The Führer Principle
“All we need is the right man,” sighed my bar customer, in a
semi-confident wrap-up of his side of the conversation. “The
right man, who has the connections and who knows how to bring
in new businesses!” And with that he got up to leave, an
unspoken confirmation that “The Right Man” was his final
solution to our permanent economic depression. It wasn’t until
he walked out when he produced a semblance of reflection: “I
don’t know why they haven’t found him yet. He has to be out
there.” And then he was gone.
During our chat I had objected that Coos Bay had been down
that road before, hiring one “Right Man” after another “Right
Man”. And none of those “Right Men”, although always greeted
with enormous expectations, had managed to bring in the hopedfor new businesses. But his eyes had glazed over, in a sort of
trance that seemed to include his ears. And after all, what do
I know? I’ve only written a book on the subject. And that
book, “The JOB Messiahs,” covering forty years of local
economic history, was over twenty years in the making.
Obviously I must have been seized by an irresponsible rush to
publication.
My customer is not a stupid man, but not many years have
passed since he came here after a successful business career
in California, a state whose economy seems to convince its
businessmen that they are the smartest in the world. During my
years in Coos Bay I’ve met several of those. Some had been
developers. They had done well in California, so they decided
to come up to Coos Bay to show the natives how it was done.
What they forgot was not only that a rising tide lifts all
boats, but that a falling tide will do the opposite. Building
a subdivision or upgrading office buildings has an excellent
chance of working out, if done in an environment of rising
property values – like California until recently. But they
thought they’d succeeded because they’d been so smart. And
when such people come here and things don’t work out so well,
what do they fall back on? The discredited notion that we
should hire an economic savior to set things right. We need to
man up, they say. We need to find The Right Man. In other
words, the JOB Messiah.
Those who don’t know history
All through that bar conversation I had an odd feeling of reliving history. I recalled a heated meeting almost four
decades ago, when vocal “economic development” activists were
pushing the then-stodgy Port of Coos Bay to hire a new kind of
Port Manager, one who should be a miracle worker and a
fighter. “We have to get a man who is willing to work and
knows all the angles,” they insisted (“The JOB Messiahs”, page
3-9). Clearly, they were demanding The Right Man as well.
The previous port manager, whose title “harbor master”
reflected the fact that he was the very last one in charge at
the Port who knew something about shipping, was Ernie Payne.
To the displeasure of the “economic development” crowd, Payne
had made no bones about his view of Coos Bay’s industrial
future, which was unspectacular. Coos Bay, he pointed out
accurately, was simply too isolated to ever attract largescale industries except for lumber: “I don’t think the
miracles are there to produce. I’ve heard a lot of promotional
schemes in 17 years.” (2-6) But Payne was retiring, and
hopefully his opinions with him, so the Port Commission caved
to the activists and hired Steve Felkins as its new Port
Manager, at twice Payne’s salary. It soon became clear that
Felkins wasn’t much of a business genius but more of a
preacher. To Felkins, “economic development” was a leap of
faith, and he hit the revival circuit, hard. From his Portprovided pulpit, the newly-called revivalist exhorted those of
little faith: “The Port of Coos Bay is at a crossroads. The
community has to make a basic decision – do they want to go
backwards, or expand and diversify?” (p. 3-10)
In reality “expand and diversify” meant closing your eyes,
taking a deep breath and throwing lots of public money at
risky business ventures, usually proposed by shifty itinerant
promoters. But Felkins managed to shame his congregation into
embracing his call to “expand and diversify”. And that’s how
the Port ended up with vacant fish plants in Charleston and an
unused T-dock on the North Spit, all of which caused great
financial distress. On the heels of those flops Manager
Felkins was advocating that the local airport must be expanded
AT ALL COST. For what purpose? Well . . . “even if nobody
landed at the damn airport, it would demonstrate that we are
willing to work together for something.” (2-9)
If some readers consider that a reasonable statement, they
must favor the religious-revival-method of economic
development. They must also agree with the editor of The World
at that time, Jerry Baron who, during decades of
counterproductive “economic development” by Felkins and his
successors, never failed to exhort the faithful to double
down: “I just wish that people here could rally in support of
something . . . it takes real courage to stand up and be for
something . . . people . . . should get together by the
hundreds and develop a committee for something.” (3-1)
Sorry, Jerry; it doesn’t work that way. Even if the Port
Manager and the Chamber of Commerce and the SCDC and FONSI and
all the rest of the parasitic “development” agencies think the
path to economic progress runs through secret committees and
secret “planning” meetings and high-minded political
endorsements and grants and earmarks and other gestures that
prove “we are willing to work together,” their opinions are
not just irrelevant, but they show complete ignorance of how
the economy works. Economic development is a matter of dollars
and cents, but not public dollars and cents, which usually
make things worse instead of better. All it takes is for some
private entrepreneurs to see a profit-making opportunity in
Coos Bay, seize it, and build on it. That has always been the
soundest method of achieving economic development. And why
haven’t more entrepreneurs done so? Because Coos Bay’s
“economic development” crowd has erected too many obstacles,
actively discouraging people from settling here; and that’s
why entrepreneurs who could have done our area a world of good
have gone to other coastal towns instead, to Brookings,
Bandon, Florence and others.
