Part 2: “Get it Done.”

Spokane’s Founding Political Idea: “Get It Done”

By William Stimson
James N. Glover, a land speculator traveling out of Portland, decided in 1872 that there should be a city beside the Spokane falls, and it has been up to generations ever since to figure out why. Spokane had no seaport and only a weak claim to a place on the national rail lines. A second accident of history, gold and silver strikes in the nearby Coeur d’ Alenes between 1885 and 1910, inflated the population of this accidental community. When the mining fortunes began to ebb after 1910, people found themselves stranded on an inland island with little visible means of support.

No doubt the resulting economic insecurity had a role in forming a certain crabbed thinking in Spokane often noted by newcomers, an insular attitude that, “If you’re not willing to help us, you’re hurting us.”

On the positive side, a sense of common danger encouraged people to work together. The kind of bootstrap cooperation that produced Expo ’74 is common in Spokane’s history. Post Street, over which the controversial River Park Square would be redeveloped in the 1990s, is called Post because Spokane founder Jimmy Glover gave that quarter of Spokane to Frederick Post in 1875. Glover also gave Post enough free lumber to build a flour mill, and then helped him build it. Flour mills were the Nordstroms of their day, a seed development Glover hoped would draw people to Spokane’s anemic downtown.

The Great Northern Tower in Riverfront Park is another symbol of Spokane’s willingness to pull together. In 1892 Great Northern President James J. Hill appeared in Spokane to address a gathering of hundreds of Spokane citizens. With the help of his railroad, he promised, Spokane could “compete with at least, if not surpass, other distributing centers in this vicinity.” However, said Hill, there was one serious problem. The rights-of-way to go through Spokane would cost him $1 million, and he did not want to pay it. “What we ask of Spokane,” Hill told the assembled citizens, “is that from the time we come to the city limits until we go out, that the right-of-way shall not cost us anything.” Then Hill said he had to continue on his travels to the Coast. He would be back in a week. If Spokane wanted the Great Northern Railroad, Hill would need the right-of-way deeds in his hand at that time.

The gathered citizens reacted oddly to Hill’s ultimatum. They cheered him. When Hill returned a week later, local developer John J. Browne presented Hill with deeds for a swath of land through the city, all donated by their individual owners and by the city government. Much later, historians would conclude that Spokane citizens had been “bullied” by Hill. But Spokanites at the time didn’t see it that way. They wanted a new railroad line (the Northern Pacific, they felt, needed competition to keep rates down) and Hill was the one who figured out how to deliver it. That made him the hero of the moment, regardless of his personal gain.

In his book, Shaping Spokane: Jay P. Graves and His Times, historian John Fahey notes the problem in judging developers of the West. Their “mix of acquisitiveness and altruism puzzles later generations.” They developed the land because they thought it was profitable, yet they took satisfaction in doing their part to make Spokane “the kind of city they thought it ought to be.” He illustrates this paradox with the of example Jay P. Graves. Graves relentlessly pursued opportunities he figured would make him rich. Yet, “Graves created hundreds of jobs. He advanced Spokane aesthetically and commercially. He brought [Whitworth] college to the city by giving land for a campus. Everywhere in Spokane the stamp of Jay Graves remains.”

Graves donated 80 acres of South Hill land for a city park only because he knew it would help sell the home lots he was developing around the park. The new homes would need water service, so Graves cleverly stipulated that in order to get the donated park land, the city must extend its water mains, which would then be available to Graves’ house lots. Graves made a killing on his South Hill development. But in laying out some of Spokane’s most beautiful residential lots and in providing the land for Manito Park, he also did something of immeasurable value to the city. Neither side felt ill-used.

Nevertheless, the pioneers who so admired entrepreneurs were not naive. They knew that, just as a deal between two private parties could go against the interests of one side, so could a deal involving the public. But the Spokane community of a century ago had many safeguards.

There were always two or three independent newspapers commenting on city affairs – at various times, the Chronicle, the Review, the Spokesman, the Spokane Press, and others. They tended to be feisty and irreverent toward businesses they didn’t trust. Taken together, that pretty much covered all businesses. When the county commissioners proposed to build a bridge across the river at Maple instead of at Post, the Spokane Review branded it “a $250,000 boodle bridge.” When in that same year, 1892, Lewis Clark, one of Spokane’s substantial citizens, set a high price on land the city needed for a water pumping station, the Review began referring to Clark and his partners as “the Clark gang.”

The first William Cowles consolidated the Spokesman and the Review in 1893, and added the Chronicle to his holdings a few years later. But the papers and Cowles remained outsiders to city hall and temperamentally skeptical of what went on there. A 1909 editorial summed up the Spokesman-Review’s general view of city hall. It said the city council should have no trouble seeing through a private company’s offer to supply the city with water from Priest Lake. “The wheels, however, revolve in mysterious ways in city politics when a big corporation is interested.”

“What we ask of Spokane,” Hill told the assembled citizens, “is that from the time we come to the city limits until we go out, that the right-of-way shall not cost us anything.” The gathered citizens reacted oddly to Hill’s ultimatum. They cheered him.

The political factions of 1900 to 1910 made for a raucous local government.

Deals involving the city treasury were eyed by a diverse city council. As the 20th century opened, Spokane city government was made up of 10 members, two elected from each of five wards, or districts: north, south, east, west, and central. A South Hill council member who voted, for example, to pump city water to Graves’s South Hill homes had to convince the representatives from all other sections of town it was good for the city overall. Those representatives looked hard at such deals because they would have to explain them to their own neighborhoods. Since elections of the day were partisan, if their explanations were weak the other party, Democrat or Republican, would field a candidate against them.

The business community had its own divisions. In general, one business faction consisted of clerks and professionals who lived in the better neighborhoods and desired calm and decent streets. They were represented by department store owners, ministers, and publisher William Cowles. The other side consisted of thousands of railroaders, lumberjacks, miners and farmhands who shouldered the drudgery of building the West, and who liked to drink. They were represented by Spokane’s large industry of brewers and saloon keepers.These factions made for a raucous local government. Everyone had proposals, and every proposal came in for unrestrained criticism. Yet it is hard to find evidence that this contentiousness snarled city government. There were no major scandals or failures. Between 1900 and 1910, Spokane’s population tripled (from about 35,000 to over 100,000). Water lines and sewer lines went in. Most of the downtown streets were paved for the first time in this period. Many of the buildings still existing were approved, constructed and inspected in this decade. The construction of the Monroe Street Bridge was planned and launched. All in all, there was probably no other decade in Spokane’s history in which so much was accomplished.

But many observers of city government felt the constant debates, disputes and factions were obstacles to getting things done. In 1910, these critics, led by the publisher William Cowles, set out to streamline Spokane’s city government.

William Stimson is Director of the Journalism Program at Eastern Washington University and the author of Spokane, An Illustrated History, American Historical Press, 1999.

Next-Part 3: The Election That Changed Spokane’s Politics