The woman wearing the barrel – and not much else – marched up and down busy streets in downtown Portland.
“Hungry people make poor pacifists,” stated one of the messages pasted on the side of the cask.
Other slogans on the barrel also offered the hint of menace: “Self-preservation is the first law of Nature!” “Horse thieves have been hanged – why not crooked politicians?”
But the protester, former actress and failed Oregon congressional candidate Grace Wick, didn’t seem threatening.
When a newspaper photographer showed up, she beamed a smile at him. She arched her back, a small American flag fluttering out of her decolletage.
It was May 28, 1935, and Wick was, for once, happy. She had finally found a way back into the spotlight.
ROLL OUT THE BARREL
Wick had become interested in politics early on.
When she came of age in her native Iowa, populism was surging across the country. “From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice, we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires,” the People’s Party declared at the turn of the century.
Young Grace idolized William Jennings Bryan, the fiery Nebraska Democrat known as “The Great Commoner.” In 1908, Bryan made his third attempt at the White House, and the 20-year-old Wick supported him. She wrote a poem about the candidate, published in her hometown newspaper, that lashed out at the industrial behemoths that Bryan opposed:
The Trusts you do not trust,
As weaklings think you must,
But they’ll wake up
And find it all a dream…
But the “weaklings” did not wake up. Bryan lost again at the polls, and the seeds of Wick’s disaffection had been planted.
In the years that followed, her idealism gave way, replaced by anger. Melancholy gripped her.
“Life is oftimes such a wearisome grind, that I feel like my neck’s in a noose,” she wrote in a journal.
Having a political cause helped with the dark moods. “Sometimes I’m glad I can fight the good fight,” she wrote, even if “sometimes I ask – what’s the use?”
She moved to Oregon – and across the political spectrum, from left to right. She would soon become the state’s most determined and colorful political gadfly.
AMAZING GRACE
Wick had a talent for garnering attention.
She alighted in Chicago at 18 in hopes of starting an acting career. One night she marched into a police station and demanded protection. She told the desk sergeant (as well as the bored police reporters who’d gathered around) that she was sure she’d been “followed by strange men” on more than one occasion.
The reporters saw a story, as Wick thought they might. She provided them with professional glamour shots, showing her in a slinky gown, a sash pulled tight around her waist to accentuate her curves. “Miss Grace Wick, Who’s Afraid to Go Home in the Dark,” the caption in the Chicago Evening American read.
She grabbed more press after moving to New York City, the country’s theatrical capital. A newspaper claimed the “young beauty (caused) a near-riot” at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace by throwing a dinner plate through a large portrait of Wilhelm II, Germany’s ruler. (World War I was on, though the U.S. wasn’t yet in it.)
But forging a stage career proved a lot harder than getting mentioned in the papers. So hard that after a decade of auditions and small parts, she gave up and married.
In 1922, she and her husband, George Merritt, moved to Jacksonville, Oregon, taking up residence in a house surrounded by an orchard.
Wick enjoyed being known around town as the actress from New York City, and she volunteered on local Democratic Party campaigns. But small-town Oregon life didn’t suit her. Neither did married life.
She and Merritt divorced in 1924, with the “former stage star” drawing public opprobrium. The Medford Mail newspaper called the split “a hard-fought divorce suit that thrilled the county seat.”
Wick, for her part, wasn’t thrilled.
“I have come to bury Love beneath a tree,” she wrote on a scrap of paper she saved for the rest of her life. She added:
I shall gather as much of joy as my hands can hold;
I shall stray all day in the sun where the winds blow;
But, Oh, I shall cry at night where none shall know.
Seeking out that joy – and her abandoned ambition – she headed for Hollywood, even though she was now in her mid-30s, ancient for a silent-movie ingenue.
In 1925, the Medford Mail published a letter from the editor of Movie Digest magazine that stated Wick was “on the threshold of a successful screen career.”
She never made it over the threshold.
She returned to Oregon the following year, writing in her journal that “luck seems to leer and to taunt.”
THE SCREW DEAL
Wick started out as a passionate supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to overcome the Great Depression.
“We have a New Deal with us now, a Leader fine and good,” she wrote in a “Christmas Sonnet” that she sent out to friends and family in December 1933.
But by this time, like millions of Americans, she’d been out of work for years and was struggling to get by.
She supported the Lundeen Bill, a more comprehensive social-welfare package than the Roosevelt administration’s program. The legislation died in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The bill’s failure infuriated Wick. She now decided the New Deal was fatally flawed – and that it had been set up that way on purpose. If all these relief agencies couldn’t help her, there had to be a dark reason.
That reason, she concluded, had something to do with immigrants and Jews – and rich men in suits conspiring against decent Americans.
It was the “Screw Deal,” put in place by a “ring of gangsters to have indefinite control over the American peons,” she declared.
In 1934, now 46 and living in Portland, Wick ran for Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District seat, securing a place on the ballot as an independent.
