During World War I, the Humboldt County labor movement made a fleeting recovery. The membership of all unions affiliated with the Eureka Trades Council doubled in the first five months of 1917.1 Unions that had been virtually moribund for a decade experienced a sudden influx of members, while the building trades unions were powerful enough to establish the closed shop in Eureka by May 1917.2 In contrast to the tame rituals that marked Labor Day rallies earlier in the decade, the 1917 rally attracted well over 3,000 people.3 Many workers obtained the eight-hour day and wage increases that at least kept pace with inflation.
Several factors accounted for the rejuvenation of the Humboldt County labor movement. The county was hit by a severe labor shortage that affected much of the nation during the war years. The lumber industry operated at full capacity to meet wartime production needs, while a massive shipbuilding program, employing upward of 1,000 additional men, put stress on a labor market deprived of 2,000 Humboldt County men who enlisted.4 As America entered the war, the Humboldt Times predicted that there would be a shortage of 3,500 men by the fall of 1917.5 The decision of San Francisco Mayor James Rolph to operate his new shipbuilding operations on Humboldt Bay under the closed shop also gave the union movement a boost. Labor News heralded Rolph as the savior of the Humboldt County labor movement.6 Finally, the federal government’s unprecedented intervention in labor relations during World War I, especially in the shipbuilding and lumber industries, gave the county’s labor movement a sense of legitimacy and self-confidence that it had lacked over the previous decade. Labor News highlighted the pressure that the federal government exerted on lumber and shipbuilding employers to improve conditions.7
Despite these signs of revival, lumber trade unionism in Humboldt lagged behind the recovery of many other sectors of the county’s labor movement. Humboldt’s lumber workers did not participate in the wave of strikes that buffeted the Pacific Northwest lumber industry in July 1917. The Wobblies did not establish an office in Eureka until late July, and it closed within two months.8 Wobbly organizers were active in the county in the early months of 1918, but they failed to attract more than a token following during the war and in the early 1920s. The AFL International Union of Timber Workers (IUTW) had more success in organizing Humboldt lumber workers. Estimates of the IUTW’s membership in the county varied greatly. The Humboldt Standard put the figure at between 2,000 and 3,000 by March 1918.9 J. T. Woods, a general organizer for the California State Federation of Labor, estimated that the IUTW had 800 members, which was probably nearer the mark.10 In January and February 1918, Humboldt County lumber workers pressed for the eight-hour day at a series of rallies. Under extreme pressure from their workers and the War Department, the county lumber employers and their Pacific Northwest counterparts grudgingly conceded the eight-hour day in March 1918.
The war’s end halted the resurgence of the Humboldt labor movement. In 1919, severe dislocations to the local economy resulted from the end of the government orders that had prompted the growth of a large shipbuilding industry. The redwood lumber market also began to slacken at a time when the county was trying to absorb returning servicemen. By 1920, the Humboldt labor movement had suffered a sharp loss of membership and was in much the same state as before the war.
The recovery of the lumber trade union movement was especially ephemeral. In the spring of 1919, most Humboldt County lumber companies reinstituted the nine-hour day with little resistance.11 The IUTW fought vigorously during 1919 to maintain its base in the county. In June it sent one of its leading organizers, Harry Call of Seattle, to Humboldt County to boost the sagging fortunes of the local IUTW branch.12 The crucial test of strength for the lumber trade union movement in Humboldt County came in September 1919 when more than 500 Hammond Lumber Company employees walked out in support of two workers who had been discharged for demanding time-and-a-half rates for all hours worked in excess of eight.13 The strike originated as a spontaneous affair, but within a few days strikers, including many women, flocked into the IUTW. The IUTW demanded time and a half for all work over eight hours, reinstatement of all strikers, and equal wage rates for men and women. The county labor movement gave its wholehearted support and the Mayor of Eureka offered to mediate, but Hammond was intransigent. He accused Call and other IUTW leaders of past links with the IWW. Revelations that the charge proved to have some degree of substance hurt the strikers’ cause. In October, Hammond secured an injunction that effectively broke the strike. Disillusioned by the defeat of the strike and proof of past affiliation of some of the IUTW’s leadership with the Wobblies, many Humboldt County lumber workers tore up their IUTW union cards.14 Hammond gloated over his victory and was emboldened to demand the closing down of Labor News.15
Throughout 1920, Call strove desperately but vainly to rekindle the spirit of unionism in the lumber industry. In 1921, most Humboldt lumber companies cut wages by from 10 to 15 percent, and some of the county’s lumber workers were forced to accept a ten-hour day. The union movement all but vanished from the woods and mills of Humboldt County during the early 1920s. The IUTW, after meeting with similar failures in other lumbering regions, formally dissolved in 1923. Undeterred by a local criminal syndicalism ordinance and frequent arrests of their members, the Wobblies made a stubborn effort to establish a foothold in Humboldt County up until 1926.16 But for all their valor and persistence, the Wobblies were no more successful in attracting a following than they had been since early in the twentieth century. Often the Wobblies expressed exasperation at the difficulty and magnitude of their task. Writing to the Industrial Worker in 1922 from Humboldt County, one Wobbly complained that “it would take a Sherlock Holmes to find any militancy in these tame apes.”17 Another correspondent to the Industrial Worker reported that in his Humboldt camp 10 percent of the men were IWW members or sympathizers, 10 percent company stool pigeons, and the other 80 percent “scissorbills”18—the derogatory Wobbly term for workers lacking class consciousness or militancy. During the early 1920s, the Wobbly journal Industrial Pioneer devoted several pieces to the plight of the redwood lumber workers. In a feature article entitled “The Tragedy of the Redwoods,” the author reproached the lumber workers for their quiescence. He called the Pacific Lumber Company and the Hammond Lumber Company the “Octopus” of northwestern California and described the massive deforestation of the redwood lumber region and the victimization of labor leaders. But, he said, the saddest feature of the situation was the “apathy” of the workers.19 In a subsequent article, “Californian” entitled his piece on the redwood lumber region “The Land of Sunshine and Serfdom.”20
