Robert D. Johnston

The Politics of Oregon History

An Introduction to OHQ's Statehood Sesquicentennial Series

IN 1959, THE Oregon Historical Quarterly remained, as it had been for decades, an active celebrant of the state's pioneer past. Surprisingly, though, the journal did not take much formal notice of the centennial of Oregon statehood. When it came time to meditate on the big anniversary, powerful editor Thomas Vaughn turned not to a historian, but rather to a poet, to do the honors. From far-off Harvard, David McCord waxed lyrical about the wonders of the Oregon Country. In three short paragraphs of a kind of prose poem, McCord invoked all kinds of mythical wonders. From "the world's most famous trail" to "two decisive mountain ranges," from "rhapsodic Crater Lake" to "the majestic sweep of the Columbia River ... at Crown Point," Oregon was glorious. Naturally. While there were "desolate" areas that had produced "despair" for the squatter, such rain rarely intruded on the state's sunny historical parade. Even human relations were simple, and happy, for "the people everywhere are neighbors and friendly." McCord could conclude in only one majestic, rhapsodic, way: "How tremendous — 'Where rolls the Oregon!'?"¹

In 2009, there remains much for us to celebrate in Oregon's heritage. Over the past fifty years, however, the state's historical institutions and scholars of the state's history have become considerably more reflective and self-conscious about the meaning of their responsibility for Oregon's past. In good part, that is because the story of the state's history — the big storyline that provides the foundational bass line for each new article and book — has become much more complex, interesting, and critical.

Cities do not intrude on the seal of the state of Oregon. (Nor, for that matter, does rain.) The sun sets gorgeously behind the mountains, as well as over the state's major extractive industries (timber, agriculture, and fisheries). Yet, while economics and livelihood seem to trump all, there is room in the seal for politics. The only words within the central shield, The Union, may seem innocuous today but in the nineteenth century pointed toward the distinctly anti-slavery ideology of "free soil, free labor, and free men." The addition of Oregon in 1859 as the thirty-third state (note the number of stars) was a significant moment in the run-up to the Civil War. The state seal replaced two previous versions, one for the provisional government (1843–1849) and one for the territorial government (1849–1857).The members of the state constitutional convention appointed a committee to design the seal, which was adopted two years before statehood. Tellingly, the new state seal erased the Native American who had served as the only human presence in the territorial seal.

Historians, more than any other scholars, should know how dangerous it is to congratulate ourselves on our current enlightenment. We understand that we, too, will be judged, and perhaps even condemned, for our weaknesses, failures, and blindnesses. That said, we should be proud of our recent ability to discover anew the richness, complexity, and pleasures of the past in the Beaver State. Above all, we no longer need to look at history solely as the study of surface fireworks: the deadly wars, the dramatic elections, the lives of great individuals. Instead, we have begun to look in compelling and even captivating ways at some of the deep structures of our past. We can try to figure out how, for instance, a changing relationship between countryside and city has produced modern-day Oregonians, as have the continuities and dramatic transformations of the history of the environment. We can explore how family and gender relations, in ever-continuing transition, have influenced landscapes of personal identity as well as the possibilities of citizenship in modern Oregon. And we can examine the lives of relatively ordinary individuals along with the high and mighty, so we can see more vividly how Oregon has always been a land of varied people and experiences.²

TO CONTINUE THIS revitalized exploration of the study of the Oregon past is what we hope to accomplish in this special OHQ series dedicated to the 150^th anniversary of Oregon statehood, what we are calling the "Statehood Sesquicentennial Series." In the four issues of volume 110 of the Quarterly (throughout 2009), series articles will range throughout the state's past, illuminating some dark corners of Oregon history as well as shining new light on better-known episodes. Yet, while some authors will not shy away from looking at such specific, and traditional, events as Oregon's constitutional convention, OHQ editor Eliza Canty-Jones and I have also recruited scholars who avowedly embrace a more inclusive set of topics as well as novel modes of interpretation.

