What happened to the loggers of America’s northeast when lumber companies moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Jason Newton’s Cutover Capitalism provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape—specifically, the northern forest of eastern North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Justin Hargett caught up with Jason recently to discuss the book.
Can you describe the research process behind the book? What sources did you rely on to reconstruct the lives of the workers in the Northern Forest?
I wanted to get as close as possible to the locations I was studying. I was lucky enough to have won a number of grants and fellowships, which allowed me to travel to archives across the Northern Forest, including the Adirondacks in New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.
The most important sources I looked at were oral histories, business records, newspapers, and forestry student theses on lumbering operations. The oral histories were amazing sources. The bulk of my oral history research was conducted at the Maine Folklife center at the University of Maine. They have dozens of interviews with farmers and lumber workers. While there are problems with relying on oral history testimonies exclusively, I back them up with other sources.
A lot of the oral histories I looked at were recorded by U Maine students in the 1960s. They interviewed loggers who were rather old at the time of the recording. Some of these loggers were born in the 1880s and 1890s. These workers were surprisingly candid and emotional in these interviews. They treated the interview process like a church confessional or a therapy session. The focus of chapter six is a Maine worker named Frederick Burke who was very open about his substance abuse problems. Burke’s interview alongside many other chunks of evidence helped me form the argument in chapter six about how class in the Northern Forest formed around these periodic drinking sprees which themselves formed around the seasonal cycles of the forest.
You highlight the brutal conditions for workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the French Canadian lumberjacks. How did this exploitation compare to labor practices in other industries or regions during the same period?
It is difficult to overestimate how vital immigrants were in the American economy before 1924. My students find it hard to believe that immigration to America was almost unrestricted prior to that year—if we ignore the openly racist Chinese exclusion policies. America became an economic powerhouse because of temporary and permanent immigrant labor. Many business owners in a range of industries from the needle trades in the slums of New York City to mining and lumbering in rural regions in the West and Northeast depended on a consistent flow of immigrants largely from Europe but also Mexico and Canada. Arriving here with few formal support systems, immigrants were forced to work longer and harder than native born Americans, for less pay and in the most dangerous conditions. The labor movement, the AFL in particular, saw this flow of immigrants as regressive for American workers, however. This all applied to French Canadians who migrated to and visited the Northern Forest. They were essential and despised at the same time.
One thing that I saw in the sources, particularly state and federal government records and business records, was this strange desire for certain immigrant groups to work certain jobs. It was really bizarre.
This was because of a belief among American elites, backed up by the latest academic research in the pseudoscience of eugenics, that certain races or ethnic groups were naturally predisposed to certain types of work. As I explain in the book, French Canadians were again and again depicted as natural forest clearers and lumberjacks. This supports the major thesis in my book that control of the working body was essential for industrialization.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, educated people believed eugenic or racial management because they learned eugenics in college. It was managers, clerks, economists, and business owners who really had a firm conviction in race science. Inspired by eugenics, this reliance on French Canadian workers in the woods evolved into a formal, state sponsored guest labor program by World War II. This program mimicked the more well-known Bracero guest worker program.
In chapter seven I explain this racial scientific thinking and also show how it was all bunk. In reality, this immigrant occupational streaming boiled down to putting immigrants into jobs that native born Americans didn’t want to work, or would only work for high pay. The racial scientific thinking served as a justification for treating immigrants poorly. French Canadian workers were beaten and killed in lumber camps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Entire families lived in the woods in the winter—in dirt floor shacks, sometimes alongside their draft animals. Child labor was endemic. By the 1950s, little had changed, and there were reports of French Canadian guest workers living in broken down buses.
How does Cutover Capitalism challenge the traditional narrative of industrialization as being fueled primarily by fossil fuels?
We universally believe that industrialization was primarily powered by fossil fuels, but Cutover Capitalism shows that it wasn’t always powered by fossil fuels, and it doesn’t need to be powered by fossil fuels. I could write many pages trying to define industrialization but, ultimately, industrialization is the increased scale and speed of production.
Fossil fuels are a terrific way to expand the speed and scale of production but it’s not the only way. Investors did not care what made them money or increased production. If you owned a share in a paper mill or if you wanted your timberland to make money, you weren’t concerned with how this was done, you just care that money was being made. You don’t care if workers are using gasoline powered tractors to move logs or pushing their draft horses to work themselves to death. It’s all the same from the perspective of capital.
