The Company Town (2 page)

At around the same time, companies began erecting such “industrial satellite towns” as Firestone Park, Ohio (Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.), Alcoa, Tennessee (aluminum producer Alcoa), and Kohler Village, Wisconsin (plumbing-fixture maker Kohler Co.). Such eminent figures as planner Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and architect Irving Gill promoted modernist aesthetics in Torrance, California. But ultimately, the successful model would emulate Britain's carefully planned garden cities, with
their wide, attractive boulevards and balance of space devoted to park-land, residences, and industry. Evoking preindustrial villages, such settlements were very different from the grimly functional early company towns with their strict gridiron of streets and rows of cookie-cutter housing. In general, corporations in this period made a major effort to house their employees: By 1916, a thousand companies were providing housing for 60,000 employees—roughly 3 percent of the U.S. population.
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In the 1930s, government began to play an ever greater role in housing development, and New Deal figures questioned the propriety of company towns, particularly in the southern textile belt, running from North Carolina down into Georgia. Nevertheless, company-built utopias continued to sprout—notably during the 1940s, when wartime demand led Henry J. Kaiser to transform the bayside village of Richmond, California, into a major shipbuilding area. Kaiser became a pioneer in providing inexpensive, universal health care to his workers with a program that was the forerunner of today's vast Kaiser Permanente health plan.

Today, the ideal lives on in such model communities as Columbus, Indiana—home of Cummins Engine and “a veritable museum of modern architecture,” according to
Smithsonian Magazine
—and Corning, New York—home base of the global high-tech corporation Corning Inc. Such companies openly argue for doing well by doing good—and while a bit of this is intended as public relations and corporate branding, it's hard to deny that there is also an element of genuine good-spiritedness.

Most recently, the utopian company town has taken a new form—that of the corporate campus. Both Pepsico's Purchase, New York, campus and the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, are company town- like in that most all human needs are provided for: gourmet food, barber shops, laundry service, exercise facilities, and even nap rooms at Google. This velvet-glove approach is not without its downside, captured in Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel,
Microserfs
, in which snack-addicted, servile geeks willingly labor as twenty-four-hour-a-day vassals of Microsoft seigneur Bill Gates. (One worker rhapsodizes: “Bill is wise. Bill is kind. Bill is benevolent. Bill, Be My Friend . . . Please!”) Employees need never leave such a cosseting environment—or ever truly end a working day.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”
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“
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hoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton,” observed British historian E. J. Hobsbawm.
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And in the United States, at least in the early going, whoever said cotton mills said water power.

Postrevolutionary America had no shortage of rivers ripe for industrial exploitation. The first to be utilized for textile production were in Rhode Island, beginning in the 1790s. One observer found: “The manufacturing operations of the United States are carried out in little hamlets, which often appear to spring up in the bosom of some forest, around the water fall which serves to turn the mill wheel.”
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Americans were determined to go their own way in creating models for industry and society, just as they had created their own political system. But there were two powerful British influences.

First, the Rhode Island mills employed technology appropriated from the Brits by this country's most famous intellectual-property pirate, Samuel Slater. Apprenticed as a lad in England to the firm of Arkwright and Strutt and rising to the rank of overseer, Slater made a careful study of that company's innovative equipment. Then, in 1789, he boarded a ship for America—he concealed his textile experience from the ever-watchful British port officials and traveled in the guise of a simple country fellow. Once in the United States, Slater gained employment at the mercantile firm of Almy and Brown, where he and his assistant built a working water frame, similar to the one that spun yarn in the Arkwright factory. Establishing the template for Rhode Island mills, Slater's first operation was on a small scale, a factory in a rented building next to the Blackstone River at Pawtucket. His workforce: seven boys and two girls, ages seven to twelve.
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Another key British influence was negative. The creators of the U.S. industry repeatedly invoked images of the foreign city that embodied all they wished to avoid: Manchester, England.

Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant visiting Britain in 1811, wrote to a friend that “we found the manufacturing towns very dirty” and later remarked on “the great corruption of the highest and lowest classes, and the great number of beggars and thieves.”
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Manchester drew numerous visitors, some perhaps seeking a squalor-induced frisson like what draws today's tourists to New York and Mumbai. Others, such as Friedrich Engels—whose descriptions written a few years after Lowell's still have the power to startle and repel—had reform in mind. To Engels, the city seemed to be “an outgrowth of accident” rather than the result of any plan. Amid the “knotted chaos of houses,” he found himself repeatedly subjected to “filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health.” Engels provides his readers with a tour of various working-class neighborhoods in the city. His conclusion: “In such dwellings, only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.”
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Manchester's size multiplied tenfold between 1760 and 1830, by which time it housed 180,000 citizens. Aside from the slums, few could help noting the “hundreds of five- and six-storied factories, each with a towering chimney by its side, which exhales black coal vapour.”
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Another report described “an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the whole place.”
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None of this was right for the New World, concluded the founders of America's textile industry.

