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Oregon Historical Quarterly

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WILLIAM G. ROBBINS

Town and Country in Oregon

A Conflicted Legacy

THE LANDSCAPES OF the American and Canadian wests offer up great distances between towns, a lower intensity and volume of human activity, and in many places, abandoned farmsteads and townsites. Ian Frazier's 1989 best-seller Great Plains provides a blunt assessment of that West: "Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere." In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, published in 1993, Kathleen Norris referred to Dakota's west-river country as "a school for humility," where people's "inability to influence either big business or big government is turning all Dakotans into a kind of underclass." Because the High Plains has always been a sparsely settled place with few urban centers, it has long been customary for historians and journalists to characterize its relationship to the rest of the nation as colonial. But the High Plains is at one with significant portions of other western states that journalist Joel Garreau once described as "The Empty Quarter."1 1
      For America west of the Continental Divide, the coastal reaches of California represent something far different from the High Plains. Nearly sixty years ago, Carey McWilliams, arguably California's greatest twentieth-century writer, suggested that for most of its history California represented all that the word metropolis brings to mind — images of power and influence, a centeredness to things, seats of business and cultural institutions. Oregon, with its major metropolitan center in the lower Willamette Valley and its vast, less-populated interior region, represents a microcosm of California and its relations with states on the Pacific slope. From the time of the California Gold Rush, rural areas in the Oregon outback and the Pacific Northwest have served as a literal treasure house of resources for the expanding industrial appetites of Atlantic-centered nation-states. What is fascinating about Oregon and the American West is the spectacular scope and rapid pace of change during the past century and a half.2 2

 
Figure 1
    This photograph of the small settlement of Linkville (later known as Klamath Falls) in south central Oregon in 1886 illustrates the vast sweep of landscape and the low population numbers of many eastern Oregon communities. The relatively isolated town's population was listed at 19,462 in 2000.

    OHS photo file 618 A, ba011279
 
 
      The roots to that dramatic transformation can be best understood within the broader context of the ever-shifting world of modern capitalism — its propensity for technological dynamism, its endless innovation, and its relentless pursuit of new marketing opportunities and new sources of raw material and labor. Because capitalism became the organizing principle for much of the world economy following the Industrial Revolution, it provides insights to change in the American West and helps explain the region's integration into national and international trade and investment relations. It follows, therefore, that Oregon's development over the past 150 years has never occurred in isolation from broader currents of national and global economic activity. The state and the greater West have moved in concert with larger trade and capital exchanges, relationships that vastly accelerated with the coming of steel rails to the region.3 3
      The emergence of urban centers such as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle — and their association with extensive hinterlands — has also developed in tandem with investment and marketing initiatives, oftentimes far distant from the region itself. At the close of the nineteenth century, political philosopher Marshall Berman argued that the principal force driving the "maelstrom of modern life" was the "ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market." That far-reaching global system, he observed, was "capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability."4 In that sense, the late nineteenth-century American West was a prototype for modern industrialized capitalism, providing a warehouse of natural resources and an investment arena for eastern U.S. and European capital — and suffering dramatic plunges in the business cycle when corporate bosses withdrew their investments.5

