Cruise control: Back in the early '60s, liberals were in charge, and they included JFK, Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, and Gov. Albert Rosellini.
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Up front, a personal note: I am a migrant, a native of the agrarian South come to what we have thought of as an earthly paradise, God's country—the Pacific Northwest. I came in pursuit of happiness, adventure, education, and the opportunity for a mite of fortune. A better life, if not paradise. As such, I'm like an overwhelming majority of those about to read this article.
Our recent numbers are staggering. In the years from 1990 to 1996, 1,198,400 migrants and immigrants moved into Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Sobering these numbers may be, but also somewhat misleading. They do not truly reflect the extra pressure on streets, roads, and landscape. For example, while the population of our Puget Sound region increased by 20 percent from 1981 to l991, the number of automobile miles traveled, same period, jumped by 80 percent. In other words, traffic increased four times for every new resident. There is reason to suspect a similar ratio applies to land use as we slurb up to the Cascade foothills and beyond.
And, alas, they tell nothing about the radical change in our politics, especially in Washington, but also in Oregon. From the 1930s to the 1990s, the political field force on our extremes has moved from secular socialism to fundamental religion; from Karl Marx to St. Paul. At the political edges, the 1990s are the 1930s turned upside down.
When I arrived in Seattle in 1950 the state had a population of 2.3 million. Fishing, farming, Boeing, and forestry were major sources of its wealth. A few years later, I interviewed Jo Grimmond, then the elegant leader of a resurgent Liberal Party in Great Britain. He rhapsodized about Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia as "the last hope of Western civilization." Grimmond noted the region's excellent public schools, its open political system, and its enormously competent politicians, all the product of a populist/progressive, egalitarian, public philosophy.
Forty years later, Jo Grimmond is gone, along with most of his party. The fish and their bold harvesters are depleted, and great swaths of forest denuded.
In a generation or less we've gone from lumberjacks to computer nerds. Electronics manufacturing has overtaken forest products as a source of wealth here. What's left of the forest industry is mainly in the hands of those industrial giants who own their own timber, like Weyerhaeuser.
The more destructive change, however, is in our 1990s public philosophy. In the face of need for concerted government action to control the new wave's sprawl through planning and new modes of transportation, Oregon and Washington have come up with a political climate that makes Orange County seem liberal. Jim Farley, the Democratic Party national chairman of the 1930s who gave Washington its signature clich麠"the 47 states and the Soviet of Washington," wouldn't recognize our new ways. Washington and Oregon of the '90s run with legislatures increasingly hostile to common schools, government regulations and, above all, taxes. Farley's "Soviet" now tends more to the theocratic than socialist.
Is it cause and effect or happenstance that this radical turn occurs alongside the '90s migration wave? Evidence is anecdotal. Thus far only one Northwest opinion pollster, Jim Hebert of Hebert Research Inc., Bellevue, Washington, has explored the connection between length of Northwest residence and public attitudes. The poll comes with warning flags: tentative and limited, a sample of King County attitudes only.
Hebert's poll results show that those who have moved here in the past 10 years are more conservative in their political attitudes. Those who've been around longer are more liberal. Newcomers are hostile towards the state's measures to manage growth, an abrogation of their property rights. Ten-year-plus citizens are overwhelmingly accepting of growth management.
What's reasonably certain is that our new citizens have not come with much knowledge of fabled Washington Democratic Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, Oregon Sen. Charles McNary, and the mainstream of public philosophy in this region from 1896, the election of Washington's Populist (that's capital "P" as in Populist Party) governor and legislature, until 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of Maggie. That mainstream came down from the region's populists and progressives. Populists were democratic, egalitarian (unlike their racist Southern counterparts), and wary of power concentrated either on Wall Street or with government socialists. The constitution they inspired made common schools the paramount duty of the state. It also created seven separately elected state offices to diffuse power in Olympia. To thwart Wall Street ownership of electric utilities, Washington created public utility districts to provide "cheap power without profits."
Oregon created the primary election, referendum, and initiative processes—popular election reforms that were quickly adopted here, then elsewhere around the nation.
With a couple of historic exceptions, this public philosophy has been steadfast and unbounded by party lines. Mark Reed, the powerful Washington Republican House Speaker in the late 1920s, pushed for workmen's compensation and public power. McNary worked with Magnuson to build the hydroelectric dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers that have so generously powered Northwest homes and factories. Dan Evans, Washington's exceptionally gifted Republican governor of the 1960s and 1970s, twice pushed income tax bills through the state Legislature. Evans also moved state comprehensive planning laws through the Republican-controlled House, only to lose them in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
