|
|
|
| Mine |
People in Bellingham developed numerous claims to the park and the mine, just as they developed multiple understandings of these places. Even as capitalism initiated and supported many of these claims, so people in Bellingham made them based on divergent constructions of the park and the mine. The coal mine, which people understood as a place of work, offers the clearest example of competing claims to place. At this point of production, basic conceptual differences about the nature of place met head on. That collision, manifested in a1922 strike, changed the direction of the actual physical re-ordering of the mine and gave one side enough power to legitimize its understanding of place. The park, constructed as a place of play, offers no such clear-cut example of competing claims. Nonetheless, people who used the park understood its nature in very different ways. If these claims never led to the kind of obvious struggle seen at the mine, they still existed.71 The mine and the park suggest how central access to power was in the shaping of place. In 1922, when E. T. Mathes described the coal mine as one of the "legs of [Bellingham’s] prosperity," he neglected one important detail. The mine was closed. A strike had emptied it of workers a month earlier.72 Part of a larger United Mine Workers of America (UMW) action, the strike lasted five months and in Bellingham resulted in the establishment of an open-shop mine.73 While the strike failed to achieve union goals, the language used by the mine owners and boosters on one side and the miners on the other revealed very different understandings of the nature of place in the mine. Representing the sentiments of boosters and mine owners, the editors of the Bellingham Reveille largely defined the mine as a local place during the strike. Problems in the workforce somewhere else, they declared, caused the strike. "[G]reat numbers [of] foreigners who can hardly speak the language of the land," the Reveille contended, made up the UMW’s membership in the "greater fields." "Impractical leadership," according to the paper, "herded" these "ignorant aliens," inciting them to acts of violence and making them a "menace" to American industry.74 The Reveille was explicit in not defining Bellingham miners similarly. "The class of men employed locally," the editors explained, should not be confused with the "foreigners." Local miners were good citizens and "homeowners," reluctantly pulled into the strike by a feeling of "duty" to the union.75 The soft tone of the Reveille might suggest a level of sympathy for striking workers. Bellingham’s relatively small size may have necessitated the softer language as well. Ultimately, the paper’s separation, or "othering" of the national UMW from local miners defined the mine as a local place. By portraying miners outside of the local context as alien agitators, the paper denied the possibility that local workers and unions could extend the mine beyond Bellingham. The Reveille relentlessly drove this message home. In an editorial published several months later, "Washington miners basely betrayed," the paper claimed the UMW had drawn the state’s miners into a strike that meant nothing to them.76 Like the earlier piece, this editorial clearly defined Bellingham miners as good citizens disconnected from the national union. Miners’ definitions of place were distinctly different. J. H. Allsop, the Secretary of the Bellingham UMW local, defined the mine in extra-regional terms. While the newspaper and mining companies argued that the peculiarities of each mining district called for separate negotiations, Allsop claimed this would lead to the disintegration of the larger national union with disastrous results. The national UMW, according to Allsop, was the miners’ "only protection" against the mine owners’ power. Its potential downfall would cripple the miners’ access to the "fundamental right" to "organize for the bettering of living conditions … and to raise the human standard."77 For Allsop, a claim to a broader construction of place was necessary for the workers' ability to claim a social position higher than the one paternalistic mine owners and newspapers articulated for them "locally." The mine owners needed coal extraction to generate profits. Two months into the strike they re-opened the mine with a non-union workforce, a move that led to the re-structuring of the above-ground workings. In order to negate the possibility of pickets' blocking replacement workers' access to the mine, the company constructed living quarters, complete with kitchens and bunkhouses, near the mine entrance. A large fence further protected the strikebreakers and, at least symbolically, illustrated the mine owners’ power to implement their vision of order on place.78 The fence also clearly delineated strikebreakers from strikers. In spite of the obvious irony that strikebreakers inhabited a fenced enclosure almost entirely isolated from the actual community of Bellingham itself, they became "local," therefore "good," workers because the mine owners' local construction contained them. Strikers, clearly outside the fence, were by implication now part of the foreign "herd" that menaced American industry. Despite their differences, the miners' and owners' constructions shared common ground, most notably in their propensity to legitimize the mine as a place in terms of gender and citizenship. Allsop countered criticisms of the strike with the argument that the striking Bellingham miners had "molested no one in the past." He appealed to notions of citizenship and masculinity when he pointed out that the pickets were "legitimate appeals to honor and manhood." All the strikers wanted was "American fair play and justice."79 In characterizing the mine and access to it in this fashion, Allsop subverted and inverted the meanings of the very terms employed by the Reveille. Like other American workers, Bellingham miners mobilized manliness, citizenship, and ideas of American standards of living to establish a legitimate, "white," working class identity.80 The mine both sides discussed was a place where men were, or should be, manly and American, even if they disagreed on what this meant. Not all claims to the mine were as directly oppositional as those expressed during the strike. In late August 1922 the strike ended. In Bellingham it appears to have resulted in a victory for the boosters’ local vision. Replacement miners stayed, and the mine president declined the opportunity to re-establish a closed shop mine.81 It took Peter Senuty, who was one of the striking miners, almost two years to return to the mine and his old position. Senuty did return, though, and over the next three decades he established a distinct claim to his place in the mine.
