While the heyday of California progressivism occurred in the 1910s, signs of a coming reform movement can be traced back to the early 1890s. Such signs included modern ballots, the appearance of Nationalist Clubs, the rise of the People’s Party, the Good Government movement in Los Angeles, and the formation of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League in the state.
The Australian secret ballot was a transpacific cultural artifact adopted in California in 1891, and elsewhere throughout the United States in the preceding decade, Massachusetts being the first state to take this step. Australians adopted secret voting in order to prevent bullying and buying of votes at polling places, which had been common in England. Before this reform came into effect in California and elsewhere in America, party organizers provided their loyal followers with ballots listing that party’s candidates. Voters’ names were called out at polling places and the person identified in this public manner would step forward and be handed a ballot that he would, in the presence of observers, place in a box. The adoption of the Australian ballot marked a departure from this crude, manipulative voting method that limited voters’ choices. Thereafter, at official polling places the state provided voters with a ballot listing all the candidates, to be cast in secret. This innovation applied only to general elections and not to party-controlled nominating conventions; still, it constituted a major advancement in democracy supported by California reformers, including labor leaders, prohibitionists, and feminists.
Nationalist Clubs sprang up in the state and across much of the nation in the early 1890s. They grew out of grassroots enthusiasm for the Christian socialist ideas of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1887). Such ideas adapted the compassionate teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to public policy, meaning that governments should care for those unable to fend for themselves: orphans, the sick and disabled, widows, the aged.
Bellamy’s controversial novel tells of a Bostonian, Julian West, who awakens from a long sleep in the year 2000 and finds an America in which a business-led aristocracy no longer exists and economic resources are evenly distributed among the populace. A moral transformation has taken place: cooperation has replaced competition, and the national government guarantees “the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.” In 1890 California featured 62 Nationalist Clubs, boasting some 3,500 members, most of whom lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The purpose of the clubs was to work toward the non-violent achievement of Bellamy’s dream of a communal society. By the mid-1890s, amid strikes and a worsening depression, the movement folded.
While Nationalist Clubs were urban-based, the People’s or Populist Party garnered support both in cities and farm country. California’s Populists, like their fellow party members throughout the West and South, campaigned against the railroads and for direct democracy, championing the initiative (a mechanism allowing voters to put a measure on the ballot), the referendum (offering voters a means to repeal a law), and the recall (providing voters with an opportunity to remove officials). These measures would become centerpieces of California progressivism. Equally important, if not more so, they would have profound future consequences, as when voters recalled Governor Gray Davis and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 (see Chapter 14).
Shortly after the turn of the century, a group of middle-class professionals in Los Angeles - including newspaper editor Edward A. Dickson, attorney Meyer Lissner, physician John Randolph Haynes, and others - launched the Good Government League. It aimed at wresting control of the city council from Walter Parker and his band of Southern Pacific Railroad-tied politicians. These mostly Republican reformers orchestrated the 1902 rewriting of the city’s charter to include provisions for the initiative, referendum, and recall. Two years later the League saw to it that Los Angeles became the world’s first city to employ the recall, which resulted in the removal of a council member who had voted to award the Los Angeles Times a printing contract even though a bid $15,000 lower had been received. An infuriated Harrison Gray Otis, the arch-conservative publisher of the Times, denounced the Leaguers as “Goo-Goos.” He disliked them almost as much as he detested the Southern Pacific Railroad, unions, and socialists. Despite opposition from Otis and others, the League swept 17 reformers into the 23 available political offices in the 1906 municipal elections, though the Southern Pacific’s candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, A. C. Harper, prevailed. A scandal the following year involving Harper’s purchase of oil and sugar stocks led to his eventual abandonment of office.
Buoyed by the Good Government movement in Los Angeles and the contemporaneous San Francisco graft trials (see Chapter 8), in 1907 California reformers created a statewide organization to revamp politics, the Lincoln-Roosevelt League. Angelinos Dickson, Lissner, and Haynes, were again involved in carrying reform to this next level, as were like-minded public figures in the Central Valley and Bay Area. Dr. Haynes, a Christian socialist whose highly successful medical practice and real-estate investments gave him the means to effect change, was particularly adept at building a Southland coalition that would add momentum to a California-wide drive for reform. Haynes organized a banquet in January 1907, to which he invited Edward A. Dickson, and arranged for prominent journalist Lincoln Steffens to be the featured speaker. Steffens urged reformers to expand their successful work
In cities to the entire state. Several weeks later, Dickson, as correspondent for the Los Angeles Express, went to Sacramento to cover the January session of the state legislature. There, by chance, he encountered for the first time Chester H. Rowell, editor of the Fresno Morning Republican. The two pledged to collaborate on forming a statewide organization to free California from the grasp of the Southern Pacific “Octopus.”
Next, two major meetings were held to create the intended organization. The first drew heavily from southern California and was held in Los Angeles on May 21, 1907. “Lincoln Republicans,” so named by Dickson, framed an “emancipation proclamation” declaring their goal of freeing the Republican Party from control by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Political Bureau. The initiative, referendum, recall, and direct primaries (whereby voters and not parties chose candidates) were endorsed. Other proposals called for state regulation of railroad and utility rates, forest conservation, workers’ compensation, a minimum wage standard for women, and women’s suffrage.
The second meeting was held in Oakland on August 1. There, E. H. Harriman, head of the Southern Pacific, was ridiculed along with other “malefactors of great wealth.” President Roosevelt’s role in pushing for federal railroad regulation was extolled. A compromise between the relatively more progressive Roosevelt followers and the more moderately inclined Lincoln admirers resulted in naming the new statewide reform organization the Lincoln-Roosevelt League. In effect, it constituted a markedly autonomous liberal wing of the Republican Party. All it needed was a titular leader.
The League’s search for a gubernatorial candidate took more than a year. Their eventual choice, Hiram Johnson, was at first very reluctant to run. A prosperous attorney with a home in Marin County overlooking San Francisco Bay, he saw little reason to spend his days in hectic Sacramento, squabbling over politics. Only after Rowell, Lissner, Dickson, and others appealed to Mrs. Johnson, who in turn used her powers of persuasion, did her husband agree to run. Having made the decision, Johnson threw his all into the campaign for governor in the 1910 election.
World History
