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COMPANY WELFARE AND ITS LIMITS · 1890S TO 1926
The show place: The other face of the factory system was welfare capitalism, and Fort Wayne's exemplar was again Wayne Knitting Mills — "the show place of the city," the federal visitor was told in 1918, its working conditions "said to be very good." Thieme built, over the mill's life, what his biography calls an extensive company welfare program: the company maintained a dormitory for the female workers it drew from the rural areas and small towns of the region — the closest thing to company housing the Fort Wayne record documents — and organized the recreations of a company town inside a city: drum corps and marching bands, and a girls' chorus, the "Knittingales." The object was the era's standard bargain, loyalty and steadiness in exchange for care, offered by an employer who had organized his company in a tumultuous period of American labor history and meant to keep the union out by kindness where others used the lockout.
The limits, in the same record: The welfare record does not stand alone. The same mill was cited in 1914 for inadequate washrooms and poor ventilation; its women and girls worked the long hours and low wages the workforce entry records; and its early decades saw the walkouts the labor entry records. General Electric's Fort Wayne expression of the same idea came later and larger: the GE Club, built for employees in 1926, a recreation building with a gymnasium and a twelve-lane bowling alley, which still stands on the west campus. Fort Wayne never had a company town, and no company-built housing rows are documented in the sources reached for this section; what it had was the dormitory, the club, the band and the chorus — welfare as an annex to the plant, in a city the workers themselves were building, street by street, around the factories. Those streets are the Communities and Neighborhoods sections' ground.
Sources: the History Center's Wayne Knitting Mills record (the dormitory, the drum corps, bands and Knittingales); the Immigrant Entrepreneurship biography of Thieme (the extensive welfare program, its labor-history setting, the 1914 citation); the Women's Bureau memorandum of October 1918 ("the show place of the city"); Indiana Landmarks (the GE Club of 1926, its gymnasium and bowling lanes).