Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

Beginning in 1955, political and business elites in Raleigh and Durham set out on a quest to turn the state away from an economy based largely on agriculture, furniture, textiles, and tobacco toward a high-tech future. They were prescient, in ways that they scarcely could have realized at the time. California’s Stanford Research Park had been founded only recently, in 1951—the kernel of what would become the iconic land of innovation, Silicon Valley, a term that was not coined until 1971.¹ Local, state, and federal policy makers almost everywhere across the United States eventually embraced the idea of trying to lure high-tech industries in the late twentieth century. But the small coterie of bankers, politicians, and professors who created the blueprint for North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park—officially founded in 1959—foresaw the outlines of a knowledge-based, research-intensive economy in a sweeping and persistent sense that few, if any, at the time could match.

By the end of the twentieth century, Research Triangle Park (RTP) had become the largest such high-tech development in the United States. It was home to corporate giants such as IBM, Glaxo, and Cisco, as well as nonprofits and government agencies such as the National Humanities Center, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the process, from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century, it became a model case study for politicians and policy makers throughout the United States and, indeed, the world showing how to create a prosperous, high-tech economy—out of almost nothing. The journey from possums and tobacco to SAS and the drug AZT might have seemed rapid and jarring to many, but it was especially so to journalists from outside, who could not help indulging the cliché of Southern primitiveness sitting side by side with hypercapitalist modernity.2

North Carolina was unmistakably part of the New South in the mid-twentieth century, fastened tightly to a regime of both segregation and low wages but also possessing a business elite that desperately wanted to move the state forward—albeit, of course, on their own terms. Always hungry to boast of new jobs won, North Carolina boosters spent much of the early to mid-twentieth century persuading Northern employers to bring their mills and other enterprises to the state with the traditional promises of cheap, nonunion labor and low taxes.³ The state, in fact, added a greater percentage of nonagricultural jobs between 1950 and 1961 than the national average, and, among its neighbors, only Georgia surpassed it on this count.⁴

But the picture was not so rosy. Certainly the state economy did not reach the dizzying heights of profit and productivity that boosters had long grown accustomed to claiming.5 Even as the population grew, an average of 90 people left North Carolina every day. African Americans in particular were abandoning the state at an even greater rate than during the wartime boom years of the 1940s, when so many escaped the strictures of Southern segregation to search for better opportunities in other parts of the country.⁶ Privately, and in their local newspapers, North Carolinians were willing to admit the obvious: the state was poor. A recession in 1954 hit its textile industry, the state’s largest manufacturing sector, hard, and employees worked fewer hours as a result. In a largely rural state where many residents supplemented their meager farm income with millwork, this blow was painful.

Worse still, the industries that did exist in North Carolina were highly competitive, driving workers to mass-produce cheap and undifferentiated products for the lowest possible wage. “Industries which are characterized by a high degree of technological progress and by a limited number of suppliers normally retain a high ratio of the benefits of productivity in higher returns on capital and increased wages and salaries,” Rep. Charles B. Deane, a Democrat of textile country, explained to the citizens of Greensboro in 1955.⁷ The state’s dominant industries, such as furniture and textiles, did not allow North Carolinians to earn greater wages by producing a higher-value, more distinctive product; wood was wood, and a sock was a sock, at least to a certain extent. The rural workers who had been pushed out of tenant farms by mechanization and the consolidation of landholdings had neither the skills nor the opportunity to earn a better wage.

Southerners have long tried to understand why their region lagged so much in terms of education, industry, and innovation. Some criticized a colonial North, which allegedly preyed on the fruits of Southern agriculture and industry while maintaining its inferior status through political mechanisms (such as the tariff, which made farm exports less competitive) and unfair trade practices (for example, freight rates that discriminated against Southern farmers). Others maintained that the inequitable heritage of slavery had retarded the development of free enterprise and capitalism in the South, while the systems of sharecropping and tenant-farming that emerged after the Civil War locked Southern workers into a nearly inescapable cycle of debt and dependency.⁸

