The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  In contrast to such a hell, Looking Backward envisions a coming golden age, realized by the year 2000, in which all individual companies are replaced by a socialist government that operates all enterprise—in which the nation becomes “the one capitalist in the place of all the other capitalists.” As part of an all-encompassing industrial army, every citizen does the work he or she is best at (women, now liberated, play a significant role), and all receive identical remuneration. There are no rich and no poor, but everyone benefits from efficiencies in production and distribution and the elimination of war and criminality. In the words of Dr. Leete, the character who explains everything to Julian West, “The brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity.”17

  Bellamy’s novel often strikes us now as mechanical and dull—a social blueprint masquerading as literature. But Bellamy, who had written four previous novels and numerous short stories for such top literary magazines as Scribner’s and the Atlantic Monthly, knew how to engage readers of his day. For the romantic-minded, Looking Backward contained a love story with a heartwarming conclusion; for fans of progress and technical gadgetry, he supplied telephones that, radiolike, delivered music to homes and an apparatus to shield sidewalks from inclement weather.

  And the true brilliance of Looking Backward lay in its ability to persuade the reader that its ideal society is also the ultimate in practicality. Nineteenth-century captains of industry may have said they favored efficiency, but Bellamy judged that their society was built on waste and fraud. “Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science. . . . Combination is the secret of efficient production,” Leete instructs. But Bellamy was not altogether consistent on this point.

  Where might nineteenth-century readers have caught a glimpse of this level of efficiency? Leete observes: “You used to have some pretty large textile manufacturing establishments, even in your day, although not comparable with ours. No doubt you have visited these great mills in your time, covering acres of ground, employing thousands of hands, and combining under one roof, under one control, the hundred distinct processes between, say, the cotton bale and the bale of glossy calicoes.”18

  The picture could hardly be clearer: Through Leete, Bellamy is describing the Waltham/Lowell manufacturing scheme. Although Bellamy denounced contemporary capitalist civilization and the Boston Associates’ contribution to it, at the same time he recognized the utopian elements inherent in Francis Cabot Lowell’s manufacturing scheme. Indeed, Bellamy had difficulty describing his own utopia without referring to Lowell-like manufactories.

  With the success of Looking Backward, Bellamy made himself into a public speaker for the Nationalists and an activist for the People’s Party, as the Populist organization of the 1890s was known. But his health was poor, and he died in 1898 at age forty-eight, a victim of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, he was far from alone in his attempt to translate his feelings for the brotherhood of man into a real-world community.19

  Like both Pullman and Bellamy, Milton Hershey was a man with major reservations about contemporary urban life. In the 1880s, as a wavy-haired, mustachioed twenty-six-year-old proprietor of a New York City candy store, he came into frequent contact with the criminal gangs and appalling squalor of the Hell’s Kitchen area. “Cities never seemed natural to me,” he reflected later, “and I never learned to like them.”20

  Although his New York store failed, within a decade Hershey had become a successful candymaker and wholesaler as head of the Lancaster Caramel Co.—the country’s number-one caramel maker—based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Then, on a trip to the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in early 1893, he paid several visits to an exhibition of chocolate-producing machines owned by the J. M. Lehmann Co. of Dresden, Germany. At the time, few Americans had even heard of chocolate, and those who had knew it as an expensive European delicacy. Nevertheless, Hershey shortly decided that public demand for caramels would soon fade and that he should become a chocolatier. He bought the Lehmann machines, imported skilled chocolate workers from as far away as Switzerland, and began producing cocoa powder, baking chocolate, and chocolate coatings for candy. He also began years of experimentation aimed at creating his own unique recipe for milk chocolate. In 1900, he sold his lucrative caramel business for $1 million to concentrate on chocolate, and shortly thereafter he introduced a line of five-cent Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bars. By 1901, his chocolate enterprise had more than $620,000 in annual receipts, and profits grew steadily thereafter. 21

  The Chicago trip, along with later journeys to England, had another major impact on Hershey. By 1903, he was laying the plans for construction of his own model town, somewhat in the mode of Pullman, which he may have seen, and of Bourneville, the English model town erected by British chocolate company Cadbury.22 First he obtained 1,200 acres of real-estate options in Derry Church, Pennsylvania, near his birthplace. Then he hired surveyors to create landscape maps and arranged for an architect to design the factory and public buildings to come. When newspapers began to report on Hershey’s intentions to build a town in the area, some expressed wonder that he would choose such a remote, amenity-bereft place. But Hershey saw in the site one major virtue: dairy farms that would supply the milk needed for his milk chocolate. There was also no shortage of clean water, and the local industrious folk would provide a reliable workforce.

  Like Pullman in the early days, Hershey was widely described in the press as a philanthropic, morally superior person—quite unlike the “malefactors of great wealth” President Theodore Roosevelt would shortly excoriate. How could such a welcome food’s producer—the Chocolate Man—be otherwise? Although Hershey himself offered few reflections on his motivations for building the town, the inspiration appears to have come from several sources in addition to Pullman and Bourneville. First, there were his mother’s religious principles—she was a fervent Mennonite, a member of a sect similar to the Amish that emphasized Bible study, community service, and abstemious living in pastoral surroundings. Hershey’s planned village, with its clean-living, prosperous workforce, nicely echoed Mennonite values.

