The Oregonian Navigates the Great Depression

OHQ vol. 114, no. 2

Harry H. Stein

The Oregonian Navigates the Great Depression

© 203 Oregon Historical Society

tHe Great DepreSSion, the nation’s worst crisis since the Civil War, unleashed gigantic economic, social, and political storms that assaulted all mass media. Those lengthy and intense storms exposed vulnerabilities in American newspapers and precipitated a variety of changes in the medium as their owners fought for survival. Financial and employee turmoil, shrink-ing numbers of journals, slimmer editions, heavy losses in readership and advertising, and feelings of institutional crisis characterized the beleaguered industry. Newspapers variously struggled to strengthen reader interest, to become less politically partisan, to become more like non-newspaper media, or to make other changes. Under the immense pressures, some panicked. “They thought they could save themselves by cheapening themselves,” Oregonian publisher E. Palmer Hoyt reflected in 90, when accepting a distinguished service to journalism award from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In contrast, his newspaper’s managers “maintained their editorial ideals” while streamlining the paper “to meet the readers’ time requirements.” As he elaborated: “We have attempted to keep pace with modern trends — in fact, in the forefront of modern trends — without sacrifice of the high ideals in which” the newspaper’s founders had clothed the ninety-year-old publication. While honoring the Oregonian’s long-time influence, the grantors of the prestigious award stressed the results of its recent transformation.

In Portland during the Depression, the Oregonian, like some stately but rusting liner breached by the elements, strained to repair itself while altering course to a safe port. With newspapers everywhere yawing or floundering and some capsizing, nothing was assured. The Depression would leave Astoria and Eugene, Oregon, with one rather than two dailies each. Only two of Portland’s four dailies survived the 930s: the Democratic Oregon Journal and the Oregonian (as its morning and Sunday editions were renamed in

Stein, The Oregonian Navigates the Great Depression

The deadline-driven newsroom and copydesk were overcrowded, gritty, and ex-clusively masculine preserves in 1939. Lower-paid women were segregated into the women-society section and other sections of the company devoted to women as both readers and consumers.

93), the Pacific Northwest’s leading Republican paper and a wielder of major influence and power in the region.

The Oregonian, acting in ways that would have seemed unlikely before the 929 Wall Street collapse, had by 90 navigated away from its conservative content and form and from its meager circulation promotion to become a more lively and timely mass-market publication. And it had navigated away from a well-defined Republican bias to a more moderate partisanship. It accomplished both by more closely aligning with trends in major, urban mass-circulation newspapers. Those trends promoted much looser editorial control over news choices and presentations, greater openness to viewpoints and information that might contradict editorial views, and stronger emphasis on up-to-date mass-market approaches to building readership and advertis-

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ing through both the newspaper and radio stations. But its captains would not direct the Oregonian too far off course during that time of crisis. The paper belonged to that probable majority of twentieth-century dailies with “cultures built on consistency and limiting changes,” in media economist Robert G. Picard’s words. Expressed differently, the Oregonian’s owners and managers did not reinvent their mass-circulation newspaper during the Great Depression. To maintain its historic identity, reputation, and signature presence in the state’s opinions and affairs, or to retain content of substantial value to its audience and advertisers, the Oregonian’s captains preserved certain institutional traditions, features, forms, and dynamics. During the Depression, they did not cast overboard the customary search for circulation and advertising profits or an organizational structure of departments over-seen by a white, male hierarchy. Many newspaper conventions and practices continued to guide them. They maintained the paper’s longtime opposition to journalistic sensationalism. They preserved a sports section popular with male fans of a few spectator sports and a women and society section largely addressed to women as stay-at-home consumers. Yet, they would editori-ally acknowledge making some course adjustments, as in placing a “more accurate emphasis on news” in 939 than they had earlier in the century.2

The Depression quickly amplified stagnation, complacency, and other weaknesses in the Oregonian’s organization, culture, and leadership. By 93, the economic crisis helped push the daily toward significant changes. A cru-cial stage in media history, identified by scholar-critic Robert W. McChesney, appears “when important new media technologies emerge, when the existing media system enters a crisis, or when the political climate changes sufficiently to call accepted policies into question or demand new ones.” For the Orego-nian, a sense of institutional crisis, a growing competition for audiences and advertising from radio newscasts and news and picture magazines, and a rapidly changing political climate triggered important changes.3

Radio stations gave the Depression-struck Oregonian valuable ballast. The company became a local radio broadcaster in 922 with the establish-ment of station KGW, to which it added on-air commercials in 92. It later upgraded the station’s facilities, personnel, and power. In 933, the Oregonian purchased and similarly upgraded the smaller KEX, taking on more revenue and a larger audience, managers believed, for its newspaper. A small number of publishers, usually powerful ones, played a significant role during this formative period of American broadcasting as they attempted to increase their corporate profits and public presences without changing newspaper practices. They brought to radio both a new legitimacy and capital for improved technology. Like their counterparts in Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh, the publishers of the Oregonian, Telegram, and Oregon Journal


established Portland stations and developed modest multi-media operations during the early 920s. KGW was one of more than 600 stations going on the air in 922. Many had a brief existence. By 930, of the five Portland sta-tions operating in 922, only KGW survived. It thrived by then with listeners and advertising revenue, according to broadcast historian Ronald Kramer.

During the Great Depression, the Oregonian’s owners and editors expanded the paper’s appeal by creating radio content that used the paper and its promotional activities on its associated radio stations and by revis-ing the newspaper’s content and appearance. They modernized the paper’s look. They substantially loosened editorial control over news presentations, provided viewpoints and news that might contradict editorial stances, and adopted approaches to building advertising and readership based in mass-market research that targeted a range of audiences. By 90, the daily was starting to restore a national reputation last enjoyed during the editorial

The KGW broadcasting studio is shown here a year after the Oregonian Publishing Company established the radio station in 1922. One of hundreds of radio stations to be established in that year, KGW survived longer than most, bringing valuable income and broad reach to the Oregonian, which used radio programs to generate additional advertising revenue and to expand readership by attracting listeners to newspaper features.

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The newspaper office on Southwest Sixth and Alder was a tall, monumental, sandstone-and-iron-framed building meant to anchor and display the newspaper’s importance, authority, and good taste. Rocked by the 1893–1897 depression, the com-pany struggled to pay the heavy debts incurred for the 1892 building and new presses.

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reign of Harvey W. Scott, who died in 90. The Oregonian by the end of the Depression had successfully survived the perilous era and begun to thrive again.

tHe olD laDy of alDer StreetIn his survey of power and power holders in the United States, John Gun-ther claimed that a person asked in 900 “Who runs Oregon?” would have answered: the Oregonian, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the lumber kings. National party figures and journalists agreed that the newspaper’s anti-silver crusade — led by Scott — was the main reason Oregon barely tipped to Republican William McKinley in 96. California and Oregon alone among western states stayed in the Republican presidential column that year. In 929, the Oregonian remained the chief guardian and voice of Portland’s major business interests and of Oregon Republicanism. It was the leading Republican paper in a heavily Republican state, a force in local and state affairs, and an effective booster of the Oregon and regional economy.6

Yet, at the same time, many people half-discounted the Oregonian as “The Old Lady of Alder Street.” To those detractors, the venerable daily, born an anemic weekly in December 0, had grown ponderous, prim, frumpy, and stodgy. “Mr. Meyer, if Jesus Christ was preaching on this corner tonight, the Oregonian wouldn’t know about it till two days later,” a newsboy told Fred G. Meyer around 93, persuading the grocer (soon, chain grocer) to advertise only in the Oregon Journal. Portland banker E.B. McNaughton, who joined the Oregonian’s Board of Directors in 939, recalled that the paper “went into storage and became almost moribund and the [Oregon] Journal went ahead” after the 99 death of publisher Henry L. Pittock, who had founded the Morning Oregonian in 6 and the Sunday Oregonian in .