During
the time Senuty worked there, he invested a large amount of time and effort
in the cleanliness of his engine house. This was an internalization of the
same gospel of efficiency that shaped the company’s construction of the
mine. This fastidiousness also represented an attempt to assert his, and by
proxy other workers’, dignity and power amid the de-humanizing machinery
of capitalism. Senuty and other miners remembered the engine house with
pride, recalling the gleaming painted machinery and clean floors covered
with
rubber mats. Numerous flower boxes augmented the décor. Senuty, in paying
almost obsessive attention to neatness and especially in raising potted
plants, re-created po For other miners, this re-creation of the engine house was a concrete demonstration of working-class power at the local level. At least in his fellow workers' minds, the engine house was clearly Senuty's place.82 Senuty operated the engines for nearly the entire span of the mine’s operation. His job skills and seniority no doubt set him apart from other employees, but Senuty and his meticulous workplace were "of the men," not "of the company." Although mine workers understood Senuty's actions as his proprietorship over place, mine owners appropriated Senuty's cleanliness. They made the engine house a regular stop for tourists such as the Kiwanians, illustrating the ability of middle class boosters and the mine's management to influence public discourse about place. The pictures of the Kiwanis trip, for instance, presented a decidedly middle-class vision of the mine. Besides de-emphasizing the work and workers on which the place was predicated, these images bolstered the "local" that The Reveille enunciated in its editorials. In these photographs, the local Kiwanians belonged in the mine, whose industrial character was hidden behind boards, greenery, and paper lanterns. The miners in the photographs were not the determined unionists who shut down the mine for five months in 1922. Instead, they were out of place in the transformed mine. These docile, contented workers served tea to the Kiwanians. Kiwanis Pictures II Dis(playing) Legitimacy in a Premodern Park. Power and class privilege were central in shaping Cornwall Park as well. The historically middle-class vision of leisure that glossed over the actual work defining Cornwall Park on a daily basis allowed the boosters' construction to meld with the more specific and personal claims that members of Bellingham's financial and political elite made on the place. In turn the landscape constructed from the confluence of these claims situated Cornwall Park as a site of interplay between ideas of race and gender, resulting in a reassuring construction that further substantiated the power necessary to shape places. Bertha Fischer made a more local claim than the boosters did. When Fischer gave the city the land to build the park and the trustees of her estate provided money to re-arrange it, she and her heirs couched her construction of place in legal terms. Deeding the land to the city, Fischer specified that the park must be for "all times" named after her father, Pierre Cornwall.83 By stipulating the perpetuity of his connection to place and philanthropy, Fischer used the park to validate her father’s position in local history. The various gates built between 1918 and 1927 illustrate the principal way Fischer and her estate claimed the park. The first set of gates was built in 1919 with funds from J. J. Donovan, a fellow member of the town’s financial elite. The second set was built in 1925 in response to the trustees’ demands. These gates were a distinctly public discourse linking Cornwall to the park.84 All who passed through them who could read could not fail to link place and name: they were entering Cornwall Park. This information jumped out in three-foot high letters, constantly and publicly reminding users whose park they were enjoying. Fischer
used the park to legitimize a memory of her father and his connection to
place. The boosters envisioned it attracting tourists and increasing
Bellingham’s importance and role in the world. These were different
claims based on different understanding of place that existed in tandem. As the gates illustrate, these two different goals for
place proved to
be complementary. The
second, more elaborate set of park gates that Fischer’s
estate funded clearly marked the place as Cornwall Park, making a very public
pronouncement supporting
