February 3, 2016 • 29 mins
On May 30, 1948, a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon. What really makes the story more than a historical footnote is how it tied in to the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon at the time.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today's podcast as yet another listener requests,
but it's one that was already on my to do list,
(00:21):
so I haven't made note of who I'll ask for it.
On a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon. Fifteen people were killed, which,
in light of some of the other disasters we've been
talking about on the show lately, probably seems like a
relatively small number, but the property damage involved was colossal.
(00:41):
And what really makes the story more than a historical
footnote is how it is tied into the racial makeup
of both Portland and Oregon as a whole, uh and
a lot of the stresses and difficulties that went on
with racism and race relations both before and after the flood.
The history iCal context for the Vanport flood goes back
(01:02):
to before Oregon became a state in eighteen fifty nine.
The issue of slavery within Oregon wasn't a totally simple one.
While it ultimately joined the Union as a free state,
there were people living there who were in favor of slavery.
This is one of several reasons why the people of
Oregon voted against holding a constitutional convention three separate times
(01:23):
before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off
a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.
Oregon did actually outlast slavery while it was still a territory.
In eighteen forty three, it's residents voted to incorporate language
from the Northwest Ordinance into its own laws. That language
was quote, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
(01:47):
in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes,
whereof the party she'll have shall have been duly convicted. However,
a little less than a year later, the Provisional Governman's
Legislative Council changed that eighteen forty three law with an
amendment that had the rather odd effect of simultaneously outlawing
(02:08):
slavery and allowing it for a short period of time.
Slaveholders were given a deadline to remove their slaves from Oregon,
and if they refused, the slaves would be freed. The
amendment went on to specify that those previously enslaved persons
also needed to leave Oregon. Free blackmails had two years
to do so, and free black females had three years.
(02:31):
The punishment for refusing to leave after being freed it
was lashing. This law was nicknamed Peter Burnett's Lash Law,
after the head of the legislative council that passed it.
A little later in the year, the punishment was shifted
from being lashing to forced labor, and the law itself
was repealed in eighteen forty five before its punishment clause
(02:52):
went into effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on
the council. Then, on September twenty st, eighteen forty I
and the territorial legislature enacted another racial exclusion law in Oregon,
which remained on the books until eighteen fifty four. This
law stated that, in Oregon, quote, it shall not be
lawful for any Negro or Mulatto to enter into or reside.
(03:16):
When Oregon finally did assemble a constitutional convention on the
road to becoming a state in eighteen fifty seven, two
proposals were placed before its delegates. One would have legalized slavery.
The other was an exclusion clause similar to the one
enacted in eighteen forty nine. Both of these passed by
a wide margin. Oregon ultimately did not want to be
(03:38):
a slave state, but it also did not want African
Americans living there. As a result, Article one, section thirty
five of the Constitution of the State of Oregon read quote,
no free negro or mulatto not residing in this State
at the time of the adoption of this Constitution shall
come reside or be within the state, or or hold
(04:00):
any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any
suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal
laws for the removal by public officers of all such
Negroes and mulatto's, for their effectual exclusion from the state,
and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them
into the state, or employ or harbor them. These articles
(04:25):
made Oregon's constitution unique among the free states. It was
the only one whose constitution was written to try to
exclude black people. The legislature did, not, in the end
provide penal laws for the removal of African Americans from
the state. Though the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,
ratified on July nine, eighteen sixty eight nullified Oregon's exclusion clause.
(04:49):
As a refresher, the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the
reconstruction amendments that followed the end of the Civil War.
It's the one that gives all citizens of the United
States the right to do process and equal protection under
the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in eighteen seventy, also
invalidated a different article in the Oregon Constitution that denied
quote Negroes, Chinaman, and Mulatto's the rights of vote. However,
(05:14):
even though the Fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments invalidated them, those
two exclusionary articles weren't actually repealed in Oregon until ninety
six and ninety seven, respectively, and they're obsolete. Text, along
with other language that alluded to race, like specifying the
white population needed to increase the number of state Supreme
Court justices, were actually still present in the Oregon Constitution
(05:38):
until a measure to remove it past in two thousand two,
and even then it only got seventy one percent of
the vote. People cited as their reasons for voting now
things like unwillingness to tamper with a historical document, so
it's not clear exactly what the motivation of everyone was,
but it was definitely kiliar with the motivation of some
(05:59):
of them was. Although the state had never passed enforcement
measures to go along with these racial exclusion laws, and
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been invalidated those laws
after the Civil War, the fact that they were written
into the state's foundational documents and had been passed at
all had a big effect on who did or didn't
move to Oregon In the migration that followed the Civil War.
(06:24):
The people who moved into Oregon were overwhelmingly white, and
some of those who did did so because they found
that constitutional language appealing. By the nineteen hundreds, the Ku
Klux Klan, perhaps the most notorious white supremacy organization in
the United States, had more than fourteen thousand members in Oregon,
nine thousand of them in Portland. By comparison, very few
(06:46):
black people moved into Oregon after the Civil War. According
to the United States Census Bureau, by nineteen forty, just
a few years before the vanport fled, more than a
million people lived in Oregon. Only two thousand, five hundred
sixty five were African American, or less than a quarter
of a percent of the population. Nearly all of them
lived in one small, segregated district in Portland, which, thanks
(07:08):
to racist laws, housing policies, and real estate practices, was
the only place in Oregon most black people could find housing.
