitalism.”Footnote 96
At the same time Tsongas was promoting Lowell’s regeneration on the national stage, California’s former governor Jerry Brown established the National Commission on Industrial Innovation to advocate for regional industrial policies focused on high-tech sectors and for investment in technological education. Brown’s group was especially closely entwined with business support: it was partially bankrolled by prominent Silicon Valley firms including Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, and the latter’s cofounder, Robert N. Noyce, sat on its board.Footnote 97 “The fact that our government has no industrial policy,” one Advanced Micro Devices executive wrote to Brown, “is a void that must be filled.”Footnote 98 As with Tsongas’s proposed High Technology Act, New Liberals used industrial policy initiatives to expand political alliances with business actors, forming a new partnership, in particular, with high-tech sectors.
Lowell, however, attracted particular interest. In the aftermath of the 1984 elections, the Democratic National Committee established the Democratic Policy Commission (DPC) with the aim, in its chairman’s words, of “rehabilitating” government and identifying “its proper goals”—reform-flavored rhetoric typical of the emerging New Liberals.Footnote 99 While partly designed as a factional counterweight to the Democratic Leadership Council, which was dominated by white Sunbelt politicians, the DPC was stuffed with figures such as Young, Brown, and Dukakis who were identifiably aligned with the New Liberal outlook.Footnote 100 In the winter of 1986, the DPC embarked upon a series of fact-finding excursions to areas of Democratic “success.” Ahead of a conference in Boston on the industrial economy and entrepreneurialism, the DPC visited Lowell, where Tsongas presided in boosterish pomp over a roundtable on “the government-labor-business partnership which had turned a community with double-digit unemployment into an economic miracle.” Lowell was hailed as a “demonstration of hope.”Footnote 101
The New Liberals were coming into focus as a political orientation by the mid-1980s. Contrary to either the “trickle down” form of supply-side economics on the Right, or the redistribution-focused agenda promoted on Democrats’ left flank by figures such as Jesse Jackson, a vision of reinvented developmental liberalism defined the New Liberals’ agenda.
Yet New Liberals saw political advantage in the theater of rejecting their party’s midcentury and postwar legacy. They sought to “distance themselves,” as a profile in Congressional Quarterly put it, “from the statist solutions…that characterize New Deal liberalism.”Footnote 102 Declared The Washingtonian, “There’s no longer a New Deal,” but the Democratic Party was “showing signs of resuscitation.”Footnote 103 Yet the New Liberals’ own programs and proposals revealed their claims of a break with liberalism’s “statist” past to be rhetorical legerdemain.
The New Liberals’ formative plans fit into a longer history of liberal efforts to restructure the economy in order to develop particular sectors, create new jobs, and generate public revenue that would pay for liberal social policies. As a 1982 Mother Jones profile of Tsongas put it, New Liberals advocated “a leaner but more activist government…to guide private investment [emphasis added].” The profile pointed to strategic economic planning in Japan as a comparison or model.Footnote 104 That longer liberal history included public-private partnerships, an essential tool of liberal policymaking and state-building since at least the New Deal. If the enduring aim of liberal economic-policymaking had been to bring state and market closer to each other, then this required the government to engage in muscular developmental activism, as it did in Lowell.
By the mid-1980s, it seemed that everywhere in Lowell was a more fun place to be than it had been a decade before. Reporting on the frontlines of regeneration, a vantage point from which to survey both rehabilitated red-brick mills and shiny new high-tech-manufacturing facilities, the New York Times declared that after decades of “apparently terminal decline,” Lowell’s twentieth-century story had had “a surprise ending.”Footnote 105 The word “ending” would prove fatefully chosen.
