Hundred-Year Shout

Sometimes when hard-pressed Oregon legislators are in doubt about how to vote on a complex new bill, they write in the margins of their legislative drafts: "Let's wait to hear what Charlie Sprague has to say about this."

They never have to wait long. In the aging brick office of the Oregon Statesman, seven blocks downtown from the state capitol in Salem, Publisher Charles Arthur Sprague has probably already tapped out his views for the next day's "It Seems to Me" column. Twenty years of such thoughtful, solid editorial guidance has given 63-year-old Republican Charlie Sprague the prestige of an elder statesman, made the Statesman, despite its small (15,940) circulation, one of the clearest voices in the Pacific Northwest.

For months Sprague insisted that the Oregon State Emergency Board was operating unconstitutionally, finally got the state attorney general to agree with him. This session's legislature is now at work on the Statesman's recommended changes. Last winter, when the Oregon house, under pressure from superpatriots, repealed its two-year-old endorsement of World Federalism, Charlie Sprague said it wasn't a matter of World Federalism itself, but "what worries me is this caving in of judgment in the face of propaganda . . . The risk is that of the closed mind, one driven by fear. [In the repeal] fear triumphed, disguised as patriotism."

Oregon Style. Trumpeting into the legislature's ear is no novelty for the Statesman. It has been doing it for exactly 100 years, as Salem's top citizens reminded Charlie Sprague at a special anniversary luncheon last week. In 1851, first Editor Asahel Bush wanted the territorial capital moved from Oregon City to Salem, characterized those who disagreed as "Lickspittles and toadies of official whiggery." Such Statesman invective soon became known as the "Oregon style" of journalism. Wrote Bush, about his bitter opponent, the Portland Oregonian: "There is not a brothel in the land that would not have felt itself disgraced by the presence of the Oregonian of week before last. It was a complete issue of gross profanity, obscenity, falsehood and meanness."

Charlie Sprague, a schoolteacher and Washington state school official before he went into newspaper work, mellowed the Statesman's traditional language but kept the hundred-proof kick when he bought the paper in 1929. He "got it by the simple, old-fashioned method of making a down payment and going into debt for the rest, paying it off over the years." In 1938, he was elected governor, but, lacking a politician's practical sense, ran into trouble. (Once, on the advice of an aide, he wore spats at a public ceremony, thus alienated thousands of frontier-minded Oregonians.) Because he talked to capital reporters with the forthrightness of an editor, he got into hot water that a "no comment" would have avoided, and missed re-election in 1942.

American Style. Downtown at the Statesman such outspokenness made newspaper legend. After World War II, when Pacific Coast feeling ran high against the return of the Japanese Americans from relocation camps, Sprague sharply defended Japanese American rights. One night he marched into the middle of an ugly-tempered anti-Japanese mass meeting in Gresham to lecture the citizens. Said he: "It would be a shocking and terrible thing for you citizens of Oregon to destroy the rights of these people. Guard those rights. If you finish them, they're finished for you also."

Last week Charlie Sprague had little to say when his turn came to speak at the Statesman's birthday celebration. But what he said made the kind of sense the Statesman usually makes: "No newspaper belongs to its past, but to its present and future. It can't be suffocated by its history. It is a living thing that must sense the life of its age."

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