Epilogue

Newton, Forging Titians Epilogue Most summers when I was a kid, my family's 1986 Chrysler LeBaron drove past a twelvefoot-tall wooden lumberjack statue on our way to our vacation home in Tupper Lake, New York (Figure 1). As we drove from our urban New York home into the heart of the Adirondack Park the roads became narrow and the smell of wood smoke wafted through the car vents. At our family camp, we made camp fires, swam in the lake, and hiked up mountain trails that revealed spectacular views of a great forest dotted with little communities. More than these activities, however, what stood out to me about these trips as a child was the feeling of a new environment. Entering the forest was like stepping back in time. Along with the changes in the environment, my family witnessed changes in the communities and the people we encountered as we traveled from city to forest. As we drove past the lumberjack statue we could also see the old Oval Wood Dish Company factory crumbling and in disrepair. Closed since 1964, it was once a hub of manufacturing that transformed the vast forest resources into disposable wooden plates, knives and forks.1 To feed its machines, and the buzzing sawmills all over the Adirondacks, entire communities had been mobilized to house, feed, and entertain loggers and care for their animals. The Oval Wood Dish Company factory's disrepair signified larger problems in the regional economy. Even as a child, the poverty of Tupper Lake was apparent. The citizens of the village did not live in rustic cabins like our summer home, but in small houses and trailers. The lack of street lights, plumbing, and a hospital, quaint features for vacationers, were signs of a depressed rural economy. Currently only four of New York’s Northern Forest counties have a poverty rate below 15% and Franklin County, where Tupper Lake is located, is the fourth poorest county in the state

1

Louis J. Simmons, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, (Saranac Lake, N.Y.: Hungry Bear Publishing, 1979) 159.

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Newton, Forging Titians with about one and five residents considered impoverished (Table 1). The food pantry in Tupper Lake feeds 100 of the 998 families in town. In the Northern Forest, three fourths of the counties have fewer hospitals than the national average.2 I cherish the memories of my summer vacations, but these trips were also early lessons in rural poverty and inequality. The economic problems facing many Northern Forest communities are the same problems facing much of rural America. Northern Forest counties, like other rural places, have lower rates of educational attainment, more low paying jobs, more idle teens, a smaller middle-class, higher poverty rates, and lower per-capita income while suicide rates and preventable deaths are higher when compared to urban areas.3 In much of the Northern Forest, manufacturing jobs are plummeting and there is a growing but low paying service sector (Figure 5 and 6).4 The poverty and forest landscape of Tupper Lake were juxtaposed with the imposing lumberjack statue. The lumberjack figure and references to it were found all over Tupper Lake. The Lumberjack Inn on Main street served up pancakes to hungry vacationers, the local book shops sell books with tales of historical adventures in the old camps, the high school has the lumberjack as its mascot, tourists can buy lumberjack tee-shirts at the local gas stations, and every summer there is a Woodsmen's Day festival which draws large crowds. My great grandparents were lumberjacks, I was told, who came to America from Québec in the 1920s, a common family history for many Tupper Lake natives. For nearly 100 years forest product manufacturing was "a mainstay" of the Adirondack

2 Jerry Jenkins and Andy Keal, The Adirondack Atlas: A Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park, (Syracuse University Press, 2004) 112, 130, 124; Stephen C. Harper, Laura L. Falk, and Edward W. Rankin, The Northern Forest Lands Study of New England and New York: A Report to the Congress of the United States on the Recent Changes in Landownership and Land Use in the Northern Forest of Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont, (Rutland, VT: Forest Service, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1990) 35. 3 The Carsey Institute, "Northern Forest Sustainable Economy Initiative: Social and Economic Overview of the Northern Forest Region," (Northern Forest Center, 2007) 41, http://www.northernforest.org/data/uploads/research%20docs/Carsey_NFSEI_Report_102007.pdf. 4

The Carsey Institute, "Northern Forest Sustainable Economy Initiative," 29.

