Chapter 11

The Makings of Stability

Lumber Unionism in Disarray

After the 1907 strike, both the AFL and the IWW did their utmost to regenerate trade unionism in the Humboldt County lumber industry. As Hammond’s open-shop offensive gathered momentum, the Eureka Trades Council realized more clearly than ever before the link between the health of the county’s labor movement as a whole and the strength of trade unionism in the woods and mills. The IWW’s organizational activities in Humboldt County lapsed for almost three years, but in 1910 they renewed their efforts to organize lumber workers in Humboldt County and other lumber centers in the West.

In spite of some limited gains during the First World War, the AFL and IWW attempts to revive trade unionism in Humboldt County during the 1910s and 1920s ended in failure. At no time could either organization claim more than a few hundred members, and for most of the period they had only a token following. The IWW and AFL had little more success in organizing lumber workers elsewhere in California, or in Oregon and Washington. Before 1917, notwithstanding repeated efforts, the Wobblies attracted no more than 1,000 members at any one time in a Pacific Northwest lumber industry that employed at least 300,000 workers.

Of course, the part played by repression and an unpropitious economic climate in the failure of the unions cannot be overemphasized. But these factors alone do not account for the inability of the IWW and AFL to attract a larger and more enduring following in the lumber industry. It suggests that lumber employers did not rely exclusively on repression to stifle trade unionism in Humboldt County during the 1910s and 1920s. Perhaps as important in inhibiting the growth of unionism was a series of newly conceived policies by the lumber companies designed to divide workers and foster a spirit of corporate loyalty. After almost a decade of reliance on repression, and an outright repudiation of the paternalistic policies of the pioneer lumbermen, several factors prompted the “outside” capitalists to reconsider this stratagem. The lumber companies began to cultivate an image of beneficence, even though it entailed making concessions and improvements. Although the motivations of the pioneer lumbermen and the “outside” capitalists were similar, the “new” paternalism was in many respects different from the old. To begin with, companies had to manage a much larger labor force, and the old bonds at the workplace and in the community could not be re-created, especially among workers, foremen, and employers new to the county. In addition, novel theories of scientific management and welfare capitalism greatly influenced the lumber employers.

With almost monotonous regularity, Labor News exhorted the lumber workers to reorganize. Unable to spark an indigenous revival, the Humboldt County labor movement appealed to the California State Federation of Labor for assistance at its annual convention in 1912.¹ In 1913, the federation sent Joshua Dale to help rebuild the Humboldt lumber union movement. Dale found the situation grim: “There is not a class of workmen in the entire country, outside the agricultural and migratory workers, that is more in need of organization than men in the lumber camps.” He was struck by the unsanitary living conditions and the dangerous working conditions: “Empty pant legs and coat sleeves, fingerless hands and sightless eyes, are a common sight in the woods.”² Dale succeeded in founding a Eureka branch of the newly chartered International Union of Shingle Weavers, Sawmill Workers and Woodsmen.³ But he did not manage to establish branches anywhere else in the county, and the Eureka branch, which had started with only 100 members, made little headway over the next few years.⁴ At the start of the 1915 logging season, the lumber companies increased the price of a worker’s board from 50 to 60 cents a day, and cut wages.⁵ Labor News reproached the lumber workers for their submissiveness, and later expressed total exasperation with them: “It would be difficult to find any place in the whole country where the company hirelings submit as meekly as they do in Humboldt.”⁶

In 1909, the IWW launched a drive to organize the lumber workers of the Pacific Northwest. For several years, the Industrial Worker had carried stories about the plight of lumber workers and appeals to organize. The Wobblies attracted small pockets of support among lumber workers, mainly in the vicinity of Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, Canada. During the summer of 1910, the IWW resumed organizational activities in Humboldt County.⁷ For almost three years, the veteran IWW organizer John Pancner lived in Eureka and attempted to rally the lumber workers of Humboldt and neighboring counties. On his arrival, he had reported “a strong undercurrent of discontent and class hatred” among the Humboldt loggers.⁸ He furnished the Industrial Worker with graphic accounts of the deplorable living conditions and wages in the county’s lumber industry. With the assistance of other IWW die-hards, Pancner held street meetings every Saturday and Sunday night.⁹ On December 18, 1910, he established LU 431 in Eureka.¹⁰ He appealed continually for fellow Wobblies to come to Humboldt to aid him, insisting that “this place is the ‘key’ to the lumber industry around here.”¹¹ But, after eight months, the IWW local had only 175 members.¹² By the winter of 1912, Pancner’s patience was wearing thin. In a testy letter to the Industrial Worker, he said he was tired of “the old cry . . . ‘we had one strike in Humboldt and we lost.’ Is this any reason why we should remain contented slaves?”¹³

In May 1913, the IWW decided it was time for a show of strength in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry. The Wobblies demanded an eight-hour day, a minimum daily wage of $3; time-and-a-half pay for overtime, and greatly improved sanitary and safety conditions.¹⁴ In a highly melodramatic fashion, the IWW called on the lumber workers of the Pacific Northwest to strike in favor of these demands. The IWW strike call provoked a negligible response from the lumber workers of the Pacific Northwest, even according to reports in the Industrial Worker.¹⁵ In Humboldt County, few, if any, lumber workers took notice of the strike call. The county press, Labor News, and the Industrial Worker reported no stoppages or walkouts. A few months later, Labor News asserted that the strike call “failed to get even a ripple started in Humboldt County.”¹⁶

New Methods in an Old Fight

The AFL and IWW faced not only the time-honored methods used by lumber employers against unions since the 1880s but also a range of new and sophisticated ones designed especially to counter the serious threat posed by the union movement in the early twentieth century. To begin with, employers took a more systematic interest than before in the composition of the workforce and the backgrounds of individual workers.