The racial demographics of the area around Portland changed dramatically
before and during World War Two, and the circumstances are
tied directly to the Vanport flood, and we're going to
talk about that, but first we are going to have
(07:30):
a word from one of our fabulous sponsors. To get
back to our story. We're going to talk about the
beginnings of the city of Vanport. During World War Two,
the ship building industry in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington
grew really tremendously in response to military needs. Most of
this growth came by a shipyards that were owned by
the Kaiser Company later Kaiser ship Building Corporation, which began
(07:53):
working with the British Navy to build ships in nineteen
The industry as a whole grew from a few thousand
people to more than a hundred and forty thousand employees
by late nineteen forty three. The Kaiser Company, which was
named for its founder, employed nearly all of them. This
huge influx of workers really put a strain on the
(08:13):
housing supply in and around Portland, thanks in part to
a longstanding resistance to public housing. Many residents were afraid
that affordable housing would lower their property values and bring
in a quote undesirable class of people. When it came
to the Kaiser Companies wartime employees, another issue on the
minds of the Portland majority was that many of them
(08:34):
were black. Particularly in the earlier years of World War two,
black men were not seen as fit for military duty.
We've talked about this in other episodes before, so as
white men were drafted into the military, black men, along
with women of all races, were the ones to very
often fill those jobs. The same was also true for
newly created wartime work, in part because so many of
(08:57):
the people were moving into Portland to get these jobs
were black. Meetings in the city about how to address
the housing shortage were met with pickets and protests. So
in the summer of ninety two, the Kaiser Company worked
out a deal with the U. S. Maritime Commission to
build a town to house its workers, situated outside the
city limits of Portland in the Columbia River floodplain. The
(09:19):
town was originally called Kaiserville because it was being built
in bottom land and a floodplain. Thirty foot tall dikes
were built on two sides of the town to keep
the water out. On a third side, a railroad embankment
fulfilled the same function, but it had not been constructed
as a dike. It was built by filling dirt in
(09:40):
and around a wooden railroad chestel. Going through the US
Maritime Commission let the Kaiser Company do an end run
around the Housing Authority of Portland. Neither the Housing Authority
nor the people of Portland got much of a say
in what was being built or who would live there.
The homes were built quickly and cheaply, and they were
intended as temporary wartime housing, not as permanent structures. They
(10:03):
were apartment buildings made of wood on wooden foundations, and
in the end there were nearly ten thousand of these units.
This housing was really pretty incredibly basic. The units had
a small bedroom, a kitchenette with a hot plate, and
only one window that could open that was in case
of a fire. Units were furnished with tenants expected to
supply only personal items like linens and dishes and silverware,
(10:27):
but because the buildings were so cheaply made, they were
also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the
sound between the units, and since the ship building industry
during wartime ran literally around the clock, Vandport was also
really noisy. Around the clock. Fires were a problem, although
fortunately these were mostly small and none of them swept
(10:47):
through the nearly all wooden city, which would have been
a definite possibility. This temporary housing became the largest wartime
housing development in the United States and the second largest
city the in Oregon, although since the government owned it,
it wasn't technically a real city. It was renamed van
Port by combining the names of Vancouver and Portland in November,
(11:11):
and its first residents moved in on December twelve. Headlines
hailed it as a quote masterpiece of urban planning. All
that happened in so you can tell how quickly all
of this was put together, since the Kaiser Corporation only
started working on it in the summer. As those first
families moved in, Vanport mostly offered housing and nothing else.
(11:32):
Although the city was roughly equidistant from Kaiser's three shipbuilding facilities,
which meant that there were shortages of rubber and gasoline.
People could walk to work, it was not really convenient
to getting into Portland or to any kind of transit.
The first residents had trouble getting basic supplies. Often it
was pressure from the Kaiser company, who was afraid that
(11:52):
they would lose their workers if they couldn't get the
basic staples that they needed that got things done. But
eventually Vanport did get a lot of amenities that you
would expect in a city, including a hospital, a movie theater,
and some shopping centers. Since it was built as worker housing,
it also had twenty four hour child care services. In
(12:12):
addition to schools, the Vanport Extension Center, which would eventually
grow into Portland State University, taught classes there. During the war,
Vanport eventually got its own ration board. The Housing Authority
of Portland wound up essentially acting as a landlord and
in some ways as the city government. The Housing Authority oversaw,
(12:33):
among other things, the creation of a fire department and
a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff Department.
The relocation of black workers from all over the United States,
but especially from the Deep South and the Southwest into
Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into
Oregon in the state's history. Between nineteen forty and nineteen fifty,
(12:57):
the percentage of Oregon's population that was African American and
grew from point to to point eight per cent. This
is still tiny percentage, that a massive increase in all
going into the same place. In the face of this
influx of African Americans to the area around previously overwhelmingly
white Portland, whites only signs that are more often associated
(13:19):
with the South became a lot more common, especially in
the parts of Portland that were closest to the railroad station,
which would have been how most people were getting there.
Vamport itself was also informally but fairly strictly segregated, with housing,
medical facilities, and recreational facilities all separated along racial lines.
The schools, however, were integrated, including hiring black teachers. Overall,
(13:44):
white residents of Portland were so distressed by the influx
of Black Americans that the Portland Art Museum arranged a
series of special exhibitions to try to calm their fears.
They were titled War Time Housing Ships for Victory and
Migration of the Negro, and they framed Portland as a tolerant, welcoming,
diverse place full of patriotic duty. Wartime Housing was an
(14:08):
adapted Museum of Modern Art exhibition that had been used
in other cities that, for various reasons, objected to the
building of mass housing for wartime workers. Migration of the
Negro was a Museum of Modern Art exhibition as well,
and was chosen because of a huge amount of anti
Southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.
(14:29):
Ships for Victory, on the other hand, was funded in
part by Kaiser Corporation, and, in the words of an
article on the matter in Pacific Northwest Quarterly Quote, by
the time the final object list was completed, Ships for
Victory violated nearly every curatorial convention and would by no
means have been considered a worthy exhibition for a museum
(14:49):
of art, but for the exigencies of war. Basically it
was propaganda. By December of ninety four, the city of
Vamport was filled nearly to capacity. Its population was about
forty two thousand people, but as the war neared its end,
in wartime manufacturing slowed down, its population started to drop.
