Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910-30 (Working Class in American History) - Softcover

Lipin, Lawrence M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252073703 ISBN 13: 9780252073700

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2007

Synopsis

Focusing on Oregon in the 1910s and 1920s, Lawrence M. Lipin traces the shift in labor’s thinking about the use of natural resources. As he shows, workers began with the so-called producerist idea that resources and land, whether rural or urban, should be put to productive use rather than set aside as “elitist” nature preserves. But working class views changed as the automobile gave people access to national parks, forests, and beaches. Workers not only accepted the preservation of nature for recreation, they pressured state agencies to provide more outdoor opportunities. Fish and game commissioners responded with more intensive hatchery operations while wildlife advocates pushed for designated wilderness. In these and other ways, the labor movement’s shifting relationship to nature reveals the complicated development of wildlife policy and its own battles with consumerism. 

An innovative blend of environmental and labor history, Workers and the Wild examines the battles over the proper use of nature in the early twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence M. Lipin is a professor of history at Pacific University and author of Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman's Point of View: New Thought Radicalism in Portland’s Progressive Era.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Workers and the Wild

CONSERVATION, CONSUMERISM, AND LABOR IN OREGON, 1910-30By LAWRENCE M. LIPIN

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07370-0

Contents

Preface...............................................................................viiIntroduction: Nature, Labor Radicalism, and Mass Consumer Society.....................11 Defending the Producers' Republic...................................................172 Class Power and Wildlife............................................................493 Autos, Leisure, and Nature..........................................................854 Consumerism and the End of the Producers' Republic..................................117Conclusion: Culture, Class, and Environment...........................................153Notes.................................................................................161Index.................................................................................201Illustrations follow page 116

Introduction

Nature, Labor Radicalism, and Mass Consumer Society

In the summer of 1919, Portland bank president A. L. Mills arrived by trail at Elk Lake, situated near the volcanic peaks of Broken Top and Mount Bachelor. There he spent August engaged in "wonderful trout fishing," but he returned home concerned that not enough was being done to preserve the trout that state officials had planted there just a few years earlier. In a letter to Oregon game commissioner Ira Fleischner, written in the opening weeks of the new decade, Mills complained that there were too many people engaged in less than gentlemanly fishing at the lake and that interests in nearby Bend were developing inexpensive resorts that would draw workers from logging camps to spend a day off at the lake. Mills loathed the change this augured. "If this lake is to continue to be a paradise for the men who love fly casting," he warned, "it will be necessary ... to close it to bait fishing and permit only the use of flies and spinners."

The letter, filed among boxes of Fish and Game Commission papers, was in many regards typical of a kind of correspondence that was maintained between state bureaucrats and some of their most important clients or constituents. For a few years, a group of wealthy men had sought to use state agencies to expand the opportunities for an uplifting leisure experience in the wild. Grounded in part in a crisis of manhood and a sense that men had become overcivilized, advocates of sport fishing and hunting believed that engagement with the wild would help restore vitality to those men who took time off from their careers in the office. They wrote to the Oregon Fish and Game Commission seeking hatchery fish with which to stock the lakes where they owned property or where they were able to visit by pack train for a few weeks during the summers. Others saw in the Oregon Highway Commission the means to sustain the development of a system of scenic highways that would bring international attention to Oregon as a rival to Switzerland in natural majesty. But whether they addressed the need to stock distant lakes or to build scenic highways, they argued that tourists would bring dollars to the state's economy, benefiting outfitters and guides who helped them make their way into the wild.

As prominent as many of these men were, they were unable and unwilling to completely overturn the basic utilitarian assumptions about the proper uses of nature. Nevertheless, they did establish the early outlines of a tourist economy. They envisaged a refined kind of tourism; only the well-heeled would be able to take sufficient time from work and hire guides and pack animals to sustain long forays into the remote forests and streams. Ideally, they would be able to enjoy the serenity of the backcountry without the noise and bustle that mass tourism was sure to bring from the city. When things did not work out ideally, they wrote to the state game commissioners. When it became clear that the tide had turned against these prominent sport hunting and fishing advocates, some would rethink their prior support for construction of scenic highways.

