The making of a southern sawmill world: Race, class, and rural transformation in the Piney Woods of East Texas, 1830-1930

This dissertation examines how ordinary people, Black and white, shaped the southern lumber industry as it emerged in the piney woods of East Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Rejecting terms such as "premodern" and "uprooted" as descriptors of emergent southern workers, the study explores how rural southerners interacted with economic change. Although lumber barons controlled much of the forest, they proved able neither to dictate patterns of land use at will nor to redirect the inhabitants of the woods into sawmills as dependable wage earners. People retained access to the resources of the woodlands and sought to prosper from the lumber boom by logging on their own account, by tapping new markets in mill towns for produce raised on their farms, or by making strategic forays into the wage economy. Even company towns emerged as a compromise between the demands of industrialists for cheap labor and the relative ability of forest farmers to maintain productive activities under their own control. Proletarianization tended to seep rather than sweep through the timberlands.;This was also a world that African Americans made. Although white workers derived benefits from racial hierarchies at the workplace and were instrumental in their implementation, white working-class racism was not the only force that defined labor relations. Blacks resisted the conditions of their employment in a host of ways. Persistent complaints among mill owners of labor shortages testified to the tenacity of African Americans in defining their own work objectives, in adapting lumbering to their own productive activities, and in exercising the freedom of mobility to secure alternatives to wage labor. Such inchoate forms of resistance, although subversive on a day-to-day level, could not force long-term change. Aware of this powerlessness, some 15,000 Blacks joined cause with whites in 1911 to form the interracial Brotherhood of Timber Workers, the only organization dedicated to challenging the power of the lumber operators. The final chapter argues that a focus on the agency of African Americans is critical to our understanding of the character of interracial unionism in the Jim Crow South, both its achievements and its limitations.