SYMHC Classics: Vanport Flood

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 and after the flood.

before a vote finally succeeded. Among other things, putting off a constitutional convention meant putting off a final decision on slavery.

punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. However, 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 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 A little later in the year, the punishment was shifted from being lashing to force labor, and the law itself was repealed in eighteen forty five before its punishment clause went into effect after Jesse Applegate replaced Peter Burnett on the council.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

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 other was an exclusion clause similar to the one enacted in eighteen forty nine.

or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein. And 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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

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

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.

also quite noisy. There was very little to dampen the 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.

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

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, 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 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. 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, 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

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 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.

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 Southern bias being shown in Portland's white and black residents alike.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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. 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.

home when the flood happened. A series of muddy swampy 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.

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 neighborhood with no other place to go.

If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.