CREDIT: Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Harris & Ewing Collection
IN THE late 1800s and early 1900s, the Southern Pacific Railroad was one of the most powerful corporations in the country, and certainly the most politically influential in California. The company consolidated its power by purchasing other railroads, then charging monopoly rates to carry freight, which angered farmers and other shippers. It used devious methods to purchase land to expand its lines, and it evicted farmers, homeowners, and businesses against their will. It became the largest landowner and largest employer in California. When people resisted its power, it used its political influence to get its way. The Southern Pacific owned—or at least rented—many members of city councils, the state legislature, and California’s congressional delegation.
One of Southern Pacific’s staunchest allies was Grove Johnson, a company attorney who served in the California legislature (1878–1882) and the US Congress (1895–1897). Although he favored some liberal ideas, such as women’s suffrage and compulsory public education, he also exemplified the close links between business and politics during the Gilded Age.
Grove Johnson’s son, Hiram, however, as the governor of California from 1911 to 1917, spearheaded a movement to curb the influence and abuses of big business. First as a reform Republican, then as a Progressive Party candidate, Johnson focused on the Southern Pacific, reining in the company with laws to regulate corporations. Johnson’s pledge to “kick the Southern Pacific out of politics in California” was politically popular. Once elected, he ended the company’s tight grip on state government and, by doing so, became California’s first politician with a national reputation.
Johnson was born in Sacramento, the state capital, where his father practiced law and politics. He studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, was admitted to the bar in 1888, and joined his father’s law practice. Their personal and political disagreements led Hiram to move to San Francisco in 1902. There he opened a law practice and quickly became a prominent attorney whose dramatic oratory persuaded juries and provided good quotations for the local newspapers.
In 1906 the city’s district attorney made Johnson an assistant prosecutor for a series of corruption trials that included the trials of San Francisco’s mayor, the city’s political boss, and some of the city’s most prominent businessmen, all of them implicated in a corruption scandal involving bribes from major utility companies. Eventually Johnson took over the prosecution team and won convictions, bolstering his reputation as a courageous lawyer and reformer.
He was increasingly drawn into the widening circle of reformers and radicals across California, who had three overlapping goals. First, they wanted to challenge corporate influence in government and the corruption of municipal and state politics, epitomized by the sway of the Southern Pacific Railroad, but also practiced by other sectors of big business. Second, they wanted to give ordinary voters a stronger voice in government by enacting “direct democracy” laws allowing citizens to recall corrupt politicians and enact legislation through initiatives (to propose new laws) and the referendum (to block existing laws), thus circumventing the influence of business groups over elected officials. They also supported giving women the right to vote. Finally, they sought to create a social safety net to cushion the hardships of poverty, unemployment, old age, and harsh working conditions.
In 1910 the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the reform wing of California’s Republican Party, convinced Johnson to run for governor. He won the party’s nomination and beat his Democratic opponent. Soon after his victory, Johnson visited the east to confer with former president Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Robert M. La Follette, and other progressive Republicans. When he returned to California, Johnson initiated a whirlwind of activity, leading the most successful progressive legislative session in US history. He persuaded the state legislature to support measures calling for the initiative, referendum, and recall and to pass a law allowing voters to elect US senators (who until then had been chosen by the state legislature), giving California voters more direct power than voters in any other state. Despite Johnson’s own ambivalence on women’s suffrage, California gave women the right to vote in 1911, nine years before passage of the Twentieth Amendment to the US Constitution. He also persuaded the legislature to provide free textbooks to children in public schools.
To rein in big business, Johnson convinced the legislature to give the state Railroad Commission additional powers to set the rates that railroads could charge (a major victory over Southern Pacific) and to regulate privately owned utilities that provided water, gas, streetcar service, and electricity. Despite opposition from some upper-class progressives who disliked unions, Johnson pushed through laws to help workers, including workmen’s compensation laws (requiring employers to compensate workers for workplace injuries), restrictions on child labor, and the nation’s first eight-hour workday law that applied to female employees.
This remarkable wave of reform made Johnson a national figure. In the 1912 presidential election, when Theodore Roosevelt challenged his fellow Republican, President William Howard Taft, he asked Johnson to run as his vice presidential partner. After Taft won the GOP nomination at the party’s convention, Roosevelt and Johnson led a revolt among Republican reformers. They created the Progressive Party, whose platform reflected a national version of the ideas they had enacted in California and other states. With Johnson’s help, Roosevelt won the popular vote in California, but he came in second nationwide.
After his defeat, Johnson, still governor of California, expanded the state’s progressive legislative agenda. The state created an Industrial Welfare Commission, which had the authority to establish a state minimum wage, a quarter century before Congress passed a federal wage law. The legislature also created an Industrial Accident Commission (to implement the workmen’s compensation law) and the Commission on Immigration and Housing (to address the plight of migrant farmworkers), and it appointed union members, feminists, and other progressive activists to serve on these commissions.
Johnson’s reform agenda was so popular that when he sought reelection in 1914—on the Progressive Party ticket rather than as a Republican—he got more votes than the Republican and Democratic candidates combined. Having achieved almost everything he had set out to do as governor, Johnson ran for the US Senate in 1916 and was elected on the Republican ticket. In 1920, he sought the Republican nomination for president but lost to the probusiness conservative Warren G. Harding.
California voters reelected Johnson four more times to the Senate, where he remained until his death in 1945. As a progressive Republican, he was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic and social programs. Indeed, the sweeping overhaul of California politics that Johnson engineered—along with such counterparts as La Follette in Wisconsin—helped lay the foundation for the New Deal. Despite his party affiliation, he was one of the Senate’s strongest union allies. For example, he led the investigation into the labor conditions in the West Virginia coal mines.
In the Senate, Johnson reluctantly supported America’s involvement in World War I but soon became a leading isolationist, opposing US participation in the League of Nations (and later in the United Nations) and resisting US preparations for World War II. He died on the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Although he served in the Senate for twenty-eight years, he spoke his most memorable words soon after taking office. Referring to the debate over the US entry into World War I, he said, paraphrasing Aeschylus, “The first casualty when war comes, is truth.”