“The continuation of the savagery of the Vietnam War is unworthy of the dignity of man.” -Linus Pauling, 1965

In 1964, Linus Pauling’s colleague in anti-Vietnam War activism, Corliss Lamont, sent a copy of his 1962 open letter against Vietnam to President Lyndon Johnson. Pauling added his support to Lamont’s action, expressing his agreement with Lamont’s plea that the new President change course and disengage from a policy of military escalation had already “deteriorated almost beyond belief.”

President Johnson did not change course.

Read Part 3 of 7 in an examination of Linus Pauling’s activism against the Vietnam War.

Thanks to Gillian Bergmann, OHBA student extraordinaire, for a suite of posts related to Peter Kopp’s new book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Corliss Lamont

“As individuals who believe that the only security for America lies in world peace, we wish to ask you why at present the United States is sending its Army, Navy and Air Force to bring death and bloodshed to South Vietnam, a small Asian country approximately 10,000 miles from our Pacific Coast.”

-“An Open Letter to President John F. Kennedy Against U.S. Military Intervention in South Vietnam,” April 11, 1962.

In spring 1962, Linus Pauling was in communication with Corliss Lamont, a philosopher and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was organizing an open letter to President Kennedy (which Pauling ultimately signed) opposing military action in Vietnam. Lamont had written to Pauling share the details of his own correspondence with McGeorge Bundy, the U.S. National Security Advisor. Bundy was highly critical of Lamont’s open letter and had provided documents intended to both enlighten Lamont and dissuade him from taking a strong stance against the U.S. position.

Read the whole post on The Pauling Blog. 

[Ed Note: This is part 2 of 7 in our series focusing on Linus Pauling’s activism against the Vietnam War. This is also the 600th post to be released on the Pauling Blog. We thank you for your continued readership.]

Last week the Oregon State Queer Archives hosted its first ever crafting event as part of OSU’s Queer History Month celebrations. We supplied attendees with copies of archival materials, including images from the Pride Center records, old event flyers, After 8 materials, and of course, glitter! One of the main goals of this event was to use archival materials as a way to imagine queer futures, particularly as they pertain to OSU and the surrounding community. Some absolutely fabulous art was created, and many of the artists generously donated their pieces to OSQA.

A flickr set of Glitter in the Archives!

Read the whole crafting event post. 

Father Georges Dominique Pire with a map and model of refugee villages in Europe.

“Our present object is not to apportion blame among the groups of combatants. The one imperative is that this crime against all that is civilized in the family of man shall cease.”

-“An Appeal by Recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize,” 1965

On the 27^th of April, 1965, Father Georges Dominique Pire wrote a letter to all of his fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipients from Aberdeen, Scotland. The letter intended to rally this group in opposition to the Vietnam War. At the time, public opinion in the United States overwhelmingly supported the recent deployment of troops to Vietnam, as ordered by President Lyndon Johnson.This commitment would be increased by December, bringing the total number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam to nearly 200,000.

Linus Pauling, who had been awarded the Peace Prize in December 1963 for his work ushering in a partial nuclear test ban treaty, read Pire’s letter with a heavy heart. Pauling had received notification of his award just as President John F. Kennedy began to increase American involvement in Southeast Asia, and only a month later the President was assassinated. This series of events paved the way for a new Commander in Chief, Lyndon Johnson, to further expand the American presence in the region.

Read part 1 of 7 no the Pauling blog. 

Melody Owen, an artist from the Portland area, is the 22^nd individual to complete a term as Resident Scholar in the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC). The Resident Scholar program, which was established in 2008, awards stipends of up to $2,500 for a month’s study in the OSU Libraries. Previous scholars have included historians, librarians, graduate, doctoral, or post-doctoral students as well as independent scholars.

Owen, whose art often focuses on the fragile state and crucial importance of the earth’s ecosystems, made use of SCARC’s large collection of Pacific Northwest materials. Her research was concentrated on the many collections consisting of materials assembled by the Forest Service sociologist and historian Gerald W. Williams. Working on a continuation of a previous project, Time is a Tree, Owen sought out photographs, postcards, and prints that related humans and trees.

In her Resident Scholar lecture, titled “Poetic Dendrochronology and Human/Tree Portraiture in Historical Photographs from the PNW,” Owen discussed the relationship humans have with trees through the lens of historic photos. Using images from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in which a person or people stand next to a tree, she examined the inclination of humans to take pictures with trees for as long as cameras have existed, and discussed their reasons for doing so.