This approach is in line with recent changes in the historical discipline that are, I believe, generally all for the good. If we look back to the way historical scholarship was practiced in 1959, we generally see a story dominated by presidents, generals, and white men. While historians at that time taught us much about George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt (or, closer to home, Meriwether Lewis and Joseph Lane), it was generally only dissidents such as Charles and Mary Beard who tried to show that ordinary Americans were also part of the basic story line. Still, even the Beards generally focused on whites. A mere handful of scholars included African Americans in the national narrative, other minority groups were locked out of the history books, and women rarely made an appearance.³

This radically limited — and fundamentally false — vision of history properly lies in ruins. Despite some excesses of political correctness, newer generations of historians have recast history in a manner that is both truer and more inclusive. The protagonists of the best work in Oregon history over the past few decades have often been woman suffragists, gays and lesbians, and even victims of domestic violence. The region's ecology, too, has taken its place as a historical actor, as environmental history has become a respected academic specialty. This rewriting of Oregon history has represented a genuinely democratic revolution in the way we think about the state's past.⁴

One way that history has not changed in the past fifty years, however, lies in a frank recognition of its civic relevance. To be sure, historical scholars' first and foremost responsibility is to do their best to "get it right," and historians properly often frown on "presentism" — the distortion of history through a failure to give the past its own proper claims within our analysis. That said, in this series we hope to offer historical work that pushes us not just to the frontiers of historical scholarship, but also to places where we can recognize that scholarship's significance in conversations about the special claims of citizenship in the state of Oregon.

This recognition of history's contemporary public relevance — of the politics of history — matters a great deal at the level of public citizenship as Oregonians use their history to inform current civic consciousness. Consider, for example, President Barack Obama's recent invocations of Abraham Lincoln (with the help of national icons such as Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen).

Such recognition also matters a great deal at a personal level. One of the most powerful qualities of the new history is the way it invites participation from all of humanity. By looking at the lives of ordinary people in the past — the carpenter and the housekeeper, even the gambler and the prostitute — we become aware of the potential for non-presidents and non-generals to be active agents in the making of a more inclusive history. My own case might be instructive as a kind of invitation to readers to think through their own biographical experiences — and how they connect to the state's politics of history. (It is worth nothing that one of the attractive qualities of the newer history is the greater leeway it gives for an embrace of the autobiographical roots of historical inquiry.)

I spent my elementary school years in Fairview, at that point a small village of 1,000 located approximately a dozen miles from Portland. My mother was quite politically involved, serving on the Fairview City Council and working for then State Senator Betty Roberts, the ultimate 1974 Democratic nominee for the United States Senate and, later, the first female justice of the Oregon Supreme Court.⁵ After a high school sojourn in southern California, I returned to the Rose City for college, and I began to ponder what had shaped the political engagement of my mother and her friends. This question ultimately led me on the path to my dissertation, published in 2003 as The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon.

One of the chief tasks of The Radical Middle Class was to explain the origins of the so-called "Oregon System" — the initiative, referendum, recall, and other reform devices the state pioneered in the early twentieth century. Previous scholars seeking understanding of the origins of direct democracy had pointed to the Populist agitation of the late nineteenth century, the hostility toward political corruption of the Progressive Era, and the energy of a handful of reformers such as William U'Ren, Oregon's premiere legislative craftsman. These explanations were compelling, but they did not seem to provide a rich enough sense of what made ordinary citizens so insistent in their claims that plain folks should take over the reins of government.

I therefore directed my inquiries both to other historians — normal scholarly procedure — and to my ancestors. In the 1890s, my great-great-grandfather took up life as an orchardist in the Hood River Valley, to be followed in the fields by my great-grandfather, grandfather, and uncles. I figured that the ornery, independent, and cussed nature of the small farmers in my family who were actively involved in politics (my great-grandfather Ralph Perry, in particular, was an active Granger) had to speak in some way to the power behind the movement for direct democracy. This led me to investigate the life and culture of small business owners in early twentieth-century Portland, and I found that, contrary to the reputation independent entrepreneurs have for being hyper-conservative, many of them were in fact radical populists. Printers, grocers, bakers, and petty manufacturers — who because of their experience in small enterprise valued independence, equality, and justice — were sympathetic to labor, egalitarian in their economics, and convinced that The People had to govern in order to protect themselves against the depredations of a capitalist elite.

