LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE

Throughout his career, Don was associated with—indeed, personified—Lewis & Clark College. He was hired as a second member of the political science department in 1951 and was a full-time faculty member until 2002—51 years. He continued to teach occasional courses at LC until 2006, including seminars on Northwest politics and the US Senate that he co-taught with retired Oregon Senator Mark O. Hatfield.

As a first-year professor, he was assigned, with an art historian and a European historian, the task of creating a new, required “Western Civilization” curriculum for incoming students, and he ever after enthusiastically embraced the liberal arts mission—while, over time, recognizing some of limitations of the Western Civ approach. Over the years, he helped build the reputation of Lewis & Clark, and the political science department in particular, serving on innumerable faculty committees; supporting younger colleagues personally and professionally; and encouraging, cajoling, and pestering a succession of college presidents, provosts, and deans, as much as he did his students, both the gifted and the less so. Don lived and breathed Lewis & Clark College, and many of his waking hours from 1951 until his death were spent thinking about how to make the college better—financially, academically, and in its service to faculty, students, alumni, and the broader community. For decades, he scanned the obituaries every morning to see if a wealthy Presbyterian lumberman had died—Lewis & Clark having its origins as a Presbyterian college and lumber being the source of much old Oregon money. Don often said of Lewis & Clark, quoting Daniel Webster’s argument in the Dartmouth College case, “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet, there are those who love it.”

YOUNGER YEARS

Don was born in Portland on October 13, 1926, and attended school in the Portland area. He remembered being excused from grade school classes in 1937 to watch President and Mrs. Roosevelt’s open car as it headed back to Portland after official visits to Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge. He graduated from Gresham Union High School in 1944, having lettered in tennis and football — at 110 pounds, he tried out for center, correctly predicting that he would have little competition for the position. In addition to the poverty of the Depression, he saw the ugly face of discrimination when high school classmates of Japanese ancestry were removed to detention camps and when he attempted to go to Oregon’s Blue Lake Park and Jantzen Beach amusement center with his African-American friend, Floyd Standifer, later a widely known jazz trumpet player. Don enlisted in the Navy at 17 and was accepted into the V-12 program to educate and train officers at the University of Washington. As WWII ended, he shifted his college studies from engineering to political science, was honorably discharged as an Ensign, and in 1947 received his BA. He completed his MA in political science at UW in 1949 and returned to Portland in 1951. While working at Lewis & Clark, he completed his PhD at UW in 1956, assisted by a grant from the Danforth Foundation. His thesis, on milk regulation in Oregon, foreshadowed his ongoing work on interest groups, state and local government, and the process of public policymaking.

A LEADER AND MENTOR

Don chaired the Lewis & Clark political science department for many years, beginning in 1959, and was later named U.G. Dubach professor of political science – a chair named after the man who had first hired him and who, before his mandatory retirement at 65, also had served for decades as dean and professor of political science at Oregon State College (now University). Don also served as a visiting professor at his other favorite institution, the University of Washington, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and taught courses at Reed College, University of Portland, and Portland State University.

Although Don was active in Democratic party politics, in Oregon and nationally, he was scrupulously non-partisan in the classroom — subjecting ill-considered opinions and unfounded assertions, whether from the right or the left, to withering inquiry. In a small department, Don taught everything from constitutional law, political theory, American politics, and state and local government to economic regulation, environmental and natural resource politics, and public administration. His students included future members of Congress, notably Rep. Don Bonker (Washington) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Oregon); ambassadors, including Edward Perkins (Liberia; South Africa; United Nations; Australia) and Charles (Butch) Swindells (New Zealand); state and local elected officials, and hundreds of skilled civil servants, as well as academics, business leaders, and lawyers. Don insisted that students learn both in the classroom and the field. With small foundation grants and his own fundraising efforts, he took hundreds of undergraduate and later graduate students to Salem, Olympia, Sacramento, Victoria BC, Washington, DC, London and Edinburgh to study how policy is made and implemented. He and his partner for 68 years of marriage, Elisabeth Clare (Betty) Hill Balmer, moved the family to Washington DC (1965–66), when he established LC’s semester in Washington program, and to Britain in 1971, leading an early LC foreign study group. Don and Betty considered Washington, DC and Edinburgh as much their home as Portland.

