of Charles Hill Morgan, is a powerful reminder that the so-called Industrial Revolution was every bit as focused on innovation and change as the technology world is today. The output of the latter is some combination of software code and electrically engineered hardware that suits the moment, but which will be continually improved through relentless innovation. That all-abiding obsession with perpetual technical improvement will sound very familiar to any reader of this book. The machine age and the Internet age have much more in common than digital innovators tend to appreciate.
A second reason the book warrants attention well beyond Morgan’s descendants relates to Worcester itself. Although the city has been at the forefront of so much—famously, the Pill and the liquid-fuel rocket, but also the trade school movement, the first violence of the American Revolution, the birthplace of so many poets and patents, the monkey wrench, the first museum in the world to purchase a Gauguin and so much more—it is a very understudied place. In terms of industrial history, there should be at least half a dozen serious biographies or dissertations written about the likes of Stephen Salisbury II, Ichabod Washburn, Milton Higgins, Tobias Boland, George Crompton and more recently Harry Stoddard and Howard Freeman—to name a few. The same is true of the companies and enterprises associated with them. The richness of Charles Hill Morgan’s life and the extensive documentary record available suggests that the local territory is more fertile than scholars know. A number of celebratory but quite useful histories of the Norton Company, Wyman-Gordon and Morgan Construction have been published as well as a more scholarly study, Family Firm to Modern Multi-National: Norton Company, a New England Enterprise by Charles Cheape, but the rich documentary record available about Worcester’s industrial development has been too thinly tapped. The last—and essentially the only—industrial history of Worcester was published in 1917 by Charles G. Washburn. The case for more serious studies of Worcester history applies to a wide range of non-economic topics explored using any number of forensic lenses. The late George Mason University historian Roy Rosenzweig demonstrated that with his acclaimed social history of labor, leisure and Worcester parks, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and History in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Rutgers University historian Gerald Grob wrote a similarly praised history of the evolving treatment of mental illness, The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of Worcester State Hospital. Written for a more popular audience, Evelyn Herwitz’ Trees at Risk: Reclaiming an Urban Forest, A Case History of Worcester, Massachusetts is a compelling example of what a well-focused, non-academic historian can contribute to our understanding of the city. Accomplished broader histories like A History of Worcester: 1674-1848 by the late Ken Moynihan, former chair of the history department at Assumption College, and the collected historical essays of Al Southwick, columnist at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, contain dozens of promising research threads to follow. Potentially fruitful topics might include histories focused on labor relations, immigration, urban development, horticulture, Plan E government, the resilience of cultural institutions and medicine. This biography of Charles Hill Morgan strengthens the case.
As for Worcester’s own industrial history, the biography of Charles Hill Morgan highlights five narrower historical themes worth identifying, because they have had such a marked bearing on the economic evolution of the city and its environs. Why might that matter? The reason is subtle, but important. As the economic historian and Nobel Prize winner Douglas North has argued in making his case for “path dependence,” history does not unfold in a predictably deterministic way. What history does is simply make some developments more likely than others—it sets more and less likely paths. History shapes opportunities, but it does not pre-ordain outcomes. The value of having a good fix on history—local or otherwise—is that it reveals the stickiness of certain forces and themes that have enough staying power to be relevant without ever being immutable.
The first theme, already alluded to above, is Worcester’s particular legacy of innovation. The incremental inventiveness of Charles Hill Morgan and so many of his Worcester counterparts epitomizes the core premise of historian Robert Friedel who argues persuasively in A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Millennium that real technological change is a series of small improvements that periodically coalesce into what appears to be a major innovation, but which in retrospect is better understood as the final piece of a complex and dynamic jigsaw puzzle. This is the argument of Abbott Payson Usher, an economic historian and his more famous Harvard colleague, Joseph Schumpeter. The latter coined the dramatic phrase “creative destruction,” while the former spent the better part of his career quietly documenting particular examples.
Second, not being on a major river with access to raw, place-specific power, Worcester’s economic development was based on steam power, and the consequence was diverse applications spread more broadly throughout the city and environs. This is why Worcester is much better understood as a manufacturing center with an almost Midwestern feel than a New England mill town. Writing in 1917, Washburn cites some 3,000 different business establishments. The city was among the world leaders in grinding wheels, envelope and textile machines, valentines, ice skates, rolling mills, wire and machine tools.
Third, industrial innovation in Worcester throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was financed almost exclusively through local sources—beginning with the merchant Daniel Waldo and later his first cousin Stephen Salisbury II and William Merrifield, who built buildings to house inventors and eventually through successful local entrepreneurs themselves. Worcester’s industrial development never depended on Boston money—the Charles River Associates and, later, the Boston Associates—that funded the iconic mills of Lowell and Lawrence and which was largely “absentee” money that took surplus capital out of the mills and re-invested it elsewhere as the comparative advantage of water power shifted to steam and trade and mining and other investment frontiers far beyond New England. As an aside, this local bootstrap funding served Worcester well for well over a century, but the downside has been that no meaningful private equity or venture capital pools were developed, so sources of investment capital have been very scarce relative to Boston.
Fourth, local economic success and the perceived opportunity associated with it, both attracted talent from away—sometimes far away—and also created pathways for clever machinists to become in more than a few cases, very successful entrepreneurs and, in some cases, “industrialists” like Morgan. Silicon Valley is a contemporary magnet for talent. Worcester and any number of innovative manufacturing centers in the nineteenth and greater part of the twentieth century once were as well. As an anecdotal example, of the eight candidates for biographies cited above only one, Salisbury, was born in Worcester and all but one, Salisbury again, moved from the ground floor up.
Fifth, and related to each of the other four, regional economies benefit from so-called “tent poles” that give both coherence and a generative dimension to the local economy. Ichabod Washburn’s early wire company morphed from Washburn & Moen to American Steel & Wire and was the largest local employer in 1900. Virtually every major Worcester company bore some original connection to Washburn—Charles Hill Morgan and Morgan Construction being an exemplar. Worcester is no longer the manufacturing center it once was. Consistent with the city’s transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, the largest employer is now UMass Memorial Health Care and the affiliated UMass Medical School. Whether this will provide the same engine for growth that Washburn provided remains to be seen, but the role is there to be filled.
There are numerous other takeaways from this biography that have a bearing on larger issues of business history in general and the development of Worcester more particularly. First and foremost, however, this is a compelling biography of a remarkable figure whose legacy remains resilient and worth celebrating on its own distinct merits. Charles Hill Morgan still stands on his own, and not just as an exemplar of a particular type.
Jock Herron
Cambridge, MA
One
Cloth, Paper, Wire & Steel