Lowell’s regeneration was heralded not only as a success story, but as a model potentially exportable to other struggling deindustrialized cities, perhaps even beyond America’s shores. Fred Faust recalled visiting struggling cities in Britain, such as Birmingham, to consult on potential public-private partnerships that could utilize cultural resources to spur economic development.Footnote 106 Economist Patricia Flynn wrote in 1984 that Lowell was widely considered “a model of reindustrialization.”Footnote 107
All the attention afforded to Lowell suggested Tsongas’s view—that the city’s public-private development initiatives could be part of a “model” for Democrats—had gained traction. This view was both correct and mistaken. Certainly, Lowell’s regeneration embodied desired features of economic development, New Liberal-style: targeting of “sunrise” sectors, public-private partnerships, and an entrepreneurial, market-shaping state. Moreover, the New England city’s experience fit within political and economic changes rippling across American cities. Lowell’s public-private regeneration had parallels in larger metropolitan locales. In Atlanta, successive mayors from the 1970s to 1990s adroitly harnessed private funds for expansions or improvements to infrastructure and civic attractions such as the airport and zoo.Footnote 108 Los Angeles’s long-serving mayor Tom Bradley (once described as “a ‘New Democrat’ long before that term was invented”) similarly leveraged private-sector support for dramatic downtown redevelopment and infrastructural improvements. Like Atlanta’s Andrew Young, Bradley courted private investment from Japanese, German, and Canadian companies in the belief that American cities’ future lay with an interdependent global economy.Footnote 109 Civic and political leaders across late-twentieth-century American cities, in other words, confronted industrial decline and fiscal contraction through the public-private funding of downtown-focused regeneration. This trend in urban political economy was not a partisan phenomenon, but, significantly, many mayors driven to engage in it—from Baltimore to Cleveland and from Atlanta to Los Angeles—were active participants in the emerging New Liberal politics.
Yet Lowell’s experience was also exceptional in important ways. Not every mid-sized American city could count on a national park to serve as the keystone of public-private regeneration; Lowell benefitted from this rare advantage. More importantly, however, the emphasis in Lowell on attracting high-tech manufacturing reflected New Liberals’ desired goal of reindustrialization, but not the actual typical outcome of late-twentieth-century regeneration. As exemplified by larger cities such as Cleveland (whose mayor joined the Democratic Leadership Council) and Atlanta, urban economies were increasingly rooted in tourism, leisure, and services rather than in “sunrise” reindustrialization.Footnote 110
The national narrative of Lowell’s success was driven by a growth of high-technology firms, especially firms that manufactured high-tech industrial and office equipment. Manufacturing jobs (of which the high-tech sub-sector accounted for fully half) doubled between 1972 and 1989. The jewel in the crown of this manufacturing renaissance was Wang Laboratories, a then-prominent maker of computing equipment headquartered in Lowell from 1978. In an especially baffling display of corporate braggadocio, one Wang executive proclaimed in 1983 that their company was “the Brooke Shields of the economy.”Footnote 111 A 1995 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report identified the influx of public and private funds as crucial to Lowell’s 1980s economic comeback, marshaled through LDFC and the Lowell Plan and aided by the fact that federal money had “flowed” into the city via the park (“The first urban park of its kind”). This investment was underpinned by an effective partnership between “public and private-sector leaders,” Tsongas most prominent among them.Footnote 112 Lowell’s standout success fed, of course, into a popular political narrative around Governor Dukakis’s “Massachusetts Miracle.” This period of economic growth during the 1980s was partly fueled by technology companies, with their success underwritten by Dukakis’s program of public investment (Dukakis was both a key New Liberal and a factional rival of the Democratic Leadership Council).Footnote 113 Lowell stood out because of the depth of its previous industrial decline, because its economic gains outpaced state averages, and because the public-private partnership model had been pioneered there.
Dukakis’s decisive defeat in the 1988 presidential election proved a premonition of things to come. The “Massachusetts Miracle” petered out amid the recession of the early 1990s, although by then it had laid the groundwork for Greater Boston’s long-term global leadership in biotechnology. Having foreshadowed the statewide revival, Lowell anticipated, as well, this slowdown. Decline in Lowell’s high-tech manufacturing began in 1989; within three years, Wang itself had declared bankruptcy. In 1992, a scabrous article in The Nation, waspishly describing Tsongas as a “philosopher/aristocrat,” argued that Lowell’s regeneration had been conclusively ended by the recession.Footnote 114
New Liberals’ sectoral reorientation away from “sunset” industries and towards high technology was a response to conditions of industrial decline, most deeply entrenched in northeastern cities such as Lowell. But as when they pursued visions of “reindustrialization,” these New Liberals seemed to misunderstand the changing nature of the American workforce. Ensorcelled by the possibilities of high-tech reindustrialization, New Liberals such as Dukakis and Tsongas failed to recognize that, even as new high-tech manufacturers had unleashed a flood of profits, durable employment growth was actually far more concentrated in lower-wage service sectors, or in high-wage financial services that made scant contribution to local development.Footnote 115 Real job growth under New Liberal governors in Southern states such as Arkansas was at lower-paying, almost invariably nonunionized companies such as Tyson Foods and Walmart.