Their efforts, however, brought resistance from both the Oregon State Federation of Labor (OSFL) and the Oregon Grange. Leaders of both organizations responded that state power should not be used to keep resources from being put to productive use and that tax revenues should be used to facilitate the productive economy, not to hinder it. Both groups articulated a producerist language to oppose what they believed were efforts by the wealthy to use the state for their own purposes. For farmers and workers in extractive industries such as fishing and logging, opposition to the efforts to construct a tourist economy was deeply ingrained in a rural value system that presumed fish and animals to belong to those who invested the labor in catching them. For rural people, the idea that the state could regulate hunting and fishing so that outsiders would be assured leisure and sport ran against the grain of common sense, especially in the way that it threatened to change and limit their subsistence strategies.

For the trade unionists of the Oregon labor movement, which was strongest in Portland, the opposition to tourism was less immediate, since prior to the advent of the inexpensive automobile few of these urban workers experienced much contact with those forests and streams that lay beyond the reach of the local interurban rail system. Nevertheless, in the years immediately prior to the entry of the United States into World War I, trade union leaders responded just as strongly against efforts to use the state for the benefit of the wealthy as their rural counterparts. They sought to use the state not to preserve resources from production but rather to enable more and more small farmers to productively use them. Their intent was radical. They sought to wrest control of both land and the state from the hands of leading capitalists and corporations in an effort to finally carve out of the West what many plebeian Americans had long thought was its destiny: to provide the basis for a republic of small, independent producers.

But these were not a lot of backward-looking arcadians; Oregon labor activists sought a more just society in which wage earners were assured of a decent standard of living and were preserved from the torment of periodic unemployment. Destroying the economic stranglehold that urban and rural land speculators had on the economy would not make unions dispensable. Instead, by restructuring labor markets, it would enable them to be more effective in their efforts to raise wages and improve conditions. As resources were forced into production, the glut of labor that led to unemployment and low wages would disappear. Labor leaders resisted the efforts of their social betters to manage nature in a way that some of it, including what might have recreational and inspirational uses, would be preserved from production, particularly when it appeared that such efforts at preservation were most likely to improve only the lives of the privileged few. This militant attack on the rich, which had its origins in urban inequality and bouts with high unemployment, was readily marshaled for the battle against elite advocates of a refined tourism. On tourism-related issues, urban and rural producers had much about which they could agree.

The laborite analysis of class and nature reflected rural realities, not just urban ones, and the assumptions, if not the policies that labor activists derived from them, were shared by rural producers whether they were fishermen or farmers. As the environmental historians William Robbins and Robert Bunting make clear, there was wide agreement among Oregonians that providence had provided a bountiful nature for the productive use of humanity and that any effort to sequester these divine resources under the stewardship of a nonproductive few was immoral. Whether it was the critique by trade union activists leveled at land speculators, the outcry raised by gillnetters against operators of fish wheels, or the charges made by the Grange that state hatchery operations diminished the food supply of farmers, Oregon producers railed against what they saw as an arbitrary and class abrogation of a divine gift to all of humanity.

Yet the period of discursive unity came to an abrupt end in the 1920s as urban workers increasingly adopted the logic and language of consumerism and tourism. This book explores some of the ways in which Oregonian trade union activists forged a more complex view of the natural world, a view that would include nonproductive uses that would fit the needs of a mass consumer society. The development of consumer society had been years in the making; beginning in the Gilded Age, labor activists, liberal economists, merchants, and advertisers began to portray the increasing array of goods available to consumers as the tonic for poverty, social disruption, and conflict. In the 1920s workers began to build a new relationship with nature as they invaded the forests and streams of the state in growing numbers in the pursuit of recreation. New technologies-most notably the automobile-and new behaviors exerted an enthusiastic departure from some of the producerist assumptions that nature must be put to productive use that had been so repetitively articulated in the previous decade, but they also went hand in hand with other cultural changes as well. As workers seized the weekend-and more and more skilled workers were able to do so by the mid-1920s-trade union language lost some of the certainty that had previously given labor discourse a religious and almost transcendent quality. In so doing, they left the nineteenth century behind them.