 4
AS A METHODOLOGY for studying Western American history, relations between country and city provide important insights into the spatial distribution of power and influence. Although the urban-hinterland nexus poses questions of ambiguity and clarity, it still provides useful ideas for understanding power relationships within the West and with more distant centers of capital. Fernand Braudel, the distinguished French historian, put the case succinctly when he compared center and peripheral areas, in which the latter were "subordinates rather than true participants" in decision making. There were, he observed, "increasingly fewer advantages as one moves out from the triumphant pole." Braudel raised a fundamental issue about that relationship: the lack of autonomy in the countryside.6 The persistence of political protest in the rural West — from the Populists of the 1890s to the county-sovereignty movement of the past twenty years — provides ideological strength to the rural-urban distinction. 5
      The use of urban-hinterland relationships to explain historical development is not meant to suggest that these are unchanging, static categories. Rather, I propose to treat rural and urban settings as dynamic, always in the process of readjustment, but still representing categories of the more powerful and less powerful.7 Although the volume of scholarly work on urban-hinterland relations has multiplied during the past few decades, most of the debates have involved Third-World dependency issues. Until recently, scholars have given little consideration to those questions within the United States. 6
      Before the Second World War, historians viewed the American West as a colonial sector, subordinate to distant metropolitan-based economies. With the growth of early urban centers in the West — San Francisco, Portland, Seattle — the region developed its own constellation of metropoles, each with ties to its own tributary hinterlands. In Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon observed that city and countryside shared common features, with the city benefitting from profits accruing to its banking and mortgage houses. Geographer Michael Conzen portrayed the nature of that relationship: "The larger the city, the wider its horizons, and the more elaborate its set of hinterlands."8 The stunning rapidity of resettlement in the West and the development of vibrant resource-based economies paralleled the emergence of the United States as a global power.9 As such, the region's growing urban centers and their resource-rich hinterlands were critical elements to the successes of the Atlantic industrial world.10 7
      Oregon and the American West were being incorporated into the expanding world of industrial capitalism at a time when the global economy was becoming truly capitalistic. Investors representing centers of surplus capital were literally traveling the far corners of the globe looking for investment opportunities. With its prodigious fish runs, valuable mineral deposits, rich agricultural lands, and abundant stands of timber, investors saw great promise in the Pacific Northwest. The ideology driving that rush of investment focused on transforming western landscapes into wealth-producing instruments. The antecedents to Oregon's modern places, therefore, are best understood in terms of national and global conditions that powered the dynamics of change.11 8
      Rural sectors of western America were affected in still other ways — especially those related to technological advances in transportation and communication that favored expanding urban centers. San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle all developed extensive tributary hinterlands by virtue of advantages in location, entrepreneurial drive, and their capacity to process and market natural resources. While San Francisco was the standard-bearer in extending the reach of capital into the countryside, lesser metropoles such as Portland were part of that story. Colonialism, as many scholars have indicated, is both an internal and an external phenomenon. Although Portland merchants had significant ties to their more powerful counterparts in San Francisco, by virtue of their own capital assets and ties to local banking houses, they were in a commanding position with respect to the Willamette and Columbia corridors. The division between dominant and dominated economies, therefore, extends from subregions of the nation state to the greater capitalist world economy, a set of relationships that prevails to the present day.12 9
      Portland has arguably been the driving force in Oregon's economy since its early days as "Stumptown," capturing the trade of the Willamette Valley and shipping wheat and other grain products to oceanic markets. Historian Carlos Schwantes points out that Portland was the only Pacific Northwest settlement to develop into a city before the arrival of transcontinental railroads. With Portland's harbor providing sufficient draft for deep-water ships, its waterfront was piled high with "lumber, wheat, fruit, and other farm products ... for distant markets." When the Ladd and Tilton Bank opened in 1859 and the telegraph reached the city in 1864, Portland solidified its status as the region's preeminent financial center. Booming interior mining camps in the 1860s boosted the city's prosperity, and its steamboats monopolized traffic on the Columbia River. "Gold and wheat made Portland rich and smug by the late 1870s," Schwantes writes, "a place untroubled ... and not a little complacent in its role as the region's premier metropolis."13 10
      With its built environment on the west side of the Willamette River about twelve miles above its junction with the Columbia, Portland's population of 2,874 in 1860 was three times greater than any other settlement in the Pacific Northwest. The Oregonian boasted in 1867 that Portland was "more distinctively a commercial city" than any other community in the state, the signs of maturity and domination over an expanding tributary region. The regional booster publication, West Shore, labeled Portland "The Oregon Emporium" in 1875, because it had captured the trade of its interior at the time of the California gold rush. Plank roads built to rich prairie lands west and south of town during the 1850s contributed mightily to Portland's preeminence on the Willamette and provided farmers with a convenient means to deliver their crops to the city. The city's business community worked to connect "the external commerce of the country," West Shore reported, "to bring the prairie schooner and the ocean-going vessel together." Those booster narratives ignored the fact that Portland's Front Street merchants — William Ladd, Josiah Failing, and A.M. Starr — raised most of the money to extend the city's growing infrastructure.14 11
      Portland grew apace — in size and influence — developing a trading network that fronted in two directions, outward to oceanic markets and sources of capital, and inward via the Willamette and Columbia corridors to a vast, resource-rich hinterland. Despite the exaggerated claims of its boosters, however, Portland was actually an intermediary settlement, a medium for exchange between distant centers of capital and its own outback. In that reciprocal relationship, mercantile shops and warehouses in smaller interior communities paid tribute to Portland, just as Portland merchants and bankers paid tribute to coastwide merchants in San Francisco. Although "Stumptown" was a mere village compared to the Bay Area metropolis, historian Dorothy Johansen aptly described Portland "as the 'city that gravity built.' Down the Willamette flowed the produce of the Valley; down the Columbia came the immigrants and the riches of Idaho mines and interior wheat fields." In each exchange, California ships delivered materials and supplies for distribution to the Willamette Valley and to sternwheelers plying the waters of the Columbia and returned home with produce loaded on board in Portland.15 12

 
Figure 2
    Taking advantage of the discovery of gold in southern Oregon, Portland merchants William S. Ladd and Charles E. Tilton incorporated the Ladd and Tilton Bank in 1859 to receive deposits, make loans, and provide banking services to customers. Within a few years, Ladd and Tilton was a very profitable enterprise, with a reach that extended throughout Oregon's western valleys and beyond.

