Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/199

190 Regarding politics Mr. Jackson once (May 12, 1916) telegraphed his editor, from Washington, D. C.:

". . . you know I have no inclination to mix in politics, or align myself with politicians. . . I care little who is senator, so long as he labors sincerely in behalf of the whole people and helps to conduct good government economically administered."

Perhaps these few expressions will give a picture of the aims of the man who built up the Oregon Journal.

Lower freight rates, an open river and improved channel conditions, harbor jetties, bridges across the Willamette, pure milk are among the campaigns for which Mr. Jackson and his editors fought through the years, with a high percentage of success.

"I heartily favor any method," he wrote in one of his campaigns, "that will give the people a full dollar's worth of roads for every dollar they put into them. When the public money is honestly and effectively spent on good roads, it remains in the country, as do the roads. Besides which an economic land value, more than equal to the cost of the roads, is created—thus giving a three-fold return to the public. Bad roads kill energies, destroy values, and breed ignorance, discontent, and ill-will."

The work for good roads was less easy in those early days than it has since become. The early users of the phrase "Get Oregon out of the mud," were quite widely viewed as "tax-eaters," always anathema in this part of the West. But, thanks to such fighters as C. S. Jackson, Oregon took an early lead in highway construction among the Pacific Coast states.

When he went into Portland from Pendleton, the odds, despite his East Oregonian success and the backing he seemed to have in Portland, were against him, the small-town man with no metro politan experience, and he was taking over a dying paper with fewer than 5,000 circulation, no prestige, and no plant to speak of. With in a year, however, he had begun assembling a personnel that was to help him achieve success. The change that perhaps did the most to put the Journal on the road to prestige was Mr. Jackson's bringing John F. Carroll from Denver as editor, succeeding Mr. Wasson. Fourteen years later, after Carroll had been taken over by the op position as editor and publisher of the Telegram, David W. Hazen, writing his obituary, referred to him as "the happy warrior," a which years afterward was to make a phrase from Wordsworth place in American political history. Before coming to the Coast Mr. Carroll had learned his reporting in Pottsville, Pa., where he covered nearly all of the Molly McGuire cases for the Evening Chronicle and saw nearly all of the 17 hangings. He later worked on the Missouri Republican at St. Louis and was city editor of the