Company Towns: 1880s to 1935
socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu
Saved by Lillian Sheng
Company Towns: 1880s to 1935
Saved by Lillian Sheng
Coal companies built towns for workers and their families. Theirs was an isolated and organized life. Miners were poor folks who usually stayed poor no matter how hard they worked. The company store kept the books, placing them in crippling debt even though they were the ones whose labor made others rich and gave light and heat to the country.
The ideology of frugality, the interests of factory owners, and the availability of surplus labor via immigration inevitably suppressed wages. With wages stagnant and production increasing, the system went out of balance and finally, in 1929, went into a deep crisis.
Big companies began to build landscaped suburban campuses. Factories also moved out of cities to suburbs, taking jobs with them. The steady shift of white city dwellers into the suburbs, known as white flight, reduced the tax base of cities, prompting city governments to cut back on infrastructure, services, and schools in a cycle of urban decline.
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