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Hard Traveling by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes A Portrait of Work Life in the New No
Hard Traveling by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes A Portrait of Work Life in the New Northwest
Hard Cover
222 pages
Copyright 1994
Contents
xi Preface
Part1 I The New Northwest as Wageworkers' Frontier
Chapter 13 Portrait of Work Life
Chapter 225 Dimensions of the Wageworkers' Frontier
Chapter 347 Forging the Commonwealth of Toil
71 Notes
Part 281 Images of Empire: The Photographic Record
Folio 183 Building a New Northwest
Folio 295 Human Machines
Folio 3119 Labor's Many Faces
Folio 4139 Worker Communities: Urban Islands and Hinterlands
Folio 5156 Pastures of Plenty
Folio 6167 Organize!
Folio 7177 War and Peace
Folio 8197 Beyond the Wageworkers' Frontier
229 For Further Reading
233 Index
Preface Most illustrations in this book depict work life in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collectively they make visible what general histories of the West have until recently often failed to notice or fully comprehend: the existence of an informal commonwealth of toil that at various times encompassed not just these four states but also major portions of the entire West.' Pioneer photographers preserved on film many views of work life in California, Arizona, Utah, and elsewhere, but my purpose here is not simply to compile a picture album. I seek instead to use historical photographs to portray the people and events most often associated with work in the West and especially to examine how photographers themselves shaped popular perceptions of labor. For such purposes it seems appropriate to concentrate on the Pacific Northwest, the part of the West already most familiar to me, and on those features of work life that did most to define the region during the years of supercharged development and change from the 1880s through the 1920s.
During these four critical decades the part of work life in the New Northwest that generated the most comment was the "hard traveling" demanded of a veritable army of manual laborers who worked in the forests, fields, and mines - in the three industries that together with fisheries on the Pacific Coast dominated the regional economy. The term, immortalized in Woody Guthrie's song "Hard Travelin'," offers an apt summary of the subject of this book. In the subtitle and throughout the text I have used the term New Northwest to emphasize that the Pacific Northwest during the turn-of-the century era was in so many important ways literally created anew. Commentators have used the term also to avoid confusing the new and rapidly evolving states in the nation's Far Corner with the Great Lakes states of the old Northwest Territory.
Seven of the eight folios of images that constitute the second portion of Hard Traveling highlight important aspects of work life in the New Northwest during the years of rapid transformation. The eighth folio focuses on depression and war during the 1930s and 1940s, although the post-1930s era, when older modes of work life had largely disappeared as a defining element in the region's labor history, is not a primary concern of this book. Arranged to complement the photographic record are firsthand observations by or about wage earners, such as are contained in the guides to each of the four Northwest states prepared by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Also of value are statements from the United States Commission on Immigration and Richard Neuberger's evocative comments on life in the 1930s contained in Our Promised Land .
Some of the most trenchant comments on manual labor in the Pacific Northwest come from the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, which during the summer of 1914 held hearings in Butte, Seattle, and Portland to probe working conditions in the nation's Far Corner. Congress established this organization in 1912 to investigate the increasing industrial violence that characterized labor-management relations in the United States. Among the members appointed by President Woodrow Wilson were John B. Lennon, American Federation of Labor treasurer, James O'Connell, head of the International Association of Machinists, Austin Bruce Garretson, choice of the railway brotherhoods, and John R. Commons, professor at the University of Wisconsin and longtime student of labor relations in the United States. "The nine members of the Industrial Relations Commission," declared the journalist Walter Lippmann, "have before them the task of explaining why America, supposed to become the land of promise, has become the land of disappointment and deep-seated discontent."
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