May 8, 2022

Councilors zipped through the 38 motions on last Tuesday’s agenda (23 leftover from the prior meeting and 15 new ones) in record time. There are only 8 motions on this coming Tuesday’s agenda. Perhaps councilors are giving new City Manger Tom Golden some time to get settled into the job before they reopen the motion flood gate.

Of the 38 last week, one generated considerable discussion that turned testy at times. It was a joint motion by Councilors Dan Rourke and Kim Scott requesting the City Manager “have the DPD present the council with an RFP for the lease and/or sale of LeLacheur Park.” The result was that (1) a tour of the park for city councilors will be arranged so they can see first-hand the current condition of the place and after that (2) councilors will meet in Executive Session to discuss the future of the park.

The disagreement arose over the role of UMass Lowell in all of this. Some councilors want UMass Lowell to be fully involved in this process and ultimately to take ownership of the ballpark, much as the University did with the Tsongas Arena. Another faction of the council wants to keep UMass Lowell at arm’s length and worried that the terms of any transfer of the park to the University would not be on terms beneficial to the city.

For more than 20 years, LeLacheur Park was the home of the Lowell Spinners, a Class A minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. Founded in 1996, the Lowell Spinners played at Alumni Stadium on Route 38 for their first two seasons but moved into LeLacheur Park as soon as that facility opened. The Spinners and Lowell rode the wave of minor league baseball popularity with sold out crowds watching future stars of the Red Sox make their professional debuts in the beautiful riverfront stadium.

But in recent years, baseball’s popularity waned and for the 2021 season, Major League Baseball made substantial cuts in the number of its minor league teams. The Spinners were a casualty and disbanded. Although the field continued to be used by the UMass Lowell baseball team, the city of Lowell incurred substantial expense for the maintenance and upkeep of the facility, costs that had previously been covered by the rent in-kind services from the Spinners.

Now the city faces the question of what to do with LeLacheur Park. Because the next part of the discussion will take place in executive session, we won’t be privy to the views of councilors on this, likely until the matter is resolved. But based on the comments made Tuesday night, several councilors seem anxious to wash their hands of LeLacheur Park and no one on the council is championing the idea of retaining and improving the place.

Back in 1994, Paul Tsongas asserted that successful midsized cities tended to have minor league sports teams. He set out to get one for Lowell and ended up getting two, the Lowell Lock Monsters of the American Hockey League and the Lowell Spinners. Tsongas said that perhaps the biggest challenge facing older cities was to get residents and leaders to believe in themselves and in their community. He felt that professional sports would help do that by boosting our self-image.

Pro hockey only lasted in Lowell until 2010 and pro baseball ended last year, but Lowell’s entire history has been characterized by repurposing things that didn’t work out and then trying something else. The Pawtucket Canal failed as a transportation canal but then became the main artery that drove Lowell’s mills in the 19th century; Wang went bankrupt and left its facilities vacant and foreclosed but the Wang Towers became Cross Point and the Wang Training Center became Middlesex Community College; and the many, many mills, left vacant for decades when textile manufacturing moved elsewhere, are now fully occupied with housing and other uses. If we had more mills still standing, they would be filled too.

When Billy Bulger, the then President of the Massachusetts State Senate, visited in the late 1990s, he said the reason he loved Lowell was because the city always fought back. How the LeLacheur Park story plays out will tell us a lot about whether that spirit survives in the city today.  

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The view of Lowell as a destination city got a negative twist in a big New York Times report on the popularity of Fox TV host Tucker Carlson. The gist of the story, which spanned multiple pages in the newspaper last Sunday and Monday, was that as Carlson has become more racist, his show has gained more viewers and has become one of the most watched shows on cable TV.

(See “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable” and “Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of Tucker Carlson Tonight”).

Here are a couple of quotes from the story that give a sense of what was written:

“Accuracy isn’t the point on Tucker Carlson Tonight. On the air, Mr. Carlson piles up narrative-confirming falsehoods and misleading statements so rapidly – about George Floyd’s death, white supremacists who took part in the Jan. 6 riot, falling testosterone levels in men, Covid vaccines, the Texas power grid and more – that The Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has made a sideline of cataloging them.”

“But if Mr. Carlson has not always been truthful, he has been remarkably consistent. Almost from the beginning, Tucker Carlson Tonight has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box.”

Those “imported voters” are immigrants which is where Lowell enters the story.

Carlson produces his show not in Washington or New York City but in Bryant Pond, Maine, which is about 70 miles inland and to the north of Portland. About halfway between Portland and Bryant Pond is Lewiston, the second largest city in Maine with a population of about 37,000. Lewiston was founded in the 1600s but grew to prominence as a manufacturing center in the 19th century. Most of the workers employed in the mills then were French-speaking immigrants from Quebec. Like Lowell, Lewiston fell upon hard times in the Great Depression and faces all the challenges of other mid-sized cities in Post Industrial America.

