Brotherhood of Timber Workers

BROTHERHOOD OF TIMBER WORKERS. Founded in December 1910 in Carson, Louisiana, by the socialist sawmill workers Arthur Lee Emerson and Jay Smith, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (BTW) was a radical, interracial industrial union that organized thousands of lumberjacks and sawmill workers in the Louisiana/Texas Piney Woods region and that, according to an opponent, was “covering the country like a blanket” by 1912. At first a semisecret society replete with Knights of Labor–derived rituals, it was forced entirely underground in early 1912. However, during the spring of that year an open, official BTW convention was held in Alexandria, Louisiana. Persuaded by speeches from William “Big Bill” Haywood and the southern poet, organizer, and editor Covington Hall (1871–1952), the delegates voted to affiliate with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The convention further adopted the IWW practice of integrated organization and voted to accord membership rights to working-class women, including the wives of timber workers. Black workers joined the union in force, along with “redneck” whites and some Mexicans and American Indians. The BTW innovated particularly in developing a language designed to underpin such solidarity by validating the manliness of union workers, regardless of race, as against the effete and dissolute bosses, and emasculated strikebreakers.

During a series of bitter strikes and lockouts in 1912 and early 1913, the union’s fortunes fluctuated greatly. It grew to include as many as 20,000 members. Nearby tenant farmers supported BTW actions and even joined the union themselves. Local residents, including many farmers who became timber workers, often resented the lumber corporations as “intruders” who brought in strikebreakers, interfered with traditions regarding common use of the woods, and destroyed the environment. However, the union suffered from fierce repression by public agencies and private police, especially in Louisiana at Grabow, the scene of a large gun battle, and Merryville, the scene of a violent strike. Legal defense came to take much of the time and money of the union, while race-baiting, blacklists, and the massive importation of strikebreakers exacted a heavy toll. By March 1913 the BTW had lost its struggle for egalitarian industrial unionism in the Piney Woods.

Green, James R. “The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 1910–1913.” Past and Present 60 (August 1973).

Roediger, David R. “Gaining a Hearing for Black-White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race Gender and Class”” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics. London and New York: Verso Books, 1994.