Capitalism and the Company Town
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Reason staffer Bill Kauffman reviews Hardy Green's new book The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy. Though Green's focus is mostly on private municipal enterprises like Hershey, Pennsylvania and Gary, Indiana (named after U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert Gary), Kauffman highlights Uncle Sam's destructive contribution as well:
Although Mr. Green ignores Washington, D.C., the company town that never recedes, he shines a harsh light on Oak Ridge, Tenn., created by the feds via "arguably the United States' most astounding and disruptive exercise of eminent domain." Thrown up in 1943 as a laboratory for the Manhattan Project and populated by 80,000 newcomers, Oak Ridge was a case of government gone wild, as thousands of Tennesseans—including families who had farmed the land for generations—were booted out by Uncle Sam with two weeks' notice. Oak Ridge was a monument to statism, with informants, armed guards, "federally financed schools" and cheaply made public housing. Workers ate "mediocre food served in grim cafeterias" and toiled without "any sense of participation in the larger win-the-war effort," since the Manhattan Project was conducted in the strictest secrecy.
The sootiest coal camp sounds like paradise by contrast. As Mr. Green writes, company towns, whether run by "utopian paternalist or exploitative despot," were constrained to some degree by the market. Oak Ridge, wholly a creature of the federal government, was beyond any such discipline.
Read the whole thing here. Reason reviews Kauffman's Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism here.
