Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire by Daniel A. Cornford

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 922 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology to a set of technological solutions, introducing mechanization on a massive scale. For the most part, this involved borrowing components from the available pool of technology, then adapting and recombining them. The creativeness of this process receives only lukewarm ac­ knowledgement from Radforth. The search for new technology had its focus in the Woodlands Section of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. The section brought competing forest companies and equipment suppliers together to pool their knowledge and find so­ lutions to their common problems. This is an important story, and Radforth tells it well, though he fails to set it adequately within the growing literature on the history of industrial research in Canada. My principal complaints about this book relate to sources. First, the University of Toronto Press must learn that a proper bibliography is not a luxury to be dispensed with in cutting costs. It is a necessary part of a scholarly work, and readers will feel its absence here. Second, Radforth has not exploited the records held by any Ontario pulp and paper firm. I researched a dissertation on the Canadian pulp and paper industry at the same time as Radforth and found the industry to be entirely cooperative. Access to such records would have added welcome balance and a fresh perspective to an otherwise thoroughly researched and well-written study. James P. Hull Dr. Hull is visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. He is completing a study of the ways in which forest-products firms in Canada have managed technical knowledge. Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire. By Daniel A. Cornford. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Pp. x + 276; notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. The late Herbert Gutman insisted that post—Civil War workers were active agents in forging the newly emerging world of industrial Amer­ ica. Ruling classes were able to control social, economic, and political affairs, he concluded, only through the greater material influences they brought to daily affairs. That interpretation of the new industrial order, according to Daniel Cornford, does not provide an adequate explanatory model for the lumber-dominated work force that evolved along California’s redwood coast. This well-researched study of the timber-dependentcommunities centering on Humboldt Bay describes a laboring class that was largely at the mercy of and subordinate to the machinations of industrial capital. Before the emergence of the huge, vertically integrated and exter­ nally owned lumber corporations at the turn of the century, a strong tradition of political dissent had developed in Humboldt County. technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 923 Steeped in the democratic-republican legacy of “free labor” and the “labor theory of value,” that tradition fostered local support for broader dissenting movements: the California Workingmen’s Party, the Green­ back Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party, and the socialist movement. Although those forms of political protest offered a penetrating analysis of Gilded Age capitalism, the author argues that they were remarkably superficial in prescribing cures. The 19thcentury dissenters, in short, were people of limited vision. In Humboldt County the leading proponents of democraticrepublican ideology were newspaper editors, men of the pulpit, local politicians, letter writers to the area press, and Fourth ofJuly orators. Their rhetoric, imploring citizens to take to the ballot box to save the republic from the malefactors of great wealth, may have served more to strengthen and add legitimacy to the existing system than anything else. A successful ruling class, Antonio Gramsci reminds us, is one capable of “persuading the other classes of society to accept its own moral, political, and cultural values.” That many of the dissenters in Humboldt County operated on the fringes of the two major political parties suggests the hegemonic influence of democratic-republican ideology, a process of thinking and a system of values that survived intact into the 20th century. By the early years of the present century, the “Big Three”—the Pacific Lumber Company, the Hammond Lumber Company, and the Northern Redwood Company—dominated the industry in the region. The emergence of monopoly conditions in the lumber...