Rioters ripped through Minneapolis in the hours following the death of George Floyd last year. The daylight on May 28 shone on burned-out buildings and smoldering cars. Come nightfall, agitators descended on the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct, chased out the officers, and set the building ablaze. That night, as police retreated, a woman was found dead with signs of trauma inside a car, and another man was killed when rioters set fire to a pawnshop.
Little by little, the flames set by rioters flickered out, and the nightly assaults on Minneapolis began to wane. But across the country, in the cooler climes of Cascadia, the disorder was just heating up. Nearly 2,000 miles from Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, launched into a hundred consecutive days of rioting.
On May 29, agitators breached the Multnomah County Justice Center, set fires inside the building, and tore through the interior. Federal officers and police confronting demonstrators were greeted with projectiles hurled by slingshots, commercial-grade fireworks, rocks, and open pocket knives. The Hatfield federal courthouse became a nightly target of vandalism; downtown Portland exploded into a war zone, with agitators constructing ramparts and shields to use against the police. Rioters hospitalized officers and managed to set fires inside a Portland police union building, eventually invading residential areas, shining flashlights into people’s homes, and menacingly chanting through the streets.
The police seemed either unwilling or unable to regain control of the city. Many blamed Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also the Portland Police Bureau’s commissioner. Wheeler remained largely sympathetic to agitators throughout the riots — until they chased him out of his ivory tower and home in September. On Aug. 31, demonstrators kicked off a riot outside Wheeler’s Northwest Portland home to “celebrate” his birthday and, in a show of thanksgiving, shattered windows, burglarized a business, and ignited a fire in an occupied apartment building.
Portland’s crisis of sanity and radicalism long ago became its well-known new normal. The city and its Portlandia caricature blurred into one, representative of the state’s cultural oddness.
How Oregon got there is less clear. Looking back, perhaps there were signs. After all, the first American to receive a state funeral and burial at the Soviet Union’s Kremlin Wall was John Reed, an American journalist born to a wealthy family in Portland. Upon his death in 1920, Lenin hailed him as a hero and indispensable chronicler of the Bolshevik Revolution, albeit born in the lap of luxury and educated at Harvard.
Some claim that left-wing radicalism is a reaction to the state’s history of housing fringe supremacist groups. But those groups were crippled by civil lawsuits and receded into oblivion rather quickly. In truth, there’s nothing to react against today in Oregon, as conservatives and, indeed, whole rural counties are running from the state. Oregonians in Baker, Grant, Lake, Malheur, and Sherman counties recently approved ballot measures requiring local officials to consider redrawing the border to make them Idahoans.
During the Vietnam War, Portland became a hub of coffeehouses, rock concerts, communal living, and other expressions of the counterculture. The irony, of course, is that it was often the children of privilege who took up the countercultural mantle and who ended up denouncing as baby killers and racists the working class that couldn’t afford to dodge the war. Not much has changed; Ted Wheeler, champion of the oppressed, attended Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard.
Speaking to Oregonians about what they think drove the state’s “Portlandization” elicits responses that range from confusion to exasperation, anger, and shock.
John Schleining traces his lineage back to homesteading pioneers who settled in and carved a life out of Oregon. He was raised in Portland, “a quiet town at the time,” and witnessed all that change with the winds of radicalism that swept through in the 1960s. He recalls the jeremiads of the Students for a Democratic Society and the militancy of the Black Panthers and associated groups. On Dec. 11, 1968, the Black Student Union took over a floor of Reed College in Portland, including the president’s office, in response to the lack of black studies programs. “By afternoon, pickets and demonstrators, mainly white students, were circulating around campus, disrupting classes,” wrote Lucas N. N. Burke and Judson L. Jeffries.
Schleining had his own encounters with the Panthers.
“One night, I got a knock on my door — it’s three Black Panthers with guns pointed at my wife and I in our little apartment,” he told me. They asked if he was a police officer, then let themselves into the place. “You were filming our brothers,” said the Panthers, barrels aimed at the couple. John said he had been merely documenting things as they happened as a local observer. They weren’t happy with that and seized his 16 mm footage and warned him not to go to the police, or else “they’d be back.”
Schleining thinks the answer to Portlandization, in part, has to do with the fact that the campus radicals of yore ended up in charge of the state government. There are other culprits, of course, such as migrating Californians and Oregon’s Silicon Forest, a nest of high-tech liberalism.
Colleen Roberts mentions some of these and tends to agree with Schleining.
Roberts was born and raised in Klamath Falls. Today, she sits on the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, runs a business, plays piano at church, and is a mother of three and grandmother to 14. We spoke on the eve of her 45th wedding anniversary; she met her husband while at college in Forest Grove, near Portland. The stability of her life stood in stark contrast with the topic of our conversation.
Like Schleining, she views Oregon’s administrative state as a vehicle for trouble. She points to the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Act of 1973, passed under Gov. Tom McCall, a Republican. The measure created a framework for land use planning across the state, placing every city and county in its regulatory grasp. That set the stage for statewide government by decree, with the loons usually pulling the levers.
In late 2019, Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission advanced citywide design guidelines requiring developers to provide “rest” space in new construction, plainly an obligatory invitation to the homeless to encroach on private property. The provision faces a few hurdles before becoming part of life in the city, but it has understandably put people on edge already. This year, a bill introduced by House Speaker Tina Kotek would limit the ability of local governments to restrict homeless “camping,” further making the state resemble Portland, which prohibits “camping” bans but enforces the provision selectively.
In May, Oregon’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Caucus lauded the advancement of Senate Bill 289, which would prohibit people convicted of “bias crimes” while on state waters or public recreation land from entering state parklands for up to five years. Another measure, House Bill 2337, would, among other things, declare racism a public health crisis. The text of the bill states, “Racism in Oregon and nationwide has created a situation that is untenable and where immediate action must be taken to mitigate further harm and violence against Black and indigenous Oregonians, people of color and tribes.”
Colleen Roberts says that those who are not on board with Portlandization feel on the back foot against an administrative state in the hands of True Believers. “There has been one time since I’ve been in office that our Legislature was balanced,” she told me. “People feel voiceless in our state.”
Pedro Gonzalez is associate editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
