Lumberjack, by William Crowe.

CONCEPT

Part of the reading list I put together for my thesis with the help of Robert Polito and Jeffery Allen. As such, it was required reading.

---

Actually, my comments on this book are best presented in conjunction with those on Tom Powers' book. This is partly because I was reading books more with a mind toward learning something new than toward studying a plot or characters, but also because they interestingly compliment each other.

That is... if Powers' was building on a body of 1950s literature that sought to immortalize the mythology of Michigan's lumbering era, then Lumberjack, which was originally published in the 1950s and 60s as a collection of newspaper editorials, sought to actively curtail that mythology.

As chief bookeeper (and eventualy stock-owner and liquidator (is that a word?)) of the Manistique-based Chicago Lumber Company was one of the most articulate and credible advocates of Michigan's lumber industry. Advocates has a special meaning here... usually an industry advocate promotes its interest as a going concern. By the time Crowe wrote, not only had the entire industry relocated, but its own practices and social role had largely changed.

Crowe, then, sought to rehabilitate both lumberjacks and "lumber barons" in a more positive social context. He did this in direct response to cother accounts of the post-lumber era that exaggerated or fabricated the extent of social chaos. He talks about the propriety and good business sense and practice of the large lumber companies, the reasonable-at-the-time wages and compensation they offered to their workers, and the particular circumstances surrounding the industry. His account was a sleeper success with Michigan's historical community, sufficient to allow a final compilation in the late 70s, and a revised reprint in 2002.

Having finally read enough material on this subject to have formed my own opinion, I think that Crowe goes too far. If others distored facts in depicting the region as completely lawless and wild, Crowe is equally partisan. In his attempts to rehabilitate the lumber industry (in which he admirably provides many citations) he utterly downplays and refutes social distress, to a much greater extent then, say, Fitzmaurice, who was also invested in painting the lumberjacks in the best light possible. In Lumberjack, for example, bagnios are listed as a passing concern, while numerous contemporary newspaper accounts argue quite convincingly that entrepreneurs like Jim Carr and Dan Dunn were for many years the most influential forces in their communities; almost as kind of self-styled political machines.

This fits in with what I was earlier saying about about the lumber industry expanding the frontier faster than social institutions could keep up. Powers' books and its companions testify to a truth, in the fact that these towns (Harrison, Seney, Meredith, etc.) were staging points before they were communities in any organic sense. They had the infrastructure for lumber transport and associated goods and services, but it was some time before they were equipped for municipal governance. Crowe downplays the extent of social disorder -- something which may have been affected by his arrival in Manistique some time after the CLC had been already established.

However Crowe is absolutely correct when he says that the presence of the industry, and the large companies in particular, had a stablizing long-term effect. Camp discipline was essential to production, and this emphasis eventually came to affect life in the cities. Brigands such as those Powers writes about actively contributed to log piracy, and so the lumber industry had a vested interest in promoting law enforcement. But most importantly, the industry brought money to the communities for a brief window of time. It was actually quite well known that an area would be logged off in a few years, so the retention of captial and diversification of the local economy absolutely depended on stable municipal governance and financial institutions. This was eventually reflected in lumber trusts and monopolies that dictated the use of property, but the election of reform tickets (such as the Clare Country Democratic class of '84) was also effective.

In the end, Lumberjack is an interesting read, partly for its very colorful and nostaglic (and at a decidedly slower tempo than other works) rendering of the lumbering era. And partly as a historical document. Crowe writes from the 1950s of an era that he alternately fears is being forgotten and misunderstood, and the passion he puts into his account is palpable, even if his prose is typically austere. More, he uses his narrative to comment on political issues during the red scare, from a point-of-view that is unabashedly conservative, yet a style of conservatism that has essentially disappeared in the last thirty years. Reading the book then, is a fine cross-section of information on both lumbering and the financial practice of the lumber industry, but is also like peeling an onion. One confronts and reckons with multiple layers of history.

END OF POST.