Forest for the Trees: How Humans Shaped the North Woods

5 Labor in the Northland

5 Labor in the Northland Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked how ’bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet: “You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” joe hill, “The Preacher and the Slave” american ideals underwent a profound metamorphosis and reorganization as the twentieth century approached. Laissez faire fell from favor. In addition to revised policies regarding disposal of the public domain, lumbermen on the Winton watershed had to contend with a changing labor situation. Despite the largest social aid program in American history—the Homestead Act and other land giveaways— the American dream had eluded many. The founding fathers had seen the value in making land available for settlement: Thomas Jefferson believed a country of landed farmers would form the best democracy; the practical and elite John Adams acknowledged that “power always followed property.” But for some that vision had never materialized. A miserable, landless underclass, a population ruled by the pitiless mar87 ketplace, grew in both size and discontent until it threatened the peace. On July 17, 1877, railroad workers in West Virginia went on strike against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad after the company slashed their wages. To fight the strikers, the company hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a Civil War–era anti-espionage organization, its tactics aggressive and violent. Workers traveling the rail lines from city to city carried word of the Pinkertons’ abuse, and solidarity spread, fire-like, from the railroad yards to workers in other industries, inspiring a general strike that soon extended coast to coast. A rally for the Working Man’s Party in Chicago drew twenty thousand attendees, and public opinion seemed to be with the strikers. After the state militia refused to fire on the disgruntled workers, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops. The resulting bloody conflict launched the modern labor movement in the United States. The terrible and inhumane living conditions of the masses contrasted sharply with the opulence emerging industrialists and financiers enjoyed. Calls for action were wrapped up in issues of class—the haves versus the have nots—and questions of responsibility—that of business owners and of the government. Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, shocking the nation with descriptions and photographs of the slums in New York City. In 1904, Henry James described the United States as a “huge Rappacini garden, rank with each variety of the poison-plant of the money passion.” Jack London published The Iron Heel in 1906. These works powerfully illustrated the desperate conditions so many Americans suffered and forcibly demanded that those in power respond.1 Progressive journalists, seeking to mimic the financial success of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, an exposé of the meatpacking industry published in 1906, took aim at business and political corruption, child labor , slum conditions, racial discrimination, prostitution, sweatshops, insurance fraud, environmental degradation, and illegal stock fixing. Colliers, McClure’s, and Atlantic Monthly published well-researched features about a plethora of social scandals and injustices, a new activist journalism branded “muckraking” by President Theodore Roosevelt. Despite the unappealing appellation, muckrakers successfully galvalabor in the northland 88 nized public opinion and forced reform, the earliest examples being the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, passed by Congress just six months after The Jungle’s publication. As the press excoriated deplorable working conditions and exposed instances of business corruption, workers slowly began exercising their strength in numbers. Organizations like the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, the Greenback Labor Party, grange societies, and other farmers’ and laborers’ unions formed to promote government ownership of the railroads and utilities, a graduated income tax, the secret ballot , women’s suffrage, prohibition of alcohol, and federal regulation of inflation and the economy.In the 1890s there were about a thousand strikes each year; by 1904, four thousand. Many Americans, especially immigrants from northern Europe, where socialism was well established , adopted and promoted socialistic ideals and policies as they sought parity with employers. Northern Minnesota’s workforce—numbering 15,886 just after the turn of the century—was particularly ripe for labor organization. The saw log harvest was mostly over, the big tree jacks having already migrated west...