Vanport and Black exclusion

Vanport, Oregon, is by far the largest ghost town I’ll ever cover and, along with Champoeg, the most historically significant. It’s also one of the newest and one of the shortest-lived. Vanport was built in a hurry in 1942, and destroyed overnight six years later by a combination of a hundred-year flood and a hundred years of institutional racism. Just as the story of Champoeg can tell us about settlers’ unfamiliarity with a new environment and the tale of Bridal Veil illustrates the shallow roots of company towns, Vanport shows how the infamous Black exclusion policy of Oregon’s early history has been carried on by more subtle methods to this day.

Fig. 8.1: Usually it’s a little more subtle than building a golf course right on top of the site of one of the state’s most notorious racist incidents.

Vanport, Multnomah County, OR, est. 1942, abandoned 1948

Let’s return to those Black exclusion laws I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The Provisional Government created at Champoeg was as divided on the issue of slavery as was the American government at the time. While nobody believed that Southern-style plantation agriculture would take root in the Northwest’s climate, Jacksonian Democrats claimed that a ban on slavery would be an unconstitutional offense against private property rights, and they knew that if Oregon entered the Union as a free state it would mean additional power for the anti-slavery bloc.

Meanwhile, the Whigs and proto-Republicans among the settlers opposed slavery, but for fairly ugly reasons. Anti-slavery members of the Provisional Government, such as Jesse Applegate, were more worried about the corrosive effects that slavery would have on white people than about the violent degradation the institution inflicted on the enslaved. The idea was that slavery created unfair competition for white workers; it also normalized tyranny and anti-democratic attitudes and was therefore not good for the body politic. (This all might be true, given the history of the South, but is really missing the point.) They also thought that slavery was un-Christian and endangered slaveholders’ souls. Cry me a river.

These two points of view – different, but both essentially racist – soon found an easy compromise. Neither group really wanted Black people in Oregon at all, and in 1844, they had their opportunity.

The Cockstock Incident began with a dispute over a horse between a free Black settler, James D. Saules, and a Wasco man named Cockstock. Saules and Cockstock had worked for another Black farmer, Winslow Anderson, and both claimed that Anderson had promised them the horse as payment. When Cockstock took the horse, Saules reported it stolen, and a warrant was issued for the Native man’s arrest. Cockstock and a few friends went to Oregon City to dispute the charges and were immediately rushed by vigilantes. A street brawl broke out, and within moments three men lay dead. Two white settlers had been slain by the Wasco, one of whom, George LeBreton, was the Clerk and Recorder for the Provisional Government. Cockstock had been killed in turn by Winslow Anderson.

The entire affair was blamed squarely on Saules, who was accused of riling up Indians. His wife was Chinook, and rumors began to circulate that he was planning to incite her people against the Provisional Government in order to get his way. The Reverend Elijah White, the American government’s Indian agent in the territory, wrote to the Secretary of War in Washington:

“[Saules] ought to be transported, together with every other negro, being in our condition dangerous subjects. Until we have some further means of protection their immigration ought to be prohibited. Can this be done?”

Shortly thereafter, the Provisional Government decided it could. Peter H. Burnett, later the first Governor of California, drafted a law that banned slavery – and also banned any Black people from residing in Oregon at all, upon pain of corporal punishment:

“That if such free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit the country, as required by this act, he or she may be arrested upon a warrant issued by some justice of the peace, and, if guilty upon trial before such justice, shall receive upon his or her bare back not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county.”

Only two members of the legislature, Hillsboro founder David Hill and Portland founder Asa Lovejoy, voted against the act.

Its passage created an immediate atmosphere of menace for the few Black settlers in Oregon, many of whom fled to what became Washington state – technically under the authority of the Provisional Government but far beyond its effective reach. Jim Saules moved to Cape Disappointment, while the towns of Centralia and Tumwater were both founded by Black Oregonians pushed out by the exclusion law. (Their names, coincidentally, were George Washington and George W. Bush respectively.) Those who did not head north were in danger: Winslow Anderson moved to the Oregon Coast, but was murdered in 1853 and his killer never charged.

