American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  Even after Pershing finished presenting all of this to Disque, the former army captain remained unconvinced. Accepting the assignment meant delaying his enlistment, which made little sense to a career soldier. Furthermore, Disque had decided that he wanted to remain in the army after the war, and everyone knew that promotions would go first to the men who saw overseas service. Pershing acknowledged that the secret assignment would mean a personal sacrifice, but ultimately it was what the nation needed from Disque most. Eventually, the pressure from America’s most powerful military commander proved too much, and Disque, who was patriotic to a fault, reluctantly agreed. He would remain a civilian and become an unofficial watchdog.

  As spring turned to summer, and with Disque observing from afar, the labor situation deteriorated further, just as Pershing had feared. The wobblies were demanding improved camp conditions and, most important, the eight-hour workday, which had become something of a signal issue for labor groups around the nation. While these requests were far less radical than the wobblies’ heated anticapitalist rhetoric, the lumbermen still refused to budge. Most had no interest in recognizing the wobblies or in ceding bargaining power to unions. And the eight-hour day was an especially problematic demand, one that many lumbermen felt could not be conceded at any cost. As Disque observed, “Being mostly men who had risen from the ranks, who had worked 12 to 14 hours a day in order to attain their present efficiency, they had never considered any work too hard for themselves and they did not consider any work too hard for those whom they employed.”

  Tensions continued to build until early July, when wobblies throughout the forests began to walk off the job. The strikes quickly “spread through the region like a contagion.” By the height of summer, some 40 percent of the workers had laid down their axes, and spruce shipments, which needed to meet monthly orders of 10 million board feet, temporarily dropped to almost nothing. The lumbermen, meanwhile, met the wobbly challenge head-on. At the height of the strike, they banded together to form the Lumbermen’s Protective Association, an organization dedicated to holding a hard line against any labor demands. This move took a page from the southern lumbermen, who had earlier formed a similar organization to brutally repress unions, including the famous and bloody incident with the labor activist Sol Dacus in Bogalusa, Louisiana.

  By early fall, the labor situation in the Pacific Northwest seemed utterly hopeless. The wobblies who were still working had begun to employ a tactic known as a strike-on-the-job. They idled about during their shifts, sabotaged campsites, and laid down their tools after eight hours. Lumbermen remained largely uncompromising. President Wilson had transmitted a personal message to all involved in the labor conflict, asking for them to cooperate in a “conciliatory spirit,” but it had done little to relieve the animosity. To make matters worse, many of the least radicalized loggers had volunteered for the war effort, shrinking the overall labor pool and concentrating the power of the wobblies. Spruce shipments, by this point, were hovering around 2.5 million board feet per month, barely a quarter of what the United States and the Allies needed. But more troubling than all of this was a rumor that had reached all the way up to Secretary of Labor William Wilson: “[U]nless present conditions are changed a complete strike will occur in the spring.” If that happened, Allied air power would be doomed.

  Disque had been quietly observing all of this for six months, still hoping for an opportunity to join the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, when he was once again summoned to the War Department in early October 1917. This time the call had come from Secretary of War Baker. Upon arrival, Disque learned that Baker had finally reached the same conclusion as Pershing: The army would likely need to get involved in the Pacific Northwest forests. The situation had simply grown too volatile to allow either the lumber industry itself or nonmilitary government agencies to find a workable solution. Everyone involved was tainted or compromised. A central authority figure was needed, someone who “wakes up and thoroughly organizes the work,” in the words of one of Baker’s staff.

  The secretary of war then turned to Disque and made an unusual request: Could he become a soldier once more and take charge of the spruce production problem? It would be uncharted territory, the first time in the nation’s history that the army intervened in labor unrest and the first time that it directly took over a civilian means of production. But the outcome of the war just might depend on it.

  Once more, Disque felt torn. He desperately wanted to head to the front and had even lined up a potential assignment. But Baker, like Pershing earlier, asked him to put his country first. As Disque later explained, they “presented the thing to me in such a manner . . . that it looked like a national necessity to have the spruce during this winter period [of 1917–18], so that the material could get into the airplanes and be on the west front by the time of the spring drive.” They “made it a matter of cold-blooded duty for me to accept it, and finally I agreed.”

  On October 10, Disque arrived in Seattle. His instructions were to spend two weeks touring the region and then report back to Baker. It was a limited mandate for the moment, but Disque carried himself with a soldier’s confidence: shoulders back, chin up, boots polished to a gloss. He didn’t hesitate to imply that his authority over the woods was unchecked. And for all that the feuding lumbermen and laborers knew, this was the truth.

  But in reality Disque was simply trying to find his bearings in a strange environment where it was almost impossible to determine how to increase spruce production. To help him navigate these issues, the Council of Defense—the nation’s civilian wartime advisory board, which Baker chaired—had arranged for a team of local experts to serve as his escorts. This group included Carleton Parker, an academic who had been working on behalf of the government to mediate the western strikes. Parker believed that most wobblies were less radical than their literature suggested and were simply out for improved labor conditions: “The I.W.W. . . . is but a phenomenon of revolt” against “a certain distressing state of [economic] affairs.”