So, with thanks to my farming forebears, I was able to offer at least a provisional response to one of the most important civic issues that Oregonians have faced for the past century: the meaning of direct democracy. Other historians of my generation, such as David Peterson del Mar and Peter Boag, have similarly used their own personal lives and embededness in the state's past to explicitly generate, and seek the answers to, pressing questions that connect the Oregon past and present (in del Mar's case, domestic violence, and in Boag's case, the status of gays).⁶ What my personal adventure in early twentieth-century Oregon history also encouraged me to do, in a more general way, was decisively broaden what politics meant for Oregonians — and, by extension, what it might mean for us today. We — historians and citizens alike — should, it seems, look not just at the ballot box, but also at the cash register and even the family dinner table, in order to best discern the civic visions and dreams of ordinary folks. That, in turn, led me to believe that perhaps the most important question we can ask of Oregon history is: How can it help us think of ourselves as better citizens — more knowledgeable, more open-minded, more committed, and, ultimately, more democratic?

WHILE THE RELEVANCE of the past to today's politics does not directly animate all the authors in this series, all of them definitely address the politics of Oregon history. The statehood sesquicentennial is fundamentally a political commemoration, signaling Oregon's becoming a state in the tumultuous run-up to the Civil War. It seems safe to say that February 14, 1859, marked the most decisive political event in Oregon history. Yet, once more hearkening back to 1959, politics intruded little on David McCord's reflections for the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Noting the state's "refreshing unpredictability at the polls," McCord simply called out Oregon as "our best example of democracy at work." The OHQ sesquicentennial series, in contrast, will focus above all on the fascinating — and newly expansive — political history of the state. Governors and senators will make plenty of appearances in this series, but so also will, for example, demographic data that can add to our understanding of the political split between rural and metropolitan Oregon.

As part of the sesquicentennial series, each issue of the OHQ in 2009 will include a combination of richly detailed original scholarship focused on a particular event or individual and more general reconsiderations of the state's political past that vault across decades (and even centuries). Essays and research articles that reconsider Oregon political history will reflect on large issues and traverse decades. Authors will address questions such as: What is distinctive about Oregon political history, and what are its major continuities? How have women made, and remade, the state's politics? How have race and ethnicity informed Oregon's patterns of political inclusions, and exclusions? Why have Oregonians traditionally hated taxes so much — or have they? In turn, Oregon Voices articles will feature biographies of individuals who are not prominently featured in the historical record or who deserve consideration from new perspectives. In either case, these lives can tell us much about the contours of citizenship in the Beaver State.

We open the series with three impressive articles by William G. Robbins, Carl Abbott, and Janice Dilg. Robbins, a long-time creative voice in Oregon history who has become the most prolific scholar on the subject, brings his considerable wisdom and experience to bear on re-thinking "Town and Country in Oregon: A Conflicted Legacy." Traditionally, when Americans have thought of "the country" or imagined past rural landscapes, they have often envisioned a pastoral idyll, where small farmers cultivate their forty acres amid a caring, democratic community. This is how I still prefer to remember the childhood years I spent at my grandparents' Pine Grove orchard; perhaps also noteworthy here is the agricultural imagery in the Oregon state seal. Yet, Robbins reminds us that the countryside was always much more complex, and less idyllic, than such romantic visions imply. He instead analyzes the countryside from the perspective of its deep connection to that wild, untamed beast called "capitalism." Since the beginnings of white settlement in the mid nineteenth century, property, market relations, and finance have dominated the fate of Oregon farmers and farm workers, as has been the case throughout the American West — and throughout the globe.

Oregon's rural areas have also, from the beginning, been intimately intertwined with its urban places. Following the important work of environmental historian William Cronon, Robbins points toward the conflicted relationship between countryside and urban areas as one of the most important tissues connecting the whole of Oregon history. Much of this relationship involved sheer dependency, as bankers and transportation monopolies gained control of timber, fish, and wheat, leaving farmers poor and fishermen desperate. Robbins, a historian whose work contains all kinds of radical implications, is not afraid to define this relationship as "colonialism" and points to the need to use words such as exploitation when looking at some of the basic patterns of Oregon's past.

