SYMHC Classics: Vanport Flood

This 2016 episode covers the May 30, 1948 flood that destroyed Vanport, Oregon. What really makes the story more than a historical footnote is how it ties into the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon at the time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The Vanport flood took place on May thirtieth,
nineteen forty eight, or seventy eight years ago today, so
we have chosen our episode on it as Today's Saturday Classic.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
This episode originally came out February third, twenty sixteen, Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Today's podcast is yet another listener request, but it's one
that was already on my to do list, so I
haven't made a note of who I'll ask for it.
On May thirtieth of nineteen forty eight, a flood destroyed Vanport, Oregon.
Fifteen people were killed, which, in light of some of
the other disasters we've been talking about on the show lately,

(00:56):
probably seems like a relatively small number, but the proper
damage involved was colossal. And what really makes the story
more than a historical footnote is how it is tied
into the racial makeup of both Portland and Oregon as
a whole, and a lot of the stresses and difficulties
that went on with racism and race relations both before

(01:18):
and after the flood.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
The historical context for the Vanport flood goes back to
before Oregon became a state in eighteen fifty nine. The
issue of slavery within Oregon wasn't a totally simple one.
While it ultimately joined the Union as a free state,
there were people living there who were in favor of slavery.
This is one of several reasons why the people of
Oregon voted against holding a constitutional convention three separate times

(01:44):
before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off
a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Oregon did actually out lost slavery while it was still
a territory. In eighteen forty three, its residents voted to
incorporate language from the Northwest Ordnance into its own laws.
That language was quote, there shall be neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the
punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. However,

(02:18):
a little less than a year later, the Provisional Government's
Legislative Council changed that eighteen forty three law with an
amendment that had the rather odd effect of simultaneously outlying
slavery and allowing it for a short period of time.
Slaveholders were given a deadline to remove their slaves from Oregon,
and if they refused, the slaves would be freed. The

(02:40):
amendment went on to specify that those previously enslaved persons
also needed to leave Oregon. Free black males had two
years to do so, and free black females had three years.
The punishment for refusing to leave after being freed was lashing.
This law was nicknamed Peter Burnett's Lash Law, after the
head of the legislative council that passed it. A little

(03:03):
later in the year, the punishment was shifted from being
lashing to force labor, and the law itself was repealed
in eighteen forty five before its punishment clause went into
effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on the council. Then,
on September twenty first, eighteen forty nine, the territorial legislature
enacted another racial exclusion law in Oregon, which remained on

(03:26):
the books until eighteen fifty four. This law stated that
in Oregon, quote, it shall not be lawful for any
Negro or mulatto to enter into or reside. When Oregon
finally did assemble a constitutional convention on the road to
becoming a state in eighteen fifty seven, two proposals were
placed before its delegates. One would have legalized slavery. The

(03:49):
other was an exclusion clause similar to the one enacted
in eighteen forty nine.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Both of these passed by a wide margin. Oregon ultimately
did not want to be a slave state, but it
also did not want African Americans living there.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
As a result. Article one, section thirty five of the
Constitution of the State of Oregon read quote, no free
negro or mulatto not residing in this State at the
time of the adoption of this Constitution shall come reside
or be within the state, or hold any real estate,
or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein. And

(04:26):
the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws for the
removal by public officers of all such Negroes and mulattos,
for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the
punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state
or employ or harbor them. These articles made Oregon's constitution

(04:47):
unique among the free states. It was the only one
whose constitution was written to try to exclude black people.
The legislature did not, in the end provide penal laws
for the removal of African Americans from the state, though
the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on
July ninth, eighteen sixty eight, nullified Oregon's exclusion clause. As

(05:09):
a refresher, the Fourteenth Amendment was one of the reconstruction
amendments that followed the end of the Civil War. It's
the one that gives all citizens of the United States
the right to do process and equal protection under the laws.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in eighteen seventy, also invalidated a
different article in the Oregon Constitution that denied quote Negroes,

(05:29):
Chinamen and Mulatto's the right to vote. However, even though
the Fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments invalidated them, those two exclusionary
articles weren't actually repealed in Oregon until nineteen twenty six
and nineteen twenty seven, respectively, and their obsolete text, along
with other language that alluded to race, like specifying the

