Brian Highsmith, Lecturer and Academic Fellow in Law and Political Economy at the Harvard Law School, has posted Governing the Company Town, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review:
--Dan ErnstThis Article explores the forms of public and private governance that facilitate localized corporate domination. Researchers have documented the oppressive employment relationship that characterized historical “company towns,” but few accounts yet have examined these communities as local governments. I use archival research to identify institutional continuities between corporate fiefdoms like George Pullman’s model town outside Chicago (1880-1898) and Disney’s self-governed district near Orlando (1967-2023). I demonstrate that local government law has contributed to the recent reemergence of company-dominated enclaves, namely by deferring to private governance and facilitating jurisdictional fragmentation.
Workers in Pullman, 1914 (CHM)
During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, proprietors of company-owned towns exercised absolute control over workers through the private law of property and contract. Mining bosses and industrial barons like Pullman intentionally rejected the municipal form, using dismissal and eviction to enforce company policy as the operative governing authority within their dominions. This strategy became less effective after the New Deal, leading observers to pronounce the demise of the company town. But I argue that parallel developments in local government law have allowed the company town’s continuation through new institutional forms, enabling corporate titans to wield public powers without accountability to any broad public. Rather than facilitating domination over captive worker-residents, these institutional forms are used primarily to externalize costs and escape democratic obligations like taxation—goals that also deeply shaped the governance of historical company towns. I review this playbook through several recent case studies, demonstrating how territorial and functional fragmentation have facilitated the proliferation of corporate enclaves—allowing spatially-concentrated private capital to secede from local democratic control.
I suggest that the company town can be understood as a democratic phenomenon: a distinctive form of private tyranny. Since the Founding, theorists have acknowledged the vulnerability of small and non-diverse jurisdictions to tyrannical rule-by-faction. By contextualizing new examples like Elon Musk’s efforts to incorporate his model towns in Texas, I show that this fear is realized where corporate interests either commandeer our formal institutions of governance or displace their typical role in structuring public life.
