“Lumber-Jack” The Giant Killer

But the lumber-jack is a casual worker and he is the finished product of modern capitalism.  He is the perfect proletarian type—­possessionless, homeless, and rebellious.  He is the reverse side of the gilded medal of present day society.  On the one side is the third generation idle rich—­arrogant and parasitical, and on the other, the actual producer, economically helpless and denied access to the means of production unless he “beg his lordly fellow worm to give him leave to toil,” as Robert Burns has it.

The logger of the Northwest has his faults.  He is not any more perfect than the rest of us.  The years of degradation and struggle he has endured in the woods have not failed to leave their mark upon him.  But, as the wage workers go, he is not the common but the uncommon type both as regards physical strength and cleanliness and mental alertness.  He is generous to a fault and has all the qualities Lincoln and Whitman loved in men.

In the first place, whether as faller, rigging man or on the “drive,” his work is muscular and out of doors.  He must at all times conquer the forest and battle with the elements.  There is a tang and adventure to his labor in the impressive solitude of the woods that gives him a steady eye, a strong arm and a clear brain.  Being constantly close to the great green heart of Nature, he acquires the dignity and independence of the savage rather than the passive and unresisting submission of the factory worker.  The fact that he is free from family ties also tends to make him ready for an industrial frolic or fight at any time.  In daily matching his prowess and skill with the products of the earth he feels in a way, that the woods “belong” to him and develops a contempt for the unseen and unknown employers who kindly permit him to enrich them with his labor.  He is constantly reminded of the glaring absurdity of the private ownership of natural resources.  Instinctively he becomes a rebel against the injustice and contradictions of capitalist society.

Dwarfed to ant-like insignificance by the verdant immensity around him, the logger toils daily with ax, saw and cable.  One after another forest giants of dizzy height crash to the earth with a sound like thunder.  In a short time they are loaded on flat cars and hurried across the stump-dotted clearing to the river, whence they are dispatched to the noisy, ever-waiting saws at the mill.  And always the logger knows in his heart that this is not done that people may have lumber for their needs, but rather that some overfed parasite may first add to his holy dividends.  Production for profit always strikes the logger with the full force of objective observation.  And is it any wonder, with the process of exploitation thus naked always before his eyes, that he should have been among the very first workers to challenge the flimsy title of the lumber barons to the private ownership of the woods?