The Company Town (36 page)

Despite numerous efforts at conciliation involving various elected officials, clergy, and others, the strike stretched on for eight years. In 1957, a U.S. Senate committee investigated what had become the country's longest-running labor dispute. Before that committee and elsewhere, company officials were open about their thinking. Chief counsel Lyman Conger—balding, thin, and bespectacled, the very picture of a tightwad—said he believed that the union was “trying to overthrow all industry, not just the Kohler company, but all industry.” Herbert V. Kohler, who was now the company's president, accused the union of promoting “class hatred” and serving “the Marxian doctrine.”

Over the years, the company consistently accused “outsiders” of stirring up the labor discontent. In response to the union boycott, Herbert Kohler maintained a busy schedule of speaking to business groups across the country. Before a Salt Lake City audience, the portly, Teutonic executive maintained that UAW President Walter Reuther was “a Moscow-trained socialist.” (Reuther was in fact a staunch anticommunist.) Kohler offered many complaints about the union, especially union “violence.” But the true sticking point seemed to be what he saw as the union's attempt to usurp management rights in such matters as shop rules, merit pay, subcontracting of work, and working hours.
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The walkout finally ended thanks to the 1960 intervention of the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled it an “unfair labor practice strike” and said that by law all strikers must be restored to their jobs. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld that ruling, and in 1965 the company agreed to pay $4.5 million in back wages and pension money to settle all unfair labor practice charges. Several one-year contracts were subsequently negotiated with the UAW.
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So, what happened over subsequent years to turn Kohler Village from a maelstrom of class warfare into a bliss-inducing locus of heated-rock massages and gourmet food?

I tried to ask, but the company said its current CEO was unavailable for comment. It could just be that the change was motivated by golf—and, perhaps, modern marketing.

By the early 1970s, the older generation of Kohler corporate leaders was gone from the scene. Herbert V. Kohler Sr. had died in 1969, and in 1972, thirty-three-year-old Herbert V. Kohler Jr. became company chairman and chief executive. In time, Junior would establish a reputation as a world-class golf nut. He would develop four primo golf courses in Wisconsin and purchase two shrines, the Duke's Course and the Old Course Hotel, in the birthplace and mecca of the sport, St. Andrews, Scotland. In 2006, the
Wall Street Journal
would call such endeavors “vanity projects,” suggesting that they made no economic sense. In addition to Herb Kohler, other “golf-bewitched billionaires,” according to the
Journal
, included Reebok International founder Paul Fireman and investor Charles Schwab, each of whom had constructed on the choicest bits of real estate, golf links that were for duffers the ne plus ultra.

But another line of argument, promoted in the same publication, suggested that such courses were simply the shrewdest kind of marketing. Along with such brands as Viking stove and Cuisinart kitchen appliances, Kohler had chosen to generate a greater awareness of its brands via oases aimed at tourists. Just as Viking had constructed a posh hotel near its Mississippi headquarters—complete with a mud-bath- and massage-ready spa—Kohler's St. Andrews and Wisconsin hotels and golf courses were “a very big part of its image,” in the terms of a company spokeswoman. The Old Course Hotel—no landmark-status restrictions there,
it seems—would soon sport Kohler faucets and bathroom fixtures, Ann Sacks tiles (another company-owned brand), and Baker Furniture (ditto). In the Wisconsin town, one could tour the factory and the company Design Center, and then repair to the links to get in at least nine holes, all in advance of happy hour.
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If Kohler Co.'s unusual grab-bag of enterprises—resorts, bath fixtures, furniture, small engines, and generators—strikes some as weird . . . well, no matter. Kohler is virtually a privately held company, thanks to a 1998 arrangement that placed control of voting shares in a family-owned trust and issued nonvoting stock to other shareholders.
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Moreover, the evolution of the company and its town represents not so much a repudiation of America's industrial past as an adjustment to modern economic realities. The trend of deindustrialization is well-advanced in the United States, having first been described in the late 1970s. Americans now live in a postindustrial society, where industrial work has come to seem a bit quaint, even campy. Kohler factory tours are handled by old-timers demonstrating hallowed verities—as when a quality-control inspector strikes finished toilets with a mallet, seeking that crystal-goblet-like sound that ensures it to be free of defects.

That same adjustment to modern economics can be found in many other places. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, there are no tours of the chocolate-making plant (tourists might bring germs in with them, it seems). But visitors can still take a twelve-minute ride through a simulated chocolate factory—Hershey's Chocolate World—and absorb just how those chocolate Kisses and Hershey bars are made. Once that excursion is at an end, there is—after a store where visitors are welcome to buy as much candy as they'd like—HersheyPark, the 110-acre Disneyland-like playground that offers rides, live entertainment, and “photo opps with HERSHEY'S Product Characters.” There's an eleven-acre zoo, botanical gardens, four golf courses, and more. Hershey also bridges the gap between fun sites and more education-oriented locations: The Hershey Museum offers a glimpse of the company's history, and Hershey Community Archives provide scholars with a range of historical materials including photographs, diaries, and oral-history interviews with company veterans.
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Lowell, Massachusetts, may be the apotheosis of the historic company town as educational experience. The Lowell National Historical Park, operated by the U.S. National Park Service, gives visitors a glimpse of cotton-mill labor: In a weave room in the former Boott Cotton Mills, workers show off operating looms. As protection against the shattering noise, guests are handed earplugs as they enter the area. A nearby boardinghouse exhibit demonstrates what it was like to be a Lowell mill girl in the 1840s—what they ate, where they slept, and how they spent their working lives and free time. There's also a working water wheel/turbine and boat tours on the canals and river. The national park features numerous music and arts festivals, youth programs, a day camp, and a summer music series with such performers as Los Lobos and Hot Tuna. The New England Quilt Museum has its own quilt festival. The American Textile History Museum spotlights the art, science, and history of textiles. And there are numerous scholarly and historical enterprises on the fringes of the national park, including the Center for Lowell History and the Tsongas Industrial History Center, which offers resources to public schools.