Lumber employers in Humboldt County and northern California exploited the growing heterogeneity of their labor force. For most of the Gilded Age, the lumber workforce in Humboldt County was made up of Americans and Canadians for the most part and, to a lesser extent, immigrants from the British Isles. In all likelihood, lumber employers had some national prejudices, but experience in the lumber industries of the Maritime Provinces, Maine, and the Great Lakes states, plus family ties to the company and community, were almost certainly more important criteria for employment. There is no evidence that lumber employers systematically considered nationality in choosing workers. By the late 1880s, Scandinavian immigrants were playing an increasingly important role in the county’s lumber industry, but the real fragmentation of the lumber workforce began in the early twentieth century and coincided with the wave of “new” immigrants, from southern and eastern Europe.

As early as 1903–4, the county press commented on the influx of new immigrants, especially Italians.¹⁷ Many of the immigrants went to work in the woods and mills, especially in southern Humboldt County. In the Hydesville census precinct, most lumber workers were employed by the Pacific Lumber Company. Information from this precinct, obtained from the 1910 Manuscript Census, indicates how diverse the Pacific Lumber Company workforce was then. Only one-third of the lumber workers were native-born. Italians made up 16 percent of all lumber workers living in the precinct and 25 percent of the foreign-born. Lumber workers from Finland, Sweden, and Norway combined made up the second-largest segment, with Austrians ranking third. A majority (58 percent) of lumber workers from the three best-represented foreign national groups—the Italians, Finns, and Austrians—had emigrated to the United States in the five years preceding the 1910 census, and 92 percent had arrived in the United States after 1900. A surprisingly high proportion of Swedes and Norwegians were also recent arrivals: 38 percent of them emigrating to America after 1905 and 81 percent after 1900. Less surprising was that the vast majority of these immigrants were aliens. Only 14 percent of Italians, Finns, and Austrians were naturalized or had filed citizenship papers.¹⁸

The lack of comprehensive lumber company employee records makes it hard to determine precisely how representative the Pacific Lumber Company’s workforce was of other lumber companies in Humboldt County. Labor News made scattered references to the employment of Italians in the Eureka area by 1906. A partial list of workers employed by the Hammond Lumber Company in 1914 reveals that a considerable number had southern and eastern European names.¹⁹ In 1911, when the Humboldt Times was berating Hammond for his antilabor policies, the Times accused him of driving “sturdy American and first class Europeans out of the woods and out of the county.”²⁰

The Pacific Lumber Company workforce may have been more heterogeneous than most companies in the county, but there is considerable evidence to suggest that it was broadly representative of the northern California lumber industry as a whole. For example, Italians constituted 24 percent of the labor force of the Union Lumber Company (the giant of the Mendocino County lumber industry) in 1909.²¹ In 1911, IWW organizers claimed that 60 percent of the Mendocino woodsmen were Italians.²² From accounts of the 1909 strike at the McCloud River Lumber Company in Siskiyou County (about 150 miles northeast of Humboldt County), it is evident that roughly half of the labor force was Italian.²³ In 1914, the California Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a 100-page report on the California lumber industry and found that most of the large lumber companies in the northern redwood district had “very cosmopolitan pay rolls, embracing men from all quarters of the globe.” Americans predominated in the California lumber industry as a whole, with Italians ranking a close second. In the northern redwood lumber district, Russians, Finns, Portuguese, and Austrians also made up large segments of the labor force.²⁴

In part, the diversification of the redwood lumber region’s workforce resulted from a calculated policy of the lumber employers. In 1911, an important article by E. A. Blockinger, the general manager of the Pacific Lumber Company, published in the Pioneer Western Lumberman (a trade journal of the Pacific Coast lumber industry), advised: “Don’t have too great a percentage of any one nationality. For your own good and theirs mix them up and obliterate clannishness and selfish social prejudices.”²⁵ In his statement to the annual convention of the California State Federation of Labor in 1911, the Eureka Trades Council vice-president, John Ericksen, asserted that “since the woodsmen’s strike here in 1907, men speaking many languages have been imported to make harmony among the workers hard to obtain.”²⁶ He appealed to the federation to print labor literature in Italian and to hire an Italian-speaking organizer. Three years later, Joshua Dale reported that the Humboldt County lumber companies “studiously selected” men of different nationalities.²⁷ The California Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the California lumber industry stated that at least one employer had freely admitted to investigators that the labor force was judiciously mixed to inhibit labor organization.²⁸

The heterogeneity undoubtedly compounded the difficulties of organizing lumber workers. “The problem of mixed nationalities is not nearly as difficult as it seems,” declared Labor News in 1910,²⁹ but this and similar proclamations in Labor News and the IWW press acknowledged the extent of the problem while trying to minimize it. Their repeated calls for union literature written in Italian and for Italian-speaking organizers indicate the importance they attached to organizing Italians. Given the failure of lumber unionism to gain an established foothold in the northern California lumber industry among workers of almost all national and ethnic groups, it would be wrong to place too much weight for this failure on the values and attitudes of any one immigrant group. Nevertheless, because Italians were the largest immigrant group employed in the Humboldt and northern California lumber industry by the 1910s, and attempts to bring them into the union fold met with little success, the question deserves attention.