Owen’s presentation was split into three main themes, which she titled “Time is a Tree,” “Tree Rings,” and “Direction of the Road.” The first theme was dedicated mainly to human/tree portraiture; that is, photographs in which a person or people stand next to a live tree. The next theme focused on photos that showed people next to cross-sections of tree trunks, stumps, and images with loggers. The last consisted of photographs that included roads that had been created to grant public to access the forests.

Owen also discussed the frequency with which people choose to take photos with trees and some potential reasons for doing so, including admiration or sentiment. More specifically, photographs were often taken to emphasize a tree’s beauty or majesty, its immense size compared to the relative smallness of a person, and a person’s skills or bravado in cutting them down.

A majority of the photos, whether or not they are zoomed in on the person, include a massive tree, and in this they convey the awe and admiration that humans hold for these trees, which are so much larger than us. Although many of these photos show only a single person next to an enormous tree, others include groups. Owen discovered that photographs with groups generally focused on only the largest trees and often showed a group posing on the tree – either across the trunk if the tree had fallen or ranged along lower branches or protrusions on the trunk.

In many of the photos, the person depicted is leaning against the tree, reaching out to touch it, or sitting on it. Owen regards this type of portraiture as indicative of our desire to feel closer to nature. Other photos show trees that have been cut down and that are being transported, with people posing next to them. Owen found many of these types of photos, which she speculated may have been so prolific because urbanization was beginning to occur and people began to spend less and less time in the forests. Instead, trees being brought out of the forest were more accessible and still allowed people to experience a connection to nature.

Other photographs show only what was left of these colossal trees after they had been cut and taken out of the forest: the stump. In photos where people posed with tree trunks, Owen found that they often stood on top of the trunk. Owen sees these images as suggesting that the person is an extension of the tree. Logging photos also show the tree after it’s been cut or in the process of being cut. In these, the loggers often pose in the cut they have made in the tree. They also show the tree as a “prize,” like a trophy salmon or elk.

The final type of photo focuses less on the trees and more on the roads that allow access to them. As cars became more popular, so did traveling to awe-inspiring places, including old-growth forests populated by trees that dwarfed the cars driving among them. Popular locations for photographs of this type were areas where trees had had arches cut in them so that cars could drive through. Owen’s selection of photographs from this category included people walking through trees, as well horse-drawn carriages and cars. She saw this series as being a timeline of sorts, showing how, while the world around us has changed, we humans have always been drawn to trees.

Owen plans to use the research that she completed at SCARC to create a book of human/tree photos and writings that relate to the images. This fall, she is also starting a graduate program in environmental arts and humanities at OSU.

The Resident Scholar Program at OSU Libraries is now in its ninth year of operation. For more information about past Resident Scholars, please see the program’s homepage.

Jason Hogstad, a Ph.D. student in the History department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is the twenty-fourth individual to be supported by the Resident Scholar Program, operated by the Oregon State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC). The Resident Scholar Program awards stipends of up to $2,500 for a month’s study in the OSU Libraries. Historians, librarians, graduate, doctoral, or post-doctoral students as well as independent scholars are all welcome to apply.

Hogstad’s visit made use of SCARC’s massive body of agricultural history collections. He focused in particular on the records of Oregon State’s Extension Service and Agricultural Experiment Stations, materials which showcase an important part of the university’s history.

In his Resident Scholar lecture, titled “War on Rabbits Begins Sunday: Ritual Rabbit Slaughter and the Oregon Extension Service,” Hogstad explored the role of the Oregon Extension Service during a period of change. His specific focus was on methods of pest control, rabbit drives and rabbit poisoning in eastern Oregon, and how the standard methods for controlling rabbits changed in the years between 1900 and 1925. In particular, Hogstad wanted to learn why people in eastern Oregon considered rabbit drives, a rather violent form of pest control, to be completely normal, and even fun. He also considered the reasons why people today find this bizarre and inappropriate.

In his presentation, Hogstad led off with a story about a rabbit drive in Echo, Oregon that took place in January, 1904. He explained how hundreds of people from neighboring rural areas, towns, and even cities gathered to kill jackrabbits. In this instance, the participants formed a line and walked through the area, attempting to herd 12,000 jackrabbits into a corral. About half of these were captured in the corral and beaten to death. The other half, however, had escaped, so area farmers asked participants to come back for another drive.

