Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry by Michael G. Hillard

Reviewed by: Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry by Michael G. Hillard Thomas Macmillan (bio) Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry By Michael G. Hillard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. The ongoing process of deindustrialization of North America's pulp and paper industry has reshaped the economic, political, and social landscape of large sections of the United States and Canada, perhaps nowhere more so than in the state of Maine. Once considered the "Detroit of paper" for the massive amount of forest products produced in the Pine Tree State, relatively few Maine wage earners now make their living in the industry. To investigate these processes, Michael Hillard's Shredding Paper factors in the perspectives of those workers and managers whose lives were shaped by the industry, while keeping a keen eye on the macroeconomic and technological changes that occurred during the latter half of the twentieth century. Taking a balanced approach, this work's greatest achievement is its ability to contextualize broad change brought on by a globalizing market. Far from a technocratic history, Shredding Paper pays special attention to the recognition of daily work practices while also giving prominence to acts of resistance by local oppositional working-class actors. Written for both a scholarly and popular audience, Shredding Paper is divided into three sections and follows a chronological order. The first section focuses on the dramatic growth of paper production in the state, with an emphasis on the S. D. Warren Mill in Westbrook. The spotlight here is less on the workers and more on the Boston-based Warren family, whose patriarchs built a paternalistic workplace culture that allowed them to hold off unionization during the period of familial control prior to the 1960s. Hillard argues that both the Warren family and the majority of the workforce viewed the mill like a family and that the Warrens ran the mill as if "the long-run stability of employment and local prosperity was, or at least seemed to be, just as important as the company making a buck" (p. 4). Because Hillard's primary sources for the views of workers derive from oral history interviews mainly conducted in the twenty-first century, there are limited first-person sources to corroborate these earlier claims regarding the period before World [End Page 278] War II. While the reminiscences of elderly retired Warren workers reveal a pattern of nostalgia for Warren family ownership, there are other sources that go undiscussed, which highlight the voices of workers less content with the status quo of the period. For example, mentioned but not explored were the five unionization drives between 1916 and 1951 as well as an eleven-day strike that shut down the mill. While acknowledging that the company treated its workforce relatively well, especially in comparison to its competition, this section would have benefitted from an approach that gives more space to those who opposed the company's paternalistic culture. While covering the rise of the paper industry, the interpretative heart of Shredding Paper is the story of Maine workers and their resistance to the economic and technological order imposed on them by international corporations from the 1960s to the present, which is vividly described in sections 2 and 3. Section 2's emphasis is on the militant culture among paperworkers, which was built alongside a decline in investment by the mill's new corporate owners. The lack of investment, which primarily manifested in the technology used in the state's aging mills, is an indication of the decreasing importance of Maine mills to large corporations such as Scott Paper. While the crux of this book is focused on the social relations that created Maine's paper industry, there is also a thread of technological change. For instance, Hillard discusses how improvements to the workplace safety of woodcutters—including the elimination of chainsaws—combined with the legal dominance of companies over contractors and led to a drastic reduction of incomes for woodcutters (p. 161). Overall, though, technological change is a secondary factor to what is fundamentally a story that emphasizes collective resistance. Shredding Paper is a vital case study for...

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