Company Towns: 1880s to 1935

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.

If that seems a little too authoritarian, understand that this is how most of the United States was originally built. Only, it wasn’t government; it was trading monopolies and railroad companies. For the latter, the railroad would acquire land for a town where they intended to put a train stop. As they developed the rail line, they would sell the l

In early-nineteenth-century America,63 which was still largely rural, self-employed people outnumbered wage earners.

But making time a commodity did not make for self-sufficiency or even, with severe depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, basic stability.