The Paint Rebellion

Checked against the record. THE SPECIFIC CLAIM IS NOT SOURCED, and the page now says so rather than asserting it. The page said the company painted interiors in bright deep greens, blues, browns and greys, that residents complained, and that the company switched to beiges and pastels. Two federal documents were opened and searched: the Historic American Buildings Survey for the Town of Mount Union (PA-5974) and for the Town of Kistler (PA-5976). Neither mentions colours, beiges, pastels, or a complaint about paint. WHERE TO LOOK. The Kistler survey names the publication the whole study fed into: Kim E. Wallace, “Brickyard Towns: A History of Refractories Industry Communities in South-Central Pennsylvania”, published in 1993 by America's Industrial Heritage Project and HABS/HAER. If the colour dispute is documented anywhere, that book is the first place to check. It was not available here. WHAT IS SOURCED, and it is a bigger story than the paint. The Mount Union survey records that the houses were “solid frame structures, nicely painted and slate roofed” with interiors “painted and papered”, porcelain sinks and city water, and plans to have them “electrically lighted and scientifically sewered”. It quotes the aim: “the employees and their families should be comfortably and decently housed; and . . . they should be encouraged to keep their houses as nicely as possible.” Housing was part of what the companies called a programme of social and cultural transformation. AND THE PART THE PAGE WAS LEAVING OUT. The same programme “included a policy of curtailing alcohol consumption”, and “employees who flagrantly ignored admonishments to abstain were fired.” A page calling this “one of the gentlest labor stories” while omitting that the company could sack a man for drinking was telling half of it. A MISQUOTATION OF MY OWN, corrected. An earlier version of this page rendered the workforce as “Poles, Greeks and Serbians”. The survey quotes the local newspaper of 1916 as “Slavish, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks and Serbians” as well as “native Americans, and southern Negroes.” Poles are not in it; Roumanians, Bulgarians and Italians were dropped. The period terms are kept as the paper printed them because paraphrasing them hides what was actually said.