Lumberjack or Technocrat?: Masculinity as Trade Secret and the Genesis of American Forestry

• In Event: Extracting Forest Knowledge: Race, Class, and Gender in Early American Forestry

Abstract

In 1918, a forestry professor named Filibert Roth wrote, "The expert knowledge of the forest was generally not possessed by the man at the central office and by the [land] owners; the forest expert of the lumber industry was the foreman of the logging camp … and what little these men had of forestry knowledge they keep to themselves." This lack of knowledge was also true of forestry professors like Roth because in the United States, forestry schools, and forestry as a profession and a science, had only existed for about twenty years when he wrote that. Consequently, to teach their students about local forest conditions and logging, forestry schools arranged extended stays in logging camps so their students could extract the knowledge of lumberjacks and their bosses. This extraction eventually contributed to the deskilling and displacement of knowledgeable workers by the very foresters they had taught.

In addition to learning logging and ecological conditions from locals, forestry students and new foresters needed to learn how to live in the woods and to manage local woodsworkers. To do so, they adopted working-class “frontiersmen” masculinity—vis-à-vis the clothing and apparel, and often behaviors and language, of the men they were supervising—in order to succeed. In fact, by 1900, the masculine gender performances of lumberjacks were seen as inseparable from their knowledge of place.

As credentialed foresters and forest rangers adopted lumberjacks’ knowledge of place and gender performances, woodsworkers became deskilled—their knowledge and experiences became redundant. Over time, college-educated or otherwise credentialed experts replaced many locals in management positions, particularly in private forestry. In other instances, lumberjacks continued to work but lost power in negotiating for better conditions at the workplace. And while foresters faced resistance and ridicule by local communities, they usually prevailed in their knowledge extraction efforts.

Author

• Jason L Newton, University of North Carolina at Charlotte