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Public Struggles, Private Pain

The Planned City spent a large part of its first two decades filling in the gaps between its grand schemes and its real people. It struggled to populate the blocks between the oversized boulevards, settle diverse folks into the blueprinted neighborhoods, and meet people’s needs beyond basic food and shelter — education, socialization, governance.

The “planned” part of Longview had been fast-paced and straightforward, once three times the original land estimate was surveyed and set up. It was the “city” part that perpetually lagged behind — settling this imagined urban landscape with real people and viable businesses. It was often too little and usually too late.

Then, catastrophe. The worldwide depression turned a slowdown into a crashing stop, devastating the business, social and personal lives of the pioneer Northwesterners. Always, it seemed, Longview had catching up to do. Now the Planned City that began its life as a well-intentioned afterthought faced day-to-day crisis conditions — in real time.

ALREADY STAGGERED BY SLOWING SALES, THE COMPANY NOW COMPOUNDED ITS BURDENS

The timber and lumber businesses, and the job market, had begun their slide within months of Longview’s big mills outputting their first products.

The founders were relying on post-World War I momentum and the intoxicating spirit of the 1920s to build their city: a rip-roaring economy and worldwide markets hungry for its products. Their grand Planned City, created as if by magic on its desolate delta, would magically beget its own robust social structure on top of it. cont page 19

That critical mass simply failed to materialize. Instead, the mid- to late20s revealed the thinness of Long-Bell’s community organization and socialization schemes. Already staggered by slowing sales, the company now compounded its business burdens with people burdens, too.

The timing of the Pacific Northwest venture was jinxed. Planned at the crest of the post-World War I lumber boom, the mill at Longview and the city itself were built on the downslope of a national economy that lay on the edge of the Great Depression. It was a venture entirely unlike the main chance on the prairie during the company’s and founder’s youth. Entirely unlike the years of easy profits from the piney woods in the South during the company’s prime.

Lenore Bradley

Robert Alexander Long

Talented Tramps

If Longview had any advantages surviving the Depression it was its very newness, its lack of established neighborhoods and customs, its frontiersman’s spirit of versatility and innovation. The new settlers by nature were conditioned to impermanence, used to day-to-day challenges, and toughened by the very effort of getting out to this far corner in the first place.

For many of them, being jobless and homeless, though not pleasant, wasn’t new either. By definition most settlers were already survivors, refugees, emigres. R.A. Long himself had famously said he never dreamed of a particular profession or career, he simply wished to get ahead.

The resourcefulness and diversity of the turn of the century workforce defies the stereotype of the “millworker” as some faceless drone limited in skills and ambition. In the town of Everett, for instance, in many ways Longview’s predecessor and precursor, an early edition of Polk’s City Directory listed the following encyclopedia of active trades unions:

MILL TOWN TRADES UNIONS: 1905 Barbers; Bartenders, Blacksmiths and Horseshoers; Brewery Workers; Bricklayers; Carpenters and Joiners; Cigarmakers; Cooks, Waiters, and Waitresses; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW); Building Laborers; Longshoremen; Machinists; Meatcutters; Musicians; Painters; Plasterers; Plumbers; Pressmen; Sheet Metal Workers; Shingle Weavers; Shirtwaist and Laundry Workers; Stage Employees; Steam Engineers; Switchmen; Tailors; Teamsters; Tinners and Wood Workers; Typographers; and Woodsmen and Sawmill Workers.

Source: historylink.org

Hobo Hospitality

One of the grave injustices of the Great Depression was its “top down” collapse. Although many speculators and manipulators suffered their just desserts, it especially victimized the innocents at the bottom of the food chain — the highly skilled and unskilled alike — who’d known nothing but the scraps and leavings of the banks, stock markets, crooks and swindlers who’d created the house of cards in the first place. Yet they paid an especially heavy price.

Ironically, because their plight was so universal — and most of them were essentially blameless — the hobo and the tramp were often sympathetic figures:

Being a tramp was an occupation that citizens understood and respected. Housewives were not frightened when one knocked on the back door asking for work and food. Husbands instructed their wives not to let them into the house but to feed them even if there was no work to be done.