Although the IWW was the harshest critic of the Humboldt County lumber companies during the early 1920s, several correspondents to the Wobbly press admitted that, notwithstanding the wage cuts and the abrogation of the wartime eight-hour day, conditions in the lumber camps were substantially better than they had been before the war. In 1922, George Duville reported that the Hammond and Pacific Lumber companies provided greatly improved living conditions, which were superior to those of other county lumber companies.21 Two years later, a lumber worker returning after an absence of five years informed the Industrial Worker that a striking transformation in living conditions had taken place at almost all Humboldt County camps.22
Whatever weight one gives to the roles of state camp sanitation laws, welfare capitalism, repression, scientific management, and divisions within the workforce, the quietitude of the Humboldt County lumber workers was not exceptional. For most of the interwar period, not only was lumber trade unionism weak nationally, but there were also comparatively few strikes in the industry. In 1917, for example, there were 299 strikes in the nation’s lumber industry, more than the total number (232) between 1918 and 1926. The incidence of strikes declined over the same period in other industries, but, with few exceptions, the tapering off was most dramatic in the lumber industry, in which, nationwide, only six strikes were recorded in 1924, nine in 1925, and three in 1926.23 The incidence of strikes and their severity, as measured by the number of workers involved and “man days idle,” continued to be low from the late 1920s until the mid-1930s in most states. In California, there were only 27 strikes, of relatively short duration, and involving a limited number of workers, between 1927 and 1936.24
In Humboldt County, the serenity of labor relations was disturbed only in 1935 by a violent but brief strike of a small number of the county’s lumber workers.25 It was reported that 95 percent of Hammond’s day crew at Samoa opposed it, while, at Scotia, 733 Pacific Lumber Company employees signed a loyalty pledge, with only 38 abstaining. Workers at the Dolbeer and Carson Company offered their employer a loyalty pledge. They stated that they had been employed by the company for from one to fifty years and that they had “always received the greatest consideration from our president and friend, J. M. Carson, and do not need a union . . . to make demands for us.” A month later, the vast majority of employees at Mendocino’s two most important lumbering concerns—the Union Lumber Company and the Casper Lumber Company—signed similarly worded petitions. There is no evidence that these pledges were either solicited or coerced. In 1938, workers at the Union Lumber Company voted 599 to 290 against any kind of union representation in elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. At another NLRB election in 1941, Hammond employees voted 546 to 417 against union representation.26 During the 1930s in Humboldt County, the AFL Sawmill and Timber Workers Union (STWU), which operated under the jurisdiction of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBC), secured only a small following.
In the late 1930s, labor relations in the Pacific Northwest lumber industry were more turbulent than in Humboldt County and most other lumbering regions. In 1937, dissident lumber workers, mainly from Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, chafing under the conservative leadership of the UBC, founded the International Woodworkers of America and affiliated with the CIO. In Oregon and Washington, the IWA and the STWU engaged in a bitter struggle to secure jurisdiction over the discontented lumber workers. The IWA, however, had even less success than the STWU in establishing a foothold in Humboldt County. Although much of the IWA’s energy was consumed by fighting between its pro- and anti-Communist wings, it nevertheless succeeded in attracting the majority of workers to its fold by the early 1940s.27 The booming demand for lumber, and acute labor shortages during World War II,28 saved the lumber workers from the consequences of prolonged and acrimonious intra- and interunion disputes. The extensive intervention of the National War Labor Board in the lumber industry forced employers both to recognize and bargain with unions in accordance with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The consequent institutionalization of labor relations, and a sustained demand for lumber after World War II, established trade unionism in the lumber industry as a relatively stable entity for the first time. During the war years, the STWU made enormous gains in Humboldt County and other parts of the Redwood Empire. Shortly after the war ended, the STWU felt strong enough to call out all its members in the redwood region in pursuit of the union shop and a substantial wage increase.
The militance of lumber workers in some regions during the late 1930s and the 1940s, and the establishment of more enduring unions, by no means reversed the subordinate position of labor in the redwood industry. Most employers could not countenance a union shop and some of the other demands made on them. In April 1948, after a strike that lasted twenty-seven months, the STWU was forced to concede defeat.29 Nationally, although lumber trade unionism remained a factor after World War II, it did not wield the same power as unions in most other industries. In 1947, only 16.5 percent of lumber workers were organized and in 1953 only 21.1 percent. In both these years, the percentage of workers organized in the other sectors of the economy except government and service was significantly higher.30
The reasons for the comparative weakness of lumber unionism in the mid-twentieth century, and indeed today, are complex but in many respects similar to those that prevailed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Union drives of the IWA and the STWU were undoubtedly assisted by the sanctification of collective bargaining initiated by the National Labor Relations Act. Furthermore, the automobile freed lumber workers from the confines of company towns and single-industry communities. But the gains made by the IWA and the STWU after the Second World War were due in large part to a buoyant lumber market that lasted until the early 1970s. The fact that lumber companies dominated the economies of the communities they operated in after the war to same extent that they had before limited the gains of the union movement even in a benign economic climate. When the lumber market collapsed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, lumber unionism in the Redwood Empire and elsewhere proved vulnerable to an antiunion offensive, and the accompanying plant closings devastated the economies of many lumber-dependent communities.