An Emergent Labor Movement
For almost two decades after the Civil War, dissent in Humboldt County took solely political forms. No organization appeared that could be described as a trade union in either actual or incipient form. In this respect, Humboldt County differed little from other population centers along the Pacific Coast. Before the 1880s, only San Francisco possessed a labor movement of significant proportions, although a few trade unions formed and disbanded in Sacramento, San Jose, Stockton, Oakland, and Portland.1 The post–Civil War years from 1865 to 1880 were also lean ones for the American labor movement as a whole. Many cities and towns, especially in the West, lacked a sufficiently large artisan workforce to sustain trade unions. The industrialization of the West did not commence in earnest until the last two decades of the nineteenth century.2 And the labor movement in San Francisco lacked the resources and the inclination to reach out to the remote hinterlands of California and spread the gospel of unionism. To some extent also, an abiding faith in the efficacy of political action inhibited the emergence of a trade union movement in many western communities.
The mid-1880s witnessed the development of the modern-day American labor movement under the auspices of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. Throughout the nation, workers flocked to join unions. Many communities in the Far West, including Humboldt County, followed suit. This chapter examines the complex interplay of factors leading to the founding of the Humboldt County labor movement.
Expansion and Fraud in the Lumber Industry
Following the depression of the late 1870s, the Humboldt County lumber industry underwent a period of rapid expansion. The booming market for lumber in the San Francisco Bay Area and rapidly developing southern California transformed the lumber industry. Between 1882 and 1887, the output of the county’s mills doubled, from 64 million feet to at least 120 million feet—one estimate put the figure at 190 million feet. The number of lumber workers employed in Humboldt County increased to 2,000 by the mid-1880s. Although a considerable amount of the capital to finance this expansion came from outside the county, local entrepreneurs continued to own and manage the majority of lumbering concerns. In 1883, however, Humboldt County and San Francisco businessmen, at the instigation of a group of Scottish capitalists, embarked on a scheme to reorganize the Humboldt County lumber industry on a scale that would have transformed it beyond all recognition, from a multibusiness community of small to medium-size lumbering concerns to one dominated by a colossus controlled almost entirely by outside capitalists. Both the means and ends employed by this conglomerate, which incorporated itself as the California Redwood Company in 1883, provoked the outrage of Humboldt County radicals and sowed the seeds of the county’s first labor movement.
The saga of the California Redwood Company must be set against the background of dubious land-acquisition practices that had been going on since at least the 1870s. Reports from the U.S. Commissioner of the General Land Office and the California Surveyor General indicate that during the 1870s and 1880s, Humboldt County lumber companies acquired vast tracts of redwood lands by fraudulent means.3 The confessions of S. A. D. Puter are most revealing. In 1908, after being prosecuted by the federal government for land fraud, Puter recounted his involvement in a book entitled Looters of the Public Domain.4 In 1875, while employed as an axman by the deputy U.S. surveyor in Humboldt County, Puter gained valuable information about the most desirable land claims. He proceeded to line up people to file “dummy” homestead entries; when the claims were confirmed eight to ten months later, he acquired ownership of them and sold the best lands to “Eureka capitalists” for a handsome profit. Because the “dummy” entry system required the collaboration of a number of individuals, many Humboldters were aware of it. A Ferndale farmer, Richard Johnston, declared in 1882 that it was “a well known fact” that vast tracts of redwood timber were “gobbled up by speculators, to my mind, in a rather questionable way,” and he went on to describe at length how the dummy entry system worked.5
In the fall of 1882, a group of entrepreneurs from Humboldt County and San Francisco, acting at the behest of the Scottish capitalists who were to form the California Redwood Company, began using the “dummy” entry system to perpetrate one of the largest timberland frauds in American history.6 David Evans, one of the county’s most eminent lumbermen, and C. H. King of San Francisco hired people to locate and survey desirable lands. They then employed agents to engage a large number of entrymen. The agents made little effort to conceal their mission, operating brazenly from a saloon three blocks away from the U.S. Land Office in Eureka. According to a congressional report, “a large number of prominent citizens of Eureka” were aware of what was going on. The agents were so zealous in the performance of their duties that “farmers were stopped on their way home [and] merchants were called