Our eulogies for great public figures have struggled to leave the mode of encomium. We see this most starkly with Asahel Bush. A century after his death, we still don't have a critical history of him in Salem's development and politics after statehood. More recently, our retrieval of the legacy of Elizabeth Lord & Edith Schryver has focused on the art of gardens and left other social history to the side.
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| June 11th, 1940 |
This past week the obituaries for Gerry Frank have also been pretty deferential. He was in fact one of the dominant figures in the second half of the 20th century for Salem and for Oregon. But even allowing for the immediate requirements of eulogy, they still leave a sense of being a little uncritical and one-sided.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Writing in late 2017 about the difficulties posed by the living for assessments of the dead, in the Daily Astorian columnist Steve Forrester noted
Brent Walth — who wrote “Fire at Eden’s Gate: Tom McCall and the Oregon Story,” the most important political biography of this state — will not take on [Mark] Hatfield. When asked by Hatfield alumni to write that biography, Walth insisted that the late senator’s dark side would have to be in the story. That ended the discussion.
Now another impediment to serious Hatfield research has arisen. In “Hatfield’s Senate papers tucked out of view until 2022,” published Dec. 27 in The Daily Astorian, Claire Withycombe of our Capital Bureau [now of the SJ] reported that the senator’s widow, Antoinette, has sealed the papers until she is “in the grave.”
Frank was his own person and had his own life, and yet the center of his history and significance is strongly related to his work and life in relation to Mark Hatfield. Though elevated by his department store fame and fortune, he achieved power not as a connoisseur of cake but as Chief of Staff. The cake and travel fame followed. A full assessment cannot leave the world of Hatfield and of politics to the side.
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| November 3rd, 1945 |
What about Hatfield's "dark side" then? One possible element of darkness that at least our popular history elides, preferring to focus on Hatfield's experience witnessing the aftermath and horror at Hiroshima, is that five years earlier as a teenage driver Hatfield killed a six year old girl, Alice Lane.
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| October 28th, 1941 |
Contrary to the newspaper claim in 1941 that Alice "stepped...directly into the path of a car," on appeal the Oregon Supreme Court said "We are convinced that this is not a case where the victim darted out from a place of concealment into the path of an oncoming automobile." (See more at Lane v. Hatfield, 173 Or. 79, 143 P.2d 230.)
This must have been a dreadfully formative experience and in conscious ways and also likely in unconscious ways informed and haunted the character, personality, and politics of Hatfield later in life.
Perhaps after Antoinette's passing the papers will be unsealed and it
will be possible to write fuller biographies and assessments of Mark
Hatfield and of the role of Gerry Frank. Frank also exercised power and we should not forget that in the canny image he cultivated as connoisseur of cake. The memorabilia installed at the Police Station does in fact underscore proximity to power.
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| With Watergate trickster and disgraced President, memorabilia installed at the New Police Station |
Both Hatfield and Frank are too important for uncritical history, myth, and hagiography. A fuller history of Salem has been hampered by the way we have insulated Asahel Bush from inquiry. Similarly, our late 20th and now 21st century call for closer readings of the politics and lives of Hatfield and Frank.
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| Sen. Hatfield on the far right - twitter |
2 comments:
In last year's abbreviated biography of Hatfield, Richard Etulain treats the death as a "tragic happening," complete with passive voice, with agency to the car itself rather than to the driver, and with an odd description of a six-year old as a "pre-teen."
"Notably, Hatfield chose not to treat in Against the Grain and his other books a tragic event that occured just as he finished high school. On 10 June 1940, Hatfield, then seventeen and two weeks past graduation, was driving north to Salem in his mother's Chrysler when the car struck and killed pre-teen Alice Marie Lane. In court, Hatfield testified that he had not seen the young girl when she darted across the rural road. He was not criminally charged for the girl's death, but later in a civil suit the Lane family won a settlement from the Hatfields. In 1943 the Oregon Supreme Court upheld the civil court's decision. Hatfield never wrote of the traumatic event, but, as we shall see, Senator Wayne Morse used the tragic happening, unsuccessfully, to denigrate Hatfield's honesty on the eve of his gubernatorial election in 1958."
Here are a couple of more quotes about how the crash and death were understood as part of political horse-race reporting.
From the Bend Bulletin, January 31st, 1966:
"Morse made a below-the-belt attack on Hatfield when Hatfield ran for governor in 1958. The attack probably did not result in Hatfield's election. He already appeared to be winning ahead in the race. Morse's attack was the last-ditch move of a man trying to help a loser reverse the tide. But it almost certainly helped Hatfield swell his margin over his opponent."
From the Register-Guard, May 28th, 1972:
"After Morse successfully shifted parties, their paths crossed in 1958 when Hatfield was running for governor against incumbent Democrat Robert Holmes. On the eve of the election, which most observers believed to be going badly for Holmes, Morse made a blistering personal attack on Hatfield based on a tragic incident from Hatfield's youth. As a high school student, Hatfield had accidentally struck and killed a child while driving his mother's auto. The parents filed a successful suit for civil damages, which Morse cited to claim that Hatfield could not be believed under oath.
"Morse's assault backfired and Hatfield was elected by a wide margin.
"At least one of Oregon's highest ranking Democrats believes to this day that Morse and Hatfield were in cahoots on this episode, weird as that seems."
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