# Oregon: Her history, her great men, her literature/Harvey Whitefield Scott

HARVEY WHITEFIELD SCOTT
"Harvey Whitefield Scott was one of the greatest American newspaper editors. He was born in Tazwell County, Illinois, February 1, 1636. At the age of 14 years he came with his parents to Yamhill County, Oregon—traveling across the plains in an ox wagon. At the age of 17 he carried a rifle as a private soldier in Colonel Shaw's militia company in the Indian wars of 1855-1856. When eighteen years of age he matriculated in Pacific University, but for want of funds was compelled to withdraw from the Institution. In 1863, he received the honor of being the first graduate of Pacific University; and many years later an official of the school remarked that had Pacific University done nothing more than to educate Harvey W. Scott, its mission would not have been in vain. While reading law and acting as librarian of the Portland Library in 1865, Mr. Scott became editorial writer on the "Oregonian," and, excepting four and a half years, he was continuously its editor from that date until his death. In 1917 two large volumes of Mr. Scott's writings, compiled by Leslie M. Scott, were published under the title, 'Religion, Theology and Morals," this branch of study having occupied the editor's attention more continuously and for a longer time than any other. These essays which are wholly Mr. Scott's in thought, diction, and manual writing, stand out prominently in the journalistic literature of our country as acceptable counsel from a reverent and tolerant mind concerning the permanent substance of religion.
"It was given to the generation of Mr. Scott's youth and to the succeeding generation of his maturer years to take a wilderness in the rough and mold it through steadily advancing forms to the uses of modern life. At the beginning of Mr. Scott's career, Oregon was a country whose very name was best known to the world as a poet's synonym for solitude and mystery; at the end it was a country which might challenge the world as an example of the worthiest things in social development. Thus background of Mr. Scott's career was a shifting quantity, presenting each year—almost each month—new conditions and fresh problems, and calling to the man who for forty-five years was the preeminent leader of its thoughts for new adjustments, oftentimes for compromises. If it must be said of Mr. Scott that the essential values of his character were individual, it still remains to be said that they were profoundly related to the conditions and times in which his work was done. The great figures of any era are those who, sustaining the relationships of practical understanding and sympathy, are still in vision and purpose in advance of the popular mind and of the common activities. So it was with Mr. Scott. There was never a day of the many years of his long sustained ascendancy in the life of Oregon in which he did not stand somewhat apart and somewhat in advance of his immediate world. In this there was an element oi power; but there was in it, too, an element of pathos. For closely and sympathetically identified as Mr. Scott was at all times with the life of Oregon he was, nevertheless, one doomed by the tendencies of his character and duties to a life measurably solitary.
The fewest number of men are pre-eminently successful in more than a single ensemble of conditions. Any radical change is likely first to disconcert and ultimately destroy adjustments of individual power to working situations. ​The qualities which match one condition are not always or often adjustable in relation to others, it was an especial merit of Mr. Scott's genius that it fitted alike into the old Oregon of small things and into the new Oregon of large things. Yet there was that in the constitution of Old Oregon which relieved it of the sense of limitation and narrowness, for be it remembered that the old Oregon—the Oregon of Mr. Scott's earlier years—stretched away to the British possessions at the north and to the Rocky Mountains at the east. Geographically it was a wide region, and some sense of the vastness of it and of the responsibilities connected with its potentialities, early seized upon and possessed die minds alike of Mr. Scott and of the more thoughtful among his contemporaries. If we regard this primitive country vrith attention only to the numbers of its people, it appears a small and even an insignificant outpost of the world; but if, with a truer sense of values, we study it under its necessities for social and political organization, there opens to the mind's eye a field vast, practically, as the scheme of civilization itself. Thus even in the old Oregon of small things, the man who sat at the fountain of community intelligence lived and worked for larger purposes and under high aspirations. In a mind of common mold, taking its tone from the life around about it, there would have developed a sense of power leading to the exhilarations of an individual conceit. Upon the mind of Mr. Scott the effect was far different. In him and upon him there grew a noble development of moral responsibility. And this he carried through the vicissitudes of changing times. It was this which gave to him, firmly rooted as he was, the power which, in conjunction with his individual gifts sustained him as a continuing force through all the years of his life."—Alfred Holman in Oregon Historical Quarterly.
"Harvey W. Scott's mentality placed him in that great group of journalistic writers from which Greely and Dana ​have passed, and of which Pulitzer and Watterson are the sole survivors. His mind was a huge storehouse in which knowledge of men, events, literature, philosophy, theology, ethics and history was piled up and labeled for ready use. His powers of expressing thought in written language have been rarely equaled. To him, words and sentences were the keen-edged tools with which the expert works and fashions with unerring directness. They were the leaden missiles with which the skilled rifleman cleaves the target. They were the thunderbolt or the lightning flash with which electricity proves its resistless powers. Splendid in their strength, overwhelming in their incisiveness and captivating in their grace, his phrasings in conveying the thought that surged in his dominant mind were the essence and means that brought him high place in his great profession."—Oregon Journal, August 1910.