(05:51):
white population needed to increase the number of state Supreme
Court justices, was actually still present in the Oregon Constitution
until a measure to remove it passed in two thousand
and two, and even then it only got seventy one
percent of the vote, and people cited as their reasons
for voting now things like unwillingness to tamper with the

(06:12):
historical document. So it's not clear exactly what the motivation
of everyone was, but it was definitely clear what the
motivation of some of them was. Although the state had
never passed enforcement measures to go along with these racial
exclusion laws, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been
invalidated those laws after the Civil War, the fact that
they were written into the state's foundational documents and had

(06:35):
been passed at all had a big effect on who
did or didn't move to Oregon in the migration that
followed the Civil War. The people who moved into Oregon
were overwhelmingly white, and some of those who did did
so because they found that constitutional language appealing. By the
nineteen hundreds, the Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most notorious

(06:57):
white supremacy organization in the United States, had more than
fourteen thousand members in Oregon, nine thousand of them in Portland.
By comparison, very few black people moved into Oregon after
the Civil War. According to the United States Census Bureau,
by nineteen forty, just a few years before the Vanport Flood,
more than a million people lived in Oregon, only two thousand,

(07:19):
five hundred and sixty five were African American, or less
than a quarter of a percent of the population. Nearly
all of them lived in one small, segregated district in Portland, which,
thanks to racist laws, housing policies, and real estate practices,
was the only place in Oregon most black people could
find housing. The racial demographics of the area around Portland

(07:40):
changed dramatically before and during World War II, and the
circumstances are tied directly to the Vanport Flood. And we're
going to talk about that. But first we are going
to have a word from one of our fabulous sponsors.

(08:02):
To get back to our story. We're going to talk
about the beginnings of the city of Banmport. During World
War Two, the shipbuilding industry in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver,
Washington grew really tremendously in response to military needs. Most
of this growth came by a shipyards that were owned
by the Kaiser Company. Later Kaiser Shipbuilding Corporation, which began
working with the British Navy to build ships in nineteen forty.

(08:25):
The industry as a whole grew from a few thousand
people to more than one hundred and forty thousand employees
by late nineteen forty three. The Kaiser Company, which was
named for its founder, employed nearly all of them. This
huge influx of workers really put a strain on the
housing supply in and around Portland, thanks in part to

(08:46):
a long standing resistance to public housing. Many residents were
afraid that affordable housing would lower their property values and
bring in a quote undesirable class of people when it
came to the Kaiser Company's wartime employee. Another issue on
the mines of the Portland majority was that many of
them were black. Particularly in the earlier years of World

(09:07):
War two, black men were not seen as fit for
military duty. We've talked about this in other episodes before,
so as white men were drafted into the military, black men,
along with women of all races, were the ones to
very often fill those jobs. The same was also true
for newly created wartime work, in part because so many
of the people were moving into Portland to get these

(09:28):
jobs were black. Meetings in the city about how to
address the housing shortage were met with pickets and protests,
so in the summer of nineteen forty two, the Kaiser
Company worked out a deal with the US Maritime Commission
to build a town to house its workers, situated outside
the city limits of Portland in the Columbia River floodplain.
The town was originally called Kaiserville because it was being

(09:52):
built in bottom land and a floodplain. Thirty foot tall
dykes were built on two sides of the town to
keep the water out. On a third side, a railroad
embankment fulfilled the same function, but it had not been
constructed as a dyke. It was built by filling dirt
in and around a wooden railroad trestle.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Going through The US Maritime Commission let the Kaiser Company
do an end run around the Housing Authority of Portland.
Neither the Housing Authority nor the people of Portland got
much of a say in what was being built or
who would live there. The homes were built quickly and cheaply,
and they were intended as temporary wartime housing, not as
permanent structures. They were apartment buildings made of wood on

(10:34):
wooden foundations, and in the end there were nearly ten
thousand of these units.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
This housing was really pretty incredibly basic. The units had
a small bedroom, a kitchenette with a hot plate, and
only one window that could open that was in case
of a fire. Units were furnished with tenants expected to
supply only personal items like linens and dishes and silverware.
But because the buildings were so cheaply made, they were
also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the

(11:01):
sound between the units, and since the shipbuilding industry during
wartime ran literally around the clock, Vanport was also really noisy.
Around the clock. Fires were a problem, although fortunately these
were mostly small and none of them swept through the
nearly all wooden city, which would have been a definite possibility.