Virginia Urrutia

They Came to Six Rivers

It’s clear from first-hand accounts that the majority of these proud men — they were almost all men — were neither derelicts nor bums. They were experienced tradesmen, craftsmen, laborers who dearly wanted the privilege of work and of supporting their families.

Northwest hydropower produces no carbon emissions, thereby significantly reducing the total carbon footprint of the region’s energy production.

Left On Its Own Longview Showed Wherewithal And Initiative

In one poignant reminiscence, a daughter recalls hearing her father getting up every day before dawn in their South Kelso rental and walking all the way to Weyerhaeuser to stand in line hoping for a day job. She and her mother could not resist constant glances out the window hoping he would not come home before dark, meaning he’d garnered a day’s work and its meager pay.

A Community Rises

With Long-Bell struggling, Longview was thrown back on its own devices. The company could no longer afford both to keep the mills running — on drastically reduced shifts — and to support infrastructure and community development, too. The Company Town was fraying, its hopes and plans stalled. The fickle rivers didn’t help. The worst floods ever (one old timer had a mark on his door frame indicating the height of the 1867 flood and this exceeded it

PORT OF LONGVIEW IN THE 2010s:

In this decade, the Port welcomed new tenants, Skyline Steel and International Raw Materials, and expanded its cargo handling capacity with the addition of a second mobile harbor crane. In 2014, the Port demonstrated its commitment to improving waterfront access by purchasing Willow Grove Park and Boat Launch from the County.

by a foot) inundated the river valleys in December 1933. Highways went under water. Kalama’s business district was a lake. Only one city in the county had dikes that held — Longview’s Wesley Vandercook had directed their building and predicted they would hold. They did.

But Longview was cut off. The Pioneer Bridge was washed out. And the railroad tracks that R.A. Long had persuaded the railroad companies to build on the west side of the Cowlitz washed out and were not replaced. The stately train station at the foot of Hudson Street would never again host rail traffic, and became Cowlitz General Hospital in 1935, marble floors and all.

Left on its own, Longview showed wherewithal and initiative. Volunteer organizations provided food and shelter.

The city took over maintenance of parks and public spaces from Long-Bell. And in an ambitious and forward-looking collaboration, Longview applied to the Roosevelt Administration for Homestead housing, another flirtation with “socialism” that nevertheless marked a pioneer partnership between local and national interests.

Throughout the 30s Longview’s people rose to the challenge: creating both immediate relief from joblessness, homelessness and undernourishment, while staying mindful of their grand designs for the Planned City. They took incremental steps with long-term consequences — from founding the PUD to exploiting the resources of Community House, donated in the 20s by Long-Bell and later given to the YMCA, which survives today. The city’s rawness and flexibility — and Long-Bell’s tenacity — gave it a certain resiliency, too. Its formative institutions could make adjustments and course corrections.

Longview weathered the Depression reasonably well. They were bad years, but not disastrous as they would have been if Long-Bell had not found a way out of its financial difficulties and managed to keep the mills running part time and to provide some assistance to the struggling city.

John M. McClelland, Jr.

R.A. Long’s Planned City

The most far-reaching of these 30s-era fixes — assisting people immediately while building Longview’s foundation — was a re-commitment to one of Mr. Long’s founding values, education.

Unshakeable Man, Unshakeable Dream

“Look about you, count your blessings. Take full advantage of your opportunities. This is the day of educated men and women.”

Robert A. Long, speech cont page 21

During the run up to these sobering times, with momentum stalled, the extraordinary character of R.A. Long had again revealed itself. In modern parlance, he “doubled down” on Longview, even toward the end, refusing the cold-blooded mill closings, budget cuts, and canceled public works that usually accompany a recession. He was entirely unshaken in the will, courage, and idealism that had guided him his entire life, and would inspire him to his dying day.

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Mr. Long had put education — the intellectual and moral development of the individual — at the center of his plans for creating a city of families, not just millhands. Kessler School stood proudly among the first landmarks in the city, built in 1924. R.A. Long High School, built with borrowed money and donated to the School District toward the end of the decade, enshrined education in a magnificent building and campus still the pride of Longview today. Erected in the years between them was a public library worthy of the Greeks themselves, all for the edification and improvement of the public.

I believe we ought to live with an incentive. with the idea of making ourselves felt in the community in which we live. I believe that God gave us talents in order that we might use those talents.

R. A. Long, speech