The Company Town

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In 1917 the Pinkerton Detective Agency sent twenty-three-year-old Dashiell Hammett to help break a miners' strike against the Anaconda Copper Co. in Butte, Montana. Hammett—who would later gain fame for his hardboiled detective fiction, such as
The Maltese Falcon
—had worked for two years for Pinkerton, tracking stolen property, transporting prisoners, and shadowing suspects. He later said he'd had no political consciousness when he was sent to Butte. But he did discover that he didn't like strikebreaking.

The Butte strike was sparked by a mine fire that killed 178 miners. It was led by the radical, syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—the romantic organizer of down-and-outs, miners, lumberjacks, oil-field roustabouts, and immigrant textile workers. The union's slogan was “One Big Union” in a day when most union “brotherhoods” defined themselves along craft lines and seemed more like fraternities than the embodiment of the cooperative commonwealth. The IWW's symbol was an arched-back black cat, yowling at the viewer—an image associated with sabotage and machine-breaking in the name of militancy and worker solidarity.

In Butte, the IWW's man was Frank Little, a one-eyed, part-Indian whirlwind of an organizer. Known as the “hobo agitator,” he had been at the center of worker struggles in Fresno, San Diego, Duluth, and most of the major IWW conflicts. An Anaconda executive offered Hammett $5,000 to shoot Little—or so Hammett later said—but the young Pinkerton agent declined. No matter. In short order, vigilantes apprehended Little and lynched him at a railroad crossing along with three other perceived troublemakers.

Hammett decided he'd had enough, quit the detective agency, and joined the U.S. Army.
¹
But he never forgot Butte, which he later immortalized as “Personville” (nicknamed “Poisonville”) in his first novel,
Red Harvest
, a crime fiction classic. “The city wasn't pretty,” he wrote. “The smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining.”
²
But the biggest stain on Butte, in Hammett's eyes, may well have been the Anaconda Copper Co. itself.

Created at the turn of the twentieth century by a charismatic Irishman named Marcus Daly, Anaconda was soon involved in suspect dealings. Standard Oil directors James Stillman, William Rockefeller, and Henry H. Rogers bought the company with borrowed money, renamed it, and quickly resold it to gullible investors, pocketing a profit of $36 million.
³
Another early owner was George Hearst, father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The company passed through various corporate hands and by the 1920s held a virtual monopoly over the mines in and around Butte. The town, once known for gold and silver mining, grew prosperous thanks to the area's abundant copper, which was increasingly in demand for electrical wiring. Butte attracted workers from around the world—and became known as a wide-open Sin City. Its red-light district, “The Line,” featured hundreds of saloons and houses of prostitution.

But contrary to this image of freedom and licentiousness, Butte was in fact locked down—totally under Anaconda's thumb. In
Red Harvest
, Hammett captures the spirit of the town: “For forty years old Elihu Willsson . . . had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin, and guts. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of
The Morning Herald
and
Evening Herald
, the city's only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance. Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.”

Hammett's Willsson was likely a fictional amalgam of many rough-hewn executives of the day. But it's possible that the author had in mind
John D. Ryan, a former department store clerk who succeeded Daly and ran Anaconda until his own death in 1933.

Anaconda remained hugely powerful not only in the town but across Montana, so much so that in 1946, when reporter John Gunther published his celebrated panorama of American life,
Inside U.S.A
., he observed, “For years the company dominated both parties, and controlled almost all elections, if necessary by dragging in the ‘cemetery vote.'” Gunther painted a picture of Anaconda as greedy and stingy—keeping other industry out of the area so labor remained cheap, removing far more riches from Montana than it ever put in. “Aside from one threadbare little park . . . it has never given the city of Butte, from which it has extracted a roaring Golconda of wealth, anything,” he wrote.
⁴

It is companies like Anaconda and the experience of towns like Butte that have tainted a term familiar to us all: company town. To those who like to think of the United States as a sweet land of liberty, the very words sound un-American. A company town seems necessarily to be a place where one business exerts a Big Brother-like grip over the population—controlling or even taking the place of government, collecting rents on company-owned housing, dictating buying habits (possibly at the company store), even administering where people worship and how they may spend their leisure time.

