Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/43

 play of heat-lightning and a rumble of distant thunder along the political horizon, and champions of new causes emerge each year.

Oregon politics have been matters of both comedy and melodrama. The State was harshly dictatorial in its treatment of Chinese immigrants, with whose descendants the commonwealth now finds no quarrel; but it was also the first to introduce the initiative and referendum, and the breath of liberalism has never entirely failed. Unpredictable as are voters elsewhere, Oregonians sometimes make strange uses of their franchise. The Ku Klux Klan burned its fiery crosses over a hundred hills, and its propagandists sowed racial intolerance in every county of the state, but the Oregon electorate, unmoved by these activities, plodded to the polls and elected a Jewish governor. The voters of Salem enthusiastically accepting a plan for a new courthouse as proposed in a primary measure, marched forth at the general election to reject the tax levy with which the structure was to have been built. The general elections of November, 1938, found the Oregon electorate voting down a sales tax which was intended to have financed an extended old-age pension plan, approved in the preceding primary. The commonwealth's true political picture reads from Left to Right, with all deviations and all shades of opinion represented, and in the very vociferousness of dissenting voices, Oregon may count its democracy secure.

Oregonians have expressed themselves well in the fields of art, letters and music. Although Portland has been called the "Athens of the West," only a few persons are inclined to be disagreeably emphatic about the matter, or to make a fetish of culture. The State's painters and sculptors show strength and imagination and skill, and men and women employed by WPA have executed some of the most forthright work among contemporary artists. Oregon writers delve into a wealth of raw source material, and do well with what they withdraw and refine; and if it is not precisely true that there are more writers in Portland than in any other American city, as has been contended, there are at least an astonishing number of poets and novelists and journalists for so small a municipality. Besides these, there are sailors who come from the sea to write of what they have seen, and former lumberjacks who wade as zestfully into the world of letters as once they did into the Oregon mill-ponds.

All this promises well for a rich and full and native culture in the future, but it should not be supposed that the state has yet abandoned itself utterly to the refinements of the arts. The pulp magazines sell as well in Oregon as anywhere else, the cinema offers as many ineptitudes;