    OHS photo file 1762, OrHi 3476
 
 
      In the midst of the expanding commerce on the region's rivers, John C. Ainsworth, Simeon G. Reed, and Robert R. Thompson pooled their financial resources in 1860 to form the region's first business monopoly, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company (OSN). The OSN was a $5 million operation by the late 1860s, managing water and land routes far into the interior Columbia drainage. Controlling portages at Cascades Rapids and a stretch of the river above The Dalles was the key to OSN's success; therefore, the company built six-mile and fourteen-mile railroads to facilitate passage around the rapids and falls.16 13
      Although it operated powerful and fashionable sternwheelers and moved a huge volume of passengers and freight, the company's monopoly provoked widespread discontent in eastern Oregon and in Washington Territory. Baker City's Bedrock Democrat described the OSN as "a positive curse to Eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Washington Territories." The newspaper reported that Reed, Ladd, and Ainsworth were "Codfish aristocrats,... sordid and grasping," guilty of "overreaching avarice." Portland historian E. Kimbark MacColl provides an appropriate summary of the company's influence: "luxurious passenger service and monopolistic freight rates created and sustained the veritable cash machine that was bitterly resented by the eastern Oregon merchants and farmers."17 14
      Because the San Francisco market dominated Portland's wheat exports, local merchants attempted to make themselves independent of that larger city's markets and began shipping wheat directly to Liverpool, England, in 1869. With Portland merchants controlling all agricultural exports from the Willamette Valley, Corvallis-area entrepreneurs, backed by British capital, pursued a short-lived attempt in the 1870s — via a proposed Corvallis-Eastern railroad — to circumvent Portland's monopoly control of export markets. With an engaging southern colonel, T. Egenton Hogg, as front man, the company completed a railroad from Corvallis through the Coast Range to Yaquina Bay and east to Albany in 1886. With ambitions to build a transcontinental link across the Cascades to the Idaho border, Hogg's construction crews reached the small settlement of Idanha at the end of the 1880s, still fifteen miles from Santiam Pass. At that point, the company went bankrupt and the mid-valley dream of being free of Portland merchants and bankers collapsed.18 15
      As for Portland's boosters, they believed that railroads were the transcendent vehicle to the city's success. As a proud symbol of industrial capitalism, railroads represented an aggressive move to take advantage of the region's natural bounty. According to the Oregonian, the new revolutionary means of transportation would prove "an indispensable adjunct of civilization." From the perspective of rural Oregonians, however, "natural bounty" reflected hard work, diligent attention to detail, and good stewardship. Portland promoters saw themselves at the epicenter of rail construction to and from the city, recipients of the wealth of a bounteous hinterland. Beyond the lower Willamette metropolis, others were more cautious about the benefits that a railroad would bring. Jesse Applegate, an early settler in the upper Umpqua Valley, worried that a proposed route from Portland to Sacramento might "bind us in vassalage to our strong neighbor [San Francisco] forever."19 16
      Portland developers remained undaunted, however, confident that the city's physical location at the "Railroad Crossroads" of the Pacific Northwest would attract the region's business, just as "the physical law which makes water run down hill." A month or so before the Northern Pacific line reached Portland in 1883, the Oregonian predicted that isolated sections of the continent along the upper Columbia River would soon be sending their productions to "River City."20 Portlanders were ambitious, as the Oregonian put it in a celebratory New Year's issue in 1888, believing that the wealth of "eastern and western Oregon, eastern Washington and Idaho" would pour into the city's "expanding clasp," bringing "a large share of commercial profit and substantial wealth to the city."21 By the early twentieth century, Portland-based trade publications would far surpass the Oregonian in anticipating the wealth that would flow to the growing settlement on the lower Willamette. 17
      Inherent to the dynamic alterations to the region's landscape were growing tensions between metropolis and hinterland, between city and country, between expanding urban centers and rural places beyond — areas whose chief economic importance lay in what they shipped to the metropolis. With its historic urban center on the lower Willamette River, Oregon provides an abundance of testimony to the influence of urban financial, social, and political power. That story begins to assume its modern form with the building of the Oregon and California Railroad south from Portland in the early 1870s. For the Willamette and Umpqua valleys, the new mode of transportation initiated a shift from subsistence to commercial agriculture, raised land values, introduced a literal cornucopia of mass-produced farm equipment, and most important to this discussion, created anger against the exploitive practices of the railroad and Portland banking and mortgage houses.22 18
      The completion of the Oregon and California Railroad from Portland through the Willamette Valley to Roseburg in the upper Umpqua Valley provides a modest textbook example of conflicts that flared among rural producers, merchants, banking houses, and railroads — the mode of transportation that made commercial farming enterprises possible. The confrontation erupted shortly after the tracks reached Roseburg in the fall of 1872, with farmers accusing local merchants and the railroad of working in collusion to deprive them of the just profits from their labor. They charged merchants with making secret agreements with the railroad to raise shipping rates on grain crops and the wool clip. With the same broadsides, farmers attacked Portland bankers for differentiated lending practices that discriminated against rural citizens. In response, Umpqua Valley sheep ranchers formed the Wool Growers' Association to protect against monopolies "detrimental to the interest of the producing and laboring classes," an initiative that led directly to the organization of Umpqua Grange, Number 29, in 1873.23 19
      The Grangers (Patrons of Husbandry) represented the advance wave of rural protest movements that spread across agricultural sections of the United States during the 1870s in response to the increasing corporatization of the American economy. Other movements followed — the Farmers Alliances in the 1880s, the Populist challenge in the mid 1890s, and continuing insurgencies during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Rural people who participated in those remonstrations pursued railroad regulation (even government ownership), greater equity in tax policy, the formation of marketing cooperatives, and other collaborative enterprises to contend against volatile market conditions. When the United States descended into its first large-scale industrial depression in 1893, agrarian reformers formed short-lived alliances with industrial laborers in a common cause against the forces of capital, both identifying themselves as members of the "productive classes."24 20

 
Figure 3
    Although the Oregon and California Railroad extended from Portland to Roseburg by late 1872, financial problems delayed construction to the south until the mid 1880s. Reconstituted under the Southern Pacific, the line was completed through Ashland and into California in 1887.

