Description
In chronicling the life of Oregon governor and newspaper editor Charles A. Sprague, Floyd McKay guides readers during the politics and journalism of twentieth-century Oregon. Newspaperman Charles Sprague, a progressive Republican, had lived in Oregon for handiest thirteen years when he become the surprise victor of the 1938 gubernatorial race. Despite the fact that a capable governor, Sprague gained greater prominence all through his forty-year tenure as editor and publisher of The Oregon Statesman in Salem. It used to be to Sprague’s day-to-day front-page column, “It Turns out To Me, ” that Oregon politicians looked for advice, and the column used to be required reading for other editors as they shaped a moderate Republican image for postwar Oregon. McKay examines the influence of Sprague’s involvement within the Progressive politics of Theodore Roosevelt, his return to Republican orthodoxy, and his later emergence as a spokesman for liberal positions on race and justice, an evolution shaped by his governorship and service on the United Nations. Sprague’s decisions – and later atonements – concerning ultra-patriotism in World War I and internment of Japanese Americans in World War II reveal an editor and governor torn by issues of his day.