(11:21):
This temporary housing became the largest wartime housing development in
the United States and the second largest city in Oregon,
although since the government owned it it wasn't technically a
real city. It was renamed Vanport by combining the names
of Vancouver and Portland in November, and its first residents
moved in on December twelfth. Headlines hailed it as a

(11:45):
quote masterpiece of urban planning. Now all that happened in
nineteen forty two u s. You can tell how quickly
all of this was put together, since the Kaiser Corporation
only started working on it in the summer. As those
first families moved in, Vanport mostly offered housing anding else.
Although the city was roughly equidistant from Kaiser's three shipbuilding facilities,

(12:05):
which meant that there were shortages of rubber and gasoline.
People could walk to work, it was not really convenient
to getting into Portland or to any kind of transit.
The first residents had trouble getting basic supplies. Often it
was pressure from the Kaiser company, who was afraid that
they would lose their workers if they couldn't get the
basic staples that they needed that got things done. But

(12:27):
eventually Vamport did get a lot of amenities that you
would expect in a city, including a hospital, a movie theater,
and some shopping centers. Since it was built as worker housing,
it also had twenty four hour childcare services. In addition
to schools, the Vamport Extension Center, which would eventually grow
into Portland State University, taught classes there during the war.

(12:50):
Vanport eventually got its own ration board. The housing Authority
of Portland wound up essentially acting as a landlord and
in some ways as the city government. The housing Authority oversaw,
among other things, the creation of a fire department and
a school district. Law enforcement came from the county sheriff Department.
The relocation of black workers from all over the United States,

(13:14):
but especially from the Deep South and the Southwest into
Vanport was the first major migration of African Americans into
Oregon in the state's history. Between nineteen forty and nineteen fifty,
the percentage of Oregon's population that was African American grew
from point two to point eight percent. It's a still
tiny percentage, but a massive increase in all going into

(13:37):
the same place. In the face of this influx of
African Americans to the area around previously overwhelmingly white Portland,
White's only signs that are more often associated with the
South became a lot more common, especially in the parts
of Portland that were closest to the railroad station, which
would have been how most people were getting there. Vamport

(13:58):
itself was also informally but fairly strictly segregated, with housing,
medical facilities, and recreational facilities all separated along racial lines.
The schools, however, were integrated, including hiring black teachers.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Overall, White residents of Portland were so distressed by the
influx of Black Americans that the Portland Art Museum arranged
a series of special exhibitions to try to calm their fears.
They were titled Wartime Housing, Ships for Victory and Migration
of the Negro, and they framed Portland as a tolerant, welcoming,

(14:32):
diverse place full of patriotic duty. Wartime Housing was an
adapted Museum of Modern Art exhibition that had been used
in other cities that, for various reasons, objected to the
building of mass housing for wartime workers. Migration of the
Negro was a Museum of Modern Art exhibition as well,
and was chosen because of a huge amount of anti

(14:53):
Southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Ships for Victory, on the other hand, and was funded
in part by Kaiser Corporation, and, in the words of
an article on the matter in Pacific Northwest Quarterly Quote,
by the time the final object list was completed, Ships
for Victory violated nearly every curatorial convention and would by
no means have been considered a worthy exhibition or a
museum of art, but for the exigencies of war, basically

(15:22):
it was propaganda. By December of nineteen forty four, the
city of Vamport was filled nearly to capacity. Its population
was about forty two thousand people, but as the war
neared its end and wartime manufacturing slowed down, its population
started to drop. Most of the people who moved out
were white. They had the means and the opportunity to

(15:42):
find housing elsewhere. Vanport's black residents, though, were effectively stuck.
There wasn't enough room for them in Portland's tiny, segregated
black neighborhood, and they weren't welcome anywhere else. And because
many of them were laid off from their wartime shipbuilding jobs,
they also didn't have the financial means to just relocate
to a completely different state. As the war drew to

