The Russians and the Corvallis, Oregon Area 

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The first Russian exploration of the Northwest, by the Danish-Russian Vitus Bering  and Aleksiei Chirikov  in 1741 was inspired by Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725, click here). Peter's attempt tp 'Europeanize' Russia included not only colonization and exploration but also a series of political, cultural and religious changes which led to the Great Schism (click here) in the Russian Orthodox Church, and to the formation and frequent exile to Siberia of Old Believers, 10,000 of whom ended up in Oregon 2 centuries later, many in the Corvallis area (click here). Henceforth, nearly every new stream of spiritual thought in Russia, the Khlystis, for example (click here) would rise and incubate in Siberia (click here) from among these men and women and their descendants, and spill eastward across the Bering Straits, as well as westward. 

For half a century thereafter, adventurous frontiersmen and fur traders, the promyshlenniki, ranged from the Kurile Islands to southeastern Alaska, and southward, often exploiting Native seafaring skills to kill and skin the many sea otter and seals for the lucrative China trade. Insofar as Siberia and Russian Alaska was concerned, was China (click here), not St. Petersburg. The Pacific North, extending from Siberia to San Francisco, was not only a geographic region and not only an economic sphere, with its center at Canton but also an obsession. As John Wyeth, looking back, humorously summarized his own and his New England kinsmen's decision to leave the Ice House business:

By the second half of the eighteenth century, European and Russian seafarers had sailed in and, to a certain degree, explored all of the world's oceans including the coast of Oregon (see right). From 1766 to 1770 the expedition of Captain Pyotr Krenitsyn and Lieutenant-Commander Mikhail Levashov discovered the last unexplored islands of the Aleutian Archipelago (click here). Nineteen years later the inhabitants of the islands were granted the right to call themselves subjects of Imperial Russia by a Russian naval captain with the unlikely name of Ivan Billings, an 'honor' not entirely pleasing to the conferees (see here).

One of these daring traders, Grigorii Shelekhov (1747-1795), encouraged by Tsarina Catherine the Great (1729-1796), established the first colony in North America, in 1784, at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island. Shelekhov's colonial administrator, Alexandr Baranov, ruled so long (1790-1818) and effectively that he came to be known as "Lord" of Russian America. 

 Lieutenant-Commander Yury Lisyansky became commander of the expedition's second vessel, the sloop Neva. Shelekhov's son-in-law, Nikolay Rezanov, chamberlain of the Imperial Court at St. Petersburg, was aboard the Nadezhda and, as one of the owners of the Russian American Company, was interested in establishing trade relations with Japan. The latter proposal was rejected by the Japanese (click here).

In 1794, the Tsarina fulfilled Shelekhov's pleas to establish an Orthodox mission in Alaska, and in 1799, Tsar Paul I (1754-1801) awarded Shelekhov's Russian American Company monopolistic control over trade and government, thus inextricably entwining the Company and the Church. Convicts from Siberia were shipped to the Northwest posts, as they had been sent to Siberia. The Company financed the Church in its missionary and educational work, while the Church became the custodian not only of the colony's 'morals' -- often in opposition to Company practices -- but also of the spiritual and intellectual nurturing of the Native Alaskans. Church Records include the baptism of 2000 Mary's River (Corvallis) Indians.

Left: The Russian Orthodox Church at New Archangel (Sitka)

 Despite the presence of the American Fur Company (of John Jacob Astor click here), which held the mouth of the Columbia River, Baranov's agents built Fort Ross, 20 miles north of Bodega Bay, in the hope that the country would yield grain to feed the Alaskan outposts. When the region proved unsuitable, Baranov extended his vision into the Pacific and built a fort on the Hawaiian island of Kauai (1815) after the shipwreck of the Sv Nikolai (see right) on the Oregon coast and the enslavement of its crew by local native Americans (see right) had soured the Russians on Oregon. 

The further expansion of the Russians in the Northwest was halted when the attempted Decembrist revolt (click here) occurred in Russia, led by Prince Sergei Volkonsky and other veterans of the Napoleonic Wars who had befriended French soldiers familiar with both the French and American Revolutions, many of whom had fought with George Washington and Lafayette. Nearly all the officials of the Russian American Fur Company were implicated. The Russian presence was thereafter confined to its existing stations by a  monarchy suspicious of any venture it could not police directly. The nature of the fur trade, requiring perpetual expansion, or  else doom, due to the ever-dwindling resources at hand, doomed the Russian colony to eventual failure.

The execution of Decembrists

The Russians, like the Spanish, were particularly interested in the American presence in Oregon, as a help in counterbalancing the British in the Northwest, as well as a source of supplies for the Russians on the West Coast of the Americas. Russian ships carried furs from Oregon to China, especially during the War of 1812, when the British were sinking or seizing American shipping, and took Astoria from Astor's company (click here). 

Oregonians reciprocated by keeping the Russians supplied with wheat, and the American presence in Russian harbors in Russian Unalaska during the Crimean War (click here), when the French, British and Turks were arrayed against Russia, was critical. Russia lost 600,000 soldiers in the War and was incapable of defending its posts in the Northwest against the British except for the American presence.

 The Russians responded in kind during the American Civil War. Alexander II, the tsar, associated the end of slavery with his own Act to end serfdom (click here). Alone of the European Empires, Russia did not sympathize with the slavers of the Confederacy. The Russian Navy informally patrolled the West Coast as a warning to Confederate raiders like Corvallis' T.E. Hogg.(click here)

In the wake of the repression which followed the Polish uprising of 1863 (click here), many people fled Russia, especially Jewish people who had experienced a few years of easing of regulations concerning Jewish life (click here) and had no wish to return to previous conditions, as promised to become - and actually became - the case, including the Hills, Jacobs and Kleins of Corvallis.