Most of the people who moved out were white. They
(15:12):
had the means and the opportunity to find housing elsewhere.
Vanport's black residents, though, were effectively stuck. There wasn't enough
room for them in Portland's tiny, segregated black neighborhood, and
they weren't welcome anywhere else, And because many of them
were laid off from their wartime shipbuilding jobs, they also
didn't have the financial means to just relocate to a
(15:32):
completely different state. As the war drew to a close,
authorities started talking about what to do with Vanport. On
June seventeenth, The Oregonian reported that city officials hoped that
the black residents of Vanport would leave to prevent any quote,
racial problems. After the war, Vanport quickly developed a bad reputation.
(15:55):
Even though its crime rate wasn't statistically very different from
the city of Portland and there was no proportionate crime
among its black residents. People perceived Vanport as being crime
written and shoddily built. The latter criticism was valid, but
as to the former Captain j Earl Stanley, head of
the County Sheriff's office in Vanport, was quoted in a
(16:15):
ninety seven article on the city is saying, quote, I
have been stationed at Vanport for only a year, but
I am constantly surprised that we have as little major
crime as we do, considering the conditions under which people
are forced to live. The walls between the apartments are
certainly far short of being soundproofed. This makes for trouble,
particularly when two families have children. The decades that have
(16:39):
passed since that time, there's been a lot of research
on what the psychological effect is of just being constantly
immersed in noise. This is a real issue in Vanport.
Like that was, it was constantly noisy, and it was
noisy around the clock because there were people working literally
every shift. So what he's remarking on here was later
proved by science. It was probably a little surprising that,
(17:02):
given the fact that people were immersed in a noisy,
chaotic environment they couldn't escape. Things were actually running along
the same lines as they were in Portland in terms
of things like crime. All of the powers involved in
this were still debating what to do about Vamport in
the spring of ninety eight, when the Columbia River started
to rise due to a combination of heavy rains and
(17:24):
melting snow from the mountains. Flood stage for the Columbia
River was considered to be fifteen feet which the river,
which the river reached and passed early in May. By May,
the river had reached twenty three ft. That was the
day that patrols started inspecting the dikes that surrounded Vamport.
On May, the river reached twenty eight point three feet
(17:46):
and the tracks along the railroad embankment started to sink
by a couple of inches. On the morning of May eight,
of bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed
on every door in Vanport, which ended in the word quote,
remember dikes are safe at present. You will be warned.
If necessary, you will have time to leave. Don't get excited,
(18:08):
but listen. Also contained information on what to do if
the Army Corps of Engineers ordered an evacuation. I've read
these instructions and I found them a little patronizing. They
said things like, don't get panicky exclamation point, well it
probably maybe wasn't intended. Is patronizing. It's hard to know
the intended tone of the writer on those. I always wonder.
(18:31):
But that same day, a crew detected seepage in the
railroad embankment and started reinforcing it with sandbags. But at
four seventeen PM, a hole formed in the embankment and
water started rushing towards Vanport, both fortunately and unfortunately because
it certainly saved lives, but it also kept people from
being able to save any of their possessions. It was
(18:53):
Memorial Day and the weather was good. A lot of
Vanport's at that point eighteen thousand residents were away from
the city, having picnics or hiking, or just visiting people
who lived elsewhere, so they weren't home when the flood happened.
A series of muddy swampy areas called slews slowed the
water down as it approached Vanport, giving the people who
(19:13):
were home about half an hour to escape, and once
it reached the town, the water knocked the wooden houses
completely off their wooden foundations. People described the scene as
looking like cork floating in a current. Vanport was virtually
completely destroyed. Fifteen people died, although rumors persisted that it
was really a lot more, and numerous conspiracy theories swirled
(19:36):
around the event long after, supposing that there was a
giant cover up of a lot more deaths that wasn't
made public. More than a thousand of the displaced families,
or about six thousand three d people total, were black.
That was about a third of Vanport's population. And we're
going to talk about the aftermath of the flood and
what happened after that in Vanport right after we pause
(20:00):
for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. So
to get back to what happened after the flood, the
city of Portland knew ahead of time that it did
not have adequate emergency housing in the event that something
like this occurred. The housing authority had said that it
could house about fifteen hundred people, and the Red Cross
said that it could house seventy five hundred. This was
(20:23):
roughly half the population of Vamport at the time. Overall,
white families had an easier time of finding shelter than
black families. Residents resisted the idea of using churches and
schools in white neighborhoods as shelter for black people, and
churches in the black neighborhood were quickly beyond their capacity.
(20:43):
According to local historians, there were white families who welcomed
black refugees from the flood, but According to the oral
histories of black survivors, this was pretty rare. Many black
families displaced by the flood wound up being housed in
abandoned shipyard barracks on Swan Island. The feeling of a
lot of people who were displaced a Swan Island was
(21:04):
that it was dangerous, like a lot of the housing
was right next to the water and there was no
buffer between the housing and the water, and so a
lot of these were families with children, and people were
very concerned about the fact that their children could drown
just being outside of the house, or not even the
house outside of the barracks. Five days after the flood,
refugees asked the Housing Authority of Portland for non discrimination
(21:28):
policies to be part of any plans for repairs or
new housing. A Vanport Tenants League was formed to try
to address former tenants issues with the Housing Authority, which,
as you remember, had been basically acting as the government
of Vanport. In response, city officials branded the Tenants League,
which had a significant black membership, as communist. Survivors of
(21:52):
the Vanport flood also tried to get some relief in court,
but they hit numerous dead ends. Several suits were filed
against the House authority, but were dismissed under an Oregon
sovereign immunity law, which protected the government from being sued.