Conversely, historian David Carlton has described North Carolina’s predicament in terms of the “product cycle,” suggesting that the state’s lack of capital, entrepreneurship, and technology hobbled it throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Northerners developed new innovations in production and marketing and only transferred these resources to the South once they could be exploited cheaply, without a need for advanced expertise or skilled labor. The textile industry, for instance, first evolved in England, before Americans pilfered the knowhow and technology to develop their own means of mechanically spinning and knitting. Although these processes were still prized—and though they depended on the specific knowledge of workers and entrepreneurs in the North—they remained above the Mason-Dixon Line. Only when businesses could set up factories that could operate cheaply and simply, far from home, were these industries relocated to the South. And even then, Carlton suggests, Northerners retained the expertise about marketing that enabled them to control the entire process of production.9

When a Greensboro contractor named Romeo Guest laid out his vision of a “Research Triangle” in 1954, he had this very problem in mind. “We expect to hatch our new industries rather than steal them,” Guest told his secretary in November 1954.¹⁰ Soon after, Guest wrote to the wife of Julius Cone, a Greensboro textile magnate, to elaborate. North Carolina could no longer persist in competing for the low-wage industries streaming from the North. Perhaps thinking of that year’s recession, he noted that “the pace of migration has greatly slowed down and now we are sponsoring the idea of getting nationally known concerns to establish research laboratories in the triangle area formed by State, Duke and Carolina. The idea of this is that [if] we develop new products in these laboratories many of the products will be manufactured in North Carolina.”¹¹ The Research Triangle would redefine the entire metropolitan landscape of Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, leveraging the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and North Carolina State College (later, university) as the kernel for a new economy based on research and technology.

Although Guest’s idea—really, a slogan—came to fruition in the ensuing decades, with companies like IBM and Red Hat setting up shop amid the universities of central North Carolina, it remained unclear whether he achieved his original aim. Did the Research Triangle “hatch” new innovations and jobs rooted in the local economy? The evidence is hazy at best, and the Triangle has arguably generated fewer local companies (or startups) than similar tech hubs in or near Boston or San Francisco.¹² Did the Triangle help Tar Heels break their dependence on outside corporations for capital and jobs? The signs of companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Sumitomo grace streets named after such North Carolinian elites as T. W. Alexander and Robert Hanes, yet their operations are based not even in the North but in the United Kingdom and Japan. Northern corporations are, of course, also well represented.

If the Research Triangle did not succeed by these measures, perhaps a different set of questions ought to be asked. How did the effort to build a center for research and technology change the social, economic, and physical landscape of North Carolina? Did it create higher-wage jobs, and did it stem the “brain drain” of educated North Carolinians to greater opportunities in the cities of the North and West? How did the influx of new residents who followed industries such as electronics and pharmaceuticals change the political and cultural dynamics of the state? For one measure, consider that a state that offered its resolute support to Republican candidates such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush tipped ever so slightly to the Democratic Party of Barack Obama in 2008. Although political commentators indulged in characterizing the urban denizens of Charlotte and the Triangle as “wine and cheese liberals,” it is by no means clear that the migration of educated, affluent, and largely white workers to the state necessarily made the electorate more liberal in its leanings. Indeed, a strongly rightward turn in state government after 2010 challenged the notion that the state’s stalwart conservatism was on the wane.13

The story of the Research Triangle is that of a particular vision of economic change and urban development taking hold in the mid-twentieth century, which its proponents themselves did not fully understand. Without the assistance of postindustrial theorists such as Daniel Bell or Alain Touraine, bankers and educators in North Carolina intuited that the state’s manufacturing base would not provide the income or security that a rising generation of workers needed. Contractors and politicians crafted an ideal of employment that demanded high levels of technology and education—as well as, it was hoped, high wages. This vision emerged haltingly, first imagining research as a supplement to manufacturing, an enhancer of productivity and products, and then conceiving of information as an end in itself. This perspective changed among North Carolina’s elite almost imperceptibly, but it tracked alongside an emergent ideology in the 1960s and 1970s by which the work of scientists and other educated professionals was perceived not as one part of a portfolio of economic activity but as the only sector that really mattered. The nascent traces of the so-called Information Revolution or knowledge economy can be found among the supposedly empty piney woods of Durham and Wake Counties, where hunting clubs and trailers were cleared out to make way for the jobs of the future.¹⁴