  Perhaps more important, creating the town was something of an adventure. And Hershey had always been drawn to the audacious ways of his profligate father, a man who was ever ready to take a flyer on bold enterprises, from berry farming to the invention of a perpetual-motion machine. Finally, Hershey disliked urban squalor and the labor unrest that it bred. He could hardly have been unaware of the nationwide railroad strike connected with Pullman or of a bitter 1897 strike in nearby Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, in an altercation with sheriff ’s deputies, scores of strikers were killed or wounded. In contrast, he would build a city—echoing Bellamy—where, as he declared, there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.”

  Such a place would serve as a standing advertisement for the Hershey Co., its wholesome values, and its products. In short order, thousands of visitors would arrive via trains and trolleys to admire Milton Hershey’s community.

  The houses that began appearing in Derry Church in 1904 were modern affairs equipped with indoor plumbing, central heating, even electricity. Hershey decreed that his town should be free of any industrial atmosphere: Consequently, he demolished an initial group of residences he thought were too uniform, and the ones that followed had landscaped yards. Unlike those in the town of Pullman, these homes could be bought for between $1,200 and $1,500. There were also one hundred lots available to those who wanted to build their own houses, although these came with detailed restrictions both on the construction and future use of any buildings.

  As for chocolate making, Hershey’s new factory was spread over eighteen buildings, including a two-story executive wing and a power plant with two giant boilers that made electricity for the plant and for the town. Cocoa beans arrived at the plant by rail and then moved through t
he facility to be cleaned, roasted, shelled, ground, and turned into the liquid that became candy, cocoa powder, and cocoa butter. Milk from the region was condensed and mixed with cocoa, and the combination was dried and molded into bars. The factory, which was graced by two enormous brick smokestacks inscribed with the word HERSHEY, tripled in size within a few years, supporting 1,700 workers by 1911.

  Hershey and his admirers wasted less rhetoric than Pullman on the civilizing impact of his town upon its workers. Moreover, the Pennsylvania town—which was nameless in the beginning and won its appellation via a contest in which the public suggested various ideas—was slow in development. Financed with the company’s considerable profits, there were soon parks and a zoo, numerous public buildings, a public library, a swimming pool and golf course, an extensive trolley system, a medical clinic, free schools, and athletic teams. There was abundant greenery, including the ornamental shrubbery that spelled out the words HERSHEY COCOA in ten-foot letters.

  For himself, Hershey built a twenty-two-room colonial mansion, dubbed High Point, that sat on a hill overlooking the factory.

  The trade-offs for town residents followed what would become a familiar pattern in model company towns. Workers got a cornucopia of benefits, including insurance, medical coverage, and a retirement plan. There were no local taxes, jobs were abundant, and services such as garbage pickup and snow removal were a given. The company donated property and buildings for local schools, including a junior college with free tuition for town residents. Each of five local churches received a $20,000 endowment. But the town remained unincorporated and had no elected officials. Milton Hershey served as its mayor, constable, and fire chief. Moreover, he was his own “moral police,” riding around town and taking notes as to which homes were not being maintained and receiving reports from private detectives as to which employees were too fond of alcoholic refreshment.

  Milton Hershey’s paternalism came to include one very unusual feature, though: Beginning in 1909, one of the town’s most significant sites was the Hershey Industrial School, a residential institution for orphan boys that was thought up by Milton’s wife, Kitty. It was but one of dozens of such institutions founded during this period, but Hershey’s school was unrivaled in its gifts. After Kitty’s early death in 1915, the chocolate magnate donated his entire estate to the institution in her memory. All of his company stock, which was valued at $60 million, would be held by a trust that supported the place. Although this latter provision was certainly charitable, it also offered a means of keeping Hershey stock closely held by a party unlikely to disagree with Milton Hershey about the direction of his company.

  The Hershey Industrial School was, and in some ways remains, a study in contrasts. The childless and poorly educated Milton Hershey lavished his fortune on the institution, setting up a well-appointed library, auditorium, and gymnasium. The students received a splendid education—Milton wanted them to have everything he had missed—and after graduation each got $100, a wardrobe, and help finding a job or a full college scholarship. But the students were housed on nearby farms, where they had to perform chores—planting, milking cows, and harvesting grain—all of which were thought to be wholesome and character-building. Students were never left in doubt about the identity of their benefactor, who frequently dropped by the institution and once a year invited the students to his mansion for a special breakfast. (The school is still in operation today, with standards and facilities that rival the likes of Choate; 80 percent of its graduates, who no longer perform farm work, go on to college.)

  In the town harmony reigned. As seems fitting in a Never-Never-Landish spot where Chocolate Avenue intersects with Cocoa Avenue, neither a funeral home nor a cemetery was allowed within Hershey, Pennsylvania. A precursor to Disneyland, Hershey Park was drawing 100,000 visitors a year by 1913. Tourists came to see and smell the chocolate-scented town, to ride on its miniature electric train and merry-go-round, and to listen to popular orchestras in the Hershey dance hall. The village had become such a sensation that little other marketing was needed—and the company ceased its print advertising.

