Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome onto the podcast Dr. Jason L. Newton to tell us about his book titled Cut Over Capitalism, The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, published by West Virginia University Press in 2024.

which asks a number of interesting questions about what happens in the forests of the United States. What happens to the loggers? What happens to the trees? What happens to the communities? What happens to the businesses when the trees are cut down? Both like literally what is happening as and when the trees are being cut down. But then what happens...

after they have been cut down? What does our understanding of industrialization look like if we take this rural tree landscaped focused perspective? So there's quite a lot for us to get into here. Jason, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?

The idea for the book actually started when I was in grad school for history. And, you know, truthfully, it started a little before that, you know, these ideas were percolating as an undergraduate. But in grad school, I wanted to be a labor historian. So I

I wanted to find an interesting case study that hadn't been covered before. And so I was kind of thinking about where I could find a case study like that. And I'd always been interested, you know, since I was very young in...

The Adirondacks, which was close to my house and the history of that area. And, you know, for those who aren't familiar, the Adirondack Park is this six million acre park in.

in New York, only about four hours from New York City, which is like one of the biggest cities in the world. But then if you drive four hours north, you get to this big state park and it's this really rural mountainous area. And I'm sure we'll talk about that more later. And a very important part of that history is logging. So I figured I would...

look into those workers because I hadn't read anything about those workers and if they had unions or a

you know, what the what their lives were like. And, you know, I talk a lot about this one town that I'm very familiar with, Tupper Lake, New York, that has this big statue of a lumberjack. And so I was like, this is a perfect case study.

And, you know, over time, I kind of expanded it out to the rest of the Northeast, thinking about these loggers or lumberjacks across the Northeast. And, you know, as I looked more

more into that, I couldn't find really any examples of unionization attempts. I mean, there's kind of one that happened in Maine in 1924 that was kind of put down by the Ku Klux Klan, actually, which was this racist kind of terrorist organization in the United States that

And then the other one, which I did end up writing a little bit about, happened in 1955. And we'll get into that later, I think. So, you know, I couldn't really write a labor history if there wasn't any unions. So the topic kind of changed to think about.

you know, who these workers were, how they made value in this landscape. And, you know, that opened up a bunch of questions, not just in labor history, but also in environmental history. And so, yeah,

You know, I began to shift the focus from strictly labor history to study, you know, the economy more general and also a lot about the environment of the area. So, you know, going back into my background a little bit, I kind of became an environmental historian as I was researching and writing this book.

Hmm. Always interesting to hear how projects develop. They never quite start from where you, you know, the end where you expect to when you start. But talking further about those questions that opened up as you explored this, can you tell us more about kind of the questions you ended up asking in the book and what that process was like to go from opening beyond labour history to having those finalised questions?

Yeah. So, you know, each chapter kind of deals with its own set of questions. They're all connected. But, you know, I dive into different aspects of logging and the environment and workers in each chapter. But right now I'll go over kind of the bigger ideas that kind of connect all the chapters together.

And, you know, one of those is what I mentioned earlier, which is simply how do people create economic value out of forests and what process are involved in that? And then as a historian, I'm always thinking about how that changes over time. Right. So that's just a very fundamental question that that's in all the chapters.

And, you know, as I was writing this also, this new field, the history of capitalism developed. So, you know, I was writing this between maybe like, you know, I started grad school in roughly 2009. And this new idea of capitalism

you know, studying capitalism and how it different places in different times have different types of capitalism.

And so that remains a consistent part of the book. Like, you know, you mentioned in the introduction, if we looked at capitalism outside the cities, outside the financial centers, what would that look like in rural regions, in rural regions where agriculture isn't even the main kind of source of livelihood?

And so that's another big question is how is capitalism different if we look at this part of America, the northern forest? And then kind of a subset of that is industrialization. So how rural spaces industrialize. You know, I think as a labor historian, when you're first starting out, you're reading a lot of books about the factory.

Right. The factories in England, you know, if you're if you're reading Thompson's making of the English working class or the factories in America, if you're if you're reading about the different textile factories in the Northeast and elsewhere.

