Chapter 7
I will not wear another man’s collar.
—Wayne L. Morse
WAYNE LYMAN MORSE, Republican senator from Oregon, whom his opponents call a “secret New Dealer’’ and a “labor stooge,” is a tall lean man with a sharp nose and sharp dark mustache, tough, talented and emphatic. When making his first campaign in 1944, he found that he was getting nowhere in the conservative ranch country in the eastern part of the state. Morse had an idea. His whole career has been that of an intellectual, but he decided to ride with the boys. He was a professor of law, but he knew quite a lot about good horse flesh. So he visited Pendleton during its famous roundup, and though this was the home town of his opponent, he made no speeches. He simply spent three days riding. His horse, which he raised himself, is a prize-winning stallion named Spice of Life. Then Morse—and horse—made a little tour of the ranch country. One of his hosts, a feudal baron to whom he had been anathema, finally burst out, “Any guy who can raise a horse like that and ride like that can’t be the son of a I always thought he was!”
This story went all over the state, and helped the young professor of law considerably in what turned out to be an easy victory. Morse carried every county in Oregon, something that had never happened in its history.
Spice of Life is still with Morse in Washington, D.C. So is another prize winner, Oreganna Bourbon. Morse came east by Ford and trailer, taking with him both horses, his wife, and three baby girls. Spice of Life is an impressive animal, and has won all sorts of prizes in the East, including the grand championship at Green Meadows, Maryland.
The senator comes by his horsiness honestly. He was born on a three hundred acre homestead farm near Madison, Wisconsin, forty-six years ago, in 1900. The family is of old Yankee stock, and one forebear was Samuel F. B. Morse; several of his ancestors fought in 1776, and he carefully keeps up his membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. Both his grandfather and father were practical farmers, specialists in livestock and horse and sheep breeders. From the earliest days, young Wayne was taught to get along with animals and especially to raise poultry; while still in high school, he exhibited prize birds at county fairs. Above all, his father kept him interested in horses. Wayne never forgot, and still likes to quote to this day, something his father told him when he was only knee high, “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a boy.”
But it is more than merely horses that brought Wayne Morse to Washington, and made him one of the most outspoken and conscientious legislators in the country.
. . . . . . .
Morse’s dominant characteristic, outside his obvious brain power and wire-taut nervous energy, is courage. He told me once, “You know, people like a scrapper. I always try to be good natured, but I certainly punch hell out of a lot of people.”
Morse practically never equivocates or straddles. He speaks out for what he thinks is right, and lets the chips fall where they may. For instance he fought Harry Bridges to a standstill in an arbitration case, and then appeared as a character witness for him in one of the Bridges trials. He tries to decide every issue on its merit, without regard to party label. He never takes the “blanket view” of a man like Bushfield. For instance he once told the Senate that the OPA “needed a housecleaning from top to bottom and I would start with Chester Bowles and send him back to the advertising business.” But at about the same time he voted for the confirmation of Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce and Aubrey Williams as REA administrator. Only two other Republican senators voted for Williams: Aiken (Vermont) and Langer (North Dakota).
In January, 1946, Morse vigorously attacked Senator Taft of Ohio as a survivor of the old Ohio gang that had destroyed the traditional liberalism of the Republican party, and then in April he let loose a blast heard around the country, following the choice of Taft’s candidate, B. Carroll Reece, as new chairman of the Republican National Committee:
The meeting of the Republican National Committee at the Statler Hotel last night was a grand flop. If [this] program is to constitute Republican policy during the next two years, the Republican National Committee will re-elect Harry Truman in spite of everything he is doing to defeat himself.
We listened to the same old cliches and reactionary nostrums ad nauseam which have produced Republican defeats since 1932.
A little later he snapped hard and briskly at Mr. Truman, saying that the president’s speech to Congress on May 25 about the railway strike was “one of the cheapest exhibitions of ham acting” ever known. Morse’s allegation was that Truman knew that the railroad workers had already promised to go back to work when he spoke. Later—when Wallace resigned in September, 1946—Morse again attacked Truman with tart sarcasm: “If the president, too, will only remain silent … then I’m sure the country will be able to struggle through.”