Many people traced the Oregonian’s fading quality to Pittock’s 99 will. The will imposed a twenty-year trust that gave appointees, not his heirs, control of his many interests and properties. Pittock’s will appointed trusted lieutenants, comfortably

Printer turned publisher Henry L. Pittock (1836–1919) provided much of the cau-tious business shrewdness that kept the Oregonian alive during many hard times.

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committed to the way things always had been done, as the Oregonian’s co-trust-ees, publisher, and chief editor. A restless group of young and ambitious white men in its shabby newsroom and busi-ness offices spoke ruefully of an ensuing “dead man’s rule.” One of those men, Robert C. Notson — a reporter during the 930s and future editor, publisher, and informal historian of the paper — later stated that the feisty Oregon Journal, in contrast, had been “putting out a more modern newspaper than the Orego-nian” in news coverage and appearance. Employees such as Notson apparently believed that their superiors disliked anything new, novel, or unfamiliar and rewarded uncomplaining steadiness over initiative and imagination. Under the trust, the Oregonian maintained its early-twentieth-century forms of reporting, features, advocacy, production, layout, and design as well as approaches to cir-culation and promotion. The trust fixed department heads in their positions, and the heads of the print shop and sports department created little baronies. In 933, Harry A. Wells, who had been a reporter and editor the past sixty-six years, praised his former employer for continuing to avoid “the jazzy make-up of most papers.” Managers had ignored,

for example, such new visual design options as “fewer items and stories under simplified headlines running across more columns” — innovations mentioned by communication scholars Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone as common in newspapers by 930. Long-familiar dogma about the supe-riority of the United States, Republican Party, American business, limited government, low taxes, individual striving, and a business-guided economy likewise ruled the Oregonian’s news and editorial columns into the early 930s. Notson laid the blame at the trust, which put “the Oregonian into a state of suspended animation.”

Robert C. Notson (1902–1999) was a fifty-six-year employee, presi-dent of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and informal Oregonian historian. Starting as a reporter in 1925, he rose through editing posts to the top editorship and then to publisher, 1968–1975.

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DepreSSionDespite such a fixed approach, the Old Lady of Alder Street enjoyed a geo-graphically broad readership. Before the birth of the Internet, an American newspaper’s delivery medium — paper — and core dependence on nearby readers largely wedded it to a particular locale. The Oregonian reached deepest into Portland and surrounding areas, but like a few mass-market newspapers in other states such as Iowa, Arkansas, and New Hampshire, it also circulated throughout the city’s large multi-state trading area. In 929, a 2-mile radius surrounding Portland encompassed some percent of the Oregonian’s subscriptions and single sales. The same edition on the same day reached all of Oregon’s counties, Washington’s Columbia River com-munities, the Spokane region, and bordering Idaho and California towns. Broadly circulated Sunday editions, favored as cheap entertainment and for their classified employment ads, anchored circulation against an even worse fall throughout the Depression, according to Notson.9

Acute conditions marked the Oregonian’s Depression-wracked circula-tion territory. It “was a terrible time. I saw people selling apples and fruit on the street, and begging and living in these Hoovervilles,” federal judge Gus J. Solomon remembered decades later. By 933, some 3 million Americans, almost a quarter of the workforce, were unemployed; millions more worked drastically shorter hours than they had before the crash. Farms, industries, and businesses reeled, and confidence sank. In Oregon, total income declined by 29 percent between 929 and 933. Almost 20 percent of Portland was on relief in 933, and two-thirds of the city’s small businesses were tax delinquent in 933. The state’s farm cash income of around $36 million in 929 had plummeted to $9 million by 933. The big rural area, home to 3 percent of Oregonians in 93, pursued a grim semi-subsistence existence, worsened by the Great Dust Bowl drought east of the Cascade Mountains. During this frightening four-year period, Oregon’s employment rolls dropped some 60 percent and wages percent. Strings of sawmill towns and logging camps disappeared. Almost 90 percent of the lumber firms in the nation’s leading lumber state verged on bankruptcy, and the state’s massive lumber workforce had been halved.0

General-circulation newspapers, always subject to major economic cycles, badly suffered during the Depression. Since the late nineteenth century, they had been almost entirely dependent on sales of advertising, subscrip-tions, and single issues. Great numbers of people and businesses simply were unable or unwilling to pay for or advertise in newspapers during the economic crisis. Severe revenue drains spelled the end for many newspa-pers. Evening publications suffered graver circulation declines than morn-ing ones, mainly because when overall demand fell, there were far greater

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numbers competing in the evening than among morning papers. The press in the seven westernmost states bore the biggest circulation losses among all the regions, according to a crude estimate by historian Earl Pomeroy. In Salem, Pendleton, and elsewhere, hard-pressed publishers quietly bartered subscriptions for services, animals, or crops.

The United States’ total newspaper circulation (subscriptions plus single-issue sales) of over 39. million in 930 plunged by almost . million by 933. Circulation partly recovered before another falloff in 93. Newspaper advertising revenue fell from a record-breaking $00 million in 929 to $90 million in 932 and farther still until a rebound in 93, before another decline (to $2 million) in 939. Interestingly, though, the urban press nationally resisted advertiser pressure to lower rates, particularly for the popular clas-sified employment ads, during the 930s.2

Some newspapers survived, if barely, by making only small changes dur-ing the Depression. Salem publisher Charles A. Sprague merely widened the Oregon Statesman’s local and area coverage, added more front-page news, printed more photographs, and improved the typography. Two conserva-tive Republican papers in Muncie, Indiana, added to their heavy content of conservative columnists and continued to bar Democratic and liberal ones. From 929 to 936, the conservative Republican publisher and top editors who hated publicizing bad economic tidings kept such news out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, except when local banks failed, news of which they buried in the back pages. Other newspapers could not or would not change longtime policies and approaches. Sixty-four of the country’s ,92 English-language, general-circulation dailies vanished between 930 and 90, adding to the long-term declines, begun around 909, in numbers of total newspapers and of subscribing households. Fame did not spare Pulit-zer’s New York World from closure in 93. Barely avoiding bankruptcy, the Washington Post found a purchaser who would improve it rather than strip out assets before consigning the hulk to posterity.3

Cities with two or more dailies fell from 26 to 9 between 930 and 90. Only one publisher was left in nine out of ten daily newspaper cities in 9. Countless weeklies disappeared along with their towns’ banks and stores. Growth in chain ownership of newspapers halted. The Hearst newspaper chain was devastated, except for its profitable Sunday papers. The Scripps-Howard chain remained profitable during the Depression only because of profits from its news services and three dailies. Absorption by a competitor normally left little or nothing of a newspaper’s historic personality. That was the case for the Portland Telegram in 93, after its acquisition by a penny-pinching Portland News that was tailored for the working class. Similarly, the Oregon Journal retained little of the News-Telegram it procured in 939


— beyond an Associated Press franchise and a 0,000 net-gain in subscrip-tion that temporarily bested the Oregonian’s circulation.