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Newton, Forging Titians economy that brought money and people to the region.5 By the 1930s the wood products industry in Tupper Lake was in decline. In the 1950s my grandparents moved downstate for jobs, becoming part of a trend of youth outmigration that had been hampering economic progress in the area since the late nineteenth century and continues today (Figure 2).6 The memory of a history of commodity production conjures a sense of dignity and pride for people in many parts of the rural United States, the Northern Forest included. Reflecting on the height of the forest products industry, one Northern Forest denizen wrote around 2001 that "[t]he [area] is defined by hard work and commonality. Here, and north of us, the whole lifestyle, ecosystem—they're hard working folks."7 Nostalgia for work in nature is powerful. Speaking about economic development in Maine in 2015 governor Paul LePage said that "Maine has had a work ethic for hundreds of years. And while I would be the first to admit it's not as good as it was 150 years ago, it's still the best in America."8 Another Northern Forest inhabitant added "cutting trees is part of the process" of identity formation in the area.9 One of the purposes of this dissertation has been to explain the process of regional identity formation and the value that this identity had. Using that method, I hope to tell the story of the development of industrial capitalism in the Northern Forest and reveal the political inclinations of rural workers in America. Identity formation is a subtle and complex process that probably deserves another 500 pages to describe fully.

5 Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index: Exploring a Deeper Meaning of Wealth, (Concord, NH: Northern Forest Center, 2000) 30. 6Jerry

and Keal, The Adirondack Atlas, 94-95, 106, 114-115; Simmons, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock, 404.

7 Laura E. Tam and Andrea Bruce Woodall, At Home in the Northern Forest: Reflections on a Region's Identity, (Concord, NH: Northern Forest Center, 2001) 67. 8 Jay Field, "Tech Firm Opening Waterville Office, Hopes to Employ 200," Maine Public Broadcasting, (December 9, 2015) accessed July 6, 2016, http://news.mpbn.net/post/tech-firm-opening-waterville-office-hopes-employ-200#stream/0 9

Tam and Woodall, At Home in the Northern Forest, 67.

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Newton, Forging Titians Though forest products are still an important part of the Northern Forest economy today, jobs in Tupper Lake, like most of the Northern Forest, increasingly come from the government and from the service sector.10 Most of those services are for visiting tourists and owners of vacation homes.11 This has resulted in a change in regional identity. "I don't know if [this transition is] necessarily a good thing," a logging business owner in New York commented, "[w]aitress don't make as much as loggers, [or] truck drivers. A growing service industry may mean more jobs, but the quality of pay, and seasonality is much worse"12 (Figure 3). What type of regional identity could be formed around the service industry? Would it be as culturally influential as the lumberjack identity was? Will statues be erected to memorialize these service workers? Despite how deserving these service workers are of praise, I doubt they will be honored in the same way that the lumberjack was. As I played with the dull fire wood axe we had at my Tupper Lake camp, I used to wonder what happened to the lumberjacks. The trees were still here, but I saw no signs of cutting. Across the street from my camp was a dense forest of mixed second growth where there were no houses, camps, or even trails. This was privately owned land, part of the partnership between citizen landholders and the state government that make the Adirondacks unique. Even though the land was in their hands, local communities preserved the forests instead of putting them to work, instead of

10In the 1980s in all of Northern New England and New York about 15% of the "total direct indirect, and induced jobs [were] attributed to… forest products." Woodswork and lumber mills provide between 20% and 65% of the jobs in manufacturing and the industry employs about 270,000 giving out $2.4-million in direct payroll. Jobs in the wood products industries are some of the best paying. Harper, Falk, and Rankin, The Northern Forest Lands Study, 36; Lloyd C. Irland, The Northeast's Changing Forests, (Petersham, Mass: Distributed by Harvard University Press for Harvard Forest, 1999) 3, 270; "The forest product industries are much more important to the Northern Forest economy than they are to the overall economy of New England and New York." Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 36. 11Northern

Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 28, 31; Jerry and Keal, The Adirondack Atlas, 126.

12Tam and Woodall, At Home in the Northern Forest, 83; Journalist Chris Arnade came to a similar conclusion about the emotional and personal impact of deindustrialization in his very recent tour around rural America. See his Pride and Poverty in America series in The Guardian, particularly Chris Arnade, "Pride and pain in Trump country: 'We all grew up poor, but we had a community,'" The Guardian, Septembet 7, 2016, accessed October 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/07/kentucky-trump-obama-unemployment-drugs.

