The title of this section isn’t entirely accurate. The California United States Senate seat that I have held since 1993 is not really “my” Senate seat. If it’s going to be named after anybody, it should probably be William McKendree Gwin, the first senator to hold it. But I’ve had this seat for four terms, nearly twenty-four years as I write, and I’ve grown fond of it. It’s comfortable and familiar to me, like a family heirloom. So I’m taking liberties here and calling it “my” seat.
Since there are two Senate seats for each state, our leaders wanted to make sure that when a state became part of our nation, as California did in 1850, each senator had different term lengths. So after the two were chosen they picked straws for the six-year seat or the two-year seat and Gwin got the six-year term. All the fifteen senators to follow him are listed in his seat. In the other seat, John Charles Fremont was chosen and served briefly. Dianne Feinstein currently occupies the “Fremont” seat.
Hanging in my office are the photos of all my predecessors. As I gaze at them from time to time, particularly when things are tough, I know that they too faced the same kind of difficult issues that I have. Well, not exactly. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, two years after my mother’s birth, senators were not directly elected by the voters. So before that time, senators were only responsible to the politicians in their state. A terrible situation for democracy, but easier for half the senators who occupied “my” seat, since far fewer people were holding them accountable.
What follows, in any case, is a brief description of the men who held the seat before the good people of California gave me this incredible opportunity. It is just a little bit of history that perhaps will interest you enough to learn much more about each of my predecessors, because each is interesting and provocative in his own way. What becomes clear even in this tiny history lesson is that events shape our careers, a point I have tried to make in this memoir.
Senator Gwin was very involved in California’s drive for statehood. William was a southerner and a slave owner from the Deep South, having already represented a Mississippi district in the House of Representatives. He knew he could never win a Senate seat from the south because other politicians had it locked up, with more influence than he did with the southern power brokers. Remember, there wasn’t a chance to go out to the people, like I did. You needed connections—big connections—to win the appointment from the state legislature.
Standing on the steps of the Willard Hotel near the White House on March 5, 1849, therefore, William Gwin turned to his friend, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and declared he was headed for California. Douglas was stunned, but he expressed his wish that Gwin would succeed in his quest to become a United States senator from that state that was yet to be admitted to the Union.
So Gwin, with the support of his wife, Mary, traveled to San Francisco in 1849. He had to take a steamship to Panama, then a boat up a river, through a jungle, and transfer by mule to a boat in Panama City and then north to San Francisco. The trip was so difficult that he left on March 5 and didn’t get to the San Francisco Bay until June 4. And I complain about the airline commute!
Gwin didn’t waste time. He brought with him a copy of the Iowa state constitution, became a delegate to the California state convention, and played a huge role in crafting the state’s constitution, which prohibited slavery.
Gwin was a slave owner himself, having spent most of his life in the south. But he knew he had to get this slot as a senator and that was an imperative. California would not be admitted to the Union as a slave state.
Gwin went back to D.C. and had the satisfaction of being a senator-elect, but he couldn’t serve until California was admitted to the Union. That debate over California’s admission to the Union was the last debate for Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. It was a very convoluted and difficult one. Had it not been for the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850, some historians feel it would have taken California much longer to become part of the United States. They believe that the opposition in Congress to California’s admission dissipated due to shock over the president’s death. Consequently, the “great compromise” of 1850 allowed California into the Union as a free state.
Senator Gwin became known as a tireless advocate for California. He introduced many bills, always explaining how the “unprecedented nature of life” in California required attention. Some things never change.
He was known for construction of lighthouses along the Pacific coast and for expanding the federal judiciary. He worked to set up schools and universities and a code to regulate the working of the mines. He established a branch of the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, a building I saved after the treasury closed it down early in my Senate term. I guess Gwin would have been happy at that.
He worked to construct Mare Island Naval Shipyard, which was part of my House district in the eighties before it closed as a base. He also worked to give California more than one million acres of public lands. One of my proudest accomplishments is gaining wilderness designation for more than one million acres of public land in California, the highest level of protection.
Gwin left the Senate before the Civil War and despite his amazing work for California, he supported slavery and the Confederacy. His son even fought for the south. This taints his tenure, but I am glad that much later in life he said: “The institution of slavery would be a curse to the white inhabitants where it prevailed.”
