Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed An All-American Town into an International Community (review)

A minor kerfuffle arose in late 2009 in Arkansas when libraries in the northwest Arkansas towns of Bentonville and Rogers, which had issued invitations and planned readings and receptions for author Marjorie Rosen, turned around and canceled them swiftly. They cited "political pressure" or the fact that library trustees had finally gotten around to reading—and then objected to—Rosen's book. Many observers saw the long and shadowy arm of the world's largest corporation in these sudden cancellations or at least the symptoms of a culture of fear that infuses many company towns—the fear of upsetting the business upon whose largesse many civic institutions depend. But only in the unreasoning imaginations of these backtracking librarians could Rosen's Boom Town be viewed as another anti-Wal-Mart volume akin to Anthony Bianco's The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of Wal-Mart's Everyday Low Prices is Hurting America (New York: Broadway Business, 2006). Rosen is less interested in the idea of Wal-Mart as an agent for good or evil than as a catalyst for social change in what was, at one time, one of the least ethnically and culturally diverse regions in the U.S., an area once dotted with sundown towns—places where African Americans were forbidden, usually by threat of violence, from residing—and which remains known, even in a religiously and politically conservative state, as a bastion of the far right wing.

Wal-Mart, that very emblem of corporate conservatism, has contributed to the increasing diversity of the region by bringing in talent from across the nation and the globe to its Bentonville headquarters, as well as encouraging its vendors to establish offices in town. Rosen's first chapter recounts the experience of an African American man, Coleman Peterson, who arrived in Bentonville as head of human resources in 1994 shortly before a local Ku Klux Klan rally. She not only captures the experiences of the Peterson family but uses them as a launching pad for exploring the racial history of Bentonville, which diverges from its neighboring cities in that it never went sundown. Rosen also interviewed a few other longstanding black residents, including the man who desegregated Bentonville schools in 1955. Rosen goes on to explore the lives of Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, detailing not only how these respective communities established themselves in Bentonville through the actions of Wal-Mart but also how Wal-Mart has tried to meet the challenges of having such a diverse staff at its headquarters, balancing the corporate desire for uniformity with the many religious and cultural needs of its employees. The author interviewed Terry Coberly, who served as mayor of Bentonville from 1994 to 2006 (a period when the population nearly doubled), as well as a former shopkeeper unable to compete with the local behemoth and a number of elderly residents who recall the days before Wal-Mart came to town.

Much of the book, however, strays outside its apparent subject as Rosen expands her scope to include the nearby towns of Springdale and Rogers. These are places which, like Bentonville, have expanded rapidly in recent years and now include a much more diverse population; though this fact is not directly attributable to the influence of Wal-Mart. Springdale is, after all, the headquarters of another corporate giant, Tyson Foods, which operates hatcheries and facilities all across the region. These have attracted thousands upon thousands of Latinos, not all of them documented, which fact has led to a growing backlash against their presence on the part of average locals and local authorities, the most visible of which is Steve Womack, mayor of Rogers. The need for unskilled labor has also attracted Marshall Islanders, and Springdale has the largest population of Marshall Islanders outside of the Pacific realm; in 2009, the Marshall Islands opened a consulate in the city. Rosen covers this ground and tells these...