The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  Onetime BusinessWeek colleague Christopher Farrell and former Rhodes College history professor James Lanier read the manuscript and made very useful suggestions. Any errors or omissions in the book are, of course, my fault alone. My agent James Levine was an early believer in the project and immediately made useful suggestions for additions. My editor, Tim Sullivan, was ever helpful with ideas and is probably due extra remuneration for his ready encouragement and emotional support during dark moments of that unhappy year, 2009. Other Basic Books stalwarts who provided invaluable service include publisher John Sherer, publicity director Michele Jacob, marketing director Rick Joyce, and Internet marketing chief Peter Costanzo, who provided advice and technical expertise in support of my halting efforts in the digital realm. And finally, none of this would have been possible without my loving and ever-responsive wife and soul mate, Emily M. Bass.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 William F. Nolan, Hammett: A Life at the Edge (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), pp. 13, 75-77; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1969), pp. 186-187; Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 65.

  2 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, in The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 3.

  3 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 378-379.

  4 John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 166-172. Originally published in 1946.

  5 John Markoff and Saul Hansell, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power,” New York Times, June 14, 2006.

  6 Housing statistic in Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism 1889-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 38.

  Chapter 1: A City on a Hill

  1 Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. 340-341. Originally published in 1839.

  2 E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 56.

  3 Gary Kulik, Roger Parks, and Theodore Z. Penn, eds., The New England Mill Village, 1790-1860 (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1982), p. xxiii.

  4 Kulik et al., The New England Mill Village, pp. xxiv-xxv; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 15-16.

  5 Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 12.

  6 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London: Panther Books, 1969), pp. 80-96. Originally written in 1844.

  7 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 56.

  8 Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003), p. 81.

  9 Kulik et al., The New England Mill Village, pp. xxv-xxxi.

  10 Ibid., p. xxvi; Thomas Dublin, Lowell: The Story of an Industrial City (Washington, DC: Department of the Interior, 1992), pp. 21-32; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, p. 6.

  11 Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, MA: B. H. Penhallow, 1858), pp. 1-14.

  12 Ibid., p. 12-14; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, pp. 38-44; Correspondence Between Nathan Appleton and John A. Lowell in Relation to the Early History of the City of Lowell (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1848), pp. 5-11, 18.

  13 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 370- 374, 386-388.

  14 Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 21, 190-195; Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 70-71.

  15 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1898), p. 5.

  16 Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell, pp. 23-25, 32; Joseph Lipchitz, “The Golden Age,” in Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts , ed. Arthur L. Eno (Somersworth, NH: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 84-86; John Coolidge, Mill and Mansion: A Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 28, 183; Coolidge notes that, unfortunately, only a few quotes remain from Boott’s diary, which is now lost.

  17 Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell, pp. 28-31; Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 20-22, 61-62, 133-134; Dublin, Lowell, pp. 36-39; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, pp. 49-50; Coolidge, Mill and Mansion, pp. 32-62; Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of Letters on North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 1839), pp. 128-129; Robinson, Loom and Spindle, pp. 8-9.

  18 Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell, p. 16; Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States, pp. 133-142; Charles Dickens, American Notes (London and New York: Cassell & Co., n.d.), pp. 55-58; The Lowell Offering, ed. Benita Eisler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), pp. 82, 161-162; Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2 (New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837), pp. 57-58.

  19 For a discussion of nineteenth-century women’s role as civilizing agents, see William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 118-122; Nancy Zaroulis, “Daughters of Freemen,” in Cotton Was King, pp. 107-108; Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), pp. 72-74, 107-110.

  20 Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 35-40, 80; Dublin, Lowell, p. 40-50.

  21 Ware, The Industrial Worker, pp. 74-78, 84, 148; Kulik et al., The New England Mill Village, p. 265.

  22 Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 86-107.

  23 Ibid., pp.108-123; Ware, The Industrial Worker, p. 88. In 1842, the Offering was taken over by the Lowell Courier, which was controlled by the corporations. When revived in 1847 as the New England Offering, it was purely an organ of company propaganda.

  24 Ware, The Industrial Worker, pp. 102-106, 149-151; Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 135-144.

  25 Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, pp. 51, 69-81, 225; Dublin, Lowell, p. 67; Ware, The Industrial Worker, pp. 105, 152; Fidelia O. Brown, “Decline and Fall: The End of the Dream,” in Cotton Was King, pp. 143-144; Manchester, New Hampshire, planned and developed in 1837, was modeled on Lowell, and originally used a workforce of unmarried Yankee women living in boardinghouses. In the final decades of the century, the separate corporations there were merged into the Amoskeag Co., which for a time was proprietor of the world’s largest textile factory. See Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

  26 Brown, “Decline and Fall,” pp. 142, 145-155; Dublin, Lowell, pp. 65-77.

  27 Coolidge, Mill and Mansion, 2nd ed., p. vii; Louis Adamic, My America, 1928- 1938 (New York: DaCapo Press, 1976), pp. 263-278.