When the autocamp closed in 1927, the Park Board turned it over to the Boy Scouts.85 The degree to which the park appeared different from the rest of Bellingham made it a practical site for middle-class attempts at escape into an imagined pre-modern simplicity. Because the boosters had re-ordered the park as a place of winding trails and landscaped scenery, the Scouts were able to project an image of timelessness on it. In doing so they used the bequest-shaped park to negotiate publicly the boundaries of race, gender, and citizenship. Historian Philip J. Deloria points to the Boy Scouts as an organization built partly in response to a sense of angst among the middle and upper classes over the apparently increasing power of capitalism.86 To accommodate this, they sought to re-affirm modern identity by acting out encounters with a highly constructed pre-modern past. Contrived though it was, they attempted to accomplish this transformation by mimicking Indians. Indians, according to the Boy Scouts’ ahistorical vision, were "primitives" with a closer relationship to the natural world than the Scouts could gain in the "modern" world. Under the tutelage of adults, children "imitated the meanings locked into Indianness, one of which was the idea that a person could make significant connections with the world by mimicking it."87 Deloria posits that supporters of the Scouts saw these "anti-modern" activities making better "modern" citizens. Because such mimesis was aimed at constructing adults better suited for an increasingly "incorporated" world, the Boy Scouts’ claim to the park as a site for potential interaction with the pre-modern did not clash with the boosters’ claim to the place as leading to a brighter, capitalist, future for Bellingham.88 The powerful and progressive city the park and mine were supposed to build was, after all, one that could be defined by modernity. The claims Scouts made on the park substantiated the sense of entitlement that allowed boosters to imagine places. Combining several definitions, historian Elliot West claims that "place" is marked off by its history. History defines not only "all the things humans have done there" but also what "that setting and that history have meant to [the] people." Place, he contends, "is partly its collective human memory."89 The Scouts, as Deloria argues, essentially imagined Indian peoples outside of the contemporary context. By toying with a dichotomous modern/anti-modern discourse that de-legitimized existing Native peoples, the Scouts worked to erase layers of meaning and history from the park. The Scouts could not, of course, erase the very real understandings and memories of place that the Nooksack and Lummi peoples in and around Bellingham held. Yet Scouts’ actions publicly substantiated the boosters’ claim, appropriation, and manipulation of the space as their own.
71 While no obvious conflict concerning claims occurred in Cornwall Park during the 1920s, potential for such struggles existed. Historian Robert A. J. McDonald, for instance, charts the degree to which conflict shaped the debate concerning Stanley Park in nearby Vancouver, British Columbia. There were, he argues, sharp divisions between the elite and middle-class vision of the park as a wilderness retreat and working-class conceptualizations of utility and recreation. Robert A. J. McDonald, "'Holy Retreat' or 'Practical Breathing Spot'? Class Perceptions of Vancouver's Stanley Park, 1910-1913," Canadian Historical Review 65, no. 2 (1984): 127-53. Return 72. "Many Non-Union Men Also Out," Bellingham Reveille, 1 April 1922, 1. Return 73. An "open shop" workplace is one in which the union has little or no power to determine who is hired. This greatly limits union influence. Return 74. "Another Industrial Blunder," Bellingham Reveille, 1 April 1922, 4. Return75. "Another Industrial Blunder." Return 76. "Washington Miners Basely Betrayed," Bellingham Reveille, 23 July 1922, 6. Return77. J. H. Allsop, "Appeal to Fair Play for Union," Bellingham Reveille, 23 May 1922, 1. Return 78. Peter Senuty, Interview by Michael Runestrand, n.d, Wtc 75-21 mn, Washington State Oral/Aural History Project, Microfiche, Wilson Library, Western Washington University. Return 79. Allsop, "Appeal to Fair Play." Return80. For a valuable analysis of the degree to which popular perceptions of "manliness" bolstered, and were bolstered by, "whiteness," as well the manner in which individuals inverted these meanings to their own, "non-white" ends, see historian Gail Bederman's, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Return 81. "Moore Declares Operators Here Refuse Request," Bellingham Reveille, 16 August 1922, 1. Return 82. Walter Johnson, interview by Galen Biery, 13 February 1979, tape 156, Galen Biery Collection-Audio Cassettes, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington. Return83. Cornwall Park Grant, Box 2, Park Histories and Reference Files, 1921-83, Washington State Archives, Northwest Branch, Bellingham, Washington. Return 84. Volume II, Records of Proceedings of the Park Commissioners, 6 March 1925, Washington State Archives, Northwest Regional Branch. Return 85. Volume II, Records of Proceedings of the Park Commissioners, 4 March 1927, Washington State Archives, Northwest Regional Branch. Return 86. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 98-102. Return 87. Deloria, Playing Indian, 117. Return88. "Incorporation" is a term drawn from Alan Trachtenberg by Deloria. See Deloria, Playing Indian, 99. Return 89. Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 139. Return
|
| Park | |
| Photographs | |
| Oral History | |
| Notes | |
| Main Index | |
|
|
|
|
|
Previous Top Next |
