by Kate Masterson

“Unprecedented,” they are saying.

I hear it almost every day. Sometimes I’m even the one saying it.

I hear “Un-American” pretty often, too, which implies that the current attack on the U.S. federal workforce is somehow out of sync with the country’s spotty track record with labor rights. Whether one takes these events with shock or resignation, though, it’s clear that the wheels of that history are churning with great force. With that in mind, I’d like to take a closer look at America’s industrial past, and maybe hazard a couple of guesses at our future.

As the threat of recession looms large and the stock market judders to stops and starts to the rhythm of internet rumors, I’m struck by the parallels to the social arc of the Gilded Age of the 1890s. Though the railroad robber barons of yore have been replaced with inarticulate social media CEOs and their ancient congressional friends, the song remains the same – this is an era of the rich getting richer at the expense of the rest of us, and this time, we aren’t getting any libraries or parks out of it.

This new techno-industrial revolution, however, may bring some corporations back around to another popular Gilded Age endeavor: the company town. Just over a century ago, the practice of corporate-owned houses, parks, churches, hospitals, and stores was common – and so were practices like issuing company scrip instead of the U.S. dollar or requiring residents to attend church. Early corporations, growing quickly and hungrily, realized that not only would employees who lived at work be timely and efficient, but that their non-work habits could be monitored and controlled, too.

In his book Company Town, Hardy Green explains that the seeds of corporate neighborhood design often began with “the assumption that employers were somehow vested with absolute authority over their employees by virtue of their higher moral and economic standing in the social strata.” This may also sound familiar to you if you’re enough of a masochist to keep up with the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, former software engineer and current breath in the ear of many right-wing thinkers in our current regime. You’ll probably know he doesn’t believe in voting, either. When asked if he believes women have a right to vote, he told the New York Times, “You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves,” which is an awful lot of words to use to say No.

His sneakily discursive answer brings to mind the philosophy of Lowell, Massachusetts, a corporate town built for female textile workers in the mid-1800s. Perhaps because of propriety and perhaps because of optics, this particular corporation offered the carrot rather than the stick: quiet blocks of single-occupancy housing, parks, exercise and music instruction, a library, and a park – as long as the women behaved themselves in the way their wealthy male employer saw fit. Strict rules forbade women from speaking during the work day, which was 4:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., set to the time of a clock suspected to be doctored. Church attendance was, of course, compulsory. Over the years, the benevolence of the company waned, and conditions significantly worsened for the workers. 

And Lowell is one example of many. While many industries from textiles to glassware to automakers have experimented with company towns, the Northeastern coal industry looms largest in my mind. My family has deep roots in the anthracite coal region of central Pennsylvania; my great-grandfather, a miner, died young of the black lung in Wilkes-Barre, and my father’s aunt labored her days away in the town’s lace mill, ultimately losing several fingers and any semblance of a sense of humor. And not far from Pittsburgh, where I grew up, a former company town lies empty on the wide and mournful banks of the Youghiogheny River. Reduction, a town built for the employees of a garbage processing company, is a group of squat, low-slung brick houses hunched below the low Appalachian hills, and is now up for sale, if anyone’s interested.

But Reduction is merely a quaint curiosity when held up against the hardscrabble company towns of southwestern Virginia, where workers toiled (and their families lived) in punishing conditions. Eventually, conditions grew so poor that workers banded together and rose up against their employers. The resulting conflict, the Battle of Blair Mountain, hardly gets attention in the history books, but is second only to the Civil War as the largest uprising in U.S. history.

Like many popular uprisings, it simmered for many years over the wealth- and standard-of-living disparities. The massive swath of profits from the coal found in towns like Logan and Matewan did not make it back into the pockets of the local West Virginians who had mined it in dangerous, backbreaking conditions. Many lived in company towns, where they were paid in scrip and spent it just as quickly at the company store, purchasing both food at inflated prices for their families and the very tools they needed to use to work.

Later, a historian recorded an interview with mine employee George Echols, a former slave and president of the local chapter of his union, who told them, “I was raised a slave. My master and mistress called me and I answered, and I know [how] the time was when I slave, and I felt just like we feel now.” He was fired in 1921, just before Blair Mountain, over his union membership.

Strikes had begun in earnest in 1913, ebbing and flowing in popularity and success until 1920, when the US Coal Commission granted a wage increase to union miners. Southwestern West Virginia, however, was mostly non-union due to strictly enforced company policies. When locals protested, mine officials hired the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to threaten them. Armed miners shot back and killed seven detectives, kicking off a quickly-intensifying skirmish that ended with National Guard involvement – and reports of bombs dropped from federal planes.

Blair Mountain’s legacy was both hard-won and delayed. Ultimately, as was proven over and over again during the United Mine Workers of America’s forty-year struggle to establish anti-child-labor laws and safety legislation, the wheel moves slowly and often does not provide reparations for its victims. The Blair Mountain miners saw no wage increase and no change in living conditions. Later, history quietly vindicated them on paper, with a U.S. Senate Committee excoriating the mine owners’ cruelty. One senator summed up the cause of the mine wars in two words: “Human greed.”

Human greed has not dimmed in the years since labor rights were won through blood and patience, and even now, the groundwork is laid for another potential tug of war between capital creators and capital holders. Case in point: these days, Elon Musk is cooking up a little something called Snailbrook, Texas. Details are scant after the billionaire quietly purchased 6,000 acres outside the Tesla and Boring Company headquarters in Austin and titled it “Project Amazing.” There have been discussions of workers’ housing, a private compound, and a brand new city. And as the shadows of the Gilded Age haunt us even today, we can only hope that the specter of labor rights follows in its footsteps.

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Kate Masterson is a writer and musician from Pittsburgh, PA. She has worked in landscaping, wildland fire, and currently works in a construction-adjacent industry. She loves to read and seeks, over all else, to understand history and to uncover the relationships between seemingly disparate subjects. These days, Kate lives in west central Washington State with her husband and two dogs.