Richard Neuberger was a U.S. senator hard to imagine, in an Oregon now hard to remember. In 1954, he was the first Democratic senator elected from Oregon in 42 years. Before his election — and even while in the Senate — he was a volcanically prolific freelance writer, producing more than 750 articles and six books. He and his wife, Maurine, who would succeed him for a term in the Senate, were the first couple ever to serve in a state legislature together. He now seems dramatically ahead of his time, energetically supporting conservation, mass transit, and mail balloting in the Senate of the 1950s.

Neuberger was elected with the active support of Oregon’s other senator, Wayne Morse, a close friend for 20 years. By the end of Neuberger’s time in the Senate — Neuberger filed for re-election two days before dying, the critical nature of his health having been kept from him — the two friends were not speaking, deep in one of the bitterest and most personal quarrels in Senate history.

Stephen A. Forrester, a landmark Oregon journalist and longtime editor and publisher of The Daily Astorian, spent 40 years on Neuberger’s trail, including interviews with many figures no longer around to give them. His new biography from Oregon State University Press, Richard Neuberger: Oregon Politics and the Making of a US Senator, makes a strong case for Neuberger’s significance as both a politician and a writer. If Neuberger’s career ended strikingly early — he died at 47, while many contemporaries elected in the 1950s would serve for decades — it also points out that his public prominence started early.

Born into a comfortable Portland German-Jewish family, owners of the Bohemian bakeries and restaurants, Neuberger began writing for The Oregonian in high school. In the summer of 1933, after his sophomore year at the University of Oregon (including the editorship of the Daily Emerald), Neuberger joined his uncle on an extended visit to Hitler’s Germany. At a time when much of the international punditry was admiring of the new regime, the German-speaking college student explored less public places and witnessed the beginnings of Nazi atrocities against the Jews.

On his return, Neuberger reported what he’d seen to the executive committee of the American Jewish Congress in New York and published his first national writing in The Nation, which an editor called “the first realistic firsthand revelation in any American magazine of what was taking place in Nazi Germany.” His reporting, which also appeared in many American Jewish publications, built connections that would help drive Neuberger’s career.   

Neuberger then embarked on a prodigious writing career, his work appearing regularly in national publications such as The Nation, Harper’s, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as becoming the Northwest stringer for The New York Times. In the 1930s, he was unusual in his steady interest in conservation issues. His sweeping presence eventually led another writer to observe, “For a number of years now, Dick Neuberger has exercised a near-monopoly on magazine markets for Northwest non-fiction.”

At the same time, Neuberger pursued a future in politics, running unsuccessfully for the Oregon Legislature in 1936 at 23, before winning a seat in 1940, going to Salem as a heavily outnumbered Democrat. His issues included the strongly anti-urban malapportionment of the Legislature, drawing the resentment of rural Oregon. After service as a public relations officer in Alaska during World War II, he claimed a state senate seat, and was re-elected in 1950, with Maurine winning a state house seat.

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Neuberger’s ambitions were bigger, but daunting in what was then the most Republican state in the West, the only one to reject Harry Truman in 1948. But some Democrats saw possibilities; Oregon’s Democratic registration had increased considerably during and after World War II. In 1954, knowing the odds were against him and resigned that it could end his political career, Neuberger became the Democratic candidate against Republican Sen. Guy Cordon.

Cordon was a powerful and influential senator, chairman of the Interior Committee, but Neuberger was a better campaigner, considerably more articulate and energetic. Neuberger’s theme was “Stop the Giveaways,” attacking Eisenhower administration positions on public power and public lands. National Republican eminences came to Oregon to support Cordon, but their presence may just have underlined Neuberger’s attacks on administration policy. Oregon’s other senator, Wayne Morse, twice elected as a Republican but a newly declared independent, made 61 speeches for Neuberger. With the Senate evenly divided, both parties knew that Oregon could decide control.

Political Oregon in 1954 is unrecognizable today. Multnomah County was evenly divided, Lane and Benton counties were solidly Republican, while Democrats retained historic strengths in rural Southern and Eastern Oregon. Portland’s West Hills, where Neuberger had lived all his life, was a Republican stronghold, and when Neuberger appeared at Ainsworth School to vote for himself, the students booed.

Neuberger faced another complication; ever since the 17^th Amendment had given Senate selection to voters, only one Jew had been elected to the upper chamber. At the University of Oregon, Neuberger’s religion had made him feel like an outsider, and now there were some ready to remind him. Early in the campaign, in an editorial widely distributed by the Cordon campaign, the Sherman County Journal referred to ”the well-known wisdom of his race in financial matters.” Others came to Neuberger’s defense, but the issue was out there.

Election night, it appeared Cordon had held on, but his margin kept dropping. Neuberger eventually nosed ahead with returns that seem especially improbable today: a big victory in a sizable Pendleton district that at the time consisted largely of Democratic railroad workers. Neuberger’s victory, along with Morse’s becoming a Democrat, officially gave the Democrats, under Lyndon Johnson, Senate control.

In the Senate, Neuberger became a notable liberal voice, stressing civil rights, conservation, and support for education. He strongly supported a wilderness bill  that would ultimately become law years after his departure.

Perhaps inevitably, he also got into a bitter quarrel with Morse. The senior senator ultimately broke with just about everybody, including family members, but the immediate causes here seem strikingly trivial: second-class mailing rates and the transfer of a small federal property to the city of Roseburg. More basic reasons were Morse’s feeling of getting insufficient deference from Neuberger, who was more interested in building relationships and effectiveness than in Morse’s prickly independence. They ended up communicating only in poisonous notes, including the Morseian pronouncement that “My disrespect for you has become so complete that there is no basis on which you and I can work together.”

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Soon afterward, Neuberger’s cancer ended the quarrel and his life. Eight months later, in November 1960, Maurine was elected to her own term in his seat.

Forrester clearly admires Neuberger, and has done an impressive decades-long research job, but does not intrude with assertive judgments, letting the story speak for itself. It’s a remarkable story, carrying considerable indications about Oregon and its future. Neuberger’s time may have been followed by decades of moderate Republican dominance of Oregon statewide office, but 70 years after Neuberger’s victory, Oregon’s two U.S. senators each have a considerable resemblance to Richard Neuberger.