Landscapes of Conflict

The Oregon Story, 1940-2000

William G. Robbins

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989884
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Post-World War II Oregon was a place of optimism and growth, a spectacular natural region from ocean to high desert that seemingly provided opportunity in abundance. With the passing of time, however, Oregon's citizens — rural and urban — would find themselves entangled in issues that they had little experience in resolving. The same trees that provided income to timber corporations, small mill owners, loggers, and many small towns in Oregon, also provided a dramatic landscape and a home to creatures at risk. The rivers whose harnessing created power for industries that helped sustain Oregon's growth — and were dumping grounds for municipal and industrial wastes — also provided passageways to spawning grounds for fish, domestic water sources, and recreational space for everyday Oregonians. The story of Oregon's accommodation to these divergent interests is a divisive story between those interested in economic growth and perceived stability and citizens concerned with exercising good stewardship towards the state's natural resources and preserving the state's livability. In his second volume of Oregon's environmental history, William Robbins addresses efforts by individuals and groups within and outside the state to resolve these conflicts. Among the people who have had roles in this process, journalists and politicians Richard Neuberger and Tom McCall left substantial legacies and demonstrated the ambiguities inherent in the issues they confronted.

1

THE GREAT HOPE FOR THE NEW ORDER

In the hurried, troubled, heartsick days of war, all of us looked back upon peace and yearned for it. But we can't have it back exactly as it was in 1940. The stage setting has changed in dozens of little, unsettling ways, new players are on the scene, and we find that the script has been altered.—E. R. JACKMAN¹

It may be said with some truth that the post-industrial age began on August 6, 1945, when three American B-29s took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas and directed their course 1,500 miles north to Japan. One of the best-known planes ever to fly, the Enola Gay, carried in its bomb bay the five-ton uranium bomb known as Little Boy. Shortly before 9:00 A.M. the Japanese port city of Hiroshima on southwestern Honshu Island was incinerated in a great spiraling cloud of fire, smoke, and dust. Later that same day, the United States government released the news that an American airplane had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima with the power of more than 20,000 tons of TNT. The White House announcement concluded with the terse statement: “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”² There is little question that the awful destruction unleashed first on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki signaled that the world had crossed a threshold of sorts, one in which human ingenuity had appropriated an awesome power—indeed, the seeming capacity to end human life itself. In Oregon the Medford Mail-Tribune thought the date of the bomb's delivery would be etched in human history “along with 1215, 1492, 1776—a date for school boys to remember, as marking the end of one great epoch and the start of another.”³

While the bomb suggested an obvious path to doomsday, many journalists and popular writers praised the wondrous potential that atomic energy and other scientific advances would bring to humankind. The benefits of science in the postwar era promised to bring ancient millennial dreams to reality, to bring forth an Eden on earth, to finally make humans ascendant in the physical world. The war itself served as a great divide of sorts, an historical transition separating the evolution of basic science that preceded the 1940s with the technological explosion that followed. Prewar scientific advances, especially in physics and chemistry, created the conditions for the massive reordering and manipulation of nature. And then, under the pressure of urgent military requirements and with huge infusions of federal monies, those revolutionary scientific advances were put to the task of developing new technologies and more productive enterprises. One of the most expensive (and expansive) of those undertakings was the Hanford nuclear complex that took shape on the Columbia River just beyond Oregon's northern border. The great outburst of technological innovation that followed the war included commercial sales of a vast array of synthetics such as DDT, new products that would eventually pose a serious threat to conditions of life in both urban and rural environments.⁴

The new world of miracle chemicals, however, was only one component in a wealth of scientific advances that occurred in the years after 1945. As the wars in Europe and Asia were winding down, President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, to use that agency's expertise in the “war of science against disease.” In his now famous report Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), Bush argued that progress against disease, the development of new products, new industries, and more jobs required “continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature” and application of those findings to practical purposes. Full employment, new jobs, and inexpensive consumer goods must be “founded on new principles and new conceptions which in turn result from basic scientific research.” The vast advances in scientific research during the war, Bush predicted, marked only the beginning of even more spectacular developments “if we make use of our scientific resources.” Although earlier frontiers had disappeared, the scientific one remained. “Without scientific progress,” the nation's health would deteriorate, the standard of living would stagnate, and the jobless rate would increase.⁵

All signs indicated that the federal government would be a full participant in shaping social, economic, and scientific policy following the war. In a 16,000–word text delivered to Congress in September 1945, President Harry Truman offered a twenty-one-point program designed to smooth the way toward “high prosperity” and “a better life here at home and a better world for future generations to come.” Among the president's recommendations were several New Deal-type programs: increases in unemployment compensation, fair labor standards, full-employment legislation, farm-price subsidies, federal housing support, and funding for scientific research, public-power development, and expanded highway construction. But the focal point of the president's recommendation centered on a national commitment to build a better future through a vast public-works program and through promoting research in the basic sciences, medicine, and public health.⁶

