Race, Skill, and Section in Northern California

POLITICS&GEOFF MANN SOCIETY Race, Skill, and Section in Northern California GEOFF MANN In the early 1920s, a time of significant technical change in the lumber industry, hundreds of African American workers migrated from the South to work in the mills of Siskiyou County, in northern California. White workers, who dominated working- class politics in the western timber industry, understood this as the arrival of the South in the western woods. This involved the construction of a historically particular logic of racial privilege founded on local understandings of technical and envi- ronmental change, labor organization, and the broader political economic experience of the U.S. working class. The specific racism of the moment demonstrates how labor relations, occupational opportunities, and skill not only reflect racial politics but are simultaneously manipulated to produce and naturalize racial stratification. INTRODUCTION: THE “NIGGER-KILLER” OF SISKIYOU COUNTY On the back of a photograph of a massive Lidgerwood skidder—the “Titanic”— in the collections a small museum in northern California, someone in the 1920s wrote, At the time this was first set up, Long-Bell [Lumber Company] imported negroes from their southern operations. Local lumberjacks objected to the negroes, and there was an average of one negro killed each week in the woods by being caught in the bight of a line. The skidder consequently became known as the “Nigger-Killer.”1 Thanks to the staff of the Weed Historic Lumber Town Museum and to Michelle Bonner, Jake Kosek, Jeff Romm, Richard Walker, and the editors of this journal (Claire Kim and Mary-Ann Twist in particular), for criticism that greatly improved my arguments. I am also very grateful to David Roediger and to Gavin Wright and David Montgomery, both of whom offered detailed and insightful comments. Neither of them will agree completely with the result, but they both made this a substan- tially better article. This research was supported by the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment. POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 30 No. 3, September 2002 465-496 © 2002 Sage Publications 465 466 POLITICS& SOCIETY The note raises immediate questions. African American lumber workers in the West? “Imported” black workers in northern California? These facts fit neither the received history of the rural West or its forest industry. And beyond these chal- lenges to the historical record, other, more troubling, problems arise. What is meant by “imported”? Did all groups of workers suffer such a terrible on-the-job mortality rate? Who were the workers, and how did this situation come to be? In short, how can we account for a political economic and sociocultural constellation that produces a “Nigger-Killer” in the northern California timber country in the 1920s? What follows is an attempt to address these questions. For the most part, the story unfolds in Weed, California, between 1920 and 1925. By piecing together the stories of the African American workers who came to Weed and trying to understand some of the texture of their daily lives, I hope to both substantiate a forgotten history of African American forest workers in the West and examine the process and content of racism and racial ideology in light of that history. A skidder is a machine used in logging operations to cable-haul felled timber to a point at which it can be transported out of the woods by train, truck, or river. The Titanic was a hulking, black and silver contraption, its size matched by its enor- mous power. Huge steam boilers, and the fifteen-foot diameter drums for which they generated pressure, ran its length and a complex, seemingly arbitrary maze of piping caged large portions of its sides. Set up on wooden blocks and fastened to the thin forest soil by anchors called “tailholts,” it looked something akin to a steam locomotive, with an additional tower from which cables ran like a spiderweb. But accounting for the “Nigger-Killer” of northern California necessitates far more than an analysis of mechanical design and worker safety. It requires inter- weaving several threads in labor history in both the South and the West. The political economic and social context within which the Titanic was operated was con- stituted by particular workers who related to each other in particular ways. These workers performed various jobs according to a specific division of labor that was controlled and reproduced in the daily relations between and within management and the workforce. All of these details are important, as is an understanding of the means through which these conditions were legitimated or maintained. Central to these questions are the material conditions of work. What is a job like? Some are physically demanding, some relatively easy. Some require consid- erable specific training, whereas others are learned quickly; some demand a great deal of agility and/or knowledge. Some jobs are dangerous, dirty, hot. Many occu- pations are “traditional,” others somewhat new. A few are highly coveted, many actively avoided. The