More than seven hundred claims were then filed against the
United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but the
(22:13):
United States was protected under a law that the federal
government couldn't be liable for flood damage. The fact that
the federal government, the railroad, the State of Oregon, and
a private enterprise were all involved in Vanport's very existence
made the whole thing an astoundingly complex legal tangle. President
Harry S. Truman visited Vanport after the flood, and cleanup
(22:33):
was assisted by the American Red Cross. However, Portland's white
community strenuously resisted additional public housing, and voters repeatedly rejected
attempts to build public housing after the flood. Consequently, Portland's
one segregated black neighborhood, which became known as Albina, became
even more overcrowded than it had been before the war.
(22:56):
This effect became even more pronounced in the nineteen fifties
when a stadium was built in Albina's lower tip, which
displaced the people had living there, who had been living there,
into the farther north, but into an area that wasn't
really any Bigger arguments began in a class action lawsuit
against the government. On August six of nineteen fifty one.
(23:18):
The court issued its opinion more than a year later,
on September twenty three of nineteen fifty two. The court
found that the Army Corps of Engineers work at the
dikes and railroad embankment was quote honest and competent. It
also found no agency involved, not the Army Corps of Engineers,
not the housing authority, not anyone to be negligent in
the matter of the flood, the failure of the railroad embankment,
(23:40):
or the fact that people have been told that morning
that they were safe. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December
nineteen fifty four, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the lower
courts ruling on the matter. I read the original ruling
and in a lot of ways it was infuriating because
it had language in it about like, it's not proven
that the fact that the railroad trestle wasn't really a
(24:01):
dike was responsible for why it failed. But the legal
scholar who wrote the paper on it was of the
opinion that all of these rulings made sense from a
legal standpoint, like the ore agaon really did have a
sovereign immunity law, and the federal government really could have
laws protecting it against being liable for flood damage. Like
(24:22):
all of these things really legally added up, But none
of that really erases the fact that the eventual response
was basically to do nothing. The Urban League in the
Portland and Double A CP tried to combat racist housing policies,
but even so, by the sixties, four out of five
black people in Portland lived in Albina, and even today
(24:43):
the majority of black residents of Portland live in its
northeast quadrant. In The Oregonian published a series called Blueprint
for a Slum, detailing redlining and other discriminatory housing practices,
as well as corruption and the morgan lending industry that
made these same neighborhoods ineligible for home loans. It was
(25:05):
a lot of the same kind of stuff we talked
about in our two part episode on red Learning last year.
By fourteen, the focus had shifted to the concept of gentrification.
At this point, housing policies have changed. People can get
mortgages in those neighborhoods, but the result has been the
erasure of a lot of previously affordable housing. So now
(25:26):
the conversation is about how to improve neighborhoods without pricing
the people who live who live there out of the
neighborhood with no other place to go. That's the Vanport flood. Uh.
It's the thing. I've thought about doing this before, but
it is another thing that has made me feel like
we need a not just in the South tag on
(25:47):
our website for the Times that people ask us how
come these things only happen in the South. That is
not true. Uh. Have some listener mail though it's about
a similarly unhappy topic. But the listener mail itself is
actually not not unhappy. I said that as though I
(26:11):
were saying not not unhappy, but just one knot is fine.
The listener mail is not unhappy. It's from Sam. Sam says, Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime fan of your show.
Thanks for bringing it to us. Your recent schoolhouse blizzard
episode struck a chord with me because my mom's family
is from rural central Wisconsin and lived through that that
storm back in even now, well over a hundred years later,
(26:35):
it's still part of the family lore. My grandma was
born on the family farm in nine so her early
childhood memories are from the time of the Great Depression,
when that community was struggling to make it by. She
had many stories about how her town responded to the
challenges of that time, including the intense winters and the
grinding poverty. My grandma's family was fortunate enough to be
(26:56):
able to afford horses and farm equipment, and because my
great grandparents were of the generation that had lost friends
and neighbors in the storm, they sought as their responsibility
to help the local kids home when the snow came in.
During storms, my great grandfather used to hitch the horses
to their wagon and head to the schoolhouse to pick
up the local children and bring them home safely. This
(27:18):
was one of my grandma's most sentimental memories, and it
was directly related to that schoolhouse blizzard thirty plus years
before she was born. And then Sam goes on with
some totally different stuff, including more of a personal note
to me and a suggestion. So thank you so much
Sam for writing um. We've gotten several notes from people
(27:40):
about either family stories that date all the way back
to the schoolhouse blizzard, or family stories from other devastating
blizzards elsewhere in the United States, which is both interesting
to read and I hope everybody is staying warm. We
coincidentally had that episode come out right before that massive
(28:00):
snowstorm hit that you stur in the United States, and
as we're recording today's episode, a lot of people are
still digging out from that. However, in Boston, we only
got about four inches and it was clear by the
next morning, which was sort of a knock on wood
blessed relief compared to last year's hundred ten inches. We
(28:21):
got about one centimeter at our Yeah, a lot. I
still know lots of people in Atlanta, and I've had
lots of pictures in my Facebook feed of people's children
sledding on what was effectively like a dusting over dirt. Yeah. Yeah,
(28:43):
I've seen pictures of a few very tiny snowmen. But yep.
So you would like to write to us, We're at
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(29:03):
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com.
Uh you can look up all kinds of fascinating information there.
Also at our website, which is missed in History dot com,
you'll find an archive of all of the episodes that
we've ever done, show notes on the episodes that Holly
and I have done that include lists of all of
our sources. If you did not hear our two part
series on redlining last year and you are now curious
(29:25):
about what that was all about at the end of
today's episode, those episodes are on there, so you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or miss than history dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today's podcast as yet another listener requests,
but it's one that was already on my to do list,
(00:21):
so I haven't made note of who I'll ask for it.