(16:04):
a close, authorities started talking about what to do with Vanmport.
On June seventeenth, nineteen forty five, The Oregonian reported that
city officials hoped that the black residents of Vamport would
leave to prevent any quote racial problems. After the war,
Vamport quickly developed a bad reputation, even though its crime

(16:24):
rate wasn't statistically very different from the city of Portland
and there was no disproportionate crime among its black residents.
People perceived Vanport as being crime written and shoddily built.
The latter criticism was valid, but as to the former
Captain j Earl Stanley, head of the County Sheriff's office
in Vamport, was quoted in a nineteen forty seven article

(16:46):
on the city as saying, quote, I have been stationed
at Vamport for only a year, but I am constantly
surprised that we have as little major crime as we do,
considering the conditions under which people are forced to live.
The walls between the apartments are certainly far short of
being sound proofed. This makes for trouble, particularly when two
families have children. The decades that have passed since that time,

(17:09):
there's been a lot of research on what the psychological
effect is of just being constantly immersed in noise. This
is a real issue in Vamport. Like it was constantly noisy,
and it was noisy around the clock because there were
people working literally every shift. So what he's remarking on
here was later proved by science. That was probably a

(17:30):
little surprising that, given the fact that people were immersed
in a noisy, chaotic environment they couldn't escape, things were
actually running along the same lines as they were in
Portland in terms of things like crime. All of the
powers involved in this were still debating what to do
about Vamport in the spring of nineteen forty eight, when
the Columbia River started to rise due to a combination

(17:52):
of heavy rains and melting snow from the mountains. Flood
stage for the Columbia River was considered to be fifteen feet,
which which the river reached and passed early in May.
By May twenty fifth, the river had reached twenty three feet.
That was the day that patrol started inspecting the dikes
that surrounded Vamport. On May twenty eighth, the river reached

(18:13):
twenty eight point three feet and the tracks along the
railroad embankment started to sink by a couple of inches.
On the morning of May thirtieth, nineteen forty eight, a
bulletin from the Housing Authority of Portland was placed on
every door in Vanport, which ended in the words quote,
remember dikes are safe at present. You will be warned
if necessary, you will have time to leave. Don't get excited.

(18:37):
The bulletin also contained information on what to do if
the Army Corps of Engineers ordered an evacuation. I've read
these instructions and I found them a little patronizing. They
said things like don't get panicky exclamation point. Well, it
probably maybe wasn't intended as patronizing. It's hard to know
the intended tone of the writer on those.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
I always wonder. But that same day, a crew detected
seepage in the railroad embankment and started reinforcing it with
sand bags. But at four seventeen PM, a hole formed
in the embankment and water started rushing toward Vanport.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Both fortunately and unfortunately, because it certainly saved lives, but
it also kept people from being able to save any
of their possessions. It was Memorial Day and the weather
was good. A lot of Vanport's at that point eighteen
thousand residents were away from the city, having picnics or hiking,
or just visiting people who lived elsewhere, so they weren't
home when the flood happened. A series of muddy swampy

(19:36):
areas called slews slowed the water down as it approached Vanport,
giving the people who were home about half an hour
to escape, and once it reached the town, the water
knocked the wooden houses completely off their wooden foundations. People
described the scene as looking like cork floating in a current.
Vanport was virtually completely destroyed. Fifteen people died, although persisted

(20:00):
that it was really a lot more, and numerous conspiracy
theories swirled around the event long after, supposing that there
was a giant cover up of a lot more deaths
that wasn't made public. More than a thousand of the
displaced families, or about six three hundred people total, were black.
That was about a third of Vanport's population. And we're

(20:22):
going to talk about the aftermath of the flood and
what happened after that in Vanport. Right after we pause
for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. The
city of Portland knew ahead of time that it did

(20:44):
not have adequate emergency housing in the event that something
like this occurred. The housing authority had said that it
could house about fifteen hundred people, and the Red Cross
said that it could house seventy five hundred. This was
roughly half the population of Vamport.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
At the time. Overall, white families had an easier time
of finding shelter than black families. Residents resisted the idea
of using churches and schools in white neighborhoods as shelter
for black people, and churches in the black neighborhood were
quickly beyond their capacity. According to local historians. There were

