The Last Stand
by David Harris
Times Books
reviewed by Ron Hogan
The Last Stand
by David Harris
Times Books
reviewed by Ron Hogan
he Pacific Lumber Company, owned and operated by the Murphy family since 1904, was the kind of company where the boss took one look at an efficiency report and threw it in the trash. He wasn't about to fire his friends to save money. And nearly all the 1,100 residents of the small town nestled deep in northern California's Humboldt County, worked for Pacific Lumber. Their parents and grandparents had done so before them, Scotia was a true company town. But in the 1980s, it all came crashing down.
Charles Hurwitz was a Texas investor, one of the principals of the huge conglomerate, Maxxam, Inc. When he looked at Pacific Lumber, he didn't see a family business and a company town. He saw a cheap investment and a quick profit if he could increase the company's production. With the help of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, he set the wheels in motion for a corporate raid.
The Last Stand tells the story of the takeover of Pacific Lumber from almost every perspective imaginable. David Harris, a former contributing editor to Rolling Stone who lives in nearby Mill Valley, spent five years interviewing nearly everybody involved in the story (only Hurwitz, Milken, and former Pacific Lumber CEO Gene Elam refused to speak to him).
And as he spoke to the people of Scotia, he began to realize that the story was even bigger than he had imagined. It wasn't just about bond traders taking over a small company and driving it into the ground for short-term financial gain. Because Pacific Lumber was a lumber company, and more specifically a lumber company in the Californian redwood forests, Hurwitz's plans to increase production by ending the Murphy family policy of "selective cutting" of the forest drew the attention of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, whose members began jamming the trees with metal spikes -- or strapping themselves to the trees before the cutters arrived -- to sabotage Maxxam's plans.
Harris expertly balances the many facets of the Pacific Lumber story, moving from corporate boardrooms to neighborhood taverns to highway protests with ease. His extensive interviews are put to effective use, presenting the events from the perspectives of their most involved participants. The Last Stand is a work of investigative journalism that moves at a gripping pace; it compares favorably with In Cold Blood or All the President's Men as a work of hard-hitting literary non-fiction. Although the book has already become a bestseller in the San Francisco area, there is a genuine risk that the regionalism of the book's setting might prevent it from finding a national audience. That would be unfortunate, because the story that it tells of corporate greed, environmental activism, and especially of workers who can only watch as their economic security is jeopardized, is one that readers everywhere ought to find significant.
