William Deverell
In the history business, calling a work a classic can be a double-edged sword. Daniel Cornford’s book is a classic in the best way. His analysis of California’s redwood forests and those who turned them into lumber is a finely wrought piece of historical scholarship. Published in 1987 by Temple University Press, Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire focused attention on a place that needed more study, the redwood forest belt of far northern California. It excavated a period either hidden or removed from view, the second half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth. It connected California’s story of “gold and mineral” to “red and wood.” It mixed high drama amidst those impossibly tall trees: trouble in the guise of Labor versus Capital tensions; tugs of war over power, pay, and work conditions; and no small amount of violence. It was all done in the form of a careful, scholarly reckoning, with many chapters and many footnotes, all tightly wound around a scholarly narrative that explained place and nature, labor and capital, in ways that brought our understanding of Gilded Age troubles into a dark forest where very few of us would have thought to look.
In 1989, just as I was finishing up my graduate training, I wrote a review of this book for the Western Historical Quarterly. I remember still how I worked on it, just a couple of hundred words, wanting to get it right. The book meant a lot to me, as Cornford had found industrial tensions, violence, and all that they provoked in ways very similar to what I had been finding in the overlapping milieu of California railroads, the subject of my dissertation and first book. Workers and Dissent offered a different case study of California’s troubled maturation, a story with earlier and far more northern roots than what I was working on. This book helped me think about my own work, helped me organize my thoughts and my notes, and I will always be indebted to its author for that.
All this is to say that the book is excellent and, now that we are more than 30 years removed from its year of publication, it is a classic.
But how else is this book a classic? That’s the bit I found harder to contemplate when writing this vignette. It is a classic because it is obscure. It is a classic because it got published, it got reviewed, and it got largely relegated to footnote references, as in “See Cornford’s 1987 study of lumber workers, unions, and corporate conglomerates.”
That is unfortunate, and being asked to write this new foreword feels like a minor vindication for the author, given that his book is likely to find a new audience. The far north of California, where the redwood belt and the marijuana belt exist in complex tension and cohabitation, is a case-study region of so much that is important in contemporary America and the West. Daniel Cornford puts it on a historical floor. He tells us much about those lumbering places that now lurk in the woods as ruins (although not all of them, to be sure). There are mills and such, some faded and empty, others reworked and rehabbed. Where steam donkeys once winched trees towards market, they now lie abandoned in the forest or rusted out altogether, gone. The lumbering goes on, of course, but now with different techniques and tools. The work still requires great amounts of labor and Cornford’s study tells us the early chapters of that work history, that labor history.
Cornford populates these woods. Populists are here, Native Americans, Knights of Labor, lumber millionaires, families, immigrants, radicals, dreamers, crooks, and killers. Californians all, and it is good, if sometimes distasteful or worse, to meet them. They render familiar and even familial a landscape we might often think of as sparse, save for the giant trees.
What’s important here, too, is that Cornford’s study is all about, literally, the trees and the forest. Redwoods are unspeakably spectacular — 10, 15, even 20 feet across, rising the length of a football field into the air. They can live as long as the Bible has existed. They stand for much in both California’s history and its present, and yet they are increasingly vulnerable to climate change and drought. It’s not just warming that threatens these astonishing and magnificent trees. Fog can damage, even kill, them, as can a rising ocean.
If we are to know these trees, if we are to help them, it behooves us to become students of them and their place. Redwood history is long and it requires work from dozens of disciplines to know it well and best. Surely one of those disciplines is history itself. In this book, we learn about the ways in which the California Gold Rush inaugurated an assault on the far north’s redwood forests, how capital got organized to do so, and how labor in turn organized to fend off organized capital.
The trees yet stand. They are the only coast redwoods on earth. They shelter an astonishing array of life in and beneath them. They suck carbon, which makes them especially critical as the atmosphere grows hotter by way of greenhouse emissions. But to help them, and to save them, requires intervention. Some trees have to be felled; the woods have to be culled. It’s ironic, isn’t it? To save them, we can turn to a history of their destruction to learn more about them, to learn more about the ways in which environmental degradation and environmental rehabilitation engage in an unending drama, a choreography peculiar to the American West of the last two centuries.
Here is a primer on some of the first moments of redwood history in human memory. As you read it, as you meet these people in the forest, look to the trees themselves, too. Actors human and sequoia sempervirens are on this stage. Listen to them both. Breathe new life into a classic.
WILLIAM DEVERELL is Professor of History at the University of Southern California.