    OHS photo file 891-B-13, OrHi 96791
 
 
      Grangers across the Pacific Northwest formed cooperative stores, warehouses, and grain elevators to eliminate middlemen costs and to give themselves a stronger position in the marketplace. The cooperative schemes enjoyed occasional successes; however, lack of capital, inexperienced management, opposition from financial institutions, and aggressive competing businesses caused most of them to fail. Although the Grange declined as an effective agrarian political institution in the Midwest, it remained a significant player in Oregon and Washington politics until the First World War.25 Similar to the Populists, the Grange offered a revised version of capitalism that would protect small landholders, but subject large land owners, transportation systems, and financial institutions to government regulation or ownership. The collective forces of capital — banking institutions, railroads, the emergence of commodity exchanges, and other related factors — overwhelmed the efforts of the Grange to effectively address agrarian problems related to those forces. 21
      Although late nineteenth-century rural insurgencies varied in temper and ideology, Marilyn Watkins argues in her study of western Washington's Lewis County that farmers "shared the goal of securing government protection from the vagaries of an international capitalist economy and the abuses of industrial corporations." Because they envisioned "a cooperative commonwealth" where producing classes enjoyed "the fruits of their labor and justice prevailed," Lewis County's farmers supported the Populists in the early 1890s. In southern Oregon's Jackson County — another center of rural discontent during the 1890s — farmers protested railroad and flour-mill monopolies, inequitable taxes, and the low prices they received for their orchard crops. The Jacksonville Democrat Times declared in December 1891: "this is a struggle of the people against plutocracy." Jackson County gave Populist candidate James B. Weaver a plurality of the presidential vote in 1892 and overwhelmingly supported the Democratic-Populist fusion candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896.26 22
      The dimensions of rural protest in early twentieth-century Oregon adjusted to changes taking place in the greater world of American capitalism, especially moves at the state and federal level toward regulating corporate behavior. Although Democratic gubernatorial candidate Sylvester Pennoyer called for regulating railroad rates as early as 1886, the Oregon legislature moved haltingly, creating an ineffective Board of Railroad Commissioners in 1887 and then abolishing the board in 1898. Joseph Simon, a Portland railroad lawyer and Oregon Senate President, led the move to abolish the commission. Agrarian interests finally achieved a modest victory in 1907, when Oregon lawmakers reestablished a railroad commission with limited regulatory power. The commission's principal contribution was to gather and publish information on interstate railroads, especially the great profitability of some lines.27 Although the revamped commission provided farmers with data about excessive profiteering, their protests about inequitable railroad rates and warehouse and grain elevator charges would continue into the future. 23
      Resistance of another kind emerged in the early twentieth century, largely from rural sectors of Oregon but also with crosscurrents of cooperation between Grangers and organized labor. Rural opposition to what were mostly urban initiatives took some unexpected twists and turns, especially with respect to Progressive Era reforms designed to open public and private lands to resource production and to impose state regulations on taking of fish and wildlife. An even more acrimonious divisiveness between rural and urban constituencies involved state initiatives to use tax monies to build a scenic highway through the Columbia River Gorge. Those contentious issues involved class and cultural differences, different perspectives regarding productive versus leisure use of resources, and disagreements about the appropriate use of tax revenue.28 Both farmers and urban workers were fearful that the unregulated market and the overweening influence of corporate power would increase inequality in American life, with agrarian and urban people reduced to vassalage. 24
      Reformer William S. U'Ren, the principal architect of Oregon's system of direct democracy — the initiative, referendum, recall, and direct election of U.S. Senators — included among his closest allies the Oregon State Grange, the Farmer's Union, and the Oregon State Federation of Labor. The roots of that collaboration date from the mid 1890s and the formation of the Joint Committee on Direct Legislation.29 While other writers have focused on U'Ren's effort to establish direct democracy to curtail the influence of big money in politics, historian Lawrence Lipin argues that his larger objective was to have voters enact Henry George's single tax, a maneuver "that would have taxed nonproductive, speculatively held real property out of existence." Despite present-day conservative abuses, according to Lipin, Oregonians should thank "this anticorporate spirit" for bringing direct democracy to the state's polity.30 U'Ren's ideas appealed to many in the Grange and the Farmer's Union who opposed monopoly ownership of timber and valuable agricultural land. 25
      U'Ren's Peoples Power League also introduced several initiatives to eliminate the Oregon senate and create a unicameral legislative system with proportional representation. The Oregon State Grange and the Farmer's Union supported the measures, their members believing that abolishing the Senate — which represented the monied classes, corruption, and inefficiency in government — would return political power to the people. Opponents of the unicameral proposal, with most leaders residing in Portland, accused the People's Power League of promoting "crackpot" proposals. The Oregonian called such measures "U'Renisms."31 Although Populist measures such as unicameralism and proportional representation failed, they reflected a voting populace uneasy about the influence of money in politics. 26
      A 1912 initiative that would have applied a graduated income tax on large landholdings illustrates the producer-oriented, anti-corporate politics behind this period of rural–working class cooperation. Sponsored by the Graduated Single Tax League of Oregon, the measure proposed to abolish the large speculative land ownerships of "railroads and other franchise corporations; by the land speculators, including the great landlords in Portland; and by the owners of valuable water powers." Although voters overwhelmingly defeated the initiative, it found its greatest support in the Oregon countryside, where there was widespread antagonism against railroad land grants. Targeting monopoly land ownership and those who held land only for its speculative value, single-tax supporters argued that such property should be put to productive use for the benefit of the larger community.32 27
      The rural and urban workers' struggle against land monopoly assumed even more radical overtones in a proposed constitutional amendment in 1916, the Full Rental Value Land Tax and Homemaker's Loan Fund Amendment. U'Ren drafted the initiative in the midst of a depression, with the objective of attacking "all the predatory interests, all the big business interests speculating in land." In his view, the measure would empower "all useful labor ... laborers, clerks [and] farmers," providing them with an opportunity to make a living for themselves and their families.33 In the end, voters turned back the efforts of Oregon's home-grown radicals to institute various single-tax proposals. The 1916 Land and Loan measure lost in a landslide, with 75 percent of Portlanders voting against the constitutional amendment. Voters statewide defeated the measure even more soundly, with 78 percent opposing the Land and Loan amendment. A tax system that relied on revenue from land value was obviously troubling to agrarian interests. Although similar measures were on the ballot in 1920 and 1922, voters rejected them with even larger margins. "The single tax," Robert Johnston writes, "finally died in Oregon."34 28

 
Figure 4
    William S. U'Ren (1859–1949) was the principal architect of "The Oregon System," early twentieth-century political reforms that included the initiative, referendum, recall, and direct election of U.S. Senators. An advocate of placing law-making power in the hands of the people, U'Ren forged alliances between labor and farmers to promote his objectives.