Fig. 8.2: The original George W. Bush.

The law was renewed in 1845, switching the penalty from whipping to a period of indentured servitude followed by expulsion. In 1857, Black exclusion was written into the state constitution. Some Oregon legislators requested federal aid in enforcing it, and spun wild fantasies in doing so. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon’s territorial delegate to Congress, claimed that:

“The negroes associate with the Indians and intermarry, and, if their free ingress is encouraged or allowed, there would a relationship spring up between them and the different tribes, and a mixed race would ensure inimical to the whites; and the Indians being led on by the negro who is better acquainted with the customs, language, and manners of the whites, than the Indian, these savages would become much more formidable than they otherwise would, and long bloody wars would be the fruits of the comingling of the races.

Thurston’s paranoia was coupled with longstanding theories that held the Canadien John McLoughlin to be an agent of the Jesuits; the mixed-race insurrectionary army were to be the foot soldiers of a conspiracy to wipe out white Protestants across North America and deliver the continent to the Pope. Like many conspiracy theories today, it’s so ridiculous it’s funny – you could easily swap out McLoughlin for George Soros – but it also had real, deadly consequences.

Fig. 8.3: Samuel R. Thurston. If it’s any consolation, he shit himself to death at age 34 on a boat back to Oregon from D.C., after contracting a fever.

(If you’re interested in Thurston and his conspiracy theories, he is the primary villain of Moontrap, one of the great historical novels by Don Berry. Berry was Gary Snyder’s less famous roommate at Reed College and is super underrated. I might have to just write a post reviewing his books.)

Despite becoming federally unconstitutional with the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, the exclusion clause in the Oregon State Constitution remained active until 1926, when it was repealed by referendum. It was used several times to harass Black residents: while only one man, a West Indian hotelier named Jacob Vanderpool, was ever legally expelled, many others were intimidated out of the state on threat of prosecution. This had lasting demographic effects. Before World War II, there were less than 2,000 Black residents in the state. I’m not going to get into the story of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Oregon in this post, but their strength in the 1920s probably played a role too; many places across the state became known as “sundown towns” where Black visitors would face deadly violence if they stuck around too long.

That war, however, began to change things.

Across the North and West, the demands of wartime industry accelerated the Great Migration, the ongoing movement of Black people from the rural South seeking better opportunities in cities elsewhere. Oregon’s African-American population went from 2,000 to 20,000 in just a couple years, and much of this growth happened in Vanport.

The planned city on the Columbia Slough was built during the war by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. In 1941, with war looming and America’s merchant marine unprepared for conflict after twenty years of isolationism, the Roosevelt administration had turned to Kaiser for help. His workers, many of them women encouraged to enter industry for the first time, rose to the challenge. The speed with which the “Liberty ships” were built was legendary: one tank lander built in the Vancouver yard was launched less than three days after the keel was laid.

Fig. 8.4: The Liberty ship SS John McLoughlin being launched at Swan Island.

Kaiser praised his Portland shipwrights in particular:

“It is no exaggeration to say that the performance of this company has astonished the world…

“Perhaps there is no one word to explain the achievement, but more than any other the word ‘loyalty’ stands out in bold relief. Perhaps it was loyalty to your sons and brothers on the battlefronts; perhaps it was loyalty to your country; perhaps it was all of these. It helped you to give a little more than you had; it sustained your will to produce more in less time; to find new ways and methods of speeding every process, to improve your skills and techniques until the whole organization seemed to move as one man…”

There were three Kaiser Shipyards in the Portland metro area: one on Swan Island, one in St. Johns, and one in Vancouver, employing a total of 92,000 people – the vast majority of them new arrivals to the city, imported by Kaiser’s company on chartered trains from the South and East. To house this influx of workers, Kaiser worked with the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) to create a vast residential complex. In the marshy rectangle now bounded by the Slough, the Columbia River, I-5 and North Portland Ave, they built almost 10,000 apartments, a hospital, a grocery store, schools, nurseries, recreation halls, and a movie theater. While the buildings were cheap, prefabricated jobs, some of the public institutions had an intriguing modernist dash to them, and the design and speedy construction of the city had it hailed by urban planners across the country. With 42,000 residents at its peak, the housing project was called, prosaically, Vanport, because it lay between Portland and Vancouver. It was the second largest city in Oregon.