From the laying of the Oregon and California Railroad in the nineteenth century to the formulation of tax policy in the twentieth, citizens with immense economic and political power have taken advantage of their privileged positions in order to develop Oregon's many resources. Still, Robbins finds much more in this story than domination and exploitation. Rural people questioned, resisted, and protested the rise and consolidation of capitalism. As early as 1872, Umpqua Valley farmers raised their voices against the collusion of railroads and merchants who they believed were acting in a manner "detrimental to the interest of the producing and laboring classes." Grangers, Populists, direct democrats, and New Dealers followed in this tradition, hoping to bring equality and dignity to those who labored hardest in the countryside.

Still, Robbins implies that by the end of the twentieth century — with timber resources in ruins and other economic strategies for rural renaissance proving unviable — the Oregon countryside had largely been conquered. Ex-mill workers might rail against environmentalists or rich new residents from California, but these are more surface struggles. When we use history to think about rural Oregon, Robbins implicitly argues, we learn that the fundamental lessons involve increasing inequality, corporate attempts to repeal land use planning, and plunging global financial markets, rather than the natural beauty of rivers or the restoration of independent homesteads.

In the end, then, Robbins's essay, which draws inspiration from various strains of anti-capitalist thought, is a piece of scholarship that powerfully intervenes in the politics of Oregon history. Rather than thinking of Oregon as paradise, or even as a place where we might be moving in the right direction, Robbins forces us to consider that citizens in Oregon have been — and still are — in thrall to a capitalist economic system that consistently undermines democracy and equality. The political implications of this vision of history are enormous, although admittedly not fully apparent. Most of all, Robbins's article leads us to a rich and fruitful set of questions. If the relationship between city and country is inherently conflictual and exploitative, then what does that mean about the state's obligations toward those being exploited? If Oregon is, despite its surface aesthetics, truly a land where The City is destined to rule, then does the countryside really hold any special claims on the commonwealth? And, perhaps most importantly, if capitalism is Oregon's general operative principle, then how much power do citizens really hold over their fates?

While Robbins focuses on the countryside in his essay, he also tells us much about the growth of cities, particularly the rise of Portland to economic power. Carl Abbott — in an essay originally written, like Robbins's, for a conference on rural and urban interdependence — continues this exploration of different urban systems in Oregon history. In "From Urban Frontier to Metropolitan Region: Oregon's Cities from 1870 to 2008," Abbott seeks above all to explain the relative significance of Oregon's urban eight-foot gorilla. Portland has always been #1, of course, but the history of its dominance has changed in intriguing and important ways from the nineteenth century to the present. Abbott uses ideas from urban geographers to categorize three distinct periods in Oregon's urban history: 1870 to 1920, 1920 to the 1970s, and the 1970s to the present.

The first period, which immediately establishes what is truly distinctive about Oregon's demographic landscape, covers what American historians generally call the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Here Abbott traces the rise of Portland as a "primate city." During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Rose City moved easily, and dramatically, to the top of the urban hierarchy. Portland's prominence was so great that it pushed aside potential competitors, from Astoria to Albany, with nary a look back. Second- and third-place cities often remain influential in various urban systems, Abbott explains, but that was not the case in "distinctly unbalanced" Oregon. By 1920, more than one-third of the state's citizens lived in Portland, with the city's population more than twice the size of the next twenty cities combined. While it had lost a bitter struggle for regional supremacy to Seattle, the Rose City's demographic domination of its own state went unchallenged — and still appeared to be on the upswing.