That trade unionists in Oregon in the 1920s came to embrace a new approach to nature and leisure provides us with an improved vantage point from which to evaluate the impact of consumerism on workers. This was hardly an Oregon phenomenon alone; all working Americans in one way or another traversed this historical ground. The trade unionists' pursuit of leisure in the 1920s also allows us to understand in more nuanced form the complicated task of state bureaucrats and the effort to manage nature that we associate with progressive conservation. Since the Oregon labor movement had previously and so strenuously pursued a producerist revolution in land ownership in concert with middle-class radicals in Portland, early efforts to preserve nature in Oregon may have been different than elsewhere. As elsewhere, urban elites seeking to preserve game fish and animals for their own leisure found themselves at odds with rural people who thought in much more producerist terms about nature. Yet in Oregon, early elite conservationist efforts were complicated by a mostly urban labor movement that was unwilling to ignore such matters and had in fact made them primary in its effort to create a more egalitarian and just society.

Getting at the shifting nature of these battles allows this book to integrate labor and environmental history, a project that has been largely unexplored for the period before World War II. Recently, environmental historians have emphasized the degree to which the federal and state bureaucracies, for which early-twentieth-century conservationists had advocated, were expressions of class power that were routinely resisted by rural people. A similar story emerges in Oregon. Whether we consider the inability of state officials to gain convictions of game law violators before rural and small-town juries, the repeated assertions of local hostility from wardens situated in the hinterland, or the resolutions of the farmers gathered in the Oregon Grange, it is clear that rural people resisted the tourist-centered reforms that prominent urbanites were in the process of imposing on the state. But just as important, the chapters that follow will make it clear that the language of rural resistance was, for a while, echoed in the house of urban labor, where a producer-oriented political language reaffirmed worker opposition to the efforts by elites to use state resources to develop a more tourist-centered economy, efforts that meant taking some resources out of production. That the increasing ability to engage in nature-based leisure corresponded so closely in time to the demise of producer-oriented politics by Oregon trade unionists points out how important this trend is in understanding the ways in which American workers adopted a more consumerist orientation.

To the Producer Belongs the Spoils

Nineteenth-century labor activists understood the labor theory of value. They turned on its head the Lockean liberal assumption that individual property was legitimate and moral because it was rooted in an individual's labor and therefore beyond the grasp of arbitrary power. Rather than emphasize the security of accumulated capital, they focused on the process of accumulation, arguing that since property was properly the fruit of one's own labor, any system that impoverished productive laborers to the benefit of those who produced nothing must be in violation of natural law.

Nineteenth-century labor activists in the eastern states had been influenced by John Locke and early-nineteenth-century radical political economists and concluded that the emerging system of industrial capitalism violated the laws of nature, largely because it unleashed undisciplined employers from traditional restraints and provided them incentive to impose arbitrary and new demands on workers while they appropriated to themselves the fruits of workers' labor. In an effort to compete and accumulate capital, master craftsmen divided and subdivided the labor process, extended and intensified the workday, and put downward pressure on wages, often by replacing skilled white men with sources of labor who would work for less. Early union leaders denied that there was any inherent reason for such negative changes, instead focusing on the greed of well-placed bankers and merchants who used their economic power to force employers to do away with the traditional respect that existed between master craftsman and journeyman. Rather than a matter of economic laws, as Karl Marx would portray it in as hard and fast terms as any bourgeois economist, early-nineteenth-century labor activists such as William Heighton of Philadelphia and Langton Byllesby of New York stressed that working-class poverty was caused by moral failings, the greed of nonproducers who, through their roles as moneylenders and middlemen, monopolized resources and manipulated market processes to profit from the labor of those who created necessary goods that sustained life. And in response, American labor activists sought to ensure that workers would receive the value of their labor.

As industrialization proceeded in the post-Civil War era, workers and farmers who spoke in this idiom of producerism consistently referred to the dangers that growing inequality posed to the American republic. Fearing dependency for themselves, they saw danger in the growing power of American financial and industrial elites to manipulate the money supply and the law so that they would expand their wealth at the expense of the independence of rural and urban producers. Such thinking led the advisory committee of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers in 1892 to seek financial aid from fellow unionists in the wake of the violent battle against Andrew Carnegie's Pinkerton agents at Homestead, Pennsylvania, by asserting that capitalists threatened "to undermine every trade organization in the United States, and reduce us to the system of serfdom which was the lot of our forefathers in the middle ages." It led the editors of the National Labor Tribune, in response to the same events, to warn its readers that "the great republic is rapidly taking on impositions upon the public that the free Briton would not submit to, and it is getting up a plutocracy which promises to be a standoff to the British aristocracy, while American corporations form now a privileged class."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Workers and the Wildby LAWRENCE M. LIPIN Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252073703
• ISBN 13: 9780252073700
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248