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The Brotherhood of Timber Workers
The Brotherhood of Timber Workers was founded in 1910 by Southern born lumberjacks Arthur Lee Emerson and Jay Smith at a logging camp in Carson, Louisiana as a radical response to the industrial capitalism of the labor workforce in the southern United States. In 1912 the union joined the IWW, Industrial Workers of the World and proceeded to recruit thousands of both black and white laborers. The BTW’s ability to align interracially in a socially segregated world, was mostly unheard of and yet powerful in obtaining a common goal to build a broad based, inclusive union.

History
The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 fought to protect the great Southern Pine Forests from timber productions. It was repealed after a decade which brought Northern Speculators to the area, buying huge sections of timber in Western Louisiana and east Texas for as little as $1.25 an acre. by 1909, 12 billion board feet of pine came out of the Southern mills and the value of lumber increased by 70-100% in the two states. The new work load brought in relatively high wages attracting hundreds of ‘hillbillies’ and low country backs to rapidly constructed lumber towns, and by 1910 over 63,000 men worked in the mills

Most of the timber workers, formerly agrarians, knew little of labor unions and clung on to older traditions when faced with this rapid industrialization such as a leisurely attitude towards work and production and a primitive respect for nature, all of which were challenged by this industrial capitalism. The working conditions came to be very difficult, disciplined and dangerous to which workers naturally resisted. Many laborers would move on when they were exhausted resulting in a chronic shortage of labor. For those that remained, the once farmers found promise of $1.50 a day cash and 11 hour work days hard to refute.

As the lumber corporations of Louisiana and Texas continued to exploit the natural and labor resources of the Sabine River Region, timber workers complained more frequently about the irregularity of their pay days and the deductions employers made from their pay. In many mill areas a Scrip System has been implemented, where companies would pay their workers in fake money that was only redeemable at company stores with extreme inflation in prices. At Kirby Lumber Company over 90% of workers were paid in scrip, leaving employees frustrated and hopeless.

The first collective action in the Sabine Pine Region occurred during the panic of 1907 when operators imposed a 20% wage cut and a stretch out of the working day. Almost all of the workers in the area walked out in a spontaneous general strike to fight against not only the poor wages, but the long hours, scrip payment, inadequate housing and sanitation and irregularity of pay days. The strike resulted in the shut down of hundreds of mills.

The BTW's Early Days
After BTW was founded in 1910, A. L. Emerson and Jay Smith moved through mills and camps disguised as insurance solicitors to recruit hundreds of black and white workers. By June of 1911, the union organizers felt strong enough to come into the open. Shortly after, a convention was held in Alexandria, Louisiana to endorse the unions’ moderate constitution which extended membership to workers of all races, sexes and occupation, while discouraging violence in all forms and encouraging a respect for property rights. Their plan for industrial unionism and initial secrecy was borrowed from the Knights of Labor

Shortly after the convention, the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association (SLOA) was organized to attempt to destroy the BTW by initiating a lockout for all those associated with the Union. By July 19th, 1911, SLOA had managed to close 11 mills and lay off 3,000 men and though it did not eradicate the presence of the BTW, it was enough to push them underground. A reduced membership and depleted treasury pushed the BTW to join forces with the IWW in May of 1912 right around the time people were starting to get the feeling that a revolution was just around the corner.

On July 7th, A. L. Emerson led a band of 100 strikers and their families to a small town in Louisiana called Grabow. Upon arrival Emerson began to speak to his followers when mill company gunmen opened fire on the groups, this erupted into a 10 minute gun battle with over 300 fired rounds, resulting in the death of four men and injuries to 40 more, this would later be referred to as the Grabow Massacre. Following this day, Emerson and 64 other union men were arrested and put on trial for the murder of a company guard and the IWW went on to file a national publicity campaign. The defendants were found innocent after the collapse of the prosecutors case, but it did not fail to gain mass attention and support for the BTW.

BTW leader Jay Smith, encouraged the brotherhood to invest themselves into literature and newspapers sharing their progress and ideas of defiance. The Lumberjack was the official newspaper of the BTW where the union could generate publicity, edited by Covington Hall, it was referred to as the “new machine gun of the revolution”. Spanning the time of the newspapers publication, it functioned as a conduit for the creativity of membership, critical to the participatory style which the brotherhood promoted and its role in the conflict

Interracial Unionism
The growth of industrial unionism depended on the support of black laborers for their work in unskilled forest and sawmills jobs that rural whites could not satisfy, leaving the whites outnumbered. Traditional race relations were altered in the lumber towns which the brotherhood proceeded to take advantage of by organizing all workers in the industry regardless of race or skill, into one big union. It wasn’t until the BTW teamed up with the wobblies of the IWW that they really committed to interracial organizing, after which their recruits started to rise by the thousands. This attempt at providing a new form of association for workers did not come without facing extreme odds in its struggle against racism, but it did help create a radical, collective response to industrial capitalism.

The End of the BTW
The strike that brought the BTW to its end occurred in 1913 in Merryville, Louisiana after the American Lumbar Company fired 15 employees who had served as witnessed in the Grabow trial. The company was unable to break the strike in a traditional manner so they hired “strong arm men” who were deputized and then allowed to terrorize the unionists. This defeat by use of company violence was the beginning of the Brotherhood’s decline. Although the union still technically existed until 1916, it was practically destroyed by the spring of 1914. . However, the short time the union was in place, they had been able to gain support from 20 to 25, 000 timber workers in the Lousiana and Texas regions leaving a heavy impact on the ideas of radical labor organization

Mikalia elle (talk) 21:56, 15 December 2014 (UTC)