Rediscovering The Oregon Way (RtOW): Introduction
When the Way was firing on all cylinders, there was a collective push to recognize and improve upon the past while envisioning a transformative future.
*Editor’s Note* For the next several Saturdays, I will be posting an excerpt from my book, “Rediscovering the Oregon Way.” This effort started two years ago in the middle of my current role as a graduate school student. I spent weekend mornings doing research, late nights conducting interviews, and spare moments looking for typos.
The book is not perfect.
I hope you will help me catch typos and identify areas for improvement and additional research. I originally wanted to formally publish this book, but I am convinced that Oregon needs to read it now—before the next election. So please forgive some of the limitations of self-publishing on this platform: I did not have a paid editor review this; there’s no mechanism for including my footnotes here (but I will send you the manuscript if you’d like); and, there was not thorough review by a research committee.
Introduction
Dave Frohnmayer, former Oregon Attorney General and President of the University of Oregon, introduced me to the concept of the Oregon Way. Legs crossed, coffee in hand, Dave recounted his interpretation of the state’s political culture during one of the many conversations we held in the Wayne Morse Commons at the University of Oregon School of Law. Legal pad in front of me, I scribbled sparknotes as he spoke. I have no idea where I put that pad...but I’ve never forgotten how Dave made me feel.
The way he talked about Oregon, you would think he had only known this small segment of the Pacific Coast. Of course, Dave was about as worldly as an Oregonian gets: for example, he had seen the upper echelons of power as a Rhodes Scholar and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. But he was content to spend the majority of his time and energy on improving Oregon. His family called the state home, his public service was done with Oregon in mind, and his time went toward helping all sorts of Oregonians reach their full potential. That is why Dave was sitting with me. Surely, he could have been elsewhere, but he rarely turned down the chance to help a student pursue a lofty goal.
I reached out to Dave for advice on my application to the Truman Scholarship, an award that supports college students who “demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service.” The coaching he imparted stuck with me, but his own good fortune in the Rhodes process did not; I lost (he won). Thankfully, even with the loss in my back pocket, Dave still agreed to meet with me on a regular basis. Our meeting agenda rarely changed. First, grab coffee from the nearby cafe. Second, debrief local news. Third, see where that takes us. We ended up talking about everything and anything. In between talks, we sent articles back and forth and assessed Oregon’s political scene as if it were a chess game. Our conversations always traced their way back to Oregon...and eventually we ended up discussing the Oregon Way.
To Dave, the Oregon Way wasn’t something you looked up in the dictionary. His Way was more like an atmosphere that enveloped the state’s political discourse and direction. He described it in anecdotes more so than in facts and figures. Stories about the Way jumped from the Rajneshees to the Rogue River. They included the likes of Tom McCall, Norma Paulus, and Vera Katz. Dave delivered each narrative in a personal manner that touched on political rivalries without becoming partisan. Though he never explicitly defined this Way, I inferred that Dave would have sent the following definition to Merriam Webster: Oregon Way [awr-i-guh wey], noun, a manner of conducting political and community affairs that a) relies on community engagement and fosters strong, independent civic institutions, and b) safeguards social norms and individual autonomy.
Collectively, Dave’s stories conveyed that the Way had shifted since Dave left the political arena. New political players introduced new norms. The composition of the atmosphere changed and the Way was becoming something unfamiliar. I craved more information on how he thought the state was shifting: What was good about these shifts? How were the shifts affecting politics and community affairs? Which stakeholders were behind the shifts and how were they making them happen? In search of answers, I did my best to keep up my meeting schedule with Dave. With that goal in mind, at 9:41pm on March 9, 2015, I sent Dave the following message:
Hello Dace,
I just wanted to check in on meeting around 12pm or after 2pm on Thursday.
Looking forward to it,
Kevin
He never responded. Hopefully, he never read it and wondered why this kid couldn’t even spell his name correctly. Dave died the next day on March 10, 2015.
The Oregon Way matters. For several decades, the atmosphere that Dave described fostered political outcomes unseen in other states (but later replicated by many of them) and nurtured leaders with unique abilities and deep understandings of the Oregon people. This atmosphere fueled the Ten Dam Nights debate series between Congressman Sam Coon and State Senator Richard Neuberger. It was the air that Governor McCall breathed when he oversaw the implementation of the Beach and Bottle Bills. It filled the lungs of Oregonians during the push to establish statewide land use laws. Some thing or some things have since polluted this air. There’s no longer a soft air that moderates our politics and connects Oregonians. The current atmosphere feels toxic. In some cases, it’s as if no atmosphere even exists. We can’t even talk with one another. So big ideas and the potential to do good pass by like clouds over the high desert.