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Newton, Forging Titians reaping from it the "Cheap Nature" that was growing there every year. Industrial forest products production on most public lands in the Adirondacks is forbidden and cutting on private land is limited in some instances. There was also serious protest in 2014 when plans were announced to develop 6,000 acres of land for a ski area in Tupper Lake. Many locals wanted the land to remain undisturbed, even though the ski area would bring good paying winter jobs (Figure 4).13 The passion that locals had for preservation extends far back in history. In 1896 when New Yorkers voted for an amendment that would permit forest products production on state lands, every county in the Adirondacks rejected it.14 The lack of industry in the region was partially responsible for the poverty that was now as much a feature of the landscape as the trees, lakes, and mountains. In 2012 Bill Towers, head of the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages suggested that communities like Tupper Lake are in risk of disappearing without more private investment. In the Adirondacks, 80% of the land is forest cover with about 4,000 board feet of standing saw timber per acre. The forest growth rate is more than twice the removal rate.15 In the Northern Forest about 75% of the land, or more than 23million acres, is timberland, capable of producing merchantable saw logs, and 84% of the area is privately owned.16 Still, the mills are shutting down rapidly, devastating entire communities. When I was researching and writing this dissertation in Maine, the news regularly reported on new mills

13 Recently the ski area was approved for development. Brian Mann, "Disarray in Adirondack environmental community, defeat on Tupper resort," North Country Public Radio, accessed January 1, 2015, https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/19181/20120124/disarray-in-adirondack-environmental-community-defeaton-tupper-resort. 14Tam and Woodall, At Home in the Northern Forest, 51; Barbra McMartin, The Great Forest of the Adirondacks, (New York: North Country Books, 1994) 102. 15

Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 44-45.

16 Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989) 3-4; Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 44, 46; Harper, Falk, and Rankin, The Northern Forest Lands Study, 2, 7; Richard W. Judd, Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England, (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) 181.

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Newton, Forging Titians closing—5 since 2014.17 Writing on the balance between conservation and economic opportunity, environmental humanist Stephanie Kaza wrote that "[t]o accept … [a complex, healthy forest ecosystem] … is to recognize the breadth and depth of people's suffering."18 The beautiful forests of the Adirondacks exist at the expense of the local population. Despite popular conceptions that rural people maintain the American status quo and build consensus, rural Americans have historically expressed their grievances in radical, sometimes extralegal ways. The Paxton Boys, the Whiskey Rebels, the Industrial Workers of the World and, most recently, supporters of trespassing cattleman Cliven Bundy and the related protesters at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Oregon, are a few examples among dozens of others. Catherine M. Stock has categorized these reoccurring actions as "rural producer radicalism."19 With the expansion of the powers of the State after the Civil War, disadvantaged rural populations in America often attempted to find solutions to their problems by edging into Federal politics. The clearest example is the Populist movement, a massive, radical rural upheaval. Northern Forest communities have never sought alliances with federal government powers, in fact they are typically skeptical of them. These citizens have "a strong sense of independence, and this often manifest itself in a desire to limit the role of the federal government in the region."20 In fact, while researching for this dissertation I have seen several Confederate flags flying in isolated parts of upstate New York, New Hampshire, and Maine symbolizing some residents' resentment towards

17 Rachel Ohm, "Shutdown of Madison mill is state’s fifth in two years," Portland Press Herald, March 15, 2016, accessed September 7, 2016, http://www.pressherald.com/2016/03/14/madison-paper-industries-to-close-by-may-affecting-214-workers/; Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 30. 18 Stephanie Kaza, "Ethical Tension in the Northern Forest," in Christopher McGrory Klyza, and Stephen C. Trombulak, The Future of the Northern Forest, (Middlebury, Vt: Middlebury College Press, 1994) 74. 19

Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

20 Christopher McGrory Klyza, "The Northern Forest: Problems, Politics, and Alternatives" in Klyza and Trombulak, The Future of the Northern Forest, 43-44.

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Newton, Forging Titians government interference. There have also been no largescale extra-legal movements voicing the concerns of workers and small producers in the Northern Forest. Northern Forest residents defy all models of how disempowered people have historically tended to voice their grievances. These communities are dying quietly with little protest, and, from the perspective of classical economists, they have been complicit in their own disempowerment. Despite the problems facing the Northern Forest, the lumberjack, this symbol of past industrial prosperity, is popular throughout the region. I saw lumberjack statues like the one in Tupper Lake in the town of Mexico, Maine, two in Bangor and another next to a lumber dealer in New Hampshire, denoting regional pride of a bygone era. Given the economic decline in the Northern Forest, the residents’ predisposition towards preservation, their independent political inclination, and lack of extra-legal protest, the pride Northern Forest communities have in the lumberjack figure is confusing. It represents the memory of forest products production and economic prosperity, but also the destruction of the landscapes that locals clearly valued. Why have Northern Forest people seemingly not had their own economic interests in mind? Why did they not fix their problems by voting or somehow advocating for the changes they needed to become more economically prosperous? Why hadn't unions formed that would have given woodsworkers and small producers a voice in how their land and labor was used? Why had they let their landscapes become places of leisure for outsiders rather than places of work for permanent residents?21 Why is wealth left locked up in the land and why does the lumberjack remain a symbol of past work in the wilderness rather than a current feature of the landscape? These types of questions provoked a congressional investigation into the Northern Forest in 1990.

