The Emperor of Epcot: Walt Disney and Company Towns

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
And now, here is Walt Disney.

**Walt Disney** (0:03)
The most exciting, so far the most important part of our Florida project. In fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow.
We call it Epcot.
Spelled E-P-C-O-T. Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Epcot will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And Epcot will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.

**Andrew Heaton** (1:06)
Hello and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for wanderers, thinkers and children of all ages, but also crotchety grumps of all ages. It's The Whole Spectrum. I'm your host, Andrew Heaton. This week on The Political Orphanage, we're doing a whole spread on company towns. We will visit paternalistic Victorian industrialists, utopian visionaries, a failed hippie commune, at least one deadly labor uprising, and perhaps the single greatest corporate flop in all of American history. To kick things off, we're going to discuss the birth and origins of America's foremost existent company town, Disney World. My friend and yours, Brian Brushwood, will join momentarily.
Here's how it's going to work today. Part one, Brian and I will discuss the nature and pitfalls of company towns as a general primer for the various corporate experiments we'll be learning about throughout the week. Then in part two of today's episode, we will get specifically to Walt Disney and the glittering corporate city state he hoped to build. Enjoy.
My guest today is the great Brian Brushwood, man's man, ladies' man, man about town, a dude with a number of interests, but by virtue of being the host of World's Greatest Con, the most knowledgeable man I know about Walt Disney and Epcot Center that we will talk about as a paragon of modern company towns. Hello, Brian.

**Brian Brushwood** (2:44)
Hey, man, it's good to be here.

**Andrew Heaton** (2:46)
I'm very excited to talk to you about company towns, Brian. You're aware that Texas is becoming kind of a hotbed for company towns. There's at least two that Elon Musk is getting started, and I think there might be others in the pipes as well.

**Brian Brushwood** (2:59)
Yeah, and I gotta tell you, I almost certainly, I was a little bit trepidatious to accept your invitation, because when it comes to the subject of company towns, I find myself pulled in massively different directions, because I love protecting weirdos who make speculative bets, individual prospectors whose fortunes ride or die and make the world better, the failures subsidize the successes. And when we imagine a single person going out and bravely staking their claim in the gold rush and trying to make money, possibly generationally change their family, we love it. And I suppose I definitely love the same thing for institutions, for corporations or, you know, depending on, let's say none of the baggagey parts of colonialism, but the idea of taking untamed wilderness and making it civilized.

**Andrew Heaton** (3:56)
Like Icelandic colonialism, where you're just getting rid of seals, but no people.

**Brian Brushwood** (4:01)
Exactly, right? Like basically making more room for more humans to have happy lives is a good thing. But that bumps up extremely strongly against my anti-authoritarian, anti-top-down structure, anti-walled gardens, anti-shut up slave. There's...
I look forward to what we unpack inside ourselves over this week.

**Andrew Heaton** (4:26)
Hey, I'm right there with you, man. I have very conflicted feelings about... I shouldn't say I have conflicted feelings about company towns. What I have conflicted feelings about are experiments and human living. I like the idea of experiments, and I should state, I like all kinds of experiments. So I am on the record as a free market guy saying, I think there should be way more communes in the United States. I think there should be a kibbutzim in every state. I think you should be allowed to leave if you don't like it. And that's where I find I get into trouble with company towns, is you want to create a utopia as a corporation, or as a person, or as a religious commune, whatever you want to do. I'm totally fine with that, provided that people can leave.
But there is this interplay between the reality of being in a company town, that at some point, there's overlapping problems that make it less simple than you can just walk away. So if I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, and I'm working for Dunkin Donuts and I don't like Dunkin Donuts, I could just leave and I can go work at another Steve's Rusty Coffee or whatever, right? Like the right of exit is very, very strong there. In theory, you could apply this to nation states and say, hey, if you don't like what's going on in the United States, you can just leave, therefore, everything's justified because you have the ability to leave the United States. No one's making you stay here. But the reality is that's such an excessive and burdensome task to uproot my entire life socially, liquidate my assets, file the paperwork and leave the country, that it's really practically not true. With company towns, at some point, there's a bright line we cross, I think, where you get into that, where if it's the employer, it's also the housing, it's also the social network, it's everything.