As a good stopover point that's more than halfway between New York City and Niagara Falls, Corning, New York, welcomes thousands of tourists each year. The world-class Corning Museum of Glass features stunning art-glass displays, glassblowing demonstrations, historical exhibits on how the company came to make such products as Corningware and fiberglass, and workshops in which kids get to construct their own vitreous souvenirs. On downtown Market Street a short ride away, there's the Gaffer District with various shops, restaurants, and outdoor concerts including seasonal harvest and tree-lighting festivals. The town also is home to the Rockwell Museum of Western Art and a Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament, and it's just a hop to the Finger Lakes wineries and Watkins Glen car racing.

Not even remote coal towns are exempt from makeovers for the tourist trade. In Colorado, where miners once exchanged rifle fire with vigilantes and militiamen, skiers now schuss down the slopes. Crested Butte, once home to silver and coal mines, features a resort with sixteen ski lifts capable of handling more than 20,000 people per hour. There are 121 trails, a superpipe for snowboard daredevils, a kids' park, and a
variety of jumps and intermediate runs. Vacation home developments have surged in the Purgatoire Valley near Trinidad, site of the 1913 mass labor march that preceded the events in Ludlow.

And perhaps the most unlikely tourist traps of all exist at the former Manhattan Project towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, where visitors are allowed to examine no-longer-used bomb-making facilities, now designated as National Historic Landmarks. In Oak Ridge, visitors get to view Y-12 and K-25, and at X-10 they see an actual graphite reactor and its control room. The Museum of Science and Energy features “atom-smasher” demonstrations. Hanford, with its five “cocooned” nuclear reactors and radioactive-waste deposits, is one of the most toxic sites on the planet. Nevertheless, the Energy Department conducts tours there of the B Reactor, described by the
New York Times
as a “three-story square of iron, steel and Masonite housed in a block of graphite.” Visitors get to inspect the control room as the tour guide explains why the remote site was chosen for the Manhattan Project and how plutonium was produced. After the tour, Hanford visitors can take in the splendors of the adjacent Columbia River and consider the abundant flora and fauna in the surrounding Hanford Reach National Monument. Once again, the area sports wineries and golf courses to complement its warm climate.
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One final—for now—development merits observation: the burgeoning of remote outposts of new high-tech industries. Among these are Google's data centers across the U.S., including its Project 02 on the Columbia River in Oregon, and the solar-energy installations in the Southwestern deserts. But can these be anything like company “towns” if the residents are primarily machines tended by a few humans?

Every one of Google's data centers costs the company around $600 million, but only two hundred human attendants are necessary to mind the generally fail-safe equipment. The huge center near The Dalles, Oregon, consists of three mammoth, low-slung buildings on thirty acres, housing tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks. All this
computing power generates lots of heat—and so large rooftop cooling systems are necessary. Also within the fenced perimeter are an administration building, an electrical substation, and a “transient employee dormitory building.”

As negotiations to make arrangements proceeded during 2005, Google insisted upon secrecy to keep competitors Microsoft and Yahoo in the dark, making local officials sign confidentiality agreements. But when Google went public with its $1.87 million land purchase that year, the natives waxed enthusiastic about the millions of dollars in investment they saw forthcoming, along with the fifty to one hundred jobs that would be created, each paying an average of $60,000. Fifty to one hundred jobs from deep-pocketed Google—that's all? In the United States today, people take what they can get.

A big draw for Google: plentiful and cheap electricity, supplied by Bonneville Power's hydroelectric and nuclear-power facilities. Google negotiated a guarantee of the electricity along with tax exemptions and a city-built fiber-optic network. Manpower was not a major concern.
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Google is not alone in building such installations. Microsoft and Yahoo also have data centers in the Columbia River region, near Quincy, Washington. Moreover, data centers are sprouting across the globe—in Siberia and Ireland (Microsoft) and in China (AT&T). For all of these companies, the main attraction is cheap power.
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Solar-energy outfits are also on the edge of a building boom, particularly in such remote areas as the deserts of the American Southwest where sunlight is plentiful. Solar-thermal company Stirling Energy Systems has numerous projects afoot, including plans to build the “world's largest solar energy generating plant” on 6,500 acres in California's Imperial Valley desert. The facility would include 30,000 solar-energy concentrators—each one composed of a mirrored dish forty feet in diameter, an engine that's driven by the heat from the dish, and an electric generator powered by the engine. Far from a pipe dream, the company already has agreements to supply power to San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. A different technology—perhaps the one most familiar to most Americans—uses photovoltaic panels. Largely associated with private-home-rooftop applications, SunPower Corp. and OptiSolar are now employing
the panels in large projects, including two big plants announced in 2008, both in San Luis Obispo County, California.
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With twenty-five states so far having mandated a greater use of “green power”—California now requires that 33 percent of its electricity come from renewable sources by 2020—solar, wind, and wave technologies could play a big role in the country's energy future, provided the companies can get costs low enough to compete with coal-fired plants.
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