Stanton Delaplane (center) won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for reporting. 

He wrote a series of articles about the State of Jefferson movement of 1941.

Delaplane was a cub reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle when he made the trip from the big city on two lane U.S. 99 to Yreka, the interim capital of the rebel state that was stirring headlines throughout the country. The headlines were rumors of the mountain border counties attempting to secede from their mother states to form their own state rich with natural resources begging to be utilized for strategic military purposes.

The other headlines of the day were dispatches from Europe telling how Adolph Hitler and his Blitzkrieg were storming across that continent in a crazy but real attempt at world domination.

Delaplane saw this home-grown back-country people really doing something that had a purpose other than to make a few headlines. His way of yarn telling the Jefferson saga in a series of articles was spun in such a way that it resonated with the folks who handed out the Pulitzer Prizes in 1942.

NY Times Tribute

 

Outtake from interview

Mr. Mosher

I can remember your Pulitzer Prize stories, which had to do with five counties in Oregon and. Northern California trying to set up a new state, but I can’t remember any of the details. It would be nice to hear about that.

Mr. Delaplane

We got a little story on the AP wire one day, saying that two or three counties up there were going to secede because they didn’t feel they were getting enough attention from the legislature. This was about two or three weeks before Pearl Harbor, just before December 7, 1941. They sent me up to Yreka where this was going on, and I began taking charge of it. Actually, I could see that they needed a little help.

We put up roadblocks and we declared a national holiday. No sales tax to the governor because "we have copper up here, and if be wants copper let him come up and dig for it himself." You know, a press agent kind of thing. It was really being press-agented by a guy from a little county in Oregon. It had no railroad; it had no telephone. He described himself as the "hick mayor of the farthest west town in the United States," which it was.

He turned out to be a simple, barefoot press agent who used to work for Bell Telephone in Philadelphia. Pretty good. He had come out there and got himself elected mayor of Port Orford. He had set up this thing for these counties. He was press-agenting it, and. I was press-agenting it, so we got together in a little cabin someplace in a small town up in Oregon.

Mr. Mosher

Compared notes.

Mr. Delaplane

Compared notes and decided how we would do it. The only thing the matter with it was, he died the next day of a heart attack. The story itself ran seven days. With the guy dying and three or four days later we had Pearl Harbor, which stopped it. Otherwise they would have dribbled along with it. It made a very dramatic ending to a seven-day series, and this is what I think impressed the Pulitzer Prize Committee. If it had gone on, it would so long and sort of going downhill. As it was, it went uphill all the way to a very high peak. The guy died, Pearl Harbor came on, and when the Pulitzer Prize people read it, we were in the midst of war. We were getting shot to hell all over the Pacific. Our fleets were going down off Borneo and that sort of thing, and it all looked very black. So this was the kind of thing that I think appealed to them--the last frontier, the guys up there packing guns, and things like that.

Mr. Mosher

It was a relief, too, a contrast. Great theatre! Of course, you were assisted by some terribly important events.

Mr. Delaplane

There is no question about it, but it was the right place at the right time. Which is the most of anybody's business--to be in the right place at the right time.

Mr. Mosher

How did they arrive at the name Jefferson?

Mr. Delaplane

I don't know. It had already been chosen before I got up there, and I don't know who thought it up. There was a small bunch of people who were ready to play around with this. It was a kind of half-serious thing with them, really, but as soon as they saw their names in the paper and saw what was happening they began to take it very seriously. Before that it was kind of for fun. Then they began to think, "Well, after all, this might be big."

I said, "Listen, you'd better get out on the highway." I wrote them a manifesto, and we stopped cars with roadblocks, things like that. Everybody was armed with shotguns and carrying pistols but very polite. We would hand out the manifesto and say, "Pass this out down the line." We’d. give them a handful and say, "Every place you stop for gas, every place you stop for lunch, leave one of these on the counter." So we were passing along this manifesto, which declared our rebellion against Sacramento and Salem in Oregon.

Mr. Mosher

I wonder if lots of movements don’t start out, more or less, like that.

Mr. Delaplane

I believe they probably do.