Lowell – Hometown of the American Industrial Revolution
When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, this historical centerpiece of American, technological brilliance, know how and entrepreneurship, whose marvels once fascinated governments across the planet, then lay in partial or advanced stages of urban blight. The interested observer could read about the glory days (1830 to ~1920) of this socioeconomic experiment in machine- assisted manufacturing by flipping through the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica or by simply delving into the newspaper archives of the Lowell Sun that were stored for posterity in the basement of the Lowell City Library, now called the Parrish Library.
Still, I was quite naive and only beginning to appreciate the developing human cultures in the previous four thousand years of activity. I felt myself living in a disassembled museum of many parts as might have discovered a young adolescent living in the environs of Rome’s Coliseum shortly after the fall of that Empire, circa 470 A.D. Much was in disarray.
What rang through my head was that haunting poem by Bercy Bysshe Shelly about the great Ozymandias, King of Kings.
Oh, how great the mighty fall! Are all empires finally buried in the dust of history? Can the US of A survive in a brave new world of ICBMs and thermonuclear warheads? And, what about all the radioactive fallout that is deadly to living systems?
Would it be possible to construct enough secure, comfortable radiation shelters, each equipped with massive air filtration pumps, scattered across the U.S. landscape to keep alive, say one-quarter of the U.S. population, for a decade or two while the radiation fallout dissipated?
But. who really wishes to live like a mole or a worm, 30 or more feet below the surface, with nothing but old, color movies of the outside world as it used to be as a source of relation? Could our national stockpile of TV shows like “Ozzie and Harriet”, Bob Hope specials, “Father Knows Best” and “Life of Riley” keep the survivors content and marginally hopeful during these estimated decades of living underground?
Nobody could put forth a soothing answer to this new, science-fiction reality show. We were looking for answers, good answers. Maybe, the next generation could save our bacon?