people+place then

The Pursuit of Happiness

Thomas Jefferson set the bar high. Our Declaration of Independence argues our right to three things: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life and liberty, pretty straightforward. Survival. But we’ve spent a good part of more than 200 years trying to get the “pursuit of happiness” thing right.

Concluding this series celebrating the centennial of Longview, the planned city out here on the final frontier, it’s time to address that tricky question. We’ve survived, endured, succeeded and failed. But are we happy? And, if so or if not, what has this community had to do with it?

And today, a hundred years into our run here at the confluence of the Cowlitz and the Columbia Rivers, are we still pursuing happiness?

The founders called it a Planned City. But ultimately it’s been a Hoped For, Prayed For, Worked For City. And perhaps that vision on the hill, after all, wasn’t a dollar sign — it was a smile.

In many respects the Planned City’s 100 years parallel a long and well-lived human life:

1920s: Birth and precocious infancy and childhood

1930s and 1940s: Adolescence and coming of age through the Great Depression, world war

1950s thru 1990s: Prime of life, industriousness and accomplishment

WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT AND WHY AND WHEN DO THEY WANT IT?

2000s thru present: Late middle age, retirement and comfortable elder-hood cont page 21

There’s another telling parallel with our human lives. In a famous paper, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow presented a “Theory of Human Motivation” later popularized as his “Hierarchy of Needs.” Maslow asked a couple of simple questions: What do people want, and why and when do they want it? Then, what steps must they take to get there?

Simplified, there are three levels in Maslow’s hierarchy, this quest for achieving full potential:

Survival: Basic needs — security and safety, food, water, and shelter

Psychological: Esteem needs — intimacies, friends, self-worth, accomplishment

Self-fulfillment: Actualization needs — creativity, achieving satisfaction, comfort, philanthrophy

So as a city — if indeed we’ve succeeded, or at least grown up — how did we progress from mere survival to self-fulfillment, as Maslow terms it? What got us there? And how did these two developing entities, the people and the place, feed each other? Coalesce? Succeed or fall short?

How did this human factor fit into the Planned City’s plan?

The Gospel of Work

The frontier perpetrated a whole host of Technicolor illusions in order to attract its pilgrims. The stark difference between what was promised and what was real revealed itself in dull shades of gray, in forlorn landscapes of mud and dust, rain and heat.

Even into mid-century: The thousands of job seekers lured to the central part of Washington State for an unspecified job in an unspecified place (they would be building the core of the atomic bomb, and none of them knew it) were tantalized with visions of green meadows and rainbow skies. Imagine, then, after a forty-hour train ride, stepping off into a wasteland called Pasco in 110-degree heat and inhaling a mouthful of grit.

What was not an illusion, and inevitably proved the frontier’s most powerful and authentic lure, was a job. The Hierarchy of Needs never explicitly mentions a job, per se But the benefits of gainful employment run its entire gamut, from survival to satisfaction — security, relationships, accomplishment, fulfillment.

Even before the Depression and its privations, Longview’s holy grail was gainful employment — transformative, life-defining. Mr. Long himself memorably said, It’s no use asking if I wanted to be a doctor or farmer or businessman because I had no set vocation in view. I just wanted to get ahead, that’s all, and to make every day count to that end.

The major driver bringing population to the frontier Pacific Northwest was simply getting ahead.