Fig. 8.5: An aerial view. Vanport was a town of very midcentury workers’ housing.

Many of these new residents were Black: the Great Migration had finally reached Portland. The housing in Vanport was segregated, as were the recreational facilities and the hospital. However, with the rest of Portland made off-limits by redlining, it was one of the few places in the state where African-American families were permitted to live. Its schools were integrated, and Vanport was home to Oregon’s first Black teachers and first Black police officer. Civil rights activists who met in the city would later establish Portland’s Urban League. A hundred years after the Cockstock Incident, the settlement ban had finally been undone.

(I’d encourage anyone who’s read this far to check out the OPB documentary on Vanport, which features interviews with people who grew up in the city and their memories of what life was like in the country’s largest housing project. Most of the illustrative passages I’ve found for this post come from the puffery of propagandists and bigots, and while those quotes are interesting, it’s better to hear everyday history from the mouths of those who really lived it.)

Despite the indispensable work done by the shipwrights, the novel presence of so many African-Americans scared the white Portland establishment. Mayor Earl Riley publicly stated “Portland can absorb only a minimum number of Negroes without upsetting the city's regular life.” Plans were laid to demolish Vanport for industrial development immediately after the war’s end. Not to be too blunt, but this isn’t far from what we’re seeing today in the pandemic, is it? Essential workers – disproportionately poor people and people of color – are praised to the heavens by politicians who then treat them with contempt and do nothing to ensure their safety.

After V-J Day, the shipyards closed, and many of Vanport’s white residents departed to find more permanent and pleasant housing. The Black shipwrights and their families had fewer options. Many probably would have left if they could. Vanport’s hastily built apartments sat on shaky wooden foundations in the marsh, and it was far from the services and amenities of the city center. Unincorporated and located outside the City of Portland, it was administered directly by the HAP, so the residents had no say in its governance. While the state did build the Vanport Extension Center – an educational institute for veterans, which eventually became today’s Portland State University – in the city, its student body was primarily white.

With its raison d’etre now gone, poverty was on the rise in Vanport, and Portland leaders began to openly resent paying for the city. Despite Black residents making up only a third of Vanport’s population, it was dubbed the “Negro project,” and Mayor Riley called it a “municipal monstrosity.” The racist callousness with which they treated the “blighted area” spelled its doom.

Just like Champoeg, Vanport had been built in defiance of environmental safety, and its fragile buildings were extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of the Oregon weather. A 1943 issue of The Bo’s’n’s Whistle, the Kaiser shipyard newsletter, had attempted to assure residents that despite being on the banks of the Columbia, the city was safe from flooding:

“There has been some concern over the fact that Vanport was on a ‘lowland.’ The founding fathers countered with a complete mosquito control program. All underbrush is removed, swamp areas are being filled in, and embankments landscaped, the sloughs are being stocked with fish. The entire project is surrounded by an impervious dike and has a complete drainage system.”

I’m sure you can feel the dramatic irony already. In the spring of 1948, heavy rains began to swell the river. The HAP responded dismissively to concerned residents, telling them in a flyer posted on May 30^th that in the event of a flood “You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don't get excited.” Meanwhile, the agency had been stripping its offices and moving its property and records out of the city.

Fig. 8.6: A view along one of the dikes today. They’re still intact... mostly.

Later that very day, the Columbia topped out at fifteen feet above its banks and breached the dirt embankment of the Northern Pacific Railway. In less than an hour, Vanport was completely swallowed. The apartment blocks were lifted right off their wood bases. Fifteen people drowned, and thousands were instantly made homeless. The only reason the death toll wasn’t higher was that the flood had fortuitously hit on Memorial Day, and many of Vanport’s families were out enjoying their vacation.

Fig. 8.7: Underwater.

