In the early twentieth century, the business cycle captivated economists and politicians alike as an explanation for and means of managing the uncertainty of modern capitalism. Marking revolutions of boom and bust, theories of cycles figured causality as predictable. Retaining aspects of nineteenth-century periodical obsessions, from sunspots to harvests, this thinking was applied to making national economies quantifiable in what would become interwar macroeconomics. Following the 1920–21 depression, the building industry was proposed as the powerful “balance wheel” to stabilize the American economy, if only control could be wrested from its seasonal “ebb and flow”—the intractable winter months that idled material production and labor. To grasp the national climate, weather bureaus, utility companies, and employment records were surveyed. Taming winter was identified as central to regulating unprofitable constrictions imposed by the irregular rhythms of seasonal construction.
This paper examines how a specific region—that of the Iñupiaq lands of the U.S.’s far northern territories—came to be a proxy for the winter problem of southern labor markets. An emerging worksite for natural resources and military projects, Iñupiaq lands offered windchill and darkness for studying cold-weather logistics and the adaptability of workers to cold in ways which were both racialized and physiological. The “cold regions,” as they came to be conceived in federal work contracts and international publications, were described not by national boundaries but subzero temperatures. The paper shows how snow labs, all-weather-construction councils, and manuals of engineers, builders, and anthropologists tried to model temperate winter in a settler-colonial North American Arctic. It examines how the construction schedule’s organization of time and work was itself a normative artifact. More broadly, the paper speculates on how the building industry has been a powerful agent, financially and epistemologically, in shaping climate knowledge according to its business and labor interests.