The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  At first, John Goldmark was not trusted by many ranchers in the valley, who were suspicious of his Ivy League credentials and his move from New York to the Okanogan. “People always wondered what a guy like him was doing in a place like this,” says R. E. Mansfield, the oldest practicing attorney in the Okanogan Valley. The flip side of small-town security is a type of gossip that can be as lethal as big-city crime. John and Sally Goldmark were assaulted with the worst of this rural specialty. Rumors circulated that John was running a secret operation with his primitive airstrip up there on the plateau. And his wife, Sally—what sort of past had she dragged out from Brooklyn to the Okanogan?

  John could be hardnosed—he did not suffer fools easily—and was always trying to do things differently. Initially, most of the other ranchers laughed at him. But over the years, they paid him the ultimate form of respect: imitating some of his ingenuities. Ten years of ranch life changed his look to that of a typical cowboy—lean, with a weathered face and crew-cut hair, always dressed in jeans and boots and plaid shirts. Yet, he could move just as easily inside a courtroom or a legislative hall as he could on the range. “John Goldmark was the only person I ever knew who made me think: There goes a great man,’ ” says Stimson Bullitt, a prominent Seattle attorney from the family that founded the KING Broadcasting empire. Others said he was too stubborn to like. In later years, he reminded some friends of Hank Stamper, the tough-nutted timberman in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion.

  In the mid-1950s, John served on the Rural Electrification Board, where he was an early proponent of public power, in part to help bring the twentieth century to his ranch and in part to help his neighbors. At the time, even though the Grand Coulee Dam had been operating for more than a decade, electricity in this part of the state was controlled by a private utility, the Washington Water Power Company, based in Spokane, 150 miles to the east. Most of the farmers couldn’t afford its rates. Even those with money had difficulty convincing the company to connect power lines to their remote locations. With construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, then the biggest public-works project in American history, Roosevelt had said, “We are going to see with our own eyes electricity and power made so cheap that they will become a standard article of use.” Such a thought seemed far-fetched. During the Depression, less than half the farmers of Washington had electricity, and only a third in Idaho and Oregon had it. Irrigation water was carried by horse, or hand, or primitive pump. Kitchen tables were lit by kerosene lamps. Homes were heated by wood-burning stove. Roosevelt looked at large sections of the dried-out American Midwest, where the earth was stripped of fertility by savage windstorms, and directed the blank-faced and bankrupt farmers to the area drained by the Columbia, new land holding the promise of accessible water and cheap power, with every farmer a shareholder.

  Washington Water Power, through the faithfully supportive Spokane Spokesman-Review, fought public power and the Grand Coulee Dam as if they were a plague that would wipe out every community in the inland Northwest. The campaign was so relentless that for many years public power was kept out of the hands of the people whose rivers were being dammed for such purposes. Eric Nalder, growing up in the small desert town of Ephrata in the early 1950s, was ashamed to mention that his father was an engineer on the Coulee Dam for fear of being taunted by his neighbors. Advocates of the dam were called “Coulee Communists.”

  John Goldmark maintained that the ranchers and poor farmers of the Columbia had a God-given right to affordable electricity from hydropower, a campaign theme that helped him get elected to the state legislature in 1956, as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district. He was twice reelected. By his third term, he was chairman of the key House Ways and Means Committee, and used his position to push for increased public power, more park space, libraries, better roads. By the time 1962 rolled around, John’s reelection seemed like a sure thing. But right from the start, things were different in this campaign. In announcing John’s intention to run for a fourth term in the legislature, the local Tonasket Tribune carried a story in which it was said that “Goldmark is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization closely affiliated with the Communist movement in the United States.” The story mentioned that Goldmark’s oldest son, Chuck, was a freshman at Reed College in Portland, “the only school in the Northwest where Gus Hall, secretary of the Communist Party, was invited to speak.” John knew some people in the valley didn’t like him; but this was poison.

  The Tonasket paper was owned and edited by Ashley Holden, who for many years had been political editor of the Spokesman-Review, where he helped direct the long, losing fight against public power. “His hatred of anybody who advocated publicly owned electricity was so strong, it was almost like a mental illness with him,” said Bob Dellwo, a lifelong Democratic Party activist from Spokane and an ex-FBI agent who spent decades fighting Holden and the Spokesman-Review, “If you were in favor of public power, the Review and the Washington Water Power Company considered you the closest thing to a Communist.” However, one by one, the rural counties of eastern Washington shook off the Washington Water Power Company and set up public utility districts, which they used to provide their neighbors with some of the cheapest electrical rates in the world. In his sixties, Ashley Holden left Spokane for the small-town bully pulpit of the Okanogan Valley paper, which he endowed with the masthead slogan, THIS IS A REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY—LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY!