    OHS neg., CN 018319
 
 
      Oregon's Progressive Era reforms introduced other changes to rural Oregon in the form of new state policies regulating the taking of fish and game. With automobiles providing middle- and upper-class citizens with greater access to the Oregon outback, the state legislature created the position of state game warden in 1911 and followed with a Fish and Game Commission to enforce increasingly restrictive laws on poachers. For rural people long accustomed to living off the land, the new enforcement policies threatened their livelihoods. The emergence of what Lipin calls "antielite politics" in the second decade of the twentieth century challenged the prerogatives of privileged urbanites who considered poachers the dregs of society. Agricultural interests — Grangers and the Farmers Union — and commercial fishers who were organized into the Columbia River Fishermen's Protective Union, fought long and hard against sportsmen who wanted fish and game resources protected for leisure and recreational use. The Grange, in particular, opposed all game regulations, charging that such laws benefitted the wealthy leisure class at the expense of hard-working farmers.35 29

 
Figure 5
    Active in Oregon since the early 1870s, local chapters of the Grange (or Patrons of Husbandry) provided a powerful voice for rural interests who were contesting against railroad and banking monopolies. Grangers were politically active in Oregon from the 1870s through the 1920s.

    OHS photo file 821, bb004683
 
 
      The differences between hunting and fishing organizations — such as the Oregon Sportsmen's League, the Multnomah Angler's Club, and the Portland Commercial Club — and rural constituents reflected class resentment against the leisure class. When Grangers addressed fish and game regulations, Lipin contends, their public comments expressed indignation "against a largely urban-dominated state apparatus, of hardworking producers ... and of small independent populist sorts up against powerful capitalist interests." At the annual meetings of the state Grange, members called for "the enactment of stringent trespass laws and that all farmers and stockmen be authorized to make arrests for the violation of same." For their part, local wardens and other officials ignored troublesome game laws, perhaps out of sympathy for their neighbors.36 30
      Finally, opposition to funding and building the Columbia River Highway and other scenic byways created a parallel discourse, juxtaposing the Grange and rural interests and the labor movement against those they termed "autoists" and the urban "leisure class." Wealthy Portland lumbermen Simon Benson and John Yeon, Great Northern Railway's Samuel Hill, and good-roads advocate Samuel Lancaster led the crusade to build the now historic Columbia River Highway. When the proponents exhausted their funding and placed a bond measure on the ballot to pay for paving the highway, Portland's Labor Press pointed out that the road had no functional purpose other than to line the pockets of those who catered to tourism. The master of the Oregon State Grange, C.E. Spence, denounced the project as little more than "a pleasure road," an undertaking that would "place a mortgage on the homes of all the people to gratify a desire for joy riding." Appearing before the Oregon State Federation of Labor meeting in 1914, the Grange master pleaded for "good roads for the farmers instead of scenic highways for joy riders."37 31
      With the passing years, especially as the number of motorists increased and the Oregon Highway Commission funded the expansion of roadways to the farthest corners of the state, the rabid opposition to road building dissipated. Henry Ford's genius eventually placed the potential of automobile ownership in the hands of most rural and urban working people. With the diminishing passion for the single tax and the increasing number of drivers on public highways, the old insurgent constituencies — Grangers, their rural allies, including the truly radical Nonpartisan League, and the Oregon State Federation of Labor — turned their energies during the 1920s to promoting a progressive income tax. With the Nonpartisan League and the Grange leading the way, organized labor joined the long struggle to establish a state income tax, a measure finally achieved in 1929. Lipin provides a fitting conclusion to a remarkable twenty-year period of agrarian-labor cooperation: "Leaving behind U'Ren's single tax, organized labor fell in behind the Grange's more electorally viable income tax measures."38