  28 Dublin, Lowell, pp. 82-89; Brown, “Decline and Fall,” p. 155.

  29 Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1950), p. 46.

  30 Coolidge, Mill and Mansion, 1942 ed., p. 113.

  Chapter 2: Utopia

  1 Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 4; Sir Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), pp. 746-747. New York population figures are complicated by the fact that the city was growing physically as well, absorbing Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond in 1898. For consistency’s sake, the figures given are for the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx only.

  2 Strong reprinted in Popular Culture and Industrialism 18
65-1890, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 173; Howe reprinted in The Progressive Years, ed. Otis Pease (New York: George Braziller, 1962), pp. 25-57.

  3 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977), pp. 8-9; American Social History Project, Who Built America, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. xxiv-xxviii.

  4 Buder, Pullman, p. 35.

  5 William O. Stoddard, Men of Business (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), pp. 248-249; Buder, Pullman, pp. 4-6.

  6 Buder, Pullman, pp. 8-11; Carroll R. Harding, George M. Pullman and the Pullman Company (New York: Newcomen Society, 1951), pp. 9-14; Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), pp. 289-290.

  7 Buder, Pullman, pp. 42-43; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, pp. 289-316. In 1894, a New York newspaper reprinted a letter from Pullman to “a prominent resident of Chicago,” amplifying the magnate’s belief that the town had had a positive effect upon its workers. “You lay much stress on the fact that there has been no destruction of property at Pullman [during the strike]. . . . May not, perhaps, some credit be given to the administration of the company, which prohibits drinking saloons and provides various sources of elevation of character?” New York Sun, July 5, 1894, reprinted in The Strike at Pullman: Statements of President George M. Pullman and Second Vice-President T. H. Wickes Before the U.S. Strike Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), p. 28.

  8 Buder, Pullman, pp. 49-74; Richard T. Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1884-1885, pp. 458-461.

  9 Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” p. 457.

  10 Harding, George M. Pullman and the Pullman Company, p. 25. In his statement before the U.S. Strike Commission, Pullman repeatedly insisted that the company had two businesses, railroad-car production and real estate, and that “the renting of the dwellings and the employment of workmen at Pullman are in no way tied together.” See The Strike at Pullman, p. 28.

  11 Edward Chase Kirkland, Dream & Thought in the Business Community, 1860- 1900 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), pp. 19-23, 154-155. Others in the business community agreed with Pullman’s approach, holding the factory and town to be “exemplifications of practical philanthropy based upon business sagacity.” Iron Age, July 12, 1894, quoted in Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 446, note 117.

  12 Buder, Pullman, pp. 97-103; Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” pp. 460, 465.

  13 Reprinted as an addendum in The Strike at Pullman, p. 27; also U.S. Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June-July 1894, Senate Executive Document No. 7, 53rd Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), p. 530.

  14 Buder, Pullman, pp. 129-199; American Social History Project, Who Built America, pp. 141-143.

  15 James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—the Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 74-82.

  16 Buder, Pullman, pp. 210-215; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 316.

  17 Arthur E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 6-47, 101-119; Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), pp. 15-43; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 65, 111.

  18 Bowman, The Year 2000, pp. 43-44; Bellamy, Looking Backward, pp. 176-178.

  19 Bowman, The Year 2000, pp. 122-148.

  20 Michael D’Antonio, Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 50-51; Carol Off, Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 76-80.

  21 Hershey Co. Web site at www.hersheypa.com/town_of_hershey/history; D’Antonio, Hershey, pp. 63-71, 88-96; Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 75-88.

  22 A brief account of British model company towns, from Cadbury’s Bourneville to soap baron William Lever’s Port Sunlight, may be found in John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 86. Both of these towns, along with chocolatier Joseph Rowntree’s New Earswick, aimed at a preindustrial aesthetic. Port Sunlight even contained replicas of famous Tudor and Elizabethan buildings.

  23 D’Antonio, Hershey, pp. 84-87, 100-105, 115-118, 123-140; Off, Bitter Chocolate, pp. 74-80; Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate, pp. 106-117, 132-135.

  24 Hershey Co. Web site; D’Antonio, Hershey, pp. 199-219.

  25 Wikipedia entry on Hersheypark at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hersheypark.

  26 Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate, pp. 262-274.

  27 Mark Twain, Roughing It, vol. 2, (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1871), p. 131.

  28 James Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 13-29; “Step into New England at Port Gamble National Historic Landmark,” Seattle Times, February 26, 2009.

