William Simon U’Ren

• William U'ren
• Born: January 10, 1859
• Died: March 8, 1949

Political reformer, the first of three sons and the second of five children of William Richard U’Ren and Frances Jane (Ivey) U’Ren, was born in Lancaster, Wisconsin. His parents, who came from a long line of religious dissenters, were followers of John Wesley when they migrated from Cornwall, England. They drifted away from Methodism, but Bible readings remained a family tradition and U’Ren described himself as a Protestant. U’Ren’s father, a blacksmith and homesteader, embraced socialism in his later years. Because of frequent family moves, young U’Ren attended public schools in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

At seventeen, U’Ren left home to work in Colorado mines and then as a blacksmith in Denver. He attended evening sessions at the Denver Business College during the winter months of 1878 and 1879. Between 1879 and 1881, he read law in the office of France & Rogers of Denver. Campaigning for Republicans in 1880 alerted him to the corrupt political practices of the day. Admitted to the Colorado bar in 1881, U’Ren practiced in three Colorado locations before moving to Tin Cup in 1888 to practice and to edit a newspaper. In the same year, desperately sick with a wrenching cough, he sought a milder climate and moved to Honolulu. There he worked on a sugar plantation, probably as a foreman.

Before leaving Colorado, U’Ren read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, remembered family stories of landlord oppression in Cornwall, and became an instant convert to George’s single tax—a device for raising public funds equitably. In 1889, on his way to Oregon, he read a pamphlet on the initiative (the proposing of legislation by public petition) and thought he had found a way to implement the single tax. These experiences illustrate a U’Ren characteristic: he gained ideas and zeal from reading theoretical political tracts.

U’Ren arrived in Oregon in 1889 and soon joined forces with E. W. Bingham, secretary of the Oregon Australian Ballot League, which sought a secret ballot; they drafted a secret-ballot law and saw it enacted in 1891. Bingham gave U’Ren advice he took to heart—to embrace a reform, create a committee, and become its secretary. In 1891 or 1892, U’Ren, who had embraced spiritualism, became associated with the Seth Lewelling (or Luelling) family of Milwaukie, Oregon. The Lewellings, political reformers as well as spiritualists, also held Farmers’ Alliance meetings in their home. At a meeting in 1892, U’Ren was introduced to J. W. Sullivan’s Direct Legislation by the Citizenship Through the Initiative and Referendum and once again underwent a political conversion. Temporarily for-getting the single tax, he championed the initiative and referendum because, he said, once you had them, any reform was possible. (In a referendum, legislation is put to a popular vote.)

From 1892 through 1898, U’Ren was a Populist. In 1893 he helped the Milwaukie Alliance organize a joint committee on direct legislation that worked for “I & R,” as the initiative and referendum were called. U’Ren was secretary of the committee and also of the Oregon Populists. Although he quickly gained a reputation as a skillful lobbyist, I & R had not been achieved by 1896, when he was elected a state representative from Clackamas County. His political maneuvering in the famous “hold-up session” of the 1897 legislature helped win the support of some important politicians for I & R, but it also caused some to denounce U’Ren as an ordinary, scheming politician. U’Ren, who never again held elective office, continued to work for I & R by helping to found the Non-Partisan Direct Legislation League of Oregon in 1898. By the end of that year, he had split with the Lewellings, returned to the Republican party, and established a law practice in Oregon City. In 1901, he married Mary Beharrell Moore, a thirty-four-year-old widowed teacher. The marriage produced no children.

In 1902, largely as a result of U’Ren’s efforts, I & R became law in Oregon. In 1903, U’Ren founded the Direct Primary Nomination League and drafted a direct-primary law (enacted in 1904) that contained “Statement No. 1,” which was designed to force state legislators to elect the people’s choice as U. S. senator. In 1905, U’Ren began to organize, and then became secretary of, the People’s Power League, founded to initiate legislation and to ensure that Statement No. 1 worked. (It did work.) The league used the initiative to enact numerous laws, most notably a provision for recall and a corrupt-practices act (1908).

U’Ren was soon hailed as a leading progressive; he even helped convince Woodrow Wilson of the value of I & R. He could not, however, induce Oregonians to accept the single tax, and so he ran for governor in 1914 primarily to push it. He finished a distant third. He then moved to Portland, practiced law, and remained active in the Grange, the American Political Science Association, the National Municipal League, the National Short Ballot Organization, and other groups. However, he became much less active in local politics.

In the 1920s, U’Ren tried, unsuccessfully, to get Oregon to adopt a parliamentary system and prolabor laws. He lost bids for the state legislature in 1932 and 1934. In 1935, and for several years thereafter, he argued for the creation of colonies of voluntary workers that would guarantee a job to anyone willing to work. Throughout this period, U’Ren received a modest but adequate income from his law practice.

In 1946 the University of Oregon awarded him an honorary M.A. in Public Service. In March 1949, the man Lincoln Steffens had called “the lawgiver” succumbed to pneumonia, at ninety, in a Portland hospital. His wife died at the same hospital less than two months later. Writers for The Oregonian (March 16, 1949) did not err when they described U’Ren as the “self-effacing” and “gentle soul” who was “the father of Oregon’s initiative and referendum system.”

Because U’Ren chose not to keep his written records, no collection of his papers exists. The principal works on U’Ren are unpublished: S. W. Reed, “W. S. U’Ren and the Oregon System,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University (1950); R. C. Woodward, “William Simon U’Ren: In an Age of Protest,” Master’s thesis, University of Oregon (1956); and E. G. Weinstein, “William Simon U’Ren: A Study of Persistence in Political Reform,” D.S.S. thesis, Syracuse University (1967). Other important sources include R. C. Woodward, “W. S. U’Ren and the Single Tax in Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, March 1960, and “William S. U’Ren: A Progressive Era Personality,” Idaho Yesterdays, Summer 1960; T. McClintock, “Seth Lewelling, William S. U’Ren and the Birth of the Oregon Progressive Movement,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, September 1967; L. Steffens, Up-builders (1909); J. D. Barnett, The Operation of the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall in Oregon (1915); B. J. Hendrick, essays on U’Ren and the Oregon System, McClure’s Magazine, July, August, September, 1911. See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974).