"My father was a Polish Jew and mother was a Russian Jew. They came to Corvallis about 1864. Mother could not read or write, but she was anxious that her children should have and education. Almost the first thing she noticed in Corvallis was the schoolhouse, and when father suggested it might be better to go on to Monroe she answered, "I am going to stay here and send my children to school." The Klein business, between Monroe and Madison on 2nd Street. "Father was a tailor. He had a sewing machine (the first that ever came to Corvallis) and a few bolts of goods. He would sell the goods or make them up into suits. He announced that if a woman bought goods for trousers for her men folks he would cut the garments out. The shop was on Second Avenue and for four years we lived in a shack in the rear. On one side was a saloon with a dance hall over it. Here the miners coming from the south with their bags of gold dust would stop for such entertainment as the place afforded. We never felt sure when we went to bed at night that we would not be dead by violence before morning. Father's business prospered and after four years he built a house on North Second Street. "I got my schooling in the public schools of Corvallis and in the old Corvallis College. For finishing I was sent for a year or two to the Sister's School in Portland. Among other things I was taught music and needlework. French was taught to those who wanted it (Mrs. KLINE showed examples of her work that show a high degree of skill and much painstaking care.)... "Fattier allowed his children to go to Sunday School at one of the churches. He was willing for them to be left to make their own choice of religion when they grew older. When we won testaments for certain work in Sunday School he made us take them back, but afterwards said that action was narrow--minded and hasty. "Father had all his life the Copy of Shakespeare and an English translation of Les Miserables from which he learned the language. He always persevered until he found the best word to express the idea he had."

Pauline Klein, Corvallis Pioneer (Ms Klein sates that her father was born in Poland, though in the census of 1870, he is listed as Russian born, and perhaps thence moved to Poland. On the other hand, the Kiders and VonRustrows were Polish Natives (click here).

From immigrants such as these, Americans first encountered Yiddish literature (click here) and art and heard Yiddish music (click here), music which is now played again in Corvallis (click here)

"If you want to know how many men live in a house, look at the walls. As many violins hung on the wall, so many Jewish men live in that house. All of them play: the grandfather plays, the father plays, the son plays… Yet it is a pity that each generation plays its own songs, that they play separately!" - Itzkhok Leibush Peretz

From these immigrants, Americans also began to hear disturbing stories of life in Czarist Russia.  Exiles like Herzen (click here) and Count Lochwitski (below) escaped and told their stories. The works of Dostoevky, an exile in Siberia, appeared (click here).  Americans began to hear of a system in which the secret police tracked every thought uttered aloud, every meeting among friends, every gift, and punished those who had less than 100% commitment to the absolute monarchy.

 The policing was of course eminently unsuccessful. The assassination of monarchs(click here), sabotage, bomb throwing, peasant uprisings (click here), military mutinies (click here), etc. were and had been both commonplace and increasing in veracity with every failed attempt, in the Russian Empire since the introduction of autocracy. Repression of an unhappy people is always as successful as carrying water in a sieve, a lesson George Bush bears witness to. People thrown into desperate situations will always be characterized by desperate actions. 

Above: A poster advertising the Count's presentation on the Chataqua circuit, which included Corvallis

George Kennan

Following the Civil War, the presidential administration of the overly trusting Ulysses Grant showered American corporations with government assistance in a way unimaginable prior to the war, when the planters of the South looked suspiciously upon every attempt to extend wage labor as a threat to slavery - as indeed it proved to be. During Grant's presidency corporations ran the country (some might argue they still do, but they are not nearly as raw in doing so, as they were in Grant's day). 

In 1866, Western Union, which had achieved a monopoly of telegraph services in the U.S. (click here) as a result of liberal land grants from the federal government, and the president of Western Union urged William Seward to buy Alaska as a jumping-off point for a telegraph wire leading through Oregon, Washington, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia to the capitols of Europe. A recent attempt at a TransAtlantic cable had failed miserably, and the oceanic distance between Alaska and Siberia is negligible, and Sibley thought it would be well worth the try. The public ponied up with 7.2 million dollars and telegraph lines flowed through the Northwest. 

Corvallis: 2nd St. Overhead are the telegraph lines of the Oregon Telephone and Telegraph Company (ATT). The wagons are horse-drawn, and the rings for reins can still be seen in the curb at Robinett's on 2nd St. Prior to the telephone, only the railroad depot had telegraph service, a monopolistic irritant (click here) to downtown businesses and editors of the Corvallis Gazette.

Sibley sent a crew to Siberia to begin surveying the Asian leg of the planned line. One of the surveyors was George Kennan (not to be confused with later purported 'experts' by the same name, writing on similar subjects) and when the Transatlantic cable was finally laid successfully (click here), his contract with Western Union ended. He subsequently spent a good deal of time traveling in Siberia and returned home to write a series of books on Siberia exiles and Russia which were also serialized in Century Magazine (click here), and were as sensational and popular as were Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writings (click here) about a non-Siberian Stalinist political prison a century later.

Sod huts of Siberian Exiles 1895

In  1897, gold was discovered in Alaska, and large numbers of Oregonians,  including Corvallis' C. A. Sehlbrede (click here) encountered first-hand the grandchildren of Russian emigrants, Russian cooking Click here), dancing (click here) and Russian art, as well as Russian Orthodox chapels for the first time. The latter were simply overwhelmed by numbers, but their stories were heard.

Left: St. Michael's Orthodox church. Right: Protestant log church in Sitka.

American opinion toward the czar, once favorable, began to shift, and was nowhere more evident than in the Russo-Japanese War (click here). 

Together with England and Japan, Czarist Russia had always been among the worst offenders in the colonial domination of East Asia. When the Boxer Rebellion broke out ( click here) , the Czar seized Manchuria and Port Arthur, which Japan had evacuated under Russian pressure. Russian expansion into Korea led to conflict with Japanese forces there and war broke out. To the shock of the Czar, American opinion, influenced by tales of Siberia and pogroms (click here), favored the 'underdog', the small nation of Japan, a particularly surprising development since the United States was again in the throes of anti-Asian bigotry,  directed at the Japanese (click here). 

Click here for larger version

"To His Excellency Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America. Honorable Sir:- The recent massacres of Jews by organized mobs at Kisheneff, undisturbed by the Russian government ... cannot be treated any longer as an internal affair of Russia... " -1908 (Library of Congress)

After the end of his short and controversial OSU presidency, Henry Miller, Southern Pacific's own legislator (click here), had been made consul general by the Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. He served both American and Japanese interests during the Russo-Japanese War, whose end, Theodore Roosevelt mediated ( click here for an early Edison news film of the Russian and Japanese envoys in the U.S.) after the Japanese destroyed the Russian fleet. Following the War, an unsuccessful revolution erupted in Russia and though the Czar was ultimately able to suppress it, large numbers of Russians emigrated here, including the Patapoffs of Corvallis (click here). Others, who had watched relatives executed, became embittered and determined to succeed where older brothers and sisters failed. One of these was Vladimir Ulyanov (click here), who watched his brother's life snuffed out by the Czar's gallows. He took the nickname of Lenin (click here).