According to the 2020 census, Lewiston is 85% white, 6% Black or African American; 2% Hispanic; 1% Asian; and 7% people of two or more races. Most of the Blacks/African Americans living in Lewiston are refugees from Somalia who came to the United States in the early 2000s and then made a secondary migration to Lewiston.

To American racists, Somali’s are a trifecta: They’re Black, they’re immigrants; and they’re Muslims.

According to the Times article, Carlson has said the following about Lewiston – and Lowell:

“In Mr. Carlson’s hands . . . Lewiston is a parable of replacement. Mr. Carlson has repeatedly depicted Somalis as threatening strangers deposited in a small, struggling city without the consent of its citizenry. “GO TO LOWELL, MASS., or Lewiston, Maine, or any place where large numbers of immigrants have been moved into a poor community, and it hasn’t become richer,” Mr. Carlson lectured a guest in 2017. (Emphasis supplied). “It’s become poorer. That’s real.”

Only it’s not real. It’s false. The Times presents paragraphs of data and evidence testifying to the falsity of those statements regarding Lewiston. And we who live in Lowell can attest to the falsity of those statements when it comes to our city. Whatever problems Lowell faces, immigration is not among them. If anything, immigration has strengthened the city now and throughout its existence.

My purpose here is not to condemn Mr. Carlson – although he’s worthy of condemnation. My purpose is to point out that his show is the most successful one in the history of cable television in America. The millions of people who watch him do so because they agree with him. The Times article reports that when a guest holding a contrary position appears on the program, viewership goes down. Consequently, the show books guests who have even more extremist views rather than guests who have contrary positions. Viewership has increased.

Carlson and Fox are not making Americans more racist; they are making more money from the racism that is already endemic in America.

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It was Carlson’s disparagement of Lowell that prompted me to write about him this week, but another national event without direct ties to Lowell also warrants discussion. That is the leaked U.S. Supreme Court memo that indicates the Court is going to overrule Roe v. Wade.

The 1973 case of Roe v. Wade and the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey held that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion prior to the fetus reaching viability. In other words, it is Unconstitional for a state to make a law that infringes on that right.

Both Roe and Casey are based on a 1965 decision called Griswold v. Connecticut which involved contraceptives. Connecticut had a law criminalizing the sale or distribution of contraceptives. Estelle Griswold, the head of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, and C. Lee Buxton, a gynecologist at Yale School of Medicine, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven as a challenge to the law. Griswold and Buxton were arrested and convicted. Their appeal made it to the U.S. Supreme Court which held that while the U.S. Constitution did not explicitly create a right to privacy, the various articles and amendments of the Constitution, taken together, did create such a right and that right protected an individual’s ability to obtain contraceptives.

That right of privacy from Griswold formed the basis of Roe v. Wade and of a whole line of other cases that invalidated laws that criminalized among other things interracial marriage, sex between members of the same gender, same sex marriage, and, as we see above, the right to contraception and to abortion up until viability of the fetus.

By overruling Roe, the Supreme Court will allow each state legislature to decide whether abortion should be legal or not. Based on a recent New York Times story, 28 states will completely ban or will tightly restrict abortion when Roe is overruled while the other 22 states are likely to retain broad access to abortion.

The essence of this conflict is the contest between the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus. To resolve that conflict, I’ve long looked to our criminal law for guidance. Consider this hypothetical: If a man shoots a pregnant woman and kills her and the fetus, has the man committed one murder or two? Under English Common Law (which emerged by the year 1200 and which forms the basis of our system of criminal justice) the answer depends on whether the fetus was able to live outside the mother – whether it was viable. If yes, then two murders were committed. If no, then it was one murder.

Roe and Casey both use the viability of the fetus – the ability to live outside of the mother’s body - as the point at which the mother’s right to get an abortion ends. Viability has generally been recognized to be 24 weeks. Before that, the decision to proceed with the pregnancy should be up to the woman and her doctor. I agree with that.

The U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the rights of the minority from the impulses of the majority. It was also designed to be flexible, to recognize and adapt to changes in society. The right to privacy is not explicitly named in the Constitution but it doesn’t have to be. Given this country’s historic ill treatment of women, it seems fundamentally unfair to permit male dominated state legislatures to abduct the agency of individual women when it comes to something as personal as whether and when to give birth.  

While reproductive freedom might seem secure in Massachusetts, it’s not. Neither will the rights to marry who you want, to love who you want, and to be with who you want. All of those rights are under threat. We are at a bad place in this country and it’s going to get worse.