7.1: The Origins of California Progressivism

The Progressive Party campaign of Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson in 1912 marked one high point for progressivism. It took place when reform was “in the air” almost everywhere. This commitment to reform came because many Americans, and probably a majority of Californians, concluded that something had to be done to restrict the new industrial corporations and to remedy the problems of the cities. Many also concluded that traditional politics posed a constraint on reform.

The Many Shapes of Progressivism

Progressivism took form through many individual decisions by voters and political leaders, but a more basic choice loomed behind many of them: Should government play a larger role in people’s lives? Time after time, Americans— and Californians—chose a greater role for government. As they gave government more power, Americans also sought to make it more responsive to ordinary citizens by introducing new ways to participate more directly in politics—and nowhere did these reforms reach as far as they did in California. Changes in the structure and function of government during these decades fundamentally altered California’s politics, and, at the same time, politics dramatically expanded to embrace a wider range of concerns.

In the 1890s and early 20th century, groups organized and entered California’s political arena, often sharing an optimism that responsible citizens, acting in concert, assisted by technical know-how, and sometimes drawing on the power of government, could achieve social progress—could improve the human situation. As early as the 1890s, a few Californians began calling themselves “progressive citizens.” By 1912, many more called themselves “progressives.”

Historians use the term progressivism to signify three related developments: (1) the emergence of new concepts of the purposes of government, expressed in a language of reform that groups and individuals used to justify their varying proposals for change; (2) changes in government policies and institutions; and (3) the political agitation that produced those changes. A progressive, then, was a person involved in one or more of these activities. The large numberof individuals and organized groups with differing visions of change made progressivism a complex political phenomenon. There was no single progressive movement. Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 probably had more strength in California than in any other state, but even in California it failed to capture the allegiance of all those who called themselves progressives.

There was no single pattern to the development of progressive reform. In some states, most notably Wisconsin, it burst forth initially in state government. In other places, it affected city government first. In California, the first victories for progressive reform came in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Municipal Reform: Los Angeles

In the 1890s, city boosters in Los Angeles took pride in the city’s two railroad connections and its booming population, but worried over the lack of a harbor. When Collis Huntington of the Southern Pacific (SP) sought to develop Santa Monica into a port for oceangoing ships, LA’s entrepreneurs and civic leaders organized a Free Harbor League. “Free harbor” meant one not controlled by the SP. They gained a valuable ally in U.S. Senator Stephen White, the Democrat elected with Populist support (see p. 194). White helped Angelenos secure federal funds to develop San Pedro as a port. In 1899, the city celebrated a “Free Harbor Jubilee,” as construction began. One of the most significant engineering endeavors on the Pacific coast, the project made Los Angeles a major port—eventually one of the largest ports in the nation.

Other Angelenos wanted to reform city government through a new charter and to defeat the conservative Republicans who dominated city government. Most of the reformers, though, were also Republicans, so they usually worked within the Republican Party. They created reform organizations, notably the Direct Legislation League, led by Dr. John R. Haynes, which persuaded city voters to amend the charter to provide for the initiative, referendum, and recall—reforms that permitted citizens, through petitions, to propose new laws (the initiative), block laws passed by the city council (the referendum), and evict an elected official from office (the recall). Other LA reformers sought municipal ownership of public utilities and the merit system for filling city jobs. Under the merit system, people seeking government jobs demonstrate their abilities through competitive examinations. Previously, people secured appointments to government jobs through loyalty to elected officials. In 1908, reformers promoted charter amendments that made city offices nonpartisan and required city council members to seek election citywide rather than from districts. This change, they argued, was more likely to produce council members who viewed the city as a whole, rather than as a collection of neighborhoods. As that campaign was in progress, reformers found evidence linking the mayor to corruption. They recalled him from office, then elected a progressive mayor.

Municipal Reform: San Francisco

A city’s charter defines its structure of government. From 1856 onward, San Francisco’s government had been structured by the Consolidation Act, an act of the state legislature that significantly restricted city government. Several efforts at charter revision had failed. When James D. Phelan was elected mayor in 1896, he made charter reform his first priority. His supporters, some of whom called themselves “progressive citizens,” included many of the city’s business leaders plus a few representatives of organized labor. The new charter, they argued, was solidly based on progressive and businesslike principles and would create a more centralized city government and increase the mayor’s power. These changes, they claimed, would prevent political manipulation by figures like “Boss” Buckley.

The new charter, which took effect in 1900, reflected Phelan’s views in providing for eventual city ownership of public utilities. Phelan consistently argued that the city should own and operate utilities including streetcars, water, and electrical power—a position more radical than most other urban reformers, who typically concerned themselves with creating honest and efficient city government. Phelan argued that if city governments regulated private utility companies, those companies would inevitably seek to influence, and corrupt, the officials responsible for the regulation.

