Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,743

This is the grave of Robert Belloni.

Born in 1919 in Myrtle Point, Oregon, Belloni was the first person in his family to attend college, at the University of Oregon, where he graduated in 1941. He then fought in World War II, working in field hospitals in the Pacific. After returning from Asia, he enrolled at the University of Oregon Law School and graduated from there in 1951, passing the bar shortly after. He started his own law practice, often representing injured workers in Coquille and Myrtle Point, which is in the southwestern part of the state, just in from the coast. This was logging and farming country. Plenty of injured workers there, especially logging, still one of the most dangerous occupations in the country.

Belloni was a strong New Deal Democrat and he had some political ambition. He became a city councilman in Myrtle Point and then was mayor. He wasn’t a major player or anything, but he was known statewide and was close to Wayne Morse, which itself is interesting because Morse was so personally detestable that almost everyone who knew him hated him. That’s outside of politics. People really just hated Wayne Morse, a bit in the way they hate Ted Cruz today in that he was personally repulsive, egotistical, and made sure you knew everything was all about him all the time.

Anyway, Belloni was locally important in southwestern Oregon and so in 1957, Governor Robert Holmes appointed Belloni to the state judicial court covering Coos and Curry Counties. He took the job seriously and rewrote the state’s juvenile justice code to keep them out of jail whenever possible. In order to avoid having to send kids to the state’s reform school, which is a misnomer if there ever was one since it’s basically a full-on prison, he started his own alternative. The Bob Belloni Ranch was a residential program near Coos Bay that opened in 1968, focusing on community based treatment intended to keep kids out of the law enforcement system. It seems to have closed in recent years, but was a positive thing. Here’s a description of its work.

In 1967, Lyndon Johnson nominated Belloni to the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. This was mostly Morse’s doing, taking care of his friend. The Senate confirmed. Very quickly, Belloni became controversial.

See, the New Deal Democratic world had no place in it for Native Americans. People have often derisively noted how Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. never mentioned Cherokee Removal in The Age of Jackson. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Having read pretty deeply in New Deal primary sources, these people simply had no vision of Native America at all. They had a vision of America that was deeply Turnerian, and here I am talking about people far more to the left than someone like Schlesinger too. It was a vision of white American progress, of men wresting profit from the land, and now of men reaping that profit since corporate domination was tamed. This is all over the WPA murals, for example.

This vision of America was also at the core of working class support for Democrats. This was a government that worked for the white man, basically. And if it worked for the Black man sometimes too, well, alright I guess, in certain circumstances so long as the white man remained safe in his dominance. The idea of the working class economy could be attached to liberalism and even leftism so long as it seemed the government reinforced the settler culture that had created historical beliefs about itself where white men had wrested control over the land from the elements, from the Indians, and now from the corporations.

This is where Belloni comes into play because by the late 1960s, the Democratic Party started to take Indigenous claims on the land more seriously. Belloni would be the key judge on one of the two biggest Native fishing rights cases in the Northwest. The one he did not rule on was the most important of them all–1975’s U.S. v. Washington, better known as the Boldt decision named for the judge who decided correctly that treaties with the Tribes actually mattered and needed enforcing and thus they had very real fishing rights. But Belloni was the presiding judge of the precursor that laid the groundwork for Boldt.

First, there was Sohappy v. Smith The Sohappy family was a Yakama family that did not put up with shit from whites who did not want them fishing. They knew the treaties and they would get arrested for enforcing them. Many times in fact. The Sohappys were hated among white fishing communities of Oregon and Washington. In this case, and I am quoting a summary here:

Fourteen individual members of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakima Indian Nation filed this case against the members and director of the Fish Commission of the State of Oregon and the Oregon State Game Commission seeking a decree of the federal district court of Oregon defining their treaty right “of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places” on the Columbia River.

There was another case going on at the same time. The federal government had sided with the Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce Reservations (I am not using Tribes here because Warm Springs is not a tribe, but a bunch of tribes thrown together on one reservation) against the state of Oregon for denying them their treaty-based fishing rights. The two cases got thrown together as U.S. v. Oregon. Belloni was the judge and he issued a decision in favor of the Tribes and he decreed what became known as the Fair Share Doctrine, which basically meant the federal government didn’t have much power to regulate Native fishing at traditional sites protected by the treaties. That laid the groundwork for Boldt. The idea of “meaningful participation” in the decision meant that the state and federal government now had to take the Tribes seriously in fishery management.

It’s hard to overstate the blow up about this case and then Boldt. Even strong liberal politicians reacted strongly against it. See, this happened at the same time that salmon populations were declining generally, thanks to a century of extreme white overfishing. The economy of the white fishermen was already in decline. Now those whites felt themselves under attack not only from a changing ecosystem that they caused, but now the resources weren’t even for them? They were for Indians????. And it was decided by some judge with some Portland and Seattle liberal environmentalists behind the Indians? For these working class whites, this was a betrayal of their economy, their race, and their historical visions of themselves all at the same time.

As I write my book on the modern Northwest and try to explain how the white working class turned from the New Deal base of the Northwest to far right politics, there’s a lot of stories like this. This is why present debates about the white working class and Trump are so stale. It’s not just that it is race or it is “economic anxiety,” as all of you like to smugly make fun of. It’s that these two things can’t be separated. White supremacy and the development of the economy were literally the same thing. The Democratic Party was of course morally correct in its position to begin embracing the Tribes. Unfortunately, this happened at the same time and by many of the same people who were between indifferent and hostile to unions (among those young Democrats of this moment moving to the right on economic issues include Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, and Jerry Brown) and what happened to the white working class during broader economic transitions caused by globalization and deindustrialization and ecological collapse. But it was sure easier for workers to blame the Indians and the hippies and the courts and the big city elites than to focus on the vagaries of globalization. All of a sudden, it felt like everyone was attacking the white worker, which in the Northwest meant the extractive industry worker. Trump’s nostalgic appeals is repealing all of this at once. This history is, I admit, a lot more complicated than to explain in an already too long grave post about a guy none of you have probably ever heard of before this. But if you think this is all bullshit, you have to be able to explain, for example, why northern Idaho remained a Democratic stronghold through 1992, when those counties almost all voted for Bill Clinton and then by 1994 they had all completely embraced the far-right demagogue Helen Chenoweth for Congress because she tapped into their multiplicities of anger about the government abandoning them.

U.S. v Oregon dominated Belloni’s career. He oversaw the enforcement of the case for the next twelve years. He finally left it in 1980, stating that his dozen years of studying the issue left him so outraged at the mistreatment of the Tribes that he could no longer be a neutral arbiter. Belloni also continued his work on sentencing reform in these years and also had important rulings on cases involving asbestos exposure and the Dalkon Shield contraceptive. Not sure of the details here. There’s an oral history with Belloni at the Oregon Historical Society but it doesn’t look like it’s been transcribed.

Belloni retired in 1984, going into senior status. He went into inactive senior status in 1995 and died in 1999, of congestive heart failure. He was 80 years old.

Robert Belloni is buried in Norway Cemetery, Norway, Oregon, which is basically Myrtle Point.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in Native fishing rights, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Billy Frank is in Nisqually, Washington and Richard Sohappy is in White Swan, Washington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.