WWI And the Russian Revolution

WW I followed, and a new wave of immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans arrived in the U.S. The Empires of Europe, Russia, France and England, teetered on collapse. Years later, Winston Churchill would tell the New York Enquirer: 

In 1917, however, the British, including Winston Churchill, were  insistent that the U.S. come to their salvation, and Corvallis boys like Ralph Ordell Wade, Erroll John Wolcott , and Rodney M Whitmore were conscripted and  sent into the War. Some, like Earl Bilderback, Clifford Francisco, George Schubert and nearly 2 dozen other Benton County boys forever disappeared in the trenches. 

Stephen Graham, visiting the devastated regions in 1920, while writing The Challenge of the Dead saw huge stacks of boxes on the quay side at Calais: "At great cost of time and labour the dead soldiers are being removed from the places where they fell and packed in crates for transport to America." There were some unfortunate errors caused by this grim undertaking. Problems over identification were not uncommon, and it was said that more than one US citizen who had returned home from Europe alive and well was shocked to be instructed to go and fetch his own body from the local depot. Additionally, 31,000 American soldiers are buried in France, England and Belgium.

Some Corvallis boys died even before arriving in Europe, when the German navy torpedoed the troop ship carrying them, the Tuscania. 

U Boat photo of survivors after the torpedoing of their ship

Some of the men who went to War emerged as better human beings. Others, like Ernest Hemingway, came away with a good deal less than they had taken with them..

Woodrow Wilson had been had been elected in 1912 only because a split in the Republican Party allowed Democratic Party delegates like Victor Moses, postmaster of Corvallis (the husband of the woman for whom the Vina Moses Center is named - click here) to break a chain of Republican presidents stretching back to Lincoln (with the sole exception of Grover Cleveland. although a Democrat, Sam Tilden, won the 1876 election, he had been cheated of it by a Republican Congress. In exchange, the troops protecting African Americans in the former slave states were withdrawn. The famous Jim Crow laws followed. Click here). 

Vina and Victor Moses

Wilson was re-elected in 1916 solely because of his professed commitment to peace ('He Kept Our Boys Out of the War' was his campaign slogan), a commitment he betrayed just as soon as the British Empire threatened to collapse. Opposition to the war was widespread and Wilson responded with an unprecedented assault on the civil liberties of those who opposed him. 

Amelia Earhart

"Once Mrs. O’Day took occasion to say publicly that, inasmuch as she was a pacifist. she would doubtless be packed off to a Federal penitentiary in case of war. Whereat, as I remember it. AE wired her, ‘Me too. I’ll meet you at Atlanta.”. Note: Atlanta was the federal penitentiary where all pacifists were imprisoned in WWI. - from Soaring Wing's by George Putnam, local newspaper editor and husband of Amelia Earhart

247 activists, like Emma Goldman (click here), a frequent visitor locally, were imprisoned on the basis of evidence, which subsequently was proved to have been falsified by J. Edgar Hoover, and deported to Russia. With Wilson's support, state legislatures, including Oregon's,  refused to allow antiwar candidates, many of them socialists, to take their seat.

Those opposed to conscription were imprisoned, including our own Dr. Marie Equi. Eugene Debs (click here) - as close to Gandhi (click here) and Christ as America has seen, was sentenced to 10 years and, despite his Indiana birth, was deprived of his citizenship for a candid speech (click here). Like Nobel-Prize winner Jane Addams (click here) or our own Sara Field (click here), suffragettes, whom Wilson had arrested day after day for picketing the White House, were especially a target for a president who made his opposition known, in no uncertain terms, to a delegation asking him to support the Women's Voting Rights Amendment:

Mata Hari

The 'CPI' organized 75,000 '4 minute men' to stand up, seemingly impromptu, in public places, to denounce the Germans and raise wartime hysteria. Dachshunds were renamed liberty dogs. German measles were called liberty measles and sauerkraut Liberty cabbage. German chocolate cake was Liberty cake. City University of New York reduced by one credit every course in German. German music was banned. 4000 German immigrants were interred in prison camps, and families like Eisenhauer 'anglicised' to names like Eisenhower to avoid the internments and lynch mobs (click here). It's all a little reminiscient of "the Patriot Act", "Operation Enduring Liberty", and "Homeland" security.

Local politicians and police were swept up by, and contributed to, the hysteria, relying upon vigilantes to enforce support for the War. Our Progressives, once admired for the creation of the referendum, the intiative, women's suffrage, and the election of senators, were (click here) silenced or, like Wilson, turned their back on their principles and constituencies in the terrorized atmosphere Wilson had created. Among the most notorious was the former Progressive senator from the Northwest, Miles Poindexter.  From the Poindexter Descendants website, "he abandoned a progressive stance after 1917 and shifted to the right during World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920. He became even more vitriolic and intolerant in his denunciation of labor unions, Socialists, pacifists, and "Bolsheviks" after 1917 than in his attacks upon the trusts."

Left: Senator Poindexter. Right: Senator, by the American artist, William Gropper

Almost without exception, these politicians were turned out by the public within a few years.

The Ku Klux Klan, with its '100 % Americanism' theme, was integrated as a paramilitary auxiliary into the municipal administration and police forces in Oregon cities. It eventually absorbed the other 'patriotic' organizations into its ranks.

The poster for the virulently racist and widely popularized Birth of a Nation (click here). Woodrow Wilson fawned over the movie, and blurted that:"It is all so terribly true" after a private viewing.

A parallel organization for bigoted ex-soldiers and ex-sailors was created, like the Klan, dedicated to '100% Americanism', called the American Legion. Like the Klan, it was enlisted as an auxiliary police force. The influence of the Klan and to a lesser extent the Legion grew and outlasted the War. The Klan provided the political leadership for the '100% Americanism' movement, but the Klan actually resorted to violence rarely. Whether it was the Centralia Massacre of labor activists or the massacres in African Americans in Tulsa, it was the American Legion who orchestrated the massacre.

