Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of

“Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan’s ascared of” recasts the legendary lumberjack as a figure for workers who refuse to be frightened out of organizing. Repeated at moments when loggers confront intimidation or prepare to defend their union hall, the expression carries both a promise of courage and a political argument: the people who do the work can claim a voice in the industry built on it.

The Lumberjack Recast

The refrain appears within an account of lumberjacks, loggers, shingle weavers, and sawmill workers described as the “helots” of a timber empire. Organizers in the Industrial Workers of the World put industrial democracy into Paul Bunyan’s story: the forests, they argued, ought to belong to the people, and the workers who cut the timber ought to receive real money rather than company scrip. Their demands were concrete—dry clothes after work in freezing weather, an eight-hour day, clean bunkhouses, and wholesome food. The expression’s legendary hero is thus not simply a strongman of the woods; he becomes a worker whose courage is connected to material dignity and collective ownership.

The passage sharpens this transformation by imagining Paul Bunyan returning from making Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four and joining a lumberjack’s local to help make the Pacific slope safe for working people. The contrast turns the language of wartime democracy back toward the workers at home. Calling the Industrial Workers of the World organizers “reds” marks the political danger surrounding that claim, while the refrain answers the threat with an image of fearlessness.

A Refrain Against Intimidation

The sentence recurs as the labor narrative moves through escalating attacks. After timber owners formed the Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers, ex-soldiers were recruited to raid union halls, assault organizers, and burn radical literature. In Centralia, an earlier assault on the union hall left workers beaten, jailed, or expelled across the county line; the hall’s papers and pamphlets were burned, while its furnishings were auctioned for the Red Cross. Against this history, the report that the loggers hired a new hall and that the union kept growing is followed by the refrain. Its repetition makes continued organization—not the destruction of a particular room—the measure of resistance.

The expression returns when the loggers consult counsel and decide they have the right to defend themselves and their hall if it is raided. By then, rumors of a decisive attack have filled the town ahead of Armistice Day, and a blind newsdealer has already been beaten and dumped across the county line. The phrase therefore frames resolve before the threatened confrontation: it does not erase the danger, but refuses to treat fear as a reason to surrender the hall or the union.

The Heroic Image and Its Political Edge

The refrain’s force comes from the tension between Paul Bunyan’s folkloric scale and the workers’ ordinary demands. Its boast of invulnerability might sound like a simple celebration of toughness, yet the surrounding account locates courage in practical solidarity: joining a local, insisting on wages instead of scrip, and defending a place where workers meet. The repeated sentence turns a familiar lumber legend into a vehicle for industrial democracy rather than leaving heroism in the realm of solitary strength.

That ideal stands against the timber owners’ own patriotic language. While they are described as having “won the war,” lumber prices had risen from $16 to $116 per thousand feet, and some spruce purchased by the government cost as much as $1,200 per thousand. In this context, the refrain’s fearless Paul Bunyan challenges a social order in which owners profit and workers face raids for organizing. Its recurrence gives the labor narrative a compact, memorable answer to intimidation: the union can be attacked, forced into a new hall, and threatened again, but its members continue to build it.