New Liberals allowed a collective fascination with high-tech manufacturing to mislead them about changes underway in long-term deindustrialized regions.Footnote 116 The greatest number of new jobs in the 1980s were to be found in workplaces such as restaurants and bars, grocery stores and hospitals.Footnote 117 A transition from manufacturing to healthcare was more common than a transition from “sunset” to “sunrise” productive industries.Footnote 118 New Liberals’ failure to grapple with such economic and workforce changes shaped their ultimate failure to realize ambitious plans for American reindustrialization. This occlusion of New Liberals’ economic vision was strongly influenced by their “professional class” politics, which encouraged them to overestimate the breadth of long-term employment opportunities offered by high-tech industry. Their class politics also encouraged New Liberals’ political ambivalence about “big government,” even as their policy program tilted towards government activism.
The downturn in late-1980s and early-1990s Lowell is important for two reasons. First, on the one hand, it resembled almost to an eerie extent the onset of industrial decline decades before. The city had become overly reliant on a single sector (in the 1980s, high-tech manufacturing). Encouraged by rapid growth, LDFC had disgorged a significant amount of its money onto tech firms. The tech firms’ leadership, meanwhile, neglected to keep up pace with innovation around products such as minicomputers, and lost ground to competitors elsewhere. Wang Laboratories in particular suffered from incompetent management after its founder retired.Footnote 119 It was a speeded-up replay of the textile industry’s decline.
Second, on the other hand, the downturn is important because of its aftermath. In the mid-1990s, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysis of the post-downturn years showed surprising resilience; and resilience that stood in marked contrast to the unpromising conditions of midcentury Lowell. Employment was 75% higher in 1994, in the immediate aftermath of the local downturn and national recession (a recession that hit Massachusetts harder than any other northeastern state), than it had been in the early 1970s. While average wages had been lower than the national average in 1972, in 1994, they were higher. The Federal Reserve economists drew a variety of lessons from the case study, but their analysis principally emphasized strategic public-private development initiatives. LDFC (“a unique multi-sector funding vehicle”) and the Lowell Plan “provided an improved base for future growth and a competitive advantage for the labor market over neighboring areas.”Footnote 120
Following its downturn, the key to the durability of Lowell’s regeneration program was its public institutions. The national park remained an unmatchable advantage, relative to similar Massachusetts cities such as Lawrence or Fall River, as a base for future development that would not disappear due to short-term economic downturn. A public research university, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, came to function as a second anchor institution. Beginning after the early-1990s recession, the university channeled funds into new business development-oriented research centers, cultivated public-private relationships, and increased its own enrollment and employment.Footnote 121 The largest twenty-first-century private-sector employer, software company UKG (which is dual-headquartered in Lowell), is comfortably outstripped by each of the city’s two top employers, Lowell General Hospital and the university.Footnote 122 This employment mixture evinced the fact that while Lowell’s regeneration succeeded in breaking its cycle of decline, it ultimately failed to defy wider trends and permanently embed a new industrial economy.
Lowell’s relationship with federal financial support continued; in 1994, it won designation as an Enterprise Community, one of the Clinton Administration’s new initiatives for injecting entrepreneurialism into national urban policy.Footnote 123 Private-sector partners were formally bound into regeneration efforts through semi-public institutions such as LDFC and the Lowell Plan. The revival of regeneration efforts after the downturn demonstrated the need for active state engagement, at levels from the local to the federal, in sustaining economic development.