And there's less written about kind of that process of industrialization outside the city. And so actually kind of I think the you know, it's right in the title of the book, how does a forest industrialize? And I think that's one of the big arguments I'm trying to make is that this kind of whole landscape of the northern forest industrializes and it does it.

in a way that's very different than urban places and a way that should actually make us challenge some fundamental assumptions about industrialization.

And then finally, a big part of industrialization, a kind of classic question when you're looking at industrialization is the formation of an industrial class. That, of course, goes all the way back to Marx, but there's a lot of literature talking about class formation. So in the second half of the book in particular, I'm looking at the formation of this lumberjack class. And

You know, maybe I should mention, you know, the lumberjack has this kind of status as a mayor in America of kind of being like a.

part myth, part reality. We have, of course, this famous idea of like Paul Bunyan, who was this superhuman giant lumberjack. But there were and still are people who make a living cutting down trees. And so that's something I get into the end is how does this, not necessarily how the myth forms, but this class of people that are distinctive as people who make a living cutting down trees, how does that form?

So those are the big questions. That's very helpful to have them laid out. And obviously, as you mentioned, the chapters within that have specific questions too, but it is good to have that kind of big picture perspective.

And it's in that sort of kind of big picture theme that I'd like to stay for a moment, because, of course, the title of the book is often a good place to get some key ideas and yours is cut over capitalism. So can you tell us a bit about kind of cut over spaces and how capitalism extracts value from them?

Yeah. So this idea of cut over capitalism really, you know, I can trace that, you know, back to another classic, Frederick Turner's frontier thesis, which is this seminal work in American history.

written by, you know, Frederick Turner in 1893 that, you know, briefly the book argues that the frontier, uh, this idea of kind of Euro Americans kind of advancing into, uh,

to kind of conquer wilderness, conquer people. Of course, the process of colonization is tersely dealt with by Turner, but that's really what it's about is taking that land from its rightful owners, the indigenous people who were here,

But, you know, essentially it's this idea of this Westward movement. And those who study the lumber industry have something similar. It's been called the lumberman's frontier, the logger's frontier. I've written about that quite a bit. And it's just the same idea that, you know, loggers kind of start off in the colonial area along the Atlantic coasts.

And they're moving westward. You know, once they kind of found all the valuable trees in the American Northeast, they moved to what we sometimes called the Lake Stage, which is Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida.

The trees aren't as valuable between there and roughly the Rockies, but then once Euro-Americans cross the Rockies, they're exploiting these great redwood forests of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Northern California, these huge redwood trees. So the basic story is that

capital or money moves westward to find the most valuable natural resources.

And of course, we could continue that story into the 20th century where more capital actually moved to the southern U.S. to exploit some of these pine forests down there. But a big part of this book, kind of looking at how value is made in the northern forest, which is that kind of initial area on the Atlantic coast, I think is really important.

I was really curious, you know, not about that period of Bonanza when, you know, a lot of money and resources are focused on this area. And that was really the colonial period. But what happens after a lot of the big, valuable trees are extracted?

You know, lumber is it is a renewable resource, but it takes a long time for like a mature white pine to grow. Right. Hundreds of years. And so what how is economic value made when you have an area that's already been exploited to this extent?

And so that's the focus of the book, more on not following the money, following the resources, but kind of going backwards and saying, okay, by 1850, if all the trees are cut, what does work and the economy look like then?

All right. Well, before we think about work in the economy, I think we probably do need to know a bit more about the environment this is all happening in. So can you tell us more about the Northern Forest? The Northern Forest, again, it's this area in the northeastern part of America. You know, if we want to go

get specific, it's the Adirondack Park, which I just mentioned, part of New York State. And then if we move eastward, it's the northern part of Vermont, the state of Vermont, the state of New Hampshire, and most of the state of Maine.

And so, like I mentioned, this was an area that was kind of initially colonized by Euro-Americans, but people continued to live and work there after that initial period of colonization.

