Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities

CHAPTER 5 "The Making of a Federal Company Town: Sunflower Village, Kansas"

111 chapter five The Making of a Federal Company Town Sunflower Village, Kansas christopher w. post Company towns in the United States in the twentieth century possessed the same fundamental purpose as others throughout the Americas: to keep workers near their jobs so as to maximize labor-cost effectiveness. As with company towns elsewhere, they exhibited tight mechanisms of social control and provided only limited opportunities for employees to improve their conditions. However, unlike their pan-American cousins, company towns in the United States were predominantly private, with little to no government oversight or even church paternalism . This pattern changed, however, with the Great Depression and World War II. A different company town landscape emerged because of the growing importance of public investment in company towns. They differed from their corporate brethren in layout, openness, politics, and social opportunities. They were, indeed, democratized company towns. This essay complements Andrew Herod’s discussion, in chapter 1, of landscape and space by elaborating on the geographic conceptualization of place. Second, it summarizes the landscape conditions of American private company towns, primarily those of the Appalachian and western United States. Third, it introduces the idea of the federal company town that resulted from growing government involvement in the American economy from the 1930s through the 1940s. This started with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal, which led to increased defense industry mobilization during the Second World War. Finally, despite the harshness of the company town landscape in the United States—both private and public—worker residents still developed profound attachments to their communities; they turned the spaces of external 112 • christopher w. post control into places of internal meaning. This chapter concludes by investigating the ways in which company towns acted as “places” among their residents, enabling workers to develop attachments and assign meaning to the cultural landscape. In illustrating these points, this chapter draws heavily on my previous work on the federal company town of Sunflower Village (Kansas) to illustrate how it compared to private company towns in the United States.1 The Federal Public Housing Administration (fpha) built Sunflower Village for employees of Sunflower Ordnance Works (sow), a munitions factory about thirty-one miles west of Kansas City (Missouri). Initially fabricated as a temporary arrangement, Sunflower Village stood the test of time and provided much more safety, mobility , and opportunities for family interaction than many private company towns and even other ordnance works plants. Due to its morphology and functional zonation, Sunflower more easily stimulated such a relationship between workers , their families, and the community, particularly for children. Sunflower’s landscape stood at the core of this bond and distinguished it from other company towns, making it the anchor for this synthesis. place and sense of place Andrew Herod provides excellent analyses of the geographical conceptualizations of space and landscape in chapter 1. He adds to what Don Mitchell claims, that every landscape is produced to serve a function, particularly in a modern and global capitalistic world.2 Complementary to these ideas is that of place. Space tends to keep distance from intimate relationships of the self; it focuses on social, economic, and political interactions. Place, on the other hand, concentrates more on the personal meaning that is produced through living in and experiencing those very same relationships situated in the landscape. In addition to reflecting and reinforcing values, the landscape also provides a means and meaning to its interactors. As geographer Ben Marsh precisely claims in his study of Pennsylvania coal towns, “place is . . . partly the means an area provides for its own continuation but also the meaning derived from its past for its continuation.”3 All humans sense the means and meaning of their places through experience . Sensing place incorporates everyday actions and emotions that humans experience; to varying extents, all people can accrue an attachment to their surroundings . Despite spatial control enforced through the company town landscape upon laborers, that very employment does provide a means to human survival for the workers. It puts a roof over the head and bread on the table, as The Making of a Federal Company Town • 113 the saying goes. Simultaneously, and because of this relationship, the industrial landscape—despite the pollution, long hours, poor pay, and health endangerment —gives meaning to the lives of those workers as the source of their livelihood . It is this dichotomous situation that creates a series of unique places out of...