History
Oregon holds the records for the most statewide initiatives (there were
318 between 1904 and 2000), the highest average initiative use (6.6 per
general election), and the most statewide initiatives on the ballot in a
single year - 27 in 1912.
Historians identify one man as the driving force behind I&R: William
Simon U’Ren” known as early as 1898 as “Referendum U’Ren” for his singleminded
devotion to the cause. U’Ren was born on 10 January 1859 in
Lancaster, Wisconsin, the son of a blacksmith who, with his wife, had
emigrated from Cornwall in England. Young U’Ren accompanied his
family westward to Nebraska, then to Colorado, learning the blacksmith’s
trade from his father. In 1885, at age 26, he earned a law degree in
Denver, and then moved to Iowa, Hawaii, and California before settling in
Milwaukee, Oregon, in 1889. By this time he had been a miner, a
newspaper editor, and a Republican Party worker, in addition to
practicing law.
In 1892 he was forced to give up his law practice as a result of an
asthma attack and, having no family in the area, was nursed back to
health by the Lewellings, a local family of fruit growers. The Lewellings
were also reformers, “good government being to us what religion is to
most people,” wrote the lady of the house. Albert Lewelling brought U’Ren
a copy of James W. Sullivan’s book, Direct Legislation, and U’Ren, at age
33, found his life’s work. As he later told an interviewer: “Blacksmithing was
my trade and it has always given color to my view of things. I wanted to
fix the evils in the conditions of life. I couldn’t. There were no tools. We had
tools to do almost anything with in the blacksmith shop; wonderful tools.
So in other trades, arts and professions … in everything but government.
“In government, the common trade of all men and the basis of social life,
men worked still with old tools, with old laws, with institutions and charters
which hindered progress more than they helped it. Men suffered from this.
There were enough lawyers: many of our ablest men were lawyers. Why
didn’t some of them invent legislative implements to help people govern
themselves: Why had we no tool makers for democracy?”
U’Ren, with the financial support of the Lewellings, took it upon himself
to forge the tools of democracy: initiative, referendum, and recall. He
brought together representatives of the state Farmer’s Alliance and labor
unions to form the Oregon Direct Legislation League, of which he was
named secretary.
In 1894 U’Ren was elected chairman of the state’s Populist Party
convention, and won approval of an I&R platform plank. That same year
the League published a pamphlet explaining I&R and distributed it
throughout the state: 50,000 copies in English and 15,000 in German.
In 1896 U’Ren won a seat in the state’s lower house and in 1897 worked
the legislature - without success - to gain approval for I&R. Warned that he
might go to purgatory for his wheeling and dealing, U’Ren replied
thunderously: “I’d go to hell for the people of Oregon!”
Following the 1897 defeat, U’Ren reorganized the League to broaden
the base of I&R support. In addition to farmers and labor unionists, the
new 17-member executive committee included bankers, the president of
the state bar association (such attorneys’ associations were notorious
during the Progressive era for opposing I&R), and Portland Oregonian
editor Harvey W. Scott.
U’Ren ran for the state senate in 1898 and lost, but nevertheless won
passage of his I&R amendment the following year. Under Oregon’s
constitution, amendments had to be approved by two successive sessions
of the legislature. In 1901 I&R passed with a single dissenting vote, and a
year later voters ratified it by an eleven to one margin.
U’Ren joined other reformers in sponsoring dozens of initiatives during
the next two decades. In 1906, he was among the sponsors of an initiative
to ban free railroad passes, which the railroads routinely handed out as
gifts to politicians and which he himself had once received. In 1908, he
proposed initiatives to make Oregon the first state with popular election of
U.S. senators and to reform election laws. Both passed by overwhelming
margins. In 1910, Oregonians passed an initiative to establish the first
presidential primary election system in the nation. The margin was small
(43,353 to 41,624), but two dozen other states copied it within six years.
The closeness of the 1910 vote showed that the voters were not quite
as ready for reform as was U’Ren, and they rejected his 1912 initiative
proposing a unicameral legislature by a greater than two to one margin.
Other early initiatives that bear the mark of U’Ren were a 1906
constitutional amendment extending I&R powers to local jurisdictions,
approved by three to one, and a 1908 amendment that gave voters
power to recall elected officials.
And these were just the beginning, for U’Ren associated himself with
many more initiative efforts before his death, at age 90, in Portland on
March 5, 1949. In Oregon, I&R had worked just as its early advocates said
it would: this one reform opened the door to all the others.
As a Progressive reformer and practitioner of initiative and referendum
campaigns, U’Ren had no equal in any state. Lest he get all the credit for
establishing I&R in Oregon, however, another man must be mentioned as
the state’s number two I&R advocate: Max Burgholzer of Buxton (near
Eugene), Oregon, who some contemporaries claimed deserved equal
credit.