As the war was drawing to a close, the American media joined the chorus of voices offering up visions of a future free from want and worry. A General Motors advertisement in Life magazine proclaimed the United States ready for a “Journey into Tomorrow,” a world in which scientists were “moving forward with new methods and improved products” that would bring a wealth of new blessings to humankind. This most American of corporations was, in fact, promoting the fantasy that future happiness could be purchased in the marketplace. But if those songs of optimism were exaggerated and overblown, there was a substance of truth to such commentaries. Discovery and invention were the order of the day—the development of the electron microscope, fiberglass, wonder fibers and plastics, light and handy Styrofoam containers, nylon apparel, cheap vinyl floor coverings, inexpensive plastic food wraps, and latex foam used in mattresses.⁷

The new homes that went up after 1945 differed from their prewar counterparts in several ways. They were often constructed from prefabricated materials and had central heating units, with oil, natural gas, or electricity replacing coal and wood. Those dwellings were also filled with a wide array of modern appliances and gadgets, from cooking stoves to refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. Rapidly expanding suburbs meant outdoor barbecues and instant markets for a wide range of goods—including hotdogs and other foods—and an ever increasing flow of throwaway materials.⁸ That brave new world of plastics and synthetic materials spilled a river of consumer goods everywhere across the United States, from the graying factory towns of the eastern seaboard to the expansive aerospace communities of the Far West, and from Rocky Mountain mining centers to the cities and small towns of the Pacific Northwest.

From the vantage of time, however, it is clear that the key innovations of the immediate postwar years—those with particularly long-range consequences—were in the chemical and pharmaceutical fields. “Wonder drugs” such as penicillin and streptomycin, developed during the war, became readily available to the public by the late 1940s, and other new antibiotics entered the market during the next few years. Congress increased appropriations for the chronically underfunded National Institute of Health, and in 1948 it renamed the agency's disease-specific units the National Institutes of Health. The two most spectacular medical breakthroughs in the postwar years included the identification of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953, an event that vastly accelerated research in genetics and molecular biology, and the development of the Salk vaccine in the early 1950s, the miracle drug that provided immunity from the dreaded crippling disease poliomyelitis.⁹

The most infamous miracle chemical compound to emerge from the war was the chlorinated hydrocarbon DDT, “the atomic bomb of insecticides, the killer of killers, the harbinger of a new age in insect control.” First used during the war to combat insects carrying infectious diseases and then made available for civilian use on August 1, 1945, DDT was wildly popular, and few questioned its use until the late 1950s. Because it was highly toxic to insects, inexpensive, and easily adapted to aerial spraying, one economic entomologist referred to DDT as “a miraculous insecticide” that promised to “banish all insect-borne diseases from earth.” The only time most Americans thought about DDT, according to historian Thomas Dunlap, was when the spray truck made its annual rounds during the summer months. American farmers became heavily dependent upon such persistent chemicals in the years following the war, and DDT was by far the most popular of them all, enjoying wide public approval until the publication of ecologist Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962.¹⁰

The tremendous productivity of the American economy contributed to one of the central pillars of postwar optimism: an unwavering belief in continued economic growth and unbounded prosperity. It was widely assumed that the country could engineer into existence ever increasing wealth, security, and financial well-being, that the American people could expect a future in which all things were possible. Economist Robert Samuelson underscored the grand postwar vision captured in what he called “the American Dream”: “We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. We expected business cycles, economic insecurity, poverty, and racism to end.” The American Dream, he concluded, became “the American Fantasy.” Truman Moore, who grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during the 1940s, believed that new inventions and unending discoveries would “bring perfection to humankind,” that the further into the future one could conjecture, “the better things would be.” Synthetics would replace exhausted natural resources, thereby providing “an artificial cornucopia to pour forth abundant substitutes for any shortages.” Moore understood the postwar promise to mean a world free from flies and mosquitoes, because DDT was available for civilian use. “I liked the smell of it,” he remarked.¹¹

At the half-century mark Life assured its readers that the United States was leading the world into the scientific age. “These have indeed been decades of dazzling achievement,” the magazine declared. A triumphant science had now given humans “the temerity to challenge even the speed of the earth's turning.” Moreover, a life expectancy once beyond the reach of human control had been dramatically advanced by the development of cures for certain diseases.¹² Some of that new world of technological wonders seeped into my own life during my growing-up years in rural Connecticut. I vividly remember, as a young high-school student in the early 1950s, the family physician prescribing penicillin for my seasonal bouts with earaches. And as a summer wageworker on my grandfather's dairy farm, one of my responsibilities was to spray the cattle with a DDT insecticide bomb before turning them out to pasture following the evening milking.

