Oregon's last conservative U.S. Senator: some light upon the little-known career of Guy Cordon.(Oregon voices)(Biography)

Guy Cordon of Douglas County was an earnest, hard-working tax attorney who found himself appointed to national office in 1944, thereby becoming the last reliably conservative Republican senator that Oregon sent to Washington, D.C. Following Cordon's narrow but unexpected loss to Richard Neuberger in 1954, no more statewide offices went to members of the Republican old guard. Although Oregon did anoint a pair of Republican senators, Mark Hatfield and Robert Packwood, during the 1960s through the 1990s, these men were moderate members who willingly bucked their increasingly conservative national party during those recent decades. The Roseburg Republican's Senate years both culminated and ended the Grand Old Party's (GOP) long-held domination of Oregon politics--from the state legislature and governor's office to Congress. Guy Cordon's political career and its fate merit some attention.

For the average easterner, the name Oregon might call forth a few stereotypical images, ranging from pioneers and covered wagons to "lumberjacks" and loaded log trucks. For those with an interest in American politics, it may also conjure a distant commonwealth populated by moderately progressive citizens. Admittedly, there are elements to Oregon's political history that justify this widely held if shallow understanding of the state. The nationally influential "Oregon System" of initiative and referendum, which citizens developed during the opening decade of the twentieth century, and the long-term presence of several well-known mavericks in the U.S. Senate during the last half of the century are among factors that contributed significantly to Oregon's progressive reputation. True enough, in addition to enacting some landmark environmental laws in the 1970s, the Beaver State has increasingly "turned blue"--in the current American journalistic use of a red-blue contrast to represent the conservative-liberal divide--during presidential elections of the past few decades. For most of its existence, however, Oregon has, by and large, been a dependably mainstream conservative, even complacent, state--politically, economically, and socially. (1)

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During much of the nineteenth century, Oregon was dominated by the Democratic party, which was the nation's more traditionalist, conservative party at the time. Following a reformist-minded shake up during the turn-of-the-century Populist and Progressive years, the state rapidly turned Republican after 1900. This shift occurred as the national GOP steadily came to represent not only a pro-business consensus ("the chief business of America is business," as Republican President Calvin Coolidge put it) but also, outside of the Democratic party's solid South, the nation's more conservative citizens. As elsewhere, the economic stress of the early Depression brought some limited Democratic resurgence to Oregon, but by World War II, most Oregonians again voted overwhelmingly for Republican state and congressional candidates, many of whom campaigned against Franklin Roosevelt's "socialistic" programs. (2)

Roseburg attorney Guy Cordon became one of those mid-century Republican figures. His ten-year career in the Senate embodies much about Oregon as the state approached a political tipping point between its past Republican hegemony and its new, substantially more liberal political order of the late twentieth century. Despite Cordon's obscurity today, his decade in the Senate has significance to the Oregon story--particularly because his political philosophy can easily be taken as representative of his fellow Oregon GOP stalwarts of the time. Cordon, as bedrock conservatism's standard bearer for the state, might even--borrowing the national title given by the party to Cordon's famous (and equally conservative) contemporary from Ohio, Senator Robert A. Taft--be called Oregon's own "Mr. Republican" of the postwar period.

For the purposes of this essay, national political "conservatism" of Cordon's day included, among other things, a pronounced pro-business/ anti-labor outlook; an at least rhetorical commitment to economic individualism, states-rights or state sovereignty, and a small federal government; antipathy to government intervention and controls (particularly in economic affairs); support for a strong military, with grudging support (as tempered by traditional American isolationism) for international agreements to combat the spread of communism; and, by 1950, a growing willingness to tar domestic opponents to the left as either "soft on communism," its dupes, or outright fellow travelers. Leaving aside the convoluted twentieth-century history of the protean political terms progressivism and liberalism, they are considered here to be essentially synonymous and include a generally pro-labor outlook with a deep suspicion of the potential abuses of and utter domination by big business; stated commitment to "the common good" by a government active as an umpire or referee between competing economic interests; a strong defense establishment heavily aided by international alliances to help contain the threat of communism; and a willingness to portray domestic opponents to the right as protectors of both corporate greed and a reactionary social order. Cordon's career and fate reveals much about the politics of postwar Oregon, a fast-changing state conflicted by the ideals of free enterprise and private initiative versus a perceived common good and the reality of increased dependence on the federal government. (3)

AS THE PRESIDENTIAL election heated up in the fall of 1948, with Republican Thomas E. Dewey still seemingly assured of victory over Democratic incumbent Harry Truman, the senatorial race in Oregon pitted four-year senator Republican Guy Cordon against the Democrats' little-known candidate Manley Wilson. In October, Roseburg newspaperman Charles V. Stanton reminded readers that four years previous, "back in the spring of 1944, when the late Gov. [Earl] Snell appointed Guy Cordon of Roseburg as United States senator to succeed the late, great Charles L. McNary, quite a few Oregonians asked, 'Who's Guy Cordon?' They don't ask the question anymore." (4) Although Dewey's 1948 upset loss to Truman stunned the country, the Republican New York governor won Oregon handily. Cordon's 61 to 39 percent triumph over his sacrificial-lamb opponent was but the latest chapter in a long-term Republican hold on the state's national elective offices.