Oregon is one of two states (the other is Arizona) where women
gained the right to vote by an initiative. But it lost on the first try in 1906,
and lost again by an even bigger margin in 1908. In 1910 suffragists tried a
different approach: an initiative giving only female taxpayers the right to
vote, a compromise that was rejected by about the same margin as the
1908 suffrage amendment. Finally, in 1912, suffragists led by Abigail Scott
Duniway won their long struggle: their measure passed by a margin of
61,265 in favor to 57,104 against.
Leading the fight against women’s suffrage were the liquor and saloon
interests, which (rightly, in this instance) feared women would vote for
Prohibition. In 1914, the first year Oregon women voted, a Prohibition
initiative passed by a wide margin. Women also provided the slim 157-
vote victory margin (out of over 200,000 votes cast) for a 1914 initiative
constitutional amendment abolishing the death penalty in Oregon. In
1912 a similar initiative had failed, 41,951 to 64,578.
Labor unions won approval of a 1912 initiative establishing an eighthour
day for workers on public works projects, and two other measures
prohibiting private employers from hiring convicts from state or local jails.
Some of the most innovative Oregon initiatives of the early days were
those that failed to pass. One was a 1914 full-employment initiative
sponsored by the Socialist Party. The proposal would have set up a job
creation fund derived from an inheritance tax on estates worth more than
$50,000 (a huge fortune in those days); the state labor commissioner
would then have had the duty to employ any citizen demanding work in
a “Department of Industry and Public Works.” The measure failed 57,859 to
126,201.
In 1930, another unique proposal - a state constitutional amendment
to ban cigarettes - was put on the ballot by citizen petition. By a three to
one margin, Oregonians rejected the idea. They did, however, approve
an initiative amendment that year establishing a procedure to set up
independent, locally owned “People’s Utility Districts” to market water and
power. In 1938, Oregonians approved the “Townsend Plan” old-age
pension initiative. The idea was the brainchild of Dr. Francis E. Townsend of
Long Beach, California, who proposed making monthly payments to
senior citizens if they promised to spend their entire allotment each month
and thus stimulate the economy. Also on the ballot that year was an
initiative to clean up the Willamette River, which was heavily polluted by
pulp and paper mills and sewage. The measure had been passed by the
legislature in 1937 but vetoed by Governor Charles Martin. Voters passed
the initiative by a wide margin.
In the late 1940s a University of Oregon at Eugene student, Clay Myers,
a leader of the campus Young Republicans, began a movement for
reapportionment of the state’s legislative and congressional districts,
whose boundaries had not been redrawn for over 50 years. Rebuffed by
the legislature, Myers sponsored an initiative constitutional amendment
specifying that if the legislature failed to reapportion the state during its
first six-month session after the census data were released every ten years,
the secretary of state would reapportion it. Voters approved the initiative
by a nearly two to one margin in 1952. Myers went on to reapportion the
state himself during his 1967-1977 term as secretary of state.
In the 1960s, Oregonians put only seven initiatives on the state ballot in
five elections, far below their average. In 1960, scenery-conscious citizens
sponsored an initiative to limit billboards through the state, but the
electorate rejected it by a nearly two to one margin. In the 1970s,
however, leading the national trend, initiative use rebounded, with 17
qualifying for the ballot. Among those approved was a “denturism”
initiative (1978) that broke dentists’ monopoly by allowing denture
technicians to sell and fit dentures at a lower cost. Ron Wyden, a young
lobbyist for senior citizens, championed this initiative. Dentists opposed the
measure with a saturation advertising campaign that voters found so
obnoxious that they approved the initiative by a seven to two margin.
Voter interest ran so high that the number of ballots cast on the
“denturism” question was only a tenth of a percent less than the number
cast for gubernatorial candidates. For Wyden, the initiative was a starting
point for his successful 1980 campaign to win election to Congress.
None of this could have occurred had it not been for the work of
William Simon U’Ren. U’Ren is perhaps the only person to be honored by a
monument commemorating his initiative work. The monument can be
found in front of the Clackamas County Courthouse, on Main Street in
Oregon City. The bronze plaque reads; “In honor of William Simon U’Ren,
author of Oregon’s constitutional provisions for initiative, referendum, and
recall, giving the people control of law making and lawmakers and
known in his lifetime as father of Oregon’s enlightened system of
government.”
In the 1990s saw the rise of an initiative proponent by the name of Bill
Sizemore. Sizemore became known as Mr. Initiative. He drew the ire of
the progressives (liberals) because all of the initiatives he sponsored
(literally dozens) were all aimed at them – tax cuts, paycheck protection,
labor reform and term limits. His success rate at the ballot box wasn’t
stellar, but his impact on the initiative scene is indisputable.
Unfortunately, his success has also led to a backlash against the
initiative process. His opponents, primarily labor unions, have sponsored
initiatives themselves to try and make the initiative process more difficult –
with limited success. However, they were successful in getting the state
legislature to place on the ballot a constitutional amendment that would
have drastically increased the number of signatures required for a
constitutional amendment. It was defeated handily.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.