The preeminence of science in the immediate postwar years fit well with the nation's overweening confidence as it stood astride a world recently devastated by war. Citizens of the United States were living amidst one of the great myths to come out of the Second World War—Henry Luce's notion that the twentieth century would be “the American Century.” Luce asserted—first in a Life editorial in 1940—that if the twentieth-century world was to achieve its full vigor and health, it “must be to a significant degree an American Century.” Luce based his thesis on the assumption that the United States would prevail because the vibrant strength of American business and the free-enterprise system would combine to make the nation a leader in the world economy. In the coming decades, congressmen and even presidents played upon the American Century idea. In his book The American Century, Donald White points out that following the war American ships and aircraft carried United States commerce to distant cities, and everywhere the dollar served as the medium for international transactions. American bank credit reached to the far corners of the globe: “Food, clothing, movies, machines, and science made the American name known throughout the world.”¹³

A good case can be made that Oregon and the Pacific Northwest represented a microcosm of the general optimism that prevailed around the country. Writing for the New York Times Magazine in late 1945, the Northwest's best-known journalist, Oregon's Richard Neuberger, referred to the region as “The Land of New Horizons.” Northwesterners were “buoyant and cheerful” and looked forward to living up to Thomas Jefferson's prediction of “a great, free and independent empire on the Columbia River.” Having experienced its greatest industrial development during the war years, the region now confronted a frontier of modern technology that brightened the “prospects for fulfilling Jefferson's vision.” Neuberger praised the natural attributes of the Columbia River country: its rich “treasure-trove of hydroelectricity”; its expanding acreages of irrigated land; its future in forest products; and its proximity to Alaska and the prospects of an expanding trade with that distant territory. “But the grandest boast of the Northwest,” he wrote, “is that it is ‘God's Country.’” In the midst of the region's scenic majesty, the average citizen “enjoys privileges reserved in other places for only a few.” Although the Northwest confronted problems with the rapid liquidation of standing timber, Neuberger was confident that sustained-yield forestry and good stewardship practices assured a promising future.¹⁴

The joyous celebrations that took place in Oregon during that first peace-time holiday season appeared to reflect Neuberger's sense of optimism. Portland reported record sales in consumer goods as Oregonians crowded through stores and shops before Christmas. Because of a transportation bottleneck, more than 10,000 soldiers and sailors added to the crush of people walking downtown streets on the day before Christmas; long queues at state liquor stores promised a “spirited eve,” according to the Oregonian. Elsewhere in the state, citizens looked forward to an encouraging future; the Roseburg News-Review promised that 1946 would be a “banner year, both for the erection of homes and business properties.” The newspaper expected “new industries and a score of new business firms” to open early in the year. The Pendleton East Oregonian looked forward to “a brand, spanking new year full of rich achievements.” While the area faced significant local problems, Pendleton and Umatilla County could look forward to good times “if we want to make it so.” With Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams already in operation and McNary Dam under construction, the area's “power problem is virtually solved.” In southern Oregon the Medford Mail-Tribune praised the bright prospects for agriculture and business, especially activities related to lumber, construction, and real estate.¹⁵

Beneath the surface of those postwar celebrations and merriment, however, the nation confronted serious problems, especially those associated with the transition from war to peacetime production. With the social and economic chaos of the Great Depression as recent memories, “reconversion” became the popular buzzword for federal and state officials, agency heads, newspaper journalists, and developers who stood to benefit from the shift to a peacetime economy. In an Oregonian column published a few days after the Japanese surrender, the normally exuberant Neuberger wrote that he thought the Pacific Northwest would face a supreme test in the postwar period. The civilian population had increased 17 percent since the defense emergency—most of the newcomers working in shipyards and aircraft plants—so reconversion would have “quite a different meaning on the Pacific Coast.” Before the war, there were few durable-goods industries in the Far West. Toward what end, Neuberger asked, “will the shipyards be converted?” And there were still other problems: the Northwest's forests, which supplied half the nation's timber, were overcut; conservation practices had been abandoned; and “the policy of sustained yield—making the annual cut equal new growth—has been forgotten.” The usually upbeat Neuberger predicted that Washington and Oregon sawmills might have to reduce rather than expand their postwar workforces.¹⁶

While Richard Neuberger fretted over the future of the region's economy, Oregon's Postwar Readjustment and Development Commission (PRDC), first appointed in 1944, was already attempting to craft a blueprint for the future. Although its monthly reports repeatedly emphasized the virtues of private enterprise, the Oregon commission (and similar advisory bodies in other western states) echoed some of the old New Deal passion for planning. According to historian Gerald Nash, the effort to develop postwar plans reflected the western states' confidence that the region was “on the threshold of a new age.” California governor Earl Warren told a group of executives in 1944 that business and industrial leaders sensed an “atmosphere of expectancy, faith and determination” in the future. When Warren appointed the California Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission, he expected the body to adopt a pragmatic strategy in which the state's government would cooperate with private enterprise to plan for the postwar era. The Oregon commission's first report to Governor Earl Snell placed a similar emphasis on “public and private projects” that would be ready to “go” when hostilities ended.¹⁷

During its five-year existence, the Oregon commission produced monthly reports that reflected its hopes and aspirations for the future, a body of writing that was decidedly more conventional than radical. Appointees to the commission included utility executives, public officials, state and federal agency representat...