But particularly the northern parts of the American Northeast was less kind of hospitable to settlement. So if we go, you know, to the Adirondacks or to the northern part of Maine, we're talking about, you know, a pretty...

hostile environment unless you're well adapted to it as a culture. This is also the area that kind of has the highest points in each state. So it's a mountainous area. It's kind of defined by its mountains. If you're a skier like me, it's the places you go to ski because all the big mountains are there in the Northeast if you're skiing in the Northeast.

Um, it's also very cold. You know, there's a lot of snow, less snow these days due to, um, climate change, but you know, at times, uh, and in certain parts of the Northern forest, we're talking about five, six months of winter, which is actually important for the story. Um,

And so in general, in the colonial period and even into the early republic after the founding of America as a country, it was a difficult place to live and people didn't want it.

It was a hard place for like a lot of living things. You know, trees are adapted to the environment, but that doesn't mean it's easy for trees to be there, to be in, you know, like a 5,000 foot mountain in the dead of a winter in the Northeast. It's actually very difficult for a tree to survive there. It's difficult for animals to survive there.

It's difficult, of course, for people to survive there. You know, we know that there were Native Americans who, you know, claim this land as theirs. The Iroquois to the west of Lake Champlain and the Algonquins to the east. They had a very long history of using this land.

But, you know, they were very smart. They typically didn't settle permanently in this northern forest area. They chose their permanent settlements to be in more hospitable places. They, of course, used this land for hunting, for resource gathering. They were there. But but, you know, when it was time to kind of figure out where to spend most of the time, they did not want to be in the northern forest. Yeah.

So, you know, this this was true for Euro-Americans. So, you know, settlement there is really slow. And actually, you can actually look at maps that show population density over time. And in the Adirondack Mountains into the 1870s and 80s, there's parts that, you know, have zero population, according to the U.S. Census.

But there is this great value in the trees there.

There's typically we would call the type of forest in the northern forest mixed hardwood. So you have spruce, tamarack, fir, beech. But really from the Euro-American perspective, there's these massive mature white pine, oak and hemlock that had a lot of value to Euro-Americans.

Thank you.

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This is helpful to understand kind of what the settlers wanted out of these areas and what, of course, they didn't. What are the steps then going from this kind of early Euro-American settlement to the trees becoming kind of competitive business environments in the sense of commodities? When did that happen? Why did that happen? How did that happen?

Yeah, well, you know, a big part of that is people, Euro-Americans needed to kind of get a knowledge of this area. You know, like I mentioned, people were hesitant to move into this area. But those people who were kind of pushed there, you

out of desperation eventually became very familiar with the forest. You know, I talk about this one character, Henry Conklin, who's living kind of even on the outskirts of the Adirondacks in the 1840s and 50s. And the reason why the Conklins moved there is because Henry's Conklin's father was a drunk who couldn't keep a job. So like the only land he could find to settle on was in the Adirondacks.

And so Henry and his family, through just living there, gained a really intimate knowledge of the forest.

Basically, you know, he had his small little farm, but he spent a ton of time just like in the forest, you know, working, playing. You know, in fact, these farms weren't very productive. So it really wasn't the it didn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time farming. And of course, you know, during winter, you can't be farming.

So basically, the people who decided to settle there spent part of their time as farmers, but probably kind of got made their living through the forest more than farming. And so, you know, myself and other historians have called these people farmer loggers, or

And there's pretty good evidence that most of their income came from forest products. And so I use that term forest products throughout the book because we're not just talking about lumber, but we're talking about dozens of different things that could be made with wood. You know, at this time, if we're talking about like the 1840s,

you know, wood was used for virtually everything. Anything that, you know, today is made out of plastic would have been made out of wood mostly. And the same goes for metal. Like a lot of what is made out of metal today was made out of wood. So these farmer loggers became experts in making mostly intermediary, intermediate goods, which means like

the things that are used to make other things, you know, lumber, uh, is, is, is one of those things, right. You know, you use the lumber to make something else, but, but, you know, I list in the book, just these different intermediary goods, intermediate goods that, um, these farmer loggers were providing to markets typically, uh, in the Southern part of new England or New York. Um, and,

And these, you know, I would say that these people were kind of maybe pre-capitalist, but not pre-market. Right. In fact, they depended on the market quite a bit because you can't eat wood. Right. So it's not like they were self-sufficient because if your if your source of income is from the forest, you need to trade that to kind of.

buy food, right? Very essential things. So they're very connected to the market, but you know, I think they're pre-capitalist in the sense that their whole life isn't fixated on just making as much, as many forest products as possible. You know, they, they kind of lived halfway on the field, halfway in the woods and were content with a certain amount to get by.