  Disque initially held a competing view: Wobblies were an inherent threat, a seditious group that needed to be eradicated. This was a relatively commonplace attitude in America, one that had underlain Pershing’s original concerns and which he’d expressed during the secret meeting back in May. But when Disque saw the deplorable conditions of the logging camps, he quickly came around to Parker’s philosophy. There was no way, he felt, that the labor problem could be mitigated without improving camp life and meeting the wobblies’ basic demands. But he would need to carve out some solution that could allow this without alienating the lumbermen.

  Working with Parker, Disque began to sketch out plans for an unusual two-pronged solution. First, the army would create a new division, the Spruce Production Division (SPD), tasked with getting the spruce out of the forest. It would include a force of several thousand enlisted men, ideally with logging experience, who could help to supplement the tumultuous labor pool. And, in a worst-case scenario, these soldiers, armed with rifles as well as axes, could intervene to suppress the wobblies. Disque described this proposal—the idea of using soldiers as a workforce in private industry—as “a radical departure from a custom as old as the nation.”

  But the second prong of his plan was, in many respects, an even stranger departure: a paramilitary labor organization that Disque would lead to be known as the Legion of Loyal Loggers and Lumbermen (4L). It would seek to bring all the interested groups—the lumbermen, wobblies, unaffiliated workers, and SPD soldiers—into a single body built around the idea of patriotism. This meant abandoning most traditional union tactics—namely, the right to strike—but Disque and Parker felt that it was the best chance for a mediated outcome. All members would need to sign a pledge that tracked something of a middle ground between the two sides. Thus, each 4L inductee would promise both to “improve the living environment in camps and mills” and “to stamp out anarchy and sabotage wherever I may find it.” Notably absent from the pledge, how
ever, was any mention of the eight-hour workday, which remained the most contentious issue.

  Disque soon returned to Washington to sell the odd-sounding plan. Many at the War Department endorsed the proposal, but strong opposition came from Samuel Gompers, who was both the head of the American Federation of Labor union and the representative for organized labor on Baker’s Council for National Defense. Gompers was dead-set against allowing a paramilitary labor organization of any sort, partly on principled grounds and partly because it undermined the credibility of his own AFL, which was trying to increase its presence in the Pacific Northwest. Disque tried to push back against Gompers, but ultimately agreed to abandon the 4L in order to gain approval for the SPD.

  However, when Disque arrived back in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, he discovered that the 4L idea—which he and Parker had already discussed with industry representatives—had taken on something of a life of its own. The lumbermen now appeared eager to sign up in large numbers. A confidential memo written by George S. Long, the influential manager of Weyerhaeuser’s western timber holdings, suggested that Disque’s cocksure presence had made the owners fearful of full army takeover if they didn’t get behind the new organization. He wrote: “[Disque] has full authority to go to any extreme that may be necessary to bring about [spruce] production. . . . To do this, of course, means some kind of a mutual harmonious solving of the labor problem.” It was also possible, as some historians have argued, that the lumbermen were only backing the 4L out of the hope that Disque would crush the wobblies and then disappear once the war concluded.

  Regardless of the motivation, the lumbermen’s endorsement gave the 4L new momentum. Disque soon found himself unable to contain its expansion and, being a pragmatist, began devoting SPD resources to organizing activities—this despite the promises he had made to Gompers, a man it was never wise to cross. Over the next several months, SPD soldiers spread out through the forests as recruiters. The 4L membership rolls quickly swelled into the tens of thousands. By early spring it was the dominant labor force in the forests, with Disque at its helm. Many workers seemed to have signed up out of a sense of patriotism and a belief that the 4L might bring real relief to camp conditions. However, the army’s coercive presence unquestionably helped. As one wobbly wrote, “Its sole hold on its membership is through intimidation and the fact that in some cases it promises more security of position to join it than not to.”

  The combined growth of the 4L and the SPD suddenly gave Disque unprecedented power over the lumber industry and the trees of the Pacific Northwest. His reach exceeded that of any of the lumber barons in the dominant cabal that controlled production. Even the mighty Weyerhaeuser, who died three years before Disque’s arrival, had never possessed as broad an influence (at least over labor conditions and production quotas). Disque had used the promise of providing SPD soldiers—who were considered to be both the most reliable laborers and a sharp influence against radicalism—to gain leverage over the lumbermen: The condition of receiving these soldiers was typically the improvement of camp conditions, such that they rose to a level equal with that of army life. And by early 1918, Disque had fundamentally restructured many of the work conditions in the industry.

  However, one challenge still remained, the stickiest issue of all, the eight-hour workday. This point of contention had lain relatively dormant during the initial growth of the 4L. The reason for this was that the reduced daylight hours of the winter months had kept work hours limited naturally. But as the days lengthened, the problem reemerged.