We need the atmosphere Frohnmayer described. Restoring this Oregon Way requires rediscovering what used to be ubiquitous in Oregon. The process of isolating what created and sustained this atmosphere will only get harder as more Oregonians that experienced that era start to leave us. I am determined to learn as much as I can from these leaders and political pioneers before too many of my emails go to inactive inboxes.
I owe it to Dave to continue the conversation we never got to finish. The feeling that Oregon was special and deserved our full attention and protection was the starting point for most of Dave’s stories. My exploration of the Oregon Way will hopefully spur others to start cleaning up the atmosphere and to bring conversation, connection, and common sense back to Oregon.
As I mentioned, there’s no dictionary definition of the Oregon Way, but for the sake of this inquiry I’ll apply two definitions that expand on how I thought Dave would have characterized the Way.
Here’s the long definition: the Oregon Way requires strong, independent social institutions, the presence of shared values and common norms, and open democratic processes; these requirements must then interact to drive the state toward progressive political outcomes.
And, here’s the short definition: the Oregon Way is a pragmatic, collaborative approach to achieving progressive political outcomes. The long and short definitions both struggle to convey Dave’s insistence that the Oregon Way was more like an atmosphere than a checklist; nevertheless, these definitions provide a means for testing the presence of an ethereal concept.
It’s worth pointing out that many, if not most, people have a special relationship with their home state. So is this Oregon Way truly unique? Yes and no. Let’s start with the “no.” Like most places, Oregon has quirks that only its residents tend to appreciate. This affinity for the atypical is replicated in places like North Carolina, which celebrates its status as the Barbeque Capital of the world, and, of course, Texas, where residents take immense pride in everything being bigger there.,
On the “yes” side, two things distinguish the relationship between Oregonians and their state: first, it’s unique how closely intertwined Oregon’s quirks are with civic affairs and politics; and, second, appreciation for Oregon and what it means to be “Oregonian” is not tied to having been born in the state. On the first point, Oregonians have a track record of celebrating politicians and political reforms that are outside of the box. As will be discussed, from Wayne Morse to Automatic Voter Registration, Oregon’s political history is lined with instances in which the oddities of its population produced peculiar political officials and outcomes. On the second, the sense of a shared appreciation for Oregon persists despite the fact that few people can claim the state as their own. Consider that just 30.8 percent of Multnomah County residents are Oregon-born. The prevalence of "outsiders" is true outside of the metro-area as well: 31.2 percent in Deschutes, 36.5 in Lane, 46.3 in Wallowa.
Some argue that Oregon isn’t some special Eden worthy of or distinct enough to have its own Way. After all, it’s just another state differentiated only by lots of trees, an understudied racist origin, and a TV show about its only major city (which often feels more like a town). These folks are right for the most part. From North Carolina to Texas and beyond, residents of most places feel strongly tied to their community and proud of its progression through time—it’s likely why they call that place home., And, looking at Oregon through a national perspective doesn’t reveal a mountain of evidence that what happens in this one state merits outsized focus. View Oregon from the Jory soil up, though, and it becomes clear that Oregon isn’t just another state, at least not to the people that call it home.
To get back to the first point, the place-based bonds that tie Oregonians to the state are different from the typical love a resident has for their state because of how Oregonians channel that bond through political processes. This dynamic—love for place-based public policy—has allowed Oregon to achieve major gains in the quality of life experienced by its contemporary and future residents. By way of example, Richard Chambers’ love for Oregon turned into the Bottle Bill, a piece of legislation that later spread around the nation and helped forever make nature more enjoyable. Several generations of Oregonians have had their equivalent(s) of Richard Chambers—the result is that Oregon’s quality of life has been iteratively improved through nation-leading legislation.
That said, Oregon’s additive quality of life hasn’t always been evenly distributed. At times, additions to the quality of life of some have come at great cost to others. These trade-offs have regularly been executed specifically along racial and class lines. Dave and I talked about Oregon’s gnarly past of racism, discrimination, and alienation. He said that the Oregon Way was at its best when it was inclusive, collaborative, and future-looking. When the Way was firing on all cylinders, according to Dave, there was a collective push to recognize and improve upon the past while envisioning a transformative future.
