The Company Town

by Hardy Green

  2 Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: A Story of Steel (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1925), pp. 28-113, 150; Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 397-404, 445-447; Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 109-111.

  3 Taylor, Satellite Cities, p. 10; Isaac James Quillen, Industrial City: A History of Gary Indiana to 1929 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), p. 175.

  4 William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Times Books, 1992), pp. 33-36; Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, pp. 68-69.

  5 Tom Bell, Out of This Furnace (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), pp. 122-123.

  6 Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead 1880-1892 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), pp.12-43; Serrin, Homestead, pp. 66-95.

  7 Anne E. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania 1855-1916 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 64-95, 113-123.

  8 Buffington, “Making Cities for Workingmen,” p.16.

  9 Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, pp. 110-112, 141-149; Brody, Steelworkers in America , pp. 67, 173-174.

  10 Buffington, “Making Cities for Workingmen,” p. 15; Raymond A. Mohl and Neil Betten, Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1950 (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 12-14; Taylor, Satellite Cities, pp. 169-171, 188-189.

  11 Mohl and Betten, Steel City, pp. 15-23; Taylor, Satellite Cities, pp. 17, 184- 195, 207; James B. Lane, City of the Century: A History of Gary, Indiana (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 43-44; Buffington, “Making Cities for Workingmen,” p. 17; Quillen, Industrial City, pp. 98-102, 117-119, 125-128, 145.

  12 Lane, City of the Century, pp. 44-45, 47; Brody, Steelworkers in America, note, p. 124.

  13 Taylor, Satellite Cities, pp. 165-166, 217-229; Quillen, pp. 152-163; advertisement reproduced in Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, p. 44.

  14 Taylor, Satellite Cities, pp. 237-243, 248-251.

  15 Brody, Steelworkers in America, p. 112; Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), p. 475.

  16 Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point: Making Steel—the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), pp. 10, 22-34, 41-79, 87-115, 140-154; Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 208-213.

  17 Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism 1880-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 28-29, 77.

  18 Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 25, 89, 154; Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, p. 83; Reutter, Sparrows Point, pp. 140-142.

  19 Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 86, 96-111, 149, 162-177.

  20 Ibid., pp. 69, 75, 184, 197, 201; Quillen, Industrial City, p. 266.

  21 Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 191-193, 208-213, 226-229; Quillen, Industrial City, pp. 271-272.

  22 Mohl and Betten, Steel City, pp. 31-42; Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 252, 258-262; Harvey O’Connor, Steel-Dictator (New York: John Day Co., 1935), pp. 102-103; Serrin, Homestead, pp. 149-156.

  23 Quillen, Industrial City, pp. 388-395; Edward Greer, Big Steel: Black Politics and Corporate Power in Gary, Indiana (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 81-82.

  24 Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 270-274; O’Connor, Steel-Dictator, pp. 105-114.

  25 Mohl and Betten, Steel City, pp. 6, 28; Brody, Steelworkers in America, pp. 266-267; Quillen, Industrial City, pp. 375-418.

  26 Quillen, Industrial City, pp. 172, 462-489; Greer, Big Steel: Black Politics and Corporate Power, pp. 69, 83.

  27 Warren, Big Steel, pp. 145-160, 166-167; O’Connor, Steel-Dictator, pp. 220- 224; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 458-474.

  28 Warren, Big Steel, pp. 193-195, 223; Reutter, Sparrows Point, p. 397.

  29 Greer, Big Steel: Black Politics and Corporate Power, pp. 86-88, 138; Serrin, Homestead, pp. 219-222; Mohl and Betten, Steel City, pp. 55-70. On Gary’s innovative public education program see Randolph Bourne, The Gary Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916).

  30 Sandra L. Barnes, The Cost of Being Poor: A Comparative Study of Life in Poor Neighborhoods in Gary, Indiana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 41; “Dead End Streets,” The Guardian, August 27, 1996, p. 22; Monica Davey, “City’s Bad Luck Takes Another Spin,” New York Times, November 30, 2003, p. 1; “Blueprint: Gary Indiana,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2008, p. C12; U.S. Steel 2007 Annual Report and Form 10-K at www.uss.com/corp/proxy/documents/2007-annual-report.pdf.

  31 Warren, Big Steel, pp. xvii, 1-2.

  Chapter 6: On the Road to the Consumer Economy

  1 Edward Chase Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), p. 271; Lawrence B. Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 3; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929), pp. 81, 153; Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: the Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” in Glickman, Consumer Society in American History, pp. 147-148.

  2 Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (London: Macmillan Co., 1907), pp. 14-16.

  3 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 195 and passim.

  4 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 66-79; Mody C. Boatright and William A. Owens, Tales from the Derrick Floor: A People’s History of the Oil Industry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 60-62; Diana Davids Olien and Roger M. Olien, Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895-1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 57- 67, 84; Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien, Oil Booms: Social Change in Five Texas Towns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 6-9, 22-25, 45.