And then, you know, as you suggest, eventually this would transform into capitalism where these people either chose to or were kind of pressured to make their life all about making as many forest products as possible. Yeah. So can you tell us more about that transition? Like what what did they you know, if that was their life before what how did their life change?

Yeah. And so this is really what the first part of the book is about, is this transition to capitalism. And a big part of this is a familiar story for historians. And this is the idea of enclosure.

Of course, that's a term that kind of comes out of the Enclosure Acts in England, but there's many environmental historians and other historians that have kind of taken that idea and found instances of enclosure in America.

For somebody like Henry Conklin, when you move into this big kind of forest that doesn't have a lot of other people in it, Native Americans were forcibly removed. Euro-Americans didn't want to settle there. Ownership of the land is kind of ambiguous. It's unclear who owns what. It's not really marked very well. Ultimately, maybe theoretically, the state or even the federal government owns some of this land.

But basically, you know, Henry Cotham makes it clear that he kind of had free reign to just kind of go in the woods and use whatever he wanted.

And, you know, of course, if you're in that kind of pre-capitalist mindset, you're not necessarily just clear cutting entire forests. So it wasn't as noticeable to kind of take commodities when you needed them. But what we see happening, you know, roughly around 1850s, you know, some of this was happening earlier, was a change in that attitude where it became much clearer who owned the land.

And and what people could or could not do on land. And so this happens in a lot of different ways in the northern forest. But the two main ones are a lot of this forest land becomes, you know, recognizable as valuable for its timber. And so private landholders begin to police their private property rights a lot more.

And the other way that this happens is through conservation.

You know, the best example is in New York, the formation of the Adirondack Park between roughly 1885 and 1894, where this giant 6.4 million acre area of forest becomes constitutionally protected to be kept as wild forest lands in perpetuity.

And so now all of a sudden, someone like Henry Conklin, these different forms of survival, the different things he was doing to survive, now become illegal. And the state is enforcing that by jailing people who are trespassing and taking timber resources off of people.

state land. Similarly, if you're encroaching on private timberland, you can get charged for trespassing as well. So we have just basically, you know, kind of more strict enforcement of these rules. And so now if you're one of these farmer loggers and you want to access these forest resources that, you know, you've been accessing your whole life, that your family

Family had been accessing for a long time. Now you to access those, you have to pay a fee or you can't access them all. If it's conservation land, you just can't. But if it's private land, you have to negotiate with the private landholder and pay what's called a stumpage fee.

which means a certain amount of money, you know, either per acre or per kind of board feet, how many trees you want to cut, you have to pay a fee. And so with this transition away from this kind of common land setup where people can access the resources kind of as they choose to more strict private property, you see these farmer loggers having to specialize, right?

You know, some of them really kind of not farming much at all, but just completely focused, focusing their time and energy on harvesting forest products. And this is crucial to industrialization. This is what makes people have to change the way that they live and work.

And therefore also creates this class of lumberjacks that you were talking about earlier. So what else do we need to understand to kind of get through this transition of farmer loggers now becoming lumberjacks, a sort of class formation in this industrialized process? What are the other elements of this? Yeah, and I would say, you know, this is where I kind of make my strongest argument about industrialization is,

I think kind of a superficial understanding of industrialization is that it's all about this introduction of labor-saving technology. And we even hear that term labor-saving technology today. I think people that study this professionally would kind of say that that's not completely accurate, but it's a common conception and there's some truth to it that with the use of new machines, right?

In the factory, it's kind of classically these mechanized textile producing machines, spinning jennies, these other technologies that make it so one worker can do more work per tiny unit, right? More work per day. They can produce more feet of textiles per day. Okay.