In 1901, Phelan’s third term as mayor was ending when the city experienceda major labor battle. The struggle began with a dispute between the new Teamsters’ Union and their employers, the Draymen’s Association. Teamsters drove teams of horses that pulled freight wagons throughout the city. Soon the Employers’ Association took over the draymen’s side of the conflict and refused to bargain with the union. Other unions saw this as a challenge to their own ability to seek improvements in working conditions. Unions on the waterfront went on strike in support of the teamsters, closing down the port. Phelan tried unsuccessfully to bring the two sides together. As the strike dragged on to a second month, events sometimes turned violent, especially when city police began protecting strikebreakers. Father Peter Yorke, a Catholic priest sympathetic to the strikers, had given crucial support to Governor Henry Gage during his election campaign in 1898, and Yorke now persuaded Gage to bring together the teamsters and draymen. Gage got them to agree on a settlement that permitted the teamsters to continue to unionize.

Charging Phelan with using police to aid the employers, some angry unionists entered city politics as the Union Labor Party (ULP). In 1901, the ULP candidate for mayor, Eugene Schmitz, president of the Musicians’ Union, won the election. Schmitz was reelected in 1903, and the ULP swept most city offices in 1905. Almost from the beginning, rumors swirled through the city that Abraham Ruef, once a reform Republican, had become the “boss” of the ULP, exacting bribes from businesses that dealt with city government and manipulating Schmitz and ULP members of the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco’s equivalent to a city council).

In 1905, Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, published exposés of Ruef’s dealings and sought federal assistance in investigating Ruef and Schmitz. He raised funds from private citizens and brought in the nation’s leading private detective firm. As the city suffered through the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906 and the rebuilding afterward (see pp. 216–218), the “graft prosecution” collected evidence that led to the removal from office of Schmitz and nearly all the supervisors. A reform mayor was first appointed, and then elected in his own right.

Francis Heney, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to prosecute Ruef. In the midst of the trial, late in 1908, Heney was shot by a prospective juror whom he had offended by revealing an old criminal record. Heney eventually recovered, but prosecution of Ruef fell to Hiram Johnson, Heney’s assistant. A highly successful trial lawyer, Johnson secured Ruef’s conviction and became well known throughout the state.

The ULP survived the graft prosecution and returned to power in 1909, when Patrick H. McCarthy, head of the Building Trades Council, won the office of mayor. Most recent historians have concluded that the ULP was much more than just a vehicle for Ruef’s graft. Instead, it was a labor party much like those emerging in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand— parties formed by labor organizations to prevent governmental power from being used against workers’ organizations, and to use government instead to benefit unions and working people.

Thus, by 1910, both of California’s largest cities had experienced municipal reform. Both had experimented with structural changes designed to make city government more effective. Both had advocates for the municipal ownership of public utilities. And both had produced successful reform politicians. These campaigns were publicized throughout the state and were imitated elsewhere.

Organized Labor in the Progressive Era

The political successes of the ULP helped to give San Francisco a reputation as one of the most unionized cities in the nation. The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1896, won a major strike in 1900 that made it a powerful force within the construction industry, able to require that only union members be hired and that work be limited to eight hours per day. Patrick H. McCarthy, BTC president after 1898, became a significant force in city politics. After a major organizing drive from 1899 to 1901, and encouraged by the strikes of 1900 and 1901, other workers in northern California also joined unions. Within San Francisco, the ULP mayor guaranteed that police would not protect strikebreakers. One journalist described San Francisco as “the city where unionism holds undisputed sway,” and, in fact, the city may have been the most unionized major city in the country. The BTC probably exercised more control over working conditions than any comparable group of workers elsewhere in the country. Workers in foundries and machine shops, organized into the Iron Trades Council, got the eight-hour day after a strike in 1907, at a time when most ironworkers and steelworkers elsewhere in the country were working 10- or 12-hour days. In general, the unionized workers of San Francisco were better paid and had better working conditions than their nonunion counterparts across the country.

In much of the country then, unions recruited only the most skilled workers. In San Francisco, however, dishwashers, stable workers, and other unskilled or semiskilled workers had unions. At a time when some unions resisted efforts to organize women, San Francisco’s female laundry workers, waitresses, and other female wage earners had unions. Women’s road to unionization was never easy, however, even in a highly unionized city. The most important limit on unionization was race. Few unions admitted African Americans, and none admitted Asians. Unions thrived in San Francisco partly because they united white workers by pointing to Asian immigrants as threats to white workers. Then, too, the city’s geographic isolation made it difficult to bring in strikebreakers. City government—in the hands of the ULP from 1901 to 1906 and from 1909 to 1911—did not intervene on the side of the employers. And San Francisco employers repeatedly failed to organize as effectively as their workers.