 32
THE YEARS OF THE Great Depression and the tumultuous period of the Second World War fuzzed some of the timeworn differences between rural and urban America. The chase after mere survival during the 1930s left people struggling with sporadic and part-time employment or low-wage work with New Deal agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. Still others survived through scouring the countryside, seeking recourse through old subsistence and foraging activities — berrying, cutting firewood, and bringing home fish and wild game. A remarkable study commissioned by President Herbert Hoover at the onset of his presidency underscored the problems of rural America. A massive tome of 1,500 pages of detailed scholarship, Recent Social Trends in the United States was released in 1933, shortly after Hoover had departed from office. Those who carefully read the document, historian David Kennedy observes, "worried obsessively about 'balance' between rural and urban America," an issue its text referred to as the nation's "central problem." The Hoover study indicated that the great riches of the 1920s went disproportionately to the wealthy.39 33
      While those disparities persisted through the 1930s, the years of the Second World War turned a moribund economy and high unemployment on its head, transforming glutted job markets into ones of labor scarcity after 1940. Those new conditions were heady experiences for people who had suffered more than a decade without steady work. Thousands of Oregonians left ranches and farms for defense plants in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, an exodus of people to urban centers that reshuffled the state's demographic profile. Many of Oregon's rural counties, especially those east of the Cascade Range, lost population during and after the war.40 The global conflict meant sharp increases in lumber and agricultural production, conditions that accelerated the transition to mechanized processes, with gasoline- and diesel-powered tractors replacing horse, oxen, and mules on farms and ranches. Those technological innovations — including a parallel mechanization in timber harvesting — revolutionized life in the Oregon outback. 34
      To tell the story of the modern age, British writer Eric Hobsbawm urged historians "to concentrate on the global transformation," especially following the Second World War, when the world capitalist economy centered on the United States. The boom that took place was unprecedented, with vast internal migrations from country to city, from rural environments to more promising opportunities in the metropolis. Of all the dramatic changes in the twentieth century, Richard Wood writes, "few were more significant than the dramatic shift of population from rural to urban areas."41 This most striking demographic movement in modern American history was indisputably apparent in California, where a vibrant market provided resource-dependent Oregon with a rapidly expanding outlet for wood products and agricultural goods. The boom broadened during the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and then reached unimaginable growth during the 1960s. Oregon's prewar economy — centered in agricultural and forest-related work — remained dominant in the immediate postwar years, with the state's forest industries employing more than 60 percent of all "factory workers," as the census defined sawmill workers.42 35
      The Second World War had far-reaching effects on the Pacific Northwest forest products industry and its dependent communities. After a decade and more of market-induced unemployment, Oregon's forested districts entered a period of sustained expansion, full employment, and regular paydays. Oregon was the most timber-dependent state in the nation after the Second World War, with more than two thousand large and small lumbering and logging operations in 1947 and a combined payroll exceeding all other employment. Domestic savings accumulated during the war precipitated three decades of booming construction activity, providing good-paying jobs for rural communities into the 1970s. Life was good. Receipts from U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management timber sales kept county revenues flush and taxes low and provided expanding road systems, good schools, and adequate services for dependent counties.43 36
      Smaller Oregon communities from Coos Bay to Grants Pass, Roseburg, Bend, and Baker were alive and humming with activity. In Coos County on Oregon's southern coast, new mills opened, gyppo operators multiplied, and workers flocked to the area. Coos County's population grew more than 30 percent during the 1940s and 1950s, percentage increases comparable to that for California during the same period. A heady optimism prevailed around Coos Bay communities, with some boosters predicting that the good times would last forever. Although there were occasional market-induced downturns during the 1950s and 1960s, workers always looked forward to renewed building activity, second shifts, overtime in the mills, and daybreak-to-dusk logging operations. Even in the darkest of winter months, everyone knew that the slackening of the seasonal rains would bring brighter job prospects. Economic conditions on the south coast — and in Oregon's other timber districts — remained relatively healthy through the 1960s and 1970s. But workers also witnessed ominous signs — accelerated harvesting rates, the increasing distance that loggers had to travel to work, and worries that the good times might not last.44 37
      In the post-industrial period following the Second World War, the American West itself — now unequivocally industrialized — began to take on the look of permanence, with the Cold War fueling aerospace and weapons production. But the special promise of its once buoyant natural resources sectors began to wear thin with the depletion of timber and mineral resources and an out-migration of people. Competition from producers abroad and the centralizing of processing and manufacturing began to wreak economic and social havoc on many of the region's old mining, agricultural, and lumbering towns. This process of deindustrialization, the disassembling of natural-resource based industries, has contributed to troubled communities, persistent restructuring of local economies, and continued demographic movements in the most transient region in the nation.45 Beginning with a severe downturn in the Pacific Northwest economy in 1980, rural sections of Oregon were important components in that economic make-over. 38

 
Figure 6
    Coos Bay on the southern Oregon coast was billed as the "Lumber Capital of the World" in the years immediately following World War II. Small operators (gyppos) combined with the huge productive capacity of large mills to make the bay area one of the largest producers of lumber on the Pacific Coast.