Above: the American Legion organizing a vigilante action in Seattle. Below: Left to Right - the U.S. National Safety Council delegate, Portland police captain, Portland Police Chief Jenkins, Sheriff Hurlburt, District Attorney Evans, 'King Kleagle' Powell, Justice Department Special Agent Lester Humphreys ('Palmer agent' under J. Edgar Hoover), Mayor George Baker, P.Malcom, 'Exalted Cyclops' Gifford. From the Oregon Telegraph.

Major Genral Smedley Butler(click here) on the American Legion: "You know very well that it is nothing but a strike-breaking outfit used by capital for that purpose, and that is the reason we have all those big clubhouses and that is the reason I pulled out of it. They have been using the dumb soldiers to break strikes." -Testimony before House of Representatives 1935

A young and ruthless library clerk responsible for the support of his mother after his father had been incarcerated for insanity, and whose idol consisted of  his own ambition, was placed in charge of a newly created police force responsible for political conformity. , J. Edgar Hoover (click here) would rule the nation for 50 years. He launched vengeful raids against those opposed to Wilson's policies. In a single night, November 7, 1919,  10,000 people were arrested in 23 cities. 

Speaking a foreign language, or with an accent - as many Russian, Jewish and Slavic immigrants did - was reason for suspicion and arrest, as well as assaults. A majority of the industrial working class was either Catholic (Irish, German, Hispanic) or Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant religious fervor was enlisted in the war and against the restlessness among the nation's poorly paid immigrants. Evangelists like Billy Sunday sold war bonds, and the government in turn sponsored Prohibition (click here), and various laws regulating the public's morals long after the war. Mae West was eventually sent to prison for a belly dance.

Mae West

Arresting Officer: ""Miss West moved her navel up and down and from right to left."

Ms. West's Attorney: "Did you actually see her navel?" (Ms. West was wearing one of her long trademark dresses at the time.)

Officer:"No. But I saw something in her middle that moved from east to west."

The War also occasioned an excuse for suppressing attempts at higher wages or better working conditions. In a world and an alliance dominated by Empire and Aristocracy, there was - in the mind of Wilson and those around him - simply no place for anything but unquestioning obedience. The Ludlow Massacre of Colorado miners (click here) had set a precedent for the use of the Army in suppressing laborers. During the War, it became a standard policy, and was extended to any one whose opinions were not Wilson's own. 

Ludlow. Above Left: the Women's March. Right: the Cavalry charge into the parade.

Locally, in Corvallis and nearby, the Army went so far as to build factories, and hire only those workers who agreed to join the 'Company Union', the Loyal Legion of Lumbermen and Loggers. The mill at Toledo was one such. There were many. In so doing, the government crushed the independent unions of the Northwest. The most popular union in the Northwest, the Industrial Workers of the World, had, before Wilson's suppression, tens of thousands of members among the loggers of the Pacific Northwest, from Northern California to Canada. More than 100 IWW officials were arrested in a 1917 strike, and by the end of the War, 2000 had been imprisoned under the 'Sedition Act' for opposing the war.

The IWW essentially ceased to exist after the War, its most faithful members out of work, in prison, shot, as in Everett ( click here) or mutilated and lynched by the American Legion and local business owners, as in Centralia (click here). The remainder signed with the Army's 'union', which provided improvements upon the standards in an industry where, according to longtime resident and former Corvallis Lumber Mill owner, Lester Harvey, the 'practice' was to simply abandon injured workers where they fell ("if you were alive, they brought you in when they came back in the evening"), testimony borne out by the Washington State Historical Society:

"The typical logging camp had a shack containing three tiers of plank bunks extending along the walls, with a wood stove in the middle. Loggers were expected to carry their own bedding which they rolled and tied with a piece of rope. There was no first aid or medical attention available for injuries on the job."

-Washington Historical Society

After the War, the Army's mills were turned over to timber companies.

WWI and the Russians

The war was a disaster for Russia. Of 12 million men shoved into the Front, 9.5 million were casualties. Russian Americans were aghast at the reports concerning the fate of kinsmen. From the beginning, supplying and transporting these armies was far more than the Russian railroads were capable of doing. The troops and the civilian population faced starvation as an infrastructure devoted to soothing the vanity of previous monarchs (primarily Peter, Catherine, and Alexander) failed to meet the demands of modern warfare. 

Bread riots, unimaginable in the other nations at war, erupted. Soldiers mutinied, as they had done among the armies of Russia's allies, but unlike French and English soldiers, the Russians also organized themselves. Groups of soldiers elected representatives who met and decided upon measures for the armies as a whole. Workers adopted similar measures in the major cities. These deliberative bodies were called Soviets, and together they demanded an end to the War which was bleeding Russia to death. The Czar refused to negotiate with commoners and was overthrown. The succeeding government bowed to English pressure to maintain the War. Chaos erupted and the Bolsheviks won an important election, as the only party whose platform addressed the pressing needs of the nation: Peace, Land and Bread. Our most widely read local author (with the possible exception of C.E.S. Wood), John Reed (click here), sweetheart of our own Louise Bryant ( click here or here) were in Russia at the time and documented the upheavals, as did Emma Goldman (click here). Reed's 10 Days That Shook the World (click here) remains one of the best selling books of all time. 

One of Louise Bryant's photos: Women soldiers in Russia

In the chaos which ensued, as the Russian nobility sought to regain power, and the Americans and Japanese - at the instigation of the  English - (click here) invaded to restore a pro-War government. It was logical for Wilson to use force to ensure a pro-War stance in Russia; he had done the same with the American people.

The intervention outlasted the War. The presence of foreign troops roused patriotic sentiments among the segment of the population which otherwise would have had a natural antipathy to Bolshevism - the small to mid-sized landholders - and the Russian government was triumphant. In the process of the invasion, however, 3 years of war ravaged the nation and a good deal of bitterness toward the West remained for a generation among a starving people. The government of Russia came to be dominated by a group of thugs centered around Joseph Stalin (click here). The old Czarist police methods were revived and tolerated - foreign invasions gave some semblance of credibility to the time-worn 'patriotic' excuses which every historian has learned to loathe, because they are invariably euphemisms for intolerance, repression and atrocities, whether in Russia or elsewhere.