That’s the story of the first senator to hold “my seat,” a man from the south who was so instrumental in California becoming a part of America.
General James McDougall, who had served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives, was declared the U.S. senator after twenty-two “ballotings” by California’s legislature. It was a very controversial election.
In 1861, the New York Times described the reasons the paper had supported McDougall: “He is sound on the Pacific Railroad, he was confirmed in the Episcopal church… and no doubt has learned the habits of self-denial since.” That was alluding to McDougall’s well-known fondness for imbibing “a great deal of whiskey.” But the most important issue, as the Times explained it, was that McDougall was “openly and earnestly a Union man.” So the second senator was fiercely opposed to secession and had strong support from President Lincoln. And that was the clear reason he won over the legislature.
The war gave impetus to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad with California’s congressional delegation uniting to push for it with a sense of urgency. California elected officials wisely asked, “Psychologically how are the Far West states to be stabilized in relation to the Union if they remain disconnected from the east for decades to come?” President Lincoln agreed, and he became intimately involved. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 authorized and financed the construction of a transcontinental railroad and a second Pacific Railway Act of 1864 increased the land grant and financial incentives. In that time frame, President Lincoln also acted to protect Yosemite.
It turns out that Senator McDougall, while giving his vote for these important projects, didn’t have a major influence over those momentous events, because his skills as a legislator continued to be diminished by alcoholism. The addiction must have been a terrible one, because it is reported that he didn’t even visit California once during his six-year term.
As a member of the House, Senator Cole was one of the delegates who gathered at Gettysburg to dedicate a burying ground for the soldiers who had given their lives in the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands had died. This is what Cole wrote about President Lincoln:
I sat only a few feet from Mr. Abraham Lincoln and had a rare opportunity to study him. He appeared rather depressed and only rarely did his face brighten… When he rose to speak, he began in a firm clear voice: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Cole was so moved by that speech and that issue. Senator Cole cast a vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. “I never felt so much excitement over any measure before,” he said. Indeed.
Many years later, when he was nearing a hundred years of age, he was invited to the House to address that body and he said:
“Our destiny no one can forecast. Our hopes are wide awake. From a few weak colonists we have become what we are today, and I think we ought all to remember above all things, the wonderful character of those who created the Republic and government in America.”
Cole lived to be 102. While he was in the Senate, he was a leader in negotiations to acquire the land known as “Russian America” that today is Alaska. He was also active in gaining grants for our harbors and forest preservation and for greater efficiency of the postal service on the Pacific Coast.
While I relish my connection to Senator Cole, who voted to abolish slavery, I’m also proud that Senator Sargent, encouraged by his wife, Ellen, proposed to the Senate the language that was eventually adopted as the Nineteenth Amendment… women’s suffrage. Women wouldn’t get the right to vote until 1920, but the Sargents were definitely part of the movement.
Mrs. Sargent was president of the California Woman Suffrage Association and became treasurer of the national organization.
In addition to his progressive politics on women, Senator Sargent was very involved in the transportation system in southern California. He knew how important it was to give farmers the ability to ship their products. Los Angeles could not be isolated and he worked to ensure that. His impetus was that it was a two-day steamboat trip from San Francisco. He probably would like Governor Brown’s bullet train.
California had a couple of major milestones in 1879 when James Farley took office. One was that agriculture replaced mining as a big factor in the state’s economy.
Farley, an attorney, was acknowledged as a leader in the Democratic Party in California. He served in the State Senate from 1869 to 1876. Clearly he was very interested in state affairs and perhaps not that interested in national affairs.
I say that because according to the website Govtrack.us, Senator Farley missed 785 votes out of 1,818 roll call votes. Or maybe it was because he wasn’t well: he died less than a year after he left the Senate.
Senator Stanford was the former governor of California, founder of Stanford University, and one of California’s “big four” businessmen, who would earn millions from the fruits of the railroad business. Leland Stanford was the seventh-richest man in the nation, the year he was appointed to the Senate.
Stanford was said to be reluctant about seeking the Senate seat, but his wife, Jane, encouraged him to accept the nomination and enter the race, which still took place inside the California legislature.
Stanford was very talented and respected, but he had been a chief executive and therefore was frustrated by, in his own words, the “deliberative processes of the Senate,” a feeling shared by most governors then and since. He complained that his constituents were “working him to death sending him 100 letters a day and expecting personal responses to each.” California had more than one million residents at that time, and they were making themselves heard.