  5 Robert M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien, Life In the Oil Fields (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 2-6, 108-122; Olien and Olien, Oil in Texas, pp. 118-122, 138-147, 206; Olien and Olien, Oil Booms, pp. 46-48, 133-139.

  6 Olien and Olien, Oil in Texas, pp. 88-91, 145.

  7 Michael Wallis, Oil Man: The Story of Frank Phillips and the Birth of Phillips Petroleum (New York: Doubleday, 1988), pp. 27, 47-48, 61-76, 103, 161.

  8 Ibid., pp. 90, 123-135, 184-191, 222-253, 295, 388, 439-443.

  9 Joe Williams, Bartlesville: Remembrances of Times Past, Reflections of Today (Bartlesville, Oklahoma: TRW Reda Pump Division, 1978); “Pickens Is Target of Numerous Barbs in Oklahoma Town,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 1984, p. 1; Francis C. Brown III, “Dear Mr. Pickens: Please Send Me Lots of Money, (Signed) A Pen Pal,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1985, p. 1; Caleb Solomon, “Lingering Oil Shock: Takeover Raids Leave Phillips Employees Fearing New Assaults,” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 1989, p. 1; Dawn Blalock, “Phillips Petroleum, Long Buried in Debt, Frees Itself,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1996, p. B3; Thaddeus Herrick, “Bigger is Better for Mulva, ConocoPhillips’s First CEO,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2001, p. B6; Alexei Barrionuevo and John R. Wilke, “Conoco-Phillips Merger to Get FTC’s Approval,” Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2002, p. A2; Ben Casselman and Angel Gonzales, “Corporate News: Oil Industry Strives to Limit Its Layoffs,” Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2009, p. B3; Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Web site, www.bartlesville.com/business/category.php?cat=1059; company museum Web site, www.phillips66museum.com/index.htm.

  10 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 430, 556.

  11 Richard S. Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), pp. 119-176.

  12 Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920-1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp. 432-434;
Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 390-392.

  13 Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1971), pp. 519-520; Brinkley, Wheels for the World, pp. 276-279.

  14 Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 442; John Gunther, Inside U. S.A. (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 417-418; Howard P. Segal, Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 6- 59, 122.

  15 Tom Krisher, “U.S. Automakers Lose Majority of U.S. Market,” Associated Press, August 1, 2007.

  16 David Gelsanliter, Jump Start: Japan Comes to the Heartland (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990), pp. 4-11, 58, 94-95, 157, 185, and passim; Paulo Prada and Dan Fitzpatrick, “South Could Gain as Detroit Struggles,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2008, p. B1; “A Tale of Two Industries,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2005; David Welch, “Why Toyota Is Afraid of Being Number One,” BusinessWeek, March 5, 2007.

  17 David Welch and David Kiley, “The Tough Road Ahead for GM and Chrysler,” BusinessWeek, May 27, 2009; Ed Wallace, “Viewpoint: The U.S. Auto Industry in 2012,” BusinessWeek, June 23, 2009.

  18 Robert Hoover and John Hoover, An American Quality Legend: How Maytag Saved Our Moms, Vexed the Competition, and Presaged America’s Quality Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), pp. 62-156, 176-201.

  19 Robert Johnson, “Iowa Villages’ Tourism Boom Brings Questionable Progress,” Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1984, p. 37; Joseph T. Hallinan, “Maytag Will Buy Amana Appliances for $325 Million,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2001, p. B6; Carl Quintanilla, “So, Who’s Dull? Maytag’s Top Officer, Expected to Do Little, Surprises His Board,” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1998, p. A1; Richard Gibson, “Maytag Faces Big Settlement Payments,” Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2004, p. 1; “Maytag Corp.: Restructuring Plan Includes Cutting 20% of Work Force,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2004, p. B4; “Maytag Corp: Shareholders Approve the Sale of Company to Whirlpool,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2005, p. B4; “Maytag Closing Means More Than Loss of Jobs,” Associated Press, June 26, 2006.

  20 Michael J. McCarthy, “Town Fears Being Hung Out to Dry by Maytag Sale,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2005, p. C1; “Don’t Worry, Newton Won’t Be a Washout,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005, p. A9; Jessica Lowe, “After Maytag’s Departure, Good Fortune Blows Newton’s Way,” Newton Daily News, April 27, 2009, www.newtondailynews.com/articles/2009/04/27/r_tfbftxd7tpcfdcuctlv1ow; Jessica Lowe, “President Unveils Energy Plan During Newton Visit,” Newton Daily News, April 23, 2009, www.newtondailynews.com/articles/2009/04/23/75398989.

  21 Cheri Register, Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 30-31.

  22 Wilson J. Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), pp. 7-21, 63.

  23 Hardy Green, On Strike at Hormel: The Struggle for a Democratic Labor Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), especially pp. 6-8, 35-41; Fred H. Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process: The Hormel-Packinghouse Workers’ Experiment (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1953), pp. 57-61.

  24 Richard Dougherty, In Quest of Quality: Hormel’s First 75 Years (Austin, MN: Geo. A. Hormel & Co., 1966), pp. 35-37, 64-82, 119-141.