At least one newspaper saw promise, pointing out that Wick had been deeply involved in Walter Pierce’s successful 1922 campaign for Oregon governor – and that 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith had used a poem by Wick in his national campaign literature. Wick was, the newspaper wrote, “well-educated and a versatile writer.”
Reveling in the good press, Wick came up with a catchy rhyme:
Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum
Democratic-Republican;
Take ‘em both and shake ‘em well –
They both produce the same bad smell.
Friends had always found Wick affable, with a winning sense of humor, but when her focus turned to politics – as it increasingly did now – she could be hard to take.
In a letter to the Multnomah County Democratic Party, she demanded that its leaders come over to her side.
“You has-been self-starters and habitual runners who couldn’t even be elected as dogcatchers should step aside and give a new broom a chance to sweep clean,” she wrote.
She added:
“I mean business, and I am out to win even if I have to tell the truth about some of these habitual runners among the Democrats. … I am going to have recognition and respect from the Democrats even if I have to use a club to get it.”
This behind-the-scenes bullying didn’t win her any allies from her former party. Out on the stump, her jeremiads against the New Deal also failed to rouse voters.
Wick placed sixth in the eight-candidate field, with 1,853 votes – 1.8% of the total.
The exposure the campaign brought didn’t even make it easier for her to land a job. She tried to get work as a cashier – and was passed over.
Six months after the election, she donned that barrel and began to trudge up Southwest Broadway.
The barrel had some 40 slogans slathered over its wooden planks.
“One of the forgotten women of the New Deal,” stated one. “Public Welfare Bureau should be fumigated!” offered another.
An ugly racism, widely considered acceptable at the time, also could be found on the barrel.
“If more politicians would act WHITE,” a slogan read, “there would be fewer of us see [sic] RED!”
A KISS FOR EVERYONE
Wick now opposed Roosevelt, but the Democratic president was far away, in Washington, D.C. So she began attacking Portland Mayor Joseph Carson. She decided to challenge Carson in the 1936 election.
Fifteen years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, “girl” candidates were still considered a novelty. Newspapers tended to diminish women who ran for office, calling them by their first names and focusing on their appearance rather than their policy platforms.
Wick tried to take advantage of this entrenched sexism. Launching her mayoral campaign, she promised “a kiss for everyone in Portland.” She barged into The Oregonian’s editorial offices, chanting: “Don’t mix your taffy with your baloney and applesauce, and the kisses will take care of themselves!”
“With that certain something in her eyes,” the newspaper wrote of the candidate’s visit, “Grace then gave the reporter a devilish look and said: ‘I’m going to give you your kiss now.’”
But then came disappointment. She handed the blushing reporter a Hershey’s chocolate kiss.
“Trusting males flocked to her banner only to have that trust violated when the kiss proved of the candy variety,” wrote The Oregon Journal, another paper in the city. Wick soon withdrew from the race.
Her personal life seemed to mirror her public one. Typed verse found in her personal papers at the Oregon Historical Society hints at an affair with a married man that left her feeling insecure, ashamed.
“I know that my beauty is fading – sin furrows the fairest brow,” she wrote. “I know you will soon be weary of the face you smile on now.”
OVER A BARREL
For years Wick had been spiraling into paranoia and overt racism, and the arrival of another world war accelerated it.
She embraced bizarre conspiracy theories, concluding that the attack on Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
In 1944, she took time off from a retail stockroom job she’d landed to travel to Detroit as a delegate at the America First Party’s national convention, which nominated the racist Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith for president.
Smith didn’t have the celebrity of pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had carried the isolationist America First banner before Pearl Harbor. The minister ended up with all of 1,781 votes in the November election – out of nearly 48 million cast.
Following Smith’s lead, Wick took to calling herself a “Christian Pioneer American.”
As she moved into old age, living alone in a small house on Northeast Failing Street, Wick’s antisemitism became increasingly conspicuous.
In a personal letter from the early 1950s, she told fellow far-right campaigner Marilyn Allen that powerful Jews were spreading Communist ideology through newspapers, radio and television.
Wick had once written detailed policy essays, but now she wanted only easy explanations for the country’s ills. She backed Joe McCarthy, the U.S. senator from Wisconsin who baselessly claimed that hundreds of Americans in and around the federal government were secret Communist agents. “God bless him!” Wick wrote to Allen.
By now, Wick’s barrel-wearing protest during the Great Depression had become Portland political lore, but Wick herself largely had been forgotten. On occasion, newspapers mistakenly attributed the long-ago stunt to another Grace from Portland, state legislator Grace Peck.
Wick tried to reclaim credit for the locally famous protest by redoing it.
In 1957, the year before she died of lung cancer at 70, Wick marched through downtown Portland’s streets again, this time wearing a handmade sign that criticized Oregon’s “old-age assistance dept.”
The protest made it into the news – barely. The Journal offered a two-paragraph squib buried deep in the paper.
That was good enough for Wick. She clipped and saved it.
-- Douglas Perry, dperry@oregonian.com
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