Although the Eureka Trades Council and the IBWSW can be criticized for making little use of Italian-speaking organizers, pamphlets printed in Italian and the Italian-language page of Labor News showed a serious effort to persuade Italians to join the union movement. As stated earlier, Italians strongly supported the 1907 strike, but they joined labor unions in limited numbers. There were several instances of Italians engaging in wildcat strikes in the years after the 1907 strike, and 700 Italians played a leading role in the well-publicized McCloud River Lumber Company strike of 1909 in Siskiyou County.³⁰ But in northern California, as in many other places in the United States, episodic expressions of militance by Italians did not translate into a willingness on their part to become trade union members.³¹ The indifference of most Italians to unions was the result of a number of factors. First, Italians encountered prejudice both within and outside the labor movement. The recollections of Julio Rovai, who worked in the Humboldt lumber industry for many years, confirm this. A combination of prejudice, strong familial bonds, and a general feeling of powerlessness helped nurture a very self-contained Italian community. Under the company town regime, recalls Rovai, “one was condemned, confined, and compelled to live their way of life.” He observed: “The Italians only strength was the family and relatives . . . [and] making it stronger by allying it to other families, and to protect it.”³² It is not without significance that one of the most serious incidents at Scotia occurred in 1913 when 100 Italians struck, demanding the right to eat in their homes and not at the company cookhouse. The Pacific Lumber Company acceded to their demand, although another 100 workers, who were protesting the quality of the fare, were fired.³³

In 1922, an IWW organizer at the Hammond Lumber Company reported that “there are many Italians, but they are leery of men who do not speak their language.”³⁴ As much, or more, than any other immigrant group, Italians saw themselves as “birds of passage” who would return to their native country after they had accumulated sufficient savings to buy land there. Over 60 percent of Italian emigrants to the United States did return to Italy, and Rovai cites examples of Humboldt Italians who did so. Finally, many Italians had little experience of unionism before coming to America. According to Rovai, a large number of Humboldt Italians came from the province of Lucca in northwest Italy where trade unionism was almost unknown.³⁵

Lumber employers were by the 1910s intent on accumulating as much information as possible about the personal histories of their workers. Employees and prospective employees filled out forms with a host of questions concerning their family status, total number of dependents, health, accident history, English-language ability, previous occupation, and amount of savings.³⁶ A primary purpose of the questionnaire was to identify the thrifty and responsible worker, one who either had a family to support or had aspirations. Blockinger believed that “the steadiest man is the one with a small savings account which he is trying to make bigger so he can get married, build a home, or lay up against a rainy day or old age.” He urged his fellow lumber employers to “encourage savings accounts either by small banks or through your pay offices.”³⁷

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost all lumber workers were paid a flat hourly or daily rate of pay. In the 1910s, lumber companies began experimenting with a range of other systems of payment. Lumber trade journals and lumber employers’ conference reports are full of accounts of systems that had the dual purpose of providing productivity incentives and dividing the workforce. In 1913, the Hammond Lumber Company became one of the first lumber companies in the West to introduce the bonus system. W. Peed, the company’s superintendent, gave a detailed and glowing account of it to the Pacific Logging Congress in 1914. The system guaranteed workers a base wage rate. Production quotas were set for crews in different departments and a bonus paid to the crew according to how far they exceeded the quota. To enhance a spirit of competitiveness, Hammond Lumber took the additional step of posting the performance of each crew on a bulletin board. Peed exulted that, under this new system, productivity in some departments had increased by as much as 40 percent in the first year of the experiment. A further advantage, stressed by Peed, was that under the bonus system, the “poor man” could be detected and weeded out much more effectively by the men on the job than by the foreman.³⁸

The printed summary of the proceedings of the 1914 Pacific Logging Congress noted the “widespread interest” aroused by the discussion of the bonus system and observed that “there is undoubtedly a rapidly growing sentiment in the various forms of industry where it is possible to devise some direct plan of participation by the workers in the returns of industry it should be undertaken.”³⁹ In 1916, H. L. Henderson, a leading management official in the Hammond Lumber Company, gave a further progress report on the bonus system to the Pacific Logging Congress. He was as enthusiastic about its application and results as Peed had been, asserting that in logging operations, “efficiency perhaps finds its greatest device to be the bonus system.”⁴⁰

Used judiciously, the bonus system was an ingenious means of increasing productivity and fostering a spirit antithetical to the development of trade unionism. It divided workers into groups of competing entities and encouraged them to blame foremen, malingering, or incompetent fellow workers, rather than the company, for a small wage packet. Conversely, if the group worked efficiently and received a large bonus payment, the system was liable to persuade workers that their fat paycheck was the result not only of their endeavor but also of the benevolence of the company. Indeed, many lumber employers, such as D. S. Painter of the McCloud River Lumber Company, saw the bonus system as an important means of fostering a corporatist ethos among the workers.⁴¹