Morse voted for Bretton Woods and the United Nations charter and, like Stassen whom he closely resembles in some respects,1 he thinks that the United States, as well as other nations, must be prepared to yield some measure of sovereignty if the UN is going to work. He was a prime mover in trying to keep the Kilgore subcommittee (investigating interrelations between American and German industry) alive and—like Henry Luce and many other good Republicans—he conspicuously joined the committee for aid to the families of General Motors strikers, early in 1946. He voted for the Full Employment bill, and refused to support a compromise that weakened FEPC; in fact, a Peck’s bad boy of the Senate as Marquis W. Childs once called him, he caused angry consternation on the right in July, 1946, when he forced a vote on FEPC by getting it attached as a rider to the tidelands bill.
On the other hand—progressives say—Morse voted to take controls off dairy and meat products; his attitude in the fight on public vs. private power is uncertain and he has never taken a strong line on lumber conservation; he is the only Northwest senator not committed to the idea of a Columbia Valley Authority, and in 1946 he disconcerted his liberal friends by campaigning for a lot of Republican deadwood in the area.
. . . . . . .
The outline of Morse’s career is simple. He went to the Madison public schools and then the University of Wisconsin, which was at that time the most progressive university in the country. He got his bachelor of arts degree in 1923 and became a master of arts a year later. A good student, he worked hard on the debating team and also found time to get a commission in the Field Artillery Reserve, U.S. Army, after four years of military training. He decided to be a teacher, and went to the University of Minnesota where he was instructor in argumentation and coach to the debating team; here he received a law degree in 1928. He went on to Columbia with a $1,500 teaching scholarship, and his doctor’s thesis at Columbia, on the American grand jury system, is still talked about as something of a classic.
Meantime, in 1924, he married Miss Mildred Downie who had been a classmate at Wisconsin. Mrs. Morse was a crack student in home economics; and while her husband was studying law, she taught home economics in a Minneapolis high school. This too is part of a familiar American pattern, that of the brilliant-but-poor young student ably assisted by a young woman with her own job as well as the job of raising a family and washing dishes. Incidentally, when Morse became senator and although he needed the money badly, he refused to put her on his pay roll, though senators from Truman up and down have long sanctified this practice. Morse is a stickler on such financial matters.
The Morses went out to Oregon in 1929. He had never seen the state before, and his antagonists sometimes call him a carpetbagger, since he has only been an Oregon resident a mere seventeen years. First he was assistant professor of law at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Two years later, at the age of thirty-one, he became professor of law and dean of the law school, one of the youngest law deans in the country. He held this post until he resigned to run for the Senate—the first time he ever ran for anything—in 1944.
But Morse had steadily been weaving himself into the fabric of public affairs. He became a member of the Oregon Crime Commission and a consultant to the legislature. His specialty was criminal law, and he was for a time chairman of the American Bar Association’s committee on prisons, probations, and paroles; he worked with the Department of Justice for years as director of a national research project on these topics. He helped write an Oregon crime survey in 1934 and was chiefly responsible for a five-volume study of national scope, The Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedure. As legislative consultant in Oregon, he helped draft bills in his field, and, in the words of a campaign biography, “many reforms relating to parole, probation, and prison administration, as well as labor law, were based on Wayne Morse’s writings and decisions.”
Then came something bigger. In 1935 he was invited to arbitrate in a dispute between a lumber operator in the Willamette Valley and labor. He did a neat job, and other jobs like it began falling his way. He was fair; he was impartial; and he never confused the principle of arbitration with mere compromise. What he sought was the essential right in any dispute. Then in 1938, Secretary of Labor Perkins appointed him Pacific Coast arbitrator for all maritime disputes between waterfront employers and longshore unions—although he was a stanch Republican. Both labor and management specifically asked Miss Perkins to appoint him. Between 1938 and 1942 he settled about a hundred cases, and saved industry in the Northwest millions upon millions of dollars and thousands of strike hours.