  25 Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process, pp. 4-13; Larry Englemann, “‘We Were the Poor People’—The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor History 15 (Fall 1974): 490-493, 508-510; Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 29-35; David Brody, The Butcher Workmen: A Study of Unionization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 161.

  26 Blum, Toward a Democratic Work Process, pp. 16-61, 126-160; Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine, pp. 83-85 and passim; Dougherty, In Quest of Quality, pp. 158-159, 179, 302-303; Green, On Strike at Hormel, pp. 38, 323, note 35.

  27 Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine, pp. 24-28, 41-45, 68-71; Deborah Fink, Cutting Into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 135-136; Michael J. Broadway, “From City to Countryside: Recent Changes in the Structure and Location of the Meat-and-Fish Processing Industries,” in Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America, ed. Donald D. Stull, Michael J. Broadway, and David Griffith (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp. 19-22; Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, “Killing Them Softly: Work in Meatpacking Plants and What It Does to Workers,” in Any Way You Cut It, pp. 64-70; “Meatpacking in the U.S.: Still a ‘Jungle’ Out There?” Public Broadcasting System program NOW, week of December 15, 2006, www.pbs.org/now/shows/250/meat-packing.html; Dennis Farney, “A Town in Iowa Finds Big New Packing Plant Destroys Its Old Calm,” Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1990.

  28 Julia Preston, “Child Labor Charges Are Sought Against Kosher Meat Plant in Iowa,” New York Times, August 6, 2008, p. A15; Thomas Frank, “Captives of the Meatpacking Archipelago,” Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2008; Julia Preston, “After Raid, Federal Charges for Ex-C.E.O. at Meatpacker,” New York Times, October 31, 2008.

  Chapter 7:The Instant Cities of the GoodWar

  1 The Census Bureau quote appears in Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2; the armed forces number appears in George Q. Flynn, The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 190; American Social History Project, Who Built America, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 445-446; Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1972), pp. 11-20, 140.

  2 John Dos Passos, State of the Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1944), pp. 92-94, 301-302.

  3 “Richmond Took a Beating,” Fortune, February 1945, pp. 262-264; Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 146-147; Mark S. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 69-71.

  4 Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 72-73; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 83-86, 124, 147-148; “Richmond Took a Beating,” p. 267.

  5 Joseph Fabry, Swing Shift: Building the Liberty Ships (San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press, 1982), p. 16; William Martin Camp, Skip to My Lou (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co, 1945), p. 343.

  6 Starr, Embattled Dreams, pp. 146-147; Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 82-88; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 62-65.

  7 Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 6-64, 114-117; Starr, Embattled Dreams, p. 145; John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 69.

  8 Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 13, 15-17, 35; “Richmond Took a Beating,” p. 265.

  9 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 87-101; “Richmond Took a Beating,” pp. 262-264; Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, p. 73.

  10 Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 56-57, 73; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 34, 46-79, 124; Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Da Capo Press, 1945).

  11 Gunther, Inside U.S.A., p. 71; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 39, 198-200;

  12 “Richmond Took a Beating,” p. 268; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, pp. 199-223.

  13 Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11-12.

  14 Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, pp. 216-218; Kaiser Permanente’s own account of its history can be found at http://xnet.kp.org/newscenter/aboutkp/historyofkp.html.

  15 Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), pp. xix-xx, 8- 28, 41, 139; Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 128-129, 176-180; George O. Ro
binson, The Oak Ridge Story (Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1950), pp. 45, 49, 68-70.

  16 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 312-315; quotes regarding Groves are from Major General K. D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987), p. 108, and Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, p. 4.

  17 William Lawren, The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1988), pp. 43-60; Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 407, 424-426, 454, 487; Stephen M. Younger, The Bomb: A New History (New York: Ecco, 2009), pp. 14-15, 21-22; Hales, Atomic Spaces, p. 134; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, pp. 44-45.

  18 Hales, Atomic Spaces, pp. 50-57, 60; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, pp. 22-25.

  19 Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, pp. 490-494, 547; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, p. 48; Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, pp. 8-10, 21-23; Nichols, The Road to Trinity, p. 149; Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 239- 244, 313-337.

  20 Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, pp. 21-23, 32, 52, 87-79, 111; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, pp. 48-49; Hales, Atomic Spaces, pp. 81-90, 109- 113; Nichols, The Road to Trinity, 58-59, 124-128, 159.

  21 Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, p. 28; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, pp. 45, 70; Hales, Atomic Spaces, pp. 176-177, 218-221; Nichols, The Road to Trinity, p. 131; Russell B. Olwell, At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), pp. 42- 61; Jay Walz, “Atom Bombs Made in 3 Hidden ‘Cities,’” New York Times, August 7, 1945, p. 1.

  22 Groueff, Manhattan Project, p. 346.

  23 Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, pp. 65-77; Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story, pp. 52-53, 94-96; Hales, Atomic Spaces, pp. 226-238; Lawren, The General and the Bomb, p. 154.