  That same year, the company staged a vast tenth-anniversary celebration of its move to the area, complete with parades, bands, fireworks, and an air show with James B. “Birdman” McCalley exhibiting his biplane. And there was oratory: In a pretelevision age, stemwinders from politicians such as William Jennings Bryan or evangelists such as Aimee Semple McPherson provided enlightenment and bombastic entertainment. (Abraham Lincoln once observed, “When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”) Thus Hershey’s celebration required a keynote address, here delivered by Omar Hershey, a famous orator unrelated to Milton. “If Big Business adopted the Hershey idea” there would be less labor unrest, he noted. “Where simple justice and plain, ordinary common sense prevails, some of the problems quickly adjust themselves,” he concluded. The company founder was presented with a silver cup, inscribed to the town’s “beneficent Jove.”23

  The company and the town prospered: Within a decade, sales of the candy bars and such new products as the Hershey’s Kiss rose to almost $8 million. By the 1930s, Hershey, Pennsylvania, had reached maturity, with the construction of sports venues, a community center, a theater, and a monumental, 170-room hotel helping to build a tourist trade. Built atop a hill overlooking downtown, the community center and Hotel Hershey were traditional Italianate and Spanish rococo structures. Much more daring was the new modern office building downtown—constructed without windows and with a uniform controlled environment.

  But while the new construction was intended partly as a Depression-era make-work project, hard times inevitably led to layoffs and reduced work hours in the chocolate factory. Meanwhile, from 1930 to 1936, the Hershey Chocolate Co. made more than $37 million in after-tax profits—or ten times its annual payroll. A more sophisticated, ethnically diverse workforce also resented company efforts to control off-the-job behavior, ranging from marital infidelity to carpooling, and there were accusations of favoritism in promotions.

  In 1937, a whirlwind organizing campaign by a new union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), resulted in recruitment of 80 percent of the company’s 3,000-odd production workers. Initial talks between the CIO’s United Chocolate Workers and management seemed to augur well, with the company agreeing to raise wages. But then came layoffs of several union militants and production speed-ups. The result was a sit-down strike that paralyzed the factory.

  A startling outburst of violence followed. Four days after the strike began, several thousand local farmers who depended upon selling their milk to Hershey attended a parade in support of the company. They delivered an ultimatum to the strikers: Leave the plant or be forcibly ejected. After an exchange of taunts with the strikers, the army of farmers and pro-company employees armed with rocks and pitchforks stormed the facility. Outnumbered four to one, the strikers were bloodied—several were brutally beaten—and evicted.24

  The incident left a suddenly divided town and a mark on Hershey’s reputation. Within two years, federally conducted union elections resulted in recognition of the conservative, craft-oriented Bakery and Confectionary Workers Union as a bargaining representative for the workers. Union contracts meant that, going forward, it would not be up to one man to make every decision about life in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The town was becoming a more mature—and more complicated—place to live.

  Milton died in 1945, and his company drifted for several decades. Generations of his successors were punishingly slow to act, seemingly frozen by the question of “What would Milton do?” It was years before Hershey Chocolate Co. took on such modern corporate functions as marketing and research and development. There was no Hershey advertising until 1970.

  But beginning in the late 1970s, the enterprise instituted many changes. Having become Hershey Foods Corp., with such noncandy products as pasta and Friendly Ice Cream, management placed all operations on more of a business footing.
Most significant, Hershey was redefining its relations with the town.

  Among the first changes was the appearance of a new Pennsylvania State University medical center, founded in 1963 with a $50 million donation from the company. As that institution matured, it brought a new element into the community: a large number of medical personnel.

  The park, which began as a free recreational facility for the townsfolk, had long been evolving toward something else. A simple merry-go-round was replaced in 1912 by an elaborate carousel with fifty-three carved animals. In the ’20s, more rides including a Ferris wheel and airplane swing were added, and in the ’30s came a penny arcade, a “mill chute” ride, and more, so that by the late ’40s the park contained more than two dozen rides. But in 1970, it was closed—and reopened as Hersheypark, a Disney-style theme park with daily admission charges. 25

  Finally, many of the town’s historic buildings were repurposed. In 1977, Milton Hershey’s High Point mansion was turned into a suite of offices for top corporate officials. In 1980, the company closed the community center and transformed it too into offices.26 Like Lowell before it, Hershey, Pennsylvania, was surrendering many of its quirks—and perhaps its unique identity.

  In the West, the exploitation-minded, smash-and-grab side of the American personality reached its fullest expression. The area’s very bounty seemed to prompt a rapacious stripping of resources and only a tenuous relationship with any given place. As early as 1871, Mark Twain observed of the gold-mining territory around Sacramento, California: “You may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California.”27

  The lush forests of the Northwest encouraged just such an approach. Logging camps arose in Oregon, California, Washington state, Idaho, and Montana to cut stands of spruce, cedar, fir, and redwoods. Crews were ever on the move to virgin woods, so these camps were never more than temporary homes. Some featured barracks to which wheels could be easily attached for relocating, and in others cabins were constructed as barges for easy flotation down rivers.