In January, 1942, Roosevelt made him a public member of the National War Labor Board, which post he held until February, 1944. During these twenty-five months he wrote more than half of all the opinions the board made. He quit in disgust because of a complex quarrel over coal involving Ickes, John L. Lewis, and the president. He thought that the president should have been willing to meet Lewis head-on, instead of giving way to him. Before this he had had a vivid fight with Byrnes, who was then head of the Office of Emergency Management, when he charged that OEM was trying to tell the WLB what its decisions should be before it had completed its investigation. Cases that should have been decided on principle were, Morse felt, being prejudged. Roosevelt, as reward for his work on the WLB, had promised him a judgeship in the circuit court of appeals. Morse is a poor man, and this would have meant a good job for life. But when he refused to kowtow to Byrnes and Ickes, the president reneged on the appointment, and he never got the job.
. . . . . . .
Early in 1944, Morse met the able and persuasive E. Palmer (“Ep”) Hoyt, who was then editor of the Oregonian.2
“You ought to run for senator,” Hoyt said.
“Ridiculous,” Morse replied. “I’ve never run for office in my life.”
“We all think you ought to run,” Hoyt said.
“Who’s we?” Morse asked.
“We” meant the progressive Republicans of the community—especially those who loathed the incumbent senator, Rufus C. Holman. Holman was a pronounced isolationist who voted against practically every major national defense measure. So Morse had two fights on his hands—the Republican primaries against Holman, then the general election against a Democrat, Edgar Smith. He won both handily, this too although Roosevelt carried the state. The situation had elements of the picturesque. Morse, a former Roosevelt appointee, was fighting against FDR who however was being backed by almost all those backing Morse.
There was some very careful skating over thin ice to be done. The Republicans thought Morse a New Dealer, and the Democrats thought him a Republican, which he was. Everything seemed to be against him. He was a professor, and hence cursed; he had spent most of the war years in Washington and was unknown to the state at large; he might be either fish, fowl, or good pinko herring. Also, Holman had a certain popularity. Morse’s technique was triple, and extremely clever. He (a) sought to satisfy the conservatives that he wasn’t “dangerous”; (b) explained to the liberals sotto voce that he couldn’t talk much, out loud, but that they could count on it that he would be sound on such issues as civil liberties and labor; (c) told labor that, after all, it should be glad to have a liberal Republican in office, especially if a Republican administration took over the country.
Morse has never had any money but his modest salary. His campaign cost plenty, but he kept turning campaign contributions down. He refused to be beholden to anybody. He told all comers that, if elected, he would vote as he pleased, with no debts at all to any special interests. He rejected one offer of $3,500 from the liquor interests, and $4,100 from the CIO. In mid-1946 he introduced a Senate resolution which, if it passes, will bring a long-needed reform, to require senators’ publicly to report all their income every year, regardless of source.
He won because: (a) Oregon has been a basically Republican state for thirty years. It is the only western state that never once elected a Democrat to the Senate in all of Roosevelt’s years in office. (b) Morse put on the best campaign in local history. He made 203 speeches in nine weeks, an all-time record, and after each one invited give-and-take questions from the floor, (c) In the primary, liberals could not possibly come out for Holman, (d) In the general election, many Democrats thought that Morse was better than their own man, who was anti-FDR; also the Democratic leadership was weak and vacillating.
The New Yorker, in the person of Howard Brubaker, ticked off Holman neatly after Morse beat him: “Senator Rufus Holman, of Oregon, accused of being an isolationist, was defeated. The homestate Republicans took the commendable position that any man who really wants isolation should have it.”
So Wayne Morse got to Washington. Nobody has greater promise of being a first-rate public servant. Here is an honest man, with a good mind, good will, and guts.
Senator Glen H. Taylor
Wayne Morse came to the Senate on a horse; so did his freshman colleague from Idaho, Glen Taylor. But Taylor brought with him more than just a dapple gray—he brought show business and a banjo. Taylor is the first professional actor ever to sit in the halls of Congress.
When he arrived in Washington in January, 1945, he sat on the Capitol steps, and with the newsreel boys taking it all in, crooned a little song:
Oh, give us a home
Near the Capitol dome
With a yard where the children can play—
Just one room or two,
Any old thing will do,
We can’t find a pla-a-ace to stay.
Later the veteran Senator Wagner of New York asked him about his qualifications for membership in the Banking and Currency Committee, for which he had applied. The Idaho freshman replied that he knew all about banking and its functions.
“What’s your experience?” Wagner asked.
“I’ve had an important personal relationship with several banks,” Taylor replied.
