Editorial: The New Company Town

摘要

One of my great-great-grandfathers was a minor St. Louis robber baron whose investments included the dance hall where Johnny did Frankie wrong back in 1899, a German-language newspaper and telephone company felled by World War I anti-Hun sentiment, and a bank that, ironically, his own son held up. He also owned a quarry in Southern Illinois. Before the Civil War, when the railroad stopped at the Mississippi, westbound settlers would mine rock at the quarry in exchange for room and board in wood-frame barracks and a bit of company scrip, which they'd save up to buy equipment for the remainder of the journey. The operation wasn't nearly as big as company towns like Pullman and Fordlandia, but the underlying impulse was the same: to profit from employees, in the name of serving them.