21

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 120.

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Newton, Forging Titians Twenty-seven years later these issues have not been solved.22 This dissertation is a history of the development of capitalism in this part of rural America that attempts to answer the questions posed directly above. Proving why something did not happen is not a fruitful catalyst for historical investigation, so instead of approaching the history of forest products production from a specific perspective, I intentionally made the investigation broad exploring the history of capitalism and the lives of workers in the region, letting the evidence expose answers to some of the questions outlined above.

Memory and Industry "Forging Titans" has traced the development of the forest products worker and small producer from 1850, up through the creation of the lumberjack class, and the subsequent rise of working-class hegemony to show how this class of workers became a significant symbolic figure of American industry and masculinity. This narrative ends before 1950, when the work of the lumberjack fundamentally changed due to the widespread implementation of gas-powered engines. The chainsaw de-skilled and reduced the workforce, while the bull dozer, truck, and trailer replaced horses and made camps and river drives inefficient. The widespread implementation of gas engines also represented a major change in the type of Cheap Nature used to get logs out of the forest. Before 1950, the industry was largely reliant on the built environment of the lumber camp workscape, the weather, and the muscle of men and animals for power. The new gas powered labor process along with the corporatization of the woods described by Eckstrom, was viewed by the American public and Northern Forest communities as a less heroic type of labor process and organizational arrangement than those of the past. Gas power

22 Jonathan Wood, "A Sustainable Resource for a Sustainable Rural Economy," in Klyza and Trombulak, The Future of the Northern Forest, 164.

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Newton, Forging Titians and corporate control destroyed the imagined connection that the logger had to the authentic masculinity of white frontiersmen that Americans valued so much. Locals with connections to the industry mourned the changes that gas power and corporate control brought to the industry because to them it meant the loss of the lumberjack identity. "Adirondack lumbering has lost its isolation, its rigors, its dangers and its aura of romance," one local historian wrote, "[t]he lumberjack has gained in health, in safety of life and limb and in steady employment. He has become respectable and commonplace."23 Eckstorm and a few other observers of the industry noticed these changes as early as 1904 when they complained of the increasingly corporate nature of forest products production. Currently, when Northern Forest communities celebrate the memory of the lumberjack they celebrate this technologically primitive, pre-corporate lumberjack, one who worked with the aid of the weather, simple machines, wood, and muscle power. Locals reenact these past workplace activities in "woodsmen days" and lumberjack competitions to commemorate the past. This specific idea of the lumberjack is incorporated into local narratives, solidifying local identities and the lumberjack symbolism.24 Locals hold these narratives in high regard and adhere to their romantic telling of the past.25 For example, on September 2nd, 2010 in Tupper Lake the local library held a "reading marathon" of

23

Harold K. Hochschild, Township 34, (Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., Adirondack Museum, c1962-1980) 45.

24 Examples include Stewart H. Holbrook, Yankee Loggers: A Recollection of Woodsmen, Cooks, and River Drivers (New York: International Paper Co, 1961) and Stewart H. Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw; a Natural History of the American Lumberjack, (New York: The Macmillan company 1938); Simmon, Mostly Spruce and Hemlock; Robert E. Pike, Tall Trees, Tough Men. On memory in the Adirondacks see Robert D. Bethke, Adirondack Voices: Woodsmen and Woods Lore, (University of Illinois Press, 1981) 33. 25 The following is a list of some other popular local histories. Note the obscure publishing company and location denoting that these books are not intended for wide distribution: Barbara K. Bird, Calked Shoes (Prospect, N.Y: Prospect Books, 1952); Maitland C. DeSormo, The Heydays of the Adirondacks. (Vermont: The George Little Press, 1974); Harold K. Hochschild, Lumberjacks and Rivermen in the Central Adirondacks 1850-1950 (New York: Adirondack Museum, 1962); William R. Marleau, Big Moose Station, (New York: Marleau Family Press, 1986); Roy Higby, A Man from the Past, (New York: Big Moose Publishing, 1974); Harvey L. Dunham, Adirondack French Louie: Early Life in the North Woods (Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1953); Stewart. H. Holbrook, Yankee Logger