(21:19):
white families who welcomed black refugees from the flood, but
according to the oral histories of black survivors, this was
pretty rare. Many black families displaced by the flood wound
up being housed in abandoned shipyard barracks on Swan Island.
The feeling of a lot of people who were displaced
a Swan Island was that it was dangerous, like a

(21:40):
lot of the housing was right next to the water
and there was no buffer between the housing and the water,
and so a lot of these were families with children,
and people were very concerned about the fact that their
children could drown just being outside of the house, or
not even the house outside of the barracks. Five days
after the flood, refugees asked the housing at the Portland

(22:00):
for non discrimination policies to be part of any plans
for repairs or new housing. A Vanport Tenants League was
formed to try to address former tenants issues with the
Housing Authority, which, as you remember, had been basically acting
as the government of Vanport. In response, city officials branded

(22:21):
the tenants League, which had a significant black membership, as communist.
Survivors of the Vanport flood also tried to get some
relief in court, but they hit numerous dead ends. Several
suits were filed against the Housing Authority, but were dismissed
under an Oregon's sovereign immunity law, which protected the government
from being sued. More than seven hundred claims were then

(22:43):
filed against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act,
but the United States was protected under a law that
the federal government couldn't be liable for flood damage. The
fact that the federal government, the railroad, the state of Oregon,
and a private enterprise were all involved in Vamport's very
existence made the whole thing an astoundingly complex legal tangle.

(23:03):
President Harry S. Truman visited Vanport after the flood, and
cleanup was assisted by the American Red Cross. However, Portland's
white community strenuously resisted additional public housing, and voters repeatedly
rejected attempts to build public housing after the flood. Consequently,
Portland's one segregated black neighborhood, which became known as Albina,

(23:26):
became even more overcrowded than it had been before the war.
This effect became even more pronounced in the nineteen fifties
when a stadium was built in Albina's lower Tip, which
displaced the people had living there who had been living
there into the farther north, but into an area that
wasn't really any bigger. Arguments began in a class action

(23:47):
lawsuit against the government on August sixth of nineteen fifty one.
The court issued its opinion more than a year later,
on September twenty third of nineteen fifty two. The court
found that the Army Corps of Engineers work at the
dikes and railroad embankment was quote honest and competent. It
also found no agency involved, not the Army Corps of Engineers,

(24:08):
not the housing authority, not anyone to be negligent in
the matter of the flood, the failure of the railroad embankment,
or the fact that people had been told that morning
that they were safe. The plaintiffs appealed, and in December
nineteen fifty four, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the lower
court's ruling on the matter. I read the original ruling
and in a lot of ways it was infuriating because

(24:30):
it had language and it about like, it's not proven
that the fact that this railroad trestle wasn't really a
dike was responsible for why it failed. But the legal
scholar who wrote the paper on it was of the
opinion that all of these rulings made sense from a
legal standpoint, like the Oregon really did have a sovereign

(24:51):
immunity law, and the federal government really did have laws
protecting it against being liable for flood damage. Like all
of these things really legally added up. One of that
really erases the fact that the eventual response was basically
to do nothing. The Urban League in the Portland and
Double ACP tried to combat racist housing policies, but even so,

(25:12):
by the sixties, four out of five black people in
Portland lived in Albina, and even today the majority of
black residents of Portland live in its northeast quadrant.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
In nineteen ninety, the Oregonian published a series called Blueprint
for a Slum, detailing redlining and other discriminatory housing practices,
as well as corruption in the mortgage lending industry that
made these same neighborhoods ineligible for home loans. It was
a lot of the same kind of stuff we talked
about in our two part episode on redlining last year.

(25:44):
By twenty fourteen, the focus had shifted to the concept
of gentrification. At this point, housing policies have changed. People
can get mortgages in those neighborhoods, but the result has
been the erasure of a lot of previously affordable housing.
So now the conversation is about how to improve neighborhoods
without pricing the people who live there out of the

(26:06):
neighborhood with no other place to go.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
That's the Vamport flood.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
It's the thing. I've thought about doing this before, but
it is another thing that has made me feel like
we need a not just in the South tag on
our website for the Times that people ask us how
come these things only happen in the South. That is
not true. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

(26:39):
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
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