On a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon. Fifteen people were killed, which,
in light of some of the other disasters we've been
talking about on the show lately, probably seems like a
relatively small number, but the property damage involved was colossal.
(00:41):
And what really makes the story more than a historical
footnote is how it is tied into the racial makeup
of both Portland and Oregon as a whole, uh and
a lot of the stresses and difficulties that went on
with racism and race relations both before and after the flood.
The history iCal context for the Vanport flood goes back
(01:02):
to before Oregon became a state in eighteen fifty nine.
The issue of slavery within Oregon wasn't a totally simple one.
While it ultimately joined the Union as a free state,
there were people living there who were in favor of slavery.
This is one of several reasons why the people of
Oregon voted against holding a constitutional convention three separate times
(01:23):
before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off
a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.
Oregon did actually outlast slavery while it was still a territory.
In eighteen forty three, it's residents voted to incorporate language
from the Northwest Ordinance into its own laws. That language
was quote, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
(01:47):
in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes,
whereof the party she'll have shall have been duly convicted. However,
a little less than a year later, the Provisional Governman's
Legislative Council changed that eighteen forty three law with an
amendment that had the rather odd effect of simultaneously outlawing
(02:08):
slavery and allowing it for a short period of time.
Slaveholders were given a deadline to remove their slaves from Oregon,
and if they refused, the slaves would be freed. The
amendment went on to specify that those previously enslaved persons
also needed to leave Oregon. Free blackmails had two years
to do so, and free black females had three years.
(02:31):
The punishment for refusing to leave after being freed it
was lashing. This law was nicknamed Peter Burnett's Lash Law,
after the head of the legislative council that passed it.
A little later in the year, the punishment was shifted
from being lashing to forced labor, and the law itself
was repealed in eighteen forty five before its punishment clause
(02:52):
went into effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on
the council. Then, on September twenty st, eighteen forty I
and the territorial legislature enacted another racial exclusion law in Oregon,
which remained on the books until eighteen fifty four. This
law stated that, in Oregon, quote, it shall not be
lawful for any Negro or Mulatto to enter into or reside.
(03:16):
When Oregon finally did assemble a constitutional convention on the
road to becoming a state in eighteen fifty seven, two
proposals were placed before its delegates. One would have legalized slavery.
The other was an exclusion clause similar to the one
enacted in eighteen forty nine. Both of these passed by
a wide margin. Oregon ultimately did not want to be
(03:38):
a slave state, but it also did not want African
Americans living there. As a result, Article one, section thirty
five of the Constitution of the State of Oregon read quote,
no free negro or mulatto not residing in this State
at the time of the adoption of this Constitution shall
come reside or be within the state, or or hold
(04:00):
any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any
suit therein. And the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal
laws for the removal by public officers of all such
Negroes and mulatto's, for their effectual exclusion from the state,
and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them
into the state, or employ or harbor them. These articles
(04:25):
made Oregon's constitution unique among the free states. It was
the only one whose constitution was written to try to
exclude black people. The legislature did, not, in the end
provide penal laws for the removal of African Americans from
the state. Though the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,
ratified on July nine, eighteen sixty eight nullified Oregon's exclusion clause.
(04:49):
As a refresher, the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the
reconstruction amendments that followed the end of the Civil War.
It's the one that gives all citizens of the United
States the right to do process and equal protection under
the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in eighteen seventy, also
invalidated a different article in the Oregon Constitution that denied
quote Negroes, Chinaman, and Mulatto's the rights of vote. However,
(05:14):
even though the Fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments invalidated them, those
two exclusionary articles weren't actually repealed in Oregon until ninety
six and ninety seven, respectively, and they're obsolete. Text, along
with other language that alluded to race, like specifying the
white population needed to increase the number of state Supreme
Court justices, were actually still present in the Oregon Constitution
(05:38):
until a measure to remove it past in two thousand two,
and even then it only got seventy one percent of
the vote. People cited as their reasons for voting now
things like unwillingness to tamper with a historical document, so
it's not clear exactly what the motivation of everyone was,
but it was definitely kiliar with the motivation of some
(05:59):
of them was. Although the state had never passed enforcement
measures to go along with these racial exclusion laws, and
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been invalidated those laws
after the Civil War, the fact that they were written
into the state's foundational documents and had been passed at
all had a big effect on who did or didn't
move to Oregon In the migration that followed the Civil War.
(06:24):
The people who moved into Oregon were overwhelmingly white, and
some of those who did did so because they found
that constitutional language appealing. By the nineteen hundreds, the Ku
Klux Klan, perhaps the most notorious white supremacy organization in
the United States, had more than fourteen thousand members in Oregon,
nine thousand of them in Portland. By comparison, very few
(06:46):
black people moved into Oregon after the Civil War. According
to the United States Census Bureau, by nineteen forty, just
a few years before the vanport fled, more than a
million people lived in Oregon. Only two thousand, five hundred
sixty five were African American, or less than a quarter
of a percent of the population. Nearly all of them
lived in one small, segregated district in Portland, which, thanks
(07:08):
to racist laws, housing policies, and real estate practices, was
the only place in Oregon most black people could find housing.
