The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  As for the town, the Land Co. hired no city planners, merely turning over the layout to engineer A. P. Melton. There would be no curvilinear boulevards or pastoral inspiration in Gary. Instead, Melton plotted the town as an unvarying grid centered on an axis of Broadway—the thoroughfare that ran straight south from the front entrance of the Indiana Steel plant—and the east-west commercial street called Fifth Avenue. The avenues south of Fifth would simply be numbered; the streets running parallel to Broadway would get the names of U.S. presidents and states. The Land Co. built a sewer system sufficient for a city of 200,000 and later would donate land for schools, churches, a library, a hospital, and municipal buildings.

  By June 1906, hundreds of men were at work building the new town. Adjacent to each company’s property, Melton plotted subdivisions for its workers’ homes. The first subdivision, intended for Indiana Steel, consisted of eight hundred acres immediately to the south of the mill site, plotted into 4,000 lots. Streets were graded and paved, concrete sidewalks built, sewers dug, and electric and gas lines installed. Lot-sale agreements stipulated simply that building plans had to be approved by an agent of the Land Co., that houses had to be completed within twelve to eighteen months, and that, with very few exceptions, no liquor could be sold. (Five sites obtained exemptions from this prohibition, Buffington explained, as a safety valve necessary to a large town, since the foreign element “would otherwise be enticed to groggeries of the lowest type.”) But unlike in Vandergrift, this near-laissez-faire approach was not greeted with an explosion of home-building. Instead, within three years only 250 private homes had been constructed.

  Consequently, the Gary Land Co. soon found itself in the home-construction business, erecting around eight hundred homes that rented for anywhere from $42 to $14 per month. Many of these were houses of five to ten rooms, and, as in Vandergrift proper, the rents made them affordable only to executives and the most skilled workers. Beginning in 1909, the company built three hundred apartment houses for workers at American Bridge and more than one hundred single homes for American Sheet and Tin Plate employees.

  It was a departure when the company constructed fifty uniform, wood-frame, four-room houses in a corner of the first subdivision. With rents a bit lower—$12 to $13 per month—less-skilled, lower-paid workers could afford to live there. But fifty units hardly put a dent in the need for inexpensive housing, and in any case, Land Co. executives decided they did not approve of the results and in 1911 tore down the alreadydisheveled structures. The majority of Gary’s 16,000 low-paid immigrant workers had to fend for themselves. Many commuted from Pullman, a twelve-mile round trip.

  Finally, private enterprise stepped in—exhibiting its least attractive attributes. The South Side area beyond U.S. Steel’s property but still within Gary’s incorporated limits beckoned to real estate promoters, including the president of the town board, a pol by the name of Tom Knotts, whose older brother Armanis had organized the original, anonymous land purchase for U.S. Steel. Tom Knotts—who once likened his real estate success to “picking leaves from trees”—ensured that land lying to the south would soar in value by seeing to it that the town’s streetcar franchise went to an ally. The Gary and Interurban Railway Co. went on to build a Broadway-centered, north-south line, not the Fifth Avenue- oriented, east-west line the Land Co. preferred. Then, Knotts and others built hundreds of South Side boardinghouses and cheap frame houses for the immigrant workers. The results were slums, given that there were no restrictions on lot sizes and no codes requiring running water, toilets, or sewers. Typical were the one hundred-foot-by-eighteen-foot shacks split up into two-room units, each of which rented for $6 to $9 per month. And unlike Vandergrift and the subdivisions of the Gary Land Co., the South Side had no limitations on drinking establishments. By 1908, there were eighty-seven saloons on Broadway alone. An infamous area known as “the Patch” emerged just south of the Wabash Railroad tracks, which defined one edge of the Land Co.’s holdings. By 1911, Gary featured one saloon for every eighty-eight citizens; in Chicago working-class wards, the ratio was 1 to 231.11

  Kirk Boott, the great potentate of the early days of Lowell, Massachusetts.

  Lowell’s Boott Mills in the late 1800s.

  The Illinois National Guard assembling before the Arcade Building in Pullman during the great railroad strike of 1894.

  George M. Pullman, head of the Pullman Palace Car company, felt his model town would have an “ennobling and refining” effect on his workers.

  Chocolate magnate Milton M. Hershey in 1927 with one of the orphan boys from the Hershey Industrial School.

  Hershey workers in 1937 producing one of the company’s signature products, Hershey’s Kisses.

  Corning Inc.’s current headquarters in the town of Corning, New York, incorporates a decades-old tower that’s emblazoned with the image of Little Joe the lightbulb glassblower.

  Founded in 1912, Jenkins, Kentucky, was one of the dozens of coal-mining towns that sprang up across Appalachia.

  At the coal face, a miner prepares a fuse and charge of explosive powder to dislodge a layer of coal.

  Into the twentieth century, companies employed Pinkerton guards to help break strikes, as they are doing here during an 1880s coal strike in Ohio’s Hocking Valley.

