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  • Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England by David Koistinen
  • Allen Dieterich-Ward
David Koistinen. Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xii + 331 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-4907-6, $74.95 (cloth); 978-0-8130-5408-7, $29.95 (paper).

Confronting Decline is an ambitious book seeking to explain the public and private sector responses to deindustrialization over the [End Page 725] course of a century in New England, America's oldest industrial region. Beginning with the decline of the textile industry in the 1920s and ending with deindustrialization in electronics and other manufacturing in the 1970s, David Koistinen frames his narrative around three types of public policy responses: retrenchment (cutting back on social programs and taxes on business); federal assistance (in the form of subsidies or other forms of industrial protection); and economic development, which ran the gamut from public support for higher education to the pooling of private funds for loans to small businesses. While the scope of possible interventions and the success or failure of specific initiatives varied widely depending on the broader national political economy, the author argues that the "basic responses to industrial decline and the interest groups that backed these responses stayed relatively constant over time" (220).

The text is divided into two parts. In Chapters 1 through 4, Koistinen focuses on the first round of deindustrialization in the 1920s, when New England textile manufacturers began losing significant market share to new Southern mills that paid workers one-third to one-half less than in the North. As the employment among textile workers in the area declined by nearly one-quarter between 1923 and 1939, for example, the number of active spindles in New England collapsed from about 17 million to less than 5. 5 million, even as those in the South grew from about 15 million to 17 million (15, 22). In response to this economic disaster, manufacturers advocated a conservative strategy of rolling back social legislation (particularly limits on working hours for female employees) and cutting business taxes and public spending. Though unable to undermine social legislation, manufacturers were eventually able to reduce business tax levies with union support, but this did "little to ameliorate conditions in the troubled cotton textile industry" (66). Similarly, the push for federal assistance during the New Deal in the form of national regulation of labor standards fell short of its proponents' goal of reducing the region's structural wage disadvantage. Coupled with the failure of organized labor's Operation Dixie to make significant inroads in the South, New England continued to hemorrhage textile industry jobs. Faced with these intransigent issues, New England elites pursued a range of other initiatives, with "a heavy emphasis on the use of research, expertise, advanced technology, and up-to-date managerial techniques as instruments of economic development" (103). The 1925 formation of the New England Council (NEC), the nation's oldest regional business organization, exemplified this approach, though Koistinen acknowledges "the growth drive was not a swift and overwhelming success [as] economic conditions in the area remained seriously troubled at the end of [End Page 726] the 1930s, fifteen years after the decline of traditional manufacturing had begun" (136).

Despite this limited success, the collaborative public–private framework established by the NEC laid the foundation for economic development efforts following World War II, a topic explored in the latter half of the book. Chapter 5 focuses on the establishment of some of the country's first venture capital firms created to address a lack of small-business financing, which was identified as a key barrier to economic growth in the region. The formation of the American Research and Development (ARD) Corporation, which happened only due to the heroic efforts of NEC officers such as Ralph Flanders, then facilitated the growth of the electronics and computer spinoffs of Boston's celebrated Route 128 corridor, a connection explored in Chapter 6. Here, the author argues that while the presence of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other area universities would have naturally produced some economic spillover, regional high-tech firms were able to...

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