But, you know, when you look at industrialization more closely, you realize that this term labor saving is not very accurate because whether we're talking about England or America, as these countries industrialize, people end up working more per year, for instance. So, you know, right away, we should question this idea of labor saving technology if people are using more. And this is also true in the Northern Forests.

And it's a little more complicated here. One thing about the cutover landscape, as I mentioned, is in the Northern Forest with all the big, valuable trees cut away, there wasn't a lot of incentive for locals or even outside investors to put a lot of money into the region. Their money was going to the lake states or to the Pacific Northwest.

And so what we see happening in the northern forest is these kind of farmer loggers, as they begin to specialize, they kind of specialize in a way where they're using very similar methods that their fathers or their grandfathers had, where, you know, it looks like they're doing things the same way they'd been doing it for 100 years, you know, before.

But, you know, if you really look at the details of production, you're seeing all these different changes. And what it boils down to is essentially making bodies work harder and faster. So industrialization in the northern forest is a process where living things are being pushed harder and harder to compete, to make a living.

And there's a lot of examples that I focus on in the book. So the few that I want to talk about here are the ways that these loggers use water. Water is actually very important for industrialization. Of course, you know, you boil water to create steam power. But loggers were using water in a different way.

Because logging isn't really, you know, the focus of logging isn't cutting down the trees. That's actually the easy part. The hard part is moving, right? You got to move these big trees from isolated forests to markets where people want to use them. And one thing that these loggers in the northern forest realized right around 1870s,

is that they could use the cold weather to their advantage. They'd always been drawing logs during the winter. Logging was always a winter activity because the snow reduced friction and makes it easier to move these big heavy commodities. But around 1870, people take that a step further and they start actually spreading water across their logging roads in the middle of the night.

And this would freeze and form a thick sheet of ice. And that ice, these ice roads, allowed them to increase the amount of logs that they could move using horsepower. They could move almost four times as much lumber on ice roads. And some even went to say as much as eight times as much.

And so this was one of the kind of

you know, very interesting ways that the labor process industrialized. And it looked kind of very primitive because, you know, even into the 1920s and 30s, you're seeing these people still moving commodities with horses, right? And this is when, of course, airplanes have been invented, but they're doing so in this new way on these ice roads. It's actually a very efficient way to move logs, right?

And these ice roads also increase the amount of time that you can move logs. So, you know, before these ice roads, it was very much dependent on the seasons, right? So if you had an early spring thaw, you had to stop. But if you can spread a really thick layer of ice, that takes a long time to melt. And so these loggers actually lengthen the hauling season to a pretty standard 10 weeks.

So you can move more logs quicker for a longer period of time. And all this snow and ice will eventually melt in the spring. And this melting of the snow creates a tremendous amount of energy that these loggers would use to push the logs out of the forest to the mills.

This is called the river drive, right? And you can actually capture some of this energy by building kind of primitive dams and control that flow of water.

You know, that's actually somewhat old process is using, you know, the spring melt to move logs. The one thing that's more novel is each logger in the northern forest would have a mark that they could mark all of their, you know, sometimes hundreds of thousands of logs with a mark, a kind of code that said, this is my log.

And so when these logs went down the river, all these kind of marks from different loggers were mixed together. But closer to the mills, and I use the example of the Penobscot River in Maine here, you have these elaborate systems to kind of sort this information.

So that one logger's cut can be kind of tabulated and they can be paid by the mill based on the kind of mark that's on their logs. So really, again, this process of log driving looks really archaic.

but it continues in parts of Maine into the 1970s because it's this very efficient way that has this very elaborate system of kind of tabulating the value of the logs as they move down river. So that's kind of another way that the labor process industrialized. And just very briefly, all of this actually creates more work

So I have a focus on chapter five on this government study from 1904 of the diet of these loggers. And it shows that some of these workers were eating up to 8,000 calories a day because as this labor process industrialized, workers are working harder and longer. The same is true, of course, of their draft animals.