The racial demographics of the area around Portland changed dramatically
before and during World War Two, and the circumstances are
tied directly to the Vanport flood, and we're going to
talk about that, but first we are going to have
(07:30):
a word from one of our fabulous sponsors. To get
back to our story. We're going to talk about the
beginnings of the city of Vanport. During World War Two,
the ship building industry in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington
grew really tremendously in response to military needs. Most of
this growth came by a shipyards that were owned by
the Kaiser Company later Kaiser ship Building Corporation, which began
(07:53):
working with the British Navy to build ships in nineteen
The industry as a whole grew from a few thousand
people to more than a hundred and forty thousand employees
by late nineteen forty three. The Kaiser Company, which was
named for its founder, employed nearly all of them. This
huge influx of workers really put a strain on the
(08:13):
housing supply in and around Portland, thanks in part to
a longstanding resistance to public housing. Many residents were afraid
that affordable housing would lower their property values and bring
in a quote undesirable class of people. When it came
to the Kaiser Companies wartime employees, another issue on the
minds of the Portland majority was that many of them
(08:34):
were black. Particularly in the earlier years of World War two,
black men were not seen as fit for military duty.
We've talked about this in other episodes before, so as
white men were drafted into the military, black men, along
with women of all races, were the ones to very
often fill those jobs. The same was also true for
newly created wartime work, in part because so many of
(08:57):
the people were moving into Portland to get these jobs
were black. Meetings in the city about how to address
the housing shortage were met with pickets and protests. So
in the summer of ninety two, the Kaiser Company worked
out a deal with the U. S. Maritime Commission to
build a town to house its workers, situated outside the
city limits of Portland in the Columbia River floodplain. The
(09:19):
town was originally called Kaiserville because it was being built
in bottom land and a floodplain. Thirty foot tall dikes
were built on two sides of the town to keep
the water out. On a third side, a railroad embankment
fulfilled the same function, but it had not been constructed
as a dike. It was built by filling dirt in
(09:40):
and around a wooden railroad chestel. Going through the US
Maritime Commission let the Kaiser Company do an end run
around the Housing Authority of Portland. Neither the Housing Authority
nor the people of Portland got much of a say
in what was being built or who would live there.
The homes were built quickly and cheaply, and they were
intended as temporary wartime housing, not as permanent structures. They
(10:03):
were apartment buildings made of wood on wooden foundations, and
in the end there were nearly ten thousand of these units.
This housing was really pretty incredibly basic. The units had
a small bedroom, a kitchenette with a hot plate, and
only one window that could open that was in case
of a fire. Units were furnished with tenants expected to
supply only personal items like linens and dishes and silverware,
(10:27):
but because the buildings were so cheaply made, they were
also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the
sound between the units, and since the ship building industry
during wartime ran literally around the clock, Vandport was also
really noisy. Around the clock. Fires were a problem, although
fortunately these were mostly small and none of them swept
(10:47):
through the nearly all wooden city, which would have been
a definite possibility. This temporary housing became the largest wartime
housing development in the United States and the second largest
city the in Oregon, although since the government owned it,
it wasn't technically a real city. It was renamed van
Port by combining the names of Vancouver and Portland in November,
(11:11):
and its first residents moved in on December twelve. Headlines
hailed it as a quote masterpiece of urban planning. All
that happened in so you can tell how quickly all
of this was put together, since the Kaiser Corporation only
started working on it in the summer. As those first
families moved in, Vanport mostly offered housing and nothing else.
(11:32):
Although the city was roughly equidistant from Kaiser's three shipbuilding facilities,
which meant that there were shortages of rubber and gasoline.
People could walk to work, it was not really convenient
to getting into Portland or to any kind of transit.
The first residents had trouble getting basic supplies. Often it
was pressure from the Kaiser company, who was afraid that
(11:52):
they would lose their workers if they couldn't get the
basic staples that they needed that got things done. But
eventually Vanport did get a lot of amenities that you
would expect in a city, including a hospital, a movie theater,
and some shopping centers. Since it was built as worker housing,
it also had twenty four hour child care services. In
(12:12):
addition to schools, the Vanport Extension Center, which would eventually
grow into Portland State University, taught classes there. During the war,
Vanport eventually got its own ration board. The Housing Authority
of Portland wound up essentially acting as a landlord and
in some ways as the city government. The Housing Authority oversaw,
(12:33):
among other things, the creation of a fire department and
a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff Department.
The relocation of black workers from all over the United States,
but especially from the Deep South and the Southwest into
Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into
Oregon in the state's history. Between nineteen forty and nineteen fifty,
(12:57):
the percentage of Oregon's population that was African American and
grew from point to to point eight per cent. This
is still tiny percentage, that a massive increase in all
going into the same place. In the face of this
influx of African Americans to the area around previously overwhelmingly
white Portland, whites only signs that are more often associated
(13:19):
with the South became a lot more common, especially in
the parts of Portland that were closest to the railroad station,
which would have been how most people were getting there.
Vamport itself was also informally but fairly strictly segregated, with housing,
medical facilities, and recreational facilities all separated along racial lines.
The schools, however, were integrated, including hiring black teachers. Overall,
(13:44):
white residents of Portland were so distressed by the influx
of Black Americans that the Portland Art Museum arranged a
series of special exhibitions to try to calm their fears.
They were titled War Time Housing Ships for Victory and
Migration of the Negro, and they framed Portland as a tolerant, welcoming,
diverse place full of patriotic duty. Wartime Housing was an
(14:08):
adapted Museum of Modern Art exhibition that had been used
in other cities that, for various reasons, objected to the
building of mass housing for wartime workers. Migration of the
Negro was a Museum of Modern Art exhibition as well,
and was chosen because of a huge amount of anti
Southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.
(14:29):
Ships for Victory, on the other hand, was funded in
part by Kaiser Corporation, and, in the words of an
article on the matter in Pacific Northwest Quarterly Quote, by
the time the final object list was completed, Ships for
Victory violated nearly every curatorial convention and would by no
means have been considered a worthy exhibition for a museum
(14:49):
of art, but for the exigencies of war. Basically it
was propaganda. By December of ninety four, the city of
Vamport was filled nearly to capacity. Its population was about
forty two thousand people, but as the war neared its end,
in wartime manufacturing slowed down, its population started to drop.