Impelled by panic or feelings of grim necessity in the face of circulation and advertising losses, newspapers, including the Oregonian, repeatedly pursued short-term benefits. They greatly reduced fixed and variable costs for presses, paper, wages, and maintenance, and, hoping to rebuild their readership bases, often dropped their single-issue and subscription prices. (Falling newsprint prices helped.) That approach encouraged widespread layoffs, wage and salary reductions, payless periods, and uncertainty among already low-paid staffs. Depression-era reporters’ pay averaged below thirty dollars a week, and the Oregonian’s reporters, copy persons, and advertising clerks usually earned less. Reduced salaries and wages sometimes arrived late at the Pendleton East Oregonian. In 930 and 93, at least five Oregon newspapers paid employees in scrip redeemable only at firms that traded it for advertising space. In 933, after three wage reductions, the Oregonian’s staff agreed to work a week without pay. Around 93, Oregon Journal employees chose wage cuts over layoffs. Unions sporadically confronted employer retrenchment and anti-unionism. Often-bitter strikes and lockouts shook papers in Seattle, Newark, San Diego, Chicago, Springfield, Mas-sachusetts, and other cities between 933 and 939. For the first time in its history, Portland was left without a newspaper during a four-day printers’ strike in January 93. At the Oregonian, where unions had represented the mechanical trades for decades, the new American Newspaper Guild won representation for newsroom and business employees in 90.

raDioNewspapers “came into the depression era as the main — if not only — mass medium that reached the great bulk of the American people,” noted communications historian George N. Gordon. “By the time the decade was over, this was no longer true.” Radio had become a regular and substantial source of news. The so-called Press-Radio War of 933–93 — a drive by non-station-owning newspapers and wire services to restrict news dissemination by stations and networks — failed. By 90, newspapers had lost to radio the invaluable communication advantage of immediacy. For fast-breaking stories, broadcasts largely replaced newspapers’ special, post-event street editions known as “extras.”6

Publishers directed, publicized, and promoted their radio stations as expandable extensions of their newspapers. KGW and KEX conveyed and sometimes dramatized upcoming Oregonian content, top editor Paul R. Kelty said in 93. Radio newscasts also “whetted interest” for his daily’s more comprehensive accounts, while major sportscasts generated sales

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for sports extras. As radio news proliferated, however, Kelty warned publishers against allowing the tail to wag the dog if the news-paper was to continue as the country’s primary and most trusted source of information. “The radio remains a news disseminat-ing auxiliary — valuable, but nevertheless an aux-iliary.” As publishers hur-ried to establish, acquire, and modernize stations and expand regional and national networks, Kelty shouted against the wind.

Radio stations gave publishers growing reve-nues, partially offsetting or even bettering advertising-revenue losses. Between 929 and 933, newspaper advertising revenue fell nationally by 0 percent, while radio advertising revenue surged 2 percent. Local and national adver-tisers swarmed to reach the mass audiences attracted to

radio and the new picture and news magazines. By 93, radio advertising revenue had climbed 263 percent over the 929 dollar figure. Radio “cap-tured something like one-fourth of the national advertiser’s dollar, while the newspaper’s share [has] dropped off to about one-third,” Fortune reported in 939. KGW “was the only really profitable part of” the Oregonian company by 93, Notson reported. Together, KGW and KEX after 933 “pretty much kept the Oregonian Publishing Company solvent” during the Depression, editor J. Richard Nokes added. Kelty wrote that advertising yielded about as much revenue for the stations as the paper lost to broadcasting between 933 and mid 93.

The Oregonian Publishing Company used its downtown Portland property to advertise not only its newspaper but also its two radio stations, indicating the significance of the newer medium to the company’s overall business strategy.

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outSiDe ConSultationThat the Oregonian, for the first time in its history, looked outside its own ranks in 93 for help in setting a new course and adopted many of the consultant’s recommendations explains numerous changes it began making during the Depression. By that year, Pittock’s anointed publisher and chief editor were dead. The Board of Directors and several editors, anguishing that the economy was worsening the defects caused by the restrictions in the trust, had the publisher hire a tough-minded consultant, former Hearst executive Guy T. Viskniskki, to help turn things around. “Here is a crisis,” Viskniskki warned. “The Oregonian must stop being a Model T newspaper in a V- age.” He also addressed newspaper leaders who sensed that a dramatic growth in Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popularity and in Oregon’s Democratic rolls and legislative representation was test-ing the Republican paper’s long-term influence. Worries about the paper’s stagnation and Oregon’s shifting polit-ical loyalties strongly promoted, if not exactly forced, an intensive rethinking and revising of approaches, policies, and staffing.9

Hiring a consultant reflected a developing newspaper trend. Viskniskki and his associates had recently inspired renovations at the Indianapolis News, Detroit Free Press, and Los Angeles Times; after-wards they surveyed the Spokane Spokesman-Review and the Phila-delphia Evening Public Ledger. They descended roughly on the Oregonian in March 93 with what Notson described as “full authority to make a thorough overhaul and point a course of action.” They soon pushed the newspaper toward adopting approaches that were more modern, better adapted to a mass market, and less politically partisan. Viskniskki issued an “injunction . . . to modern-ize the product and sell it. And we succeeded in doing exactly that.”20

Guy T. Viskniskki (1877–1949), founder-editor of the Army’s Stars & Stripes newspaper, exported his pitiless cost-cutting and improvement techniques for the Hearst chain to Depression-struck dailies. What transpired proved to be a watershed for the Oregonian.

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Time reported on Viskniskki’s immediate impact. On November 2, 93, just eight months after the consultant’s arrival, the Oregonian’s read-ers were dazed to see “for the first time, a picture at the top of Page One. It illustrated not a world calamity but an ordinary sob-story.” Although Time was incorrect in stating the newspaper had never before run pho-tographs on the first page, the magazine could be excused for missing the images of Republican national candidates printed every four years. The “Pittock makeup” had dictated a grey, pinched-looking page of endless-feeling single or double columns. No headline had covered more than one column, even on the declaration of war in 9. “The paper was one of the last metropolitan dailies to change its front page from a conservative style in which multiple-column headlines were never used,” wrote its former executive editor. Two-column stories and multi-column headlines sud-denly appeared on the front page that November morning and bannered across the tops of the otherwise-unchanged women’s and sports pages. The daily front-page political cartoon and Washington correspondent’s report shifted to the editorial page among the columnists, crossword puzzles, and letters to the editor. The redesigned front page featured several local, mostly short, stories “written with a forced gaiety that would have made the Oregonian’s late, great Editor Harvey Scott writhe in angry protest,” Time declared. “Headlines were blacker, shallower. Inside were more and bigger pictures.” The “crowning horror was a Bible contest” to promote circulation. To Notson, the “results were good. The Oregonian began to gain almost immediately in circulation.” Although “many readers were outraged” by the new look, their complaints were ignored.2

Viskniskki “laid about him with his cleaver. Deadheads rolled, deadwood was chopped away, and the ‘old lady of Alder Street’ woke up with her face lifted,” Time reported. The face-lift included a larger type size and greater space between lines for easier reading. Viskniskki ordered unpopular cost cutting (such as dimmer lights and toweling made from waste paper), but those actions were accompanied by his recommended purchase in 93 of the expensive new Associated Press wire photo service. The Oregonian also made a huge capital investment: two new presses. In 93, its first four-color press began Sunday printing of profitable color advertisements as well as the comics and Pacific Northwest Farm, Home and Garden section. Viskniskki arranged the replacement of the change-resistant circulation manager, pro-duction manager, and composing-room foreman as well as the promotion of several employees in their thirties, including future publishers E. Palmer Hoyt and Notson. “Boy scouts,” their critics at the paper called them. Not everybody liked what was happening, but resistance apparently was minimal and ineffective.22


As Time magazine noted, the Oregonian’s readers found a dramatically different newspaper on November 21, 1934 (below) than they had the day before (above). The newspaper’s managers and owners had long resisted such changes in layout, but they had proven popular in other markets and would be worthwhile for the Old Lady of Alder street as well.

