The Company Town (35 page)

Railroads had been prime movers of early industrial parks, encouraging flight from costly urban centers. But the acceleration of the trend was tied to more recent developments in transportation and communication—namely, truck deliveries via highways, automobile commuting, and the rise in computer applications. An increasing number of light-assembly operations found homes near airports.

Office-park pathbreakers included IBM and PepsiCo. In 1957, the computer company commissioned Finnish-born Eero Saarinen—an architect on his way to developing a world-class reputation in part due to his many company campuses—to design a scientific research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The three-story, 770,000-square-foot building there would house 1,500 scientists in a fieldstone-and-glass
structure that set a new standard for suburban offices. IBM was so pleased with the Yorktown facility that it decided to move its corporate headquarters out of Manhattan to Armonk, New York. Architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill—the company that had arranged Oak Ridge—drew up plans for a 403,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete edifice, complete with two sculpture-filled courtyards on 420 acres. At the same time, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill created Connecticut campuses for Connecticut General Life and Emhart Manufacturing Co. Saarinen designed another complex for Bell Labs, at Holmdel, New Jersey, which opened in 1962.

PepsiCo followed IBM's lead, moving northward out of New York City. In 1958, the soft-drink giant bought a former polo club in Purchase, New York, and hired architect Edward Durell Stone to plan a prestigious headquarters complex that would consist of seven seemingly overlapping, three-story buildings on 112 acres. Native and exotic trees and grasses were as carefully chosen as the fifty celebrated works of sculpture by the likes of Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi.

Outside of the New York area, the flight from urban centers was perhaps even more pronounced. In the 1960s, more than thirty industrial parks representing seven hundred high-tech companies—Digital, General Electric, RCA, and Raytheon included—emerged along Route 128 near Boston. The Great Southwest Industrial Park, opened in 1967 on the outskirts of Atlanta, seems like a paradigm of the modern corporate campus. After passing through a ninety-foot-high abstract entry arch, employees and visitors traveled along wide, divided boulevards bearing such collegiate names as Bucknell and Colgate. Trees and shrubbery shared quadrangle space with modernist sculpture. Buildings housed regional distribution centers for Coca-Cola, Goodyear, Philco-Ford, and Stanley Home Products. Not far away, the Atlanta Executive Park, which opened in 1964, housed administrative rather than industrial activity. There, a central plaza, the Pantry in the Park, supplied office workers with a snack bar, copy service, and gift shop.
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Examining the emergence of corporate campuses and the exodus from New York City, urban sociologist William H. Whyte in 1988 noted that the new complexes had “little connection with their surroundings.” He went on:

An unabashed fan of the urban experience, Whyte concluded that corporate campuses were employee-unfriendly developments—isolated, accessible only via increasingly congested roadways, often both pharaonic and sprawling, with little functional use of vast open space and too few pathways for those who might simply like to take a walk. Some were fortresslike, as if intended to discourage visitors, he said. Most unforgivably, he found all of them inhospitable to the “unplanned, informal encounters” among people upon which both markets and spontaneous creativity depend. Ever hopeful, though, Whyte observed that the time-tested “idea of towns is gaining currency” as the campuses were found wanting. He seemed to forecast a return to sensible, small-community living and working.
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Corporate campuses have continued to sprout, but company towns are hardly things of the past: Hershey, Corning, Scotia, auto-production towns across Middle America, midwestern meatpacking towns, and even the Atomic City of Oak Ridge are still in business. Moreover, rather than supplanting company towns, corporate campuses reproduce much of company-town life, albeit with a postindustrial, white-collar twist, in places ranging from Federal Express's 500,000-square-foot Collierville, Tennessee, campus to the Mountain View, California, site of the Googleplex. The FedEx facility is home to 1,500 employees and features jogging trails, a library, a wellness center, and coffee bars on each floor of the four office buildings. Google famously offers its cosseted workers free gourmet meals (Indian or Latin American, if one likes), exercise facilities, and massages. Do employees need to get their pants dry cleaned or hair cut? There's a service right there. There are even “sleep pods”
where employees can take soporific-music-induced naps. All of this may sound idyllic, until you realize that workers need never go home—or stop working.
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For a glimpse of the continuity with the past and the profound readjustments that mark the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American scene, one could hardly turn to a more appropriate place than Kohler, Wisconsin, a town of 2,000 souls fifty-five miles north of Milwaukee along the Lake Michigan shore. Search for that town on the Internet, and first thing, “Destination: Kohler” pops up, a Web page featuring dazzling photos of local fishing, golf, spas, and food-and-wine gatherings. Hotel packages are offered at the American Club and the Inn on Woodlake, with the former described as “the Midwest's only AAA Five Diamond Resort Hotel providing unique, luxurious décor that creates a singular experience room by room.”

There's little on the Web site to identify the place as the hometown of plumbing-fixtures manufacturer Kohler Co.

The site does say that the American Club once provided housing, meals, and recreation to immigrant employees who could not afford their own homes. But it doesn't say much about the work of those immigrants. Instead, Web surfers are encouraged to book a room in the club's Carriage House, visit the Kohler Waters Spa—where now there's no immigrant immiseration in sight. The late-October Kohler Wine & Food Experience is touted as offering brushes with celebrity chefs and sips of vintage plonk. The Memorial Day Kohler Festival of Beer, it suggests, is an opportunity to sample Wisconsin microbrewery products, not to mention the Blackwolf Run Beer Cup Golf Tournament. Clicking on the “Kohler: At Home” link brings the first hint that, oh, all of this is connected somehow with the toilet-and-tub maker.
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Life was not always like this in Kohler Village.

