When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees

Abstract

Reviewed by: When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees David Rosner Janet Greenlees. When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2019. xiv + 250 pp. Ill. $50.95 (978-0-8135-8796-7). In the early 1840s Charles Dickens, perhaps the singular English author giving voice to the horrifying realities of lower class urban life in England, toured the United States to understand the new republic and the people who had broken away from Empire only a few decades before. He made a special stop in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the new textile mills organized to process the cotton that the slave-based South was pouring into the world economy. He was deeply aware of the importance of the cotton to the textile industry as it was the backbone of the industrial revolution in England where working people drawn to Manchester, Lancaster, Leeds and other cities were suffering from low wages and horrifying living conditions in what William Blake had dubbed “satanic mills.” What Dickens found in Lowell was a world apart from that he observed in the English mill towns. Dickens expected a dispirited workforce living in similar horrid conditions. Yet, in Lowell, the mills he observed were remarkably clean and tidy. “The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of.” The young women who worked there appeared healthy and happy. “Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were.” But he was at a loss to find them. “I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.”1 By the turn of the twentieth century, the halcyon days of happy workers and clean, tidy workplaces and living quarters were gone in the New England mill [End Page 165] towns, as they were in the British textile industry as well. By the time of the famous Lawrence textile strike of women made famous by the poem put to song, “Bread and Roses,” the towns were among the most unhealthful in the country. Fall River, Massachusetts had “gained the infamous distinction of having the highest death rate of any northern U.S. city, surpassing that of New York City and the Lancaster mill towns” of northern England. Chief among the diseases and causes of death in these once-salubrious towns was consumption, a collection of symptoms that were sometimes caused by the tubercle bacillus and, in some industrial sites, seen to be caused by the dust laden air created by a host of new water and steam-powered devices that produced huge amounts of dust in confined spaces that workers breathed in. Water driven looms, steam-powered drills and chippers, lung diseases of various forms came to dominate the lives and deaths of workers in textile mills, mines, quarries, foundries, steel mills, brick factories, and a host of other worksites central to the emerging industrial, urbanizing society. Silicosis in the quarries and foundries, asbestosis in the growing auto and brake industries, construction and insulation trades, and, most relevant to Greenlees’s story, byssinosis in the textile mills began to seep into medical and politicians’ consciousness. Heat and humidity in plants driven by coals, steam, electricity, oil and various forms of power, all contributed to a singularly unhealthful work environment. When the Air Became Important traces the history of consciousness of disease...