from their counters and persuaded to allow their names to be used to obtain land.”7 In addition, sailors living in Coffee Jack’s boardinghouse filed their first citizen papers so that their names might be used for dummy entries. Four hundred dummy entrymen filed timber claims, and after agreeing to transfer the land deeds later, received from $5 to $50 for their efforts. This scheme involved 57,000 acres of what the secretary of the interior called “perhaps the most valuable tract of timberland in the United States.”8 The secretary’s estimate of the amount of land was on the conservative side. In his 1886 report, the commissioner of the General Land Office stated that a special agent sent to Humboldt County to investigate the fraud estimated that “not less than 100,000 acres” was involved,9 and a story in the New York Times in April 1886 put the figure at 96,000 acres.10
The fraudulent land acquisitions and the prospect of a massive consolidation of the county’s lumber industry caused consternation among Humboldt radicals. Suddenly they were confronted, on their very doorstep, with a glaring example of a heinous evil they had railed against for almost twenty years. Louis Tower, who had been active in the Greenback Labor party, stressed the parallel between developments at the local, state, and national levels. In a searing letter to the Democratic Standard, he denounced “our money kings,” who have “so exploited labor—have so circumvented and controlled the industries of the nation” that the people had been reduced to a level not much above a “bare subsistence.” He lambasted the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, and the Spreckels and then, turning to developments in his own county, accused “lumbermen and others” of land fraud “thus shutting honest labor from the benefits of the public domain.” He added that “the natural law of labor is that it shall gather its own fruits” and that “if this law is constantly interfered with . . . the people, like a mighty river, obstructed at every assailable point, will rise in their might and sweep away every obstruction.”11
But Tower’s fellow Greenbacker, Charles Keller, played the main role in trying to mobilize the community against the depredations of the California Redwood Company. In late March and April 1883, Keller wrote a series of letters to the Democratic Standard. He stated that he had “no notion that this community will be surprised by this statement,” but he implored, “Can nothing be done to stop these land thieves and this nefarious practice?” He proposed that the Central Committee of the Greenback Labor party “take the matter in hand.”12 Confronted with a mixture of hostility and indifference, Keller’s indignation was kept alive by continuing reports of land frauds, supplied to him by patrons of his butcher shop. “The stealing was so gross,” he recalled, “that I induced various of my informants to make affidavits before a notary public stating that these reports were correct.”13 Keller forwarded the affidavits to the Land Office in Washington.
Undoubtedly, some residents were as outraged as Keller and Tower, but they made up a minority of the community. It is likely that a considerable number of people had simply become inured to the spectacle of land fraud. Indeed, a not insignificant number may have violated federal land laws, albeit on a small scale, to acquire more than the 160 acres that the Homestead Act allowed. There was, though, a more fundamental reason people were prepared to condone or overlook large-scale land fraud involving the Humboldt County lumber industry. The federal land laws in the early Gilded Age imposed legal constraints on the land-acquisition practices of lumber companies that were not altogether conducive to the effective and rational operation of a lumber concern. Homestead and preemption laws applied to lands suitable for agriculture, not to timberlands. Thus, a large number of claims encompassing timberlands were fraudulent, since the lands were not suited or intended for agricultural use after they were cleared. The Timber and Stones Act of 1878 made it legally possible to acquire timberlands in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington Territory. Under the act, 160 acres of government-surveyed timberland could be sold to any person or association of persons at a minimum price of $2.50 per acre. The applicant had to swear that he was not acquiring the land for speculative purposes, that he had not contracted to sell the patent to someone else, and that the land was unsuitable for cultivation.14
One of the principal concerns of a lumber entrepreneur was to ensure that, over the long term, his mill would have an adequate and accessible supply of timber. There would have been little point in undertaking heavy capital investments in equipment and transportation facilities if a sufficient supply of lumber could not be guaranteed over the lifetime of the investment. By the 1880s, few Humboldt County lumber companies owned less than 1,500 acres. The Pacific Lumber Company commenced operations in the mid-1880s, having acquired a land base of 12,000 acres of redwood timber. By the late 1880s, the Dolbeer and Carson Company owned over 20,000 acres of timberland.
