Between 1850 and 1930, a million people from Quebec were pushed by economic circumstances to cross the border into the United States. Although most ended up in industrializing cities, many had experience in logging and other backwoods labor that gave them valuable skills they could put to use in the northeastern states. As historian Jason L. Newton writes, this was a tricky situation for an emerging ideology that viewed racial differences as determinative of people’s place in the economy.
In the nineteenth century, Newton writes, numerous American writers depicted French Canadians as cheerful, simple people steeped in a backward Catholic worldview and deeply in touch with the land. They were often connected to Indigenous people—either through supposedly ubiquitous (but actually rare) intermarriage or as a group similarly tied to nature. In this view, rather than civilizing the wilderness, they became part of it.
In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau wrote of a French Canadian woodchopper that “in physical endurance and contentment, he was cousin to the pine and the rock.” Unlike Thoreau’s fellow Yankees, he had no anxiety and no deep thoughts, and he found chopping wood a source of endless pleasure.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Newton writes, American conceptions of identity shifted toward the biological, drawing on the Darwinian view of evolution to explain that civilized, white races deserved to control territory because they were innately equipped to transform it and create value. In 1903, for example, popular travel writer Richard Harding asked whether land “lying unimproved” around the world should “go to the great power that is willing to turn it to account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its value.”
More to Explore
Tree of Peace, Spark of War
Prominent historians and political figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, subscribed to the notion that “Anglo-Saxon” (or “Germanic,” “Nordic,” or “Aryan”) people were uniquely suited to transforming wild lands with their coarse practical intelligence, individualism, and restless energy. In this view, other European immigrants were unsuitable for civilizing the frontier—Southern Europeans were effete and decadent while Eastern European Jews were hapless in the woods and better-suited to urban, commercial spaces.
Weekly Newsletter
Newton writes that race scientists in academia and government research viewed the French as somewhere between Anglo-Saxons and Mediterraneans racially. Given the proven success of French Canadians in working in the deep woods, it was impossible to dismiss them as lacking strength and endurance. However, the researchers depicted them as missing one key element: independent mindedness. In this view, their Catholic faith was emblematic of an essential inability to think for themselves, which conveniently made them suited to working hard under the leadership of a boss from a whiter race. One 1881 Massachusetts government report described French Canadians as “the Chinese of the Eastern States.”
And, indeed, much like other immigrant laborers, French-Canadian loggers were subject to harsh working conditions and low pay as well as to political disenfranchisement. In 1891, the state of Maine was specifically targeting the group when it passed a law preventing anyone unable to read English from voting or holding office.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
_(19900270844).jpg){kind=link}