  The second shot against Goldmark came from Albert Canwell, an embittered former legislator who operated as a self-described expert on international Communism from his home on the Little Spokane River. Some men play golf for a hobby, Canwell once said, “I collect information on the Communists.” With Holden’s help, Canwell circulated a tape in the valley, a question-and-answer session in which the expert, Canwell, answered his own questions. In the tape, Canwell mentioned John Goldmark’s affiliation with the ACLU, “one of the most effective Communist fronts in America.” Next, he and Holden published part of that tape in a private newsletter, where they questioned why Goldmark, “a brilliant young lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law School, a nephew of Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court,” had chosen to become a rancher in the distant Okanogan.

  In late summer, Canwell and Holden took their campaign to a packed meeting at the American Legion post in Okanogan. Goldmark and his friend, local state senator Wilbur Hallauer, asked to speak, and were told they could not. The ACLU was the stated topic of the night, but Goldmark was the evening’s true target. As several hundred people filed into the overheated Legion post on a summer night, Canwell handed out an open letter addressed to Sally Goldmark, in which he asked her if the Communist Party, “knowing your secret,” had pressured her into drafting left-wing legislation for the state of Washington.

  The Depression had been very hard on the family of Sally Ringe. The daughter of German immigrants, she was forced to give up her studies at medical school after her father went into bankruptcy. She worked in a New York soup kitchen for a while, seeing the faces of the broken men and women of the 1930s, day in and day out. Idealistic and outspoken, she joined the Communist Party in 1935. She paid her dues and attended meetings for six years. Shortly after, she met John Goldmark, she lost interest in the party—Hitler’s alliance with Stalin had changed the minds of millions in America and Europe—and she quit. She later cooperated with the FBI when two men came to the ranch in 1949 to ask about her background. She was found to be so harmless that her husband, who had remained active in the Navy Reserve as a commander, was twice given top officer security clearances. In the Okanogan Country, she was active in the Grange, the PTA, the 4-H Club and the county-fair board. But Sally’s years as a Communist would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  At the Legion meeting on that summer night in 1962, Canwell preached against the Communist in their midst with the vigor of a televangelist reaching for a ratings point. He handed out a Washington ACLU chapter newsletter with Goldmark’s name on the masthe
ad, and then told the farmers and ranchers that the ACLU was “the major Communist front operating in the state of Washington.” In those days, calling somebody a Communist was the same as branding him a traitor; it was a word effortlessly hurled at many prominent citizens. For nearly an hour Canwell spun tales about hidden agents and threats from within. You couldn’t trust anyone. Communists were gaining force on both borders, and operated “both within and without,” he said, “like an octopus.” He sat down to thundering applause. Then John Goldmark tried to speak for five minutes, saying the ACLU reflected the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He was hooted down. When his friend Wilbur Hallauer tried to speak, the mob turned mad. “Get him out of here!” they yelled at their longtime state senator, and he was pushed off the stage.

  Goldmark later said that looking into the enraged eyes of the people who had been his friends and neighbors for sixteen years sent a chill down his spine. He felt as though he were surrounded by a lynch mob. Who were these people? What had happened to the tolerant Westerners, free-thinking and independent, who would help you fix your fence if you bucked bales in return, who judged you by what you did instead of what was said about you, who never asked where you went to school or what your father did for a living? In the Okanogan Country, there was no hint of the restrictive class system of some circles of the East, where school ties and family connections could bind or exclude for life. But there was this, the noose of the rural West.

  The Canwell speech was summarized that week in Ashley Holden’s newspaper, under the headline COMMIE FRONT EXPOSED BY AL CANWELL IN LEGION TALK. In the same issue, he wrote an editorial in which he said John Goldmark “is a tool of a monstrous conspiracy to remake America into a totalitarian state which would throttle freedom and crush individual initiative.…” Two weeks later, John Goldmark was defeated for a fourth term in the state legislature by a three-to-one margin. In a newsletter published after the election, Canwell described his Legion Hall talk as “the bullet that got Goldmark.”

  Shunned by neighbors, thrown out of office, his family tortured by further gossip, John called on his friend Bill Dwyer, who at thirty-three was just coming into his own as one of the best young lawyers in the Northwest. Goldmark wanted to sue for libel. Dwyer said it would be tough. Goldmark had never directly been called a Communist—just a stooge, dupe and tool of their invisible conspiracy. Goldmark decided to press forward. On November 4, 1963, more than a year after the smear campaign, the trial opened. Twelve jurors—three sawmill workers, two apple farmers, an unemployed construction worker, a beekeeper, an Indian, two wives of cattlemen, a state employee and a cook at the local chow house—were impaneled to pass judgment on the claims of their neighbor, who had since become a stranger. They filed into court dressed in overalls and stained shirts and worn workshoes. The same type of folks who were ready to hang John Goldmark in the Legion meeting one year earlier were now asked to examine the truth behind their community’s hysteria.

  For two months, they heard from a range of national experts—United States Senators and prominent ex-Communists among them. A witness for Goldmark was Sterling Hayden, the actor, who said, “I was perhaps the only person who ever bought a yacht and joined the Communist Party in the same week.”

  Three weeks into the trial came some startling news—the young President, John F. Kennedy, had been shot.

