Might 13, 2025
Reflections on Gents of the Woods: Manhood, Fable, and the American Lumberjack.
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Contestants log roll the Paul Bunyan Lumber Jack Present from Nova Scotia on the Marshfield Truthful on August 23, 2019, in Marshfield, Massachusetts.(Matt Stone / Boston Herald by way of Getty Photos)
Nostalgia is the beating coronary heart of the Trump motion. From fears of DEI displacing whites to the rise of so-called “trad wives” wanting to duplicate what they see as conventional notions of motherhood beneath patriarchal households, nostalgia for a supposedly misplaced previous drives a lot of Trump’s enchantment. Massive components of the working class, livid that its historic proper to onerous, masculine work has disappeared, has additionally embraced Trumpist nostalgia. A long time of business job loss and a scarcity of solutions for displaced employees in regards to the future has turned the blue-collar counties that made up the core of the New Deal Coalition into Trump havens. The media has largely centered on industrial manufacturing unit cities in swing states, however its impression in pure useful resource counties has been simply as transformative.
Addressing Trumpism isn’t the acknowledged purpose of Willa Hammitt Brown’s excellent Gents of the Woods: Manhood, Fable, and the American Lumberjack, however I couldn’t learn it with out processing it by way of our present second. Narratives of the previous shift to serve the curiosity of highly effective reminiscence creators. Brown notes how shortly media narratives about Trump’s January 6 coup try modified for the pursuits of the Republican Occasion. Her case examine on late-Nineteenth-century logging within the Nice Lakes demonstrates clear understanding of how nostalgia erases reality and creates palatable visions of the previous that permit modern folks to neglect hardships and exploitation, settling for a imaginative and prescient of the previous that appears easier than immediately’s difficulties. By erasing histories of working-class exploitation, environmental degradation, and settler colonialism, the official vacationer business of the Northwoods tells a narrative that matches proper right into a Trumpist narrative about what America was once and what it could possibly be if made nice once more.
Though Brown deeply loves her Northwoods dwelling, she pulls no punches on what constructed its fashionable iteration. The timber business rests upon the appropriation of Menominee and Anishinaabe land, a part of the bigger settler colonialist venture. It exploded after the Civil Struggle, constructed on unmitigated and uncontrolled environmental destruction and labor exploitation. Put up–Civil Struggle America had an insatiable demand for timber, and the Northwoods supplied a lot of it till its virtually whole deforestation inside 20 years. Neither massive capital, employers, nor employees noticed any worth within the forest itself, and so they noticed its elimination as an indication of progress. Irresponsible forestry led to huge fires that devastated many of those communities within the early twentieth century.
Loggers lived a tough, brutal existence. The harmful work led to grievous harm and loss of life. Even loggers who survived might not often labor within the business for greater than 20 years. The work’s itinerant nature meant that many loggers didn’t marry or dwell the lives of restrained manhood so valued by Victorian period commenters. As a substitute, they created masculine work and social cultures that valued their very own hierarchies, typically primarily based round violence. Violence grew to become a technique to implement security from untrained greenhorns who threatened veteran loggers by way of their ignorance. Violence additionally enforced racial hierarchies, each in opposition to Scandinavian immigrants and Native American employees. Males on the far edges of a rough-and-tumble system of unregulated capitalism felt they wanted violence to guard themselves, create neighborhood, and make a life.
With reputations as violent, itinerant males, loggers have been hardly welcomed by native residents once they arrived on the town. In a chapter paying homage to how folks discuss in regards to the homelessness disaster, Brown explores how “respectable” Northwoods residents pathologized the loggers’ lives, seeing them as threats to domesticity, and wishing to maneuver them on as shortly as doable. Labor historians want to see histories of organizing right here, however apart from a short try by the Industrial Employees of the World to prepare these employees in 1916, they confirmed little coordinated political exercise. Their types of resistance consisted of strolling off the job or letting out their frustrations by way of brawling. Labor historians have just lately begun to pay extra consideration to employees who don’t set up and might clarify a lot in regards to the working class by way of these research; Brown provides considerably to this dialog.
In the meantime, lumber barons akin to Frederick Weyerhaeuser grew rich on the backs of those employees. They constructed palatial properties in cities akin to St. Paul. When the timber started to expire on the finish of the Nineteenth century, many of the loggers have been out of luck. However Weyerhaeuser merely moved operations to the big forests of the Pacific Northwest, after he purchased 900,000 acres of virgin southwest Washington timber from his fellow Minnesota capitalist, the railroad baron James J. Hill, in 1900. As soon as once more, the cycle of environmental and labor exploitation would start, with a lot of the identical labor violence and long-term injury to the ecosystem.
Present Problem
Brown reveals as a lot curiosity in how reminiscence is created and the tales we inform in regards to the previous as she does in regards to the employees themselves. The Paul Bunyan character was a creation of company leaders, permitting for the retelling of historical past to erase the environmental tragedy and brutality inflicted on employees. Rising up within the Northwoods, she famous how enterprise and political leaders created historic tales of rugged males conquering the wilderness, fully manufacturing handy half-truths for generations of residents of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Furthermore, this reminiscence recreates the manly life-style for contemporary shoppers because it does the cowboy—harmful however full of journey, violent however with an ethical middle primarily based round restraint.
Educating sanitized variations of previous work led working-class folks to check what they hear to their present work life. With jobs within the timber business a fraction of what they have been a half-century in the past, it’s hardly stunning that employees would embrace a story of creating America nice once more by way of onerous work. I grew up within the woods of Oregon and Washington as a substitute of Minnesota and Wisconsin, however the tales Brown tells match strongly with what I’ve seen within the Northwest, the place timber counties threaten to depart Oregon to create a “Higher Idaho” to get away from the liberals in Portland and Eugene, pushed by a want to return to the period of males slicing down bushes to construct America.
Nostalgia sells folks on a previous that by no means actually existed, one which appears a lot easier than the current. However will historians exist sooner or later to offer the tales Individuals want to listen to? Brown isn’t employed as a professor. On the identical second that Individuals desperately want these tales, the neoliberal college system has slashed funding for arts departments. Tenure-track jobs within the area have collapsed for the reason that Nice Recession. That is as true in blue states as in crimson states, as the company donors who run the schools search to show our greater training system into nothing greater than a job coaching program, with directors completely satisfied to conform.
Willa Hammitt Brown, and her necessary e book, demonstrates why we should demand universities require the examine of historical past. We’d like extra tales from her and tons of of different unemployed and underemployed historians encouraging us to reject nostalgia and take care of the legacies of labor exploitation, environmental degradation, settler colonialism, and the tales that cowl all of it.
Erik’s creation
Erik Loomis is an assistant professor of historical past on the College of Rhode Island. He’s the writer of Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (2016) and Out of Sight: The Lengthy and Disturbing Story of Companies Outsourcing Disaster (2015).
