On January 2, 1884, Charles Ferdinand Keller and his family reluctantly boarded the passenger ship Humboldt to leave forever the county where they had striven to make a living for ten years.1 Following Keller’s disclosure of one of the largest timberland frauds in American history, a boycott of his shop in Eureka left him no alternative but to depart the land of the giant redwoods.2
Keller had arrived in Humboldt County, California, in the mid-1870s, and after filing a homestead claim, began farming 15 miles south of Eureka. Within a few years, he became one of the county’s most articulate dissenters. Deeply troubled by both local and national developments, he joined a branch of the Greenback Labor party. At an Independence Day celebration in 1880, he reiterated his support for the party and deplored the inequities that he believed characterized the American political system:
The rights of the majority are being prostituted to the money mighted minority. Mammon dictates the laws that are to govern the nation. There is an aristocracy exempt from taxation that feeds upon the vitals. . . . These wards of the nation have everything their own way, and no man has needs they need to respect. . . . We must either take what they offer, or, what is more likely, starve.3
In 1883, after the demise of the Greenback Labor party, Keller voiced outrage at attempts by a “Scotch syndicate” to acquire 100,000 acres of redwood timberlands in Humboldt County by fraudulent means and consolidate many of the county’s pioneer lumber concerns into a giant enterprise. Faced with the opposition of lumber companies and the county press, Keller founded branches of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) and sowed the seeds of the county’s first labor movement. In spite of impassioned appeals and determined efforts, Keller was no match for the power of the lumber companies. Exiled from Humboldt, he moved to Tulare County, California, where, with other dissidents, he established the Kaweah Cooperative colony and endeavored to build a new moral world in an era that seemed to him dominated by large corporations and a pernicious spirit of acquisitive individualism.4
Keller’s profound disquiet and his transcendent social vision reflected a strong dissenting tradition in Humboldt County and elsewhere in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Keller’s tale illuminates important aspects of the social and political conflict that affected Humboldt County and many communities from the redwood forests of the Far West to the Eastern Seaboard.
Since the early 1960s, numerous community studies have greatly enriched our understanding of the American past, particularly our knowledge of the lives of ordinary workingmen and women.5 The case-study approach has enabled historians to examine in detail particular industries, cities or regions, and social strata often neglected in sweeping national histories. Most community studies have focused on Eastern and Midwestern towns and cities and on the impact of industrialization on the working class of comparatively large metropolises. Although these studies have often explored the main locus of nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial development, and thus the environments in which labor unions and political radicalism often thrived, the majority of Americans lived in different settings during this period. As Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude have noted, the proportion of Americans living outside cities was five out of six in 1860 and two out of three in 1900.6 Not until 1920 did a majority of Americans live in an “urban” setting.
The fact that most Americans lived in small towns until well into the twentieth century has far-reaching implications for the study of American social history. The fabric of social relations and the problems of organizing labor and dissenting political movements were not the same in the nation’s large cities as they were in the countless mining, lumbering, and textile communities that dotted the American landscape. In the American West, especially, economic development typically occurred in small-town settings. The locus of industrialization was dictated by the availability of raw materials that were usually situated in remote areas. Thus, industrialization often led to the ascendancy of one industry, such as lumber or mining, and the mushrooming of company towns and single-industry communities. By no means unique to the American West, this pattern of development was a pervasive and enduring feature of the industrialization of the region.
Melvyn Dubofsky, and other historians, have argued that the Western working-class experience was distinctive, owing to the conditions under which industrialization occurred there. But the conclusions reached by Dubofsky were based on a broad overview of the American West extrapolated mainly from findings on the social history of the mining industry in the Rocky Mountain West during the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries.7 Twenty years after the publication of his seminal essay we still know relatively little about the degree to which Western working-class radicalism was the product of rapid industrialization, concomitant changes in technology, and the concentration of capital in many subregions of the West and in industries besides mining. We have yet to explore fully how the remote setting in which industrialization frequently took place affected the labor movement and political activity, and the extent to which there was something qualitatively different about the nature and development of Western working-class radicalism.
