The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (review)

Cathy Stanton won the 2007 National Council for Public History's book prize for The Lowell Experiment, an empirically grounded study of public historians at work in a former Massachusetts textile mill town. The author situates the founding of Lowell National Historical Park (1978) in the context of the rise of public history and the emergence of the industrial heritage site out of the ruins of deindustrialization. She notes, rightly I think, that industrial museums "come to praise and to bury—to extol the workers whose labor created these places and frame that labor as something essentially finished." (xii) The sense of disconnection with the present, its pastness, is an integral part to the interpretation of industrial sites. Stanton asserts that this unwillingness to tackle present-day issues serves to depoliticize the message, even when the Lowell site is infused with social history. Conflict is almost always located safely in the distant past.

Stanton uses the performance of the guided tour as an entry point into the Park Services' interpretation of the site. The "The Run of the Mill" tour, the most frequently offered, consisted of a trolley and boat journey into the early development of the industrial city. Technology, waterpower and the "mill girl" labour force all loomed large in the official narrative. However, Stanton is attentive to the small opportunities for subversion of the official line. Yet there was virtually no contact with residents during the park's tour of the "Acre", a poor working-class district, and a narrative arc of upward mobility. Throughout these chapters, Stanton makes the crucial point that the "culture-led regeneration" of Lowell has produced few new jobs. It was more a matter of re-imaging the town, branding it post-industrial.

The interpretative core of the book originates in Victor Turner's notion of rituals of reconnection. Based on her interviews, Stanton concludes that working-class memories serve as markers of how far middle-class public historians and visitors have come. The park reconnects them with the working-class pasts of their parents or grandparents. In effect, "The park's rituals of reconnection are designed to bridge personal distances—between visitors' and public historians' own family pasts and personal presents—while denying the social distances between these postindustrial workers and people less fortunately situated in the present day." (182)

So far so good. Yet what perplexed me about Stanton's book was its refusal to engage meaningfully with Martha Norkunas' superb monograph, Monuments and Memory. Like Stanton, Norkunas examined the politics of remembering in post-industrial Lowell. But there the similarities end. For Stanton, the social actors are non-local public historians. In fact, local residents in Stanton's account are peripheral to the story being told and their interventions are belittled as the work of a handful of "local cultural activists," or as an "activist tribe." (192) Stanton clearly questions their moral authority to speak on behalf of local community. By contrast, Norkunas is more interested in the public and private remembering of city residents including her own family. The two books thus mirror the two "poles of discourse" that prevail in Lowell: "localness" and "outsiderhood."

The park's "Working People" exhibition is put forward by Stanton as a warning to public historians who work with communities. The first half of the exhibit represents social history at its critical best. However, the second half of the exhibit on immigrants provides a celebratory narrative not unlike a scrapbook or photo album. The bifurcation of the exhibition was the result of a local representative playing the "blow-in card" to over-rule the objections of professional public historians. Stanton sides with her peers, throughout. Why is it that we only get to see the local "blow-in card" being played? What power cards did the institutional insiders in the National Park (the public historians) play? The unresolved tension between community collaboration and critical social history, so central to the work of Lowell's progressive public historians, is thus...