“Were you a vice president, perhaps?”
“No.”
“A cashier?”
“No.”
“A teller or a clerk?”
“No.”
“What, then?” finally asked the puzzled Wagner.
“I was a depositor,” Taylor replied.
He got the appointment.
Glen Taylor, no matter what people in Boise or Pocatello, Idaho, may tell you, is not a clown, not a hillbilly, not a buffoon. On the contrary he is an extremely serious man. He has a nice dry wit, abundant common sense, fertility of mind, and a modest enough sense of showmanship. Above all his character shows pertinacity of almost incredible dimensions. Bilbo sneered at him once that he might make a senator in “about five years,” but he has already proved himself one of the most useful senators the country has.
Taylor’s career is picaresque to say the least. He was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1904, and brought up in the hamlet of Kooksia, Idaho, one of the eight children of a retired Texas ranger who was also a minister. He quit school when he was twelve, and has never had any formal education since. The contrast to his friend Wayne Morse, an intellectual by profession, is immense. Taylor got into show business while still in his teens. The family was hard up and full of acting talent, and several of the brothers joined to make a troupe that went all over the West, playing repertory in a casual sort of way. Taylor met a young actress named Dora Pike while with a musical comedy company in Montana, and married her. They set up an organization known as the Glendora Players, and went right on barnstorming. Taylor played every kind of role, from romantic lead to comedian.
Then two things happened: the talkies and the depression. Between them they practically put Glendora out of business. The company shriveled from twenty to four and, in the end, to compete with the talkies, Taylor had to try to pack more and more thrills into an evening. One triumph imposed by bitter circumstance was a production of Ten Nights in a Barroom, rewritten for a cast of four.
“And during all this time I began to see all the misery,” Taylor told me when I called on him in Washington. “It was in the early 30’s. Kids didn’t have proper clothes in winter. People came up to us, half starving and miserable, and offered us chickens in exchange for tickets. We still had a truck, and we kept moving from town to town every day, provided we took in enough at the box office to buy gas for each move…. Finally we went bust. And when folks were sick with hunger in the towns, we saw either fields still producing food or potatoes lying out to rot. I began to brood over how things could be so wrong. I found a book by Stuart Chase and it set me to thinking. I began to feel that all this misery was silly and unnecessary and that a man ought to do something to straighten out the confusion.”
The Glendora troupe miraculously revived, and by the fall of 1937 Taylor had a truckload of scenery and spotlights and a company of seven, with Mrs. Taylor still the indispensable leading lady. Then another menace hit them—radio. A rival company in Great Falls was pushing them hard, because all its members could play some kind of musical instrument, and so could advertise their performances by musical spots on local radio programs. These rivals didn’t even have scenery. Taylor, a real trouper, was outraged. Amateurs! But they did have music. Taylor says, “I was never one to see things go off and beat me.” So he hired a band. It walked out. Glen and Dora put their heads together. This was a crisis indeed; this was make or break. So Taylor, who had been able to play the mouth organ and ukelele in an extremely primitive way, taught himself to handle a banjo and guitar, and Mrs. Taylor took piano lessons—by mail! Taylor bought one of his brothers, who was still a faithful member of the troupe, a trombone, which was also mastered by correspondence, and then Dora graduated to the saxophone. The Taylors were now their own band as well as theatrical company, and they set out once more on their route of ramshackle one-night stands in the Montana and Idaho hinterland.
In 1938, Taylor decided to run for Congress from the Pocatello district. It took four hard campaigns and six grinding years before he became senator, not congressman, and reached Washington. Until his election he had never in his life been east of Chicago.
The first campaign was a dashing and militant affair. The Taylor troupe, mounted on trucks, thundered into each community. A kind of stage was set up at any convenient spot, a loud speaker blared forth, and the entire company put on a show, playing and singing till the crowd was big and curious enough, whereupon Taylor emerged grim and taut to deliver a slashing political speech, assaulting all the politicians, pleading for the common man and flaying the plutocracy.
This was the Pappy O’Daniel technique, one might say. Not at all. First, Taylor was, and is, violently sincere. Second, he wasn’t selling flour. He wasn’t selling anything, in fact, except himself.