  In the early 1900s, laborers at Cannon’s Cabarrus Cotton Mill in Concord included child workers as young as eight years of age.

  Charles Cannon, president of Cannon Mills, ruled the town of Kannapolis, North Carolina, from the early 1920s until his death in 1971.

  A sign on Kannapolis’s south main street and another atop Cannon Mills’ works proclaimed the company as the world’s largest maker of towels.

  The use of labor-saving machinery across the South’s textile belt doomed rival producers in New England and meant much of the work was simple enough to be performed by children. This photo was taken in 1908.

  As head of U.S. Steel, Elbert H. Gary presided over a vast expansion of the company’s productive facilities and construction of the Indiana town that bore his name.

  The intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, here under construction in 1907, would become the central axis around which company engineers plotted Gary, Indiana.

  Frank Phillips, a former barber and bond trader, built Phillips Petroleum into a vertically integrated, $130 million company by 1925.

  Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was the site of several major oil strikes in the early 1900s, but the town also became a major administrative center for Phillips and other oil companies.

  Henry J. Kaiser was a pioneer of welfare capitalism, offering twenty-four-hour childcare, workplace-safety programs, and comprehensive medical care to his World War II shipyard workers.

  The “liberty ship”

  SS George Washington Carver just prior to its launch in 1943.

  A woman welder at the Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, California, in 1943.

  The so-called “hillbilly girls” who worked at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 facility during World War II had no idea that they were producing U-235 for use in an atomic bomb.

  Like other company towns discussed, Oak Ridge is today a tourist destination complete with souvenir postcards.

  Political struggle between local politicians and corporate interests continued for several years. The 1909 mayoral election pitted Knotts against the Land Co.’s candidate, Republican John A. Brennan. The town’s only newspaper, the Gary Daily Tribune, supported Brennan, but Knotts created another paper to support his candidacy, the Evening Post. Affairs quickly turned messy: The county’s Republican sheriff arrested Knotts on a charge that he had defamed Brennan. There were near riots as Republicans brought in dozens of immigrants to cast votes for the GOP. Knotts won by seventy-one votes, but his triumph was short-lived. The Republican-controlled Lake County government harassed Knotts continuously, filing fourteen charges against him, ranging from embezzlement to perjury and election fraud. No trial ever took place, but the charges damaged his reputation. Then in 1913, he
was opposed by Citizens Party candidate Roswell O. Johnson, whose backers included independents, Bull Moose progressives, unhappy Democrats—and U.S. Steel. Spies observed Democratic rallies, and company foremen punished workers who attended them while ushering right-voting employees to the polls. Immigrants, who played little political role elsewhere, were eligible to vote in Indiana shortly after they declared an intention to become U.S. citizens—and ethnic bosses or foremen herded them to the polls. Johnson won by 1,516 votes. Republicans would dominate city politics from that time into the 1930s.12

  By 1909, Gary had 12,000 inhabitants, residences valued at $2 million total, fifteen miles of paved streets, two banks, six hotels, three daily newspapers, two schools, ten church denominations, and many stores and shops. It had only two parks, neither with any playground or recreational facilities and one of which was dominated by a large water tower. Thousands of men were already at work making steel.

  To attract workers, the corporation had advertised Gary’s progress in newspapers across the United States and Europe, and real estate interests circulated promotional pamphlets. (“Come to Gary,” urged one Land Co. newspaper advertisement: “Become a factor in the building of this model city. Own your own home in Gary.”) The foreign publicity was particularly effective, pulling large numbers from twenty-two countries including especially Ireland, Croatia, and Serbia: Before Gary was three years old, 50 percent of its population was foreign-born. U.S.-born professionals including teachers, lawyers, newspapermen, architects, and would-be merchants came, too, in search of adventure and a new start. By 1914, Gary’s citizenry had more than quadrupled to 50,000. For all of its shortcomings, the town’s schools were up to the standards of most progressive cities, according to Graham Taylor. What’s more, the city featured such impressive institutions as a $65,000 Carnegie-donated library and an elaborate YMCA constructed with a $250,000 personal gift from Judge Gary.13

  The city of Gary was only four years old when U.S. Steel began building another city, this one in the South. Fairfield, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, would be a manufacturing hub for the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co., American Steel and Wire, and other corporation subsidiaries. Once again, U.S. Steel shied away from residential construction and ownership, this time not even generating a separate land company to manage development. Instead, in Fairfield the company turned over these tasks to a private real estate firm that founded the Corey Land Co., named after the town’s first appellation. Here, though, as in Vandergrift but not in Gary, Corey Land hired an expert landscape architect to develop an overall plan.

  It was another Bostonian, George H. Miller, who developed four main residential zones for Fairfield. Dwellings ranged from double three-room bungalows to two-story homes with baths and electricity. These were a far cry from the simple wood-frame dwellings in Kannapolis and even farther from the coal-town shacks. There was no grid in Fairfield—instead, streets adhered to the meandering local topography.