In designing the research park at the Triangle’s center, planners hewed to the bucolic ideal of a campus where deep thinkers could contemplate in the quiet of a carefully cultivated nature, far from the distractions of the noisy city. As Margaret Pugh O’Mara has shown, Stanford pioneered this academic-cum-corporate ideal of the laboratory in the garden. It also belongs to a longer history of ideal planned communities, including Robert Owen’s nineteenth-century New Lanark and “invented edens” such as the nuclear research villages of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, founded during World War II.¹⁶

The design of RTP placed labs in a suburban landscape of curving roads and the straight lines of modernist architecture while scattering the scientific workforce throughout the greater Triangle area. Around it grew the multipolar city of late-twentieth-century urban sprawl, in which the traditional downtown business district ringed with suburbs gave way to a new pattern: a variety of nodes of activity spread across a bigger and more dispersed landscape. In a sense, the Triangle resembles metro Atlanta or Los Angeles, stretching over school districts, towns, and counties, but it lacks a single urban core. One city did not spread out and gobble up outlying villages and neighborhoods; rather, a constellation of settlements coalesced, by equal measures of convenience and contrivance, into a common area founded on a geometrical abstraction with an industrial project at its center.

A city without a mayor or manager—but with its own post office and zip code—RTP called for new forms of governance at both the regional and local levels. On one hand, the spatial scale of the Research Triangle prompted unprecedented levels of coordination among state, county, and city planning agencies to manage development and provide services such as public transit. From the very beginning, though, the Triangle was the site of new hybrids of private and public authority. Since 1959, the nonprofit Research Triangle Foundation (RTF) has acted as a de facto government for the land that became Research Triangle Park soon after.17 The foundation resembled the new forms of so-called special districts and business improvement districts that enabled private interests to take over some of the tasks of local government throughout the United States in the late twentieth century. RTP provides an opportunity to understand better how and why government by public-private partnership emerged.¹⁸ University presidents, business leaders, and the governor all sat on the board that managed RTP, even though the park was nominally owned by two public colleges (North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and a private one (Duke).¹⁹

In this way, the Research Triangle represents a postindustrial update of many classic themes of Southern history. As a sprawling quasi-city that freely mixed pastures and laboratories, the Triangle typified the “rurbanization” that David Goldfield has observed in numerous cities of the New South, where a combination of automobiles and annexation permitted urban areas to retain many of the hallmarks of the countryside.20 The alliance of academics, bankers, industrialists, and politicians who championed the idea of the Triangle in the late 1950s represents a textbook case of the “civic elite” Blaine Brownell has found commanding the affairs of towns and cities throughout the South.²¹ The subsequent rise of Cary and its main corporate patron, the SAS Institute—arguably one of the two or three largest privately held software companies in the world, with revenues of $1.68 billion and 10,110 employees in 2006—since the late 1970s reveals the old Southern mill town mentality reconfigured in a sleek new high-tech version.²² Indeed, without the cohesive sense of shared interests, without the interconnections among these privileged North Carolinians, it appears unlikely that a project like the Research Triangle would have secured the necessary resources from either private interests or the state to succeed.

While the story of the Triangle reinforces and extends these familiar themes, it also represents a new level of urban and economic planning in the South. The region of privately run mill villages and company stores gave birth to a new and more complex work environment. It amounts to a kind of social engineering. Changes in wage levels, in-migration and out-migration, ethnic diversity, housing stock, and countless other factors were due in large part to the concerted effort of elite North Carolinians to steer the state’s economy in a particular direction. Postindustrialism, in short, was not the natural outgrowth of an older capitalist manufacturing economy but, rather, the result of deliberate efforts to amend the tax code, secure state and federal subsidies, and command the resources of public and private universities in order to foster specific types of employment and enterprise. “I think you have got hold of something very important and practicable there,” one of Romeo Guest’s media allies, Greensboro Daily News editor William T. Polk, said in late 1954. “North Carolina and the South need research, perhaps more than anything else.”²³ If it was research the South needed, it was research it would get—one way or another, whatever the consequences might be.

Brain Magnet tells this story by examining a series of interlocking spaces, beginning with Research Triangle Park itself—zealously designed as the ideal environment for knowledge work and a 1960s-style, modernist futurism. It looks at the work environments that followed, from the Research Triangle Institute, Burroughs Wellcome, and the National Humanities Center within the park, to SAS Institute in nearby Cary, as ideas about intellectual labor and the management of creativity evolved over the course of the late twentieth century. It goes beyond the workplace to consider what the nascent creative economy looked like in new suburbs such as Parkwood in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the gentrifying downtowns of Durham and Raleigh of the early twenty-first century. Each locale provides a tableau of a new economy taking shape, an outline of the ideals and aspirations of its participants—whether in the ranch home or “McMansion,” laboratory or executive suite, coffeeshop or coworking space.

