THE CAMPAIGN: Fork in the Road

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From an opposition legislature, Langlie wheedled a sales-tax increase and a state motor-vehicle pool. In 18 months he transformed a $6,000,000 deficit into an $8,000,000 surplus. But he offended old-line GOPoliticos by handing out good jobs to his reformer friends and retaining capable Democrats, offended Washington's old people by opposing an extravagant pension plan. Running for re-election in 1944, he lost to U.S. Senator Mon Wallgren by 28,000 votes. While the Democrats took over Olympia, Langlie joined the Navy, served as a legal officer, returned at war's end to practice law, and enjoy family life with Evelyn, daughter Carrie Ellen and son Arthur Sheridan.

But Langlie kept a practiced eye on the new administration, shuddered at Mon Wallgren's billiards exhibitions in the governor's mansion, his yacht and airplane, his appointment of Dave Beck as a regent of the University of Washington. Langlie beat Wallgren in 1948, was comfortably re-elected in the Eisenhower landslide in 1952.

The Changing Scene. During his postwar terms in Olympia, Langlie found himself head of a state that had shifted into high gear. Western Washington, which once lived primarily off forests, fish and Alaskan shipping, hums today with expanded industry, e.g., the two new plants of Boeing Airplane Co., additions to the Kaiser Aluminum plant, new oil refineries. Natural-gas lines from New Mexico now crisscross the state; others are coming from Canada. In the plains of eastern Washington, blocked off from the rains by the rugged and magnificent Cascade range, lush crops of grain and fruit grow under irrigation, and brand-new cities have burgeoned around the Atomic Energy Commission's Hanford plant. The state's population, 2,500,000, is increasing slowly but steadily, spreading out from the three major cities of Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma.

To exist, to fight the handicap of distance from Eastern markets and the disadvantage of freight-rate differentials, Washington in its early years depended heavily on federal assistance. In the last two decades federal aid has best been symbolized by the estimated $2.1 billion spent by the U.S. to harness the Columbia River for power, irrigation and flood control. Today, with the matter of public power a raging political issue in the Northwest, Washington has reached another kind of crossroad.

In voting for a Senator, Washingtonians must decide whether to heed the Democratic cry that the Administration is engaged in a gigantic giveaway of power resources, or to agree with Langlie and Eisenhower that the time has come to stake real future progress to a power program run—where possible—by public and private local groups. Langlie argues that Washington State has no guarantee that the rest of the U.S. from here on out will earmark the $300 million necessary every year to continue developing Northwest power. More important, he predicts that future power expansion, if it is to be economically sound, will center around steam plants instead of around vast new hydroelectric projects—and ultimately, beyond that, around the atom. Hence, he says, there is no real need for the expensive high dams still advocated by the Democrats.