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Managing editor Hoyt and the new circulation manager and future publisher Michael J. Frey “worked closely together,” Notson observed. Frey “had been told to sell the Oregonian as it never had been sold before.” They quickly lowered subscrip-tion and street-edition prices to match the Oregon Jour-nal’s. Repeated promotional schemes similarly raised cir-culation. A “Young Orego-nian” page devoted to its own clubs, outings, and events, for example, cultivated reader-ship loyalty among teenag-ers and their families. The company’s radio stations also publicized and promoted the Young Oregonians.23

“For the first time,” Frey’s c irculat ion depar tment “became the eyes and ears of the newsroom in determin-ing the desires of the reader,” Notson remembered. That enhanced authority and the

greater importance given to marketing research suggest that the Oregonian began in 93 to align itself with an unpublicized trend whereby advertising and circulation-promotion departments increased their influence on news-paper content. To better attract advertisers and to supplement managerial hunches, the Oregonian and other urban dailies had initiated marketing-research projects during the 920s, studying how target audiences spent their time and money and what most appealed to newspaper buyers. Readership studies during the 930s, particularly of what content generated repeat daily newspaper purchases, further influenced how newspapers handled recipes, fic-tion, local and national news, gossip, sports, editorials, and crossword puzzles.2

To appeal to women as well as small-town and rural residents, the Oregonian instituted a Sunday picture page “Showing the Leaders and

Michael J. Frey (1898–1978, on right beside an unidentified person) rose over sixty-three years through the Oregonian’s circulation and business departments. As publisher (1953–1968), he led the paper through a bitter strike (that destroyed its unions) and the start of far-reaching computerization and automation.

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Events in Oregon Cities” in May 93; a twenty-page Sunday fiction section in November 93; a Pacific Northwest Farm, Home and Garden section the next April; and the syndicated American Weekly Sunday magazine supple-ment in September 93. To respond to reader interest in a rapidly changing world — including a growing federal presence in national life, widespread labor and social unrest, extensive Asian and European turmoil, and the march of dictators — the Oregonian began to departmentalize news into local, regional, national, and international categories and gave each its own section. Photographs, picture pages, and front-page news summaries mul-tiplied. Hoyt held reporters to what in 90 he called “the sacred objectivity of news,” a widespread convention that newswriting must be detached from a reporter’s opinions and emotions. Simultaneously, interpretative and explanatory journalism from syndicates, press associations, staff writers, and others gained new prominence. The Oregonian also used more bylines, which reporter (later editor) J. Richard Nokes recalled as being profession-ally “important for a journalist [like himself] in those days.” Such changes brought the Portland daily more in line with contemporary press trends. In journalism historian Frank Luther Mott’s calculations of content in ten “leading” metropolitan dailies, for example, the biggest non-advertising newspaper space increases during the 930s went to public affairs columns, Washington, D.C., news, foreign news and features, “women’s interests,” and comics.2

newS-eDitorial SeparationViskniskki also successfully urged the Oregonian to begin separating its editorial and news departments and to totally end editorial control of the newsroom — changes for which Notson and other young staff members previously had advocated. Managers made the chief editor and editorial page editor separately responsible to the publisher in 93, a change Pittock and Scott’s heirs made official board policy after the trust expired in 939. That change made it possible, for example, for the paper in March 93 to give front-page prominence to texts written by Roosevelt while simultaneously attacking him in editorials. Viskniskki, a student employee heard later, had ordered that equal news space go to the two major parties solely “to bring back into the Oregonian circulation fold the many Democrats and liberals who had given up the paper in disgust.” Like many other dailies, the Orego-nian imported to editorial pages the newly influential Washington, D.C., political columns and other syndicated matter that sometimes countered the paper’s editorial views. Columnists who stressed the light side of life, such as Will Rogers and Dale Carnegie, plus opponents of the New Deal, such as Mark Sullivan and Paul Mallon, still predominated in the Oregonian by 93,

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The Oregonian instituted three new features in its Sunday papers in 1934 and early 1935: fiction section (top), regional farm, home and garden news (middle), and a picture page “showing leaders and events in Oregon cities” (bottom).

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but such pro–New Deal columnists as Oswald Garrison Villard, Dorothy Thompson, and Joseph Alsop offered readers different points of view.26

To advance the Oregonian’s renewed ethic of journalistic impartiality, managing editor Hoyt cautiously introduced more neutral reporting on Democrats after 93. That modification, the inclusion of pro–New Deal columnists, and the positive attention sometimes given New Dealers and regularly given locally and regionally advantageous New Deal projects indi-cate that the paper’s once intimate ties to the Republican Party had grown more distant by 90. Republicans could no longer assume the Oregonian’s automatic deference. From acting almost as a branch of political parties and factions, the American press, including the Oregonian, sprouted a some-times-wavering independence from parties and factions. That important decades-long transition was well underway before the Depression. In 923, for instance, the voluntary American Society of Newspaper Editors Code of Ethics declared: “Partisanship . . . in the news columns . . . is subversive of the fundamental principle of the profession.”2 Although Viskniskki’s recommendations on political content and editorializing likely hastened — or solidified — the Oregonian’s important transition, the owners’ and managers’ perception of political realities had already prompted the changes before he arrived.

Political storms began breaking over The Old Lady of Alder Street at the outset of the Depression, notably affecting the long-established practice whereby, as Notson recounted, the “news columns were made to support the editorial policy.” The first storm grew out of the 930 gubernatorial race. Portland department-store heir Julius Meier, running on the Independent ticket, swamped Republican Phil Metschan, Jr., and Democrat Ed Bailey. From September into early November, Oregonian news columns and editori-als had assailed Meier as a dangerous radical, mainly because he supported a 930 ballot measure permitting the formation of public utility districts. Chief political reporter John W. Kelly cudgeled Meier in what Notson called the “old Oregon style” — one with no pretense to neutrality. Kelly, Henry Hanzen of the Telegram, and Ralph Watson of the Journal all “went beyond reporting; they also plotted and directed, planted stories and rumors, and were often more politician than journalist,” journalism historian Floyd J. McKay charged. Once elected, Meier refused further contact with his tormentor, and the newspaper sent Kelly east to become the Washington, D.C., correspondent. Republican notables decried his successor, Notson, as an insufficiently partisan reporter of state government and the special 933 legislative session; editors sent him to the real estate desk.2

The 932 presidential outcome was even bleaker for the Oregonian. Despite editor Kelty’s pre-election mention of a desire “to give space and hearing

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to all sides of public questions,” the newspaper vigorously campaigned for the Grand Old Party. Front pages during the first week of November usu-ally included two or three pro–Herbert Hoover accounts and a single one on Roosevelt. As usual, the only photographs gracing its front pages were four-column images of the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates. But the electorate decisively chose Roosevelt in the first of his four Oregon victories. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Democratic ranks began to grow. While Republicans dominated the state’s politics until after World War II, they declined from almost three-fourths of the total registered number in 930 to just over half in 90. In the Oregon House of Representatives, Democrats had a majority of thirty-four to twenty-six by 93, a dramatic transformation from the 929 Republican majority of fifty-eight to two.29