New England workers, its magnates decreed, would be youth drawn from rural soil—borrowed for a short time from their pastoral lives, not destined to become a permanent and degraded proletariat. By 1815 there were 170 small-scale factories in Providence alone. Hundreds more would sprout in the 1820s and '30s. The typical southern New England mill village—Slatersville (Rhode Island), Phoenixville (Connecticut), or Ware Village (Massachusetts), for example—contained only one mill employing one hundred or fewer workers, primarily children, and these hands and their managers probably supplemented their factory work with agricultural labor.
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But more ambitious capitalists saw that larger scale enterprise could mean greater profits—without requiring the immiseration of the worker. Unlike Manchester, larger developments could be bright and airy, marked by stately brick factories and dormitories built alongside sturdy and inspiring churches. Nor would the skies be dark—America, which had an ample supply of coal, as yet lacked the transportation network necessary to bring it to the East Coast. Of necessity, New England's mills would run on the ultimate renewable resource: kinetic energy from falling water.

Even a less-than-torrential river might do. The group of Boston capitalists who became known as the Boston Associates demonstrated this by building a fully integrated factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, its water wheel and machinery driven by the gently rolling Charles River. All steps of production, from “bale to bolt,” could be carried out at the Boston Manufacturing Co.'s facility, avoiding the inefficiencies of the Rhode Island “putting out system,” in which storekeepers arranged “outwork” on cottage industry handlooms. Waltham's labor force consisted of young women fresh from the farm, housed in company boardinghouses, and the superintendent's mansion was close by.

Despite these differences in scale and organization, the Waltham mill-works shared one striking similarity with Rhode Island: intellectual piracy. It was with an eye to constructing an American textile industry that Lowell made his pilgrimage to Manchester, where he studied the machinery. Britain prohibited the export of its manufacturing technology and kept a sharp lookout for any sketches or representations of it. Twice the authorities searched Lowell's luggage—but he had strong powers of memorization. By 1814, he and Massachusetts mechanic Paul Moody had produced a version of the Manchester power looms for Waltham.
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The three Boston capitalists behind the Waltham development were Lowell, Nathan Appleton, another wealthy merchant, and Appleton's brother-in-law, Patrick Tracy Jackson, who would become the on-site superintendent. In contrast to many other mills, which were owned by individuals, this and the later enterprises of the Boston Associates were structured as limited-liability corporations. Lowell and Jackson put up the greater part of the outfit's initial capitalization of $400,000. According to Appleton, Lowell (who died in 1817) was “the informing soul, which gave direction to the whole proceeding.”
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Although U.S. textiles prospered during the War of 1812 embargo, the peace of 1815 saw the return of foreign products to the U.S. market, proving ruinous to many Rhode Island manufacturers. But the Waltham operation prospered, thanks to the productivity of its power looms. By 1820, three mills were operating at Waltham, producing a half-million yards of cloth. Within its first seven years—by 1819—the operation earned back its initial capitalization. Dividends averaged over 19 percent a year between 1817 and 1821 and rose to more than 27 percent in 1822.

The third mill exhausted the water power available at Waltham. In search of another place where a similar operation could be erected, Appleton traveled to New Hampshire, where he inspected a falls on the Souhegan River. Shortly thereafter, he learned through Moody of a site at East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, with a falls of thirty feet on the Merrimack River.

In November 1821, with a light snow covering the ground, Appleton, Jackson, Moody, and three others traveled to that sparsely settled location, where no more than a dozen houses stood. But there was some infrastructure development, particularly two canals: the Pawtucket,
which circumvented the falls to make the river navigable, and the Middlesex, through which horse-drawn barges pulled freight down to the Mystic River and Boston beyond. The visitors “perambulated the grounds and scanned the capabilities of the place,” as Appleton recalled. They quickly arranged for a quiet purchase of the available, surrounding lands and of the company that owned the canals, the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals. They also immediately petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for an act of incorporation in the name of the Merrimack Manufacturing Co., with shares held by Appleton, Jackson, Moody (rewarded for “his agency in the discovery” but also key to the enterprise due to his proven mechanical ability), and John Boott and his brother Kirk, who was appointed treasurer, the title the Associates gave those who functioned as chief executive officers, with an annual salary of $3,000. The company's initial capitalization of $600,000 eclipsed that of Waltham.
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Such was the beginning of America's first large-scale planned industrial community: Lowell, Massachusetts.

The America in which Appleton, Jackson, and the others lived was, of course, only a few decades removed from revolution and the invention of a new political culture and set of political institutions. Questions of economics and development were very much on the national agenda as Americans grappled with just what sort of society they hoped to construct.