  Yet there was one respect in which Fairfield adhered to southern custom: the town was closed to African Americans. Those who purchased lots encountered restrictions that specified that the “lot shall be used by white persons only.” That didn’t mean that the industrial firms in Fairfield employed only whites—as ever, the sweatiest, most punishing labor was reserved for blacks. Soon a cluster of Negro shanties emerged just over the Fairfield city line. 14

  A score of such medium-size steel towns were scattered across the industrial heartland. Where U.S. Steel had Gary, Fairfield, and more, Bethlehem Steel had works at Steelton, Pennsylvania; Lackawanna, New York; and Sparrows Point, Maryland. Jones & Laughlin made steel at Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (which was run through the 1920s much like a coal company town by plant superintendent Tom Girdler); Inland Steel, at Indiana Harbor, Indiana; Colorado Fuel and Iron, at Pueblo, Colorado; and Weirton Steel, at Weirton, West Virginia (another virtual dictatorship, presided over by private company police). Such one-industry communities were home to 60 percent of U.S. steelworkers. 15

  Sparrows Point provides a noteworthy contrast to Gary. The town and mill, located on a peninsula at the confluence of the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore Harbor, were projects of the Pennsylvania Steel Co., a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad. While Midwestern plants depended upon iron ore from the Mesabi Range and the western United States, Pennsylvania Steel got ore from Cuba, and later from South America. Company executives figured that meant an Atlantic shore location made more economic sense. Development moved quickly: In the 1880s, company point man Frederick Wood traveled to Cuba to contract for the ore, scouted out potential sites for the U.S. works, and recommended the Maryland location. The company quickly and quietly acquired the land for $57,900. Before a stone was laid, Luther Bent, president of the steel company, came to an agreement with Maryland’s Democratic machine politicians that Pennsylvania Steel would have absolute political control over Sparrows Point—everything from hiring teachers to controlling the police. In 1891, Bent signed papers incorporating the Maryland Steel Co. of Baltimore County. He named Wood as president of the new enterprise and his brother Rufus as general agent in charge of town affairs.

  Interestingly enough, the Woods were born in Lowell, Massachusetts, sons of a Boott Mills weaving-room foreman, and they brought a Boott-like sense of social hierarchy with them to Maryland. After laying out and constructing Sparrows Point on a grid of rectangular blocks, with streets named simply for letters of the alphabet, the company allocated houses according to one’s place in the corporate pyramid. Avenues A through D, closest to the water, were for executives; Avenues E through F were for foremen and skilled workers; and remaining lettered streets were for workers of lesser rank. Homes became smaller and neighborhoods denser as the alphabet progressed.

  The company owned all buildings directly and rented them out to employees, meaning that, of course, tenants had to leave if they lost or gave up their jobs. The houses were substantial and inexpensive, renting for between $5.50 and $12 a month. Once again, of course, the company’s primary housing concern was for managers and skilled workers: On the far north side of the peninsula was a group of shanties for unmarried immigrants and single black men—six-room affairs housing up to four men per room, with no running water, and privies out back.

  There were two schoolhouses in town, one for whites and another for blacks. Seven churches were present on land rented from the company for $1 per year, and no alcohol was allowed in the town.

  Although many of the residences in Sparrows Point were above average for a company town, there were similarities to coal-mining communities. Rents, for example, were deducted from pay. There were no independent stores in Sparrows Point, only a company store where credit was extended in the form of scrip. Company executives got stock in the store and bonuses based on its earnings, which ran between 10 percent and 12 percent a year.

  And in what was standard practice in steel facilities, the plant ran long hours: The day shift was eleven hours, followed by a thirteen- or fourteen-hour night shift and a twenty-four-hour swing shift on Sunday. (Every two weeks, the shifts reversed so that those working days went onto nights and vice versa; on the day of the shift turn, half of the workers had to pull a twenty-four-hour stint.) There were no vacations, and two unpaid holidays per year. The Sparrows Point facility was a self-declared open shop—no union allowed.

  By 1910, 4,000 men were employed there, 75 percent in the works and the rest in the shipyard. It had already become the largest employer in Maryland. But following a drop in global sales of rails, and drastic cuts in the workforce, the company sold out to Bethlehem Steel in 1916. Bethlehem president Charles M. Schwab, who’d come to that company only a year after resigning from U.S. Steel, saw Britain, France, and Russia as profitable wartime clients and courted them even when the United States was supposed to be a neutral power. Munitions and armor-plate sales abroad allowed Schwab to transform Sparrows Point into a much larger works, employing 12,500 men at its peak.

  Wartime prod
uction demands, it turned out, weren’t altogether to the liking of steel executives. President Woodrow Wilson’s National War Labor Board sought a détente with organized labor and began proceedings against Bethlehem Steel, forbidding it from blocking union activities and requiring the organization of shop committees. In response, the company began an employee-representation plan much like the one at Colorado Fuel and Iron. Employees elected representatives who met annually with top management; elected plant committees met six times a year to discuss such issues as transportation, the company bonus system, safety, housing, and grievances. Management, however, could simply terminate any grievance.