Above: street urchins orphaned by the Civil War and Intervention. Below: a cart of children, casualties of the starvation which accompanied the Civil War and intervention.

A new wave of Russian immigrants arrived, ranging from dispossessed aristocrats to Old Believers (click here), some of whom have subsequently moved to Alaska and completed the Circle, so to speak. 

Russian Old Believers taking the U.S. oath of citizenship. Below: the hut of the hermit, Artemiis, Old Believer, Alaska.

Years later, a naval captain who spearheaded the desegregation of the U.S. Navy, an OSU Professor by the name of William Appleman Williams(click here), would rise to notice  on the basis of his work on this period in American history. 

OSU's William Appleman Williams.

Click here for J. Edgar Hoover's file on Billy Holiday, begun after she popularized Strange Fruit, about the lynchings which began in earnest during WWI.

The Russian political and military response to the calamitous situation in time became draconic and its implementation fell into the hands of a group of thugs gathered around Joseph Stalin. The Czarist regimentation of the life of the nation was resurrected, with similarly unsuccessful results. The prisons of Siberia were filled with dissenting voices (click here), each of who had friends and relatives harboring a simmering resentment. Only the dire external threat and the pathetic appeal to a people's patriotism sustained the new government. 

In the immediate wake of the Revolution, many Oregonians sympathized with the people of Russia. The 1919 AFL Convention, for example, adopted resolutions calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Russia: "The Soviets of Russia represent eighty per cent of the people - a larger majority than the government of the United States represents. The Russian people should be permitted to manage their own affairs." However, the business class in the United States was seized by an exaggerated paranoia and Wilson's suppression of outspoken individuals intensified further. Dissent withered in an atmosphere of conformity, fear and even terror.

Our own Mary Colby, who - like her sweetheart George Oppen - expressed sympathy with the Russian Revolution, was expelled from OSU(OAC at the time), ostensibly for the not uncommon crime of curfew violation in 1926 (click here) after expressing sympathy for the Russian people. She and her fiance hitchhiked to New York, and would , George's Pulitzer Prize winning poetry notwithstanding, be hounded, like OSU's other Prize winners, Ava and Linus Pauling (Linus was the only person to have won 2 Nobel Prizes; click here), by J. Edgar Hoover for the rest of their lives. Hoover would work for 50 years at the FBI and with whispered innuendos and visits to employers of any who questioned a right-wing philosophy petrified forever in the years of Woodrow Wilson.

A Russian Poster from the Civil War and Intervention

The Oregon legislature, at the time openly acknowledged as being in the pocket of half a dozen companies (both Oregon Senators, Oregon Congressman Bingham, and a slew of legislators had been investigated and/or indicted in the land fraud scandals - click here - on the eve of the War; Bingham and Senator Mitchell were sentenced to the penitentiary), passed a law criminalizing the advocacy of changes in ownership, which was backed especially by the utilities,on the motion of Kasper K. Kubli (KKK), of Jacksonille, and the law was passed with one dissenting vote. The law was designed so that people could be, and were, arrested for the discussions now taking place concerning PGE in the wake of the Enron debacle. 

The Legislature's Act was subsequently repudiated by the people of Oregon in an initiative and referendum, but meantime its enforcement was, according to the memoirs of Governor Walter Pierce, 'immediate and concerted' .News vendors selling popular publications,and the editors of socialist newspapers and the secretary of the state Socialist  party were imprisoned. Most of these publications and speakers branded as 'Bolsheviks' in Oregon were supporters of the campaign to substitute the 8 hour day for the dawn-to-dusk work prevalent at the time. Any attempt to regulate working conditions or the activities of corporations were branded as Bolshevism (click here) and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as its military parallel, the American Legion, were newly mobilized by corporations and the police as paramilitary auxiliaries to suppress such efforts at regulation. Especially resistant to regulation were the private utitility companies. According to the Oregon Historical Society, the Northwest Telephone and Telegraph Company even put 2 full time Oregon organizers for the Ku Klux Klan on the company payroll, and Northwestern Electric put another on company salary (OHQ, June 1974). 

The Ku Klux Klan came to be a formidable force, capable of electing Klansmen George Baker as mayor of Portland and Walter Pierce as Governor in 1922.

Above: the Corvallis Klan joined its sister chapter in a march through downtown Albany in 1927. Below:  Governor Walter (in a college robe) Pierce and Portland Mayor George Baker, both members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Above: Baker with General Pershing, commander of US Troops in WWI. According to Pierce's Memoirs, he and Baker together attended a KKK meeting after this parade.

'100% Americanism' did not include immigrants, nor did it include any one but Protestants. Jewish, and both Orthodox and Catholic Christian immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe were targets. Irish Americans were lumped in with the Catholics. Boycotts of Jewish merchants like Meier and Frank, and Klein and Jacob in Corvallis, were organized (to the credit of Oregonians, Julius Meyer was later elected governor, as an independent, on the Public Utility issue which the legislators had criminalized). Roman Catholic, and just plain 'Irish' politicians became the butt of Klan campaigns. An Oregon law, aimed at nuns and and Orthodox Jews, was passed forbidding the wearing of religious garb in schools. Right wing protestant evangelists toured Oregon, staging politicized 'revivals' and reinforcing the determination of the flocks to stamp out 'Popery'. The only minutes of the Klan which have survived from the era are those of the La Grande Klavern, and in these minutes, the central role of protestant pastors in the Klan is both remarkable and reprehensible (click here)

Above: Irish-American Ben Olcott collected this in 1918, one of many.

The Klan absorbed most of the  other "patriotic" organizations after the War, including the oldest, the American Protective Association, whose black and orange colors sprang from the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish  Orange and Black Orders, which were adopted by the OSU faculty in place of navy and white in 1893, when the A.P.A. claimed a million members nationwide. Warren Harding won his seat as Senator by viciously attacking Timothy Hogan for being a Catholic who was bent "on delivering Ohio to the Pope". Harding would eventually be elected as a President with the most corrupt administration since that of U.S. Grant - his Secretary of the Interior went to prison for accepting a $100000 bribe from an 'energy development corporation' - and he had a child with a schoolgirl he had taken as a lover, initiated when he was 55 and she was 14, our own Nan Britton (click here). Appropriately enough, in a grim sort of way, the school board would name an elementary school in Corvallis, and the City Council would name a boulevard, after Harding.

