Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (review)

Mark Glen Madison

Technology and Culture, Volume 47, Number 1, January 2006, pp. 206-208 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0082

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production goals. But during the postwar years only a minority possessed the acumen to employ new technologies appropriate for their type of farming. Some farmers were too cautious or frugal, while others were wasteful zealots who incurred excessive debts (p. 150). Between 1945 and 1970, farmers confronted shrinking profit margins and public criticism of the ways in which they used new technology. By 2000, they faced intense foreign competition as well, even as their own operating costs increased. Technological change is prominent in each of the seven chapters of this book. Readers will learn about rural responses to radio, the automobile, and electrification as well as to farm implements and chemicals and the ways in which technology contributed to specialization and expansion. In the final analysis, Scott and Nordin argue, technological advances caused farm failures and consolidations (p. 151). For all their discussion of technology, however, they miss opportunities to engage historians of technology and even make missteps as they highlight the struggle to cut production costs, increase profits, and ease labor. In the discussion of hybrid corn, for example, they fail to mention the importance of inbreeding, suggesting that a hybrid is simply a cross of different varieties rather than a cross of different varieties of inbred parent stock. Although the varietal crossing of corn that they describe was an ancient art, the application of Mendelian genetics to corn and the creation of hybrids was a twentieth-century innovation. These caveats aside, From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur is a valuable account of changes in farm policy, lifestyle, and production techniques. It draws on an impressive array of primary sources and secondary accounts to illuminate what this transformation meant to individuals as well as to the Midwestern Corn Belt. Readers will appreciate the numerous tables indicating trends in production, education, government support, and other topics. Historians of technology will find much of interest, but will finish the book desiring more.
J. L. ANDERSON
Dr. Anderson completed his dissertation, Industrializing the Corn Belt: Iowa Farmers, Technology, and the Midwestern Landscape, 19451972, in 2005 at Iowa State University.

Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. By Robert B. Outland III. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+352. $47.95.

In 1840, Edmund Ruffin, the insightful observer of the Southern landscape, noted that the Southern longleaf pines were deformed by being skinned for extracting turpentine (p. 98). Robert Outland makes an intriguing claim that in a similar fashion, the development of Southern industry, the environment, and the workforce were deformed as a result of practices in the naval stores industry between 1720 to 1945.
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Outland does not have a particularly focused thesis, this being primarily a descriptive work. He argues persuasively that the naval stores industry is more representative of Southern industrialism than more traditional studies of textiles, tobacco, or furniture manufacture. Although his book is firmly rooted in the field of Southern history, economic historians, labor historians, historians of technology and science, and environmental historians will all find aspects of the naval stores story that apply more broadly to their disciplines in spite of its regional characteristic. Naval stores is singularly defined as all materials used in ship construction, from hemp to masts. By 1800, the naval stores industry in the American South was focused primarily on tar and raw turpentine and their derivatives, spirits of turpentine, rosin, and pitch. Turpentine and rosin became the most lucrative by-products during the industrys quick rise and slow decline. Tapping the Pines is structured chronologically, although the technology of the turpentine industry evolved only slightly over a very long period of time. One of Outlands more provocative observations is that the history of naval stores reflects a telling lack of technological advance. Because this was exclusively a Southern industry, he claims that it suffered from the regional lack of capital and industrial expertise. Yet, even as naval stores remained technologically backward, it was greatly affected by technological advances elsewhere. The development of superior domestic and foreign turpentine production outside of the South by using new chemical and industrial techniques placed increasing stress on the traditional naval stores industry. Concurrently, the postbellum expansion in Southern railways allowed new forest tracts to be used for turpentining ahead of the cut. The continued search for new forest frontiers, as the turpentine trade migrated south from its Carolina roots, speaks to a particularly destructive extraction industry. Harvesting naval stores for most of its history involved boxing the tree, which either killed it or greatly hastened its demise. Further destructive practices included so-called slash and burn. The result was continuous destruction of forested lands and an impoverished environment left behind. This is in sharp contrast to the French practice during the Napoleonic era that entailed the creation of a sustainable forestry and naval stores industry that was to become the great natural classroom for future American conservationists. A century later, Gifford Pinchots U.S. Forest Service and the methods of scientific forestry began to restore some of the Southern forests, although progressive labor reforms never took hold in the piney woods. Outland harrowingly describes the labor practices in the turpentine industry. The antebellum naval stores industry relied heavily on slaves whose working conditions were among the worst in the South. Emancipation was a myth for most of these laborers, as vagrancy laws, debtor statutes, convict leases, and other coercive measures left many of them trapped in peonage despite Progressive and New Deal initiatives. Labor practices (such as tech207

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nology) changed slowly in the naval stores economy, thereby forging an unfortunate link between the old and new South. The books distractions include several odd grammatical lapses and sentences such as When gone, the longleaf failed to reproduce itself . . . (p. 98), a statement of profound biological obviousness. The few photos illustrative of the industrys arcane tools and techniques are poorly reproduced. Still, Outlands impressive research chronicles the ultimate decline of the traditional naval stores industry, the result of new technologies such as pulpwood plants and labor reforms such as the minimum wage. Within this narrative is an environmental and economic cautionary tale wherein once again the exploitation of a rich natural resource impoverished those inhabitants unfortunate enough to live in closest proximity.
MARK MADISON
Mark Madison is the historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and teaches environmental history and the history of science at Shepherd University in West Virginia.

Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas Fir Country. By Scott Prudham. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. ix+260. $90/$24.95.

Knock on Wood is not primarily a study of technology and culture, although shifts in the technology of timber extraction play a role in its arguments. Neither is it a conventional historical narrative. As a work of economic geography, with data presented in complex but impressive tables and graphs, the wealth of detail here provides powerful evidence for what environmental historians have long argued, but not fully proven: that the political dichotomy of jobs vs. owls in the Pacific Northwest forest is not only false, but a fundamental misreading of the history of the twentieth-century timber industry in the communities and forests of the Douglas Fir region. Historians willing to wade through the sometimes impenetrable jargon will be rewarded with a compelling analysis of post-1940 industrial restructuring and job loss. As we gain perspective on the spotted-owl wars, Scott Prudham declares, we must stop blaming owls and start blaming capitalism. This echoes Donald Worsters central argument concerning a different region in Dust Bowl : the Northwest timber crisis came about because capitalism worked exactly as it was supposed to. Prudham bases his analysis on Karl Polanyis and James OConnors theories of nature and labor as fictional commodities in a capitalist economy. Neither trees nor human workers can be real commoditiesuniform inputs rationalized at an ever-increasing scale of production. That commodification remains false, fictional. Despite genetic manipulation, Prudham demonstrates, trees remain natural. They grow in all different shapes and sizes, far apart from one another and very slowly. Human beings, in turn, remain social and political; they need meaningful work, stable com208