The city on the slough was a total loss and was never rebuilt. Many refugees were forced to pack into Albina, Portland’s only Black neighborhood, resulting in yet more crowding and poverty. HAP got their wish: the site of Vanport was cleared of ruins and turned over for development. Today, the townsite is home to some light industry, the Portland International Raceway, and the Heron Lakes Golf Club, as well as a small wildlife refuge. The only remaining signs of Vanport are the roads (repaved for golfers and park visitors), the concrete foundation of the movie theater, and the immense earthen dikes that were supposed to protect the city.

Fig. 8.8: Birds and beavers inhabit Vanport today.

Albina itself soon fell victim to the same pattern of malicious neglect from the city government. Deemed a slum and a target for urban renewal, in the 1950s and 1960s large swaths of the neighborhood were bulldozed for I-5, the Rose Quarter stadiums, and the Emanuel Hospital. In the twenty-first century, gentrification continued the job, pushing Albina residents out into deep East Portland as condos rose along N Williams Street. Yet again, the destruction was accelerated by government policy: Oregon implemented a statewide ban on rent control in the 1980s, and Portland City Council has continued to prevaricate on tenants’ rights. Their inaction has directly exacerbated the crisis.

Fig. 8.9: Refugees fleeing Vanport. (Oregon Historical Society)

This all goes to show that Black exclusion was not an episode or an aberration: it has continued since its statutory repeal through officially colorblind policy decisions. Although Oregon’s liberal political leaders today are willing to talk about the tragedy of Vanport and the disgrace that was the 1844 exclusion law, most of them speak of these as past mistakes that must be atoned and apologized for, rather than a continuing process that can be halted through legislative action. Admitting that they have the power to stop gentrification and Black displacement, and to break the cycle that began in the 1840s, would require courage and honesty – traits that so-called leaders like Ted Wheeler have in short supply.

This isn’t a political blog, you might be thinking. Why am I telling the story of Vanport in this way? It’s one of the most important episodes in Oregon’s history and has been covered countless times; I could just have included some links and maybe a blurb about my visit to the townsite. Why’d I recap the whole tale at length?

There’s an essay by Hayden White in which he argues that there are two possible motives for studying history. The good kind of historian is interested in finding out the origins of the contemporary world in order to provide grounding for political projects of liberation. The bad kind is a “cultural necrophile” – his words – who is simply a fan of the past, interested in the stories and aesthetics of bygone times for their own sake.

I think this dichotomy is a bunch of baloney, although I’m definitely going down to the mall at some point to get CULTURAL NECROPHILE put on a custom hat. The reason I study history is because I love the world around me, and because understanding the scintillating complexity and contingency of the world makes me love it all the more. The more I read about the history, culture, biology, and geography of the Northwest the more grateful I feel to live here, in spite of the ugliness of much of what has happened on this land. Love requires honesty, and love of place is no different.

It’s possible to be entertained, thrilled, disgusted, heartbroken, and called to action by history all at once. And how could it be any different? The past is too densely tangled to be reduced to a list of sins committed by oppressors and acts of noble resistance by the oppressed. Lewis and Clark performed an incredible human feat and broadened the world’s scientific knowledge, while acting as agents of imperialist expansion and genocide. The loggers who cleared the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest vandalized a sacred ecosystem for other men’s profits, but at the same time gained deep knowledge of, and respect for, the land on which they worked. Jim Saules stood up for himself and asserted his rights as a Black man before the law – by employing racist tropes of duplicitous Indians to bring death down on Cockstock. The Oregon story is full of evil, but there is no such thing as original sin.

The long and continuous story of Black exclusion in Oregon, from Jim Saules through Vanport to today’s North Portland real estate market, should be told and retold, both to build pressure for revolutionary political change and to celebrate Black Oregonians’ resilience. I notice that when many white people learn about their home’s history, their reaction is to wallow in guilt, declare a Year Zero, and pretend to disown the past. That’s not honest and not productive. If you dismiss your city and state as an inherently, irrevocably flawed cesspit, you foreclose the possibility that it could be anything different. If change is impossible, the only option is eternal self-flagellation. Love your home, embrace the fact that your culture and community shape who you are for both good and ill, and commit to fixing its problems. We’ve got a lot of them, and they can’t wait.