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Newton, Forging Titians the local history book Mostly Spruce and Hemlock by Louis Simmons, a popular local history about the village. According to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, the "reading event … [featured] 76 people reading 461 pages for 19 hours" to "promote reading and local literature."26 Dozens of other local histories reinforce the narrative of the heroic lumberjack, the same figure that Roosevelt, Wyckoff, and Eckstrom, visited and learned from. When professional historians encounter these romanticized local histories, they are quick to dismiss them even though these histories reveal how antimodernist ideas of masculinity were reabsorbed into the local forest products producing communities that birthed them. For example, Vernon Jensen, in his 1945 Lumber and Labor, explains that many popular histories of lumberjacks defer "to the romantic and [overplay] the sensation."27 Writing about Lake State lumberjacks Robert C. Nesbit wrote that the work did not:

require a special breed of men. This is a delusion of memorialists who have been told they led exciting lives in a setting which is forever gone, or of romantics, regional authors, and eager folklorists. It is the province today of advertising agencies pushing fabricated pancake mix and imitation maple syrup. They should be condemned to a season in a logging camp of the 1870s.28 The many authors who criticize local history are not willing to historicize the romanticization presented in local narratives nor question what effect these narratives had on defunct lumbering

(New York: International Paper Company, 1961); Reed, Frank A., Lumberjack Sky Pilot (Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1965); Peter C. Welsh, Jacks, Jobbers and Kings, (Utica, N.Y.: North Country Books, 1995). 26 "Golff-Nelson to host ‘Mostly Spruce and Hemlock ‘reading marathon" Adirondack Daily Enterprise (Saranac Lake, NY), accessed December 13, 2010, http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/page/content.detail/id/514967/Goff-Nelson-to-host-Mostly-Spruce-and-Hemlock--reading-marathon.html.

27

Vernon H. Jensen, Lumber and Labor, (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945) 293.

28 Robert C. Nesbit, The History of Wisconsin: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873-1893, (State Historical Soc. of Wisconsin, 1985) 63; William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2009), 426.

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Newton, Forging Titians communities. The creation of these narratives is another result of the rise and fall of industrial capitalism in rural America. They are just as relevant to the history of the forest products industry as any other aspect of the region's history. For these reasons, this dissertation has always cautiously considered local history both for the insights they provide into the history of commodity production and for what they reveal about the more recent history of memory and identity formation. Avoiding local history when conducting a social historical investigation is not advisable. For example, when I asked one award-winning historian of rural North America about their thoughts on the spending spree—a favorite topic of local historians—I was told that they knew of no work on the subject that did "not perpetuate a stereotype … [and that] it has yet to be proven that loggers went on wild spending sprees." Giving local history the currency it deserves, while also using more conventional sources, I found that the spending sprees not only happened but that they were crucial to class formation and they helped to perpetuate the appropriation of workers' bodies as "Cheap Nature," as I showed in chapter four. These wild expressions of passion in Northern Forest towns affected ideas of masculinity among Gilded Age and Progressive Era antimodernist who saw spectacles of hedonism among lumberjacks as body love; authentically and naturally masculine, a subject I explore in chapter six. Finally, Northern Forest towns tout the rowdiness of the lumberjacks in statues, lumberjack competitions, local history books, and in other aspects of their tourism industry because the lumberjack had profound cultural and economic significance in modern America. As a child I was also drawn to the Northern Forest because of its connection to lumberjack symbolism just as a young President Roosevelt was. Both myself and Roosevelt felt nostalgia for past deeds of white men in the woods. We both understood the lumberjack as part of the wilderness, and that these workers were manly because of their affinity with the wild. Tourist are drawn to the masculine lumberjack and the affinity that this class had with nature. Local 504

Newton, Forging Titians communities now profit from the allure of the lumberjack which brings spending vacationers to the region. Every chapter of this dissertation speaks to these three levels of historical analysis: the social history of rural producers, how lumberjacks were interpreted by elites in the form of working-class hegemony, and how Northern Forests communities valued the memory of the industry including the lumberjack (though the latter type of analysis is largely hidden in the footnotes). *

