Working (and Living) the Company Way

By NANCY F. KOEHN

SEEN through the wide arc of history, ours is an edgy, mistrusting moment. Since the financial crisis two years ago, Americans have shown persistent skepticism about large corporations. According to a Pew Research Center report earlier this year, for example, only 25 percent of those surveyed say big business has a positive impact on how things are going in the country.

Patricia Wall/The New York Times

A new book, “The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy” (Basic Books, $26.95), by Hardy Green, is not likely to restore our flagging faith in big business.

Mr. Green, a former associate editor at BusinessWeek with a Ph.D. in history, has written a sprawling account of the rise and fall of company towns across the last 180 years of industrialization. The book leaves readers with a few flashes of encouragement but more moments of heavy-heartedness about the history of American capitalism. Mr. Green sets out two very different models of company towns. One is the utopian ideal, “backed by companies that promise to share their bounty with workers and their families,” and characterized by ample benefits for workers. At the other extreme is what Mr. Green calls “exploitationville,” a company-created town that operates on the logic that “business exists to make a profit, not to coddle employees.”

Mr. Green sprints — at times breathlessly — through all kinds of company towns, mostly past but some present. He draws his research from a range of historical and current sources. (It includes a quotation from me. Disclaimer: I do not know Mr. Green.) He uses these accounts, in tandem with a clean, engaging voice, to tell story upon story.

The early chapters deal with the development of several utopian company towns, whose creators planned them in part by envisioning what they would not be. For example, the merchant Francis Cabot Lowell, who founded Lowell, Mass., in the 1820s to house his textile company, had visited Manchester, England, in 1811. He was struck by its filth and degradation, what he called the “great corruption of the highest and lowest classes.”

Determined to avoid this outcome, he and his partners recruited young, unmarried women from Massachusetts farms as factory workers, housed them in supervised boardinghouses, provided them with pianos and libraries, and required them to attend church services.

Although on two occasions in the 1830s the mill women organized to protest wage cuts, outside observers found the town and its workers’ lot superior to that of counterparts in Europe.

The chocolate king Milton Hershey began building his factory and model town almost a century later, in 1903. Like Mr. Lowell, he wanted to avoid what he saw as the ill effects of industrial cities. Mr. Hershey oversaw generous worker benefits like medical coverage and a retirement plan. He also acted as a kind of moral policeman, keeping a constant — at times, oppressive — eye on citizens’ behavior. In 1937, members of the young Congress of Industrial Organization staged a sit-down strike at the company plant in protest of union recognition policies by management. The unrest ended four days later, when strikers were forcibly evicted.

The vision of an industrial utopia had been compromised. As Mr. Green writes, “the town was becoming a more mature — and more complicated — place to live.” Still, more than a century after its founding, the town has to a large extent remained a community built on chocolate — and home to Hershey Foods. It also houses the Milton Hershey School for underprivileged children and Hersheypark, the huge amusement complex.

In its middle chapters, the book describes company towns that looked much more like “exploitationvilles” than cities on the hill. Many of these were coal-mining communities, like Lynch, Ky., built in the early 20th century by the U.S. Coal & Coke Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. In coal town after coal town, the daily life of workers was “unremittingly grim,” plagued by dangerous working conditions, low wages, poor housing, filth, poverty and worker indebtedness to the company store, Mr. Green says.

Some companies in the oil, meatpacking and textile industries also built communities designed to minimize costs at the expense of workers, he writes. His accounts of these towns, and of management attempts to stamp out worker demands, are sobering. All too often, this is how market capitalism shakes out for employees and others with little power. But by laying out the history of such exploitation side by side with alternative models, Mr. Green lets us view the main tensions of American business.

When business needs unskilled workers from a labor market with enough supply, he argues, “executives have cared less about progressive relations with communities and employees.” By contrast, he says, managers have leaned toward utopian policies when labor has been scarce and profit margins high.

IN the final chapters, Mr. Green briefly examines modern-day company towns and corporate campuses like the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Google provides its workers a host of services, including meals, massages and “sleep pods.”

“All of this may sound idyllic,” Mr. Green writes, “until you realize that workers need never go home — or stop working.”

For all its detail, the book leaves some questions unanswered. How, for example, do individual managers and workers experience life in these two very different kinds of environments? And what systemic factors, including attitudes outside these company towns, keep a given regime in place?

In spite of the book’s shortcomings, Mr. Green has amassed a collection of important, well-told stories about the contradictions, inequities and possibilities of American capitalism.