The story of the second period, in turn, reveals an appreciable movement away from complete cultural and political urban domination. From roughly World War I to the Vietnam War, Portland remained supreme, but to a significantly lesser degree than during the previous era. Cities such as Medford and Klamath Falls gained population and found new power within their micro-regions. Portland's share of the state's population actually declined all the way to 18 percent (although the figure for the greater Portland metropolitan area was as high as 42 percent). Most interestingly — and this seems to mark a significant contrast to Robbins's analysis — Abbott argues that common bonds of culture united Oregonians across the divide of city and countryside. Many poor rural people spent harvest time on farms before coming to the Rose City's large skid road over the winter; in turn, middle-class rural residents shared with their urban cousins a common belief in economic growth. Any talk of "two Oregons" foundered at a time when an Oregon governor was just as likely to come from Condon or Corvallis as from Portland.

The third era of the Oregon urban system is our own age; arguably, this period contains the highest level of conflict. The story again is one of increasing balance amid Portland's continued dominance, although in the twenty-first century, metropolitan areas (not just cities) have become the most important actors in the state's demographic dramas. And metropolitan Oregon, ranging from Bend to Eugene, from Newport to Hood River, now clearly has interests and values distinct from increasingly beleaguered hinterlands. Senate Bill 100, the foundation of the state's pioneering land use planning system, best symbolizes the rift, as an overwhelming number of Willamette Valley legislators voted in favor of the bill while only nine out of thirty representatives from the coast and eastern Oregon favored the measure. Still, Abbott argues, both city and countryside have made an effective, if implicit, pact. Metropolitan residents protect agricultural markets and send plenty of tax money to support public institutions in less-prosperous parts of the state. Rural citizens, in turn, have accepted (not necessarily happily) the role as a home for tourism, garbage, and prisons.

Carl Abbott is not as overtly politicized a historian as William Robbins. While it is difficult to walk away from Robbins's work without realizing that he is intensely critical of capitalism, Abbott is more circumspect about the way his accounts of the past engage the public sphere. Still, at the end of his article, Abbott turns to an exploration of politics that does effectively connect history to contemporary civic life. Placing twenty-first century voting patterns in historical perspective, he forecasts an increasing electoral split between the metropolitan culture of northwestern Oregon and eastern and (especially) southern Oregon. Voters in Jackson and Union counties are the strongest supporters of anti–land use planning initiatives and referenda (such as Measure 49), while those in the metropolis voted the other way. Residents of Wallowa and Klamath counties cast their ballots against gay rights (Measure 9); their urban counterparts voted the other way. In contrast to previous periods in Oregon history, difference in party affiliation is also growing, with the metropolis increasingly Democratic and the countryside increasingly Republican. The implications are, once again, quite significant. While various commentators predict the end to the "culture wars" that have wracked America since the 1990s, Oregon may instead see increasing political and cultural conflict. Perhaps "two Oregons" might not prove so inaccurate. As Abbott instead seems to gently predict, metropolitan life and politics might become so dominant in the coming decades that Oregonians could face the prospect of the death of any meaningfully viable rural culture in Oregon. And if that happens, what distinctive traditions — in literature, in ecological visions, in economics — will Oregonians lose?

William Robbins and Carl Abbott take on large themes that traverse the entire course of Oregon history. Janice Dilg, in contrast, takes on a specific event, the passage of Oregon's first minimum wage law, interpreted through the prism of a singular life. Originally intended to be the first Oregon Voices feature in our series, Dilg turned an insightful biographical portrait of Caroline Gleason/Sister Miriam Theresa into a full research article. Although the article remains anchored in the life of a particular individual, Dilg has conducted a full and fresh exploration of early twentieth-century reform politics. Her article, therefore, is at least as instructive about the possibilities of democratic politics in Oregon history as are the broad sweeps through the past outlined by Robbins and Abbott.

"'For Working Women in Oregon': Caroline Gleason/Sister Miriam Theresa and Oregon's Minimum Wage Law" introduces readers to someone who has previously appeared in the margins of historical writing but who deserves the kind of full-scale treatment Dilg provides. (Indeed, I believe a book on Gleason/Theresa would be a quite valuable contribution.) Gleason, a Minnesotan who received a vigorous Catholic upbringing and education, came to Oregon in 1908, after graduating from college, to work under the tutelage of longtime family friend Father Edwin V. O'Hara. O'Hara, deeply influenced by the pro-labor and social justice teachings of the early twentieth-century Church, introduced Gleason to the energetic world of Catholic social reform in Oregon. Starting off as a Latin teacher at Jefferson High School, Gleason soon began to work with the Catholic Women's League, serving the homeless and troubled. Impressed with her abilities and commitment, O'Hara chose Gleason to do a social survey of wages and working conditions that would serve as support for a minimum wage law for women the Consumers' League of Oregon would eventually advocate for.