*

*

When I look at the Tupper Lake lumberjack statue today, it is clear that it never represented worker solidarity or the heroic artisan like many other statues commemorating workers do. Instead, ironically as it may seem, these lumberjack statues represent nature and people's connection with their landscape. To understand the statue and its connection to the Northern Forest, it helps to understand what Adirondack historian Philip G. Terrie wrote about landscapes: People tell stories about the land that reflects their needs. They project their needs onto the land in the stories they tell about it. They define— in a sense, create—the land in their stories. These stories either achieve currency in the popular imagination or they fail to do so … By 'story' I do not mean fiction; I mean widely shared understanding about the land’s meaning deriving from accounts of actual encounters with the land.29 My dissertation shows that Terrie's analysis is correct, but needs to be extended further. The relationship between land and people is symbiotic. Landscapes are defined by people and economic systems, but people also become defined by or even absorbed into their landscapes in the process of working on it. Over time, people can become [Cheap] Nature, but they can also become memories and narratives that are engrained in landscapes. These complex symbiotic relationships between people and the land change over time, and how they are interpreted change as well.

29 Philip G. Terrie, Contested Terrain: a New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks, (Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., Adirondack Museum, 1997) xx-xxi.

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Newton, Forging Titians The supposedly masculine performances of the rural working-class which antimodernist praised were actually responses to capitalism's intrusion on the Northern Forest landscape. Up until the 1950s, rural working-class life was a struggle for survival in a place where resources were scares and the economy was in a slow steady depression. Characteristics of masculinity were formed through attempts on the part of smallholding, yeomen farmer-loggers to maintain control of production by contracting as opposed to wage working and by increasing the speed and efficiency of production without the implementation of high cost capital goods. Masculine gender performances were also shaped by the work culture that formed because of the specific mode of production found in the Northern Forest. An example of these gender performances were workers' responses to the food wage system, and the spatiality of production and consumption. These factors of survival and production made workers and contractors into Cheap Nature that produced logs at cost sustaining the industry by appropriating workers' bodies. Industrialization in the hinterland was directly juxtaposed by the rise of the new urban corporate class who no longer had to think about survival daily. In self-reflective anxiousness, antimodernist looked to the built environment of the working forest and at the bodies of working lumberjacks for a solution to overcivilization. Antimodernist sought to make their own bodies into Cheap Nature for the sake of their own health. Classifying the racial characteristics of rural workers as purely white frontiersmen, or half-wild Canadian, was an important part of affixing the cultural gaze onto rural workers. The idea of the manly lumberjack and his connection to the land became so ingrained in modern American culture that it became valuable to Northern Forest communities after the industry declined in economic importance. Both rural working-class masculinity and the projection of it as working-class hegemony, were deeply affected by the specific social/economic/cultural forces that were conjured by the specific type of capitalism that developed in the hinterland. 506

Newton, Forging Titians This dissertation has argued that the emerging rural proletariat in the Northern Forest became national models of masculinity because they represented a connection to work and wilderness that was valorized in urban, corporate America post-1900. Because capitalism worked by exploiting Cheap Nature, lumberjacks themselves—their organizational methods, their labor process, their metabolism, and their identity—were interpreted as parts of nature. Important and influential sections of the American population desired to be part of nature in the way that lumberjacks were imagined to be. Working in the wilds of the Northern Forest bestowed an important reputation on rural workers. Through working-class hegemony, this reputation was incorporated into American middle class culture. Northern Forest communities now commemorate the lumberjack identity, an identity created largely by antimodernists, and value the memory of work in their wild landscapes. The memory of a connection to the land through work has value in these communities. The Northern Forest Wealth Index Steering Committee, a group who is exploring ways to preserve the environment and improve the economy in the area, included "personal connection with the landscape" as an indicator of wealth but found that "it would be impossible to quantify the strength or extend of people's relations with the Northern Forest landscape because those connections are so intensely personal."30 This type of wealth cannot be understood through traditional economic analyses of costs and benefits; supply and demand. These benefits, like much of nature, exist outside the cash nexus. In fact, many aspects of capitalism cannot be understood through studying the cash nexus or exchange values.31

30

Northern Forest Center, Northern Forest Wealth Index, 23.