So they're eating up to 8,000 calories a day. And this government study shows that they're actually still losing weight. So, you know, just for context, that's kind of four times as much food as the, you know, it's recommended that an adult eat today. And they're eating that much food, but still losing weight.

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Yeah, no, those are pretty powerful examples to illustrate the changes that industrialization brings. I wonder if we can talk a little bit more about these workers and kind of who they were. For example, is it accurate, these sorts of myths that exist, that these lumberjacks in the northern forests were always white men? What were their ideas about race that impacted what kinds of jobs? Who had which of these jobs in this industrialized landscape you've described?

Yeah. So that's another thing that I picked up on as I was reading more and more about the Northern forest and the different forest product industries is that, you know, the companies that were operating both the mills and the kind of contractors that got the logs to the mills, these people are sometimes called jobbers too, is that they were,

consistently talking about French Canadian immigrants. And I was kind of curious, like why this specific group was the group that the mills wanted, that the contractors or jobbers wanted. And so I started looking more deeply into that.

And, you know, the height of industrialization, you know, in this period, let's say between 1870 to 1920, also coincides with the apex of the pseudoscience called eugenics, right?

And this was the study of, put very simply, this was a study of racial difference that is now completely discredited, but was a very strong and powerful intellectual current in America. And, you know, looking at what eugenicists were writing about immigrants, right?

I was able to kind of connect that with how people were thinking about efficiency in the workplace. And it was pretty clear that industrial managers, economists, and again, these eugenicists saw that certain races of people were more efficient at doing different types of work.

And this was an idea that, you know, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch called race management. And among the different kind of tools and race management is this more standard idea of like divide and conquer that you can kind of use immigrant workers to quash solidarity by kind of, you know, putting them strategically in different places in the workplace or pitting different ethnic groups against one another, right?

But, you know, this example of French Canadians in logging showed that it went a little further than that, that, you know, certain managers and owners and even people that, you know, didn't necessarily weren't very highly educated, saw that certain ethnic groups were more efficient at different jobs. And the French Canadians were kind of innately valuable as loggers, that somehow they develop differently in,

In in North America to make them good at kind of working in isolated environments in the forest in the cold and and you know there's this elaborate logic built up around this.

Ultimately, all this racial difference is completely wrong. We know it's not scientifically accurate, but this served as justification for kind of depending on French Canadians, paying them lower wages because they weren't kind of racially equal to native-born Americans from other parts with other different ancestry.

And making these French Canadians work in very poor conditions because it was seen as kind of part of their culture or even part of their kind of biology to be able to work in these environments.

And so this actually led to, you know, the industry dependent on French Canadians. But this relationship evolved into a government sponsored guest worker program. So after World War Two.

Through a diplomatic agreement between Canada and the United States, you actually had American companies had the ability to bring French Canadians into the country to work mostly in logging camps. All they had to do was fill out what was called a Woodsman order form.

and give that to the proper state or federal agency. And then these French Canadians would come into their camps, you know, be delivered to their camps, basically, for six months to work and logging and then sent back to Quebec.

And this actually mimicked a larger program in the southern border, and particularly in the southwest, called the Bracero Program, which was similar, but it was for Mexican agricultural workers.

And this program of bringing French Canadians down from Quebec into America, it was called the Bonded Labor Program. And it hasn't gotten as much attention from scholars as the Bracero Program, but it was virtually the same thing. One of the big differences was

the numbers were very low. This program continued after World War II. And in the 50s, in the Northern Forest, in the 1950s, we have roughly...

between 5,000 and 7,000 bonded workers coming from Quebec to work in the American lumber industry, where if we look at the Bracero program, it's hundreds of thousands. So the scale is very different, but the legal structure is the same. And I argue that all stems from this initial kind of eugenic idea that the French Canadians were suited to this type of work

I end the book talking about a 1955 unionization attempt with the Brown Company in New Hampshire, where the really contentious issue was these French-Canadian bonded workers.

where the union was saying it's very difficult to organize these guest workers because they're in the woods for a short period of time and they go to Quebec. And we actually know the company, the Brown company, was intentionally trying to create racial antagonisms between the French Canadian workers and the American workers to stop that unionization campaign.

