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Reviews
SAVING OREGON'S GOLDEN GOOSE: POLITICAL DRAMA ON THE O&C LANDS
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arranged and edited by Joella Werlin
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| Inkwater Press, Portland, Oregon, 2006. Photographs. 142 pages. $14.95 paper. |
| The historian's axiom that historical research and writing can never be definitive is well-confirmed by accounts of the last fifty years of the Oregon and California Revested Lands Administration, better known as the O&C. Interviews with the few remaining men who were at the center of problems and challenges there and in Congress are, consequently, especially valuable. |
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Joella Werlin, who put together recollections and testimony by four such survivors, is trained and perceptive as an oral historian. In 2003, she published the results of thirty hours of interviews with one of the most important activists in O&C's story, Dan Goldy. The present volume, however, is a disappointment. Its four narratives are fragmentary, digressive, and assume that any reader has more knowledge of issues and participants than is likely the case. |
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The best of these accounts is the frank assessments offered by Oregon's former governor and United States senator, Mark Hatfield. The lumber industry and its supporters at the local, state, and federal levels are subjected to a no-holds-barred evaluation. Hatfield, a Republican with access to members of the Eisenhower administration, emphasizes that the O&C troubles, then and now, came not just from men with parochial or selfish agendas but also from the physical impacts of forest fires, international lumber markets, and the roller-coaster ride of economic recessions and diminishing timber supplies. The other two interviewees, former Oregon Congressmen Robert Duncan and Wendell Wyatt, offer far less "meat" on the subject. |
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For reasons of a personal nature, lobbyist and strategist Joseph S. Miller's recollections are also less useful than Hatfield's account. The editor has demanded less of him and puts the necessary autobiographical and biographical information after the other section, at the end of the volume. Miller, unfortunately, devotes half of his sixty-four-page portion to a recap of the classic expose, S.A.D. Peter's Looters of the Public Domain (1908), describing seventy years of fraud, greed, and manipulation of the O&C lands in the seventy years before the Revested Act of 1937. That act brought scientific forestry access and harvesting to what are surely the richest stands of timber in the world. Franklin Roosevelt's Interior secretary, the hawk-eyed Harold Ickes, staffed the O&C administration not with men from his nemesis, the Forest Service, but the new Bureau of Land Management. Miller knew many of these stalwarts of sustained yield, as well as the state and federal legislators and trade organizations in Oregon, Washington State, and Washington, D.C. |
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His account cites the astonishing increase in receipts and harvests from the O&C "checkerboard" sections in eighteen westside counties. From a few million dollars and a million board feet in the immediate post-World War II tryout period to a billion dollars and a billion board feet by the 1960s, it was, Miller says, a golden age for the golden goose of O&C's contribution to Oregon's economy. That contribution was designated by both givers and receivers for schools, public buildings, and road improvements. Any traveler to those counties today will see and be told of the results of this O&C "formula." |
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Miller's brief summary of the gains and setbacks of his forty years at the center of O&C issues is couched in entertaining prose, but it is lean in explanations. There are no revelations from his own papers or archival collections that reside in Oregon and Washington, D.C. Out of the many thousands of conversations he most certainly had with hundreds of colleagues and legislators, he gives only three brief but tantalizing quotations (pages 47, 51, and 57). |
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This reviewer laments the editor's reticence with all four of these veterans of recent O&C history. One omission is especially unfortunate: a discussion of the increasing impact of environmentalists' demands, which, with the dangers Hatfield notes, may well bring about the dismantling of the admirable — and unique — expression of Jeffersonian Democracy, the O&C Administration. |
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| Elmo R. Richardson
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| Moscow, Idaho |
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