31 For example, Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman find that the simple equation can explain why people move from farm to city or via versa: "Wu - Wr = Cu -Cr, where Wu is the annual urban wage … Wr is the amount of rural earnings, and Cu and Cr are the living cost in city and country." These price factors are obviously not the only factors people considered when deciding if they should move out of a rural area. Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, "The Industrial Revolution as a Response to Cheap Labor and

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Newton, Forging Titians People choose to live in the Northern Forest and "accept lower wages, fewer jobs and limited amenities" because of the connections they have to their land and their regional history. These connections began to form as early as the 1880s and helped to quell labor unrest.32 As a symbol, the lumberjack exemplifies these connections. Eckstorm's refusal to separate the natural from the human resonated in Northern Forest communities. They see the lumberjack as part of the landscape, part of their nature. This concluding chapter has shown that rural working-class people were and, are now, deeply affected by the intersection between capitalism, the environment, and gender identities. These connections may have quieted labor unrest even if working conditions were abysmal. The methods of historical investigation that focus on identity formation need not be cast aside in historian’s new pursuit of the history of capitalism. In fact, identity formation is one of the most important effects that capitalism has on land and people. Historian Hal Barron wrote that the experiences of those Americans who lived in settled rural areas like New England and New York was much more representative of the American experience than life in bustling, volatile, frontier zones or large cities where historical attention has traditionally been focused.33 The processes that this dissertation describes—the rise of capitalism in a landscape and the interaction between land and capitalism that makes valuable identities—happened in similar ways in thousands of different landscapes across the United States. As frontiers close the landscape homogenizes and becomes less productive, and the memory of work on the land gains currency. Identity formation might be capitalism's most enduring and important effect on the land.

Agricultural Seasonality, 1790-1860: A Reexamination of the Habakkuk Thesis" in Carville Earle ed. Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems, (Stanford University Press, 1992), 184-185. Harper, Falk, and Rankin, The Northern Forest Lands Study, 37. Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England, (UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) xi, 1, 2. 32 33

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Newton, Forging Titians Epilogue, Figures Figure 1.

Bill, "From Tupper Lake to Long Lake," Windswept Adventure (blog), accessed January 23, 2015, http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_I3fMEVHCdRE/TPokxyB60DI/AAAAAAAAIxw/CqVoKwHgCM/s1600/IMG_7891.jpg.

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Newton, Forging Titians Table 1. 2015 Poverty Rates in the Poorest Counties in New York and in Northern Forest Counties of New York Percent-inRank-byCounty Poverty Percent Bronx 30.50% 1 Kings 23.40% 2 Tompkins 20.60% 3 Franklin 19.70% 4 St. Lawrence 19.70% 5 Chautauqua 19.40% 6 Montgomery 19.10% 7 Oswego 18.50% 8 Sullivan 18.00% 9 Broome 17.80% 10 Oneida Fulton Herkimer Clinton Jefferson Lewis Warren Essex Hamilton

16.50% 16.20% 15.90% 15.20% 15.00% 13.30% 11.90% 11.40% 9.50%

14 17 19 25 27 37 48 50 56

Key: Northern Forest Counties = "A Comparative Look at County Poverty Levels," New York State Community Action Association, Poverty in New York, Poverty Data, data from, US Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey (ACS) report S1701 - Poverty Status in the Past 12 Months, 2010 - 2014 five year estimates, accessed July 12, 2016, factfinder2.census.gov.

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Newton, Forging Titians Figure 2.

"The Deindustrialization of the Park, 1900-2000" Jerry Jenkins and Andy Keal, The Adirondack Atlas: a Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park, (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 95

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Newton, Forging Titians Figure 3.

"Total Earnings of Northern New York Worker by Industry" and " Earnings of Northern New York workers by Industry 1969-1994 (In Constant 2000 Dollars)" in Jerry Jenkins and Andy Keal, The Adirondack Atlas: a Geographic Portrait of the Adirondack Park, (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 126

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Newton, Forging Titians Figure 4.

Brian Mann, "Disarray in Adirondack environmental community, defeat on Tupper resort," North Country Public Radio, accessed January 1, 2015, https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/19181/20120124/disarray-in-adirondackenvironmental-community-defeat-on-tupper-resort.

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Newton, Forging Titians Figure 5.

"Referenced Figures-Manufacturing in The Northern Forest," Research, Northern Forest Center, accessed January 3, 2015, http://www.northernforest.org/research.html. Figure 6.

"Referenced Figures-Service Industries in The Northern Forest," Research, Northern Forest Center, accessed January 3, 2015, http://www.northernforest.org/research.html. 514