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The Dark Decade

The 1930s catastrophe that shook the world and the nation, the Great Depression, hit the fledgling Planned City on the Columbia especially hard.

Longview’s potential was grand, its ambitions mighty, but they banked on aggressive growth and accelerating prosperity: The roaring 20s had built the theater and set the stage, the 30s would kick the show into high gear. Instead, to continue the metaphor, the seats sat empty and the box office closed for business, the actors were out of work and the investors out of money.

They Banked On Aggressive Growth And Accelerating Prosperity

The city built with global ambitions would begin to rebound only at the end of the decade, thanks to an even greater global catastrophe, the second World War. Suddenly the shrewd siting of the city on the deepwater Columbia paid huge benefits. The coming of hydropower, the demand for war materiel, and the cranking up of America’s huge industrial capacity all directly benefited and revived Longview.

It would change the city forever. Its founder gone, his great company in ruins, a seismic shift in its economy and governing would thrust Longview onto the national and even international stage. Popular wisdom has since liked to say Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia River won World War II. If so, the Planned City contributed more than its fair share in shaping what would soon be known as The American Century.

Signs of trouble appeared well before the stock market crash in October, 1929. Two years earlier a sharp drop in construction nationwide had rocked the lumber industry. Unsold inventory crowded the docks. Long-Bell’s dividend shrunk to only a dollar a share. It would be the last the company would pay. And the slide grew worse: cont page 19

By the end of 1931 half the men who had worked in the mills and forests of Washington and Oregon were looking for jobs. Many mills, including Long-Bell’s manufactured lumber and sold it at less than cost, just to stay open.

Lenore Bradley Robert Alexander Long

It was a world in crisis, not just their region. In 1929 the Japanese had dramatically increased tariffs and, according to Lenore Bradley, “dealt a body blow to exporting mills.” Oceangoing vessels that had supported trade with China, India and Australia, besides Japan, no longer made Longview a port of call.

The End of the Beginning

John M. McClelland, Jr. divides Longview’s first five decades into three periods. “The first were the remarkable beginning years from 1923 to 1930. The second period was unfortunate. It was the stagnant Depression that brought nearly everything to a standstill from 1930 until 1940.” The third takes us to the mid-1970s, “35 years of municipal adulthood.”

The 1930s were Longview’s struggling adolescence. Everything was half-formed, so its fits and starts were dramatic and its challenges blatant. Fledgling social services rushed into action, neighbors looked for ways to care for each other. At the risk of the dreaded “socialism” the community even began to look for public action to combat its private problems, with the necessary increase in governmental regulation and administration. The seeds of two of Longview’s proudest accomplishments, its PUD and its community college, can be traced to the mid-thirties.

Still clinging to Long-Bell’s skirts made the town highly volatile and vulnerable. Most people clung to the single-minded belief that — despite resolutely insisting it was no mere Company Town — in the end the Company could and would support them. It was a dangerous co-dependence. Besides acting as employer and financier, the company was expected to be chief educator, city manager, church and community organizer, all-purpose supplier and savior.

Until suddenly it wasn’t.

Company losses in 1931 had reached $5 million, liabilities exceeded assets by $34 million, interest on the $19 million debt accumulated. The debt now frightened Long.

Lenore Bradley

Robert Alexander Long

The founder, now 81 years old, was assailed from all sides. Struggling individuals pleaded for relief and additional social services. Disgruntled executives and shareholders, even family members, attacked the crumbling company for its codependencies. Critics claimed, explicitly, and publicly, that LongBell’s financial woes resulted directly from its extravagant expenditures out west.

The Dream of His Eyes

On March 15, 1934, Robert Alexander Long died after a short illness, at age 84. Typically among his few regrets was that his financial decline had prevented him fulfilling some of his many philanthropic commitments, his giving.

