Oregon is currently home to Intel’s largest manufacturing cluster in the world. This success can be traced back to the first Arab-American governor in the U.S., Republican Vic Atiyeh. During his time as governor from 1979-1987 and his role in the legislature, he laid the groundwork for Oregon’s economic growth throughout the past thirty years, engaging Oregon in the modern global economy and luring high tech companies to invest in the state. Implementing novel archival research, government documents, and interviews, Dr. Jim Moore, Politics and Government professor at Pacific University, is writing a topical biography on Atiyeh’s life and contributions to our political system. He is exploring the important implications and larger narratives resulting from Atiyeh’s work. 

Dr. Moore is the most widely-cited public political analyst in the Pacific Northwest, with a collection of almost 6,000 newspaper articles, interviews, and commentaries explaining current political happenings. He is an expert in U.S. political affairs, international economics, and U.S. foreign policy. Before Atiyeh died in 2014 at age 91, he asked Dr. Moore to write his biography. Atiyeh’s archival records—which were donated to Pacific University—are open without limitations, which is extremely rare for these types of archives. Dr. Moore works in close collaboration with the director and archivist of Pacific University’s library, as well as several other librarians. His research looks at the changes that occurred as Oregon moved from a timber-dependent economy to one that relies on its connections to the global economy. Dr. Moore looks at the results of Atiyeh’s 28 years in elected office; no other work has examined this phenomenon in such a holistic way. The biography explores diverse political topics of both the state and U.S. government, including the understanding of economic growth, complex laws, the development of state taxes. It also includes an in-depth telling of domestic terrorism incidents and the quiet—yet effective—approach Atiyeh took in handling those experiences. Dr. Moore aims to complete this transformative biography by Spring 2017.

Current research topics include:

• Understanding How Economic Growth is Fostered by Government - Dr. Moore is looking at the way the government sets the economic framework within a state and the U.S. as a whole. During 1982, the Northwest faced the worst recession since the Great Depression. Atiyeh believed government funds had been cut too much and an income tax surcharge was needed to amend this. Though now a novel perspective from a Republican, he argued that the government serves an important role, and therefore should not be starved so that it cannot perform its job. During this time, Oregon had a unitary tax that taxed companies on their global earnings, and not just on the earnings in the state. This prevented many outside companies from investing in Oregon. Atiyeh got the legislature to overturn this tax in Oregon, the first state to do so. Without this large barrier, countries eager to invest in the U.S., such as Japan, were encouraged to do so. Atiyeh’s role in overturning this tax demonstrates the way the government can step in to change laws and guide economic growth.
• Understanding Limited Tax Creation - Each state’s government needs funding in order to run, but the ways in which government is paid for has limits. Dr. Moore is examining the few ways taxes can be established, and Atiyeh’s novel solutions to mitigate financial stresses. Oregon has not had a sales tax for the past 80 years; the highest support it has ever received from voters was just 35% of the vote. So how does one run a state without one of the most reliable taxes available? 20 years before he was elected governor, Atiyeh served on the legislature and tax committee. By the time he was 40 years old, he was considered one of the main tax experts in the state. He knew that the state needed to make taxes more equitable while ensuring the government could be adequately paid for. This was an ongoing process for him, and toward the end of his second term in the governor's office, he decided to endorse and establish a plan for a sales tax. This plan involved lowering property and income taxes in an attempt reach a balance. It was voted down—like other sales tax proposals before it—by Oregon’s electorate. However, it exemplifies how this governor understood the importance of taxes. It also revealed the difficulty of explaining the necessity and need to balance taxes to a large group of people, like Oregon voters. This is still an issue; Oregon held a ballot measure in November 2016 that proposed a tax similar to Atiyeh’s 1982 perspective that promoted balancing taxes with government support.
• Identifying How States Independently Engage in Foreign Policy - Dr. Moore is exploring the way states pursue foreign policy on their own, regardless of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. Taking more than 20 trips abroad during his time as governor, Atiyeh opened up Oregon to world trade. He was one of the first U.S. governors who actively encouraged leaders from foreign countries to invest in a particular state. No other governor had pursued foreign policy at the level and consistency of Atiyeh. Truly a pioneer in state foreign relations during the 1980s, his international actions spurred other governors to follow suit. With ethnic roots in Syria, he used his background to try to open backdoor diplomatic communications between the Reagan administration and the president of Syria. Though it never developed, this attempt illustrated Atiyeh’s use of high politics, implementing diplomatic relations to open up ties with foreign states seen as problematic to the U.S. He was able to successfully negotiate with Japanese and Taiwanese companies, encouraging them to invest in Oregon. He pushed Oregon’s developing high-tech industry, resulting in the largest Intel manufacturing cluster in the world.