Similar to the bonus system was the contract system, by which a senior worker in a particular logging or milling function would be paid a lump sum to produce a certain quantity. The effects of this system were much like the bonus system in that it induced the contracting worker to be especially concerned with the work performance of his crew. Finally, where the bonus system was not used, or where the individualization of some tasks made it impractical, workers were paid under a basic piece-rate system.⁴² Carrying the principle of incentives and accountability to their logical extremes, some companies went so far as to fine workers for wastefulness and carelessness.⁴³ The introduction of these incentive schemes antedated the establishment of the eight-hour day for all lumber workers in March 1918, but Labor News and the San Francisco Labor Clarion alleged that lumber employers made more extensive use of such methods after the passage of the law in order to maintain production levels with the reduced working day.⁴⁴ These new payment systems were popular with many employers in the West Coast lumber industry and persisted well into the 1920s.⁴⁵

Toward a New Paternalism

Important as employers regarded the policies of judiciously selecting workers, mixing ethnic and national groups, and “incentive” wage payments, these were not their only new tactics. There was a fear that such tactics might not be sufficient or, in the case of wage-incentive schemes, could even backfire if not applied carefully and along with other stratagems. A growing number of employers believed in fostering a sense of corporate identity among their workers. Beginning in the 1910s, lumber employers experimented with a range of welfare plans to achieve this goal. Like the pioneer lumbermen of the nineteenth century, they saw, albeit after a decade or so of confrontation, that inducing a degree of company loyalty could help preempt trade unionism. As the secretary of the Pacific Logging Congress put it in his 1912 report: “The best cure for the IWW plague—a people without a country and without a God—is the cultivation of the homing instinct in men.”⁴⁶ In addition, the doctrine of social environmentalism, which attained popular currency during the Progressive era, also influenced lumber employers. In short, many were persuaded that safe, sanitary, and reasonable working and living conditions would result in a more contented and productive labor force.⁴⁷

One of the most important factors that inspired lumber employers to experiment with welfare capitalism derived from their own experience. Before becoming owners, managers, or foremen in one of the giant lumbering concerns of the twentieth century, many had worked in the pioneer lumber industry of the nineteenth century. As labor relations grew increasingly antagonistic, they attributed the deterioration to the impersonalization of relationships between themselves and the workers caused by the massive growth of many lumber enterprises. Peed eloquently expressed this view in a speech before the Pacific Logging Congress:

The logging business has grown from a camp handled or owned by one man, and working only a few men with a small equipment of teams, up to the large operations of the present time, wherein the organization involves a great number of men and a heavy investment in machinery, equipment and rolling stock. With the earlier small operations the manager was able to keep in a close personal touch with all the details of the work and with the men employed by him. The present conditions are such that, with the large and complex organizations, scattered over a more or less extended territory, it is not possible for the manager to maintain the close relations that heretofore existed.⁴⁸

Another lumber employer echoed Peed’s sentiments: “Ten years ago, when we had but 75–80 employees, I knew each one by name, and frequently the members of their families, but today we have a crew of 700. I am overloaded in the office and about the only ones I know are the few that are left from the original crowd.”⁴⁹ Edwin Van Sycle, who worked in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry for many years, concurred. He observed that with the eclipse of the small logging concerns, “the close personal relationship was gone and, with working or living conditions no better, the logger began to grouse, then bedamn . . . under the spur of the union organizer, to rebel.”⁵⁰

While the scale of many lumber operations and the employers’ lack of ties to the community precluded any replication of the bonds that nineteenth-century pioneer lumbermen had with their workers, the development of full-fledged company towns by the 1910s created a promising environment for using welfare capitalism to instill a sense of company loyalty among employees. T. H. Simpson, industrial chaplain of the logging industry of Grays Harbor, Washington, summarized the twin elements of the welfare capitalist thrust: “First, the physical, which has to do with camp sanitation, bunk house accommodation, bathhouses, light, heat, bedding and food. Second, the mental or morale of the workers . . . which builds up or destroys loyalty to the company.”⁵¹ Lumber employers realized that improved working and living conditions were necessary if they were to instill a spirit of corporate loyalty. This would help nurture contentment and increase labor productivity by reducing accident rates, illness, and labor turnover. Employers came to this conclusion partly because of the prodding of state legislatures through laws and administrative agencies. At the 1914 Pacific Logging Congress, the Washington State commissioner of health spoke on “camp sanitation.” Referring to the rapid industrialization of America, he stated that “little or no attention was paid to the human element—the worker. But during the past two decades experience had shown that aside from the personal interest of the worker, the prosperity of the industry itself necessitates an ever-increasing attention to the worker’s physical welfare.”⁵²

Some of the attempts by the lumber companies to foster loyalty bordered on the crass. With derisive comments, Labor News and the Industrial Worker reprinted a circular that the Pacific Lumber Company distributed to its workers in 1913: “Men are valuable just as in proportion they are willing to work in cooperation with other men. Harmonious cooperation is organized efficiency. . . . Bear in mind that the Company’s success means your success.”⁵³ In general, however, the methods were more subtle. Some companies made deliberate efforts to personalize relationships with the men. Blockinger gave the following advice to fellow managers:

