Perhaps no single structure or institution better represented the face of the towns along the Q than Cicero’s Western Electric Hawthorne Works. Occupying a site on the east side of Cicero Avenue between Cermak Road and the CB&Q tracks from 1905 to 1986, at it’s peak Western Electric was by far the towns along the Q’s largest employer (45,000 in 1929) and an iconic example of 20th century industrial America.
Western Electric is best known for its manufacturer of Bell System telephones – all of them for many years – but an astounding variety of other objects, ranging from vacuum cleaners to military radar equipment was produced inside Hawthorne Works’ red brick walls.
Western Electric got its start the 1860s, when a pair of enterprising young men, Enos Barton and Elisha Gray opened a shop in Cleveland, Ohio, to supply telegraphic equipment to the Western Union Telegraph Company. At Western Union’s request they relocated their shop to Chicago, and reorganized it as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone in 1876. History could have been different. Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by only a matter of hours. Otherwise for decades and decades we might have had the Gray System instead of the Bell System.
Introduction of telephones transformed the communication landscape. In 1878, Western Electric Manufacturing diversified into telephone manufacturing. A protracted legal battle over patent infringements between Western Union and the American Bell Telephone Company resulted in Western Union selling its 1/3 interest in Western Electric Manufacturing Co. to American Bell. Western Electric Manufacturing was reorganized simply as Western Electric Company, an affiliate of American Bell Telephone and subsequently American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).
Telephones proved so popular that by 1902, Western Electric had outgrown its space in its multistory building at Clinton and Congress Streets on Chicago’s Near West Side and began a search for a new, more spacious location. The desired site was found adjoining the village of Hawthorne within the Town (effectively township) of Cicero and construction of the Hawthorne Works was begun.
When opened in 1905, Hawthorne Works was more than a factory, it was a works, a self-contained industrial ecosystem. Quoting from a Western Electric descriptive brochure from the 1920s:
"It was a vast manufacturing complex spread over two hundred acres employing up to forty thousand workers in more than a hundred buildings. With its own hospital, powerhouse, three-hundred member police force, a fully equipped fire department and eleven cafeterias, Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works was more than just a factory. It was a self-sufficient city."
Though already huge at its opening, the facility grew. Increasing demand for telephone sets and supporting communication equipment, as well as diversification into additional product lines such as radio vacuum tubes, created the need for further expansion. Nine new buildings were erected in 1917, adding 319,000 square feet to the telephone and assembly shops. Hawthorne Works employed 25,000 people – that number would grow to 45,000 by 1929.
By 1920, the facility had produced over eleven million telephones. The company produced thousands of varieties of telephone apparatus. During WWI, the company developed air-to-ground communication systems. All WWI radio equipment was produced at Hawthorne. Development of the condenser microphone and other sound technology facilitated introduction of “talkie” motion pictures in the late 1920s. Over the years Western Electric produced typewriters, sewing machines, electric fans, vacuum cleaners, microphones, mimeographs, vacuum tubes, radios, radar equipment and transistors.
Hawthorne Works had its own railroad. The Manufacturers’ Junction Railroad was established, first to bring in building materials for construction of the Hawthorne Works facilities, and later to provide connection to the national railroad network. The railroad operated 25 miles of track at its peak, through and around the Hawthorne Works property.
Hawthorne Works’ growth was made possible by a first and second generation, predominantly Czech and Polish labor force, earning the facility the affectionate moniker of “the Bohemian Bastille.” The adjoining suburbs of Cicero (which by then had subsumed the little village of Hawthorne) and Berwyn experienced explosive growth early in the century as a consequence of Hawthorne Works; expanding employment. Between 1910 and 1930, Cicero’s population more than quadrupled, and Berwyn’s population grew eight-fold, leading to the construction of the iconic brick bungalows that line the streets for miles and miles in each community.
Proximity of the CB&Q railroad, and the Chicago Surface Lines and West Towns streetcar systems, allowed Western Electric to draw upon communities for miles around for its labor and management employment pool. Conspicuously absent from Hawthorne’s workforce during the first four decades, were African-Americans. Only when Western Electric became a major military defense contractor during WWI did the company “break its color line” and begin employing blacks.
In the 1920s, Western Electric began a study of the effect of workplace illumination on employee productivity. The project was soon expanded to include a variety of workplace changes: lighting, temperature, length of work day, time and length of breaks, snacks, socialization. The unexpected conclusion was that every change increased worker productivity. The conclusion came to be known as “the Hawthorne Effect,” a phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed.
The Great Depression of the 1930s nearly silenced Hawthorne Works. Western Electric sales fell from $411 million in 1929, to less than $70 million in 1933. Employment declined from 45,000 to 6,000. No telephones were manufactured. 15% of Americans had given up their telephones. The company diversified into household products such as bookends, ashtrays, kitchen appliances, jigsaw puzzles and furniture.
America's participation in WWII both revived Hawthorne Works' and Western Electric’s fortunes and changed their mission. In 1942 and 1943, 80% of Hawthorne Works production was defense related. Radar systems, tank, aircraft and ship radios, and gun directors, battlefield announcing systems, and under-helmet headsets, were just some of what Hawthorne produced during the war. No civilian telephones were produced. With the return of peacetime, Western Electric continued its focus on defense related production.
Hawthorne Works had reached its apotheosis. Western Electric had already opened additional manufacturing plants in Kearny, New Jersey and Baltimore in 1925. Following WWII, Western Electric undertook further dispersal of manufacturing.
Despite the1950, relocation of telephone handset production to Indianapolis, 25,000 workers were still employed a Hawthorne. Production and employment remained steady through the next two decades. By the early 1970s, production and materials handling processes favored single-story buildings. Efforts were made to adapt Hawthorne Works to modern manufacturing methods, but the fact was that the nearly eighty-year-old multi-story, multi-building Hawthorne Works complex was obsolete.
Production and employment declined. Obsolete parts of the complex were demolished. By the early 1980s only 4,000 to 5,000 workers were still employed. On June 25, 1983, employees were informed of Western Electric’s decision to close Hawthorne Works. Operations wound down and the complex fell silent in 1986. The site at Cermak Road and Cicero Avenue was redeveloped as a shopping center named, appropriately enough, Hawthorne Works.
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