 As historian Carlos A. Schwantes notes, Portland was "conservative, business oriented, with a tendency towards smugness among its elite" and consequently the Oregon labor movement was correspondingly more cautious than were the shipping and mill workers of Puget Sound.The election of 1908 saw the arrival in Oregon of Presidential candidate Eugene Debs aboard the so-called "Red Special," a train chartered by the Socialist Party and taken from station to station around the country for campaign speeches on the fly.The train made several stops in Oregon on September 14, energizing the state's party members.