On November 0, 932, in the wake of widespread Democratic victories, the Oregonian’s masthead relabled it “An Independent Republican Paper.” The daily thereby entered a strong current: between 900 and 930, there was about a five-fold increase in Democratic and Republican papers declar-ing themselves Independent-Democratic or Independent-Republican. An editorial that day announced: “The Oregonian is an American newspaper, of republican principles — but it is American first of all.” It pledged a ces-sation in its normal partisanship during the present emergency and urged patience with the nation’s new chief executive. The new president would enjoy a temporary press honeymoon, not only from the Oregonian but also from many important Republican and conservative Democratic papers and from conservative syndicated columnists.30

The Oregonian self-consciously slipped into its new moderate tone. In 933, the publisher signed the National Recovery Act’s “Blue Eagle” code establishing a forty-hour week for news and editorial workers. In 93, the paper editorialized that nobody should fear that the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Act would overly centralize power in Washington, D.C. It assured readers that both laws were temporary awards of congressional authority to the executive and that they allowed or incorporated important safeguards. That same year, for the first time in the paper’s history, the Oregonian also began routinely reporting on Democrats — their party activities, statements, and leaders.3

The Oregonian (with one notable exception) eventually turned against the New Deal and Roosevelt. Here, it followed a trend among Republican and conservative Democratic publishers and columnists who ended their early support because of anger over policies such as the newspaper code, the Social Security Act of 93, or the New Deal’s backing of unions or new federal regulation. In 93, the Oregonian opposed the president’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and blamed a sudden halt in national recovery mainly


on curtailments in govern-ment spending. An editorial on March 9, 93, praised the formidable new Repub-lican–Southern Democratic congressional coalition for blocking Roosevelt and New Deal measures: “The practi-cal tactics of the adminis-tration, while it professes a lofty idealism, often are contemptible in the extreme.” Six days later — following front-page positioning on March 23 and March 2 of “President Roosevelt’s Own Story of the New Deal” — the Oregonian editorialized that what the chief executive said he represented amounted to failure. In an “hour of national despondency and disillusion,” the published selection from Roosevelt’s public papers and addresses “reveal a presidential compla-cency approximating smug-ness.” The president was “his favorite hero — though not in five long years, nor by the spending of prodigal billions, has he redeemed his pledge to bring about the more abundant life and restore work to the nation.” Meanwhile, editorialists liked New Deal largess.32

Throughout the Depression, the Oregonian — in contrast to its overall stance on the Roosevelt administration — extensively and often sympa-thetically treated New Deal projects that leaders of major Pacific Northwest business and farming sectors, particularly those in Portland’s leading busi-nesses, considered beneficial to the city, the state, the region, and themselves. Historically, those sectors had set much of the paper’s compass, and while the Oregonian was changing in important ways, it clung to that direction. Many businesspeople and farmers wanted such federal programs as the Wil-lamette Valley Project (a series of reservoirs on the Willamette River and its

E. Palmer “Ep” Hoyt (1897–1979), a some-time pulp fiction writer, rose from Oregonian movie reviewer in 1929 to copy editing and into management. As an editor and, in 1939–1946, publisher, he played a central role in improving the paper.

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tributaries) and the region-wide Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). As early as the autumn of 933, the daily’s reports and editorials on a proposed Bonneville dam framed the BPA as a spur to Pacific Northwest navigation, the state’s private (but not public) utility interests, and economic growth. After gently chiding the Portland Chamber of Commerce’s chief lobbyist for not understanding that the BPA was a federal project, not a local one, a September 93 editorial urged “tak[ing] the broad view of this Bonneville business at least until we see how it is going to work.” The Republican paper featured on its October , 93, front page an account praising federal power production and the new agency authored by the new BPA chief, J.D. Ross.33

The Oregonian’s more-balanced approach was not loved by all. In lead-ing Republican circles, Hoyt’s paper came to be seen as a vagabond or even a bit of an outlaw. “The experience of attempting to run unbiased political news in the columns of a paper as steeped in Republican tradition as the Oregonian is indeed an interesting one,” Hoyt remarked just before his 93 promotion to general manager (renamed “publisher” in 939). “Old-line Republicans resent any Democratic news whatsoever and, of course, resent all the more any substantial showing of this nature.” Two years ago, he explained, “I was faced with the request from old-guard Republicans that I fire [Duane] Hennessy, Hal Moore, and Loren Milliman. Hennessy was charged as being a Democrat at heart, Moore as being a Democrat in fact and Milliman with conducting a survey on the presidential situation which showed with pretty fair accuracy that Roosevelt was going to win. In the words of one prominent Republican at that time ‘It may be true but we don’t want the leading Republican newspaper of the Northwest saying so’.” A “group of prominent old-guard stand-patters were interested in getting me fired, also. A direct quotation from their plea, ‘He may know how to run a newspaper but he doesn’t know how to run a political campaign’.”3

With a replenishing spirit less politically doctrinaire than his prede-cessors, Hoyt became the daily’s best-known figure since Scott. In 939, while he was publisher, the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, awarded for R.G. Callvert’s widely reprinted and distributed patriotic editorial, “My Country ‘tis of Thee.” (“If you cherish” our country’s liberty, equality, and peace, wrote Callvert, “then defend with all your might the American ideal of government” from evil Asian and European dictators.) Many journal-ists admired the Oregonian’s transformations. Fortune in 939 called it “superbly edited.” The daily was “becoming somewhat more liberal, and was the only important paper in the state to oppose flatly the anti-picketing bill — which the voters passed by a large majority.” That law, probably the nation’s most stringent regulation of labor-union activities, was ultimately declared unconstitutional.3


Liberals and civil libertarians, more or less accepting the Orego-nian’s opposition to the New Deal, liked much of what they saw in the changed paper. Hoyt had launched “a newspaper revolution,” exag-gerated a former Washingtonian and New Dealer, Justice William O. Douglas. Portland civil libertar-ian Monroe M. Sweetland wrote the Oregonian in 93 to praise its readiness “to go to bat for the basic American civil liberties for free speech, free press and free assem-bly.” In 93, Richard L. Neuberger, then a liberal freelance journalist published in its pages, likened the “upright, conservative daily” to the respected Christian Science Moni-tor and New York Times in treating news impartially and objectively. Although “oblique in its editorial attitude toward the New Deal, it is a sturdy and reliable champion of civil liberties,” he declared.36

The liberal press critic and muckraker George Seldes disdained the anti–New Deal editorials but praised the Oregonian as “one of the few papers in the country that sincerely champions the liberties of the underdog.” The championing force was Paul Kelty, “a liberal of the old school.” His “editorials lambasting the Dies Committee,” a Communist-hunting House of Representative’s committee, “were the best in the Far West along that line.” Seldes, while overestimating the paper’s importance in bringing about the landmark Supreme Court decision DeJonge v. Oregon and in crusading against Portland’s Red Squad, said that it had:

led a campaign which resulted finally in the Supreme Court decision outlawing Oregon’s

abortive Criminal Syndicalism law. It also has been more outspoken than any other paper

on the Pacific Coast in its defense of the Spanish Loyalists. The Oregonian sponsored a

crusade in Portland which resulted in the curtailment, and abolition of the city’s vicious

Paul Kelty, shown here in a photograph from 1933, was an editor at the Oregonian during the 1930s, when he offered opinions on the best use of radio, declared support for giving equal attention to both candidates in presidential elections, and wrote editorials critical of the U.S. House of Representative’s anti-Communist Dies Committee.

