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1911 recall and ballot initiative laws to fight money powers { October 30 2005 }

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   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-tm-nuhiram44oct30,1,789012.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-tm-nuhiram44oct30,1,789012.story

Channeling Hiram
Arnold Schwarzenegger has compared himself to early 20th century tough-guy governor Hiram W. Johnson. He may want to be careful about that.
Joe Mathews
Joe Mathews is a Times staff writer.

October 30, 2005

As the special election drew near, the governor braced for defeat.

"I am rather fearful that our people are sick of campaigns and probably sick of the campaigner," he confided in a letter to a friend, "but I don't know how else to arouse the interest necessary for success."

The man who wrote those words was a showman with a tough-guy image, a political outsider who had never sought public office until his successful run for governor, a Republican who championed direct democracy and had used it to get what he wanted.

He wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was Hiram W. Johnson, who started a California revolution by persuading voters in 1911 to legalize the recall of elected politicians, and to establish the referendum and the ballot initiative.

Schwarzenegger has found a role model in Johnson, a charismatic character who railed against "special interests," took on the railroad barons and ruled the state from 1911 to 1917. When Johnson wanted to change the system, Schwarzenegger has said, "Johnson did not call the lobbyists or the union bosses. No, he went directly to the people. Ninety-four years later, we will do exactly the same."

The parallels between California's 23rd governor and its 38th do run remarkably deep, as a review of the thousands of Johnson papers on file at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley shows. They also show that a politician today might want to compare himself to Johnson—up to a point.

"It's very interesting to me that the Schwarzenegger administration might be thinking about Hiram Johnson," says Bill Deverell, a historian and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. "Because the real question for him might be: How do you prevent yourself from becoming Hiram Johnson?"

Like Schwarzenegger, Johnson was famous, but not as a politician, when he decided to run for governor. It was 1910, and the state was holding its first direct Republican primary. Before then, an outsider wouldn't have had a chance, because party leaders picked the nominee for governor.

But this new kind of election was a perfect match for Johnson, a 44-year-old lawyer who knew how to put on a show. Once, he pulled a dagger out of the waistband of a witness on the stand. To defend a Chinese organized crime figure, he brought six Asians wearing yellow overcoats into the courtroom, placing his client among them; the wrong man was identified as the guilty party.

In 1908, after prosecutor Francis Heney was shot in the head in court by a saloonkeeper during the trial of San Francisco political boss Abe Ruef, Johnson stepped in for the wounded Heney. Ruef was convicted, and Johnson became a folk hero.

The Lincoln Roosevelt League, a group of Republican businessmen and lawyers, hired Johnson as its attorney in 1909. The next year, after league leaders persuaded his reluctant wife to go along, Johnson announced his campaign for governor.

He started more than five months before the Republican primary; his was the longest, most sophisticated, most expensive campaign in state history. He drove around the state in a bright red Locomobile touring car and amassed a campaign budget of more than $30,000, surpassing state spending limits.

Advance men arranged for automobile parades and military bands to precede rallies. In Sacramento, 18 shots were fired from a cannon as the candidate arrived to make a speech. In San Jose, "yell teams" were positioned in different parts of Auditorium Rink to create a sound effect at which the audience marveled. The Berkeley Gazette reported that the candidate's appearance there was so eagerly anticipated that "farmers and ranchmen left their fields in the midst of the busy season, merchants closed their stores, teachers dismissed their pupils."

The people found Johnson refreshing, much as they would Schwarzenegger nine decades later. The press didn't take him seriously. "Americans love a circus," the Los Angeles Times said in an editorial. "While they are a serious people in the main they are possessed occasionally by a trivial mood, and while that mood prevails they seek the frivolous as a momentary diversion. Hiram Johnson as an exponent of reform in politics rivals Barnum's best performers."

One Johnson foe, Alden Anderson, a former lieutenant governor, sputtered that his opponent was "misrepresenting and evading the principal policies that are today before the people of this state." Johnson replied that there was only one issue: stamping out special interests, namely the Southern Pacific Railroad, which he called "the most corrupt political organization in the United States."

Southern Pacific was a brilliant target. A monopoly with control over shipping rates, it had for decades run a political machine with tentacles in state and local governments and the judiciary. The railroad's political influence was on the wane in 1910, but it was still widely reviled. Johnson, whose reputation was as a populist anti-corporate crusader, received financial support primarily from business: grocers, canners, the dairy lobby, bankers, real estate interests, wine and liquor merchants, the growing oil industry, nearly any outfit that relied on Southern Pacific to move its goods and that thought, as most did, that the railroad charged extortionate rates.

Democrats had run against the railroad for years, and Johnson's Republican foes in the primary had picked up the attack. Johnson was better at it than they were.

Like Schwarzenegger, he was a performer who enjoyed no-holds-barred rhetoric (he compared his enemies to Nero and Caligula) and believed in the power of forceful appeals to the masses. "My only method of doing politics," Johnson wrote in a letter to a friend, "has been to state what I want to do and then, with a club, go out and endeavor to put it over." And like Schwarzenegger, he portrayed himself as an outsider. "I am not a politician, so I am not trying to pose as one," he told a Palm Springs audience in May 1910.