The focus on industrialization in large urban areas of the North and Midwest has produced some excellent studies of such industries as textiles, boot and shoe manufacturing, the artisanal trades in the nineteenth century, and some of the mass-production industries such as steel and automobiles, but it has also led to the neglect of more “rural” industries like lumber, which at one time or another played an important role in the economy of virtually every region of the United States. Even in 1900, when the lumber industry in Maine and the Middle Atlantic and Great Lakes regions was declining, lumber stood among the top manufacturing industries whether measured by workers employed, total capital invested, or total value of product.8 From the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, the lumber industry employed well over half a million workers each year; it was the major source of employment in nine states and second in importance in ten others.9 In the American West, the lumber industry was crucial to the economy of many states for half a century. In 1910, lumber workers constituted 63 percent of the wage earners employed in manufacturing in Washington, 52 percent in Oregon, and 20 percent in California. In California, there were twice as many workers in lumber as in any other branch of manufacturing.10 Invariably, lumbering took place in the context of company or single-industry towns. Thus, as late as 1931, 44 percent of towns in Washington and 40 percent of those in Oregon were company towns or depended on the lumber industry for their livelihood.11
Forest historians have written some excellent monographs on the business and environmental history of the lumber industry, but, like many labor historians, they have tended to treat lumber workers and labor relations in an episodic manner, usually from the standpoint of a particular strike. Vernon Jensen’s Lumber and Labor (1945) was the last major work devoted to lumber workers and labor relations in the industry. Our understanding of the social and labor history of the lumber industry stands to benefit from the case-study approach applied to many other industries, and it permits the detailed examination of questions precluded by the chronological and geographical breadth of Jensen’s work.12 Humboldt County provides an excellent microcosm for such a study. Located in northern California, in the heart of the redwood lumber region, Humboldt was by the late nineteenth century one of the foremost lumber-producing counties in the United States. As recently as 1948, it ranked as the nation’s second most important lumber-producing county.13
This book examines the political history of one of the country’s premier lumbering communities, as well as its social and economic history. The texture of social relations in Humboldt County cannot be seen apart from the politics of the community. Moreover, the county’s politics is an important story in itself. The book focuses, in particular, on the emergence of a strong tradition of political dissent in the 1870s that was reflected and sustained by considerable support for the California Workingmen’s party, the Greenback Labor party, the Knights of Labor, the Populists, and the Socialists. Throughout the Gilded Age, a radical democratic–republican tradition united many lumber workers, farmers, artisans, and small businessmen and nurtured these movements. The ideology of Humboldt County dissenters reveals that the politics of dissent was not simply a mechanistic response to changing social and economic conditions. As Gareth Stedman Jones has argued persuasively with reference to the Chartist movement, the language of class or dissent can be a major and independent determinant of the parameters of radicalism.14
The vibrant democratic–republican ideology that nurtured this dissenting tradition drew on a cluster of ideas that included “equal rights” and the labor theory of value. It upheld the American political system as the world’s foremost example of a government founded on pure republican principles. To be sure, this ideological legacy contained contradictions and ambiguities, as well as elements that fostered consensus, accommodation, and a spirit of mutuality. Nevertheless, the more radical features of the democratic–republican tradition provided dissenters with a body of ideas with which to scrutinize Gilded Age America. Humboldt radicals were greatly alarmed by what they saw. They were convinced that economic power was becoming dangerously concentrated and the once pristine American political system was suffering from a serious affliction.
Two points concerning politics in Gilded Age Humboldt County are worthy of particular note. First, although in its geographic location Humboldt County could hardly have been more of an “island community,” to borrow Robert Wiebe’s phrase, there was nothing parochial about the political awareness of the county’s dissenters. To an important extent, their perception of developments at the national level shaped their critique of Gilded Age American capitalism. Parallel developments at the local and state levels reinforced the dissenters’ conviction that the American body politic was suffering from a grievous malaise. Second, while social and labor historians are increasingly recognizing the vital role of a democratic–republican tradition in the politics of dissent in nineteenth-century America, the majority of these studies ascribe this ideology to eastern urban artisans whose culture and workplace experience were being threatened and transformed by the industrial revolution before the Civil War. In Humboldt County, artisans made up a small proportion of the workforce, and technological changes did not significantly affect work processes in the lumber industry or lead to the “de-skilling” of large segments of the workforce. The fact that a radical democratic–republican tradition was by no means the exclusive preserve of artisans and others seriously affected by industrialization suggests that this ideology was more pervasive in Gilded Age America than has often been supposed and helps explain the widespread appearance of third-party movements at the local level noted by such historians as Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and Leon Fink.
One of the goals of this book is to elucidate the many problems associated with trying to organize workers in single-industry or company town settings. The tendency of business and labor historians to examine labor relations in the lumber industry from the perspective of strikes has left a misleading impression concerning the militancy and organizability of lumber workers. Studies of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in particular have tended to portray lumber workers as irreverent, rebellious, radical workers who constituted ideal union material.15 This assessment has obscured the major logistical problems encountered in organizing lumber workers and requires considerable qualification. From the late nineteenth century until the 1930s, very rarely was more than 5 percent of the lumber workforce organized in any one year. By 1940, after the “turbulent years” of the 1930s, only 11.5 percent of the total lumber workforce was unionized.16
Although a strong dissenting political tradition emerged in Humboldt County during the late nineteenth century, attempts to build a trade union movement were less successful. In the mid-1880s, the Knights of Labor became a major force in the community, but ultimately their presence proved to be as ephemeral there as it was nationwide. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic renaissance of the union movement, both within and outside the lumber industry. In 1905, Humboldt’s lumber workers founded the first international union of lumber workers, and succeeded within a year in organizing half of the county’s lumber workforce, making it the strongest bastion of lumber unionism in America at the time. The success of the lumber workers, however, proved to be as short-lived as that of the Knights. The lumber companies, wielding their formidable power in the community and an array of more subtle strategies, virtually eliminated lumber trade unionism in the aftermath of a major strike in 1907. The Humboldt County labor movement, aside from a brief flourish during World War I, ceased to be a major force in the community until the 1940s.
In recent years, a rash of historiographical and review essays has appeared, appealing for a synthesis in the field of labor history, Western history, and American history generally.17 Although this is desirable (albeit a daunting undertaking), it is, for several reasons, premature. Most important, because of the relative dearth of community studies of the American West, any synthesis of American social history will have to incorporate the findings of local studies of this vast and diverse region of the American continent. I hope this book makes a contribution toward the task.