Don helped establish the Pacific Northwest Political Science Association and was a tireless convener of professional meetings, symposia, and gatherings informal and formal, bringing together academics, students, journalists, politicians and their advisers, pollsters, and the top campaign, lobbyist and administrative figures, whom he referred to as “political durables,” to learn from each other. His biennial “election post-mortem” was for more than 50 years a bipartisan opportunity for political insiders and academics in the Pacific Northwest to analyze election results. He held many positions in the PNPSA, the Western Political Science Association, and the American Society for Public Administration. Although Don’s true calling was as a teacher, professional colleague, and mentor, he did not neglect scholarly work and wrote monographs, articles, book chapters, and book reviews on campaign finance, elections, reapportionment, and environmental and energy politics.

In the 1970s, Don and several Lewis & Clark colleagues began offering classes and seminars in political science, economics, and public administration to executive managers from federal, state and local government agencies in the Pacific Northwest, including the Bonneville Power Administration and the Bureau of Land Management. Related field trips often included visits to coal mines, dams, and nuclear power plants, as well as state legislatures and lobbyist offices. Particularly popular were Don’s intensive one-week trips to Washington DC, featuring a day-long bus tour of the city that included the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court, monuments, and museums, but also soup kitchens and slums, and ending at the National Cathedral. In the early days, Don sometimes drove the bus himself while using the PA system to provide a non-stop monologue on the city, its history, and the development of federal policy. Those classes grew into a larger-scale Lewis & Clark graduate program offering a masters degree in public administration, as well as the executive seminars and the Washington course. The graduate program was later transferred (over Don’s strong objections) to Portland State University, where it continues to thrive.

A POLICY SHAPER

Don’s teaching was also informed by his personal involvement in shaping public policy. In the 1950s, he served as staff director for a state legislative committee that conducted a comprehensive study of the needs of migrant workers in Oregon, resulting in legislation to improve housing, health care, and labor conditions. He was a party in a lawsuit challenging Oregon’s failure to reapportion its legislature, and, in a defamation case, he testified about the difference between communism and socialism. Don worked on natural resources policy for the Democratic National Committee, writing position papers and attending the 1960 and 1964 Democratic conventions as an expert on natural resources policy in the western states. He hosted Senator John F. Kennedy on a visit to Lewis & Clark in May 1960, during the Oregon primary. Don later was a consultant to the Public Land Law Review Commission, whose multi-volume report was the basis for major federal public lands legislation in the 1970s. From the 1960s to 80s, he was hired each election by NBC News to organize stringers at key polling sites around Oregon to conduct exit interviews and obtain early return data for use in projecting results. His political savvy and lifelong involvement with the theologically and politically liberal United Church of Christ (successor to his family’s German E&R church) led to his appointment to the board of the National Council of Churches, where he served on the Social Action Committee. Don also served on the boards of the Portland Reporter newspaper in the 1960s and KING Broadcasting Co., a major NBC affiliate in the Northwest, in the 1970s and 80s.

In their 80s, Don and Betty moved to a downtown Portland retirement apartment complex known for its intellectual and artistic life, where they quickly became leaders in the vibrant community life there. For many years, Don organized speakers from the academic, political, business, and arts communities for a weekly “Men’s Breakfast,” which evolved into the larger and more inclusive “Saturday Forum.” Betty booked the weekly classical and contemporary music programs while continuing her own occasional piano performances. Betty and Don continued to participate in various book groups into their late 80s, and Don attended a regular political theory discussion group, consisting mostly of political scientists less than half his age, until he was 89.

Don is survived by his wife of 68 years, Betty; his brothers Bob and Lou; and his sons Tom, Paul, Andy, and Dan, and their families, including eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Don often told students interested in social change that it was not enough to “do good”—you had to be smart, skilled, and hardworking. You had to “do good well.” Don lived a long, engaged, and good life—and he did it very, very well.