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police Red-squad. In both editorials and feature stories the paper showed that the Red-

squad was financed by leading lumber barons and anti-union employers who wanted

to prevent the organization of their employees.3

It “conducts its news columns objectively and refuses to make them propa-ganda for special interests,” Seldes added. In 90, the University of Missouri Journalism School medal “For Distinguished Service in Journalism” listed the Oregonian’s news-editorial separation, high quality editorializing, sub-stantial regional news and features, sturdy defense of civil liberties, and a “long and dignified history as a distinguished and influential newspaper.”3

tHe oreGonian’S Depression-era leadership largely institutionalized changes designed to secure additional audiences (and thereby advertisers) in its extensive circulation area while retaining its valued prime audience of white middle- and upper-class Republican businesspeople, farmers, ranchers, and their families. As before, managers addressed a readership that crossed age barriers, gender lines, and state lines. Now, they sought to attract and arouse reader interest among previously ignored or spurned segments: white middle- and working-class Democrats and liberals. And as a promotion activity, they attempted to build interest among an emerging, next-generation readership: teenagers in Portland and its vicinity. They also used the paper and its radio stations to both offset reader and advertiser losses to radio and to new types of magazines and regain many of them for the Oregonian.

Newspapers in the western world “have always produced readers, not news, as their primary goal, creating a selection of news tailored for a par-ticular readership to create profit and/or exert influence on the readership,” media historians Richard Conboy and John Steel argued. The dominant journals came to “have distinct news agendas” in the twentieth century, “but they are always differentiated by an astute commercial consideration of the cultural and political inclinations of their readership.” As to the commer-cial, the American urban mass-circulation newspaper by the 920s, wrote historical sociologist Richard L. Kaplan, had “largely acceded to a dynamic commercial logic of profit-seeking, audience-maximizing, and market concentration.”39

For the urban mass-circulation press before the 930s, readers primarily had become “customers” (later, “consumers”); the news, a “product”; and circulation, a “market.” “From a business model rather than journalistic standpoint, the primary function of the newspaper is an advertising delivery system,” economist Picard argued. Newspaper editors and owners tried to dif-ferentiate their product from those of other print and, by the 920s or 930s,


non-print media, and then to market that product to readers and advertisers.

In 92, Mott boldly declared, “the publisher is a merchant, and the editorial art is largely one of merchandizing, as respects general newspaper content.” While metropolitan newspaper publishers and editors could be individual-ists in their editorials, he continued, they attempted in their nonadvertising columns “to provide, as closely as possible, satisfaction for the desires and tastes of what they conceive to be their proper reader audiences.” In other words, the prevailing commercial logic had, over time, led them away from any notion of a homogenous audience to one that was segmented into its most valued groups for advertisers and readership. Newspapers typically segmented demographically identified groups by their habits, needs, and desires, including the competing time demands alluded to by Hoyt in 90. They also had extended their audience reach by expanding into radio.0

Resistant to alterations during the 920s, the Oregonian became fairly nimble and adaptive during the 930s. The paper also achieved its largest circulation to date, though in 939 circulation again fell, briefly, behind the Oregon Journal after its News-Telegram acquisition. By 90, the daily cir-culation was larger than in 929 by some 6,000 and on Sundays by some ,000 in a state that had added roughly 36,000 residents during the 930s. Nevertheless, advertising gains were apparently weak. Viskniskki’s 93 reexamination of the paper, Notson reported, showed that advertising was “the sole department that had failed to respond properly to” the consultant’s 93 schemes.

The Oregonian was successful by the end of the Depression because it had widened reader interest through conveying greater variety of material and through its heightened accuracy and political fairness. It had increased news coverage, analysis, and reviews; added more and briefer news accounts; departmentalized news; and printed more photographs. Such changes made it more competitive among the mass audience drawn to such burgeoning news and picture magazines as Time, Life, and Newsweek and to the rapidly expanding radio newscasts, including “news commentary.” In content, design, circulation, and promotion; in relabeling itself an Independent Republican paper; and in beginning to separate news from editorial control, the Oregonian aligned itself more closely with major press trends. Its captains had made major changes in the Oregonian based on a complex gauging of: the newspaper’s own traditions; the political, social, and economic storms sweeping the nation, community, and circulation area; the prominent actions by institutions of business, politics, and other media; and the prevailing trends and conventions among American newspapers.2

Readers in 90 saw a sprightlier and less politically overbearing daily led by a younger generation, albeit still white and male. Despite complaints, the

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noteS

. Oregonian, May 0, 90; Robert G. Picard, “Cash Cows and Entrecote: Publish-ing Companies and Disruptive Technolo-gies,” Trends in Communication :2 (2003): 2. The cost-cutting Scripps Howard chain also formed the first three joint operating agreements in the country, where compet-ing business and production units were merged while competitors remained edito-rially independent. See Edward E. Adams, “Scripps Howard’s Implementation of Joint Agreements for Newspaper Preservation, 933–939,” Journalism History 23 (Winter 99–99): 9–6.

2. Picard, “Cash Cows and Entrecote,” 2; Oregonian, September 2, 939.

3. Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 200), 2.

. Christopher H. Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (Mahwah, N.J.: Law-rence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 69; Ronald Kramer, Pioneer Mikes: A History of Radio and Television in Oregon, Academic Reference Manuscript Edition (Ashland, Ore.: Western States Museum of Broadcasting and TPR

Foundation, 200), 6–2, 6, 0, 2–3; Michael Stamm, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Phila-delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 20), 6, 62–63. See also Michael Stamm, “The Sound of Print: Newspapers and the Public Promotion of Early Radio Broadcasting in the United States,” in Sound in the Age of Me-chanical Reproduction, eds. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 200).

. Numerous works by the historical sociologist Michael Schudson influenced this analysis, including Michael Schudson, “The Sociology of News Production Revis-ited (Again),” in Mass Media and Society, eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), ; and Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of the American Newspaper (New York: Basic Books, 9).

6. John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper, 9), 9; Charles Austin Bates, American Journalism from the Practical Side (New York: Holmes, 9), 36; Burton J. Hendrick, “The Initiative and Referendum and How Oregon Got Them,” McClure’s Magazine 3 (July 9): 26.

Oregonian apparently had not alienated its traditional Republican follow-ing — one unlikely to be attracted in significant numbers to its Democratic rival anyway. New Deal Democrats in the same period found little to like in the increasingly conservative and anti–New Deal Oregon Journal. Many who had preferred one of the now-extinct competitors — notably white liber-als, Democrats, and working-class people — or who had read no Portland newspaper in 930 bought the Oregonian in 90. Previous non-readers probably included goodly numbers who liked its effort to speak with more diverse and multiple voices than it had in 930. Having successfully survived the Depression era, the renovated and still politically potent Oregonian was poised to take — as it did — profitable advantage of wartime America’s thirst for news, rising incomes, and increased advertising demand.


. Robert C. Notson, Oral History, Sep-tember , 99, tape 3, sides A and B, SR 0, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; Robert C. Notson, Mak-ing the Day Begin: A Story of the Oregonian (Portland: The Oregonian, 96), 2, ; “Or-egonian Forges Ahead,” Time, December , 9; newsboy quoted in E.B. McNaughton, “Autobiography,” [99], 2, Reed College Library Special Collection, Portland. See also “Newspapers” in The Great Depression in America: A Cultural Encyclopedia, eds. Wil-liam H. Young and Nancy K. Young (West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 200), :32.

. William B. Smart, “The Oregonian, a preliminary history” (Senior Thesis, Reed College, 9), 3; In Re Pittock’s Will, 02 Ore. 9 (92); Oregonian, August , 933; Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of the News: A History (New York: Guilford Press, 200), 29; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2.

9. Notson, Oral History, September , 99, tape 3, side B; William B. Friedricks, Covering Iowa: The History of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company 1849–1985 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000); Oregonian, June 2, 929; U.S. National Re-sources Committee, Regional Planning: . Pacific Northwest (Washington: Government Printing Office, 936), figure .