He was beaten of course. He ran fourth in a primary field of nine. But he learned a lot, and people—even though they laughed at the “cowboy maestro”—liked him.
In 1940, Senator Borah, the ponderous and inexplicable negativist who for a generation had been synonymous with Idaho in the national mind, died. Taylor—it should be clear by this time that nothing whatever daunts him—decided to run for the succession. This was as if a water boy set out to succeed Jack Dempsey. The party wheel horses stormed and gaped. From Democrat headquarters Taylor, an obvious outlaw, got no support at all. He had practically no money. With what money he did have he did not buy radio time or advertising space in the newspapers—he bought a horse. And on this horse he campaigned for four hundred miles. He would go up to a lonely farmhouse, dismount, introduce himself, ask for a vote, and ride off again. The horse was named Ranger—of all names. The miraculous thing is that though Taylor was beaten in the general election (but by a fairly close margin) he won the primary. In other words he beat the Democratic machine, and the party, whether it liked it or not, had to take note of him.
Came the war, and Taylor was flat broke. He went to an Idaho defense plant and asked for a job as a truck driver. “Why, you’re the guy who ran for senator!” he was told. “We ain’t got no jobs for any guy like you!” So he had to flee the state and look for work where the lethal secret of his political past was unknown. He did get a job in San Francisco, earned good money as a painter’s assistant, and didn’t save a nickel. Why not? “You can’t buy publicity without money,” he told me sagely, “but politics is like show business and publicity is the one thing you ought to have, if it’s the right kind.” So he spent his earnings on maintaining contacts in Idaho. He wrote three thousand letters—long-hand!—to people in his district.
Came the 1942 elections. He returned to Pocatello, filed again, ran again, and was licked again. He went back to California, got a job as a sheet metal worker, stayed with it for sixteen months, watched affairs in Idaho with the eye of a hungrily expectant falcon, and returned to run once more in 1944. This time he had sixty dollars saved. He spent it on buying a business suit—he had decided to give up both trouping and the horse—and a few pamphlets. Nothing could keep him down. The Democratic machine even tried to split the ticket in order to sabotage Taylor’s vote. But by this time the people—or just enough people, to be precise—were behind him. He won the primary by exactly 216 votes, against the incumbent senator, D. Worth Clark (who is now a partner of Tommy Corcoran in Washington, D.C.), and romped home in the runoff against the governor, Clarence A. Bottolfsen, by 105,000 votes to 98,918.
Taylor looks back to all this now as a kind of crazy six-year dream. Sometimes he misses Idaho, its friendliness, its high and open skies. “It’s a free man’s country,” he told me. “A guy who has something, he’ll get somewhere.” But he’s having a wonderful time in Washington, and not until 1949 does he have to face a new campaign.
His maiden speech was in support of Henry Wallace. He voted for the Reciprocal Trade Agreements, for Bretton Woods, and for the United Nations charter. He voted for the British loan, then turned against it, because he thought that British policy might involve us in war with Russia. He is a firm believer in international good will and amity, and on October 24, 1945, he rose and addressed the Senate with the following unexpected words:
Mr. Taylor. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, out of order, to submit a resolution at this time.
The President pro tempore. Without objection, the resolution may be submitted.
Mr. Taylor. Mr. President, I should like to make a brief statement in connection with the resolution. I dislike very much to interrupt consideration of the tax bill. On the other hand, it may be a welcome respite for Senators to hear of something besides taxes for a few moments.
Mr. President, this is a rather momentous occasion in my experience in the Senate. This is the first resolution I have ever introduced. Furthermore, it is a resolution which may be rather startling to some, and, to say the least, controversial.
My proposal in the resolution is that the Senate go on record as favoring the creation of a world republic.
