Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence and the Evolution of a State

Chapter 4. Town and Country in Oregon: A Conflicted Legacy

59 Chapter 4 Town and Country in Oregon A Conflicted Legacy William G. Robbins The landscapes of the American and Canadian West offer great distances between towns, a lower intensity and volume of human activity than in the East, and, in many places, abandoned farmsteads and town sites. In his bestseller Great Plains, the writer Ian Frazier provides a blunt assessment of that West: “Money and power in this country concentrate elsewhere” (Frazier 1989). The poet and essayist 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” (Norris 1993). Because the High Plains has always been a sparsely settled place with few urban centers, it has long been customary to characterize its relationship to the rest of the nation as colonial. It is not unique, however , because the region is at one with significant portions of other western states, a region that the journalist Joel Garreau once described as “the Empty Quarter” (Garreau 1981). Sixty years ago, Carey McWilliams, arguably California’s greatest twentieth -century writer, suggested that, for most of its history, California has been the urban center for the area west of the Continental Divide (McWilliams 1949, 82). The coastal reaches of 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, lightly 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, the Oregon outback and adjacent areas have also served as a literal treasure 60 TOWARD ONE OREGON house of resources for the expanding industrial appetites of Atlantic-centered nation states. What is fascinating about America’s Far West is the spectacular scope and rapid pace of change during the last century and a half. The roots of that dramatic transformation can be best understood within the broader context of the ever-shifting world of modern capitalism—its propensity for technological dynamism and 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 the most systematic framework for explaining change in the American West and the region’s integration into national and international exchange relations. Oregon ’s development over the last one hundred fifty years, therefore, has never occurred in isolation from broader currents of national and global economic activity. Rather, Oregon 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. The emergence of urban centers in the American West and their association with extensive hinterlands also developed in tandem with investment and marketing initiatives often originating far from the region itself. The political philosopher Marshall Berman argued that the principal force driving the “maelstrom of modern life” at the close of the nineteenth century was the “everexpanding , drastically fluctuating world market.” That far-reaching global system , he observed, was “capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability” (Berman 1982, 16, 19).1 In that sense, the late-nineteenth-century American West was a prototype for modern 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 moguls withdrew their investments. As a methodology for studying Western history, relations between country and city provide important insights into the spatial distribution of power and influence. Although the urban-hinterland relationship poses many questions, it still provides useful ideas for understanding power relationships within the West and with more distant centers of capital.2 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.3 There were, he observed, “increasingly fewer advantages as one moves out from the triumphant pole” (Braudel 1977, TOWN AND COUNTRY IN OREGON 61 82-85). Braudel raised a fundamental question about that relationship: the lack of autonomy in the countryside. The persistence of protest...