0. Gus J. Solomon Oral History, tape 3, side , SR 2, Oregon Historical Soci-ety Research Library, Portland; Leonard J. Arrington, “The New Deal and the West: A Preliminary Statistical Inquiry,” Pacific Historical Review 3 (August 969): table 2; Robert E. Burton, “The New Deal in Oregon,” in The New Deal: The State and Local Levels, eds. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State Uni-versity Press, 9), 36; Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indi-ana University Press, 9), ; William H. Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 99), –; David Peterson del Mar, Oregon’s Promise: An Interpretative History (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press,

200), –; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depres-sion and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 99), 0–6.

. A study excluding city dailies found that in 92 several small Oregon papers also derived between and 0 percent of their revenue from commercial printing. Eric W. Allen, “An Analysis of Costs of Oregon Daily Newspapers,” Journalism Quarterly (June 930): ; Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a So-cial Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 93), ; Earl Pomeroy, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard W. Etulain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 200), 2; Floyd J. McKay, An Editor for Oregon: Charles A. Sprague and the Politics of Change (Cor-vallis: Oregon State University Press, 99), –; Gordon Macnab, A Century of News and People in the East Oregonian, 1875–1975 (Pendleton: East Oregonian, 9), 26; Liv-ing Stories Spot #6, “Newspapers during the Great Depression,” Baylor University, available online at http://www.baylor.edu/livingstories/index.php?id=90 (accessed July , 202).

2. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, ; William H. Young with Nancy K. Young, The 1930s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 62; John Scott Davenport, Newspaper Circulation: The Backbone of the Industry (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 99), 6–; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2; Charles V. Kinter, “Rigidity of Advertis-ing Rates In Depression and Boom Years,” Journalism Quarterly 2 (June 9): 22–26. It is unclear whether the Oregonian followed the trend of maintaining advertising rates.

3. McKay, An Editor for Oregon, –; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (New York: Harcourt Brace, 93), 3; John Cooney, The Annenbergs: The Salvaging of a Tainted Dynasty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 992), 0; Davenport, Newspaper Circulation, 6–; Robert L. Bish-op, Katherine Sharma, and Richard Brazee, “Determinants of Newspaper Circulation: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series Study in

200 OHQ vol. 114, no. 2

the United States, 0–90,” Communica-tion Research (January 90): 9; Chalmers M. Roberts, The Washington Post: The First Hundred Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 9), 99.

. The Census defines places of at least 2,00 population as urban. Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretative History of the Mass Media (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 92), 3, table ; Alfred McClung Lee, “The Basic Newspaper Pattern,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 29 (January 92): 6, table , ; John C. Busterna, “Trends in Daily Newspaper Ownership,” Journalism Quarterly 6 (Winter 9): 32; David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 29; Edward E. Adams, “Combatting Economic Downturn during the Great De-pression: The Recovery of Scripps-Howard Newspapers,” paper for Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Com-munications, August 2, 2003; Oregon: End of the Trail (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 90), 3; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2.

. The lost Oregonian wages were only restored in 93, when its finances seemed to be improving. Smart, “The Oregonian,” ; Lee, Daily Newspaper, , table 26; J. Richard Nokes, Oral History, January 2, 996, tape , side B; Oregonian, May 0, 90; Notson, Making the Day Begin, , 2; Oregon Journal, September , 92; New York Times, January 6, 93; Daniel J. Leab, A Union of Individu-als: The Formation of the American Newspa-per Guild, 1933–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 90). The five newspapers that administered scrip were: The Dalles Chronicle, Astorian-Budget, Woodburn In-dependent, Eugene Morning News, and Bend Bulletin; see McKay, An Editor for Oregon, .

6. George N. Gordon, The Communica-tions Revolution: A History of Mass Media in the United States (New York: Hasting House, 9), ; Stamm, Sound Business, , and generally. See also Randall Patnode, “Friend, Foe, or Freeloader? Cooperation and Com-petition between Newspapers and Radio in the Early 920s,” American Journalism 2

(Winter 20): –9.. The paper and its two stations offered

lower joint advertising rates. “KGW AND THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: What they offer the radio advertiser” (Portland: KGW, [930]); Stamm, Sound Business, 6, 62, 6, ; “Newspaper Organizations Charted,” Editor & Publisher 63 (September 2, 930): ; Paul R. Kelty, “Radio Prized Ally, not Competitor, Says Daily Owning Two Stations,” Editor & Publisher 6 (July 2, 93): 0.

. Harvey J. Levin, “Competition Among Mass Media and the Public Interest,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Spring 9): 6 n; Gwenyth L. Jackaway, Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to Newspapers, 1924–1939 (West-port, Conn.: Praeger, 99), 20, 6–; Stamm, Sound Business, 62–63; “The Press and the People — A Survey,” Fortune 20 (August 939): 6; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2; Nokes, Oral History, SR , Oregon Histori-cal Society Research Library, Portland, July , 996, tape , side .

9. Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2, –.

20. Viskniskki was reemployed in Octo-ber 93 in anticipation of the trust’s ending in late January. Notson, Oral History, Sep-tember , 99, tape 3, sides A and B; Not-son, Making the Day Begin, 2, -9; “A Plain Statement of Facts,” Time, January , 93.

2. Horace E. Thomas to Mandy [Call-vert], August 0, 96, in “R. S. Callvert cor-respondence 96,” Ronald G. Callvert Papers, Mss. 29, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland; “A Plain Statement of Facts”; Notson, Making the Day Begin, –6 and generally; Smart, “The Oregonian,” 3–3. Two photos appeared at the top of the new front page dissected by Time, and the magazine ignored the front-page printing of Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidate pictures previously.

22. “A Plain Statement of Facts”; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 9; Oregonian, March , 93; “Portland Saga,” Time, October 3, 93; Smart, “Oregonian,” .

23. Notson, Making the Day Begin, –2; Oregonian, May 2, 93, and December , 93; Kelty, “Radio Prized Ally”; “Oregonian Forges


Ahead.” On radio competition spurring ag-gressive newspaper circulation building, see Todd Alexander Postol, “America’s Press-Radio Rivalry: Circulation Managers and Newspaper Boys” in Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History, Annual 1995, eds. Michael Harris and Tom O’Malley (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 99).

2. Notson, Making the Day Begin, –2; Notson, Oral History, September , 99, tape 3, sides A and B; “Oregonian Forges Ahead.” On the systematic twentieth-century study of newspaper reader habits, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary S. Zboray, “Newspaper Readers” in Encyclopedia of American Jour-nalism, ed. Stephen Vaughn (New York: Routledge, 200).

2. Metropolitan dailies after 929 increased their photo content by about two-thirds, reaching 3 per-cent of an issue by 93. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 962), 62–3, 6–9; Frank Luther Mott, “Trends in Newspaper Content,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 29 (Janu-ary 92): 60–6. See also Oregonian, May 2, 93, September 30, 93, and May 0, 90; and Nokes, Oral History, January 2, 996, tape , side 2.

26. Notson, Making the Day Begin, 9; Smart, “The Oregonian,” 6–; John Cowles, “The American Newspapers” in America Now: An Inquiry Into Civilization in the United States, ed. Harold E. Stearns (New York: Scribner’s, 93), 36. See also Oregonian, September 3, 933, November , 93 (columnists), March 9, 93, September 6, 93, and March 9, 939.

2. American Society of Newspapers, Code of Ethics or Canons of Journalism,

http://ethics.iit.edu/ecodes/node/ (ac-cessed April 6, 203). See also “The Oregon Code of Ethics for Journalism,” Oregon Exchanges (July 922).