Knights in Shining Armor
But if misery loves company, stupidity and ignorance love it
even more; they crave the support of other mini-brains, and
the more the better. Back in the ‘eighties the Port’s Larry
Ivy, who also served as interim Port Manager, was asked once
what would happen if the Port of Coos Bay would cease to
exist. His reply: “Oh gosh! I don’t know what would happen.
But I can tell you what would no longer be available, there
would be no agency to supply jobs.” (8-3)
Whatever happened to private employers, or employment
agencies, or even the Oregon Department of Employment? Never
mind, because Ivy’s new boss Frank Martin took La-La-Land to
the next level. Frank Martin was the ultimate Right Man, who
put stars in his supporters’ eyes. Back in 1983, Teri Whitty
told me in excited confidence that Mr. Martin was arriving
soon, to set things right for Coos Bay. And all during
Martin’s disastrous tenure at the Port of Coos Bay, the
Whitty’s, the Brunells, and other pillars of this community
never wavered in their support of a con man who verbalized his
understanding of his own job as follows:
“Public agencies should be “innovators,
creators
and
financiers for the private sector” and should then “move on to
something else.” (8-3)
I don’t know what Martin could have meant by this except that
in his world, all promising new products, from the Model-T to
Microsoft Windows, were invented by Port Managers and other
Right Men. Those Right Men would then fund people like Henry
Ford and Bill Gates, so they could market the Right Men’s
brain children, making undeserved gazillions for themselves.
If anybody has a different explanation, I’d love to hear it.
Besides Larry Ivy and the hidebound Coos Bay dynasties,
Martin had many more supporters of the same mind-set. World
editor Jerry Baron, besides ignoring all realistic assessments
of Coos Bay’s limited industrial potential (3-3), was not only
a fervent supporter of every hare-brained scheme the Port
undertook, his economic philosophy favored despotism. While
contemplating the wreckage wrought by the various Port
Managers in 1999, Baron advocated a “new and creative,”
“three-year economic development demonstration project”, which
would consist of forcibly “relocating urban industry, business
and populations into rural areas [like Coos Bay], thus
creating new model cities.” This has not been tried since the
Soviet Union fell apart, and for good reasons. There was a
difference, of course, in that instead of Moscow, Salem would
have to pay the costs of this upheaval worthy of a dictator’s
imagination. (17-19)
When, after a calamitous but noisy tenure, Frank Martin
finally left town in 1988, he got a festive send-off, with
Governor Goldschmidt attending and booze and jokes flowing,
and all the rest of it. Clearly, such parties are intended to
hide the truth of another Great Man’s failure, for if they did
acknowledge it, wouldn’t the attending politicians catch some
of the blame? No – Martin remained a hero to people like Jerry
Baron (17-18), despite numerous revelations about
profligacy, his bullying, his lying and other misconduct.
his
The worship of Great Man has continued. Recent years have seen
even more adulation of the Coos Bay Port Manager as a Knight
in Shining Armor. I am quoting from a piece by Elise Hamner,
at the time a World reporter, but later appointed “Manager of
Communications and Community Affairs of the Oregon
International Port of Coos Bay”. That means public relations,
if you didn’t know. Smoothing the way to that appointment was
her obvious hero worship of Port Manager Jeff Bishop, who has
since departed for greener pastures in Oklahoma. Back in 2005,
Bishop claimed to have found the road to Coos Bay’s new Golden
Age by promoting an LNG import terminal (since then, like
every other grand industrial plan for Coos Bay, made unviable
by market forces). According to awe-struck Elise, attending a
Port meeting in 2005:
“Bishop’s presence is hard to miss. He’s a tall man with a big
handshake.
As Thursday night wore on, his smooth forehead was flushed.