For a number of reasons that I explore in the book, fossil fuel powered machines were slow to penetrate the Northern Forest. They were there, but just not that common or not as important as manual labor. This was true into the 1950s. So the scale and scope of logging didn’t increase here through the use of fossil fuels. Instead they increased through the sweat of workers’ brows and through new ingenious ways of working with the forest environment.
What Cutover Capitalism shows is that if you look at industrialization from the firm level (and industrialization always happens at the firm level and expands out) we see that in all cases industrialization means workers are working harder and/or longer. This was true in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and it was true in the Northern Forest. The difference between these industries is that in the Northern Forest the increased pace of production depended on muscle power more than in many other industries.
What lessons do you think Cutover Capitalism offers for understanding the relationship between labor, the environment, and capitalism today?
Writing a book is an amazing learning experience and one of the most important things I learned is that our planet is warming today because the accumulation of human labor over time manifests as CO2 emissions. More humans, working with more machines, longer and harder have warmed an entire freaking planet!
This is a startling realization but it also has in it a key to fighting climate change. Climate change and the pace of work are connected. If we slow our pace of work, we can slow or stop climate change. There is a growing body of research connecting decreased work hours (per day/per week) to fewer climate changing emissions. When we work less, we travel by car less, we turn machines and lights off for longer periods of time, and on and on. Importantly, this doesn’t mean doing the same amount of work in a shorter period of time, five days of work in four days for example. That is just a work speedup. I’m talking about each worker literally working less, being less productive in a week.
Shortening working hours is win-win, with the caveat that wages stay the same (yes this can be done, just google “bread and roses strike.”) If we all work less we all have more free time and we save the planet. Unfortunately, this advice contradicts about 120 years of orthodox economic thinking that connects historical progress with increased productivity. Yet, it is this orthodox thinking that propelled loggers to work at such extreme levels and this same thinking that contributes to climate change.
Do you have an idea where your research will take you next? Are there other intersections of labor and environmental history that you want to study?
One thing I wanted to explore more after writing this book was who had the knowledge that made forest products production possible. When I read about these historical logging operations and investigated the background of the workers I was always amazed. These were people with little or no formal education who were doing real feats of engineering, on the fly, with little capital investment or specialized tools. I also did a little bit of research into the early forest service and forestry students, and I found that forestry students prior to the 1930s were most often learning about the forest from workers. Right now, I’m working on a project on how the forest service entered into forests across the country to try and learn from workers. College educated forestry professionals eventually replaced these workers and became the managers in lumber operations and the land managers of the growing acreage of state and national forests.
Are there present-day industries or societies that apply organic power and natural cycles to large-scale processes in ways that are similar to those you describe in your book?
There are a lot of these. Farming is one example, particularly if we look at fruit and vegetable cultivation in places like California. Yes, they rely on machines, but the changing seasons and manual labor are still essential. Not surprisingly, these workers are often Mexican guest workers.
One take-away from my book is that industrial societies have never freed themselves from natural cycles. Popular conceptions of industrialization and anthropogenic climate change make it seem like humans are in control, but the exact opposite is true. Industrialization has embedded us into the global carbon cycle, the movement of CO2 between atmosphere, ocean, organic things, and land. Before industrialization humans had little reason to be concerned about the carbon cycle. Now people are forced to measure atmospheric carbon to the same degree that farmers measure soil nitrogen levels or that loggers measured snow depth. We still aren’t in control, we are just trying to cope on a dynamic and powerful planet.
Lastly, and possibly most importantly, what are your thoughts on the Denny’s Lumberjack Slam breakfast?
Yes please! But actually, this provides a cool example of reverse engineering from the historian’s perspective. We all know somewhere in the back of our mind that old-school lumberjacks ate a lot. This is reflected in the Paul Bunyan myths or on the Denny’s menu. Before beginning this research I asked myself, “is it true that lumberjacks ate a lot, and if so, why?” The answer is yes they did eat a lot. I found a study from 1904 that confirmed that Maine lumberjacks were some of the biggest eaters in America, consuming sometimes more than 8,000 calories a day. So onto the question of why they ate so much. Well, the obvious answer and the true answer is because they worked really hard. But then I asked myself why did these particular workers work so hard? The entire book unravels from this series of questions. Ultimately the answer is that, in the cutover landscape of the Northern Forest, industrialization had to be a labor-intensive process.