A few days later Taylor told a newspaper columnist that the American press truly perplexed him. When he sang a ditty on the Capitol steps, he pointed out, it made the front pages all over the country. When he delivered a long, cogent, and perfectly serious argument for the formation of a world republic, it made page 16 in exactly one newspaper.3
Taylor’s style in the Senate is exactly what one would not expect, The man is undoubtedly an actor, but he doesn’t talk like one. His manner is quiet, his language excellent, his approach candid, his mood beguiling. There can be few men who speak with a more subtle combination of formality and charm. Listen again to the Congressional Record:
Mr. Taylor. I should like to make my position clear to the Senator from Colorado and to other Members of the Senate. I hold no brief for Mr. Petrillo…. This bill would, I believe, work great hardship on the whole theatrical profession, that is, insofar as it is connected with radio. I have great numbers of telegrams from members of the radio profession, singers, actors, writers, directors, and I am put in a rather unusual position. If there were only one lawyer in the United States Senate and a bill came up in the Senate which all the lawyers of the country thought was going to be very detrimental to their best interest, they would probably get in touch with the one lawyer in the United States Senate to present their case for them. That is what has happened to me. It happens, I believe, that I am the only man with a theatrical background here, so people in the entertainment field have picked on me to try and help them in their extremity.
Taylor is always modest and homely, seldom brilliant, absolutely honest, and colloquial when the occasion fits. As witness:
I’ve never been rich. But the most debt I ever incurred at one time was $2,500 before I came to the Senate. I’m in debt $14,000 now. So help me, I ran for the Senate three times before I made the grade, and two of those times I didn’t know what the salary was.
When I came here I wanted a two-bedroom apartment. I could have got that kind for $250 a month, only I had children. So I decided to buy. … I found a row house in a dark neighborhood for $10,000. When I offered to buy it, they raised it to $12,000. … So I put my wife on my office payroll. Whether on the payroll or not, she would have spent a lot of time in the office, because we enjoy each other’s company.
It was in this connection that he mentioned that Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn had earned nine hundred thousand dollars the year before; he added mildly, “Maybe he’s worth more than we are.” Once he had a nice brush with Pappy O’Daniel of Texas, denying a statement by O’Daniel to the effect that all that senators cared about was votes; he said, “I will not compromise with the things I believe in, for the sake of votes.” On another occasion, after talking about how he loved his job, he concluded, “But I’m going to vote in the Senate as if I never expected to come back.” This statement is worth pointing an emphatic finger at; not many senators—or any other officeholders in America—would care or dare to say the same.
In 1946, Taylor made a fine little commotion by saying that he did not know whether he could go on accepting his salary because, like all his colleagues he had just been circularized by the financial clerk of the Senate asking him to swear that he was not a member of any organization asserting the right to strike against the government. Taylor put in a couple of days of research, and found that he could not absolutely affirm that this right was not upheld by rules of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association (AF of L) in which he retains proud but inactive membership. He concluded by refusing to sign the circular. “There,” he said, “the matter rests. It is up to the financial clerk to make the next move, and we will see whether or not I am eligible to be paid.” (Congressional Record, July 11, 1946.) A few weeks later Taylor came out with another bombshell, suggesting—“in his verdant ignorance” as he put it—that Congress, at the end of each session, “should publish the voting records of its members.”4 Incredibly enough—for a country supposed to be rational minded—this has never been done.
For a man who had to leave school at eighth grade Taylor has a considerably developed dialectical skill. A Washington reporter recently quoted him explaining how he could often vote against the administration, yet be for it:
I do not feel that I am against the Administration. If my brother were doing something which I felt in my heart was wrong and I tried to dissuade him, I do not believe it could honestly be said that I was against him. I would be for him. I am for the Administration. I want to keep the record clear.
Taylor is a tall man, good looking, spare, with the mobile mouth of an actor and a craggy nose. The Taylors have two sons. One, aged nine, is named Arod (his mother’s name spelled backward); the other, three, is P. J. He was named for Taylor’s father, whose name was Pleasant John.
Footnote on Idaho
Like all pioneers, Idahoans are materialists.
—M. R. Stone
Idaho is split across the middle by the mountains, and the northern panhandle differs so drastically from the south that it is virtually two states. It measures almost seven hundred miles from top to toe. There is no direct north-south railway, and to get from Moscow, the university town in the north, to Boise, the capital, by rail is quite a job; the journey takes twenty-three hours, and you have to go by way of both Washington and Oregon. Idaho is not a widely known state, and it has never exploited its own past, which in truth is romantic enough, as has California, say, or New Mexico. Idaho is torn, above all, between two other states; between the pull of Washington in the north, that of Utah in the south. Half of Idaho belongs to Spokane, I heard it said, and the other half to the Mormon church.