characteristics and perceptions matter because they can help us understand how work and social status are related in a particular context and how disagreeable, dangerous, undesirable jobs—the jobs African Americans have almost always had—are also virtually always considered “unskilled.” These are essential steps toward any explanation of why we find southern African Amer- GEOFF MANN 467 icans dying performing dangerous low-wage jobs on a high-technology (for the time) skidder in the woods of the Pacific coast. I focus on skill, technical change, sectional political economic difference, the relationship between capital and labor, and the racism of workers and management, emphasizing the historically specific conception of the relationship between skill and race in the realm of wage labor. I argue that they are, in fact, not easily disentangled, each dynamically shaping and shaped by the other. Not only is race reproduced by skill-based occupational hierarchies, as can be read from much of the literature on segmented labor markets, but fluid determinations of skill may reproduce racial difference.2 Jobs can be defined as unskilled either because they are the province of “inferior” workers, or to ensure that “undesirable” tasks are performed by “undesirable” people, regardless of their abilities or experience. This entanglement can not only help explain how the “Nigger-Killer” came to be but can provide fruitful material for a reconsideration of some of the most seemingly commonsense ideas—skill and race—we use to reflect on the experience of work in particular, and daily life more generally. The tale of African American lumber workers in Weed allows the relation between skill and race to be rethought as inseparable. As any static or objective understanding of either is relin- quished, we can see both as manifestations of broader struggles of working people for status, power, security, and higher wages. Supporting these claims means drawing on a varied literature, and the organization of the article reflects this variety. In section 1, I recount the story of African Americans in Weed in the early 1920s, focusing on the workers and their lives; their employer, the Long-Bell Lumber Company; and the structure, labor, and race relations of the U.S. lumber industry after the First World War. I place particular emphasis on the specter of the South as perceived by western timber workers and the manner in which this specter haunted northern California. In section 2, I consider the legacy of the South in U.S. industrial development and labor politics. In this light, I elaborate some thoughts about the relation between skill and race and argue that a flexibly racist determination of the meaning of skill has abetted the subordination of racialized workers in the face of radical economic change. Section 3 returns to the Lidgerwood skidder through the experiences African American workers, in an attempt to understand the creation of a “Nigger-Killer” in northern California timber country. 1. THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION TO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA In April 1923, a train carrying W.E.B Du Bois on a West Coast speaking tour ran through Weed.3 Unfortunately, Du Bois did not disembark. Presumably he was unaware that Weed contained one of the largest African American communi- ties in the rural West, whose members comprised a substantial portion of the Weed Lumber Company’s labor force. 468 POLITICS& SOCIETY A very small black population had been in Weed and nearby McCloud since 1917, recruited from the South by labor agents.4 The vast majority of black workers, however, came to Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border, after 1920. They came one of two ways.5 One group undertook a punctuated migration from the South; some came by way of Oklahoma, others from southern California, some from Alabama or Arkansas. A second group of workers consisted of those who came directly from DeRidder and Longville Louisiana in 1921 and 1922, their transportation costs advanced by the Long-Bell Lumber Company of Kansas City, the majority shareholder in the Weed Lumber Co. These were joined by friends and relatives who followed them out over the next few years.6 By the mid-1920s, there were one thousand African Americans in Weed, a town of just more than six thousand.7 The community to which they migrated was dominated by the local mill. Founded by Maine lumberman Abner Weed in 1901, the town was wholly owned by his Weed Lumber Company. It evolved as a company town in the paternal tradi- tion, where Weed Lumber owned the company store, banks, hotels, clubs and other social venues, churches, housing, and the town land.8 By 1907, Weed Lum- ber was one of the largest producers in California, thanks in large part to an array of wealthy investors that included prominent San Francisco bankers and Long-Bell.9 When Long-Bell eventually acquired majority ownership in 1916, it maintained not only the name of its subsidiary but also the company town structure with which it had experience in the South.

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