Left: Our Nan. Right: Warren

In Oregon, the emphasis of the 'patriotic' groups lay upon religion, but, as elsewhere, race was an issue. Nationwide, there were race riots in which European Americans burned black townships to the ground throughout the nation, in East St. Louis, Tulsa (click here) and elsewhere. Saccho and Vanzetti, Italians, were executed as was the Swede Joe Hill.

Above left: The burning of the black community in Tulsa. Above right: the mobile machine gun used by the American Legionaires who led the riots.

In Oregon, the ethnic groups targeted were Irish and especially Japanese. Long-time resident Ed McClain's older step-brother told him many years ago that In Corvallis, in 1928, the part of town which yet bore the name 'Chinatown', was burned down as part of a campaign against remaining Asian Americans, who were largely Japanese in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Laws (click here).

Since the Klan's secretiveness forbade it from open organized appearances, anti-Japanese sentiment in Benton County, as also in Hood River, Medford, Roseburg,  Prineville and elsewhere through out the state was led by the American Legion (see the Oregon Historical Quarterly for Sept.,1975). The national body of the Legion joined the Hood River Legion in its coalition with the Anti-Asiatic Association of Hood River. In 1923, a law was passed making it illegal for Japanese immigrants to own land in Oregon. Similar laws were passed in Washington and California and such incidents  incensed the Japanese government, and contributed greatly to the tensions which led to War between the U.S. and Japan within 20 years.

In 1925, Benton County was the site of the worst incident. The government-built mill at Toledo had been turned over to the Pacific Spruce Corporation. The Company was unwilling to pay the wages necessary to ensure an adequate supply of laborers to 'pull the green chain', and managers began discussions with a Japanese-American contractor. 35 Japanese-Americans, including women and children, were imported and 'let' houses which the company had built for them. A mob of 300 from Toledo, Corvallis, Philomath and Newport threw the families out of their homes, loaded them on trucks, and forced them to leave town. In 1942, as 11 Japanese Americans in Corvallis were being arrested and sent to concentration camps for the crime of being descended from Japanese ancestors, the police chief in Toledo would boast to the Gazette Times that the action in Toledo had simply been ahead of its time.

The Toledo Switcher at the mill in Toledo, Oregon today. from Dan Haneckow

The rise of the Klan and the American Legion in Oregon, and the campaigns against Catholics and Japanese, was symptomatic of a movement, world wide, which fostered bigotry and racial prejudice alongside national swaggering. The many flavors of Nazism, collectively called fascism, festered in other nations, too, although only in the anti-Irish part of the British Empire (Ulster), the United States, and - ironically - Japan (click here), was it tied to religious orthodoxy, and in the United States that meant Prohibition (click here), Baden-Powell's militarisation of the Boy Scouts (click here), eugenic sterilization (click here) and right-wing evangelists (click here) - all of which both predated and outlasted the War but which flourished only amidst the mayhem of WWI and the fear generated by the U.S. government.

Above left: the Salem, Oregon sterilization, under the Eugenics laws, of an Oregon man for not paying for groceries he had put on credit. Right: Oregon's Bethania Adair-Owens, Oregon's first woman doctor, was the moving force behind the Eugenics laws of Oregon. The primary writer of books on the subject, in Oregon, was Oregon State Professor,Sigma Xi officer and Zoology Departmnt head, Nathan Fasten (click here). Fasten was an Austrian who resigned in WWII for reasons stil unclear, and later went to work in Seattle on a water project. Nationally, Margaret Sanger, the primary proponent of family planning, was a leading campaigner for Eugenics, which threw her motives under a cloud for many years.  Internationally, the greatest adherents were the Nazi Doctors (click here), whose films were publicized in the U.S. by American Eugenecists until WWII. In Oregon,sterilization, as in the case above (castration for males) was the legal response to homosexuality or oral sex between heterosexuals, and was touted as the answer to poverty, as is evident here. Poverty was regarded as genetic.

Throughout the era, there were many, many Oregonians who resisted the pressure of the American army, of the Klan, the American Legion, and others to conform at the expense of the state's more vulnerable citizens. C.E.S. Wood (click here) was one of thousands who were both famous and visible. The Gazette-Times, uncharacteristically opposed the Klan, as did the Oregon Statesman editor, George Putnam, at great risk to life. Putnam was particularly loathsome to the Klan because he was married to Amelia Earhart (click here). The issues of the Industrial Workers of the World - peace, and the 8 hour day, an end to child labor, and safe working conditions - all came, increasingly, to be a concern of the mainstream: in 1916 and 1920, 10,000 Oregonians voted for  various parties with such planks in their platforms. Wilson had never received a majority of votes in Oregon, and at War's end, in 1920, his Party received less than a third of the Oregon vote.

In 1924, 60,000 Oregonians voted for the Progressive Party (click here) and Robert LaFollette, who had consistently opposed the War in the Senate and favored fair-labor legislation (certain Senators supporting the War had tried to have him expelled; yet, 40 years later, the Senate in 1957 voted him as one of the Top 5 Senators of all time. Click here), and an additional 5,000 voted for various other parties with equally 'Progressive' platforms. In 1932, 213,000 Oregonians voted for Franklin Roosevelt, who passed the nation's first equitable labor laws. Another 20,000 voted for various labor parties - despite the fact that the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, was an Oregon boy (click here). Hoover garnered a mere 136,000 votes. 

Nationally, the race riots and lynchings resulted in W.E.B. Dubois (click here) founding the Niagara movement which grew into the N.A.A.C.P. The lynchings and shootings of labor organizers resulted in the Great Steel Strike of 1919 (click here), and the Seattle General Strike of 1919 (click here). Both race and labor issues were too endemic in the culture to be merely suppressed by the unconstrained use of terror.