Somewhat out of character, he didn’t quote the words of any
great thinkers. . . . . No one said a word. . . . “It’s a
large moment,” Port Commissioner Caddy McKeown said letting
out a big breath. “I thank you for the effort that’s come
forth here. It’s a long time coming.”
And then there was a long silence. . . .”
Longshoremen who had come to the meeting to complain about a
lack of jobs “were shocked and humbled. And very pleased.
‘Wow,’ one ILWU delegate whispered . . . after the meeting. .
. . (Bishop) walked out into the dark, down the steps of City
Hall, seeming confident he has begun to push down the barriers
that have long prevented the port from prospering.
“That’s what they hired me to do,” Bishop said. Then he headed
off alone, down toward the port’s offices overlooking Coos
Bay.” (19-4)
Great men are almost always bad men
Great Men are not only expensive for those with Great
Expectations, but they have pernicious effects on the people’s
money, on their liberties, and on openness in government
generally. In a few words: they trample on them. This is
because of the old error that the goal sanctifies the means.
And this is why the history of “economic development” in Coos
Bay includes so many, many episodes of the Port (and SCDC and
Fonsi and the Chamber and the rest of its supporters)
intimidating local critics, conducting business in secret, and
committing financial and electoral corruption. It’s important
to realize that the worship of Great Men always results in
such problems, prime examples of which are found in chapters
6, 9, 13, and more.
It may be fair, at this point, to recognize that the worship
of (and the wish for) Great Men who ride roughshod over
conventional rules to achieve Great Things may well be part of
human nature. John Dalberg-Acton, also known as First Lord
Acton (1834-1902), was the scholar who formulated the famous
quote “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.” Not many people seem to know that Lord Acton, a
devout Catholic, wrote this in a letter criticizing the
assumption of infallibility which the Catholic Church of the
time wanted to give the Pope – and did. Other lines from that
letter by Acton are: “Great men are almost always bad men,
even when they exercise influence and not authority, still
more [given] . . . the certainty of corruption by authority.
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the
holder of it.”
But even though Acton warned against the worship of Great Men,
people in Coos Bay keep looking for them, which places them in
the awkward position of advocating fascism. While most people
have heard of Mussolini’s fascism in Italy, and Hitler’s
Nazism in Germany, not many seem to know that many other
countries were run by mini-Hitlers and mini-Mussolinis in
those days. Between World War I and World War II, dictators
were in charge in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Spain,
Portugal, Bulgaria, Russia, every one of the Baltic republics,
and more. Clearly, the human wish for the guidance of an allknowing, all-seeing Leader, a.k.a. The Right Man, has been
around for a long time.
The Führer Principle
And the German Nazis, methodical as they were, had made
dictatorship palatable for ever-more German citizens by a
philosophy called Das Führerprinzip – “The Leader Principle”.
According to this ideology, the Führer’s word and the Führer’s
wish were above all written law, and all government agencies
were obligated to work toward realizing his grand plans,
regardless of what the law said. Below Hitler himself there
were lots of smaller Führers too, who had similar unquestioned
authority within their jurisdiction. According to Wikipedia,
this societal structure was very much like a military
organization. “The justification for the civil use of the
Führerprinzip was that unquestioning obedience to a superior
supposedly produced order and prosperity . . .”
In World War II the Germans had invaded Holland for reasons
obvious to themselves, but not so much to the Dutch, and for
many years after the war, many Dutchmen had a lingering
resentment against their eastern neighbors. What didn’t help
much was that in the 1950s, as a result of their nearmiraculous post-war economic recovery, the Germans started new
invasions of the Low Countries, mostly on weekends and
holidays, on inadequate highways choked with miles-long lines
of Volkswagens, BMWs and Mercedeses. The usual objective of
those peacetime incursions was some Dutch beach, where the new
occupants would dig foxholes to protect themselves, this time
from North Sea breezes instead of an allied invasion fleet.
While it’s neither true nor fair to say that those Germans
behaved like the conquerors of World War II, it was reported
that some, upon returning to their foxhole the next day and
finding it occupied by another family, sternly demanded it be
surrendered on the grounds of adverse possession.
But one day a group of Germans was strolling along the canals
of Amsterdam when they were approached by an enterprising
university student. In the tourist season many Dutch students,
all of whom spoke several languages, made money on the side by
acting as tour guides. Now it is a fact that the German word
Führer means “leader” but also “guide”. So this eager-beaver
student walks up to the wandering Germans, asking: “Brauchen
Sie einen Führer?” Do you need a guide?
“Nah,” one of the older Germans said. “A Führer? We already
tried that. Didn’t work out so gut.”