CHAPTER 31
Old and New Columnists
Portland Item: The "Morning Oregonian has a larger subscription list than any other daily published m the city of Portland"; and "the Daily Times has the largest circulation of any daily paper in the city." Glad to know that they are both doing better than each other.
orange jacobs. 1862.Motto for Bridegroom: Veni! vidi! vici!——I've been! and gone! and done it!
h. r. kincaid, 1865.
No attempt has been made here to give a complete survey of Oregon newspaper volumns and columnists. Eleven have been selected as representative of this form of writing in the state from 1862 to the present. Very definitely, of course, they belong and deserve emphasis in a study of regional literature, since they are local literature in the smallest published unit that can be found and, where they stimulate creative interest in the community and accept contributions from those who live in it, they come as near as anything we have today to being folk literature.
They are neighborly, naive, humorous and philosophic in their regular characteristics, and often use rhyme, sometimes satire, frequently in palatable doses the propaganda of reform, and the pun remains in them a respectable ingredient. Their technique does not hold to the Who, When, Where, Why, What and How of journalism. By being personal, informal, subjective, and loose in unity, their whole form is relaxed. Although run in newspapers and paid for out of newspaper budgets, and having the reciprocal function of winning and holding subscribers, they are literature rather than journalism, and papers that feature them are to that extent literary papers. Their development in Oregon has been extensive, original and influential. Enough of them are buried in old newspaper files in