When he launched his presidential campaign outside Boott Cotton Mills in 1991, Paul Tsongas had been cozily ensconced in a Boston law office since his recovery from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Ever-loyal to the regeneration project, he had found plenty of time to dash up and down Route 128 to persuade investors of the opportunities awaiting them in Lowell.
It had seemed unlikely that Tsongas could make a bid for national office after his retirement from the Senate, but the 1992 presidential race was enticingly open. Spooked by President George H. W. Bush’s post-Gulf War popularity, several major Democratic contenders decided to sit the race out. But the Democratic Leadership Council was on maneuvers, with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton as its standard-bearer.Footnote 124 Tsongas moved to launch his campaign earlier than this intraparty rival. Tsongas’s message was much the same as it had been a decade before when, in the speech to Americans for Democratic Action, he had decided to give the Democratic Party a good shake and set it back on its feet. He still urged his party to focus on growth and cultivate public-private partnerships. He made his case with, as New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor wryly noted, his old uncharismatic seriousness.Footnote 125 After all these years, he still represented “liberalism dressed in a three-piece suit.”Footnote 126
Tsongas’s principal competitor for the nomination, however, had sung similar notes from the New Liberal songbook over the years. Public-private partnerships, Governor Clinton wrote in a 1986 Southern Growth Policies Board report, “will increase the per capita income, reduce poverty, and reduce unemployment.”Footnote 127 During his tenure as governor, Clinton established agencies such as the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority to direct investment into higher-tech sectors, boosted funding—occasionally blending public and private financing—for scientific research and education, and deployed the Arkansas Capital Corporation to incubate voguish economic-development schemes such as microenterprise.Footnote 128 Fifteen years after its creation, Lowell National Historical Park was only one example of New Liberals’ zest for public-private development initiatives.
The 1992 Democratic presidential primaries witnessed the triumphant culmination of the New Liberals’ rise. Greatly influenced by Robert Reich, a Harvard professor and quondam CPE advisor, Clinton advocated public investment in upskilling, retraining, and technical education as navigational instruments for Americans facing the era’s economic sea-change. Rather than simply a creation of the socially and culturally conservative Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton’s presidential campaign reflected the dynamism of New Liberal politics.Footnote 129 Clinton’s signature proposal, however, was a sweeping middle-class tax cut. More golden eggs, Tsongas thought, and less concern than ever for the health of the goose. With uncharacteristic whimsicality, Tsongas took to brandishing a large plush bear on the campaign trail: this represented Clinton, the “pander bear.”Footnote 130 Yet while Clinton struck a populist pose in response to Tsongas’s businesslike mien, both candidacies harked back to the New Liberals’ formative years as advocates of developmental liberalism.
As the Cold War’s end came into view, the New Liberals were drawn not into market triumphalism but, more urgently than ever, into contemplation of international economic competition. Tsongas’s pro-business political orientation offered a different path than Clinton’s more “progressive” alignment, but they shared a desired destination: national industrial policy.Footnote 131 “Industrial policy is what Japan has. It is what Germany has,” Tsongas argued, and “It is what we must have as well.”Footnote 132 Channeling the experience of his hometown, Tsongas contended that “American companies need the U.S. government as a full partner if they are to have any hope of competing internationally.”Footnote 133 Tsongas’s pro-business posture in the 1992 campaign might, to a critical eye, evoke the archetypal New Liberal embrace of “corporate America’s” interests over those of American citizens. But more profoundly, this final act of his political career reflected the defining cause of the New Liberals: the reinvention of liberalism’s commitment to market-shaping state power. During the making of the New Liberals—often amid specific, place-based contexts shaped by economic change and decline, such as in Lowell—it had been necessary to bring state and market, public and private, closer together.
Clinton’s political skills carried him to the nomination and thence the presidency in 1992. Tragically, it turned out that Tsongas had been too optimistic about the miraculous turnaround in his health. In January 1997, he passed away at the age of fifty-five. Speaking about his mid-1980s recovery from cancer, Tsongas said that it had given him a new sense of needing to take action. He had thought, “I would never go back to the old assumptions.”Footnote 134 It sounded as though he may also have been contemplating his hometown’s long path towards regeneration.
