COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL APRIL 4, 2018
9A
Offbeat Oregon History: Mayor Baker's theatre in Portland
By Finn JD John
For The Sentinel
M
ost modern Oregonians
interested in Portland
history don’t quite know what
to make of George L. Baker.
Baker served longer in the
offi ce of Mayor of Portland
than anyone ever has, before
or since. He was hugely popu-
lar among most Portlanders for
most of that time, becoming
known for a kind of adorably
bluff teddy-bear boisterousness.
But he also resorted to fascist
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tactics in opposing labor unions
and other “subversives”; he was
famously friendly with the Ku
Klux Klan; and during Prohibi-
tion, his police department ran
an outright protection racket
among illegal speakeasies and
kept City Hall generously fur-
nished with seized liquor.
Baker got his start as a
Vaudeville showman, and by
the time he was getting into pol-
itics he was running Portland’s
premier stock theater company.
But hardly anyone today under-
stands how important that was.
And the fact is, one can’t un-
derstand Mayor George Baker
without knowing what his the-
ater meant to the Portland of the
1910s.
Stock theatre is something
most Americans today know lit-
tle about. It still exists; but it’s
a faded and impoverished ghost
of what it was at the turn of the
20th century. Usually it’s seen
in the form of local repertory
theatres like the Oregon Shake-
speare Festival in Ashland. It’s
something of a niche art form,
patronized by a small but enthu-
siastic cohort that tends to pride
itself (not without reason) on its
cultural refi nement.
But in 1901, when George
hung out the shingle over his very
own stock-theatre playhouse, that
wasn’t the case at all. Stock the-
atre was a mass-media enterprise,
and it was huge — possibly one
of the fi ve or ten most important
industries in the city. But it was an
industry with a bit of a lingering
reputation problem, dating from
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the years just after the Civil War.
Vaudeville has always had a
bit of a disreputable edge, and
never more so than in the 1870s
in the American West. Compa-
nies toured around the country
like circuses or carnivals. The
shows they performed were of-
ten poorly written and ribald, the
theatres they played in sometimes
doubled as bordellos. The players
were widely considered fast and
disreputable, and although they
usually weren’t, it only took a
few examples to reinforce those
stereotypes.
But local resident players, back
in the early days, were worse.
Vaudevilleans usually weren’t
prostitutes and card-game swin-
dlers. In the frontier town of Port-
land just after the Civil War, lo-
cal players usually were. Venues
like the Oro Fino — owned and
operated by Portland’s fi rst chief
of police, James Lappeus — ac-
tually had little rooms upstairs for
“private theatrical performances,”
and trained mountebanks staffi ng
the gambling tables downstairs to
fl eece the suckers and tenderfoots
and keep the regulars winning
just enough to keep them com-
ing back. Particularly in saloon
settings like the Oro Fino, the
women sometimes would vamp
audience members between sets,
cajoling them into buying them
drinks which they would dump
discreetly into spittoons.
As the town got bigger and
more respectable, though, so did
the theaters. And by the time
George Baker was entering the
fi eld, there were basically two
kinds: Vaudeville houses, offer-
ing cheap shows by the travel-
ing troupes; and big upmarket
mainstream houses, less cheap
but by no means expensive,
which hired their own profes-
sional staff or “stock” of play-
ers.
In this era, live theater was
the preeminent storytelling me-
dium. When the movies came
to prominence after the First
World War, it was live theater
that they essentially replaced.
Live theater supplied the stories
and narratives that Portlanders
used to defi ne themselves and
their world, and it was the most
accessible source of the East
Coast culture that middle-class
Portlanders felt the lack of rath-
er keenly in their rough-hewn
frontier city.
By the turn of the century,
the Baker Stock Theatre was the
center of Portland’s mainstream
social life. Baker positioned it
as a great unifying force: it was
not too high-brow for the aver-
age longshoreman to appreciate,
but not too frivolous for an eru-
dite lawyer to enjoy.
It was strictly G-rated: Mind-
ful of the sketchy reputation of
his industry, Baker took pains
to make his theaters as clean
and wholesome as possible, and
his players — who were part
of the community, of course —
shared that vision. Entire fami-
lies made it part of their weekly
routine, and on Wednesday mat-
inees, babies and children under
5 were allowed.
Baker’s players, especial-
ly the leading ladies and men,
quickly became celebrities.
“We belonged to them,” said
Miss Fay Bainter, the compa-
ny’s leading lady for a time
around the turn of the century.
“We were a part of their lives.
Our position was enviable.
Why, I never had to use a street-
car or taxi. Someone would al-
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ways stop and take you where
you wanted to go.”
For those few years, Baker’s
theater was the cultural epi-
center of Portland. It brought
the upper and lower classes
together, gave young people a
place to meet and get to know
one another, and performed a
community-building function
of which Baker was obviously
very proud.
“Don’t you remember the
way it was?” former leading
man Howard Russel asked an
Oregonian reporter in 1909.
“Why, if the right people did
not occupy the seats we were
accustomed to seeing them in,
we would ask (from on stage),
“Where is so-and-so tonight? I
don’t see them in their regular
seats!’ It was like a family par-
ty.”
It’s this picture of Portland
— an overgrown small town,
rough-hewn but with high cul-
tural aspirations, a town in
which workers and business
executives moved in the same
circles and knew one another’s
families and laughed at the same
jokes and enjoyed the same di-
versions — that has to be kept
in mind when considering the
things Baker became most no-
torious for after he was elected
mayor of Portland in 1917. Be-
cause within just a few years of
his election, that “belle epoque”
Portland was lost and gone.
George knew, and had pre-
sided over, the golden past
that the cultural reactionaries
yearned for as the “Red Scare”
dawned in 1919. He looked at
union representatives fi ghting
to get their members treated
fairly, and saw out-of-town
troublemakers trying to turn
brother against brother for their
own personal gain; so he hired
a secret crew of thugs to fi ght
them. He saw ethnic minorities
and newly emancipated women
infl uencing and changing the
culture he’d helped create in
ways he didn’t like, so he threw
his support behind the “100 per-
cent Americanism” of the Ku
Klux Klan. This is, of course,
no excuse for his quasi-fascist
behavior throughout the 1920s;
but it’s important to know in
evaluating this fascinating and
controversial ex-mayor.
By the end of his time in of-
fi ce, in 1933, Baker was basical-
ly a spent force. Perhaps that’s
because his theater company,
which he hadn’t really been able
to run personally while serving
as mayor, went out of business
in 1922. The golden age of
stock theater was over; its pri-
mary functions had been taken
over by the new Hollywood
feature-length movies. By then
there was a whole generation of
Portlanders who had never been
to Baker’s theater, never met
him working the crowd on open-
ing night, and knew him only as
a back-slapping character about
whom rumors of disreputability
occasionally swirled, presiding
over one of the more corrupt
City Halls on the West Coast.
In 1932, 47 percent of the
electorate voted to recall him
from offi ce. Baker took the hint
and announced he wouldn’t run
for re-election. He died in 1941.
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