As Dilg effectively demonstrates, such a law was at the heart of Progressive Era reform. So named because of the impressive efflorescence of reform activity during the early twentieth century, the Progressive Era used to be considered by historians as having flowed from a fairly unitary impulse to democratize politics and regulate corporations. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the twin Progressive Titans. In recent decades, however, scholars have significantly deepened and diversified the Progressive Era, pointing to the wide variety of (often conflicting) reforms that were on the period's table, ranging from direct democracy and a ban on child labor to Prohibition and coercive eugenics.⁷

Women's political activities like Gleason's are at the center of this new understanding of the Progressive Era. Female activism extended far beyond the most famous example of Jane Addams, the much-cited "saint" of Chicago's Hull-House settlement house. Throughout the country, ordinary women forged dense networks of voluntary associations — many of them female-only — in order to best serve their fellow citizens through movements for sanitation, social welfare, recreational space, and public health. Yet these women were far from politically united. Besides needing to negotiate the ever-present divides of race and class, there were two fundamentally competing ideologies of women's empowerment during the early twentieth century. The "equality" ideal held that the proper route for feminism was to ensure that women had exactly the same legal and political obligations, rights, and responsibilities as men. This is the philosophy that has largely triumphed in our political culture, and the one we are most familiar with.

A century ago, however, it was the "difference" philosophy that held greater sway with female reformers, as well as with society at large. This ideal held that women and men truly were different — perhaps because of nature, certainly because of the intense cultural expectation that women either were or would become mothers. Women were more nurturant than men, according to advocates of this ideology, and because of that were not as able to deal with the strenuous (indeed, often vicious) forces of competition unleashed by an unrestrained capitalism. To force an artificial equality on women would be to ensure that women — particularly weak, working-class women who could not protect themselves — would suffer from the depredations of merciless and cutthroat employers. Reformers reasoned, therefore, that while improved wages, hours, and working conditions for all workers would be best in an ideal world, it was more important in this world to seek the highest level of protection possible for female laborers.

From today's perspective, we can more easily see the condescension and oppressive nature of supposedly kindly reform efforts such as protective legislation. Dilg certainly understands this, but she places such maternalism in a fully historical perspective that helps us better appreciate the ideas and actions of reformers such as Gleason. While Gleason was part of a community of reformers who, generally, would have preferred to pass legislation supporting all workers, she (and they) clearly understood the limited range of options specific to early twentieth-century women. Not only were male employers ever-ready to take advantage of female employees, unions were also generally exclusively male and often openly antagonistic to women. Moreover, the Supreme Court had made it clear in such cases as Lochner vs. New York (1905) that almost any government legislation that benefitted male workers would be struck down as an infringement of the right to free contract. The court had, however, given its nod of approval to protective legislation for women in the classic case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), which had originated in a Portland laundry.

So when Gleason actively sought out single mothers living in poverty, desperately trying to raise their children in a hostile environment, it made much sense for her to join with those who advocated a minimum wage, hours restrictions, and better working conditions — for women alone. This, then, is the story Dilg skillfully narrates, of Gleason working to get the legislature to pass such a law, serving as executive secretary of the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC) that implemented the measure, and advocating for the survival of such legislation in an increasingly hostile and "un-progressive" political and legal climate. Dilg also briefly narrates Gleason's life after the IWC, when she joined the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary order and took up the religious name of Sister Miriam Theresa. From her posts at St. Mary's Academy and Marylhurst College, Sister Theresa continued to work for social reform as an activist and scholar.