Most of the people who moved out were white. They
(15:12):
had the means and the opportunity to find housing elsewhere.
Vanport's black residents, though, were effectively stuck. There wasn't enough
room for them in Portland's tiny, segregated black neighborhood, and
they weren't welcome anywhere else, And because many of them
were laid off from their wartime shipbuilding jobs, they also
didn't have the financial means to just relocate to a
(15:32):
completely different state. As the war drew to a close,
authorities started talking about what to do with Vanport. On
June seventeenth, The Oregonian reported that city officials hoped that
the black residents of Vanport would leave to prevent any quote,
racial problems. After the war, Vanport quickly developed a bad reputation.
(15:55):
Even though its crime rate wasn't statistically very different from
the city of Portland and there was no proportionate crime
among its black residents. People perceived Vanport as being crime
written and shoddily built. The latter criticism was valid, but
as to the former Captain j Earl Stanley, head of
the County Sheriff's office in Vanport, was quoted in a
(16:15):
ninety seven article on the city is saying, quote, I
have been stationed at Vanport for only a year, but
I am constantly surprised that we have as little major
crime as we do, considering the conditions under which people
are forced to live. The walls between the apartments are
certainly far short of being soundproofed. This makes for trouble,
particularly when two families have children. The decades that have
(16:39):
passed since that time, there's been a lot of research
on what the psychological effect is of just being constantly
immersed in noise. This is a real issue in Vanport.
Like that was, it was constantly noisy, and it was
noisy around the clock because there were people working literally
every shift. So what he's remarking on here was later
proved by science. It was probably a little surprising that,
(17:02):
given the fact that people were immersed in a noisy,
chaotic environment they couldn't escape. Things were actually running along
the same lines as they were in Portland in terms
of things like crime. All of the powers involved in
this were still debating what to do about Vamport in
the spring of ninety eight, when the Columbia River started
to rise due to a combination of heavy rains and
(17:24):
melting snow from the mountains. Flood stage for the Columbia
River was considered to be fifteen feet which the river,
which the river reached and passed early in May. By May,
the river had reached twenty three ft. That was the
day that patrols started inspecting the dikes that surrounded Vamport.
On May, the river reached twenty eight point three feet
(17:46):
and the tracks along the railroad embankment started to sink
by a couple of inches. On the morning of May eight,
of bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed
on every door in Vanport, which ended in the word quote,
remember dikes are safe at present. You will be warned.
If necessary, you will have time to leave. Don't get excited,
(18:08):
but listen. Also contained information on what to do if
the Army Corps of Engineers ordered an evacuation. I've read
these instructions and I found them a little patronizing. They
said things like, don't get panicky exclamation point, well it
probably maybe wasn't intended. Is patronizing. It's hard to know
the intended tone of the writer on those. I always wonder.
(18:31):
But that same day, a crew detected seepage in the
railroad embankment and started reinforcing it with sandbags. But at
four seventeen PM, a hole formed in the embankment and
water started rushing towards Vanport, both fortunately and unfortunately because
it certainly saved lives, but it also kept people from
being able to save any of their possessions. It was
(18:53):
Memorial Day and the weather was good. A lot of
Vanport's at that point eighteen thousand residents were away from
the city, having picnics or hiking, or just visiting people
who lived elsewhere, so they weren't home when the flood happened.
A series of muddy swampy areas called slews slowed the
water down as it approached Vanport, giving the people who
(19:13):
were home about half an hour to escape, and once
it reached the town, the water knocked the wooden houses
completely off their wooden foundations. People described the scene as
looking like cork floating in a current. Vanport was virtually
completely destroyed. Fifteen people died, although rumors persisted that it
was really a lot more, and numerous conspiracy theories swirled
(19:36):
around the event long after, supposing that there was a
giant cover up of a lot more deaths that wasn't
made public. More than a thousand of the displaced families,
or about six thousand three d people total, were black.
That was about a third of Vanport's population. And we're
going to talk about the aftermath of the flood and
what happened after that in Vanport right after we pause
(20:00):
for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. So
to get back to what happened after the flood, the
city of Portland knew ahead of time that it did
not have adequate emergency housing in the event that something
like this occurred. The housing authority had said that it
could house about fifteen hundred people, and the Red Cross
said that it could house seventy five hundred. This was
(20:23):
roughly half the population of Vamport at the time. Overall,
white families had an easier time of finding shelter than
black families. Residents resisted the idea of using churches and
schools in white neighborhoods as shelter for black people, and
churches in the black neighborhood were quickly beyond their capacity.
(20:43):
According to local historians, there were white families who welcomed
black refugees from the flood, but According to the oral
histories of black survivors, this was pretty rare. Many black
families displaced by the flood wound up being housed in
abandoned shipyard barracks on Swan Island. The feeling of a
lot of people who were displaced a Swan Island was
(21:04):
that it was dangerous, like a lot of the housing
was right next to the water and there was no
buffer between the housing and the water, and so a
lot of these were families with children, and people were
very concerned about the fact that their children could drown
just being outside of the house, or not even the
house outside of the barracks. Five days after the flood,
refugees asked the Housing Authority of Portland for non discrimination
(21:28):
policies to be part of any plans for repairs or
new housing. A Vanport Tenants League was formed to try
to address former tenants issues with the Housing Authority, which,
as you remember, had been basically acting as the government
of Vanport. In response, city officials branded the Tenants League,
which had a significant black membership, as communist. Survivors of
(21:52):
the Vanport flood also tried to get some relief in court,
but they hit numerous dead ends. Several suits were filed
against the House authority, but were dismissed under an Oregon
sovereign immunity law, which protected the government from being sued.