The California governorship was for Johnson, as in many ways it is for the man in the office today, a platform for constant campaigning. But compared to Johnson, Schwarzenegger is a homebody. A typical day on the trail for Johnson lasted 16 hours. During the 1911 special election, he gave speeches at the Los Angeles train depot, Whittier, Pico Rivera, Laguna Beach and Huntington Park, in one morning. He spent the afternoon tearing through Watts, Compton, Wilmington and San Pedro.

That election was a watershed. The governor had persuaded the Legislature—by threatening to enthusiastically campaign in the districts of lawmakers who wouldn't back him—to place 23 constitutional amendments on the ballot. Voters approved all but one.

As governors, Johnson and Schwarzenegger attacked many of the same issues using similar rhetoric.

Johnson established the state workers' compensation system; Schwarzenegger has spent time and political capital trying to reduce its cost. Both worried about the price and availability of power and electricity; Johnson pushed for public ownership of utilities while Schwarzenegger has favored deregulated power markets. Johnson established the first comprehensive state budget and, with the approval of voters, a board of control. Schwarzenegger is supporting a ballot initiative to give governors more authority to make midyear cuts.

Johnson and Schwarzenegger each sought, in the words of the former, to "require the application of business principles to government." While Johnson built a corporate-style state government bureaucracy, Schwarzenegger has proposed the elimination of dozens of government commissions to streamline the bureaucracy. Both tangled with unions; both sought to reduce costs for private business in the state. Johnson enjoyed a good cigar as much as Schwarzenegger does.

But while Schwarzenegger is an optimist who has remained upbeat even as his approval ratings have dropped, Johnson, even when he was winning, battled what he termed "breakdowns" and "dark moods." Combining depressive moments with a hot temper, Johnson said he feared that he was "temperamentally ill fitted for official position."

The long-ago governor was fascinated by the movies: Johnson praised D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking, explicitly racist "The Birth of a Nation" so strongly that the film's producers used his comments in national publicity. He was, in fact, a bigot, writing in letters that Jews were greedy and blacks lazy. Although he publicly took credit for the state's adoption of suffrage for women, he privately expressed grave doubts. "I am sorely confused and perplexed over what may happen to us by the addition to our electorate of 350,000 women," he wrote.

In 1913, Johnson enthusiastically signed the Alien Land Act, which prohibited many noncitizens from acquiring property in the state. Schwarzenegger amassed a good deal of California real estate before he became a citizen. The act was overturned in 1956.

In 1912, Johnson helped form the Progressive Party and took the second spot on the national ticket behind Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson won the election. In 1914, Johnson was elected to a second term in Sacramento.

In 1915, Johnson called another special election, with 11 measures on the ballot. Two had been placed there by voters' signatures—one to make all elections nonpartisan and a related measure regarding the form and printing of the ballot—and nine others by Legislature. Johnson focused on the nonpartisan referendum.

The San Diego Union fretted in an editorial that "California appears doomed to be continually in the throes of politics" thanks to Johnson. "As soon as one election is over," the paper said, "long-range campaigning for the next one will begin."

Both Democrats and Republican attacked Johnson, in much the same way that Schwarzenegger has been assailed this year. Critics complained about the Johnson political machine, funded with donations from businesses and some of his own appointees. Johnson's method of politics was too personal, the critics declared, and the nonpartisan measure would destroy the ability of parties to check the governor's power.

The governor was using the ballot "to perpetuate the present administration machine in office," according to an official ballot argument against the nonpartisan measure, written by a state assemblyman. "If this measure should become the law, how would this administration machine ever be combated? It is infinitely better that your officials should follow policies and principles promulgated and widely advertised by legally constituted party conventions than merely be responsive to individual doctrines and isms."

For his part, Johnson protested vehemently against the notion that he had a political machine or wanted to perpetuate in power. He said he was only trying to empower the people, to give them more choices at the ballot box than the parties would provide.

"Let us assume that a governor was anxious to build up a tremendous and powerful political machine which would perpetuate him in power," Johnson said in 1915. "How would he do it? Would he do it by trying to build that machine in the affections of the people at large? Or would he do it by endeavoring to control with party machinery a faction of the people? Which would be easier for a governor with ulterior motives?"

The nonpartisan measure lost, 59% to 41%, and the 10 others went down to defeat, too.

The next year, halfway through his second term as governor, Johnson won a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in 1945. He hadn't meant to stay in the Senate. He ran for president in 1920 and dominated the Republican primaries. But he was outmaneuvered at the convention, and turned down the vice presidential spot on the Warren G. Harding ticket. Calvin Coolidge accepted and became president upon Harding's death in 1923.

In the Senate, Johnson wasn't known as a populist or anti-railroad crusader, but as an isolationist. He spoke against participation in World War I, saying the U.S. shouldn't help "a little group of unpronounceable races," and he was late to see the threat of Hitler. Back in Sacramento, the special interests against which he had campaigned continued to wield power. In the 1930s, one speaker of the Assembly was a Southern Pacific Railroad lobbyist.

Johnson was buried in a cemetery south of San Francisco. His wife had a stanza from Kipling chiseled into the marble: "This single faith in Life and Death and to Eternity: The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!"


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