Learn to know your men by name or as many by name as possible. Speak to each from the highest to the lowest. A group can be addressed as boys and somehow it makes them feel better. Let the men feel you are taking an interest in their work. Compliment them when they are doing anything especially well. Keep your foreman always in the position of authority but that don’t [sic] mean that you must see everything through his eyes. Correct faults through the foreman yet let the men feel that any suggestion for the good of business can be made to you directly.⁵⁴

The heart of the strategy for promoting company loyalty lay in the attempt to build a new moral order in lumber camps and towns. The proverbial Paul Bunyan blanket stiff, who recklessly whored, drank, and brawled his way through life, would be replaced by a man of stable and sober habits, and somewhat more lofty aspirations. In this endeavor the Pacific Lumber Company was in the vanguard. Blockinger’s recommendations are again highly instructive:

A reading room with facilities for letter writing and any games, except gambling, is easily and cheaply put into any camp. Arrange subscription clubs for papers and periodicals or let the company do it for the men. If you can have a circulating library among your camps and at the mill plant, it will be much appreciated. Let the daily or weekly papers be of all nationalities as represented in your camp. Lumber trade journals are especially interesting to the men and they can and will readily follow the markets for lumber and appreciate that you have some troubles of your own.

Organize fire departments among your men. The insurance companies will give you reductions in rates for such additional protection while it offers another opportunity for your men to relax and enjoy themselves.

Shower baths at the camps or mill are easily and cheaply installed. They will be used and appreciated after a hot, dusty day’s work.

Make your mill town beautiful. Spend some money for paint and fences. Encourage the planting of trees, shrubs, and flowers. Offer prizes for the best kept front yards. . . .

Get your men loyal and keep them so. Let this replace loyalty to a union. The spirit is what you want in your men. Ten good men will accomplish as much as fifteen ordinary laborers if the spirit and good will is there. Treat them right and they will treat you right.⁵⁵

In 1909, as the Pacific Lumber Company commenced a great expansion of its plant operations, it also began encouraging a whole range of social and cultural institutions to improve the moral order of Scotia. A second schoolhouse was built in 1909, but more symbolic was the decision in 1910 to close the company saloon and establish the First National Bank of Scotia.⁵⁶ In a letter to Collier’s National Weekly in 1913, P. A. Rosetti described the great change that had taken place in the moral tone of the community. He recalled that when the company was running the saloon “wide open,” many men spent most of their leisure time there, “cursing, quarelling and fighting.” After access to the saloon was drastically restricted in 1908, a social club was organized. Clubrooms were furnished with chairs, tables, a piano, a phonograph, billiard and pool tables, and a gymnasium. Singing and debating were encouraged, and there was a special evening for ladies. All these facilities were furnished for a 50-cent monthly membership fee. In addition, between 1903 and 1913, four fraternal societies were founded, two churches built, and another bank established. Rosetti reflected:

I walked into Scotia on a Sunday morning 14 years ago and I could see men under the influence of liquor in all directions. . . . I again walked into Scotia on a Sunday morning six months ago, and I could see well-dressed men with respectful countenances, pleasant and cheerful, and afterward I learnt that practically everyone had a bank account. I could see bright, neatly dressed children coming from Sunday school, men and women going to church or on their way to visit neighbors.⁵⁷

The Pacific Lumber Company had a well-stocked library with a good selection of books in Italian.⁵⁸ In addition, the company awarded cash prizes to families with the best-kept lawns and gardens.⁵⁹ Many companies sponsored baseball teams to promote social integration and corporate identity. During the 1910s, teams representing the Pacific Lumber Company, the Hammond Lumber Company, the Northern Redwood Lumber Company, the Little River Redwood Company, and the Arcata Barrel Company, among others, competed in the Industrial Championship league. The games attracted large crowds, and baseball in Humboldt County soon was of a semi-professional standard. As early as 1909, the manager of the Pacific Lumber Company team was complaining that rival teams imported players.⁶⁰ In 1910, the company put all the “sawdust babies,” as the players were called, on the company payroll. The company’s athletic budget for the last six months of 1923 allocated $2,600 to baseball, $1,750 of which was spent on salaries.⁶¹

The new interest of the lumber companies in organizing the recreation of their employees was also evident in the increasing practice of showing movies in company towns and wood camps. In December 1911, the Pacific Lumber Company became the first to show movies in Humboldt.⁶² Providing movies for workers was just one more means, according to one commentator, “of keeping the workman contented and preventing the debauches which so often wreck camp operations.”⁶³ In 1920, the Pacific Lumber Company completed construction of the Winema Theater in Scotia.

