Designing Obedience: The Architecture and Landscape of Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1930

When International Harvester executives announced their plans in 1904 to build a clubhouse for employees at the McCormick reaper works in Chicago, they hoped that the facility might lure workers away from the coarse pleasures enjoyed in the surrounding working-class neighborhoods. They believed the three-story building would serve as a symbol of good taste and proper behavior in a grim landscape of tenements, taverns, and smoking factories (Fig. 1). As one newspaper reporter noted in that year, “the hope and expectation of the stockholders and officials whose money is going into this building is that it will prove a magnet to draw the employes from saloons and other places of resort where waste of money and weariness of flesh are the penalties that add to loss of time.” McCormick executives saw the brick and limestone structure as more than recreation center: It was also a transformative machine, gathering men up from the streets and converting them into efficient and compliant workers.