Believe it or not, Senator Stanford maintained two other jobs while he was a senator. He managed the university he founded and was also president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Maybe that’s the reason he only addressed the Senate fewer than two dozen times in his eight years there.
Senator Stanford dedicated his time as a senator to several issues including interstate commerce, currency, and public education. In an amazing situation, he rallied support against the Interstate Commerce Act and said it was about regulating railroads. Whoa! He owned a railroad, but that was no impediment then. He turned out to be on the losing side of that issue.
Stanford put forward a “cooperation bill” that he really cared about. It was about the need to have more cooperation between workers and business owners. He envisioned that workers would work better in a cooperative relationship. To me it sounds like giving workers ownership in part of the business they work for.
He failed to get that legislation passed too.
Stanford was very progressive on worker policy and public education. He supported a bill called the Blair Education Bill, which would have set up a federal grant to help the states educate their children. He said, “The national government could have no more important objective than improving the intelligence of the nation’s citizens.”
Education was Stanford’s great passion, but despite his best efforts the Blair Act never became law.
Although Senator Stanford, a man of many careers and a major contributor to the state of California in the nineteenth century, did not deliver legislative accomplishments while in the Senate, he did receive this high compliment from one of his colleagues, Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, who said:
“Every suggestion Stanford made, every speech he ever delivered and every bill he introduced had for its object the good of all the people.”
To me, that is a very high compliment.
Leland Stanford was the only senator in my seat to die while still serving the people of California.
Senator Perkins was a former governor of California and was appointed to Leland Stanford’s seat after Stanford’s death. He was the last senator to serve in this seat before the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, ensuring that United States senators would from then on be elected by popular vote.
Significant changes occurred in California and nationwide during his service. The first World Series was held in 1903, the Pacific Fleet was established, the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line, and the movie industry was established in Los Angeles.
Perkins served during the 1906 earthquake, which was so horrific for San Francisco. More than three thousand people died and most of the city was leveled. He also worked with his colleagues on the investigation of the loss of the SS Titanic in 1912.
The very big issue that the senator embraced was the Raker Act. It passed in 1913 and is still an issue in San Francisco today. Perkins was a leader in the passage of this act, which declared that: “If the source of water is on public land, no private profit could be derived from the development.”
The senator was chairman of four Senate committees during his tenure, a situation not permitted today. He chaired Fisheries, Civil Service and Retrenchment Committee, the Naval Affairs Committee, and the Railroads Committee. Today, you can only be chairman of one committee. (I actually chaired two committees, the only one in my time in the Senate to do so. In addition to the Environment and Public Works Committee, I was the head of the Ethics Committee.)
Senator Perkins was really the first senator to begin to deal with the issue of water. He was involved in the beginning of California’s complicated water delivery system, which one expert called “a reorganization of nature.”
James Phelan was the first U.S. senator in my seat to be elected by the people, not appointed by the powers that be.
To give you the sense of his politics, when he was still the mayor of San Francisco, he faced off about water against the president of the Sierra Club, the great John Muir. The issue was whether a dam should be built 170 miles east of San Francisco. It was in Yosemite National Park. Phelan proposed this Hetch Hetchy Valley reservoir as a new supply. Debate was drawn out over a decade. Phelan believed that the needs of San Franciscans should take “precedence over the recreation of a few.”
Phelan won and the environmentalists lost when President Woodrow Wilson signed the legislation right before Phelan came to the Senate. The debate over Hetch Hetchy was very difficult. This issue is still alive today as part of the battle between development and preservation.
World War I had broken out by the time Phelan was elected to the Senate. In 1917, seven months after President Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, Senator Phelan delivered a speech that called attention to California’s contribution to the war effort, including the invention of the caterpillar tractor in Stockton, California, which allowed tanks on the front lines that “broke the Hindenburg line.”
“The smokestacks are something of which we should be proud and are a new glory to California,” he said. “The wreaths which issue from their tops crown enterprise and labor. There can be no defilement of our California sky by smoke which brings prosperity and attendant happiness to our people and greatly serves our country in arms.”
Well, Senator Phelan was not a visionary in one regard. It would take years to clean up the air pollution that was harming California until the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. Phelan’s support of economic growth regardless of its consequences would be tempered over time.
