Dark Rose: Organized Crime and Corruption in Portland

One: Early Portland and the Failure of Progressive Reform

25 One E early PortlanD anD the failure of Progressive reform In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Portland was known simply as “The Clearing,” a rest stop for those traveling between Fort Vancouver and Oregon City. In 1843, the town was founded, and a toss of the coin—a gamble—led to the site’s naming in 1844. Massachusetts lawyer, Asa Lovejoy, and Francis Pettygrove, a businessman from Maine, shared the land, but could not agree on a name. Pettygrove won the coin toss, therefore, his beloved Portland, Maine, had a namesake on the West Coast. Portland, Oregon, was established before other notable northwestern cities, such as Seattle, Tacoma, or Boise, and quickly began to grow. The personality of this new town, which bulged with eight hundred people in 1850, was molded by a thriving commercial life that grew out of the abundant farmlands of the Willamette Valley and the thick forests of Oregon’s Cascade and Coast mountain ranges. The city’s wharves soon filled with lumber, wheat, and fruit, which were readied for shipment to distant markets. When the gold rush transformed San Francisco from a coastal hamlet into a boomtown in the 1850s, Portland provided the lumber to build the “City by the Bay.” By the end of the nineteenth century, Port- 26 ChaPter one land, although not as glamorous as San Francisco or Denver, was an important city in the West.1 As Portland grew in the 1870s and 1880s, it became an important river city, like St. Louis and Cincinnati. Portland’s character was shaped by a conservative financial community that pursued sound investments in both new business opportunities and old establishments ; yet Portland’s investors were not opposed to occasional risky speculation. Town leaders were committed to public education and sought to develop a unique, if fairly traditional, Portland culture, one that differed from the ethnic-flavored environment of Milwaukee and the loud boosterism of Chicago. According to historian E. Kimbark MacColl, “Portland’s characteristics blended together to give the city a special quality of affluence, tempered by civility and good taste.”2 Portland’s “particular sense of place,” historian Carl Abbott explains, “is based on its everyday environment.”3 Portland ’s serene environment of wooded hilltops, majestic rivers, and nearby snow-covered peaks earned Portland the moniker, “Pearl of the Northwest.” The shining city on the hill also had a familiar underside. Like many American cities in the nineteenth century, Portland’s gambling dens, brothels, and saloons boomed, the by-product of turbulent , expansionist, and lawless times. By 1864, the growing town included seven hundred transients in hotels and boardinghouses, and the presence of gold in the region, combined with land speculation and a boisterous waterfront, stimulated the construction of saloons, dancehalls, and brothels where men indulged in various “sinful” pleasures.4 By the early 1880s, dozens of entrepreneurs profited from the lucrative enterprises of prostitution, gambling, and liquor, while the town’s economic elite and municipal leaders owned and managed many of the properties linked to these activities. Since the middle- to upper-class—Portland’s “establishment ”—were responsible for civic governance, there was an obvious conflict between their moral and law enforcement duties and their unsavory side interests. Businessmen controlled Portland early PortlanD 27 politics as well as the contracts for municipal services. The principal men of the city not only profited from railcar service, street paving and maintenance contracts, public utilities, and insurance policies, but also from the city’s illegal operations. Given their social, political, and financial connections, they were disinclined to stifle the profitable gambling, liquor, and prostitution operations that reformers wanted to eliminate. This would remain true into the 1950s. Before the Civil War, municipal corruption was less common in America’s young cities than it was after the war. Antebellum urban populations were smaller and enterprising civic leaders had less incentive and fewer opportunities to capitalize on their positions. However, as cities grew after the war, opportunities for graft and illegal agreements increased as city officials created public services and signed lucrative contracts.5 In 1883, for example, Portland Mayor James Chapman publicly admitted that he had bought his 1882 election. He had agreed to appoint former City Councilman Lucerne Besser and acquaintance Tom Connell to top city jobs in exchange for their support. Financial duress, Mayor Chapman explained, motivated him to sign a contract with Besser in 1882, appointing Besser superintendent...