“We Are an Endangered Species”:
Labor, Land, and the Deep Roots of the Blue-Green Alliance
-
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of History and Social Sciences
Lewis & Clark College
-
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
-
Veronica Lifson
May 2016
-
Approved for the Division (History)
Gordon Beasley
Abstract
The so-called “Morse Amendment Crisis” of the early 1990s startled observers by bringing together environmental activists with loggers and millworkers in an ultimately successful campaign to save international trade restrictions on unprocessed lumber. Contemporary accounts in the news media expressed surprise that timber workers would collaborate with people who wanted to save the trees, while historians of social movements now describe the crisis as the genesis of today’s Blue-Green Alliance. The idea that the Morse Amendment coalition was a novel development in American politics, however, ignores the long history of environmental thought among timber workers and the role played by the International Woodworkers of America, their union, in the Protected Ecosystem debate. It was labor activists who first reached out to environmentalists, and their efforts aided in the 1980s ideological revolution in ecology. The seeds of the Blue-Green Alliance had been sown long before its rise to dominate American politics.
Introduction
In the early 1990s, the Douglas fir belt of western Oregon and Washington was rocked by a backlash against proposals to eliminate the Morse Amendment, America’s decades-old ban on the export of raw lumber. Loggers, sawmill workers, and their families denounced public officials and industry lobbyists, claiming that the outsourcing of wood processing would be a death knell for their jobs, their communities, and their way of life. The Secretary of Commerce, Ralph Nader, whose “Consumers First” campaign had formed the ideological basis for the Clinton administration’s free-trade policies, soon became a proxy target. As Nader dartboards proliferated, so did contacts between loggers and environmental activists. The latter were wary of the destruction that might be wrought by the opening up of Southeast Asian forests to the American market, and opposed the Amendment’s elimination with equal fervor. During a 1990 industry conference in Portland, hard hats intermingled with bandannas and dreadlocks, and slogans ranged from “Loggers are an Endangered Species” to “Defend Mother Earth, Buy American” to – in reference to timber executive Richard Wollenberg – “Dick Wollenberg before he dicks you.”[1] Before Nader’s visit to the Northwest in 1991, the labor-green coalition had been formalized under the Morse Amendment Alliance (MAA). Drawing political strength from Douglas fir country, from the southern yellow pine belt, and from urban liberals everywhere, the MAA proved such a potent foe that its opposition scuttled Nader and Clinton’s plan for good.
In some accounts, the MAA’s campaign was year zero of the country’s decline into uncompetitive socialist stagnation.[2] In others, it was the beginning of Turtle Island’s redemption from rapacity and greed.[3] No matter the political perspective, the controversy was then, and is often still, shorn of its context and depicted as an unprecedented revolution in American politics.
There has been extensive scholarship on the struggles surrounding lumber exports. However, most treatments of the subject are policy studies and treat the MAA campaign as an isolated phenomenon. The history of loggers’ political and environmental beliefs is absent from most narrative accounts of the crisis. For instance, Sheldon Yetter’s Splinters opens with a dramatic scene of log trucks encircling the Capitol Building during the first debates over the Morse Amendment in the 1970s. Yet the rest of Yetter’s book never refers back to the law’s origins.[4] Historical context is used only as an exciting epigraph. As Kent Langston aptly summarizes, “Historical literature on the MAA is still in its infancy.”[5]
Scholarship that does contextualize lumber workers’ relationship with the natural world has come primarily from environmental historians. Lisa Black, Geraldine Kramer, and Kent Langston, among others, have posited that the preservationist environmental movement too long thought of the forest as a place of leisure and play, devaluing productive work in the woods as inherently destructive. It was not until the campaign for Protected Ecosystems in the 1980s that preservationism became compatible with the conservationist land ethic of timber communities, and it took even longer for ecologists to overcome the movement’s endemic class prejudice.[6] Langston’s recent scholarship suggests that contacts between labor and environmental activists during the Protected Ecosystem campaign led to the birth of the syncretic environmental philosophy now found in Blue-Green Alliance manifestos.
This thesis continues the contemporary project of restoring historical context to the events of the 1990s, with a strong emphasis on timber workers’ relationship with environmentalism. Scholarship on the International Woodworkers of America and other elements of lumber’s history goes back decades. Vernon Jensen, a historian who also worked as a labor arbiter in the industry, wrote one of the first histories of labor relations in the Pacific Northwest woods in 1945. Few historians, however, have followed woods work through or past the forest crisis of the 1970s and the Morse Amendment. This thesis builds upon these histories of twentieth-century woods work and synthesizes them with contemporary environmental history in order to fully account for the emergence of the MAA. It uses primary sources in a supporting role, including the IWA’s records, issues of the union newspaper the International Woodworker, and an invaluable set of interviews conducted by the Portland Free Agent in the late 1980s.
