How Little Boy Atom Bomb Grew Up in Company Towns

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How Little Boy Atom Bomb Grew Up in Company Towns: Lewis Lapham
By Lewis Lapham - Sep 11, 2010 12:01 AM ET

"The Company Town"

The cover jacket of "The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy." The book is by Hardy Green. Source: Basic Books via Bloomberg

Audio Download: Green Discusses His Book `The Company Town'

http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/Vi ... DXlkZM.mp3

Hardy Green, author of "The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy." Source: Basic Books via Bloomberg
Lewis Lapham

Lewis Lapham of Lapham's Quarterly in New York. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

With Albert Einstein urging President Roosevelt to beat the Nazis to an atom bomb, the government created the Manhattan Project.

Top secret research sites included Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and uranium-enrichment facilities in Tennessee.

At Oak Ridge, local inhabitants and farmers were chased off the land to make way for a new town designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill with housing, cafeterias, schools, churches, shops and bowling alleys for more than 66,000 workers.

Of the huge factories, the K-25 uranium-separating plant alone covered 44 acres and was then the largest building in the world.

Kept in the dark, the workers learned just why they were there when the four-ton Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences declared that the Manhattan Project sites would pose risks to humans for tens of thousands of years into the future. Even so, the places proved real crowd-pleasers and in 2003, Oak Ridge's wartime electromagnetic plant Y-12 was reopened to produce missile parts and store weapons-grade uranium.

Today, when you drive into town there's a sign: "The Atomic City Welcomes You."

I spoke with Hardy Green, author of "The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy," on the following topics:

1. Utopian Dreams

2. Exploitationville

3. Building the Bomb

4. Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo

5. Economic Context

To listen to the podcast, click here. To buy this book in North America, click here.

(Lewis Lapham is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly and the former editor of Harper's magazine. He hosts "The World in Time" interview series for Bloomberg News.)

To contact the writer on the story: Lewis Lapham in New York at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-1 ... apham.html

The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy
by Hardy Green

The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy Cover

Publisher Comments:
From the looms at colonial Lowell, Massachusetts, to the tire plants in Akron, Ohio, to Googles Project 02 in The Dalles, Oregon, the company town has mirrored the development of American capitalism. In The Company Town, Hardy Green, former associate editor at BusinessWeek, shows how two strands of capitalism have competed for ascendancy: one, a utopian vision of care and concern, rooted in a paternalistic idea that companies should take care of their workers, represented by such locales as Hershey, PA; the other, exploitative and profiteering, in which owners extract as much work for as little compensation as possible, as demonic as the Harlan County coal mines. At once a riveting history, a stark social commentary, and an insightful tale of how business works (and how it should work), The Company Town is the story of the shaping of modern American capitalism.

Review:
"Labor historian Green tells the story of American capitalism as played out in the rise and fall of the 'company town' in this engaging book. From the tent cities of Appalachian coal fields to the model villages built for New England mill workers, the company town was once a common feature in the American landscape, with a legacy that can be seen in Google and Microsoft's high-tech campuses. Marked by the domination of a corporation over the lives of its workers, company towns also became scenes of social control and experiment: capitalist utopianists like candy-maker Milton Hershey strived to create communities that would improve worker productivity, moral rectitude, and docility. If the book has a flaw, it is its overemphasis on the (admittedly colorful) personalities and philosophies of the corporate barons at the expense of the workers' themselves, whose lives are sketched in the abstract but whose voices are rarely heard. With that caveat, the book provides a valuable perspective on a well-worn history, detailing the heinous, lofty, and occasionally absurd ways companies have tried to shape their workers' lives beyond factory walls. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

Synopsis:
At once a riveting history, a stark social commentary, and an insightful tale of how business works (and how it should work), "The Company Town" is the story of the shaping of modern American capitalism. b&w photos.

About the Author
Hardy Green is a former associate editor at BusinessWeek, where he was the steward of the magazines respected and influential book review section. He lives in New York City.

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