In the context of the activities of the California Redwood Company, the county press harped on the contradictions and limitations of federal land laws as they pertained to timberlands. No newspaper put the case more forcefully than the Democratic Standard, which, still under the editorship of William Ayres, performed a dramatic volte-face on the land-monopoly question. Three weeks before it published Keller’s tirade, exposing the massive land frauds taking place, the Standard commented that lands were being acquired in the county by means that would “shame a Louisiana Returning Board.”15 At the very same time that it was publishing Keller’s letters, however, the Standard took issue with him. When Keller cited the Timber and Stones Act chapter and verse, the Standard responded by saying that the law could not have been so impractical as to limit each man or association of individuals to 160 acres of timberland.16 In another article, the Standard argued that “so far as the redwoods are concerned, it takes large capital to generate them in the manufacture of lumber.” Moreover, the Standard attempted to turn the arguments of Keller and Tower on their head when it asserted that “poor men cannot work them” [the redwoods], and “if they can locate them, it is to secure what benefit may arise from a sale” as this was “the only way a poor man can realize any benefit from his timber right.”17
Ayres had other reasons for defending the California Redwood Company. He was among the approximately 200 people who had filed a dummy land claim while the company was active in the county. And, like almost all other participants, he eventually had his land claim invalidated by the federal government.18 Ayres’s involvement in the affair and his persistent attempts to discredit investigations by the federal government were to haunt him for the rest of his public life.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the support for the California Redwood Company in a totally cynical light. Many people—with memory of the depression of the late 1870s still vivid—believed that infusions of outside capital would bolster and stabilize the county’s lumber industry. The Democratic Standard was not the only paper to make this argument. On May 5, 1883, the Times-Telephone (a name temporarily assumed by the Humboldt Times) confirmed rumors that a syndicate was trying to buy most of the county’s timberlands and noted with satisfaction that “the taxable property would be greatly increased” and that “a new life would be given to the manufacture of lumber.”19 The Ferndale Enterprise assured its readers that this “movement” would not “work any injury to our people . . . enough mill property will always remain in the hands of private parties to protect themselves, and create a lively competition in the lumber industry.”20
Herbert Gutman has argued that, in many Gilded Age communities, a broad coalition of labor and small businessmen resisted the encroachment of outside capitalists.21 To the extent that this was true, it was less true of single-industry communities. The dependency of a community on one industry inclined many people, including workers, to perceive a mutuality between their interests and those of the community’s dominant industry. In addition, it is hard to overestimate the scope for repression and victimization in single-industry communities. Thus, a boycott of Keller’s butcher shop contributed to driving him from the county;22 and the blacklisting of several of the county’s early labor leaders, including George Speed, forced them to leave Humboldt. The lengths to which some of the California Redwood Company officials were prepared to go to stifle a federal investigation indicates how ruthless some individuals in the lumber industry could be. Not only were investigating agents offered bribes, but also, according to the General Land Office Report for 1886, “Witnesses were spirited out of the county; others were threatened and intimidated; spies were employed to watch and follow the [land] agent and report the names of all persons who conversed with him; and on one occasion two persons who were about to enter the agent’s room . . . were knocked down and dragged away.”23 Finally, an attempt was made to poison one of the investigating agents.24
The International Workingmen’s Association
By the summer of 1883, Keller had decided that battling the California Redwood Company would take more than indignant letters to the press and forwarding affidavits to the Land Office in Washington. “If ever there was a time in Humboldt County for an intelligent organization of wage workers that time is now,” he wrote in early August 1883.25 He informed the Democratic Standard that on a recent visit to San Francisco he had joined the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and intended to form branches of the organization in Humboldt County. The IWA, founded by Burnette Haskell in San Francisco in 1882, had established a significant following in parts of California and several western and Rocky Mountain states. Haskell, a lawyer, began his career in radical politics and the San Francisco labor movement in January 1882 when he started publication of a weekly newspaper called Truth, which for a time became the official organ of the San Francisco Trades Assembly. The object of Haskell’s IWA was “to assist and aid the organization of labor, the various trade unions, Farmers’ Alliances and all other forms of organization in which the producers have organized or may organize themselves.” The IWA leadership adopted a cell system, patterned after many secret revolutionary societies, whereby each person in the cell was supposed to form a group of nine without divulging the names of his recruits to his cell.26