This book is not a New South history, strictly speaking—at least not in the mold of superlative works such as Christina Greene’s 2005 Our Separate Ways or Matthew Lassiter’s 2006 The Silent Majority, both of which touched on the political history of the metropolitan Triangle.24 It is not principally about issues such as desegregation or the rise of the New Right, though certainly those historical trajectories skate and streak across the background of this story of an emergent new economy. It is about the way we think about and imagine the economy, what the economy is, where the economy should go, and, above all, who matters.

Brain Magnet is in, but not of, Southern history; it is part of a different discussion, one that concerns the shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one dominated by services and information technology. Intellectuals, journalists, and policy makers struggled to define what that new economy really was for much of the late twentieth century. The Austrian American economist Fritz Machlup was among the most farsighted; his book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States introduced the term “information society” in 1962.²⁵ That same year, the young activists of the New Left recognized the decline of manufacturing as a proportion of the workforce and the increasing prominence of education, science, and technology in the economy. (At the same time, they worried about automation and the prospect of a “remote control economy.”)²⁶ American sociologist Daniel Bell began thinking of it as “post-industrial” in the 1960s, and he and his French counterpart Alain Touraine both published books in the early 1970s that helped popularize the term. Influential management theorist Peter Drucker first wrote of the “knowledge worker” in the 1960s; economist Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts” followed in the 1990s, redefining the same set of educated, mostly professional workers. All were the forerunners of urbanist Richard Florida’s concept of the “creative class,” which debuted in 2002 to much acclaim.²⁷

This book offers a different, parallel account of this intellectual history—one that looks out from the piney woods of rural Durham County rather than the conference panel or the editorial boardroom of the New York Times. It proposes that an intuitive understanding of an economy in which manufacturing was supplanted by intellectual labor developed on the ground in what was, frankly, one of the less likely places for it to happen. North Carolina boosters in the 1950s and 1960s spoke of “creativity,” creative people, and brains—that is, the figure of the intellectual worker well before these ideas became a prominent part of either the academic or public discourse. And by the time deindustrialization and the emerging knowledge economy had become widely debated in the 1970s and 1980s, the Triangle had achieved broad recognition in the media and policy circles as a place that got the postindustrial transition right. RTP’s reputation was so great by the 1980s that it was arguably better known elsewhere in the world than North Carolina itself. There is a perhaps apocryphal story, often retold, about a Japanese businessman who was told about North Carolina and responded, “Is it in the Research Triangle?”

Of course, RTP is not the paradigmatic case of the “city of knowledge,” to borrow historian Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s term. Scholars such as O’Mara have provided superlative studies of Silicon Valley and Massachusetts’s Route 128, the quintessential American sites of high-tech innovation, while Stephen J. Pitti, Lily Geismer, and Willow Lung-Amam have undertaken careful studies of the cultural, political, and social dynamics of the communities that grew up around these tech hubs. Other cities with dynamic tech economies have begun to receive scholarly scrutiny, such as Austin, Texas, in Eliot M. Tretter’s Shadows of a Sunbelt City. Indeed, the Triangle parallels many of the metropolitan enclaves of the affluent and educated that emerged in post–World War II America, all of which were funded directly or indirectly by the federal government. These included Orange County, California, where Cold War defense industries drew engineers and managers; the tony districts of Maryland and Northern Virginia, where employees of both government contractors such as Northrup Grumman and federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration built their lives; or greater Boston, where high-tech industries also spawned new, affluent suburbs. Each of these places was remade by the movement of money, people, and technology during the Cold War.28

The Research Triangle, however, has received significantly less attention, apart from celebratory local histories and an informative 2011 overview of the region by University of North Carolina planning scholar William Rohe. However, it makes sense to look for the origins of the economic and technological transition of postindustrial America in a place that was not the paradigm. Many people have already written about the Bay Area or Route 128, but looking at the most typical or successful example of something simply cannot tell you about how the model evolved and diverged in places that were not the pinnacle of apparent success—which is to say, everywhere else.