It's true: Company towns are un-American—and they are the essence of America.

The United States has a unique experience with company towns. With its vast expanse of virgin land and a government that has generally taken a laissez-faire attitude toward business, the United States has provided a greater opportunity for developing such settlements than other countries. The United States also has a tradition of social experimentation: If the Pilgrims could construct their ideal City on a Hill, so too could American businessmen create their own communities, from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Pullman, Illinois; Morris Run, Pennsylvania; and Valsetz, Oregon. By one estimate, more than 2,500 single-enterprise towns once dotted the country.

Trace America's economic evolution, and you get a tour of company towns—from early textile sites such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, to today's company campuses in New York state and California. Along the way, you'll have to take note of coal towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, and Appalachia; steel towns in the Monongahela River valley and Illinois; Texas and Oklahoma oil camps; shipbuilding centers in Connecticut and California; meatpacking burgs in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota; and the government company town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Some of America's seminal industries have faded from the scene—and along with them, the towns they were associated with have fallen into decrepitude or even disappeared. Hard times are irrevocably associated today with Lowell; Gary, Indiana; the former textile villages of North and South Carolina; and such once-proud meatpacking towns as Ottumwa, Iowa.

But company towns are not simply a phenomenon of the past: In an age of transnational corporations and exurban sprawl, company towns remain a basic part of American life. They are as near as Corning, New York, and Hershey, Pennsylvania, their products as familiar as Tabasco Sauce, Spam, and Kohler bathroom fixtures.

And maybe even as familiar as Google. For in a remote part of Oregon along the banks of the Columbia River, that company recently built a large industrial complex mostly in secret. The facility, known as Project 02, stretches over several acres, with electric-power equipment much in evidence. Given Google's business, it can hardly be surprising that the prime residents of the campus's three large buildings are computer servers—perhaps tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks—necessary to keep Google's search engines and Web services humming. But a few humans are needed, too, if the effort is to be completed and maintained. “The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent, and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people,” wrote the
New York Times
in 2006.
⁵
That means that fundamentally, what may be coming together in The Dalles, Oregon, is a contemporary—and lowemployment—version of the company town.

Such towns generally tend toward one of two models, although many fall in between. In this account, I will refer to the Butte model as “exploitationville.”
Perhaps the apotheosis of such towns may be found in Appalachian coal country, home of the likes of Lynch, Wheelwright, and Coal Run, Kentucky. The logic behind such places is simple and familiar. It rests on the thinking of every bean counter: Business exists to make a profit, not to coddle employees. Society as a whole benefits most when enterprises are cost-effective, productive, and profitable. The very ruthlessness that surfaced in these places seems less like an inevitable outgrowth of such logic than a willful expression of malicious personalities.

But another model regularly shows up in the United States, recurring across the decades: ideal communities backed by companies that promise to share their bounty with workers and their families. These utopian towns were and are characterized by modern public buildings, libraries and facilities for leisure, education, and cultural enrichment, and comfortable dwellings for managers and workers. A paternalistic attitude may be present as well—sometimes resulting in a watchfulness toward the citizenry on the part of the company overlords: Such guardians have tended to favor tidiness in housekeeping, sobriety, and oftentimes regular religious observance.

Although one might expect idealistic experiments to fade as industrial society matured, instead the utopian model has resurfaced again and again. For example, in Pullman, Illinois, the eponymous railroad-car maker in the 1880s erected a model town where “advanced secular Gothic buildings” lined tree-shaded streets. Scotia, California, founded by Pacific Lumber as a rustic forest camp in the 1880s, evolved into a pin-neat, saloon-free Shangri-La amid redwood forests; workers got low rent, full medical benefits, college scholarships for their kids, and more. Hershey, Pennsylvania, built by chocolate man Milton S. Hershey in the early 1900s, featured electrified, centrally heated homes, a free playground and zoo, and a model school for orphan boys supported by a foundation that held a majority of his company's stock.