Keller stressed that the new organization was “for educational purposes, to aid the organization of the laboring classes” and that it was “not a political measure, neither can it be used by political party tricksters; it is a social move for the amelioriation of the condition of all laborers and for the betterment of society.”27 But, to Keller, the IWA amounted to much more than a string of workingmen’s debating clubs. Indeed, he believed that the IWA should become a trade union in its own right in Humboldt County. In letters to the San Francisco Executive of the IWA, he wrote of the need for an emergency fund financed by quarterly dues as being essential “to resist monopoly.”28 Keller lost no time in launching the Humboldt County IWA. By September 1883, he reported that at least three groups of the IWA had been founded, and in a letter to the Democratic Standard he claimed that the organization had more than 60 members in Humboldt County.29 In late September and October, Keller forwarded a steady stream of membership applications to IWA headquarters in San Francisco. He also requested more copies of Truth, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Underground Russia, which, he said, were “doing good work.”30
It was not only the fraudulent land activities of the California Redwood Company that agitated Keller and other IWA members. In August 1883, Keller wrote to Truth complaining that the lumber companies were attempting to flood the labor market in Humboldt County: “Every steamer brings a new invoice of labor here to an already overstocked labor market. These poor men are enticed here by capitalist lies.” Within a few weeks, Keller said, there would be 500 men idle in Eureka.31
Amelia Jones, who along with her husband, Samuel Jones, a shoemaker, was an IWA member, wrote to Haskell echoing Keller’s complaint. She charged that the lumber companies were engaged in a deliberate campaign to slash wage rates. To this end, she said, the companies discharged loggers and were now advertising for 500 men. “The people here are alive to the issue,” she reported, and they “feel like throttling the double headed monster.” The “International” was doing all it could “under the circumstances,” but she stressed that the local press “are doing all they can in favor of Monopoly, and bow in humble submission to the Golden Calf.” She reported a concerted effort by the IWA to sell Truth throughout the county, for “there are hundredths [sic] of people here that are willing and ready to hear the truth.”32
On October 9, 1883, Keller wrote to Haskell and Charles Burgman of the IWA Executive Division stating that the newspapers “have shut down on me” and that the Humboldt IWA had decided to buy a small press. In the meantime, Keller asked them to print a thousand copies of an address he had drafted “To the Laboring Men of Humboldt County.”33 The three-page pamphlet accused the lumber companies of “a systematized plan . . . to bring wages down to starvation figures” by flooding the labor market and related how the California Redwood Company had acquired most of its land. The address then turned to the question of impending wage reductions of from $10 to $20 a month and urged workers to resist the cuts. A special appeal was aimed at “our resident merchants,” who were “in the same boat with labor as regards this campaign.” Within a few years, said Keller, the syndicate would establish its own stores and warehouses:
There is but one preventative—unite with hard handed labor so that you can resist every unjust demand by the lumber syndicate. . . . The remedy consists in thorough organization: such an organization is now taking place in your very midst. . . . We have already sixty active organizations in the county with a membership of nearly three hundred. Any sober, industrious man or woman can become a member of the Association.34
Interested parties were directed to visit Keller, secretary of the Humboldt Branch of the Pacific Division of the IWA, at his market in Eureka. The address ended by guaranteeing all members that “the company” would not discover their names and affirmed:
We have associated ourselves for protection only; we have no wish to interfere with the actions of any man or his business, so long as he or they do not trample on our joint rights, among which we count, freedom of speech . . . and honest and sufficient wages for an honest days work. We understand well the truth, that labor creates wealth, and we have determined that the man who produces, shall enjoy more fully the wealth his labor creates.35
Ira Cross is probably right in saying that the IWA’s claim of 60 organizations and 300 members in Humboldt County was an exaggeration, although there is no evidence to disprove Keller’s assertion. Cross estimates that the IWA had at least 19 groups in San Francisco, 10 in Humboldt County, 2 in Oakland, and 1 apiece in a scattering of locations in California. Undoubtedly, Humboldt had by far the largest IWA membership in California outside San Francisco and one larger than estimated by Cross.36
What kind of people joined the Humboldt IWA? Using the patchy records left by Haskell, one can obtain the names of 44 people who were definitely members. Not included in this figure are the names of people in the county who subscribed to Truth and had personal contact with Haskell and who were almost certainly IWA members. The occupations of 24 members can be determined from Haskell’s papers and the 1884 register of Humboldt County voters. There were five lumber workers, five laborers, three gunsmiths, three shoemakers, two farmers, one cook, one harnessmaker, one butcher, one journalist, one photographer, and one engineer. All but five of these members lived in Eureka. This is obviously a very small sample on which to generalize about the composition of the IWA in Humboldt County, but it does suggest that the majority of members were urban wage laborers.37
Notwithstanding the support for the IWA in Humboldt County, one must ask why the organization failed to attract a mass following. First, there was an enormous leap entailed in moving from third-party political activity to joining a secret and self-professed revolutionary organization. Second, it cannot be reiterated too strongly that in joining such an organization in a community dominated by a single industry, an individual jeopardized his livelihood. Third, the dispersed nature of the population outside Eureka and poor intracounty transportation facilities militated against a cohesive countywide organization. Moreover, the county press chose virtually to ignore the IWA, let alone give it any support.