2. Notson, Oral History, August 2, 99, side B, and September , 99, tape 3, side B; McKay, An Editor for Oregon, 63–6; E. Kim-bark MacColl, The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1915 to 1950 (Portland: Georgian Press, 99), 06–0.

29. Oregonian, September 30, 930, Oc-tober 0, 930, October 6, 930, and April 26, 932; Notson, Making the Day Begin, ; Smart, “The Oregonian,” –, 30; John M. Swarthout and Kenneth R. Gervais, “Oregon: Political Experiment Station” in Politics in the American West, ed. Frank H. Jones (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 969), 30;

Floyd J. McKay, “Popu-lists, Dreamers, and the Citizens who Built Or-egon’s Capitol,” Oregon Historical Quarterly : (Spring 203): .

30. Malcolm M. Wi-ley and Stuart M. Rice, “The Agencies of Com-munication,” in Wesley C. Mitchell, ed., Presi-dent’s Research Com-mittee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 933), :20. For a simi-lar trend in announced newspaper party af-filiations between 0 and 920, see Matthew

Gentzow, Edward L. Glaeser, and Claudia Goldin, “The Rise of the Fourth Estate: How Newspapers Became Informative and Why It Mattered,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, eds. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), , 92 table 6.2; and Gary Dean Best, The Critical Press and the New Deal: The Press versus Presi-dential Power, 1933–1938 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 993), 3–.

Robert Notson holds a copy of the Oregonian in 90. ©The Oregonian. Rights Reserved. Reprinted with Permission.

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3. Oregonian, November 22, 93, September 2, 933, January 2, 93, and February , 93; New York Times, August 0, 933; McKay, An Editor for Oregon, 6; David Welky, Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Chi-cago: University of Illinois Press, 200), 22.

32. Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, H.L. Mencken, and Hamilton Owens, The Sunpapers of Baltimore (New York: Knopf, 93), 2; Archer H. Shaw, The Plain Dealer: One Hundred Years in Cleveland (New York: Knopf, 92), 39; Oregonian, February 9, 93, and November 0, 93.

33. William G. Robbins, “The Willa-mette Valley Project of Oregon: A Study in

the Political Economy of Water Resource Development,” Pacific Historical Review (November 9): 9, 60; Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story 1800–1940 (Seattle: University of Washing-ton Press, 99), 23–93; Wesley A. Dick, “Visions of Abundance: The Public Power Crusade in the Pacific Northwest in the Era of J.D. Ross and the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 93), 369 n96. See also Oregonian, September 9, 933, October , 933, January 2, 93, July 2, 93 (car-toon), September 23, 93, October , 93, November 0, 93, November. 2, 93, and February 6, 93.

3. While telling Bend publisher Sawyer that his job was to run a newspaper without

regard to its endorsements, Hoyt in the fall of 939 joined the “campaign team” working futilely to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Sen. Charles McNary. Steve Neal, McNary of Oregon: A Political Biography (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 9), ; E. Palmer Hoyt to Robert W. Saw-yer, July 26, 93, in Robert W. Sawyer Papers, AX 00, box 0 file 9, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene; and George S. Turnbull, History of Oregon Newspapers (Portland: Binfords & Mort, 939), 202–203.

3. Jeffrey B. Rutenbeck, “Palmer Hoyt,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Perry J. Ashley (Detroit: Gale Research, 993),

2:3–; “The Press and the People — A Survey,” Fortune 20 (August 939): ; Harry H. Stein, Gus J. Solomon: Liberal Politics, Jews, and Federal Courts (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2000), 33–3; “Ed Hoyt & the Hussy,” Time, February , 96; J.W. Forrester, Fifty Years of Oregon Journal-ism (Eugene: University of Oregon School of Journalism, 96), ; Oregonian, October 2, 93; New York Times, May 2, 939.

36. William O. Douglas, The Court Years: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas (New York: Random House, 90), 9; Oregonian, November , 93; Richard L. Neuberger, Our Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 93), 39. Adding to the list of pro–civil liberties positions described in the

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next footnote by Seldes, Neuberger men-tioned the paper’s opposition to “compulsory military training and the denial of the use of public buildings to radical groups” and its continual condemnation of “the suppression and intimidation of liberal students at Ore-gon State College.” Michael Munk hints with-out reference to newspaper content that all Portland newspaper leaders, including Hoyt, opposed the West Coast waterfront strike of 93: Michael Munk, “Portland’s ‘Silk Stock-ing Mob’: The Citizens Emergency League in the 93 Maritime Strike,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 9 (Summer 2000): 0-60; and Munk, “West coast waterfront strike of 93,” Oregon Encyclopedia, available online at http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/west_coast_waterfront_strike_of_93/ (accessed December 2, 20).

3. The American Civil Liberties Union tiny Oregon chapter thought its lobbying of the Oregonian paid off by 93. Albert F. Gunns, Civil Liberties in Crisis: The Pacific Northwest, 1917–1940 (New York: Garland 93), 2–; Monroe Sweetland to ACLU, March , 93, in American Civil Liber-ties in the Pacific Northwest Papers, Allen Library, University of Washington, Seattle (selected from American Civil Liberties Pa-pers in Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University), reel ; George Seldes, Lords of the Press (New York: Julian Messner, 93), 2–; Stein, Gus J. Solomon, 3–3, –2. For a smattering of editorials and series that Sweetland and Seldes likely admired, see Oregonian, January 2, 93, November 0, 93, November 2, 93, November 2, 93, December , 93, and December 2, 93.

3. Seldes, Lords of the Press, 2; “Mis-souri Honor Awards 90 for Distinguished Service in Journalism,” University of Missouri Bulletin #6 (90), 6; “Oregonian Forges Ahead.”

39. The Oregonian long cultivated its readers’ taste for the unsensationally popular; conservative, Republican, and white racial views; local, regional, and national identifica-tions; and regard for hard work, prudence, morality, and social peace. Richard Conboy

and John Steel, “The Future of Newspapers: Historical Perspectives,” Journalism Studies 9: (200): 63; Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objec-tivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), .

0. John McManus, Market-Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? (Thou-sand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 99), :0; Robert G. Picard, “Shifts in Newspaper Advertising Expenditures and their Implications for the Future of Newspapers,” Journalism Studies 9: (200): 0; Mott, “Trends in Newspaper Content,” 60.

. Annual newspaper figures vetted by The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) since 9, and used in directories, are at best suggestive historical evidence. ABC rules repeatedly changed the definition of what constituted a circulated newspaper. Its honor system did not prevent some dailies and magazines from overstating circulation, too. More broadly, because of promotional discounts, “circulation” does not accurately reflect earned revenue, one of several dif-ferent measures of newspaper success. Don Bauder, “Get the Union-Tribune — For Almost Nothing,” San Diego Reader, August 9, 2009, available online at http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/aug/9/city-light-/ (accessed December 6, 2009); Todd Bensman, “Newspaper Circulation Scandals: Testing a New Dimension of Media Credibility” (M.A. thesis, University of Mis-souri, 2009); N.W. Ayer and Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer & Son, 929), , and (90), 9; Notson, Making the Day Begin, 2; U.S. Bureau of Census, Oregon: Resident Popula-tion and Apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives www.census.gov/dmd/www/resapport/states/oregon.pdf (accessed May , 202).

2. Wiley and Rice, “Agencies of Com-munication,” :20; Smart, “The Oregonian,” 6; Leonard Ray Teel, The Public Press, 1900–1945: The History of American Journal-ism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 32; Oregonian, May 0, 90.

The Oregonian Navigates the Great Depression

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