  29 Wikipedia entry on Pacific Lumber at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Lumber_Company; Humboldt Redwoods State Park history at www.humboldtredwoods.org/park_history ; David Harris, The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California’s Ancient Redwoods (New York: Times Books, 1995), pp. 16-19.

  30 Wikipedia entry on Pacific Lumber; Hugh Wilkerson and John van der Zee, Life in the Peace Zone: An American Company Town (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 15-21, 45-46, 50, 53, 92, 99, 150-152; Harris, The Last Stand, pp. 10-15; Gaye LeBaron, “Remembering Scotia, the Last of the Company Towns,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 12, 2008.

  31 Harris, The Last Stand, p. 19; “Pacific Lumber Offer Is Begun By Maxxam,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 1985, p. 8; “Maxxam Group Plans to Double Redwood Harvest,” Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1986, p. 27; “Suit on Takeover of PL Tied to Drexel Case,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1988, p. B12; James B. Stewart, “Scenes from a Scandal: The Secret World of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 1991, p. B1; Ned Daly, “Ravaging the Redwood: Charles Hurwitz, Michael Milken and the Costs of Greed,” Multinational Monitor Web site, www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/09/mm0994_07.html. On the benefits of Wall Street takeovers, see for example Steven M. Davidoff, “Wall Street’s Deal Factory Hits the Reset Button,” New York Times, September 17, 2009. Natural disasters have been a recurring feature of Scotia’s history, with 1955 and 1964 floods of the Eel River that each time threatened to destroy the town. See Wilkerson and van der Zee, Life in the Peace Zone, pp. 62-63, 141-147; “California, Oregon Damage Near $1 Billion from Floods that Claimed About 40 Lives,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 1964, p. 4.

  32 Wikipedia entry on Headwaters Forest Preserve at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headwaters_Forest; Humboldt Redwood Co. Web site, www.hrcllc.com; LeBaron, “Remembering Scotia,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, October 12, 2008; “Declaring Victory, Tree-Sitters Leave Redwoods,” Associated Press, September 24, 2008; Josh Harkinson, “Out of the Woods,” Mother Jones, November/December 2008, pp. 62-64; Heidi Walters, “For Sale: Scotia Inn,” North Coast Journal, May 14, 2009.

  33 Davis Dyer and Daniel Gross, The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of a Global Corporation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 47-59; Thomas P. Dimitroff and Lois S. Janes, History of the Corning-Painted Post Area: 200 Years in Painted Post Country (Corning, NY: Corning Area Bicentennial Committee, 1977), pp. 53-60, 85-96, 117-129; cut-glass wares of the Hawkes and Hoare companies are on display at the Corning Museum of Glass.

  34 Dimitroff and Janes, History of the Corning-Painted Post Area, pp. 147-149.

  35 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 77-103, 117-118; Dimitroff and Janes,
History of the Corning-Painted Post Area, p. 137-139.

  36 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 138-156, 165-168; Dimitroff and Janes, History of the Corning-Painted Post Area, pp. 223-233.

  37 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp.195-196, 204-205, 213-214, 221-222; Dimitroff and Janes, History of the Corning-Painted Post Area, pp. 253, 273.

  38 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 103, 236, 243-264, 271- 278, 289-296; Dimitroff and Janes, History of the Corning-Painted Post Area, pp. 295- 297; Brian Howard, “Corning Incorporated,” American Biotechnology Laboratory, October 2005.

  39 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 312-316, 411, 452.

  40 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 335, 353-367, 380; Ann Harrington, “The Scion in Winter,” Fortune, November 18, 2002, p. 129.

  41 Dyer and Gross, The Generations of Corning, pp. 380, 394-396; Stephanie N. Mehta, “Cooking Up Hope for Corning,” Fortune, May 3, 2003, p. 158; William C. Symonds, “Corning: Back from the Brink,” Business Week, October 18, 2004; Michael Mandel, “Corning: Lessons from the Boom and Bust,” Business Week Online, May 4, 2009.

  42 Interview with Corning Enterprises President G. Thomas Tranter Jr., June 12, 2009; interview with former Corning chairman James R. Houghton, June 16, 2009.

  43 Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 582-589.

  44 Margaret Crawford, “The New Company Town,” Perspecta 30: Settlement Patterns (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 49-54.

  45 Margaret Crawford, “Bertram Goodhue, Walter Douglas and Tyrone, New Mexico,” Journal of Architectural Education, Summer 1989, www.jstor.org/pss/1425018; also see www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/tyrone.html.

  46 Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atco,_Georgia.

  47 Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa,_Tennessee.