It is especially instructive to look at a place like North Carolina, which started out at or near the bottom in terms of wealth, poverty, and technological innovation in the 1950s, and yet through assiduous effort and masterful storytelling managed to go a good distance from there. Poverty and inequality persist, of course, both within the Triangle and (especially) across the rest of the state. But how a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians came to imagine a future economy in an unlikely place puts those very changes in the sharpest relief. In the 1960s, many intellectuals and policy makers began to intuit that an economy in which, at a minimum, manufacturing labor played a smaller role was coming. What shape that economy would take remained to be seen, but anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and activists of the New Left foresaw it.²⁹ It is noteworthy that a sociologist such as George Simpson or a small-town banker like Archie Davis realized this as well, often well before other intellectuals.

Those very North Carolinians were farsighted enough to anticipate, however clumsily or unintentionally, the ideas of thinkers such as Richard Florida by well over forty years. In their relentless branding of the Triangle, they spoke of the importance of creativity and the value of a stimulating intellectual environment for a nascent group of knowledge workers. They mobilized universities, museums, dance companies, and even book clubs to persuade scientists, engineers, and their families to come to the Raleigh-Durham area as early as the late 1950s. They stressed that smart people like to live near other people similar to themselves—the chemist with the linguist down the street, whose wives volunteer in the little theater or take a night class together. This was nearly fifty years before journalist Bill Bishop presented his compelling thesis in The Big Sort, which argues that Americans were increasingly gravitating toward communities with people who shared their political and cultural tastes.30 This was the creative class forty-five years before The Rise of the Creative Class, knowledge workers sixteen years before Coming of Post-Industrial Society. And although the terms and buzzwords have come and gone over the years, the emphasis on creativity and the interests of a prized group of highly educated workers remained explicit throughout.

In today’s age of food trucks and hipster CEOs, it is worth noting that the members of the Triangle’s proto-creative class were, for the most part, “squares.” Richard Florida might disdain the highbrow art and culture favored by upper-middle-class stiffs in the cities and, increasingly, suburbs of the mid- to late twentieth century, but opera and ballet were what sold in the 1960s—at least for educated outsiders who were leery of coming to sleepy towns in a seemingly remote and still backward South. The difference between the North Carolina Symphony and a Romanian-Hawaiian fusion poké bowl place might seem transparently obvious, but the difference is more superficial than it seems. The chemistry PhDs and the hip software engineers that Florida has placed in the official creative class share much in terms of education and cultural capital—as well as their role as sought-after residents, workers, and taxpayers—whether it is 1965 or 2005. The tastes simply changed.

Thus the Triangle offers a previously untold story of the origins of the information economy, of the creative city, where such ideas germinated early on and far from Boston or Palo Alto. By the 1990s and 2000s, Raleigh and Durham received lavish praise in the media as among the most creative, brainiest cities in the nation, boasting a better quality of life that frequently outranked anywhere else. The region’s transformation began with an unusually intentional, conscious effort to rebrand a place, create a new economy, and attract both technologically advanced businesses and highly educated workers. It prefigured the incessant mantra of knowledge, creativity, and innovation that came to dominate discussions of urban economic policy in the early twenty-first century. RTP itself was the proving ground for a new concept of the economy that prized only brains and largely excluded the smokestacks and dirty hands of before. Yet geographer Jamie Peck has warned that this vision is an imperfect one, in a virtuoso takedown of Florida’s thesis. Creativity is great—who could be against it? But “the uncreative population, one assumes, should merely look on, and learn.”31

The Triangle’s story is one of self-invention and audacious boosterism amid the high-water days of the Cold War, when federal government money was flowing into research (not just for defense but for public health, environmental protection, and other worthy causes) and one of the poorest states in the nation decided to gamble its economic future on the universities that sat at its center. In the process, boosters almost inadvertently redefined the metropolitan landscape of Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, and, later, Cary as a new entity that had never existed before—“the Triangle.” The knowledge economy that is so often taken for granted in the twenty-first century was born amid the possums and pine trees of North Carolina’s Durham and Wake Counties. RTP might not have been a city in the strictest sense of the term, but it nevertheless gave deliberate birth to the “city of ideas.”