Technology and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 143 Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City. By Margaret R. Wolfe. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Pp. xii + 259; illus­ trations, notes, index. $24.00. Kingsport, Tennessee, was “the first thoroughly diversified, profes­ sionally planned, and privately financed city in twentieth-century America” (p. 1). Margaret Ripley Wolfe, a native of the area who teaches at nearby East Tennessee State University, has written the first scholarly work about this widely proclaimed “model city.” Like Stanley Buder’s Pullman (1967), James Lane’s “City of the Century’’: A History of Gary, Indiana (1978), and Charles Johnson and Charles Jackson’s City behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942—1946 (1981), hers is a fine case study of a community whose raison d’être was modern tech­ nology, and whose physical, economic, social, and cultural structures reflected that fact. In Kingsport, the focus was not, as with those other three com­ munities, on developing a particular industry or military weapon but rather on promoting various “interlocking” (p. 21) private industries that would complement one another while seeking nonlocal markets. The community’s leading industries eventually included Tennessee Eastman, part of Eastman Kodak and established by George Eastman himself; Kingsport Press, book printers and manufacturers; Blue Ridge Glass; and Mead Pulp and Paper. During World War II Tennessee Eastman produced vital antisubmarine explosives and thereby pub­ licized Kingsport further. Located in northeastern Tennessee, near the Virginia border, Kingsport was built on a barren, swampy site surrounded by great natural beauty. Small settlements had existed nearby, but none had prospered, thanks to the absence of efficient transportation systems and so trade routes. The extension by 1915 of the Clinchfield Railroad across the Appalachian Mountains made a larger, permanent settle­ ment practical. Realizing that goal soon became the obsession of John Dennis, a Maine-born financier, and J. Fred Johnson, a native moun­ taineer Dennis hired to promote Kingsport. The two worked together until their deaths in the mid-1940s. Wolfe amply details their ideology that shaped Kingsport’s devel­ opment: a genuine if paternalistic concern for uplifting the local folk economically, socially, and culturally; a commitment to patriotism and the Protestant work ethic, one shared with their fellow citizens; and a belief in both the “New South” creed of industrial growth and the Progressive ethos of efficiency through proper industrial and civic management. In addition, the city’s incorporation in 1917 coincided with the birth of professional town planning, and the prominent Mas­ sachusetts plannerJohn Nolen was hired to draw up blueprints. Over­ all, his 1919 plan was followed, though in recent decades there have been considerable deviations. Like fiis clients, he favored the City Efficient approach over the City Beautiful. 144 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE To northern investors tired of union organizers and foreign-born workers and the left-wing ideas they often shared, the prospect of hiring conservative, hardworking, and predominantly native-born WASPs for a well-planned “All-American City” was naturally attrac­ tive. It is among the book’s strengths that Wolfe neither romanticizes Kingsport’s workers nor vilifies their employers. She rejects the pop­ ular notion that industrialization there as elsewhere destroyed an idyl­ lic Appalachian culture. Kingsport, she shows, amply served the varying interests of its promoters, investors, and workers. Yet if “the conceptualization of Dennis and Johnson had been largely realized by the 1940’s” (p. 210), the town never resembled the “cap­ italistic utopia” (p. 12) its founders had envisioned. Wolfe is quite sensitive to the costs of Kingsport’s growth: outside ownership even today of most major industries; inadequate housing, schools, and hos­ pitals; unceasing air and water pollution; controversial union orga­ nizing and strikes; wage and other discrimination toward female and black workers; and reluctance to accept government assistance, in­ cluding the cheaper electric power then offered by the nearby Ten­ nessee Valley Authority. After World War II, as the “founding fathers” passed on, no one replaced them. This produced not only a loss of vision but, more concretely, a deteriorating downtown and a refusal by prospering suburbs to be annexed. Indeed, the other members of Tennessee’s tri-cities metropolitan area, Johnson City and Bristol, no...