The Southern Pacific Railroad was the most powerful influence shaping California politics from 1870 to 1910. That does not mean that the railroad always got its way, that it was the only force shaping the state’s policies, or that its opponents were above reproach in public affairs. During that 40-year period, as throughout the state’s past, many happenings were too complex to be reduced to a simple morality play involving unvarnished heroes and villains. That said, the Southern Pacific was a colossus, exercising considerable influence in California’s legislature, its courts, and its official regulatory commissions. Newspapers, too, were influenced by the railroad to provide friendly coverage of company operations.
Such influence-peddling was overseen by skilled practitioners of the art. David Colton, the railroad’s earlier Sacramento lobbyist, was succeeded by attorney William F. Herrin, who from 1893 to 1910 headed the Southern Pacific’s legal and political departments. Herrin saw to it that every California county had a Southern Pacific political boss. He and his protege in charge of Los Angeles operations, Walter Parker, directly or through county bosses bribed government officials to do the railroad’s bidding. Herrin and Parker were basically nonpartisan dispensers of cash, offering money to officials regardless of party affiliation, though most went to Republicans.
If newly elected state legislators were not already recipients of railroad bribes, shortly after installation they often found a cash-stuffed envelope in their mailboxes. A letter would accompany the cash, stating that the Southern Pacific wished to retain their legal services. As the confidentiality of the attorney-client relationship is protected by law, it was nearly impossible to prove in a court that the “retainer” was really a bribe.
Regulating and taxing the railroad proved very difficult since California judges were often appointed by state senators influenced by the Southern Pacific. Once on the bench, judges at times received free rail passes. While the 1879 state constitution prohibited such passes, enforcement of the ban was lax.
Southern Pacific influence also reached to the highest tribunal in the nation. U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, a friend of the Big Four, received his appointment with railroad support and afterward rendered legal opinions that protected the Southern Pacific and other carriers from taxation and regulation. He argued in The Sinking Fund Cases (1879) that Congress could not amend the Pacific Railroad Act in such a way as to ensure that the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads repaid their federal government loans that had been extended to build the transcontinental line. Moreover, he championed the doctrine granting personhood to corporations under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection clauses. The U. S. Supreme Court’s adoption of that interpretation helped shelter the Southern Pacific from taxes imposed by the State of California and several of its counties. Such taxes, the court held, deprived corporations - the equivalent of persons - of their property without due process of law.
Though the Southern Pacific sought to influence various state regulatory bodies, it focused most intently on the bank and the railroad commissions. Banks lending money to businesses or persons who publicly denounced the company might be dogged by the commissions and pressured into denying loans to anti-railroad interests. Authorized by the 1879 California constitution, the state Railroad Commission was largely ineffective in its work during the next three decades. The assembly committee on commerce conducted an investigation in 1883, finding that one of the three commissioners had accumulated $20,000 that he could not account for coherently, and a second commissioner - who had close ties to the Southern Pacific - had made more than $100,000 in an ethically questionable transaction.
While larger newspapers, like the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, had the financial resources to remain independent of the Southern Pacific, smaller publications found it harder to reject railroad subsidies in exchange for favorable coverage. Also, the smaller presses could least afford to risk losing railroad advertising contracts by being openly critical of the Southern Pacific.
World History
