The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy

Abstract

This survey of American industrial towns has three major strengths. First, it is well written and summarizes the histories of past and present industrial towns nicely. (It helps that Hardy Green has a doctorate in history and a lot of practice at writing for nonhistorians.) Second, the author does a good job of showing how nineteenth-century attempts to marry town building with particular industries or companies evolved in the twentieth century into something that was both more and less than its nineteenth-century predecessors. As Green puts it, “the evolution of the company and its town represents not so much a repudiation of America's industrial past as an adjustment to modern economic realities” (p. 197). Third, and perhaps most well done, is Green's fine wrap-up chapter in which he lays out how owners and managers adjusted their “mix of utopia and exploitationville” to fit different economic and social conditions (p. 204).