North Idaho is indeed part of the “inland empire,” with Spokane its natural citadel and market. It is largely wheat, timber, and mining country, and the leading newspaper is not the Boise Statesman, which is read by few northerners, but the Spokane Spokesman Review. Its great stand of virgin white pine is the last of such size left in the world, and it mines enough silver to make it the biggest silver-producing state. South (not “southern”) Idaho, with some of the wildest and least known territory on the continent outside Alaska, is irrigated in part by the Snake River with its “thousand miles of rainfall”; this is also a region dominated by agriculture—including the celebrated potato crop—and such examples of leftover war industry as the gun relining plant at Pocatello. Incidentally it is curious that Idaho, such a landlocked state, should possess the second largest Naval training station in the country, on Lake Pend Oreille.
I asked an Idaho patriot why the potatoes were so big. Answer: “We fertilize ’em with cornmeal, and irrigate with milk.”
Practically all local issues are focussed on the north-south split. The north is outnumbered by the south two to one, and hence is at a grave political disadvantage, which it tries to surmount by bargaining in the legislature; it fears being run by the richer south, and wants to be let alone. It cares very little for the politicians in Boise; it wants the same kind of development—particularly in things like public power—that Washington has. One standing quarrel has to do with the university.5 The old joke is that Moscow, in the north, got this institution as part of a deal in which the state penitentiary went to the south. Pocatello has a junior college called the Southern Branch of the University of Idaho and the south wants to expand this into a full-fledged four-year school. The north resists, saying that Idaho can’t afford two state universities, and that it’s better to have one strong school—no matter how inconveniently placed—than two weak ones. But as a result, most students in the south drain off to Utah.
Moscow, a charming town, gets its curious name not from anything Russian, but from an Indian tribe called originally “Masco.” The state has some picturesque place names. Two towns closely adjacent are named Desnet and Tensed. Desnet was named for a missionary, and the next community, unable to think of another name, simply inverted it.
Also Moscow (population 6,014) contains, in addition to the university, one of the most astonishing evangelists in the United States, a worthy named Frank B. (“Doc”) Robinson who preaches by mail. He gives correspondence courses in something called “Psychiana, the world’s fastest-growing religion,” and his mail is so big that the local post office bulges at the beams. Robinson is a wealthy man, a prominent civic leader, and the publisher of the town’s secular newspaper, the daily Idahoan. Sample of his ecclesiastical style:
I TALKED WITH GOD (Yes I did—Actually and Literally) and as a result of that little talk with God, a strange Power came into my life. … It’s fascinating to talk with God, and it can be done very easily, once you learn the secret. And when you do—well—there will come into your life the same dynamic Power that came into mine. The shackles of defeat which bound me for years went a-shimmering—and now?—well, I am President of the News Review Publishing Company, which corporation publishes the largest circulating afternoon daily in North Idaho. I own the largest office building in our City, I drive a beautiful Cadillac limousine. I own my own home, which has a lovely pipe organ in it [sic!] … And all this has been made possible because one day, ten years ago, I actually and literally talked with God.
You, too, may experience that strange mystical Power … and when you do, if there is poverty, unrest, unhappiness, or ill-health in your life—well, this same God-Power is able to do for you what it did for me! … For this is not a human Power. It’s a God-Power. … Well, just write a letter or postcard to Dr. Frank B. Robinson, Dept. 97, Moscow Idaho, and full particulars of this strange Teaching will be sent to you free of charge. But write now—while you are in the mood. It only costs one cent!
Idaho is a borderline state politically, and as Taylor’s campaigns show, most contests are very close. Bottolfsen and another governor, Clark, once alternated in the governorship by winning successive races by only a few hundred votes, and a recent governor and senator, Charles C. Gossett, once carried an important county by a majority of one. Taylor, by the way, invaded the state lustily in the summer of 1946 to attack and beat Gossett, who represents the conservative Democrats and who had once beaten him. The best organized political machine, until Taylor came along, was that of the Clark family. Idaho had a “Clark party”; people talked of the “Clark forces.” One Clark was a senator, and another was governor and is still a federal judge.
