Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 8-1981 Trouble in River City: An Analysis of an Urban Vice Probe Joseph S. Uris Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Part of the Public Affairs Commons, Public Policy Commons, and the Urban Studies Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Uris, Joseph S., "Trouble in River City: An Analysis of an Urban Vice Probe" (1981). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 4493. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.6377 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. TROUBLE IN RIVER CITY: AN ANALYSIS OF AN URBAN VICE PROBE by JOSEPH SAMUEL URIS A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in URBAN STUDIES Portland State University ~1981 Joseph Samuel Uris TO THE OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH: The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Joseph Samuel Uris presented August 7, 1981. AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Joseph Samuel Uris for the Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies presented August 7, 1981. Title: Trouble in River City: An Analysis of an Urban Vice Probe. APPROVED BY MEMBERS OF Th£ DISSERTATION COMMITTEE: ABSTRACT This dissertation is an historical case study of a highly publicized . investigation of vice and official corruption which took place in Portland, Oregon from 1954 to 1958. Three major relevant areas of social science literature are reviewed. These are: historical material on American reform and corruption, criminology and political science. This literature suggests both the ubiquity and usefulness of vice and corruption in the urban situation. A set of propositions regarding vice, corruption and reform was developed from these works. These propositions were then examined in terms of the vice probe and political situation in Portland, Oregon. The triangulation method of this study involves three separate data sources : popular accounts in the print media; government documents, including material from the Oregon State Archives, the City of Portland and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field; interviews conducted by the author (1979-1981) with persons who had intimate knowledge of the vice situation, political arrangements or corruption in Portland. This case study has utility and general application beyond the single case illustrated. It demonstrates the functions and limits of corruption and reform. While historical in nature, this study offers insight into processes seen in many cities today. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been accomplished without the help of people from many walks of life. First and foremost, I thank the men and women, famous and anonymous, who shared their unique knowledge of these events. Without their interviews this dissertation would be like a two­ legged stool. Thanks go to the two principal typists: Melinda Burch, who typed the working drafts and interview transcriptions; and Karen Davidson who typed and edited the final product. Thanks also to Joyce Boles, Pat Gold and Catherine Paglin. I gratefully acknowledge the many hours of aid and aJvice given by J.D. Porter, the Oregon State Archivist. Luella Pollock, librarian at Reed College was most generous with materials in Reed's excellent collec­ tion of U.S. Government documents. The Oregonian generously made its Oregon Journal and Oregonian files available. The Multnomah County Library proved a wonderful resource~ I am indebted to my dissertation committee members, Gerald Blake, David Horowitz, Michael Reardon and my Chairman, Hugo Maynard. A Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, National Criminal Justice Education Development Project Fellowship made the initial research for this dissertation possible. For this I would like to thank Don Gibbons, the Project Director. Finally, I dedicate this work to Charlotte Asendorf, whose patience, support, criticism and inspiration made it happen. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS • • . iii LIST OF TABLES • vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION . • . • . The Historical Incident . 4 The Case History •. 5 II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. 7 The Traditional Functionalist View. 8 Marxism and Crime - Left-Handed Functionalism • . 10 The Machines and the Reformers. 16 Organized Crime and Corruption: Four Modern Cases .•••..... 23 The Media and Modern Reform . • • 34 Outsiders and Reform. 36 III METHOD . 38 Triangulation of Sources. .. 38 The Data Sources •. 39 Interview Technique • • 44 Method Summary •..• • • • 50 IV HISTORY OF THE VICE PROBE. • • 52 Overview of the Portland Vice Probe of 1956-1958. 53 v PAGE The Second World War and After, 1940-1948 . 55 The 1948 Reform Movement. 59 Vice S11rvives . • • . 66 The Exposition-Recreation Center Deal - 1954-1956. • . • . • . 71 James Elkins - The Han Who Talked • . 75 Two Papers, Two Views . 76 The Teamsters Hove In . 79 A View From a Distance - The State Capitol. 86 The View From the Grand Jury. • • . 94 The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field Takes on Portland. • . 95 The Journal's View. • . • • . .171 The Schrunk Position and the Portland Network •. 201 v ANALYSIS OF THE PORTLAND VICE PROBE. .209 What Really Happened? . • . • . .209 The Propositions and the Case History . .216 VI CONCLUSION • . • . • . • • . • . .234 BIBLOGRAPHY. • . • • . • . • . 239 LIST OF TABLES TABLE PAGE I Interview Respondents by Category ..•.•..•.• 46 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Perhaps no more connnon image of urban American crime exists than that of the gangster or racketeer who, with cunning and ruthlessness, moves against law and order to establish a violent empire. There are few who have escaped the vision of The Godfather or Public Enemy Number One. In the popular press as well as on the screen, the crime lord is depicted as an aberrant type; a rare, bad breed who, together with the corrupt cop, preys upon the innocence of the law-abiding citizen. Yet the phenomenon of the vice lord, the bribed policeman and the corrupt pclitician survive to reappear in countless cities, many times throughout history. American urban corruption, vice and crime, with their networks of cooperating crooks and political bagmen, is well documented by scholars as well as yellow journalists. The ubiquitous phenomena of vice and its inevitable si~ter, corrup­ tion, have not escaped the attention of modern social science. Indeed, disciplines far apart in perspective have found surprising common ground on the issue. Functional sociologists Robert K. Merton (1949) and Kingsley Davis (1971) focus largely upon how the urban system maintains and perpetuates itself. Marxist sociologists Stephen Spitzer (1975) and Paul O. Hirst (1972) argue that systemic contradictions between classes will bring about inevitable and fundamental social change. Yet both schools of analysis support the overriding notion that organized crime, vice, political corruption and machine politics serve the existing order 2 in a numi:ler of significant ways. In the main, historians of urban machine politics, corruption and reform like Hays (1964), Wade (1968) and Lubove (1969) share this assessment. All three groups see the problem not as an individualistic phenomenon, but rather as a part of the structural context of power and class relations in the urban situation. Four modern cases of urban machines, vice and corruption will be examined in the following pages: Daniel Bell's (1960) study of organized crime, The End of Ideology; Francis and Elizabeth Ianni's (1972) study of an Italian-American crime family, A Family Business; John A. Gardiner's (1970) case study of organized crime in Wincanton, The Politics of Corruption; and William Chambliss' (1978) study of a crime network in Seattle, On The Take. All four studies suggest important structural and functional aspects of the phenomena. All see the phenomena's survival through time in terms of interest groups served by, and/ or in opposition to, the crime, vice and corruption networks surveyed. All emphasize that these occurrences are not individualistic aberrations. Instead, they are seen as serving the interests of groups well rooted in the social structure. Vice and corruption serve the consumer by providing goods and services otherwise not available through legitimate me~ns. They serve the lower strata of society by providing alternate paths to wealth and power. Vice and corruption serve the interests of the corporate and wealthy classes through risk reduction and certainty in what would otherwise be an uncertain, open market. They serve the political elite by securing financial and other support through a network, at once highly structured and informal, of coumitments, sanctions and mutual rewards. Vice and corruption serve existing crime networks by giving them access 3 to the politically and economically powerful. At the same time they offer a measure of protection to all involved from serious formal sanction. Finally, the American phenomenon of corruption, vice, crime syndi­ cation and machine politics permits the public at large the luxury of condemning the very activities it freely enjoys. Morally speaking all have their cake and eat it too. Specifically, as will be shown later, vice and corruption