What are the political implications of Dilg's article? Perhaps, to begin with, that it is important to understand that feminism has, historically, many varieties and much complexity. Even though it is today difficult in many circles to call a belief in female difference and the need for the special protection of women "feminist," a reckoning with this historical complexity may well help citizens understand that visions of social reform and human decency have always come from a wide variety of perspectives — including from ideas that are no longer popular. Gleason/Theresa's life also points toward a need to recognize the connection between religion and progressive political action. This connection was easily understood a century ago and still survive, although today in a more subterranean fashion. Dilg's article also serves as a quite concrete illustration of the desirability of moving away, at least to some extent, from a historical focus on governors and senators and toward an examination of determined groups of ordinary citizens (often women) who were frequently Oregon's fount for social justice. And finally — as we learned in kindergarten — Caroline Gleason's story reminds us that individuals really do make a difference in helping to change the world. Unfortunately, it is still much more likely that kindergartners will learn only about the Columbuses and Washingtons of the world, never receiving exposure to the arguably more relevant example of a middle-class activist such as Gleason.

HISTORIANS ARE animated by a sometimes peculiar and quirky set of concerns. We want to know everything about a subject, and our own ornery nature can lead us to believe that every single small detail we track down holds great significance. Despite the dangers of such single-minded obsessiveness, I actually honor this occasionally antiquarian impulse. When we uncover and preserve a particular detail, we are holding in our hands the remnants of at least one past human life. That can be by itself, and alone, a sacred task: one that, according to Jewish tradition, suggests the saving of the entire world.

Nevertheless, the best history usually, if not always, connects with the present, and thus with the civic realm. This means historians and citizens — all of us becoming, in an ideal world, citizen-historians — should be in the same boat, speaking to each other about common concerns and seeking together to find answers to some of our most pressing public concerns.⁸ Fortunately, as the Oregon Historical Quarterly has demonstrated throughout much of its long history, it is quite possible to have such a mutually beneficial conversation. Please, then, consider this sesquicentennial series an invitation to join in a renewed, historically rich, civic dialogue — to contribute together to the politics of Oregon history.

NOTES

I would like to thank Larry Lipin and Harry Stein for their help with this essay. I especially wish to thank Eliza Canty-Jones for her invitation to be involved with this series, as well as for her excellent editing.

^1.� David McCord, note inside front cover, Oregon Historical Quarterly 60:1 (March 1959).

^2.� For a profound reflection on how, at least during an earlier era, the traditional way of writing Oregon history served the cultural and political purposes of the state's elites, see Rick Harmon, "Thomas Condon and the 'Natural Selection' of Oregon Pioneers," Oregon Historical Quarterly 99(Winter 1998–9): 436–71.

^3.� One of the best treatments of this subject is more hopeful than I am about the inclusiveness of past historical practice. See Ellen Fitzpatrick, History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Also, while the Oregon Historical Quarterly of the period generally followed the practices I have mentioned, the 1959 volume does not include as many stories about presidents and generals as it does descriptions of work and travel undertaken by less-well-known people.

^4.� See Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Boag, "Sex and Politics in Progressive-Era Portland and Eugene: The 1912 Same-Sex Vice Scandal," Oregon Historical Quarterly 100:2 (Summer 1999): 158–81; Boag, "?'Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?' Gay Culture and Activism in the Rose City between World War II and Stonewall" Oregon Historical Quarterly 105:1 (Spring 2004): 6–39; David Peterson del Mar, What Trouble I have Seen: A History of Violence against Wives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). For the best interpretive work of Oregon history in this new tradition, see del Mar, Oregon's Promise: An Interpretive History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003).

^5.� See Betty Roberts, with Gail Wells, With Grit and By Grace: Breaking Trails in Politics and Law, A Memoir (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2008).

^6.� See del Mar, What Trouble I Have Seen; and Boag, Same-Sex Affairs.

^7.� The best recent treatment of the plural nature of the age's reforms is Maureen Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s to 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Robert D. Johnston, "Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography" Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1(January 2002): 68–92. The latest argument for the unitary approach is Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003).

^8.� For some reflections on "citizen-historians," see Robert D. Johnston, "Beyond 'The West': Regionalism, Liberalism, and the Evasion of Politics in the New Western History," Rethinking History 2 (Summer 1998): 239–77.

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