Oregon Historical Quarterly

 Reviews accounts and gave credence and major space to those being challenged. The Journal’s Democratic editorialists saw the traditionally Republican Oregonian as doing that party’s work against tarred Democrats. Donnelly valuably describes actual and attempted state and local whitewashes aiding the subjects of Oregonian revelations. The law proved a weak reed to use against exposed individuals.Almost nobody was tried or convicted or imprisoned, despite many indictments. Elkins and an employee served short jail terms for illegal taping. A deeply involved district attorney paid a small court fine for not prosecuting gamblers. Portland voters conferred on a seemingly tarred Sheriff Terry Shrunk the first of his mayoralty terms, and a jury speedily acquitted him of criminal charges. The Oregonian, honoring its promise of protection for the tapes, financed Elkins’s defense and appeal before he quit the state and life, perhaps via shots to his chest. Donnelly focuses on Portland and less on its “patterns of vice and corruption consistent with those present in large U.S. cities”after the Second World War (p. 5). An early chapter on Portland’s corruption up through the 1920s — and its theme of elite centrality in corruption — is poorly related to later arguments. The author just casually mentions corruption in Portland’s home county and nearby communities . He helpfully differentiates honest unionism (which suffered at Teamster hands) and clearly explains how Teamster gangsterism flourished in the country. Donnelly does not examine what, after the outcry, did or did not change in Portland’s comfortable old system.Pointing mainly at the pre–WorldWar I period and the sole 1948–1952 term of Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee, he states that Portland offers“an exceptional case study of repeated and failed efforts by progressive reformers to clean up municipal government and police morality”(p.5).He seemingly believes that Portland’s corrupt system did not change much in the end. Donnelly smartly and skeptically, although sketchily, discusses public opinion and Portland criminals, journalists, cops, businesspeople , and politicians and their intricate relations with one another. He critically uses many sources to create a narrative that alerts readers to numerous participants’lies and halftruths . Readers interested in Oregon history or in American urban, journalism, political, or criminal law history will find value in Donnelly ’s careful accounting. Harry H. Stein Portland, Oregon Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe by Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2011. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $26.95 paper. This study examines the life of a very important western suffragist, Emma Smith DeVoe, best known for her leadership of the Washington Equal Suffrage Association (WESA) at the time of the breakthrough state victory in 1910. That campaign has already been examined by other scholars, so this material is not new. The author’soriginal contributionsliein examining the career of this prominent western political activist to evaluate the significance of the West in the national suffrage movement — a subject still in need of much work — and to address the question of what newly enfranchised women did with their votes. Due to limited sources about her youth,the study essentially begins with DeVoe’s marriage and early life in the Dakota Territory, where she and her husband were active in“civilizing,” through reform politics, the raw communities in which they lived (chapter 1). DeVoe joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union  OHQ vol. 112, no. 4 (WCTU) and soon became a speaker and organizer for the group. The WCTU’s support of woman suffrage and her own inclinations soon involved DeVoe in that effort, including the 1890 South Dakota suffrage campaign (chapter 2). Her experiences in that campaign were formative, anticipating many of the strategies, tactics, and problems — including the charge that she was ambitious and selfish — that would characterize her subsequent activities in other states. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on DeVoe’s activities as a paid organizer for the National American Woman SuffrageAssociation (NAWSA),whose leaders were particularly impressed with her fundraising abilities during the difficult years of the early 1890s. In this role, DeVoe worked closely with Carrie Chapman Catt,who supervised the NAWSA Organizing Committee, and the two established a...