These sorts of pushes have included a degree of exceptionalism—the idea that only Oregon could take on such an endeavor—and, at times, surely were not as inclusive as they could have been. Yet, it was the pushing of the Frohnmayers, McCalls, Pauluses, and everyday residents of Portland, Pendleton, and Pilot Rock that gave Oregon an atmosphere unlike any other. And, to again highlight point number two, these pushes often are started and sustained by people who adopted Oregon as their home and still committed to making it a better place to live for current and future generations.
So here’s a recounting of how Oregon’s special atmosphere came to be and a hope that we can rediscover and spread it. This book isn’t driven by a partisan agenda. It is motivated by an Oregon agenda. A chance to look back at the state’s cultivation of a distinctive political culture and remember what it is that makes you proud to call yourself an Oregonian and how to turn that pride into progress.
I don’t anticipate rediscovering my notes from talks with Dave but I will do everything in my power to hold on to how he made me feel—like I was a small part of a large story about Oregon’s progress. I think it’s that feeling of having a role in Oregon’s narrative that spurred so many before us to turn their love for the state into legislation that safeguarded its best aspects for future generations. That’s why it’s important that Oregonians feel their state can be an Eden. It’s this aspirational view of Oregon that has made countless men and women sacrifice their time and energy to advance legislation that moves the state closer to its potential. Restoring that feeling among all Oregonians can redirect the state away from national pettiness and pandering and back to the Oregon Way.
I’m not the first to have this hard-to-define feeling that Oregon can be much more than just a home, but a model. The resettlement of Oregon was grounded in a variant of this feeling — in pioneers’ desire to start new, different, better lives. The belief that Oregon should be different and ahead of other states drove resettlers to try to seal off Oregon to protect what they thought made it great, progressives to give residents more democratic tools to shape the state to their needs, and everyday residents to form broad coalitions around big goals. Oregonians should continue to hold this belief and use that shared belief to see themselves as a family rather than as a federation of communities tied together by arbitrary lines and a couple of rivers. The former approach will lead to continued progress on increasing the state’s quality of life. The latter marks a continuation of the movement away from the Oregon Way.
What follows is a mix of identifying the components of Frohnmayer’s atmosphere—the structures supporting the Oregon Way—and assessing the condition of those components over time. Dave didn’t pass along his interpretation of the structures and motivations responsible for the creation of the Oregon Way. I deconstructed his stories, though, and recovered four likely components: enforced political and social norms, open democratic processes, shared values, and strong, independent social institutions.
As depicted below and explored in the book, I am not certain how best to align the four components to derive the Oregon Way, but I am sold on the four forming the foundation off of which generations of Oregonians have improved their collective quality of life.
I’ll make the case for the importance of these components by looking into their impact on different political eras of Oregon’s political culture as well as seeing how they shaped more than a few of the stories Dave mentioned. My hope is that you’ll finish the book with a better understanding of what makes Oregon distinct, a little more optimism for the future of the state, and a sense of what can be done to restore the state’s reputation for a high quality of life. For non-Oregonians, the book should provide a template with which to assess the presence of a “Way” in your own city, region, or state.
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Thank you to all of the individuals who have contributed to this writing effort including my partner, Dalton, my parents, my siblings, and my most enthusiastic running buddies, Tommy and Patrick. I’m grateful for the time spent interviewing generous Oregonians such as Senator Bob Packwood, Governor Ted Kulongoski, Governor John Kitzhaber, Governor Barbara Roberts, Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, Attorney General John Kroger, Secretary of State Phil Keisling, State Senators Bill Hansell, Cliff Bentz, and Arnie Roblan, Doris Penwell, Margaret Hallock, Dan Tichenor, Len Bergstein, Karmen Fore, Kristen Leonard, and David Peterson del Mar. Thank you also to Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, Vermont State Senator Kesha Ram, and Vermont State Senator Becca Balint for talking with me. Professors Ed Whitelaw, David Frank, Henry Alley and Roxann Prozniak, and educators such as Ann Karakas and Arlene Tsugawa prepared me to take on this effort; I’m thankful for their encouragement and instruction.
This book is dedicated to Richard Chambers, Dave Frohnmayer, and Cindy Frazier. Each has put their love for Oregon and its people ahead of personal well-being.
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