Mr. Long (as he was always known) had hidden his true nature behind a placid, even meek persona. Somewhat frail and dandified in appearance, he could seem to present to Longview, and to posterity, a man more in his dotage than his prime. After all, he conceived the dream of his Planned City while in his eighth decade! But this was a grave misapprehension. In a sketch of Long published in 1907, Kansas City editor George Creel tried to look behind the facade which already presented itself to the public:

At first glance there is nothing about him to suggest the captain of industry…but in the breadth of his forehead and the dream of his eyes, lies the secret of Mr. Long’s success. He has come to the top by sheer mental force, by power of imagination. Most men of affairs fear imagination and sedulously abstain from ever looking up at the stars. Not so with Mr. Long, for inquiry among those who knew him best develops that he was never at any time a slave the the usual, a devotee of routine. His eyes were never on the ground. He thought big from the first, and his mental grasp was huge.

Other writers and historians have pointed out this seeming contradiction in Mr. Long, the churchy, abstemious lumber baron gallivanting across the country in a private Gilded Age railroad car. Stewart Holbrook writes tellingly in his book, The Columbia: “Long was a pious man, markedly humble in religious matters but in no matter humble elsewhere.”

John McClelland, Jr. had a fine sense of the man, pointing out in his 75th Anniversary edition of R.A. Long’s Planned City that few of Mr. Long’s original achievements endured. His company had been broken up and absorbed by Eastern giants; his model farm abandoned; his Kansas City mansion become a museum. But one “dream of his eyes” had in fact flourished:

But far out in the valley of the Cowlitz, the city that began as a plan and a dream not only endures but grows and prospers. The name R.A. Long is as commonly used in 1998 in Longview as it was when the man himself was alive. Longview, it turns out, is the means by which a man who wanted very much to be remembered is remembered.

Photos, this page, top: Pike polers “chuting” logs being dumped into a pond; opposite page, above: cedar shingle bolts ready for transport.

Photos courtesy of Longview Public Library.

Near right: Log ponds were the ubiquitous storage and marshaling yards. Opposite, right: Two stories’ worth: 700 cords of shingle bolts await shaking and shingling. Photos courtesy of Cowlitz County Historical Museum.

Putting Water to Work

Meanwhile the depression deepened and Longview suffered. In 1935 the city built for 50 thousand counted only 12,000, and added only 385 more by 1940. Survival was the strategy of the day, and it applied across the board, from residents to small businesses to the larger industries — small economies, little efficiencies, facing challenges, out-thinking circumstances.

On the industrial side, Northwesterners doubled down on one of their most basic survival strategies: putting water, which was free, to work. The hardscrabble loggers and lumbermen in the thirties developed ever more creative uses of the region’s “other” great natural resource.

It didn’t take the Bureau of Reclamation, Corps of Engineers, or Federal Power Commission to demonstrate to the denizens of southwest Washington the power of water — to float things, move things, and eventually power things. It can be argued that the plentiful supply of water — Virginia Urrutia named her history of Cowlitz County “They Came to Six Rivers” — was as crucial to local development as the huge stands of raw timber.

The Scandinavian loggers and lumbermen, of all people, needed no lessons in hydrology. The endless inventiveness of people extracting trees and sending them to market had forever relied on water to move the big brutes out of the woods and eventually to their customers.

It would be hydropower on a massive scale — with the completion of Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia — that would help the city and region shed the Depression and scale up industry and trade to fight a world war. In the meantime, the region was already using water power in a host of applications. The utilization of that power, the control of it and administration of it, would be among the most impactful stories of the 1930s.

We do not possess the river, no matter how we try. It possesses us, exacting a price for whatever we ask of it. It will keep within its banks, but the dikes must be strong. It will give us power if we dam it, but the price is high.

VIrginia Urrutia

They Came to Six Rivers

“Shingles Did It”

Three words, according to a local historian, explain the growth of Castle Rock, a community a few miles up the Cowlitz River from Longview. “Shingles did it,” said local historian Leland cont page 21

Jackson. Hence, the harvesting, transport and processing of the cedar “shingle bolt” as but one example of the imagination, courage, and practical savvy of the pioneer loggers.