Without mention of the factors that, mutatis mutandis, are present in almost all American states—the party organizations, the women’s vote, the farmers, the liquor interests—one might summarize political forces in Idaho as follows. First, the great mining companies, like Bunker Hill & Sullivan (at Kellogg—zinc and lead) and the Sunshine Mining Company near Coeur d’Alene, which has the world’s biggest silver mine. Working closely with the mining interests are the big lumber companies, like the Clearwater Timber Company and the local Weyerhaeuser interests, and the Idaho Power Company which is active all over the state. This was once part of Electric Bond and Share. The biggest lobby in the legislature is a combination of mines, lumber, and utilities. Yet Idaho is not nearly so business dominated and exploited as, say, Montana or Colorado. There is no single corporation that has anything like the power of Anaconda in Montana. Idaho is not a colony.
Second, the Mormon church, which is the biggest religious denomination in the state. “Eighty per cent of the Idaho vote,” runs a local truism, “is agricultural, and 40 per cent is Mormon.” There are some communities in the irrigated southeastern areas that are 70 per cent Mormon or more, and the putative influence of the church was considered so strong that, when Idaho became a state back in 1890, the constitution went out of its way specifically to outlaw polygamy. The Mormons “take their orders from Utah”—so Idahoans are apt to say. As we shall discover when we come to Utah, the Mormon community is a very conservative force politically, and also a powerful influence for sobriety, good citizenship, and admirable social values. As part of the complex north-south balance of power in Idaho, it is a tradition that no Mormon may be governor of the state.
Third—and uniquely in the nation—the Basques.6 These are mostly shepherds. They form the largest Basque colony this side of the Pyrenees. They are almost as radical as the Mormons are conservative, and they played a considerable role in the 1944 elections; in fact, they swung the balance. This was partly the result of an invasion of the state by the CIO. Labor is extremely weak in Idaho, and until recently had no political voice at all. Then Roy Atkinson, the regional director of the PAC in Seattle, got busy. He won the support of a Basque leader named Pete Leguenecahe, organized the Basque vote, and put it behind the Democrats, like Taylor, who were fighting the conservative machine.
Fourth, a minor point but worth mention, Idaho has received in recent years a fair quota of dust-bowl immigrants and migrants from the Dakotas. These—perhaps only temporarily—have added to the dissident vote in the state.
Fifth—and this is true in all western states—the education lobby. Idaho has very little to spend on social services, say $2,250,000 per year, but it does its best to keep up the schools. Uniquely in the country, the Board of Education is considered to be a fourth equal partner in the state government along with the executive, legislature, and judiciary.
Finally, the Idaho Statesman, which has a prestige and position all its own despite journalistic depredations from outside. The Statesman consists, in a word, of a remarkable blue-blooded lady named Margaret Cobb Ailshie, who is editor, owner, publisher, and dominator. She owns the other Boise paper too, and the town is thus one of the very many in America in which a single person or family has a complete monopoly in journalism. Mrs. Ailshie, who inherited the Statesman from her equally remarkable father, is an extreme reactionary—something to the right of Louis XIV or Boies Penrose say—and a genuine patrician.
It is an interesting commentary on the slipperiness of the American attitude to institutions and a kind of national short-mindedness that Borah, incontestably the best-known citizen that Idaho ever produced, left no political family of any kind, no tradition or inheritance, no machine. His following was, of course, supraparty. But one can travel the length and breadth of the state nowadays and scarcely hear his name. Of course Borah never paid much attention to Idaho per se. For instance he never owned a house in Boise, but simply kept a few rooms in the Hotel Owyhee. His widow—though her father was a former governor—has never come back to the state.
Idaho has much else that might be mentioned—the last “white” (=fast) water of the great log drives, a colorful congressman in the person of Compton White, the attractive railway-tourist development known as Sun Valley, and a remarkable novelist in the person of Vardis Fisher. To conclude, it is fond of a little joke—that it would be the biggest state in the union if ironed out flat.
1 And who was once one of his students at the University of Minnesota.
2 Hoyt has now moved on to Denver where he has stirred up the entire population as publisher of the Denver Post.
3 Leonard Lyons, New York Post, December 13, 1945.
4 New York Post, August 16, 1046.
5 Of the three regents of this school one is a housewife, the other two are farmers.
6 But Oregon also has a Basque community.