According to Hogstad’s research, this was standard operating procedure for rural communities in eastern Oregon. By the early 1900s, the area had only been settled for about twenty years, and the area was not easy to farm, given that it is very dry and subject to major temperature swings. As farming technology improved, specifically irrigation, more farmers came into the area. And it wasn’t just the human population that was increasing: irrigation increased the amount of food available to jackrabbits, while a bounty on coyotes decreased predation, leading to a boom in rabbit populations.

In response, farmers began to advertise rabbit drives, asking people from surrounding areas to come help. Newspapers published articles vilifying rabbits and advertised rabbit drives and associated activities, such as dinners or a performance from an orchestra. The drives themselves were seen as fun, as a celebration.

In his talk, Hogstad spoke of the rabbit drives as more than a way to remove a threat to farmers’ financial security. They also seemed to provide an outlet for the frustration and lack of control that area farmers grappled with as they sought to make a living in a harsh agricultural environment. Through a contemporary lens, Rabbit drives might now compare to modern fishing tournaments or bird watching events, where the goal is to see how many you can “get.”

Despite the popularity of the drives, they really didn’t make much of an impact on the jackrabbit population as a whole. Indeed, it would take a whole new method of control to bring about the drastic population decline that farmers sought.

The Oregon Extension Service was created in 1911, its purpose being to bring knowledge and information from researchers at Oregon Agricultural College to farmers throughout the state. However, many county agents had trouble convincing farmers to listen to someone whose credentials were mostly academic. Amos E. Lovett was one of these state agents and, in 1915, he put a plan into action that changed the fate of Extension. Seeing increasing rabbit populations and noting the lack of impact that rabbit drives were making, Lovett decided to become an expert in pest control. As such, he began traveling the state, talking with farmers and writing articles.

Lovett and a colleague eventually formed improvement organizations to show farmers how to mix rabbit poison – a combination of strychnine and alfalfa. The clubs also empowered county Extemsion agents to communicate with people in different areas, and to show what they could do for the area’s residents. For the farmers, there was a bit of a catch to the poisoning campaigns: to get poison, they had to join an improvement club. But once they did, the poison was free. Like the rabbit drives, farmers and their families managed to make poisoning campaigns fun, even holding so-called “poison picnics.” And unlike the rabbit drives, poisoning worked: in 1918 alone, an estimated $750,000 worth of agricultural production was saved.

When the rabbit populations around Echo boomed again in 1922, farmers this time turned to an Oregon Extension Service agent. The result was a staggering 110,000 rabbits killed; almost twenty times the number claimed in the rabbit drive held eighteen years earlier.

Near the conclusion of his talk, Hogstad branched out to look at the consequences of the change from rabbit drive to rabbit poisoning. He found that the shift in who was involved in pest control – namely the disappearance of urban residents – changed the ways in which these people viewed agricultural life. This disconnect between rural and urban dwellers inevitably changed the relationship between the two groups of people. Poisoning also turned pest control into an area for experts only, as it now required professionalism and science, not just the enthusiasm that propelled the rabbit drives.

Of course, people were not the only populations affected by the switch to mass poisoning as a method of jackrabbit control. Once jackrabbits were mostly eradicated, the farmers then moved on to other groups of pests, such as mice and ground squirrels, both of which experienced population booms as the jackrabbits, their primary competitors for food, disappeared. Potentially broader impacts on the environment were not considered.

The Resident Scholar Program at OSU Libraries is now in its ninth year of operation. For more about past Resident Scholars, please see the program’s homepage.

The OMA hosted the first of SCARC’s 2016 Archives Month events and we have it recorded for you to view online! “Hear the Stories: Oregon African American Railroad Porters Oral History Collection” featured the oral historian, filmmaker, and educator, Michael “Chappie” Grice sharing the stories of Oregon’s African American railroad porters, including his personal experiences.

Read the rest at http://wpmu.library.oregonstate.edu/oregon-multicultural-archives/2016/10/12/oh-29-event/.

Linus Pauling harvesting abalone, 1963.

In the years immediately following Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s purchase of Deer Flat Ranch, the space quickly fulfilled its potential as a refuge from an extremely busy existence. A few years after buying the property, Ava Helen told her husband

Do you know, we have been here for one week, you and I, without seeing a single other person? This is the first time in our 40-odd years of marriage that this has happened.

More than a refuge even, the ranch gradually emerged as a kind of paradise for the Paulings. One could reliably harvest ten abalone off the adjacent rocks at low tide, and Linus found that he greatly enjoyed harvesting these sea snails with his wife, pounding them shoreside to tenderize them for dinner.

Read the whole post on the Pauling Blog!

This is part 2 of 3 in “The story of Deer Flat Ranch.”