Vortex 1: Oregon Sponsors a Rock Festival to Prevent a Riot

In the summer of nineteen seventy, President Nixon was scheduled to visit Portland. The American Legion was planning its Americanism Day parade for late August. Vietnam Veterans Against the War planned a counter-march. Oregon's governor, Tom McCall, was looking at a scenario in which ten thousand or more antiwar demonstrators would converge on downtown Portland on the same day, with the National Guard on standby.

McCall was a Republican. He was also, by nineteen seventy standards, an environmentalist and a pragmatist. His solution to the Portland problem was one of the stranger acts of governance in American history: he authorized the state of Oregon to sponsor a rock festival.

Vortex I, as it was officially named, took place at Milo McIver State Park near Estacada, roughly thirty miles southeast of downtown Portland, from August twenty-eighth through September third. The state provided land, portable sanitation, and what amounted to official permission to gather and camp. Antiwar organizers were quietly encouraged to make their way to the festival rather than the city streets. The message, never stated quite that directly in official communications, was: we are giving you somewhere else to be.

It worked. Estimates of attendance ranged from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand people over the week. No official count was ever taken. The festival had no permanent stage, no headliner roster in the traditional sense, and no subsequent history, because no governor has repeated the experiment.

Nixon's Portland visit proceeded. The city did not riot. The National Guard was not deployed in the streets.

Vortex I was the only rock festival in American history directly organized by a state government. McCall later described it as one of the more successful public-safety decisions of his tenure. It cost far less than a riot would have, and it is remembered, decades later, as exactly the kind of thing that could only have happened in Oregon.