    OHS digital image no. ba0121157
 
 
      Structural unemployment, the uprooting of people's lives and other socially disruptive consequences of personal hardship, struck Oregon's timber-dependent districts especially hard during the early 1980s. The rash of mill closures and resulting unemployment reflected a severe slump in the nation's construction trades and a general transformation in the North Pacific slope's wood-products industry. Those technological and capital shifts included increased mechanization in the woods, the introduction of automated mill equipment, and centralized production in fewer processing plants. Although Coos Bay may have been the pacesetter in mill closures and high unemployment, the economic malaise quickly spread to other timber districts around the state — to mill towns along the Oregon coast, to Eugene, Lebanon, and Sweet Home in the Willamette Valley, and to the eastern Oregon communities of Burns and Baker.46 39
      The economic troubles during the 1980s were most severe in southern Oregon and in timber counties in the eastern side of the state. The deep recession also reopened the historic divisiveness between rural and urban parts of the state, with Larry Smith, chair of the Baker County Board of Commissioners, declaring: "We're at the wrong end of the stick. We get cracked all the time." Smith accused Oregon legislators and state agencies of discriminating against rural districts in the distribution of funding. Although the issue of geographic inequity between rural and urban Oregon was an old one, it resurfaced in the early 1980s over lottery money for economic development and support for social programs. Portland General Electric economist Charles Allcock feared that the growing political and cultural schism between rural and urban Oregon would become a "divisive factor" in state politics.47 The fact that urban areas in the Willamette Valley fared better than most rural counties further compounded those disparities. 40
      When Portland and the nation emerged relatively unscathed from the economic slump, Oregonian reporter Julie Tripp reflected that such "comparatively robust recoveries must go down hard" in Oregon's rural counties, where unemployment was still on the rise. In December 1984, four of the five counties with the highest unemployment percentages were all timber dependent (Curry, 20.7; Coos, 15.4; Baker, 14.2; and Douglas, 13.7). State employment figures revealed relatively low percentages of unemployment in the state's four major metropolitan areas — Eugene-Springfield, Medford, Portland, and Salem. William Street, a state labor economist working out of La Grande, revealed a key characteristic of the new rural economy — a sharp decline in good-paying jobs and an increase in low-wage employment. In Klamath Falls, new high-tech assembly jobs were mostly minimum wage, whereas jobs lost in the lumber mills had paid $25,000 to $30,000 a year. U.S. Bancorp's John Mitchell observed that Oregon was undergoing a "major structural change" and predicted that industry would never return to the halcyon days of the 1970s, when the state enjoyed low interest rates, a rapid rise in population, and sharp increases in construction-related jobs. He also predicted that foreign investors would stay away from rural areas.48 41
      Adopted in 1973, and moving in concert with troubled local economies, Oregon's pioneering land-use planning system became another lightening rod for tensions between rural communities and the Willamette Valley's urban corridor. In the midst of the recession of the early 1980s, opponents of land-use planning launched an initiative effort in 1982 to make the state's land-use authority "advisory only." Oregon's leading corporate players — Associated Oregon Industries, Associated General Contractors, Boise Cascade, Georgia-Pacific, and Weyerhaeuser — funded the effort to repeal the planning system, an initiative that was turned back in the fall election when a dying former governor, Tom McCall, issued a dramatic appeal to voters to protect the state's livability and its planning system. The same corporate contributors bankrolled succeeding efforts to overturn or dramatically alter land-use planning in Oregon. While they have played to the anxieties of rural voters, their real ambitions have been more self-serving — the development of destination resorts, golf courses, and the conversion of vast forested areas to real estate enterprises.49 Developers who wanted to extend urban-growth boundaries, especially during the state's booming population growth of the 1990s, also partnered with those who wanted to repeal land-use planning.50 42
      "The West as Westerners have known it is changing," journalist Foster Church observed in 1991; "it will never be the same." Church was referring to "white flight," the movement of middle- and upper-class Californians to sparsely populated, rural areas in the West. Seattle-based New York Times correspondent Timothy Egan remarked in his 1990 book The Good Rain that the old resource towns in the West "have been used up," and the people who lived in those communities were fast becoming an endangered species. While many of the primary production centers were suffering the ravages of high unemployment and its attendant problems, still others had sprouted boutiques, tanning salons, and luxuriously built residential areas. The declining fortunes of many rural communities since the early 1980s were obvious — depleted resources, the movement of capital investment to more profitable venues, the consolidation of production, labor-saving technologies, and environmental restrictions.51 Many people in those communities became bitter, finding enemies among environmentalists, well-off urbanites, and the large corporations who had moved on to more lucrative investment opportunities. 43
      While long-time resource towns such as Coos Bay, Roseburg, and Astoria languished with relatively static demographic profiles, below-average wages, and aging populations, others — such as Bend and Ashland — have been partner to the great Western American land rush: escalating real estate prices, new people, new homes, new wealth, and very different cultural tastes. The new monied classes have introduced social and cultural changes that have been disruptive and unsettling to older residents. Gone are blue-collar jobs in the mills and woods; in their place, a new service- and servant-oriented economy has emerged, with low-paying, part-time jobs without benefits and increasingly unaffordable homes and rentals. 44
      Bend and Ashland are "Aspenized" examples of New Western communities that are increasingly layered and polarized as new wealthy classes remake the landscape and social environments of former mining, fishing, and logging towns. Those upscale communities — and others left behind in Oregon's twenty-first-century economy — reflect opposing sectors of the way modern capitalism has worked its way across the region. If cycles of boom and bust "are as intrinsic to capitalism as earthquakes are to the earth's geology," Lester Thurow suggests policymakers should expect more of the same in the future.52 Increasing inequalities in wealth, both within and between rural and urban settings, provide additional evidence of the way modern capitalism produces inequality.53 With a problematic stock market, a dormant national construction industry, and troubles in the state's high-tech sector, Oregon provides a blueprint for Thurow's prediction. 45


NOTES

This essay was originally presented at the Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence conference in Salem, Oregon, on November 14, 2008.

1.  Ian Frazier, Great Plains (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989), 91; Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), 9, 31; and Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 287–327.

2.  Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (1949; reprint, Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1979), 82.

3.  Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 16, 19. My most detailed effort to develop this argument is in Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), x–xiii.

4.  Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, 19.

5.  For a further elaboration of this argument, see Leften S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 168–69.

6.  Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 82–85. Ann Markusen points out that conflict arises when owners of transportation and finance live in one area and producers live in another. See Markusen, Regions: The Economics and Politics of Territory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1987), 4.

7.  These ideas reflect the arguments of T. Berend and Gyorgy Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 9; and Thomas J. McCormick, "World Systems," The Journal of American History 77 (June 1990), 125–27.

8.  William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 7–8; Michael P. Conzen, "The Maturing Urban System in the United States, 1840–1910," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (March 1977), 89.

9.  I use the term "resettlement" to refer to the displacement of Native people from valuable agricultural and other lands to more marginalized places in much of the West.

10.  Markusen, Regions, 2–4.

11.  For general studies that address these themes, see David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and John Agnew, The United States and the World Economy: A Regional Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

12.  Donald W. Meinig, "American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (1972), 179.

13.  Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 236.