Even before 1910, the Hammond Lumber Company provided its workers at Samoa with an assembly hall, reading rooms, and other social and recreational facilities.⁶⁴ The recollections of Elsie Miller, who worked for Hammond during the early twentieth century, suggest that his social and recreational programs were not unlike those of the Pacific Lumber Company, and that the money spent on such ventures was not wasted:

There’s always been a kind of family atmosphere in the company and the town. I always declare there’s never another place in the world like it, because in time of disaster, everybody rushes to everybody’s aid. If there’s illness, or any trouble of any kind, the company always comes forth, and so do all the rest of us. The company built us a lovely clubhouse here for the youth, the PTA and the Woman’s Club.⁶⁵

The general pattern for the lumber companies was to improve living conditions and provide social and recreational facilities in the company towns first and then to implement such reforms at the logging camps. By the early 1920s, Hammond had extensive social facilities at some of his larger logging camps. At one camp there was a school, social center, and a free library. There were facilities for showing movies, and dances were held regularly; women had their own social club. Cabins became more individual when companies stopped building them in symmetrical rows. The Humboldt Standard asserted that this was part of an attempt to encourage men to bring their families with them to the woods, and it added that companies provided “cosy little cottages and garden spots.”⁶⁶

In 1913, the Pacific Lumber Company sponsored a benefit ball for an employee with a severe case of diabetes.⁶⁷ A year later, Humboldt lumber companies instituted the first annual Lumbermen’s picnic, which was attended by approximately 2,000 people.⁶⁸ The Pacific Lumber Company demonstrated its benevolence at Thanksgiving in 1917 by treating its employees to a lavish turkey dinner.⁶⁹ It is difficult to know how workers responded to these gestures of benevolence. Some employees evidently did not view them any more cynically than Elsie Miller did. To take one example, on March 6, 1918, a large number of mill employees from the Hammond Lumber Company appeared at the house of George Fenwick, who had been general manager of the company for eighteen years, to serenade him on his birthday and present him with a gift.⁷⁰

Lumber employers became increasingly concerned with labor turnover rates in the late 1910s. High turnover rates in themselves were a direct cost;⁷¹ equally important, they minimized the potential for nurturing a loyal and socially disciplined cadre of employees. The subject arose with increasing frequency in lumber trade journals and at logging conferences. There is little empirical data on turnover for most American industries before 1920,⁷² but turnover rates in the lumber industry apparently were among the highest. The California Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 1913 that at one of the lumber camps providing the best conditions in California, 391 of 1,694 workers quit during the peak month (August) in the lumbering season.⁷³ In 1915, the Federal Industrial Relations Commission estimated annual turnover in logging camps at about 500 percent; records of a Washington lumber camp for 1919 to 1921 revealed an annual turnover rate of 564 percent.⁷⁴ In 1917, Colonel Bryce Disque, the man sent by the War Department to try and resolve the labor problems in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry, estimated the turnover rate at almost 1,000 percent annually.⁷⁵

In Humboldt County, the Pacific Lumber Company made the earliest and most concerted effort to reduce the turnover rate. In 1918, the company introduced a “continuous service plan.” Under the plan, a man who stayed with the company for one year got an annual bonus amounting to 2 percent of his salary; after five years of service, the bonus amounted to 7 percent.⁷⁶ While the Pacific Lumber Company introduced the plan during the acute labor shortage of World War I, it was retained after the war, and during the 1920s turnover rates fell to half their previous levels.⁷⁷ By the early 1920s, if not before, the Hammond Lumber Company had introduced a similar plan, except that workers received a 3 percent bonus after only six months and 4 percent after a year. The Industrial Worker commented that “a system like this sure breeds stool pigeons.”⁷⁸

In many regions, lumber employers harnessed the services of the industrial department of the YMCA. Almost every session of the Pacific Logging Congress during the 1910s and 1920s contained a detailed report of the work of the YMCA in lumber camps, and frequently the Congress featured a YMCA welfare dinner. The aims of the YMCA dovetailed neatly with lumber employers’ interest in engineering a new moral order in their workforce. John Goodell, Northwest Industrial Secretary of the YMCA, summarized these goals in a speech before the Pacific Logging Congress in 1911:

The YMCA recognizes the threefold nature of man—body, mind, and spirit. . . . The YMCA seeks . . . to develop the threefold nature of man in the construction and logging camps of the Northwest. The physical side is developed by recreative games, such as baseball, boxing, wrestling. . . . The mental side is developed by providing reading matter in the form of daily papers, magazines, circulating libraries etc. . . . A talk on “Savings” by some banker has always been profitable. The spiritual work . . . usually consists of a gospel song service some evenings in the week, and a gospel talk and song service on Sunday evenings.⁷⁹

The following year, Goodell stressed “the particular need of the lumber industry” to remedy problems caused by “the vanishing personal relationship between employer and employee.” He reiterated that the YMCA could play an important role in producing healthy, efficient, and loyal lumber workers.⁸⁰

The YMCA supplied library materials to Humboldt logging camps in the late 1910s, but a Eureka branch of the YMCA, founded in 1894, had lapsed by the twentieth century, and despite the appeals of the Eureka Herald,⁸¹ the YMCA did not reestablish itself in Eureka until 1920. Anticipating the branch opening, the Humboldt Times praised the YMCA and linked its activities to the general interest being shown in employee welfare:

Many of us can remember when no employer ever was expected to give a thought to the health or welfare of his employees. . . . Men were only so much timber for use of employers—driven dumb creatures without souls. But times have changed—laborers are no longer to be thought of as “Chinks,” “Dagoes,” or “Wops.” They are human beings with souls. The Trotskys, Lenins, Mooneys and McNamaras are the product of neglected moral social and religious surroundings. Their minds have been poisoned from youth by false teachings.⁸²