But, “like maverick calves,” bolts snagged themselves on rocks or roots; piled up and pressed by water, it might take days or even weeks to break a jam. Timber jams were worse, and some could stretch as far as five miles. Breaking up one historic jam, on the Coweeman River in 1923, required extreme measures — dynamite. Urrutia continues:

This was such an exciting event that nearby Goble Creek School was dismissed so that pupils could watch the jam break up. Dynamite blasted away the lower logs stuck between the cliffs; once this barrier broke, logs behind leaped free, some flying forty-five to fifty feet in the air, leaving waves in their wake that knocked down fences and flooded fields.

Power to the Person, Power to the People

Everywhere water pooled, or flowed downhill, seemed to stimulate an imaginative means of transport or storage. With logs plentiful, the woodsmen threw up hundreds of trestles, sluices and makeshift dams on the creeks and rivers of the southwest country. Then, like wild woodland cowboys they rode, bucked, corralled, poked and prodded — and even dynamited, when necessary — their way downstream.

The ability of their abundant water to create power, first through water wheels or heated to power steam engines, was never lost on the pioneers. Nor was the politicalization of power, whose generation and distribution was mainly in the hands of private parties and monopolies.

Here the contradictory character of the Pacific North-westerner emerged dramatically: disenchanted by an ineffectual government and a prolonged depression, people began to call for collective action. But collective action required planning, administration and regulation, and that’s what “governments” did. And in the politically charged 30s, “government” threatened that dread disease — socialism.

Shingle bolts began as cedar stump cuttings — the fellers left six to ten feet of clearance of stump which could be re-cut as “bolts,” sections of log 54 or 55 inches in length. Later lumbermen would harvest whole trees for bolts, as more and more settlement demanded more and more roofing. Once downstream to a sawmill, bolts could be wedge-split into “shakes” or sawn into “shingles” around 48 inches long.

The problem was getting them down the rivers.

When the log pond was filled with these bolts and river conditions were favorable the bolts were released into the river. A crew of shingle-bolt drivers, armed with pike poles and peavies, ran along the riverbanks or splashed waist deep in the water, sometimes even riding on the bolts, keeping them corralled as they spun along.

Viirginia Urrutia

They Came to Six Rivers

Don & Andrea Cullen

from page 21

This conflict — individual liberty versus collective accountability, personal freedom versus organized action — raged around the world in the years before World War II. But especially for those in the brand new Northwest — so many of whom had come to escape constraints and breathe free air — the paradox of “having it both ways” would be stamped on their character forever:

Simultaneously dependent upon and contemptuous of the federal government, their creed, as historian Bernard DeVoto once described it, was ‘Get out and give us more money.’ Applying a brand of logic peculiar to westerners who prosper with the help of federal money, we understood the government-planned, government-run, and government-financed damming of the Columbia as an affirmation of our rugged individualism. We incorporated the harnessed river into our mythic West.

Blaine Harden

A River Lost

The Public’s Utility

The Washington State Legislature had, in late 1930, approved an initiative authorizing the creation of public utility districts.

By a vote of the people in any county, such districts, soon to become known as public utility districts, or PUDs, could be established and, if they could borrow enough capital, force any utility to sell out.

J.M. McClelland, Jr.

R.A. Long’s Planned City

COLUMBIA RIVER BASIN WATERWAYS AND DAMS

U.S.

“The venture into ‘socialism.’

That’s how author John McClelland, Jr. headed his section on the advent of public power in Cowlitz County. The irony is explicit. The public power movement had in many cases an inverse effect: rather than loosing wolves in sheep’s clothing, speculation run amok, it offered the tools of capitalism in the service of the public good. Roles were reversed: The sheep donned the wolves’ clothing and got down to business.