Ultimately, when the union did focus on organizing these French Canadian guest workers, they were successful in forming the only union of lumberjacks in the history of the Northern Forest. And so that is kind of where I end. But, you know, I just want to mention that even though we know these racial differences were false.

These racial differences were seen at the time as just another part of nature that could be exploited for production. So we talked about, you know, using water resources, using draft animals, using, you know, the tremendous caloric expenditure of these workers as parts of nature that allowed for value creation in this cutover landscape. Race was seen as another part of nature.

an efficient way to use bodies to, again, extract value from these cutover landscapes where a lot of the big sources of value had already been extracted from.

Yeah, that's definitely worth making that connection explicit. So thank you for adding that in. You do mention that that's roughly where the book ends, but in some ways there is kind of one piece farther forward towards our present, which is something we mentioned right at the beginning, or you mentioned, the idea that these workers of the Northern Forest, there's a lot of myths around them that still exist today. In the book, you talk about encountering them as a child, and

How and why did that happen? Was it while these workers were doing these things we've been discussing?

Yeah. So, you know, in the very end of the book and the epilogue, I returned back to Tupper Lake, which I mentioned earlier in the interview, which is the small town in the Adirondacks that I have this kind of personal connection to. And, you know, when I would go to the Adirondacks as a child, there was this kind of imposing, maybe 11 foot tall building.

wood carved lumberjack statue that's basically impossible to miss if you're driving through the town. And of course, you know, that's part of what inspired my interest in studying these workers. But, you know, unlike other kind of depictions of workers,

It was very clear from the history of the industry that this wasn't kind of a commemoration of unions, right? It wasn't a commemoration necessarily of kind of, you know, it wasn't a traditional celebration of American workers as kind of, you know, single-handedly creating all the value that existed, right?

You know, what I began to see when I talk to local people in the Northern Forest, when you read interviews, when you read, importantly, local history, so history written by non-professional historians about the lumber industry, what they highlight is what I highlight in the book.

which is people doing very difficult work in a natural environment, right? People working with nature, right? These locals, you know, this veneration of the lumberjack wasn't necessarily seen as these people who came in and destroyed the wilderness. It was kind of seen as like part of the landscape, right? And so, yeah,

And reflecting on this, that lumberjack statue kind of came to me at least to symbolize this bond that people form with nature through work. It's a type of solidarity between humans and non-human nature. And that's kind of how I began to see this lumberjack statue.

Hmm, that's definitely a great way to kind of tie a number of things we've been discussing together and takes us from the beginning to the end of the book, as you mentioned with the epilogue. But before I let you go, is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on next that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, my interests now have kind of divided. I'm still interested in forest history and I also am still interested in capitalism and industrialization. So it's kind of a fork in the road here. And the book that I'm currently working on and currently writing is about professional forestry.

So, you know, the actual field of forestry

which is about, you know, managing timber resource, standing timber resources. And I touched on this a little bit in my dissertation, but I wanted to come back to it because I'm looking at kind of where these college educated foresters got a lot of their understanding of the forest from and

You know, forestry starts in Germany, is kind of imported to the United States, but really it starts from scratch in the U.S.,

And one thing I'm thinking about is this idea that these college trained foresters have to actually look to these working class people that we just got done talking about to actually kind of absorb their knowledge of the forest and incorporate it into their forestry curriculums at universities. And, you know, that looking at forestry that way actually challenges a lot of the literature on conservation and

which is typically about kind of elites, you know, highly trained people talking about how working class people misuse natural resources. So that's one project. And the other project is not very developed, but it's just going to be a larger history of this idea of labor intensive industrialization or how important kind of

increasing muscular effort is in industrialization outside of the northern forest. Well, both of those projects sound interesting. So thank you for giving us the sneak preview of them. And of course, best of luck in pursuing them. Thank you very much.

In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Cut Over Capitalism, The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, published by West Virginia University Press in 2024. Jason, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Yeah, thanks again. This was a ton of fun.