Fossil ‘Bone Wars’ came to Oregon, but just barely

0:00Good morning, Oregon. I'm Finn J.D. John F.J. at OffbeatOrgan.com, and this is the daily Offbeat Oregon History Podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy it. The story was first published on February 2nd of 2013 under the headline Mill Owners Fight with Cities, Sparked Anti-Japanese Riot. Here we go. In the summer of 1925, an event took place in the coast-range town of Toledo that would spark widespread outrage and an international incident. The event was for all practical purposes a race riot, a mob of hundreds of angry white people attacking and evicting a small group of Japanese workers. From a distance, the story looks like an ugly

1:03episode of provincial racists behaving badly and subsequently being punished by the more enlightened, and that's more or less an accurate assessment, but it is incomplete. The real struggle that had come to a head in Toledo that summer day was not between the white residents and the Asian contract workers, but between some of the residents and the absentee owner of the sawmill that dominated their town. Spoiler alert, the sawmill owner was the only winner here, which is a little outrageous considering that he did more than anyone else by a long shot to set the whole thing up. Here's what happened. In the early 1920s, the Pacific Spruce Company sawmill, owned by C. Dean Johnson, utterly dominated the town of Toledo. Thanks to this one mega mill, the town's population had gone from a few hundred to a few thousand in just a few years. Johnson had bought the mill at a tidy discount from the US government after it got out of the Spruce milling business when World War I ended. Johnson lived in Portland, but his son, C. Dean Johnson II, managed the mill and lived in Toledo. The trouble started

2:07when the Johnson started toying with the idea of hiring a contract crew of Japanese workers to pull green chain. The green chain was a conundrum for lumber manufacturers. It's the most grueling work in the mill. Yet under the system they were using in 1925, it requires a high level of skill and judgment. Workers in the 20s had to move fast to grab pieces of finished lumber off the conveyor chain as they moved by and sort them into piles according to quality all on the go. Traditionally, new hires would start out pulling green chain, and after a year or two, they'd move up into less demanding and more prestigious jobs. The trouble was that that left the least skilled workers in the mill doing one of the more important jobs, and the quality of the mill's output was suffering as a result. The Johnson's thought the solution would be to establish a whole new class of workers in Toledo, workers who would just pull green chain, who would be effectively ineligible for promotion to more desirable jobs and who wouldn't be so troublesome. Naturally, that entailed a segregated colony of racially different people.

3:07In the mid-1920s, it was Japanese workers who were available and willing to work under such conditions. 50 years earlier, it would have been Chinese. A century earlier, Irish or maybe African slaves. Today, it would be Central Americans. Well, word of the scheme leaked out early in 1925, and it was not well received. City business leaders asked for a meeting with the younger Johnson, who told them the company was just hiring a dozen or so Japanese workers to plug a gap on the green chain. Nobody whose job was going to be replaced. There's nothing to worry about, but they still worried. And following the meeting, there was a big community meeting after which the city issued a written protest against bringing in, quote, foreign labor. This seems to have made the Johnson's mad. Immediately, they move forward with plans to hire not a dozen, but about 60 Japanese workers through a labor contractor in Portland to house them in a separate cantonment on company property and to replace two shifts of green chain workers with them. To the town's folk, it looked like a confirmation of their worst fears. The Japanese workers would be a beachhead. Their

4:11economic power was their ability to do better quality work than the locals for cheaper. They'd be established in Toledo as a separate colony, not mixing with the town at all, not contributing to the economy in any way. And their numbers would grow until the Johnson's sawmill was a closed system with a town wasting away and demoralized on its outskirts. Essentially, they feared a situation kind of like the one satirized in rural dolls, Charlie and the chocolate factory after Willy Wanka brought in the colony of unpaid but always happy umpa lumpas. But meanwhile, news of the community's opposition had come to the attention of the labor contractor in Portland, and he was not about to send his crew into a dangerous situation to become pawns in a labor struggle. He informed the elder Johnson that the deal was off. Johnson's response was to travel to Toledo, call another town meeting and bully the leaders of the town into rescinding their protest. He insisted that they vote out loud one by one so that the only way to vote against it was to publicly identify oneself as an enemy of the most powerful man in Toledo. Well, he got what he

5:12wanted and the deal was back on. From his office in the Northwest Bank building in Portland, Johnson hastened to reassure the labor contractor that everything was now just hunky dory and his crew would be welcomed in Toledo with open arms. But as the old saying goes, a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. So when that crew of Japanese workers showed up in Toledo, they had no idea that they were about to become pawns in a power struggle between the two great economic forces of the little Timbertown. When the Japanese workers arrived, they barely settled in before a huge crowd formed and moved in on them. The crowd, it was not yet a mob, but it would be shortly planned to make a show of force and, quote, unquote, escorts the Japanese colony out of town. But the crowd was met at the property line by both Johnson's and some of their men all freshly deputized Old West style and they were ready for a fight. Not a fight for the civil rights of the Japanese workers, but a fight to defend their property from what they saw as the outrageous act of meddling in someone else's business.

6:14The members of this crowd don't seem to have been planning to riot and none of them had brought weapons. But when their leader asked to speak to the foreman of the Japanese crew, Johnson shoved him in the chest and told him to get off the property. This transformed the mass of Toledo citizens into an angry mob, which then stormed the place. People got punched, knocked down. A gun taken from one of the mill's defenders was waived around a little, but soon got taken and tossed into the river. In a matter of hours, the Japanese workers were, quote, unquote, escorted to waiting cars and trucks and taken to Corvallus. Some of the townspeople passed a hat to give them some money, but the workers, by now getting over the shock of their treatment and starting to get angry, wouldn't hear of taking it. We don't want that kind of money. Worker Toma Kichigogura told the city marshal when he tried to give it to him. In the aftermath, no charges were filed against anyone. But five of the Japanese workers sued for violations of civil rights. The first case of its kind, and they won a $2,500 judgment against five of the most active participants in the episode.

7:15As for the Johnson's mill, after an internal purge of all employees connected with the riot, it carried on as before. In 1951, it was sold to Georgia Pacific. The story of the treatment of the Japanese workers in Toledo remains as a lingering and embarrassing memory, and a vivid reminder of how much has changed in Oregon since the 1920s. And also, as an uncomfortable reminder of a few things that have not. Key sources in this story include works by Ted Cox and BA Johnson. Well that's our show for today. Thanks again for listening. This podcast is part of Offbeat Oregon History, a public history resource for the state we love. Say are you an audiobook listener? And do you enjoy old pre-war pulp stories like Tarzan of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian and the Call of Cthulhu and stuff like that? Or do you like early Victorian penny-dreadful fiction like Swini Todd and Varney the Vampire and Highwayman Dick Turpin? If so, you might enjoy the audiobooks I have out there in the world.

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