  “Who shot him?” Canwell asked Richard Larsen, a reporter for the Wenatchee World.

  “Whoever it was, I hope he was a good shot,” Ashley Holden replied.

  Kennedy’s accused killer had been to Moscow and Cuba, and was a professed Marxist. What would this do to Dwyer’s careful dismantling of the conspiracy theory? Goldmark feared the worst. But jurors were already with him, Thompson said later. “We knew he’d been screwed,” he told me. “You can’t do that to a guy, no matter what you think of him, and get away with it.” For all the experts brought from distant cities to the small town covered by ice-fog in midwinter, nobody was ever able to connect the ACLU or John Goldmark to a conspiracy to remake America into a totalitarian state. Testimony from twenty years of government Red hunts failed to provide a single nugget to back the claims made against him.

  In closing arguments, Joseph Wicks, a defense attorney, again raised the question of why an educated man would choose to live in such wild country. Said Wicks: “He, the brilliant student of government, of political science and of law, of human nature, settles for a cow ranch in Okanogan County where he didn’t know whether apples grew on trees or on a vine, where he didn’t know which end of the cow gave milk or which end of the cow ate the hay.”

  The vitriol pouring forth was so strong that Sally Goldmark started trembling. Wicks acknowledged that the smear had riled up the community. “Sure, it creates hatred. And isn’t it about time that we had a little hatred for those people that declare that ‘We will bury you?’ ” Wicks quoted Scripture, then pounded his fist down. “What is God to an atheistic Communist?” At that, Sally burst into tears and ran from the courtroom.

  In rebuttal, Goldmark’s attorneys played on the jurors’ sense of decency. Just as a terrible lie could spring from this wide-open country to ruin a man, so could a judgment of simple wisdom and fairness. “Life is only good in a community where freedom and justice are preserved for everybody, not just for a few,” said Dwyer. His colleague, R. E. Mansfield, responded to the venom of Wicks with a Biblical quote of his own. He chose his words from the Book of Proverbs: “A man that beareth false witness against his neighbor is a war club and a sword and a sharp arrow.” Twenty-two years later, the verse would prove to be prophetic.

  The Goldmarks won; the first part of this story is an American fable, where truth, justice and tolerance win out over evil. After five days of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict against Ashley Holden and Albert Canwell—the largest libel verdict in state history at the time. Gerald Thompson remembers sitting up in the attic of the old concrete-covered Okanogan County courthouse, watching the snow bury his car down below. The jurors were angry at what their community had done to the Goldmarks, he said, and they wanted to make it right. With the verdict, Thompson went back to his orchard near the Canadian border, convinced that never again would anyone call a decent man a traitor in the Okanogan Valley and get away with it.

  More than a quarter-century after the trial, R. E. Mansfield is still practicing law in the Okanogan Valley, as he has done since 1937. In his law office hangs a poster-size picture of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt. The valley, slowing down for the winter, looks much the same as it did during the Goldmark trial. But some things have changed. The biggest employer, the timber mill in Omak, has just been purchased by its union employees, making it one of the largest businesses in the West owned by its workers. A worker-owned timber mill—in the old days of the Okanogan Valley such a move would surely be labeled a Communist takeover; today, the local newspaper hails the employee buyout as a bold stroke for community ownership and self-destiny. Mansfield, who faced some lean times after he represented Goldmark, is a beloved figure in the valley; he now plays cribbage with one of his worst enemies, “a guy who hated my guts and believed I was a dyed-in-the-wool Commie.” The John Birch Society, whose members saw Communists behind every apple-storage bin, has all but vanished.

  What happened to the Goldmarks—both generations—brings tears to the eyes of a man who is usually never without a joke. Mansfield has never stopped thinking about that family. After the 1963 trial, the Goldmarks recovered their reputation, but never put their lives completely back together. Four years after the verdict, on a cold winter day, John was bucked from a horse in a distant part of the ranch. When Mansfield and others finally found him, he was seriously injured and near death from the onset of hypothermia. Several hip operations failed to restore adequate movement. He moved to Seattle, where he practiced law for several years. After a long fight with cancer, he died in 1979. Six years later, Sally Goldmark died of emphysema just before her oldest son and his fa
mily were butchered.

  Still, the libel trial had done to the Red Scare what the Scopes monkey trial had (at least temporarily) done to Creationism. Bill Dwyer wrote a thoughtful and moving account of it titled The Goldmark Case: An American Libel Trial. In 1988, after one of the longest delays for any judicial appointee in modern times, Dwyer was approved by Congress as a United States District Court judge in Seattle. During the nearly two years that elapsed after he was first nominated, critics said Dwyer was unqualified to be a federal judge because he had done volunteer work for the ACLU.

  Mansfield believes that the Goldmark trial changed life in the Okanogan Valley forever. It had always been the type of open country, in appearance, that could stir poets from Winthrop to Wister. What has changed following the Goldmark trial is that the people opened up a bit, too.