More fundamentally, the rise of jazz (click here) challenged Euro-American supremacy in the world of music and dance. The first distinctly American cultural innovation, jazz was at heart strictly an African-American innovation, and was associated with multiethnic audiences in urban settings. Ma Rainey (click here), Bessie Smith (click here),Fate Marable (click here) and Louis Armstrong (click here) had a much greater impact on music and dance than vaudeville had done over half a century(click here). The Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn combination (click here), a duo comprising perhaps the greatest composers in the nation's history, emerged.It was a line which led directly through Howlin' Wolf(click here), training in WWII north of town at Camp Adair, to Rock and Roll (click here). Long time resident Pat Bullis said that the Lewisburg Lakeside Skating Rink actually was once surrounded by a lake, and people would row out to the rink, where there were jazz bands who played until the crack of dawn.

Above: Lakeside; Below: Pat Bullis and her husband, killed in WWII.

Flappers (click here) dominated fashion. The great comics like Chaplin and Keaton (click here - Keaton;s opus the General was made on the tracks between Corvallis and Dayton) now making a comeback at our local Elsinore Theater (click here), Rudolph Valentino (click here) and Lon Chaney (click here), Tom Mix (click here; Tom had deserted the U.S. Army rather than return to the Phillippine War - click here - in 1902) and William S. Hart ( whose parents settled locally; click here) dominated the films of the era. Above all, Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd, click here), was ever-popular. 

Hopalong

His wife had fallen in love with him, before ever meeting him, after seeing him in Cecille B. Demille's Volga Boatmen (click here), about the Russian Revolution (click here).The best-selling novelist was probably David Graham Phillips (here) , although  F. Scott Fitzgerald (click here) would soon be as famous. Magazines and books were sold widely, on the names of investigative reporters like Ida Tarbell (click here), Nellie Bly (click here) - who reported from Russia in WWI - and Lincoln Steffens (click here). Our own Steven Puter sold immensely (click here and here).

In theater, and especially in musical theater, the All-American and early professional football star (the Akron Pros) Paul Robeson, dominated, despite what Rutgers University characterized as  "threats of rioting and bombs". Robeson was the first major African American performer who refused to appear before segregated audiences or to take the stereotypical roles of his day. For his efforts,  he earned the enmity of J. Edgar Hoover, whose own views kept him out of nightclubs where African and European American musicians like Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman (whose own parents had fled Czarist Russia) played jazz together (click here). Across Britain, the continent and Russia, Hoover hounded Robeson (click here), whose increasingly strong political views resulted in the U.S government taking his passport and denying him the right to travel and speak abroad - as happened with our own Linus Pauling (click here) and countless thousands.

Above: Lionel Hampton,Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa

Internationally, the era was one of foment and birth. Jazz had taken the world's heart. Films and images were spawned by the the truly gifted, such as Artaud (click here), Manray (click here) and Marcel Duchamp (click here) alongside other leading Dadaists, the group of poets and artists who rejected the arts of a civilization which had spawned such war, and launched a new world literatuure and in the plastic arts. 

Duchamp's LHOOQ, which when pronounced in French is a vernacular reference to the smile and her ardor as a lover.

Among the poets, Andre Breton (click here), Robert Desnos (Click here), and a host of others stood out abroad, as did our own Russian American, George Oppen(Click here) here, and his political opposite, the pro-Nazi Ezra Pound (click here), in the U.S. The quintessential Russian poet Mayakovski (click here) came to visit and enthralled the crowds with his stage presence. 

Politically, the old Empires were tumbling like rotting trees in a storm. The Austro-Hungarian (click here), Prussian (click here), Turkish (click here) and Russian Empires ceased to exist. The English began to lose their grip on India as a slight lawyer named Gandhi (click here) began to mobilize the spirit of Moslems and Hindus on the subcontinent. In Indochina, the French faced an increasing challenge which would end 2 generations later in their smashing defeat by the Viets at Dien Bien Phu(Click here). Lawrence of Arabia(click here) had fostered the feelings of the Arab peoples for independence which is yet playing itself out (click here).

In Russia, now the Union of Soviets, the influence of Stalin's secret police was extended, like that of Hoover in the U.S., into the universities, the work places, and even the families of Russia. Except for the stranglehold of the British, and later the Nazis and - ultimately - of the Americans, Stalin's repression would likely not have been tolerated. As Ben Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel", and Stalin played the card to great advantage. Immigration from Russia became less acceptable and legally more challenging, although it did occur and included Stalin's own daughter, long after his death. We would see very few locally, until after WWII and the uprisings of the Hungarians against the Soviet occupation after the Hungarian defeat in WWII resulted in families like Joe Novak's, arriving, and in 1968, when the Czechs rose, and local resident  Tripp Mikuch joined in throwing stones at Russian tanks.

Of the various local organizations which sprang up during and immediately after  WWI, only the American Legion survives in any measure,  clothing itself in baseball (click here). The Ku Klux Klan is negligible, exercising some tiny influence with our local Nazi skinheads (click here). The Boy Scouts have shed much of the militarism introduced by Baden-Powell over the objections of the group's founders, and are denied use of the public's facilities on grounds of their exclusion of homosexuals, a curious phenomena since one of the 3 greatest serial pedophiles in recent town history was a previously heterosexual Scout Master, the others being a Catholic priest (click here) and  the director of the Children's Farm Home , which was founded by the Temperance Union (Click here) in 1923, in cooperation with the Oregon state normal (teachers') school at Monmouth ( it was used as a training center for students from that institution. click here).

Soldiers of WWI were  promised a bonus which would be payable 25 years later, in 1945. When the stock market collapsed and the nation's economy ground to a slow death, the soldiers asked Congress to speed up the payment. It was believed that the extra cash would be spent and would provide the markets with a shot in the arm. As the Congressional vote neared, a local, former sargeant and laid-off cannery worker named Walter Walters conceived the idea of assembling thousands of WWI veterans in front of the capital to lobby and to demonstrate support for the bill by veterans.In 6 weeks, 25, 00 soldiers and their families had assembled, living alongside the Anacostia River in one of the shack cities which had sprung up all over the country and were named Hooverville, after Herbert Hoover, of Newburg, Oregon.