The Eureka YMCA began with a charter membership of 775 people. Mrs. George Fenwick, wife of the general manager of the Hammond Lumber Company, became one of the vice-presidents, and Mrs. Milton Carson, the wife of the owner of the Dolbeer and Carson Lumber Company, served on the board.⁸³ A month before the founding of the YMCA, the future secretary talked with officers of the Pacific Lumber Company about holding Sunday school meetings in the logging camps and found them amenable to the idea.⁸⁴ By January 1921, there were branches of the YMCA at Eureka, Arcata, Fortuna, and Scotia. At Scotia, the Pacific Lumber Company converted an old movie theater into a gymnasium, which the YMCA used for physical education classes.⁸⁵

Labor Legislation to the Aid

Although the lumber employers’ interest in the moral and material welfare of their workers was partially inspired by the growing volatility of labor relations in the early twentieth century and the general influence of Progressive values in social welfare and scientific management, these were not the only forces making for a new departure in labor relations policy. Improvements in material conditions and efforts to reshape the moral order of the company town and the logging camps occurred at different times and varied significantly according to county, state, and employer. While lumber employers were aware of the potential and danger of strikes and unionism, they also knew that lumber trade unionism was weak. Furthermore, social environmentalism and other Progressive ideas associated with management only began to gain currency in the early 1910s. To a significant degree, as Daniel Nelson has argued, the new concern for employee welfare was prompted by state labor legislation.⁸⁶

In California, the Workmen’s Compensation Act and the Camp Sanitation Act of 1913, in conjunction with other legislation, put pressure on lumber employers to be more concerned about the welfare of their workers. The Camp Sanitation Law, which was amended and reinforced in 1915, established strict guidelines for improving camp living conditions and gave agents of the labor commissioner considerable powers.⁸⁷ Agents were given access to camps and workplaces and “all the powers and authority of sheriffs and other peace officers to make arrests for violations of the provisions of this act.”⁸⁸ In 1915, the California Commission of Immigration and Housing assumed all responsibility for enforcement of the act.

In 1913, shortly after passage of the Camp Sanitation Act, the California Bureau of Labor Statistics began an extensive investigation into the California lumber industry. In the northern redwood district, 40 camps were visited and statistics compiled on 7,198 workers. The report indicated that in the California lumber industry as a whole, few improvements had taken place since the passage of the Camp Sanitation Act. Sanitary and living conditions were usually little better than they had been in the nineteenth century. In the northern redwood lumber district, conditions were especially bad. Only one camp had installed steel bunks (as required by the 1913 law), and the commissioner reported that “generally speaking the premises were greatly in need of attention,” while “the sanitary condition in many of the camps deserved severe criticism.”⁸⁹ Only one camp in the region supplied a shower bath.⁹⁰

The records of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing indicate that the Commission did an extremely effective and conscientious job in enforcing camp sanitation laws.⁹¹ Lumber camps in Humboldt County were visited annually by inspectors from 1913 until the mid-1920s. The inspectors compiled lengthy reports on all lumber camps; summaries of the reports were sent to the lumber companies, and the commission firmly asked the companies to remedy deficiencies. During 1917 alone, 1,003 camps were examined by commission inspectors, and by January 1, 1918, the commission had investigated 4,239 labor camps and made 2,720 reinspections. By that date, 74 percent of the camps were in compliance with the law, compared to only 34 percent when the commission made its first inspections.⁹²

By the early 1920s, the commission reported dramatic improvements in conditions at Humboldt lumber camps. In 1920, the Humboldt Times gleefully quoted Edward Brown, director of the Bureau of Labor Camps, extolling the lumber employers for all the improvements they had made.⁹³ A letter by the director of camp sanitation, written in 1921 to Henry Cole of the Little River Redwood Company, praised the lumber operators for making “wonderful strides in improving the lumber camps.”⁹⁴ In 1923, in its published report, the commission recalled that in 1914, when inspectors first visited Humboldt County, they were told of a “nut” who provided a bath for his men and that inspectors in the county were looked upon as “crazy men and their suggestions were openly called extravagant dreams.”⁹⁵ By 1922, the commission reported, “there was not a lumber camp of any importance in the entire state which did not have adequate bathing facilities.”⁹⁶

The relationship between the commission and the lumber companies seems to have been a remarkably harmonious one. Edward Brown asserted that “the camp managers of Humboldt have nearly all shown a willingness to cooperate.”⁹⁷ The 1919 annual report of the commission quoted Donald McDonald, vice-president of the Pacific Lumber Company:

We are heartily in accord with the campaign which has been carried on by the State Commission of Immigration and Housing for the improvement of camp sanitation. The results are not measurable in dollars and cents alone. Proper conditions about the wood camps not only make for better men, but better service, and in our judgement the work which has been carried on by your commission has been a distinct help, not only to the employee, but the employer.⁹⁸

The lumber companies’ cooperation with the California Commission of Immigration and Housing reflected their shared motives and assumptions. “If men are housed comfortably and not, as is the case in some lumber camps, in a less healthful and decent manner than a good farmer houses his animals, the morale of the men is sustained and they stick by the job instead of drifting the moment they make enough money to leave the camp,” stated Edward Brown.⁹⁹ The Commission was preoccupied from the outset with defusing working-class discontent over conditions and, with an increasing number of lumber employers, shared the much-cherished notion of many Progressives that the solution to the labor problem lay in improving working and living conditions.¹⁰⁰ If some lumber companies did not initially welcome the intrusion of the commission, most employers realized by World War I that the commission’s approach to the labor problem dovetailed in many respects with their own.