Conclusion
Lowell’s regeneration, simultaneously representative yet idiosyncratic, traced at the local level the ambitious, ultimately unfulfilled economic vision of the New Liberals. During an era when the Reagan administration exploited economic shocks and fiscal crises to propel economic financialization and social-policy retrenchment, New Liberals’ formative focus on shaping long-term growth and reindustrialization could be construed as eccentric—a misunderstanding of where the most significant changes were taking place in late-twentieth-century U.S. politics. Historians increasingly argue that neoliberalism did not lead to the diminution of the state—what neoliberalism’s conservative champions such as President Reagan claimed to want—but to its reconfigurtion, the exercise of regulatory and legal powers to encourage financialization and insulate markets from political intervention. This argument is persuasive. And on its terms, New Liberals did not embrace neoliberalism in the 1980s. Rather, they sought to bring back developmental liberalism: reinventing the liberal state rather than welcoming the emergence of its neoliberal cousin.Footnote 135
Yet, what most powerfully endured in New Liberals’ politics after the 1980s was their political anxiety about embracing the very species of activist, market-shaping government for which their own policies - called. Emphasizing this shortcoming, however, tempts critics to overlook how New Liberals sought to revive and reinvent, rather than repudiate, developmental liberalism. Lowell’s regeneration illuminated this through its dramatic intersection with New Liberal political and policy formation.
If one were to have taken stock of Lowell’s regeneration at different times between the mid-1960s and the turn of the millennium, the results would have looked strikingly different. When Patrick Mogan and his colleagues launched Lowell’s Model Cities in 1966, it seemed as though economic regeneration had been tried, and had failed. In 1987, when London’s Financial Times described it as “the city that rose from the dead,” Lowell’s turnaround was so dramatic that it was being hailed as a “model of reindustrialization,” its favorite-son senator was a serious national figure, and locally-based technology firms seemed at the forefront of the new American information economy. Peter Aucella marveled that it was a “hopping town.”Footnote 136 Had one been present when Paul Tsongas launched his presidential campaign in 1991, it would probably have seemed as though the city was likely to subside back into long-term economic decline. Yet, by the time that the Center for Lowell History (which sits nestled between the rehabilitated cotton warehouse and a row of boardinghouses) conducted twenty-fifth-anniversary oral histories of the park in 2003, the mood of interviewees was optimistic.
Lowell has continued to benefit from the program of regeneration inaugurated a quarter of a century before. Compared to a cross-section of other “small legacy cities” (cities with historic industrial economies that suffered from deindustrialization), Lowell’s poverty rate remains lower than that of nearby Worcester and less than half that of Youngstown, Ohio; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Kalamazoo, Michigan.Footnote 137 Often, private- or civil society-led economic initiatives in cities can be attempted compensations for strong government, or, more balefully, can form the vanguard of privatization.Footnote 138 Lowell’s public-private partnerships have depended on activist local government, joined with a sustained flow of federal investment.
The regeneration program’s political origins did shape some historical shortcomings. Despite a profound attachment to their hometown, Tsongas and his allies targeted their political energies at the priorities and prerogatives of business in pursuing economic development. Seeking to build a beneficent “business climate,” they paid considerably less attention to the social programs that transitorily occupied the attention of Lowell’s civic leaders in the 1960s.Footnote 139 Yet the long-term durability of regeneration, especially when compared to certain other deindustrialized cities, was their lasting achievement.
In 1982, Paul Tsongas had urged Democrats to embrace “leaner but more activist government.” He built upon his specific experience of regeneration in a deindustrialized city. But he was also engaged in making New Liberal politics.Footnote 140 All too often, New Liberals elided that essential qualifier, “more activist,” when they offered panegyrics to entrepreneurialism. When Democrats had the chance to put designs into practice at the local level, the “public” in “public-private partnership” was not only required, but was determinative of results. During these experiences of policymaking, they worked within a longer tradition of state-guided, public-private economic development that stretched back to the New Deal, even if they wanted to forget it.
Open access