More than seven hundred claims were then filed against the
United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but the
(22:13):
United States was protected under a law that the federal
government couldn't be liable for flood damage. The fact that
the federal government, the railroad, the State of Oregon, and
a private enterprise were all involved in Vanport's very existence
made the whole thing an astoundingly complex legal tangle. President
Harry S. Truman visited Vanport after the flood, and cleanup
(22:33):
was assisted by the American Red Cross. However, Portland's white
community strenuously resisted additional public housing, and voters repeatedly rejected
attempts to build public housing after the flood. Consequently, Portland's
one segregated black neighborhood, which became known as Albina, became
even more overcrowded than it had been before the war.
(22:56):
This effect became even more pronounced in the nineteen fifties
when a stadium was built in Albina's lower tip, which
displaced the people had living there, who had been living there,
into the farther north, but into an area that wasn't
really any Bigger arguments began in a class action lawsuit
against the government. On August six of nineteen fifty one.
(23:18):
The court issued its opinion more than a year later,
on September twenty three of nineteen fifty two. The court
found that the Army Corps of Engineers work at the
dikes and railroad embankment was quote honest and competent. It
also found no agency involved, not the Army Corps of Engineers,
not the housing authority, not anyone to be negligent in
the matter of the flood, the failure of the railroad embankment,
(23:40):
or the fact that people have been told that morning
that they were safe. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December
nineteen fifty four, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the lower
courts ruling on the matter. I read the original ruling
and in a lot of ways it was infuriating because
it had language in it about like, it's not proven
that the fact that the railroad trestle wasn't really a
(24:01):
dike was responsible for why it failed. But the legal
scholar who wrote the paper on it was of the
opinion that all of these rulings made sense from a
legal standpoint, like the ore agaon really did have a
sovereign immunity law, and the federal government really could have
laws protecting it against being liable for flood damage. Like
(24:22):
all of these things really legally added up, But none
of that really erases the fact that the eventual response
was basically to do nothing. The Urban League in the
Portland and Double A CP tried to combat racist housing policies,
but even so, by the sixties, four out of five
black people in Portland lived in Albina, and even today
(24:43):
the majority of black residents of Portland live in its
northeast quadrant. In The Oregonian published a series called Blueprint
for a Slum, detailing redlining and other discriminatory housing practices,
as well as corruption and the morgan lending industry that
made these same neighborhoods ineligible for home loans. It was
(25:05):
a lot of the same kind of stuff we talked
about in our two part episode on red Learning last year.
By fourteen, the focus had shifted to the concept of gentrification.
At this point, housing policies have changed. People can get
mortgages in those neighborhoods, but the result has been the
erasure of a lot of previously affordable housing. So now
(25:26):
the conversation is about how to improve neighborhoods without pricing
the people who live who live there out of the
neighborhood with no other place to go. That's the Vanport flood. Uh.
It's the thing. I've thought about doing this before, but
it is another thing that has made me feel like
we need a not just in the South tag on
(25:47):
our website for the Times that people ask us how
come these things only happen in the South. That is
not true. Uh. Have some listener mail though it's about
a similarly unhappy topic. But the listener mail itself is
actually not not unhappy. I said that as though I
(26:11):
were saying not not unhappy, but just one knot is fine.
The listener mail is not unhappy. It's from Sam. Sam says, Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I'm a longtime fan of your show.
Thanks for bringing it to us. Your recent schoolhouse blizzard
episode struck a chord with me because my mom's family
is from rural central Wisconsin and lived through that that
storm back in even now, well over a hundred years later,
(26:35):
it's still part of the family lore. My grandma was
born on the family farm in nine so her early
childhood memories are from the time of the Great Depression,
when that community was struggling to make it by. She
had many stories about how her town responded to the
challenges of that time, including the intense winters and the
grinding poverty. My grandma's family was fortunate enough to be
(26:56):
able to afford horses and farm equipment, and because my
great grandparents were of the generation that had lost friends
and neighbors in the storm, they sought as their responsibility
to help the local kids home when the snow came in.
During storms, my great grandfather used to hitch the horses
to their wagon and head to the schoolhouse to pick
up the local children and bring them home safely. This
(27:18):
was one of my grandma's most sentimental memories, and it
was directly related to that schoolhouse blizzard thirty plus years
before she was born. And then Sam goes on with
some totally different stuff, including more of a personal note
to me and a suggestion. So thank you so much
Sam for writing um. We've gotten several notes from people
(27:40):
about either family stories that date all the way back
to the schoolhouse blizzard, or family stories from other devastating
blizzards elsewhere in the United States, which is both interesting
to read and I hope everybody is staying warm. We
coincidentally had that episode come out right before that massive
(28:00):
snowstorm hit that you stur in the United States, and
as we're recording today's episode, a lot of people are
still digging out from that. However, in Boston, we only
got about four inches and it was clear by the
next morning, which was sort of a knock on wood
blessed relief compared to last year's hundred ten inches. We
(28:21):
got about one centimeter at our Yeah, a lot. I
still know lots of people in Atlanta, and I've had
lots of pictures in my Facebook feed of people's children
sledding on what was effectively like a dusting over dirt. Yeah. Yeah,
(28:43):
I've seen pictures of a few very tiny snowmen. But yep.
So you would like to write to us, We're at
History Podcasts, How Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook
at Facebook dot com slash miss the History and on
Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler as miss in
History dot tumbler dot com or also on Panterrist adventrist
dot com slash missed in History. You can come to
(29:03):
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com.
Uh you can look up all kinds of fascinating information there.
Also at our website, which is missed in History dot com,
you'll find an archive of all of the episodes that
we've ever done, show notes on the episodes that Holly
and I have done that include lists of all of
our sources. If you did not hear our two part
series on redlining last year and you are now curious
(29:25):
about what that was all about at the end of
today's episode, those episodes are on there, so you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or miss than history dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
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Tracy Wilson
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