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Reviews
Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851–2001
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By Jewel Lansing
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Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 592 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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Reviewed by Geoffrey B. Wexler
Oregon Historical Society, Portland
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| On april 14, 1851, Portland's first city government — an unpaid group of seven men — met at an unrecorded location. Only six years earlier, a sixteen-block town site had been surveyed in what was called simply "The Clearing," with most of the streets merely imaginary lines on a muddy riverbank. Yet within forty-four years of its first meeting, the city government had its new permanent home in an elegant stone-and-marble building that took up an entire block of its own. Portland now covered around twenty-five square miles and contained close to seventy thousand people. |
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Here was what historian Gunther Barth termed an "instant city" — an urban center that arose, primarily in the western United States, in the late nineteenth century. In places like San Francisco, Denver, and Portland, there was no time for the slow maturation of city life as it had evolved for millennia. Instead, the demands of modern trade and commerce dictated that all the components of European civilization must emerge immediately: paved streets, music halls, fraternal organizations, architectural monuments, and democratic governments. |
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The rapid growth of Portland's city government is the primary subject of Jewel Lansing's book. Herself an elected official — she served as Multnomah County auditor from 1975 to 1982 and as Portland city auditor from 1983 to 1986—Lansing has examined the municipality from the vantage point of its mayors and council members. She begins with the exploration and settlement of the Oregon Country during the period of joint U.S. and British occupation, when the rich agricultural lands of the Willamette Valley became the destination of a massive migration of families from the eastern and midwestern states. In addition, Lansing shows how enterprising Portlanders were able to capitalize on the town site's strategic location near the confluence of two of the West's major waterways. |
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Lansing's emphasis is essentially on personalities—people such as enterprising tanner Daniel Lownsdale, who purchased half the original town site in 1848 and proceeded to successfully promote its development. She discusses every mayor and every council member, beginning with Hugh O'Bryant, a man who "had wanderlust, ambition, and an amazing capacity to get himself elected to public office" (p. 31), and ending with Vera Katz, a politically savvy "outsider to city hall" who spoke with a "heavy, laid-on-with-a-trowel New York accent, acquired in her youth" (p. 452). Along the way we meet colorful figures such as theatrical producer George Baker and tavern owner Bud Clark, both of whom served multiple terms as Mayor. There are also the author's mayoral heroes, such as the late nineteenth-century patrician Henry Failing, who helped rationalize and stabilize the city's finances, and Neil Goldschmidt, a young progressive of the 1970s who championed urban planning, limits to growth, and mass transit. Throughout the book readers are given an abundance of details, some of them trivial (the state of council member Mildred Schwab's car) and many significant (the facts surrounding the vice investigations in the mid-1950s). There are so many details, in fact, that the footnotes themselves might constitute a stand-alone volume. |
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There are a number of limitations to this otherwise laudable narrative. A thorough proofreading is needed for future editions. More lively illustrations would be welcome (some portraits are used twice in identical form). There are certain omissions — no mention of Capt. John C. Ainsworth, one of the principal players in the city's early growth, and little mention of the Multnomah Hotel, which rivaled the Portland Hotel as the town's social nexus in the 1920s. More importantly, the history of Portland's city government is presented here largely as a phenomenon unto itself, with only slight relationship to developments taking place throughout the United States and western states. In discussing municipal vice and the indictment of Mayor George Williams in 1905, for example, it would be interesting to place the discussion in the context of similar civic reform movements, such as the San Francisco graft investigations, which took place in the same era. |
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Despite these shortcomings, Jewel Lansing has given us an indispensable account of the entire history of Portland's city government, from its ramshackle beginnings to the solidity of its present form. The author has done an overwhelming amount of work. In addition, her personal acquaintance with key political figures has helped her obtain inside information to which few authors would have access. All of this contributes to making this book essential reading for anyone studying Portland history, and it will surely find its way onto many bookshelves. |
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