In the 1910s, Walter J. Kohler—head of the eponymous company founded in the 1870s to sell retrofitted “hog scalders” as bathtubs to a swelling immigrant population—decided his firm had outgrown its Sheboygan home. Like many others observed in this account, Kohler and
his architect, W. C. Weeks, toured industrial garden villages in Europe. Then, upon returning, he engaged landscape architects from the Olmsted firm—who had also designed Vandergrift, Pennsylvania—along with engineers and town planners. The executive acquired a tract of land at the southwest edge of Sheboygan and in 1912 began to build the new burg that would be known as Kohler Village. The result was a picturesque settlement of winding streets, parks, and brick and frame houses amid plentiful greenery. A separate outfit, the Kohler Improvement Co., sold the completed houses to employees with the understanding that the company retained rights to buy them back if they were ever put on the market. As in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, restrictive covenants limited the uses of these properties, including barring “immoral” enterprises and taverns.

For itself, the Kohler family erected a mansion called Riverbend, located not far from the company offices and foundry and adjacent to the Sheboygan River. Proud of its Austrian heritage, the family had long been at the center of Sheboygan cultural, social, and political life. In the 1890s, company founder John M. Kohler held several public offices including the mayoralty—he was endorsed by the
Sheboygan Telegram
, which cited his efforts in building the town's harbor and in local charity. His four sons were active in politics and various cultural institutions, with one son, Walter Sr. (founder of Kohler Village), and a grandson, Walter Jr., both serving as governors of Wisconsin.

By the mid-1930s, Kohler Village consisted of the company's 191-acre works—including a headquarters, foundry, ceramics plant, engine-making plant, and design center—along with 450 houses, half occupied by company officials and office workers and half by production workers. These residents composed less than 10 percent of Kohler's total workforce, but their experience had a big impact on company-employee relations. The American Club, which included a dormitory and eating hall, accommodated unmarried plant workers. Kohler Co. also financed fine schools and a large public auditorium. The village was governed by an elected board, which was nevertheless easily moved to rubber-stamp all company proposals.

Moreover, company employees benefited from Kohler corporate-welfare measures, including group life insurance, a pension plan, and banquets for the many recently naturalized U.S. citizens among the workforce.
Into the 1920s, wages of Kohler's 4,000 workers were higher than those at other area employers.

But as the Depression set in, labor relations deteriorated. Layoffs were concentrated among those who did not live in the model village. Those who continued working saw dramatic cuts in hours, and the wages of village residents were often garnished to pay home mortgages held by the company-affiliated Kohler Building and Loan Association. Checks issued for two weeks' work were for as little as 85 cents. Although the company continued to see itself as a generous, empathetic employer, Kohler workers decided they needed union representation, and turned to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), forming Federal Labor Union No. 18545. Thus began a thirty-year struggle for union recognition, marked by two violent strikes.

Initially, the company responded by forming a company union, the Kohler Workers Association (KWA), which it openly supplied with equipment and manpower. In July 1934, following a few bouts of unproductive negotiating with management, the AFL union went out on strike. Actions and rhetoric escalated quickly, with the union turning to mass picketing involving up to 4,000 people at the plant and management refusing to bargain with “law violators.” Kohler Village employed 1,000 “special deputies” and armed them with machine guns, rifles, tear gas, and clubs. Only ten days after the strike began, a confrontation between these deputies and pickets led to rioting and violence in which forty-nine strikers were shot, most in the back, and two were killed.
The Nation
opined that the labor conflict signified “the rise and fall of America's most widely advertised venture in industrial paternalism.” The issue quoted the testimony of federal mediator Father J. W. Maguire: “I have been in many strikes, but I never saw such needless and ruthless killing by supporters of the law. . . . You don't have to shoot people in the back when they are running away!”

Later that year, the National Labor Relations Board held a union-representation election, with both strikers and nonstrikers being allowed to vote. The result was a victory for the company union, KWA. That organization ran a campaign that utilized both petty bribery—cigarettes, candy, and sandwiches were distributed on the shop floor—and intimidation, with supervisors instructing workers to vote for KWA. Picketing by Local 18545 continued at the plant until 1941, when the company
agreed to a contract with KWA so it might win more war contracts from the government.

In fact, the company's antiunion attitude remained, and another vicious strike broke out in 1954. Over the years, substandard pay and hazardous working conditions had prompted a change in the KWA, which became more militant and in 1952 affiliated with the United Auto Workers /CIO. It negotiated one contract with the company, but then Kohler dug in its heels. As the strike date approached, the company again adopted a siege mentality: Guards armed with shotguns, tear gas, and revolvers moved into the plant. The company also hired two private-detective agencies to spy on union supporters—and also, it later emerged, on National Labor Relations Board investigators. Kohler reopened its factory, utilizing a workforce of those who crossed picket lines and of new employees, and it made no effort to bargain with the union. For its part, the UAW once again employed mass picketing and demonstrations, and ultimately sponsored a nationwide boycott of Kohler products.