If San Francisco was “the city where unionism holds undisputed sway,” Los Angeles had a reputation as a stronghold of the open shop—the term used to describe employers who refused to bargain with unions. In LA, the chief bulwark against unions was Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the moving force behind the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. A conservative Republican and powerful force in LA, Otis’s newspaper berated his opponents, including Democrats, progressives, and unions. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association organized the city’s businesses against unions. By keeping out unions, the city’s business leaders reasoned, they could attract companies seeking an inexpensive work force. Nonetheless, by 1910, some LA unions were making gains; Mexican workers on the street railways and workers in several industries declared strikes to gain recognition. Pushed by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association and Otis, the city council responded by prohibiting picketing by strikers.

The unions of the Bay Area looked anxiously at LA, for lower wages there tempted companies to relocate. Bay Area unions were also pressured by employers who competed with southern California companies and their lower labor costs. Extremists in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, including John and James McNamara, had begun to set bombs to terrorize opponents of unions. In 1910, they targeted the Los Angeles Times building. In the early hours of October 1, an explosion ripped open the building and ignited a roaring fire. Twenty-one people died. William Burns, whose detective agency had aided the San Francisco graft investigation, tracked down the bombers. Most union leaders considered it a “frame-up” and

In the early morning of October 1, a bomb exploded in the Los Angeles Times building and ignited highly flammable ink, newsprint, and natural gas, turning the building into a flaming inferno and killing 21 people. Why did the LA Times attract this form of terror? What was the aftermath?

defended the McNamara brothers. When brought to trial in 1911, however, James McNamara confessed and John McNamara pled guilty, cruelly disillusioning their supporters. Both brothers were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Efforts to Reform State Government Before 1910

Several varieties of reform swirled across the nation in the early 1900s. In 1900, Robert M. La Follette, a Republican, won election as governor of Wisconsin and led that state to regulate railroads and reduce the power of political bosses. His success prompted imitators, who began to win state elections across the country by attacking corporations, especially railroads. At the same time, President Theodore Roosevelt secured his reputation as a “trustbuster” by using the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) to break up giant corporations. He then moved on to railroad regulation in 1906. Publishers discovered that their sales boomed when they featured dramatic exposés of political corruption, corporate wrongdoing, or other offenses—for example, Fremont Older’s crusade against Ruef. Those who practiced this provocative journalism acquired the name “muckrakers.” Muckraking magazines brought national attention to situations in particular cities or states. In 1904, for example, Ray Stannard Baker profiled San Francisco’s unions in McClure’s Magazine, the most prominent of the muckraking magazines.

Though reform burgeoned across the nation, California state government seemed immune. In 1902, the Republican state convention nominated George C. Pardee considered a reliable conservative and friend of the Southern Pacific—to run for governor. The Democrats ran Franklin K. Lane, who condemned the SP and nearly defeated Pardee. As governor, Pardee slowly separated himself from the SP. When he sought renomination in 1906, the Republican state convention instead chose James Gillett, a member of Congress known to be close to the SP. Journalists accused the SP of brazenly dominating the convention and dumping Pardee. Abraham Ruef, “boss” of San Francisco’s Union Labor Party and a Republican in state politics, later admitted that the SP had given him $14,000 (equivalent to about $335,000 now) to help in nominating Gillett. Theodore Bell, the Democratic candidate, crisscrossed the state demanding railroad regulation and other reforms, but Gillett won.

In 1907, reformers charged the SP with blocking reforms in the legislature. In August 1907, a group of Republican reformers, most of them newspaper publishers and lawyers, launched the League of Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican Clubs—usually called the Lincoln-Roosevelt League—and pledged to end SP control of state politics. They scored some victories in the 1908 elections, and the legislative session of 1909 was marked by battles between reformers and conservatives, and between the critics and defenders of the SP. Most importantly, the legislature passed a direct primary law. In a direct primary, voters registered with a particular party choose that party’s candidates for office. Previously, candidates for state offices had been chosen by conventions. At conventions, reformers charged, political bosses connived with corporations—especially the SP—to nominate candidates agreeable to both of them. Thus, the direct primary was presented as a way to remove corporate influence from the political process.

In 1910, the state stood at a significant crossroads. Progressive Republicans were well organized, and they had the opportunity, for the first time, to go directly to the voters for the nomination of candidates for office.