Above left: 'Hooverville'; as Salem cherry picker. Above right: 'Hooverville', Seattle. Below: Part of the 'Bonus army' gassed and burned out by Macarthur.'
Below: left -the huts torched. Right - the soldiers' rally

Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler (click here), who organized the Oregon State Police, was one of those most involved in the Bonus March, on behalf of his former soldiers. Herbert Hoover (click here) had little understanding and less patience with the plight of working America, and opposed the Bonus Bill. 2 veterans were shot by policemen and Hoover sent the army in- the 3rd Cavary under Major George S. Patton, with sabres drawn, and the 12th Infantry with tanks, under Douglas MacArthur. 

Like countless rogues, before and after, MacArthur claimed his ruthless treatment of the WWI soldiers prevented a Bolshevik revolution.

Hoover, afraid of the escalating violence, twice sent MacArthur orders to stop but MacArthur flatly ignored them, gassing - against the advice of his aide Dwight Eisenhower - the soldiers and their families, and torching their primitive homes. At 11 PM he ordered the army to charge the ex-soldiers anew and then immediately called a press conference, with the same lack of integrity or courage he later exhibited at Bataan , to attribute the entire operation to Hoover. An embarrassed Hoover concurred. It was precisely the same sort of insubordination that would lead to MacArthur's dismissal in the Korean War (Corvallis resident Ed McClain was in the first Marine Division at the time and remembers being assigned with other soldiers in full combat gear to await MacArthur's arrival in San Francisco at the time, because there was deep suspicion that MacArthur was planning a military takeover of the United States' government.). 

4 years later, the same soldiers returned to the White House under Franklin Roosevelt, where they were greeted warmly by Eleanor Roosevelt (click here) and her husband Franklin Roosevelt. FDR explained to the men and their families that he thought  that government assistance ought to be based strictly upon need rather than a single life experience. The soldiers understood they qualified under such criteria, and dispersed quietly. It was the end of the WWI era.

FDR

The election of FDR marked a watershed in American history, as well as in the history of Russia, and of Russians in America. Americans became keenly aware that the Return to Normalcy promised by Warren G. Harding after WWI meant corruption (click here), pedophilia (click here) and ultimately disaster, Most Americans were convinced that the old regime was finished. A variety of options were looked at. Many of these options came from abroad, including Russia, whose artists toured the United States.

According to Congressional testimony, the American Legion plotted a coup, a la Mussolini, with several multimillionaires but made the mistake of approaching Smedley Butler (click here) in the course of planning. Smedley blew the plan wide open (click here) at a Congressional hearing which was then reported by John Spivak, the reporter who smuggled himself into a Georgia prison and wrote a marvelous set of reports that contributed heavily to the successful release of Robert Burns' story, I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.

The poster from the acclaimed 1932 film

 The Communist Party swelled. Father Coughlin, a right-wing Catholic priest who also admired Mussolini (click here) started a genuine Fascist movement, Henry Ford propagandized for the Nazis (click here). Louisiana populist Huey Long (click here to listen, here to see), assassinated and made famous by his brother (click here), the burlesque star Blaze Starr and the Paul Newman movie Blaze, came very close to being elected President. 

Above: Blaze Starr's Press photo. Below, Joseph Sheppard's less romantic painting from life.

The Progressive Party resurfaced. Progressive Henry Wallace click here) became vice president - though support of Wallace's platform of 'equal pay for equal work', of a minimum wage and social security, was considered  'communist' by Oregon State University and 2 of Wallace's supporters - a chemistry professor named Ralph Spitzer and an economics professor named L.R. LaVallee.

An OSU Barometer photo showing the domineering president of OSU  'looming' over the much-loved and admired Therese and Ralph Spitzer. Symptomatic of a self-consciousness, perhaps, of its backwater status, OSU has always tried to enforce a provincial idea of orthodoxy, seeking out administrators and professors who were never a source of controversy, or even interest. The result has been a mediocrity of ideas and methods, which ironically has been the very source of the backwater status. It's quite curious, howeverm that physics professor William Pierce (click here) said he thrived at OSU. Pierce wrote the Turner Diaries which inspired Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, and who left OSU only to take the leadership of the American Nazi Part after its leader,

 Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the United States. Industrial trade unions reemerged. 

WWII(click here)  broke out and the United States was allied with the Soviet Union. Corvallis boys like OSU Forestry student Jim Ashcraft, along with 2 of his brothers, died in Europe.  Others, like John Hampshire died in China, in combat with the Japanese. The ship named after our town, S.S. Corvallis (click here), sailed with aid for Russia and was mauled in an attack.

Local people who fought in WWII were many, and those killed were numerous.. Above are 3 local women killed as Army Air Corps flyers. From left upper, clockwise: Mary E. Hartson,Hazel Ying Lee, Marie Ethel Sharon. Also pictured: Paula Ruth Loop, an Oklahoma woman who died locally while flying a BT-13.

The war was devastating for the Soviet Union. An estimated 39 million Russians died. In its wake, Stalin was, if possible, more ruthless than ever. The same was true for the English (Click here), French (Click here), Belgians (Click here), Portuguese (Click here) and Americans (click here) impelled upon a policy of confrontation in which all used other peoples and other nations to fight a proxy war. Korea and Vietnam were major episodes but there were countless others. The United States has landed troops in other countries, against the wishes of their governments nearly 150 times, and the nation's citizens still are not nearly secure as the citizens of any of the nations who remained neutral, and far less militarized, these past 60 years. As a consequence, we are increasingly viewed by the world's peoples as predators.Confrontations breed confrontational politics, as the nation has discovered anew, to the great sorrow of many.

 Technically, the Soviet Union could claim never to have invaded other nations. since its troops were always 'invited' by 'friendly governments. In point of fact, the 'friendly' governments were sustained and often installed and sustained  by the army (click here) and the accompanying bureaucrats which follow in the wake of soldiers.

 In 1991, the Soviet Union largely disintegrated. The Baltic (click here), Armenian (click here) and Moslem (click here) minorities as well as the occupied nations of east Europe and the Ukraine (click here) bolted and are now independent of Russia, insofar as one can be independent of a neighbor of such monstrous size. Trudeau, once Prime Minister of Canada, said that sharing a border with the U.S. is "like sleeping with an elephant - one feels every twitch". That must also be true for neighbors of Russia.  Finland (click here) is a model for such coexistence perhaps.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have seen a large number of people immigrating to Corvallis from Russia. Some are technicians and engineers, others are students. Some are simply, and most beautifully, lovers. 

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