Finally, there were contradictory and self-limiting features to the IWA’s philosophy and modus operandi that circumscribed its ability to develop a broader base. The IWA’s organizational structure, with its small, secretive groups operating in self-imposed isolation from one another, was not conducive to building a grass-roots organization that could effectively protect the rights of labor. Membership data reveal that a number of IWA members were related, and Keller’s correspondence indicates that he was very cautious about admitting people to the organization. It was also difficult for the IWA to operate as a labor organization when members were not bound by workplace ties or even the same occupational backgrounds. There was, indeed, an ambiguity of purpose about the IWA, particularly in its early months. Was it a trade union, or was it essentially a working-class organization dedicated to radicalizing the people-at-large through the dissemination of propaganda?
Thus, structural and ideological contradictions weakened the IWA. From the outset, Keller, with his usual perspicacity, saw the need to cement the structure of the organization in Humboldt County. In a letter to Haskell on October 9, 1883, he brought up the question of establishing an emergency fund. “At present a great many do not know what to make of our organization, because we have no Constitution, no general law to govern and hold together.” He argued that an emergency fund would “give the men an opportunity of holding out in case of a reduction in wages next spring” and that the establishment of such a fund would reinforce the bonds holding the IWA together, for “where a man’s money is there is his heart also.”38 It is perhaps significant that the IWA leadership in San Francisco did not respond to Keller’s suggestion.
But for all its contradictions and limitations, the IWA in Humboldt County marked an important turning point in the history of radicalism in the community. It signified that a solid core of dissidents no longer retained an abiding faith in the ability of political action to address the nation’s evils. This realization was a necessary condition for the foundation of a labor movement, and it grew, at least in part, from disappointment with the Workingmen’s and Greenback Labor parties’ performances. An increasing number of radicals believed by the mid-1880s that the road to salvation lay not exclusively in the political arena but also in the organization of the working class as a self-conscious, extrapolitical entity. In 1880, when he embraced the Greenback cause, Keller asserted that “the greatest fault of the people is the neglect of the duty toward the state. It is this neglect that makes them servants where they should be masters.” The Greenback Labor party should elect “honest men” and eliminate “the power of the machine politicians.”39 In 1884, in a lengthy article in Truth, Keller stated:
A change in political parties . . . will never bring about the reforms desired by the laboring class of our population. . . . Any real change in the condition of the workers must be brought about by the workers themselves; it must be homemade; it must be fashioned by men who are themselves toilers, who know and can appreciate all the hardships labor is heir to, and not a kind of gloved gentry who can boast a Henry Ward Beecher in their ranks. . . . Laborers can obtain ALL they desire without taking political action, without riot and revolution. The remedy lies with them and them only.40
Keller advocated an “inter-State Labor Union” that would encompass all labor organizations and wield such power that it would control “the entire labor market” and be “independent of and superior to the Government.”41 Keller wrote this piece from the San Francisco Bay Area. In early January 1884, demoralized by the boycott of his butcher shop and the refusal of the press to publish his letters, Keller left Humboldt County with his family.42 He continued to be active in the IWA, founding a branch in Traver, California. He also became, with Haskell, a founding member of the Kaweah Cooperative Colony in Tulare County, California.43
The Humboldt IWA did not expire as an active organization after the departure of Keller. In January 1884, Truth reported that the Humboldt IWA had put out two issues of a newspaper called International44 The Humboldt IWA continued to induct members until at least April 1885.45 Haskell visited Humboldt County in January 1885, and his diary entries indicate that the organization was far from defunct. Haskell addressed a number of IWA meetings, including one at the small township of Freshwater that was attended by 50 people. “A lot of good material there,” he noted in his diary. He also spoke at Axe Hall in Eureka on January 6, but his presence went unreported in the Humboldt press.46
The Lumbermen’s Union
The Humboldt IWA exploited the mounting resentment against the California Redwood Company, which was about to start operations in 1884 with 700 men, in spite of an ongoing investigation by a federal grand jury. Before the season commenced, however, the company provoked a serious confrontation with the lumber workers. In February 1884, the company issued a terse notice stating that henceforth the sum of 50 cents would be deducted from each employee’s wages in order to finance a hospital plan for workers. Under the plan, the company would provide a hospital facility staffed by two doctors. Married men could be treated at home, and their families were eligible for treatment at half price.47