The First World War also helped convert a significant number of lumber employers to welfare capitalism and new management policies. The lumber industry benefited as much as any other from the wartime boom in the economy. West Coast lumber employers were suddenly faced with severe labor shortages. This encouraged them to introduce, or use more extensively, policies designed to reduce labor turnover and attract new workers. The greatly enhanced bargaining power of labor also led to increasing militancy by lumber workers, especially in the Pacific Northwest. For a time, the IWW and the International Union of Timber Workers (IUTW) were able to disrupt production and expand their membership base. In Humboldt County, although the labor movement experienced a revival during the war, the lumber industry was not affected by the rash of strikes and slowdowns that hit the Pacific Northwest. In part this may have been because California lumber employers experimented with new policies earlier than their counterparts in Oregon and Washington, and, in particular, had gone further toward improving living conditions. Writing in 1918, Paul Scharrenberg, a leading figure in the California labor movement and a member of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing, commented that “it is a significant fact that while the lumber regions and construction camps of the Pacific Northwest have had a long series of labor difficulties, California has been singularly free from any such disturbances since the camp sanitation policy has been in force.”¹⁰¹ But the militancy of lumber workers elsewhere in the West reawakened lumber employers to the potential threat of a revival of lumber trade unionism and the need for preemptive measures.

During World War I, the federal government was anxious to stem the rising tide of lumber trade unionism and militancy. Confronted with serious lumber production bottlenecks that threatened the war effort, the War Department put pressure on lumber employers to improve working conditions and shorten the working day. Most employers yielded to the pressure. In March 1918, they agreed to grant workers the eight-hour day. Simultaneously, the federal government and the Pacific Northwestern lumber employers sponsored the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen to compete with the IWW and IUTW.¹⁰² The union proved a great success, boasting 70,000 members by spring 1918. This was far more than the IWW and IUTW combined ever attracted at any one time, although from 1917 onward, savage repression by private organizations and local, state, and federal government authorities greatly circumscribed the IWW’s and IUTW’s ability to function as unions.¹⁰³

Lumber employers, like most others, did not welcome the unprecedented degree of federal government intervention in labor management and production during World War I. But the intervention spurred lumbermen who had been dragging their feet to improve conditions in the industry and experiment with welfare capitalism. After the war, when the market slumped, many lumber companies cut wages and increased the working day. They did not abandon welfare capitalism, however; indeed, like the Pacific and Hammond Lumber companies, they expanded their programs. And as the California Commission of Immigration and Housing reports indicate, working and living conditions improved, rather than deteriorated, despite the virtual absence of trade unionism and a generally weak lumber market during the 1920s.

It would be facile to suggest that by the 1920s all lumber workers were corporate automatons who viewed the company’s interests as synonymous with their own. Julio Rovai’s colorful recollections of life during the 1920s in Rio Dell, which was inhabited primarily by Italians working for the Pacific Lumber Company, hardly depicts residents as puritanical corporate zombies. Even allowing for a measure of exaggeration, bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution flourished in the community. So universal was bootlegging that when a major fire broke out in 1928, many denizens broke open barrels of wine to douse the flames after the water supply had been exhausted.¹⁰⁴ But Rio Dell, located 2 miles from Scotia, was not a company town, and Rovai, while glorifying the illicit recreational activities of his fellow Italians, writes of the “powerlessness” they felt vis-à-vis the Pacific Lumber Company. In Rio Dell it was one thing to be a bootlegger and debaucher and another to challenge the prerogatives of the company on fundamentals of labor policy. Despite the much more intrusive role of employers in the social life of company towns, such as Scotia and Samoa, workers may have been able to carve out some measure of autonomy and social space, but the obstacles to doing so were infinitely greater. In a situation of virtual powerlessness, it was tempting for workers to submit to the dictates of the company, and to be reduced to a state of apathy, particularly when employers were not totally indifferent to their “welfare.”

By the late 1910s, as David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich have suggested, employers in many industries realized that it was not always advisable to depend on repression and the “drive system” to maximize profits and harmonize labor relations.¹⁰⁵ Welfare capitalism, scientific management, bonus and incentive schemes, and more time-honored methods of segmenting the workforce along national, ethnic, and racial lines could be used effectively to both divide labor and placate it. The lumber employers ability to implement many of these policies, especially welfare capitalism, was enhanced by the company town or single-industry setting in which most lumber production occurred. Indeed, as Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has argued persuasively, welfare capitalism may have been an important factor in American labor relations in general until at least the mid-twentieth century.¹⁰⁶ Finally, during the 1920s, a weak lumber market and a conservative political climate made the prospects of reviving trade unions even more formidable than in the 1910s.