Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country (review)

It is not everyday one reads the line, "A Boon for the Community! The Big Corporations Are Certainly Not All Soulless." Yet this quote from the Copper Country Evening News on September 16, 1898, nicely highlights the negotiation process between the Copper Country companies and their employees, as revealed in Alison K. Hoagland's Mine Towns: Buildings for Workers in Michigan's Copper Country. Set in her native Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Hoagland deftly illustrates the material culture of the company-run towns (a term not be taken lightly, as I describe below) and how they reflect the reality of paternalism in the region. Using a plethora of resources, from buildings themselves and their remains to company and federal archives, Hoagland puts the reader into the material culture of the peninsula and guides them through the history of the region and the changing relationship between company and worker.

In a fifteen-page introduction and six chapters, Hoagland investigates the material culture of housing, the spatial dynamics of a crippling labor strike, various opportunities for homeownership (of all things) by workers, the acquisition of "conveniences," and, as a crescendo to analyze the companies' legacy, past and present attempts to memorialize and/or preserve many of the landscapes that represented these communities. Having published my own work on company towns and memorialization, I found the book familiar and well-conceived; it effectively combined my own two academic loves. The book offers to us three key contributions. First, Hoagland examines negotiated paternalism. Second, she uses the built environment as an archive of the Copper Country and the legacy of its heyday works as a virtual palimpsest of labor, economics, and culture. Third, she achieves a narrative that goes beyond the male worker perspective and also highlights the everyday experiences of laborers—and their wives and children—in a true investigation of home and family. Unfortunately, all of this wonderfully rich description comes without a more rigorous assessment of the literature on American company towns, labor, memory, and the cultural landscape's expression (and reinforcement) of these cultural processes.

Company towns have frequently been criticized by scholars for their treatment of laborers (Dinius, Oliver and Vergara, Angela, Company Towns in the Americas (2011); Mitchell, Don, The Lie of the Land (1996)). Even the ways by which we memorialize labor disasters (Johnstown, Pullman) have been assessed for memorializing production and not the human labor that makes that production possible (Foote, Kenneth, Shadowed Ground (2003); Mitchell, Don, "Heritage, Landscape, and the Production of Community: Consensus History and Its Alternatives in Johnstown, Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania History (1992)). Still, some company towns have offered opportunities to workers that they may not have otherwise received in the open labor market (Elliot, Russell, Growing Up in a Company Town (1990); Chris Post, "Modifying Sense of Place in a Federal Company Town: Sunflower Village, Kansas, 1942 to 1959," Journal of Cultural Geography (2008)). And, indeed, it appears that there exists a continuum upon which communities forged their relationships with workers. In this regard, Hoagland's contribution is poignant: in many cases, paternalism was negotiated between workers and corporations; paternalism was flexible, based on the environment and needs of both management and labor. Hoagland's use of the term "company-run," as opposed to "company town," illustrates this argument (p. 200). As she points out in her discussion of the companies building schools, bathhouses, and libraries, "The community institutions fostered by the companies were not one-way gifts but, rather, involved a negotiation with workers" (p. 215). In a region that had already been developed with towns and cities when the miners came in, it was not necessary for the companies to provide these services. The fact that they did proves that employees had some influence on how their communities developed.

Hoagland's second contribution is her use of material culture, and its imagery...