Using laws of eminent domain if necessary, the newly formed PUDs could set up business as the public’s advocate. With the depression still brutalizing local economies, the ability to control and potentially reduce power rates was a powerful incentive.

Still, it was the people’s vote. After a vigorous campaign in 1936, Cowlitz County voted for a PUD, 6,193 to 5,461. Due in many ways to Long-Bell’s active behindthe-scenes efforts to defeat the measure, Longview’s segment of the vote was close, too, 2,106 for and 1,836 against. Now the task became raising enough money to buy out the existing utility, Washington Gas and Electric Company.

Public Utilities were suddenly plunged into a world of high finance, issuing bonds, soliciting investors, fashioning elaborate and high-stakes deals. By 1940 they had a price and a bond issue:

$6.6 million dollars in 30-year revenue bonds issued by the utility, sold on Wall Street, and paid off by the ratepayers at interest rates averaging four percent. The PUD founders proved a quick study, but admittedly benefitted from good timing, too:

It was a fortuitous time for PUDs to make a beginning, since it was just after the first of the federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia — Bonneville — came on line with the cheapest power in the nation. The lower rates promptly offered by the PUDs, therefore, were due more to harnessed falling water than public ownership of distribution systems.

J.M. McClelland, Jr.

R.A. Long’s Planned City

Cowlitz PUD cut rates twice in its first year of operation.

The National Player

Odd as it may seem growing up in a place that owed its very existence to federal money, I cannot recall anyone ever saying anything good about the government.

Blaine Harden A River Lost

Video games have been around for 52 years, whereas film began in 1895. Seeing rapid innovations over the decades, we’ve gone from Pong in two dimensions to photorealistic, massive worlds with player freedom that takes hundreds of hours to see all of it.

Virtual reality is the latest spin, turning gaming into a high-intensity fitness regime that is set to become an Olympic sport one day! VR is also being used for pain relief and comfort, for example letting a user suffering from a burn feel like they’re watching snowfall.

I am excited to see what the next 52 years of video game evolution will bring!

Longview is a microcosm for the tectonic shift created in America by the second world war. The fortuitous building in the 30s of what would become the worlds greatest power plant — the Columbia River system itself, which many glibly credited with winning the entire war — helped turn Longview from a relative backwater into a national player.

Well before Pearl Harbor, December, 1941, the United States committed to aiding its prospective allies. The government added its powerful subsidies to ramping up industry, and especially to boosting aluminum production, vital in constructing ships and airplanes.

Using its new access to cheap power as an incentive, Longview bid for a reduction plant planned by The Aluminum Corporation of America — Alcoa — but lost that contest to Vancouver. Soon the Reynolds Metals Company began shopping for a location to build its first western plant. Longview was desperate for this piece of business, and its payroll of 500 workers. It would be the first local industry that would not be using wood as its raw material.

After a day of vigorous lobbying at Portland’s Benson Hotel, the Longview delegation poised for the big decision, along with representatives from the competition, Portland and Astoria. McClelland offers a fond and personal recollection of the outcome:

In dramatic fashion, R.S. Reynolds announced the decision. Longview had been selected. The Longview Daily News, its editor elated, considered the news too big to wait until the next day. An extra edition was published. It was that important an event because it was the first really good thing that had happened to Longview since the Longview Fibre Company development 13 years previously.

J.M. McClelland, Jr.

R.A. Long’s Planned City

There would be hardships and austerities during the war — some 45 of Longview’s sons never returned — but the dark decade of the 30s was history. Like the entire country, Longview bootstrapped itself, driven by a national crisis and an activist government — there was little talk of socialism during the war — and never looked back. Virginia Urrutia:

In the fall of 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, Reynolds tapped its first pot of molten aluminum to be poured into ingots. By the spring of 1942 the plant was able to produce thirty thousand tons each year. By the end of the war in 1946, 642 were on the payroll, and Reynolds was the fourth largest industrial employer in Cowlitz Country. •••