14.  Samuel N. Dicken and Emily F. Dicken, The Making of Oregon: A Study in Historical Geography (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1979), 81, 92; Oregonian, July 1, 1867; West Shore 1, no. 1 (August 1875), 4; and Oscar O. Winther, Old Oregon Country: A History of Frontier Trade, Transportation, and Travel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1950), 124.

15.  Dorothy Johansen and Charles M. Gates, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 279.

16.  Ibid., 279–82.

17.  The quotations are in Dorothy O. Johansen, "Capitalism on the Far-Western Frontier: The Oregon Steam Navigation Company" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1941), 258. See also E. Kimbark MacColl, with Harry H. Stein, Merchants, Money, and Power: The Portland Establishment, 1843–1913 (Portland: The Georgian Press, 1988), 207.

18.  Johansen, Empire of the Columbia, 282; and Jeff Moore, "Oregon Pacific Railroad," www.trainweb.org/highdesertrails/oprr.html (accessed February 2, 2009).

19. Oregonian, June 28, 1865; MacColl, Merchants, Money, and Power, 250; and Jesse Applegate to J.W. Nesmith, November 15, 1863, printed in the Oregonian, November 21, 1863.

20.  Ibid., August 14, 1883, and January. 2, 1888. The business community and commercial publications used the term River City to describe Portland.

21.  Ibid., January 2, 1888.

22.  Peter G. Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 114, 135–36; and William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 106–107.

23.  For the origins of the conflict in the Umpqua Valley, see William G. Robbins, "The Far Western Frontier: Economic Opportunity and Social Democracy in Early Roseburg, Oregon" (Ph. D. diss., University of Oregon, 1969), 90–92; and Roseburg Plaindealer, June 24, and September 29, 1873.

24.  David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 154–55; and Marilyn P. Watkins, Rural Democracy: Family Farmers and Politics in Western Washington, 1890–1925 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 12.

25.  Danbom, Born in the Country, 155–56; and Watkins, Rural Democracy, 184–86. Because it operated "cash-only cooperatives," Lawrence Goodwyn contends, the Grange "failed to address the real ills of farmers," who lacked the cash to participate in such ventures. See Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 32.

26.  Watkins, Rural Democracy, 4, 67; and Jeffrey M. LaLande, "?'It Can't Happen Here' in Oregon: The Jackson County Rebellion, 1932–1933, and Its 1890s–1920s Background" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1993), 21, 29, 36, and 45.

27.  MacColl, Merchants, Money, and Power, 406–407; and Johansen, Empire of the Columbia, 459–60.

28.  Two recent books have shaped my thinking for this section of the essay: Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, 1910–30 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

29.  Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 122, 152.

30.  Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 10.

31.  Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 141–45.

32.  Lipin, 24. The quotation is from a State of Oregon voters' pamphlet.

33.  The U'Ren quotations are in Johnston, The Radical Middle Class, 172–75.

34.  Ibid., 176; Oregon Labor Press Cartoon - Single Tax, Oregon History Project, http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=1DBA2ECF-0B7E-09B5-6EC52E893EF927A1 (accessed February 2, 2009).

35.  Lipin, Workers and the Wild, 10–12 and 49–52.

36.  Ibid., 61.

37.  Ibid., 38–41.

38.  Ibid., 117, 147–52.

39.  David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10–12, 20–21.

40.  U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, vol. 1: Number of Inhabitants, 886; and ibid., Seventeenth Census of the United States: Census of Population, 1950, vol. 2: Characteristics of the Population, 37–129.

41.  Richard E. Wood, Survival of Rural America: Small Victories and Bitter Harvests (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 3.

42.  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short History of the Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), 200, 276; Charles McKinley, Uncle Sam in the Pacific Northwest: Federal Management of Natural Resources in the Columbia River Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 10.

43.  For the immediate postwar boom, see William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 21–46.

44.  University of Oregon, Bureau of Research and Municipal Service, Population of Oregon Cities, Counties and Metropolitan Areas, 1850–1957: A Compilation of Census Counts and Estimates in Oregon, Information Bulletin No. 106 (Eugene, 1958), 19; and University of Oregon, Bureau of Research and Municipal Service, 1950–1980, Population and Housing Trends, Cities and Counties of Oregon (Eugene, 1982), 26.

45.  Gerald Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 6; Michael P. Malone, "The Collapse of Western Metal Mining: An Historical Epitaph," Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986), 455; Robbins, Colony and Empire (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), 187–97; and Wood, Survival of Rural America, 7.

46. Eugene Register-Guard, November 29, 1981; and Corvallis Gazette-Times, April 11, 1985. See also the chapter, "Hard Times and Survivors" in William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850–1986 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).

47. Oregonian, December 29, 1985.

48.  Ibid., January 27, 1985.

49.  Brent Walth, Fire At Eden's Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1994), 456–63; Edward J. Sullivan, "The Legal Evolution of the Oregon Planning System," in Planning the Oregon Way: A Twenty Year Evaluation, Carl Abbott, Deborah Howe, and Sy Adler, eds. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1993), 59–60.

50. Oregonian, May 31, 1998; Sullivan, "Legal Evolution," 60.

51. Oregonian, October 20, 1991; Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 19.

52.  Lester C. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow's World (New York: W. Morrow, 1996), 211, 242.

53.  The rural-urban wage gap has widened during the past thirty years, some of it attributable to declining timber harvests, but much of it is related to the growing high-tech sector along the Interstate-5 corridor. See the Salem Statesman-Journal, August 30, 2008.

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