How did companies once central to the American Rust Belt gain so much power over steel and iron landscapes? To answer this question, this paper considers the intertwined environmental and political economic histories of the late 19th and early 20th American industrial revolution across urban and rural cases. To illuminate how companies established and consolidated their power over work and home in my cases locations of Chicago and Wisconsin, I consider three interlocking puzzles that emerge from the data 1) how spatial context and political history shaped the expression of new industry in my case locations, 2) what problems infrastructural paternalism solved for companies, and 3) how early expressions of paternalism structured and institutionalized the distribution of rewards and economic risks in management-labor relations.
I focus on the era of market expansion occurring between the late 19th until the first decade of the early 20th century. Akin to other accounts of industrialization, my cases illustrate how the shift to mass-production, and consequently, the amassing of thousands of immigrant wage laborers, ushered in an era of conflict between worker, company, and state. However, I intervene into the literatures of industrial history and political economy by integrating three under-analyzed components into the conversation of industrialization and deindustrialization. First, I emphasize the role of geographical isolation in contextualizing the social history of both Iron County, Wisconsin, and southeast Chicago, Illinois. Although rural scholars have long linked the role of geographical remoteness with company control over landscape, community, and work, few scholars of urban, industrial development have traced the processes of connection-making, company power, and the development of paternalism. Second, I show how firms utilized principles of paternalism to solve a logistical problem of housing, transportation, and worker management in once-peripheral areas. I provide conceptual clarity to the logic of infrastructural paternalism, one often glossed as either moral or manipulative in secondary literatures. Finally, I introduce the interlocking concepts of rewards and risks. Both employers and their workers understood infrastructural, paternalistic benefits as rewards that could be earned or lost based on both worker behavior and employer whim. In fact, infrastructural paternalism was a mechanism through which firms shifted the risks of tenuous economy onto laborers. Firms secured greater margins of profit in a young, Bessemer steel economy by increasing worker employment insecurity.
This paper derives from my dissertation project. Drawing from archival research in Chicago and rural Wisconsin, ethnography, and ninety contemporary interviews, I probe the long-term consequences of industrialization and deindustrialization of these landscapes. I argue that to understand contemporary community outcomes across rural and urban locations in the Rust Belt, we need to grasp the contexts and processes through which iron and steel companies institutionalized certain management-employee relations during the 19th century establishment of Bessemer steel manufacturing and extraction projects.