The hospital plan was not well received by the lumber workers. A special meeting was set “for the purpose of considering the feasibility of forming a WORKINGMEN’S PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION” at Russ Hall in Eureka.48 Daniel Cronin, one of the leading figures in the Humboldt IWA, called the meeting to order, and W. J. Sweasey chaired it. Patrick Dunn was elected secretary. Cronin expressed strong opposition to the mandatory nature of the hospital plan. He added that the men were insulted at not having any say in the plan’s formulation and that they were suspicious of the company’s motives and the competence of its doctors. Cronin alleged that the California Redwood Company was trying to coerce its workers into accepting an automatic 50-cent deduction to pay for the plan. Robert Gunther, a farmer, spoke up on behalf of the lumber workers, objecting to the compulsory nature of the plan and insisting that the 50-cent premium would more than cover costs, a point reiterated by Sweasey. David Evans, the spokesman of the California Redwood Company, claimed that the men had asked for the plan and denied any pressure was being exerted to make men subscribe to it. The meeting polarized into pro- and antihospital factions, with the latter in the distinct majority. As the meeting was about to adjourn, Cronin urged workers to join the Humboldt Workers’ Protective Association, and 126 men responded to the call.49 George Speed recalled vividly the factors that brought about the first organization of Humboldt County lumber workers: “changes being attempted by a big lumber pool” intent on reducing wages and imposing a hospital plan “without giving us any say in the management.”50
The Humboldt Lumbermen’s Union, as the organization was renamed, was officially launched on February 16, 1884, at Buhne Hall in Eureka. The hall was filled to capacity, and 228 more men joined the union. M. H. Grant, a photographer and IWA member, was elected president; Charles Baldwin, a clerk, became secretary; and W. J. Sweasey was chosen as treasurer.51 The constitution and the proceedings of the Lumbermen’s Union were secret, but in May 1884, Cronin reported that meetings had been held at Eureka, Arcata, and Blue Lake, and a total of 80 new members had enrolled. He stated that the union sought to assist its members in periods of illness and injury and give “a respectful burial to our dead,” and he proudly related how he had just dispensed $56 in benefits to a union member. Cronin made it clear that the union was more than a benevolent association: “We propose to protect labor from any unjust demand. Organization begets organization. Capital is organized, why not labor?”52 Cronin’s optimism concerning the Lumbermen’s Union is corroborated by Millard Gardner, who shortly became the official organizer of the Knights of Labor in Humboldt County. He recalled that within a few months, the union had 600 members and a treasury of about $900.53 The Times-Telephone put the membership at 700 by August 1884.54 In the face of the strength of the Lumbermen’s Union, the California Redwood Company dropped its hospital plan.
During the summer of 1884, the Lumbermen’s Union decided to invite a Knights of Labor organizer to Humboldt County. James Johnson, a leading light in both the IWA and the Knights of Labor in San Francisco, went to Humboldt County in July 1884.55 On July 22, Johnson organized a local assembly with approximately 70 members.56 In its August issue, Truth confirmed the founding of L.A. 3337, or the “Humboldt Assembly,” as it soon became known.57 In mid-August, the Lumbermen’s Union decided by “mutual consent” to dissolve itself because it was believed that the Knights of Labor was “better adapted to the requirements of the members, and that such of the Lumbermen’s Union as are not ineligible by reason of their occupations joined, or may join, the Knights of Labor.”58 According to Gardner’s recollections, “every member” of the Lumbermen’s Union joined the Humboldt assembly. Daniel Cronin was elected Master Workman, and another IWA member, James Timmons, was elected secretary.59
Keller and his fellow IWA members played a critical role in laying the groundwork for the Knights. They skillfully exploited the resentment against the California Redwood Company and built a cohesive and well-directed movement. The machinations of the company impelled Humboldt dissenters to take a stand in their own backyard against one of the more sinister manifestations of the corruption of the American republic. An increasing number of radicals despaired, by the mid-1880s, of redressing such evils by the electoral process alone and emphasized the self-organization of the working class. It is surely significant that at least five of Humboldt County’s most prominent radical figures—W. J. Sweasey, Daniel Cronin, George Speed, Charles Keller, and Alfred Cridge—were, at one time or another, members of “utopian communities.” These men, like many other Gilded Age radicals, sought to establish a society on transcendent and truly cooperative social values.60