—Thomas A. Balmer, Chief Justice, Oregon Supreme Court

YOUNGER YEARS

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 14, 1950, to Clayton and Ivy Claggett, Bill grew up in West Allis, part of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with an Honors degree in Political Science in 1972, then did his graduate work in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where a Ford Foundation Fellowship helped him to complete his doctorate in 1978 under the direction of W. Phillips Shively.

Bill’s first professional job was in the Department of Political Science at the State University College in Buffalo, 1977–1979, followed by the Department of Political Science at the University of Mississippi, 1979–1984—which, Wisconsin loyalist that he remained until the end, he always insisted had ‘thinned his blood’ so seriously that he could never again move north. So he shifted to the Department of Political Science at Florida State University in 1984, where he remained until his retirement in 2015. Bill, James Lee Ray (of Vanderbilt University), and I were the new hires at FSU that year, producing a friendship that lasted until his death and one that generated those two later mono-graphs plus much conversation and camaraderie over the years.

A WRITER

His journal articles varied widely but had particular foci on the acquisition of partisan attachment and its evolution over time, on historical comparisons within mass politics, on the nationalization of American politics, and on voter turnout and its measurement. He appeared multiple times in The American Political Science Review, The Jounal of Politics, The American Journal of Political Science, Social Science History, American Politics Quarterly and The Western Political Quarterly, to list only the multiples. His most frequent coauthor was Paul Abramson (of Michigan State University), thanks to a running series of articles in The Jounal of Politics on racial differences in self-reported and validated voter turnout.

Bill’s two major monographs were Shafer and Claggett, The Two Majorities: The Issue Context of Modern American Politics (1995), and Claggett and Shafer, The American Public Mind: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States (2010). These occasioned four extended visitorships at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he became a fixture in the Junior Common Room: diverse newspapers, diverse magazines, and a diverse clientele gave him things to talk about and people to talk to, while the institu-tional provision of meals left him free to concentrate on research.

Oxford was substituted in later years by extended summer periods at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which, if it lacked a Common Room, did offer brats, beer, the Terrace, and a reconnection with his Wisconsin roots: while Claggett the scholar was a first-rate data analyst, Claggett the Wisconsonite always remained the machin-ist’s son from West Allis. A very private person when off-duty, he is survived by his long-time girlfriend and by a set of close friends scattered around the United States. They will continue to miss him.

—Byron E. Shafer, University of Wisconsin, Madison

ABOUT THE VICTORIA SCHUCK FUND

The Schuck Fund supports the Victoria Schuck Award, which is given annually for the best book published in the field of women and politics. It honors the lifelong service to the field of Victoria Schuck, who earned her PhD from Stanford University in 1937 and served in senior administrative roles at both Mt. Holyoke College and Mount Vernon College. The Schuck Award carries a prize of $1,000.

As a direct result of this gift, APSA will be able to significantly increase the size of the prize that the winner of the Victoria Schuck Award receives each year. The larger prize will result in greater recognition and encouragement of research and publication in the field of women and politics, which is essential to better understanding our complex and rapidly-changing world.

ABOUT DR. IRVING KRAUSS AND DR. WILMA RULE

Dr. Irving Krauss was a professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb, IL. Krauss received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. He taught at the University of Hawaii for the next decade before moving to NIU, where he would spend the next 16 years of his career, including several years as department chair. His main research interests were stratification and class, with a special concern for the underprivileged. Krauss spent an active retirement in Alpine County, CA and passed away in 2015.

Dr. Wilma Rule was a noted scholar of gender, politics, and electoral systems. She received a BA in political science and journalism in 1949 and an MA in political science in 1950 from the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD from the University of Hawaii in 1968. Rule held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan, and did additional post-doctoral work at Northwestern University. At the time of her death in 2004, she worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Rule was a longtime member of the association and served as the secretary-treasurer of the Organized Section on Representation and Electoral Systems. Rule’s work appeared in both the American Political Science Review and PS: Political Science & Politics and was widely presented at conferences in the profession around the world. The International Political Science Association’s prize for the best paper on gender and politics, founded in 2000, is named in honor of her achievements.