  Only now, unlike the situation the previous summer, Disque was in charge. His authority, by this point, arose from not only the army and the 4L, but even from the hard-line lumbermen, whose Protective Association had recently agreed to abide by Disque’s conclusions on the eight-hour question. Whatever choice Disque made would be the final word.

  But he was himself torn. On the one hand, as he explained: “I can’t understand any man who would want to cut his work off on 8 hours during the war period.” On the other hand, he feared that “the industry would probably be wrecked for months to come if we didn’t announce for the eight-hour day.”

  Ultimately, pragmatism trumped his principled sense of patriotism. In late February Disque declared that the entire Pacific Northwest lumber industry would shift to an eight-hour workday beginning March 1, 1918. To strengthen this pronouncement, he added that SPD soldiers would only be assigned to camps that complied. Remarkably, his orders were followed practically to the letter. The labor situation finally appeared under control, almost one year after Pershing initially reached out to Disque.

  However, it turned out that Pershing’s focus on the labor situation had dangerously oversimplified the spruce production challenge. Disque had discovered that while labor unrest was the central problem, it was far from the only one. The industry as a whole was simply not organized around producing airplane-grade Sitka spruce. Lumber companies in the coastal forests historically had designed their operations around access to Douglas fir trees, the region’s primary commercial species, and not Sitka spruces. Consequently, many of the best spruce stands remained functionally unreachable, lacking road or rail access. Furthermore, and perhaps more important, most mills could not actually produce airplane-quality Sitka spruce. The tree’s grain tended to twist in the outer part of the logs, where the clearest cuts of lumber were found. Traditional mills that tried to cut spruce thus frequently produced cross-grained timbers that airplane manufacturers could not use. In the estimation of one observer, this problem alone had rendered nine-tenths of pre-SPD spruce production useless to the Allies.

  Disque determined that the only way to resolve this problem was for the SPD to build its own spruce mill. The government, however, had no more practice at building logging facilities than it did building labor organizations. Plus, given the scale of military requirements, an ordinary-sized mill would barely make a dent in the production orders. But Disque let none of this dissuade him. He devoted much of late 1917 to designing a massive spruce production center, one whose capacity would exceed even that of the big mill at Bogalusa—1.5 million board feet a day, 50 percent greater than the highest day of production at the Louisiana factory. Ordinarily, construction of such an operation would take a year or more, but using SPD labor Disque managed to have it built in roughly forty-five days. And it opened just in time, less than a month before Disque’s eight-hour workday pronouncement.

  By the spring of 1918, with the labor and mill issues under control, spruce production finally reached the desired 10 million monthly board feet level. This remarkable turnaround staved off an Allied air power crisis. And Disque’s success emboldened military planners to make great demands. As he explained, “[T]he Director of Aircraft Production notified me [in mid-1918] that . . . he wanted thirty million feet of lumber monthly, and that the requirement might [go] up to fifty million feet.”

  Before Disque’s arrival in the Pacific Northwest, these amounts would have been inconceivable, but the SPD was now ready for this new challenge. Under Disque’s guidance, 4L members constructed hundreds of miles of railroad, opening up billions of feet of timber located in remote stands—an article in American Forestry declared this “the most ambitious transportation project ever attempted in one year in the Pacific Northwest.” The SPD also initiated construction on several new massive cutting facilities, two of which were equal in size to Bogalusa. And Disque instituted a policy of selective logging, which forced loggers to fell only aircraft-quality spruce and few of the surrounding Douglas firs.

  With each passing month, the spruce totals climbed steadily upward. By November, SPD production had jumped to 22 million feet, more than enough for the needs of the United States and the Allies. However, that would be as high as the production totals rose. For on November 11, 1918, armistice was declared. The war was suddenly over, twenty months after the United States had entered the fray.

  The end arrived barely a year after Disque had first traveled
to the Pacific Northwest forests, but in that short time he had managed to alter the course of the war and the lumber industry. Pershing and Baker had been correct that the nation needed him in the woods more than at the front. By the time of the armistice, Disque’s staff had grown to nearly 30,000 SPD soldiers. The 4L, which he oversaw, counted more than 125,000 members, many of them former wobblies. Disque himself had recently been promoted to the rank of brigadier general, a title that rarely went to those working on the home front.

  But the most important measurement of Disque’s impact was, in many respects, neither troop levels, nor 4L rosters, nor ranks. It was Sitka spruce production. His programs had managed to raise output levels 1,700 percent, for a total of 143 million board feet during the life of the SPD.

  This unprecedented increase in production led directly to a surge in Allied air power. As Disque explained, “Before America entered the war the airplane issue between the two groups of contestants was even. America swung that issue in favor of the Allies. Ten thousand Allied planes were built of American spruce and other American products.” At the time of the armistice, the Allies possessed six times as many planes as Germany. The head of the nation’s Aircraft Production Board later claimed, “[Disque’s] operation, in my opinion, was the most important thing that confronted us. I mean, we could have fallen down anywhere else, and the Allies might have carried on, but if we fell down in the spruce production the Allies went down with us, because they were depending on us for their spruce, and they had no substitute.”