Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,620

This is the grave of Douglas McKay.

Born in 1893 in Portland, Oregon, McKay grew up pretty poor and had to drop out of school to work. But he really wanted an education. So he worked and did what he needed to do and found his way to Oregon State in Corvallis as an agriculture student. It’s still a cow-tipping kind of school today. He graduated in 1917 and then went into the Army to fight World War I. He was a first lieutenant and suffered a severe injury. His whole right side got hurt (I’m not sure if he was actually shot or whether it was something else) and he was awarded the Purple Heart for it. But it also meant that his desired career as a farmer wasn’t going to happen because he couldn’t handle the physical side of it. So he moved to Portland and went into insurance and then sold cars. He started his own dealership, selling Chevrolets in 1927, and he soon expanded this into perhaps Oregon’s first car dealer empire. He would later become president of the Oregon Automobile Dealer’s Association.

Now, we have talked around here before about how car dealers are pretty much the most right-wing people in the country, the classic Buddy Garrity Republican. Let’s just say that’s nothing new under the sun! Douglas McKay was the classic Buddy Garrity Republican for this era, a man who considered himself SELF MADE and hated the idea of anyone getting in the way of what HE BUILT. At the moment in time that he was opening these dealerships, he didn’t have to worry about it too much. It was the era of Coolidge and Hoover after all. Even when the Great Depression hit, Hoover and the entire Republican Party simply weren’t going to do anything to help the poor. The voters made them pay repeatedly, just creaming them in the 1930, 1932, 1934, and 1936 elections.

By this time, McKay had decided to take his conservative politics into the electoral realm himself. Now based in Salem, he was elected mayor of that boring state capitol in 1932. He then went to the state senate in 1934 and served four terms. During World War II, he rejoined the military in some capacity, which surprises because of his physical issues, but whatever office he worked in, he rose to major.

In 1948, McKay ran for governor of Oregon. Despite what people think of the state today, for most of the twentieth century, it was really quite conservative and that included both parties. Oregon was one of the states where FDR tried to interfere in Democratic primaries in 1938 to get rid of right-wing Democrats who opposed the New Deal, for example. Didn’t work out better for FDR there than it did in the South. Well, the Republican Party was certainly no better. McKay won that race on a platform of fiscal conservatism. He saw Oregon’s robust natural resources as there for development. That didn’t make him so different per se from the state’s liberals, but development could mean different things. Who would benefit? Did any of these resources have a chance for preservation? What about labor unions? Could they influence these questions? For McKay, the answer was generally that employers would benefit and labor might benefit, but only as workers, not as policy creators. This mattered in an era where the International Woodworkers of America were actively trying to reshape the national conversation of logging in order to push for selective logging that would maintain forests and jobs instead of the industrial clearcutting that would sweep all the trees away and then the jobs too.

So McKay opposed the Columbia Valley Authority proposed for the region. The Tennessee Valley Authority was a huge success on its own terms, but the idea of public power outraged conservatives. The CVA had huge support among Northwestern liberals, but for McKay, all development must come from the private sector, for the private sector. This kind of attitude did lead to useful government investments at times, such as promoting the building of a more advanced state highway system. But McKay was really conservative on these natural resource issues.

McKay was not thrilled about Dwight Eisenhower’s nomination in 1952. He was a Bob Taft guy, all the way. But he also knew that no one could beat Eisenhower, so he gave him an early endorsement. Eisenhower then paid McKay back by naming him Secretary of the Interior.

Now, people have this twisted idea of the Eisenhower administration as some kind of respectable liberal Republicanism that we would like to have today. And I guess we have to give Ike credit; he did not attempt to roll back the entire New Deal, as Robert Taft and many Republican voters and Doug McKay would have liked. But he was plenty right-wing for the time and many of his appointees were horrible, especially in the more regulatory agencies. That included Ezra Taft Benson in Agriculture and of course McKay. This doesn’t even get into Ike’s pushing of the termination program of Native American tribes, putting him right there with Andrew Jackson as the worst president on indigenous issues in American history. We should put this myth of Eisenhower the Reasonable Republican to bed. Looking at McKay’s tenure at Interior can help us accomplish this task.

McKay’s first task at Interior was to fire as many people as possible. Got to get rid of those Big Government Deep State Liberals! He fired 4,000 Interior workers and reduced its budget by $200 million. He wanted to dam every river in the West and that included in Dinosaur National Monument. The attempt to dam Dinosaur is, along with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the most important foundational moment in the modern environmental movement. The Sierra Club sprang into action, becoming political for the first time its history (which made a lot of its members uncomfortable) and engaging in a national lobbying campaign to save Dinosaur. McKay was their enemy and he thought of them the same way. He ensured that the Hells Canyon dam projects would be under private hands instead of publicly run like the TVA. He had big giveaways to private companies to harvest timber in Oregon, making him tons of enemies at home and getting him the nickname of Giveaway McKay.

McKay also pushed hard for Termination of the tribes relationship with the federal government. The idea here was to strip them of their tribal holdings and force them to integrate with society. Because the Bureau of Indian Affairs is under the Department of Interior, which says plenty about how the government thought about Indians–give them away like the land where they lived–McKay was a critical figure here. One of the real disasters of this program was with the Klamath in Oregon. Holders of rich timberlands, the government paid them off with a one-time payment, then the timber companies went in and raised hell in the forest. Meanwhile, the Klamath fell into rapid poverty, without the natural resources they could have managed collectively for the tribe, without access to the land where they had sustained themselves for generations both in terms of food and spiritually, and completely ignored by the state that claimed this was good for the tribes. He directly interfered with Oregon tribes trying to resist Termination and it was the tribes in that state most attacked by the program, thanks in no small part to McKay and his timber industry allies who wanted that wood. It was a disgusting, horrifying process and Douglas McKay deserves more than his share of responsibility for it.

By 1956, Eisenhower knew he needed a reset at Interior. He urged McKay to step down to run for the Senate against Wayne Morse, who everyone hated personally no matter the party but who was a tough politician. McKay did and then proceeded to lose in the general election. Oregon conservation groups went all-in to elect Morse.

McKay had a heart attack in 1959 that killed him. He was 66 years old.

Douglas McKay is buried in Belcrest Memorial Park, Salem, Oregon.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of the Interior, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oscar Chapman is in Arlington and Fred Seaton is in Hastings, Nebraska. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.