I have long been interested in the nearest small town to me, Pelzer, South Carolina, that in its founding seems to have combined elements of progressive thought (especially in attempting to educate the residents well beyond the minimum standards of the time) and dystopic Orwellian dictatorship. Some very early and famous at the time innovation in the use of electricity, but still used child labor, if not quite as harshly as most (“Shoeless” Joe Jackson lived and worked in Pelzer as a child.)
Years ago I OCRed this article from Harper’s Monthly in 1902, which covers some of both sides of the Pelzer coin, but mostly lands on the favorable side. But today I found a newspaper article from 1899 in the LOC archives that has to be read to be believed–a long description of an opressive nightmare dystopia, but the article presents it as literally Paradise on Earth.
(In 1935, there was one last national spotlight on Pelzer, when there was a millworker strike, strikers turned on each other, there was gunplay, death and injury, marshall law, and the National Guard.)
From review of its wiki page, Pelzer was a typical Company town dedicated to the textile industry. In 1950 the population was about 2,700. As of the 2010 census, it was 89.
A while back, one of the cable channels had a marathon of movies set in Pacific and Caribbean islands. During this marathon, I realized that a universal feature of “tropical paradises” is “an economy so backward that my chicken-feed pension will make me the wealthiest man on the island, and I can hire natives to do all the menial chores that I don’t want to bother with.”
Paradises are usually paradise for a very small percentage of the population.
I looked at the articles. The bottom line is that people lived in Pelzer of their own free will, and could choose to leave any time. If fact, it seems that the worst punishment the dictatorial Captain Smythe could inflict on anyone was to ask them to leave the town.
However, it does highlight how bad working conditions were in factories at the time. Conditions in Pelzer were considered pretty good by comparison with elsewhere in the region.
I went to college in Greenville, and I assure you all: Pelzer is a grubby little strip-mall suburb of a third-rate city (even by South Carolina standards). Which means it is perfectly average for former textile mill towns.
There’s an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal complaining that New York’s Upper West Side is no longer a “paradise” due to Covid-19-related changes.*
*(it seems that the homeless and formerly homeless who’ve been moved into area hotels are weeing on the streets, panhandling and threatening mayhem).
