Hospitals of Industry: New York’s Progressive Era Labor Colonies

Recent scholarship, including the work of scholars like Barbara Arneil (2017), asks researchers in places like the United States and Canada to revisit histories of colonialism closer to home. This dissertation analyzes one moment of domestic colonialism, in Progressive Era New York State. Using archival materials and scholarly literature, this research analyzes three instances of labor colonies: the New York City Farm Colony, New York State’s planned Industrial Farm Colony, and the Warwick Farm for Inebriates. Traced through each of these is a thread of the “Unemployable”—a label of rising salience often associated with homelessness, addiction, or non-deservingness of aid—for which the labor colony was a suitable remedy. During the Progressive Era, institutions like the New York City Farm Colony became increasingly focused on the Unemployable, and these institutions mandated sophisticated and intense kinds of agricultural and industrial work. Meanwhile, policymakers passed a state industrial farm colony law for people convicted of misdemeanors like disorderly conduct and public intoxication. Only due to the development of a national, wartime labor colony plan did the state colony not open. An interdisciplinary work of policy history offering a new approach, this dissertation features chapters on the history of the concepts of colony and vagrant, an archival history tracing the implementation of the state’s Unemployable labor colony institutions, an analysis of the policy process associated with the state labor colony bill, as well as a working out of the political theory behind colonies. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the heterotopic nature of social policy and pathways for future historical, theoretical, and methodological development.