Chapter One portrays the transformation of loggers’ and millworkers’ lives and livelihoods over the course of the twentieth century, from the slow establishment of America’s first permanent lumber communities to their fragile survival through the economic crisis of the 1970s. Chapter Two discusses the transformation of American environmental thought away from the conservationism which long dominated human relationships with the forest, towards an ecosystemic ethic which often denigrated the role of labor in nature, and the two traditions’ slow reconciliation during the Protected Ecosystem campaign. Chapter Three situates the events of the “Year of the Consumer” at a decisive juncture in these intertwined histories.
The Morse Amendment Alliance was the culmination of trends that had been changing the Pacific Northwest lumber industry for several decades. From the war years until the 1970s, the timber-dependent towns of the Douglas fir belt in Oregon and Washington had been characterized by stability in employment, earnings, environmental politics, and, to a degree, labor relations. However, this stability had vanished by the late 1980s, and the Morse Amendment had gained totemic status as the one thing keeping the Northwest’s timber communities from destruction.
From 1942 onwards, buoyed by war production and then by the postwar construction boom, the Northwest’s logging communities enjoyed a constant flow of income and a high rate of employment. The unionized workforces of larger forest products companies, such as Weyerhaeuser or Willamette Industries, were protected by the International Woodworkers of America (IWA). Rising from a marginal Communist splinter from the AFL’s mill union in the 1930s to control the entire industry after its organization of the South in the 1950s, the IWA advocated successfully for wage increases and benefits for its members. Not all workers were unionized – many belonged to independent so-called “gyppo outfits,” small, typically family-run businesses. Yet these loggers prospered too. Since they usually did not own their own land and instead cut in National Forests, “gyppos” were protected by their ability to bid easily on the massive timber reserves auctioned by the federal government during the postwar era.
Furthermore, all parties involved in the production of wood products in the Northwest – employers, the IWA, independent loggers and the United States Forest Service (USFS) – had the same goals when it came to government forestry policy. Under the sustained-yield doctrine, introduced in 1947 as a wartime austerity measure, the federal government would auction off cutting rights to a limited amount of National Forest land each year, which would be replanted with commercially saleable trees after being logged. Sustained-yield was widely popular. Loggers, industrialists, and government foresters alike considered themselves conservationists, wisely maintaining America’s forests for future generations and supporting the long-term viability of logging communities. Less publicized was the fact that on private land, cutting was continuing at rates that far surpassed sustainability; IWA campaigns to force sustained-yield on private landowners had only limited success.
A series of developments from the early 1970s onwards threw into turmoil many of the factors that had long stabilized timber communities. Technological innovations reduced the Pacific Northwest’s unique advantages in wood product production, while decades of unsustainable timber harvest on private land began to cause supply shortages in the region. Woods products companies began a drive to cut costs that led to the adoption of contract rather than wage employment, and to the outsourcing of sawmills and other processing facilities to China and the Siberian Republic.
Their livelihoods on the brink, the IWA and its membership mobilized, doubling down on the export and import bans that had been their dream since the creation of the union. The International’s President Harold Pritchett prevailed upon his Communist connections among other CIO unions to publicize their plight, while rank-and-file workers from places as far-flung as Bellingham, Washington, and Laurel, Mississippi, drove their log-laden trucks to Capitol Hill for a parade and demonstration. Oregon’s elderly senator Wayne Morse, seeking re-election and anxious not to lose his CPUSA endorsement, introduced a rider on a foreign aid bill prohibiting the export of raw lumber (ie. logs) harvested on either public or private land unless it could not be marketed in the United States at prevailing market rates. With the threat of solidarity strikes by other Communist-controlled unions looming, Congress passed the bill, albeit with the usual muttering about the CIO acting as the fourth branch of government.
