OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
In 1974, the novelist and psychedelic evangelist Ken Kesey got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to run an event he called the Bend in the River Council. This was an experiment in state-level direct democracy: town meetings across Oregon would elect a slate of 100 or so delegates who'd meet for a four-day conference in Bend. After taking in a lecture series, the delegates would come up with a menu of policy proposals on the issues of the day, which would then be presented to voters in a "Media Referendum" via newspapers and radio broadcasts.
The conference took place in July, at the height of Watergate, and its recommendations (see below) definitely captured a certain zeitgeist. Featured lecturers included Arcosanti founder Paolo Soleri, alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil, David Brower of the Sierra Club, and Wayne Morse. Morse was then running for his old Senate seat, which he'd lost six years earlier; he apparently gave the best-received speech of the event, an incendiary attack on Nixon which referred to the Council as a result of the American people's estrangement from an increasingly undemocratic federal government. It was one of his last public appearances: he died on the campaign trail several weeks later.
There is, of course, a reason I've had to learn all of this from historic newspaper databases rather than from a book. The Bend in the River Council didn't make much of a splash. I only found out about it in the first place from a throwaway line in an article about the poet Walt Curtis, who was a delegate. Kesey and his fellow organizers received 4,822 ballots back in the weeks after the conference, which is not a particularly impressive showing. (One actual accomplishment of the conference seems to have been encouraging conversation between people from different socioeconomic and regional backgrounds. Not all the delegates were hippies - a lot were farmers adamant about preventing the construction of suburbs on good agricultural land, and two interviewed by the Oregonian were real estate developers who bucked their tribe by supporting Tom McCall's land use laws. I will say though that communicating across political divides is something Kesey was always pretty good at so I'm not sure that's evidence of a broad constituency for any of this stuff absent his personal charisma and ego.)
So this thread isn't a "WI all these ideas became law," because that was never going to happen. I'm posting this less as a scenario in itself (although it could be fun to speculate on Morse living long enough to return to the Senate as an even more radical gadfly) and more as a sort of resource for radical ideas that were being floated in 1974. Particularly fascinating is the "Law and Community" question about electronic data privacy and ownership, which is almost chronauseatingly ahead of its time. These folks were thinking about people's rights over their personal digital information before the internet existed!
Here's the ballot:
I still haven't found a tabulation of the results, but apparently the self-selected electorate voted 78% to 17% in favor of amnesty for draft resisters, 86% to 7% in favor of the elected energy commission, and 92% to 4% in favor of the electronic data veto.
The conference took place in July, at the height of Watergate, and its recommendations (see below) definitely captured a certain zeitgeist. Featured lecturers included Arcosanti founder Paolo Soleri, alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil, David Brower of the Sierra Club, and Wayne Morse. Morse was then running for his old Senate seat, which he'd lost six years earlier; he apparently gave the best-received speech of the event, an incendiary attack on Nixon which referred to the Council as a result of the American people's estrangement from an increasingly undemocratic federal government. It was one of his last public appearances: he died on the campaign trail several weeks later.
There is, of course, a reason I've had to learn all of this from historic newspaper databases rather than from a book. The Bend in the River Council didn't make much of a splash. I only found out about it in the first place from a throwaway line in an article about the poet Walt Curtis, who was a delegate. Kesey and his fellow organizers received 4,822 ballots back in the weeks after the conference, which is not a particularly impressive showing. (One actual accomplishment of the conference seems to have been encouraging conversation between people from different socioeconomic and regional backgrounds. Not all the delegates were hippies - a lot were farmers adamant about preventing the construction of suburbs on good agricultural land, and two interviewed by the Oregonian were real estate developers who bucked their tribe by supporting Tom McCall's land use laws. I will say though that communicating across political divides is something Kesey was always pretty good at so I'm not sure that's evidence of a broad constituency for any of this stuff absent his personal charisma and ego.)
So this thread isn't a "WI all these ideas became law," because that was never going to happen. I'm posting this less as a scenario in itself (although it could be fun to speculate on Morse living long enough to return to the Senate as an even more radical gadfly) and more as a sort of resource for radical ideas that were being floated in 1974. Particularly fascinating is the "Law and Community" question about electronic data privacy and ownership, which is almost chronauseatingly ahead of its time. These folks were thinking about people's rights over their personal digital information before the internet existed!
Here's the ballot:
I still haven't found a tabulation of the results, but apparently the self-selected electorate voted 78% to 17% in favor of amnesty for draft resisters, 86% to 7% in favor of the elected energy commission, and 92% to 4% in favor of the electronic data veto.
Last edited: