Nostalgia and Masculine Work

I reviewed Willa Hammitt Brown’s Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack for The Nation. The book is excellent, but what it really allowed me to do was to talk through some of the bigger issues we face today. A couple of excerpts:

Nostalgia is the beating heart of the Trump movement. From fears of DEI displacing whites to the rise of so-called “trad wives” wanting to replicate what they see as traditional notions of motherhood under patriarchal households, nostalgia for a supposedly lost past drives much of Trump’s appeal. Large parts of the working class, furious that its historical right to hard, masculine work has disappeared, has also embraced Trumpist nostalgia. Decades of industrial job loss and a lack of answers for displaced workers about the future has turned the blue-collar counties that made up the core of the New Deal Coalition into Trump havens. The media has largely focused on industrial factory cities in swing states, but its impact in natural resource counties has been just as transformative.

Addressing Trumpism is not the stated goal of Willa Hammitt Brown’s outstanding Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack, but I could not read it without processing it through our current moment. Narratives of the past shift to serve the interest of powerful memory creators. Brown notes how quickly media narratives about Trump’s January 6 coup attempt changed for the interests of the Republican Party. Her case study on late-19th-century logging in the Great Lakes demonstrates clear understanding of how nostalgia erases truth and creates palatable visions of the past that allow contemporary people to forget hardships and exploitation, settling for a vision of the past that seems simpler than today’s difficulties. By erasing histories of working-class exploitation, environmental degradation, and settler colonialism, the official tourist industry of the Northwoods tells a story that fits right into a Trumpist narrative about what America used to be and what it could be if made great again.

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Teaching sanitized versions of past work led working-class people to compare what they hear to their current work life. With jobs in the timber industry a fraction of what they were a half-century ago, it’s hardly surprising that workers would embrace a narrative of making America great again through hard work. I grew up in the woods of Oregon and Washington instead of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but the stories Brown tells match strongly with what I have seen in the Northwest, where timber counties threaten to leave Oregon to create a “Greater Idaho” to get away from the liberals in Portland and Eugene, driven by a desire to return to the era of men cutting down trees to build America.

Nostalgia sells people on a past that never really existed, one that seems so much simpler than the present. But will historians exist in the future to provide the stories Americans need to hear? Brown is not employed as a professor. At the same moment that Americans desperately need these stories, the neoliberal university system has slashed funding for humanities departments. Tenure-track jobs in the field have collapsed since the Great Recession. This is as true in blue states as in red states, as the corporate donors who run the universities seek to turn our higher education system into nothing more than a job training program, with administrators happy to comply.

Willa Hammitt Brown, and her important book, demonstrates why we must demand universities require the study of history. We need more stories from her and hundreds of other unemployed and underemployed historians encouraging us to reject nostalgia and deal with the legacies of labor exploitation, environmental degradation, settler colonialism, and the stories that cover it all.

I did think of saying something about them using a decade old bio that has me as an assistant professor, but really, who cares. In any case, work culture is real and you aren’t going to change that by just telling men they shouldn’t work hard anymore. Telling people what social values they should have and that everything they’ve learned is wrong turns out to be a complete and unmitigated political disaster. Who knew! And obviously a paragraph in a book review in The Nation is not going to change the fact that college students are no longer learning history and the future of telling the history of the Trump era is very much in doubt since the job of history professor barely exists anymore. But you make your remarks when you can.