Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity by Meredith Whitney Read Free Book Online Page A

signs of the American ghost town—communities that once swelled with people and industry but are now beset by decay and neglect. Many grew up around single industries like coal production or manufacturing and attracted newcomers thanks to plentiful job opportunities. As long as the industry did well, so too did the towns. Jobs and personal-income growth enabled company towns to build and improve upon public services like schools, parks, and libraries. However, once the industries began to decline or move on, employment and personal income often declined with them. Over time, municipal governments struggled to pay for services they could afford when tax bases were healthier. Towns were forced to cut back, and with those cuts the towns became less and less attractive places to live. This is how boomtowns become ghost towns.
    With roots in a core agrarian economy, the U.S. population was once spread across the country, with big rural populations in the South. Cotton production in the South gave birth to industry along the Mississippi River and created boomtowns like Jackson and New Orleans. With highly fertile soil, proximity to great waterways, and—shamefully—an abundance of slave labor, Mississippi became one of the United States’ biggest exporters and wealth creators. After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, annual cotton production in Mississippi soared to 535 million pounds in 1859 from zero in 1800. Big Northeast real-estate concerns like the American Land Company and the New York Land Company rushed to buy up valuable Mississippi farmland. “Cotton provoked a ‘gold rush,’” writes cotton historian Eugene Dattel, “by attracting thousands of white men from the North and from older slave states along the Atlantic coast who came to make a quick fortune.” The Civil War and the end of slavery brought an end to that gold rush, and now Mississippi ranks the poorest state in the country. 3
    By 1850 the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, had emerged as a new epicenter of American industry and population growth. Among young people, Lowell is probably best known as the city featured in the based-on-a-true-story movie
The Fighter,
in which Mark Wahlberg portrays the poor kid who makes good in the big league of the boxing circuit. But back in the midnineteenth century, there were ten thousand textile workers in Lowell producing fifty thousand miles of fabric every year—their looms powered by mills and waterwheels built alongside the Merrimack River. Lowell became the first large-scale factory town in America. Some called it the “cradle of the American Industrial Revolution,” 4 as raw cotton could be turned into cloth all in one centralized location. But just as new technology created Lowell, it played a part in Lowell’s decline too, as rail lines made canals obsolete and steam power and turbines improved on Merrimack River waterwheels. Electric streetcars also enabled workers to live farther away from company towns, foreshadowing the suburbanization to follow.
    Industrial Revolution (1750–1850)

    Agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology. Migration from the UK to New England/Mid-Atlantic.
    Economic development regionally limited as the power source was water based.
    By the late 1800s, New Bedford and other New England cities with their own seaports began to eclipse Lowell. By the 1900s, the textile industry started to abandon the Northeast altogether for the South—particularly the Carolinas—as steam-powered mills and cheaper labor made production there more profitable. Some New England mills were closed outright or forced into bankruptcy. (Others stayed open but barely, allowed to wither on the vine by absentee owners who refused to make the necessary but costly improvements required to keep the old mills competitive.) Lowell became a shell of its former self in the second half of the 1900s. Some even claimed it resembled Europe after World War II. 5 Today some of the