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  • Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916
  • Anne Kelly Knowles (bio)
Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916. By Anne E. Mosher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii+249. $45.

Anne Mosher's fine book examines one of the most important ways that technological change shapes human society: how it makes and remakes the places in which we live and work. As a historical geographer, Mosher brings a particular focus on the landscape to the story of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a steel town in the Kiskiminetas Valley northeast of Pittsburgh. As the first U.S. industrial community designed along gracious lines by Olmsted, Olmsted and Elliot, the country's leading landscape-architecture firm, Vandergrift broke the old company-town mold. It was also remarkable as a company town intended to be a self-governing community of private homeowners rather than renters under the company's thumb. In writing a book about this unusual town, the author sought to discover whether the ideals of its urban designers and its patron, industrialist George G. McMurtry, were actually borne out as Vandergrift became a living, working community, and whether it actually was the workingman's paradise it was claimed to be by local boosters and others who emulated the town's plan.

The most interesting sections of Capital's Utopia are based on Mosher's close reading of historical maps, plans, and correspondence. She extracts the narrative of industrial restructuring from a series of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, whose detailed representation of rolling-mill configuration reveals the transition from puddling-based iron-refining technology during the 1880s to the much larger-scale, tightly integrated production of [End Page 211] steel in open-hearth furnaces during the 1890s. Her analysis of the struggle between the idealistic landscape-architecture firm and McMurtry's cost-conscious company may interest scholars of urban planning more than historians of technology. The outcomes in the built landscape, however, as rendered in town plans and Mosher's excellent descriptions, are central to an understanding of Vandergrift's social divisions and how planned and unplanned residential development eventually made home-ownership possible for most workers.

This latter point is particularly important to Mosher's argument. She writes that "the principles of social order through environmental determinism, home ownership, and self-help" (p. 177) inspired the Apollo Iron and Steel Company to build Vandergrift despite punishing nationwide strikes at iron and steel works during the early 1890s. Rather than trying to control workers overtly by subjugating them to tighter discipline, McMurtry studied the enlightened paternalism of European iron- and steel-makers, several of which had built handsome towns to house workers at major installations. McMurtry gave the European town plans an American twist by anchoring his in the notion of home ownership. Workers who owned their own homes, he reasoned, would become responsible citizens; their loyalty to their home would extend to their employer; and they would be more likely to stay put during hard times, thus giving the company maximum flexibility for deploying labor as needed.

Although Mosher's analysis of how this came to pass is convincing, she overemphasizes the role of environmental determinism. McMurtry and his associates hoped that Vandergrift's physical amenities would promote worker contentment, but the behavioral consequences of home ownership were much more important. Furthermore, the various incarnations of the town's steel plant also retained workers through the owners' constant effort to fight unionization, which enabled the company to survive economic downturns by lowering wages and shifting workers around its various facilities.

Capital's Utopia also leaves one wondering what it was like to live in this place. Mosher conscientiously recounts changes in the occupational and ethnic structure of Vandergrift and its predecessor, Apollo, and notes mildly surprising similarities in the household composition of working families at various levels of the labor hierarchy. But she gives us little sense of how the increased scale of manufacturing affected daily life or workers' well-being. By the turn of the twentieth century, Vandergrift's steel and tin works were among the largest in the country, employing thousands of men in a great variety of occupations. Were different classes equally healthy, well educated, and...

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