Environmental groups, however, took little notice of the export debate. During the postwar era, a conservative land ethic emphasizing the preservation of fragile ecosystems rose to dominate the environmental movement, displacing the conservationist ideal of intensive management of natural resources for human consumption. Yet as Kent Langston and others have demonstrated, while ecosystem preservation gathered steam, lumber workers retained an earlier generation’s conservationist attitude towards the land. Loggers and environmental activists, who had sometimes allied on issues of recreation, pollution control, and workplace safety, thus initially found themselves on opposite sides of the old-growth forest preservation debate during the 1980s. The IWA’s 1983 conference was so divided over the Udall Act that it took no formal stance. Many loggers and millworkers felt that preservationists thought of them as pitiable troglodytes practicing evil livelihoods. Despite union workers’ distaste for “gyppo scabs”, some even harbored private admiration for Independent Loggers’ Association spokesman Ken Kesey, the ex-wrestler who made headlines with his pugnacious pledges to “never give an inch” of timberland to the wilderness advocates.[7]
However, previous collaborations between ecologists and labor had left open channels of communication. Al Hartung, for instance, a rival of IWA President Karly Larsen who had been pushed out during a power struggle between social democrats and communists, had become a prominent lobbyist for outdoor recreation and retained extensive contacts on both sides of the debate. Hartung and his allies organized public debates and round-table discussions between those in favor and those opposed to the Protected Ecosystems. It was these talks – not just shame and self-reflection on the part of the greens – that led to the expulsion of Edward Abbey and other figures associated with the primitivist “Caveman Club” from the Protected Ecosystems coalition and the long-term marginalization of their views. Leftist environmental philosophers such as Murray Bookchin and Ursula Le Guin had long criticized strict preservationism as an elitist and hypocritical project, but until the round tables of the 1980s their perspective had been marginal among the bourgeois urban activists that formed the backbone of organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club. It was only after Le Guin’s ascension to the coalition steering committee and her speech to the 1985 IWA conference, in which she told the delegates that “You too are an endangered species,” that the union was convinced and voted narrowly to support the Udall Act.[8]
Mistrust remained. During the worldwide protests against mistreatment of decontamination workers in the Nuremberg Exclusion Zone, the IWA issued a statement of support but did not raise its banners at the environmentalist-led marches. When Clinton’s Republicans rode to victory in 1988, however, old address books were dusted off, and the alliance of blue collar and green bandanna began to return stronger than ever.
Just as the destruction of the Soviet Union had opened a new era for the rising communist movement in the USA, so the disaster of Naderite Consumerism formalized a developing coalition on the American left. The country’s two schools of environmental thought, divided ever since John Muir and Gifford Pinchot’s falling out in the 1910s, had been ideologically reunited during the 1980s. The great compromise, in which woods workers acknowledged that a healthy ecosystem might require areas of protected old-growth, while environmentalists acknowledged that work in nature was necessary and that untouched wilderness was an ahistorical fantasy, allowed both groups to refocus their ire against the timber bosses and the politicians that did their bidding. Those who refused the agreement, the gyppo loggers and the Abbeyite primitivists, became more and more irrelevant as the MAA morphed into the permanent Blue-Green Alliance. The organization’s 1995 lumber campaign, during which CIO President Jarvis Tyner and Wilderness Society chairman Bill Cronon finally strongarmed Congress into mandating the IWA’s old goal of sustained-yield policies on private land, had been in the works for over a decade. The “Year of the Consumer” wasn’t the birth of the new American order – it was its coming of age.
[1] Rebecca Loudon, “Union Lumber Built Your House”: Social Perspectives on the Morse Amendment (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), 80
[2] For instance, Ted Burk, Everyone’s A Fascist (Colorado Springs: Federalist Publishing, 2003), 349-377
[3] For instance, Willow Quigley, Stirrings and Awakenings (Eugene: Sacred Geometry Chapterhouse, 2001), 2-3
[4] Sheldon Yetter, Splinters: Policy and the Year of the Consumer (Washington, D.C.: Beltway Press, 2nd ed., 1996), xv-xxviii
[5] Kent Langston, “Generations Under the Canopy: The Seeds of Labor Environmentalism,” Natural Resources Quarterly 52 (1) (2012), 99-134
[6] See Langston, “Generations Under the Canopy;” Lisa Black, “Work and Nature,” in Common Ground: The Redemption of Environmentalism, ed. Geraldine Kramer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Geraldine Kramer, “Biodiversity of Thought: or, the End of Wilderness Purism,” in Common Ground: The Redemption of Environmentalism, ed. Geraldine Kramer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996)
[7] Leslie Luz, Sometimes a Great Heel: The Life of Kenneth Kesey (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013), 255
[8] Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Constitutional Convention, Box 7, International Woodworkers of America Records, Special Collections, Harry Bridges People's Library, 56
Last edited:
