“The success of the Club in promoting men’s activities was so outstanding that a special meeting was called on April 23, 1915, to consider extending the privilege of membership to all employees, both men and women. This change was authorized and the Hawthorne Men’s Club became the Hawthorne Club.

“Growing upon the solid foundation set by the original founders of the organization in 1911 , the Hawthorne Club now consists of a membership comprising all Hawthorne employees, officered by 15 directors, five executive officers, 25 sub-chairmen and 225 representatives. The Club conducts various associated clubs, an Evening School, a varied recreational program, and an office giving numerous special services—a total of some 30 activities, requiring nearly 900 people for their successful management. Of these, 140 are instructors in the Evening School. The majority of the others are members of various committees.”

The brochure indicates that all the officers of the Club are elected by the worker-participants.

Excerpts from the section The Club

Six years before William Morris wrote, in 1890, the utopian tract depicting an idyllic socialist society, News From Nowhere, he wrote A Factory As It May Be, an essay that prefigured, with its focus on a convivial workplace, his future well-known novel. A Factory was no idle pursuit of a literary figure, but a political response to a reproach socialists received that they had no positive vision of what to replace the “system of waste and war.”

While Morris was uninterested in designing a blueprint for the future, he felt compelled to offer a “hint…on the conditions of pleasant work in the days when we shall work for livelihood and pleasure and not for ‘profit’.” Morris was a textile designer and like other skilled artisans plied his craft in a workshop, however the vast majority of work during his life had already been transferred to the confines of multi-story redbrick-built factories. Given this reality, he set about imagining a future factory as an extension of the workshops he knew.

His first priority was to situate the factory in a pleasant place surrounded by beautiful gardens where the workers had access to fresh air and relaxation. It follows, of course, that the factory would not foul its surroundings. If a river flowed by, no toxins would be dumped into it. When Morris wrote water-power was already giving way to the devastating environmental consequences of coal to provide the steam to power all the factory machines.

Next, the factory itself would be an architectural wonder with high windows to let in sunlight and spacious interiors not cramped by machinery and narrow aisles. Further, the factory would have an adjacent dining hall and library. And for evening study: rooms for lectures and conversation. And why not a gym and game room?

Morris cleverly answered those who scorned his depiction as frivolous by noting that each factory already supports a mansion and gardens, but these “frivolities” are not available to the workers, just the boss.

. . .

Having described the future socialist factory, Morris turned to the products created behind its walls. Only beautiful, sturdy and useful goods will leave the factory—in other words, the manufacture of utilitarian products, not glitzy consumables. The production of useful goods would provide the workers with honorable employment that they could be proud of and which would satisfy their needs to achieve creative outlets.

. . .

However, twenty-one years after Morris wrote A Factory and four thousand miles west of London, in the expansive prairie outside of Chicago, a new factory opened. The company brochure hailed the new location and new industrial site in glowing terms:

. . .  a plant that was a marvel for its age gleamed ready to accept the workers and management teams that moved west to occupy its benches, offices and foundries. An amazing 36 building sections . . . had been built in two years. It was beyond doubt the most modern industrial complex of its day. (From a 1915 company brochure)

It had spacious concrete walkways between the buildings and wide roadways bordered by grass and flowers. Hundreds of workers were transferred to it from New York and Chicago. One New Yorker, accustomed to that city’s cramped working quarters, wrote back home describing his new working conditions. He said that Hawthorne looked “more like a park than anything else. (Ibid.)

This was the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the Bell Telephone System. It was a vast complex situated on 300 acres just beyond the city limits of Chicago in the village of Hawthorne. Construction began in 1903 and in two years a total of 600,000-square-foot, sprinkler-equipped buildings were erected, the first fire-safe factories and offices in America. The goal was productive efficiency by consolidating several thousand workers spread across cramped and dark buildings in Chicago and beyond. Where before they worked like moles, in the new buildings with their sixteen foot ceilings and twelve foot windows to let natural light in, the workers could breath. And along with their participation in the ever-expanding, cutting-edge technological complex, as reported by the local press, it is no wonder that the environment elevated the self-esteem of the workforce. By the early 1920’s, a veritable metropolis of labor comprising 20,000 workers developed on Chicago’s western border, complete with its own power plant, hospital, dining halls, fire brigade, railway and laundry. Less than a decade later 40,000 workers were employed on the site.

As employment grew, the company constructed baseball diamonds (six in total) and tennis courts (thirteen) for the workers. Besides encouraging sports, and with large tracts of land available, other parcels were set aside for vegetable gardens and even for a field the brass band used for marching practice. Soon dining halls had to be expanded and a library was added along with classrooms and workshops. In 1927, the Albright Gymnasium was built to provide for physical activities during the cold winter months in the Chicago area.

These company-sponsored ventures may impress us as innovative, and even enlightened, but they were not so much unusual as scaled-up common practices of the time—referred to as “welfare capitalism”—that larger firms undertook. Sports facilities, clinics and clubrooms along with some benefits such as survivor’s insurance were not exceptional, though they were modest compared to Western Electric.

. . .

At the Hawthorne Works, the workforce consisting of a large number of young women (including teenagers) deviated from the historic standard of a masculine industrial army. Western Electric was the largest US employer of women at the time—there were almost 200,000 operators at switchboards in 1920—and it was noteworthy these workers were valued as semi-skilled operatives.

Many of these young, well-paid women were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and, as such, they had few resources for a social life with their fellow workers. Of course, single young men, often immigrants themselves, worked at the Hawthorne plant also and to accommodate the leisure pursuits of this young population, Western Electric established the Hawthorne Men’s Club in 1911. This institution, which was unusual for the time, organized a spectacular array of social activities from dances and vacations to evening classes, chess, and sports of all kinds including swimming, golf and basketball.

The Hawthorne Club was established at the very beginning of the popular feminism that developed, especially in cities, with the rise of the suffragettes and the Flapper style in dress and hair. First Wave Feminism, expanding beyond the middle class to young women workers, forced the all male club to incorporate all the workers at the Hawthorne plant in 1915, five years before the franchise was granted to women. The renamed Hawthorne Club, in keeping with this new sensibility, sponsored a women’s basketball team called the “Ruthless Babes” and to punctuate their liberation with target practice, there was a women’s gun club. But, of course, before long that quintessential American institution, a beauty pageant was launched.

Western Electric’s expansive support for leisure pursuits, successfully embedded company loyalty amongst the workers, but other bonds, not recognized by management studies since they were more psychological than organizational, reinforced identification with the company. First, as mentioned, thousands of young women were employed at Western Electric, and by earning above average wages for their gender these women achieved a level of independence unknown to previous generations.

And second, Western Electric was a cutting-edge technology firm and working there, as the company never failed to remind the workers, had the aura of contributing to Progress. The telephone, after all, was seen as a technological miracle that brought personal and commercial benefits to the world and the company nurtured pride in what was perceived as useful work. Morris’ socialist criteria for freedom on the job would hardly be met at Western Electric, but useful work, one could argue, was provided. The company’s promotion of leisure pursuits, more than paternalistic management or supplying useful work, defined it as a unique enterprise of historic significance. If Morris were presented with the range of after-work pursuits that the company sponsored, in which thousands of workers participated and which demonstrably had positive affects in their daily lives, he might have been astonished even if he would hardly characterized it as utopian.