The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy (review)

I begin with a caveat to readers of this review. I have a strong prejudice in favor of books that are argument driven. This one is not. Rather, it is a collection of vignettes on a central theme. Readers who share my prejudice may thus find the book disappointing as I did. Those who do not will discover a collection of essays on company-dominated towns that summarizes available literature on the cases chosen in clear and readable prose.

The author groups a variety of towns under the rubric “company towns,” including isolated mining camps and mill villages literally owned in toto by a corporation (Appalachian and western mining camps), planned industrial communities (Pullman, Illinois), mill towns where a single industry (but not necessarily a single firm) employs a majority of the local labor force (Lowell), and towns where a corporation exercises major influence but is not necessarily the only employer (Richmond, California).

The author loosely groups the many cases he describes into two categories based on the motives of the organizers; “exploitationvilles,” places where company domination was rooted in the economic logic of the industry and its frequently isolated location, and planned utopian communities motivated by the ideological and moral vision of the founders. His archetype for the former is Butte, Montana, which he introduces through the eyes of Dashiell Hammett, whose early experiences as a Pinkerton detective there shaped his later literary and political vision. For the latter, the author examines several cases in detail including Pullman, Hershey, PA, and Scotia, CA.

He begins with Lowell, Massachusetts, well-trod scholarly territory. His account, drawn from a limited range of the large scholarly literature, offers little that hasn’t been said many times before. The account includes some erroneous or doubtful assertions: e.g. that monthly wages for operatives in the 1830s were “six or seven times the average teacher’s salary” and that many operatives “used their savings … for college tuition” (19, no footnotes offered). Similarly, the author’s story of Pullman in the next chapter doesn’t offer much that couldn’t be found (better) in the handful of secondary works he consulted.

Several cases chosen in later chapters such as Corning, NY, Scotia, CA, and Kannapolis, NC, have not been as widely written about as Lowell and Pullman and the author supplemented the secondary works he drew upon with more extensive research in newspapers and periodicals than in the sections on Lowell and Pullman. These will probably strike scholarly readers as a bit fresher than the earlier chapters. In general, the closer the author gets to the present the more he draws on such periodical and newspaper sources and the less derivative the stories become.

Only in a seven-page final chapter does the author attempt to synthesize his findings into a larger argument. A few pages of bullet points that look like PowerPoint outlines conclude with some observations about the social responsibility of business.

The version of this book I read was a prepublication proof. I found a number of obvious factual errors such as: in 1916 “a thousand companies were providing housing for 60,000 employees—roughly 3 per cent of the U.S. population” (6). The 60,000 estimate strikes me as quite low but it’s clearly not 3% of national population of more than 100 million; “By the late ‘40s the country entered an economic depression” (22). That occurred between 1837 and 1843. Perhaps they have been corrected in the final edition.