Phelan’s view of the war can be summed up in his words: “It has been said that it is cruel to take life, but to take away the joy of life is a crueler thing to do, because a man without hope in poverty and suffering brokenly lives on.”
Samuel Shortridge took his seat in the Senate as the Jazz Age and roaring twenties took off.
In California, the movies were captivating the nation, attendance doubled, and the American culture was changed forever. The industrial infrastructure of southern California was being fueled by oil. Pumps and derricks were everywhere. California’s population was headed toward five million.
Samuel Shortridge supported the National Origins Act of 1924, which limited immigration with quotas that tied immigration to American ancestry. Shortridge supported this kind of exclusion, which was very hurtful to any immigrants from Asia, especially the Japanese.
Then the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929, and the Great Depression began. Unemployment in San Francisco and Los Angeles was estimated to have reached 30 percent by late 1932. Department stores reported a 38 percent decline in sales. Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photograph of what she called a “hungry and desperate mother” taken in San Luis Obispo County, California, encapsulates the times.
Clearly the people of California wanted change, so in the 1932 Republican primary Shortridge was defeated, and in the general election the seat went to a Democrat.
William McAdoo was elected to the Senate in the year construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge.
McAdoo was fortunate to be running at a time when FDR crushed his opponent, Herbert Hoover. Democrats still do better in Senate elections today when they run the same year as the presidential election.
McAdoo had many ties to Hollywood, having served as general counsel to United Artists; he was also the son-in-law of President Woodrow Wilson. He supported the programs of the New Deal, which transformed the nation by undertaking a massive rebuilding of roads, schools, dams, post offices, and other infrastructure.
Senator McAdoo quit his seat early because he saw he was about to lose the primary to Sheridan Downey; Downey supported the first old age pension proposal and people wanted that kind of champion for them in the Senate. McAdoo opposed the bill that carried this idea: the Townsend Plan.
Senator Storke, having been appointed to fill out McAdoo’s term, was only in the Senate for two months, so there is not much to say here. He was perhaps the most accomplished senator in the outside world. He won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, helped establish the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport, and led the effort to upgrade Santa Barbara State College to a University of California campus.
His departure coincided with the rise of Hitler in Germany.
In 1939, the year Senator Downey was elected, whatever good feelings citizens had from the amazing growth of California came tumbling down when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and our installations there.
Senator Downey supported the declaration of war against Japan and knew his constituents in California were gravely concerned that an attack could come to their state. “If the empire of Japan can reach the islands… what’s to stop them from striking a coastal state?” he said.
The panic set in further when a Japanese submarine actually surfaced in a Santa Barbara channel and fired shells at oil storage tanks. The physical damage was minor but the psychological blow was heavy.
In 1941, Senator Downey was named chairman of a special committee on old age pensions. He had worked on this issue for years and had run on the issue.
Downey was very progressive in his first term and called for a special committee to investigate discrimination against African Americans in the military. He also fought for increased veterans’ benefits.
His politics veered right after his re-election in 1944, and before facing a difficult Democratic primary, he retired.
He was being challenged by Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas.
Before Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, California had a Senate candidate who had performed as an actress—Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas and the first Democratic woman to be elected to the Congress. She represented California’s fourteenth district and served three terms from 1944 to 1950. Her issues were women’s rights, civil liberties, and world disarmament. She became a major figure in Richard Nixon’s ascent to the United States Senate.
In the late forties, Nixon was also in the House of Representatives and gained notoriety for going against communists. Nixon had his opening to run for the Senate when Sheridan Downey lost the support of the liberal elements of the Democratic Party. Helen Gahagan Douglas ran against Nixon, whose campaign focused on the implication that she was a communist. She in turn gave him the long-lasting title of “Tricky Dick.”
It’s been reported that John F. Kennedy quietly donated money to Nixon’s campaign, though I can’t say why.
Nixon didn’t write anything in his memoirs about his time in the Senate. He had his eye on the vice presidential nomination and clearly used his Senate seat as a stepping stone.
There were many issues at that time: the Korean War, the intensification of the Cold War; the Civil Rights movement was starting. But Nixon had his eyes turned elsewhere.
Eisenhower picked Nixon as his running mate because, according to Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, he wanted “someone on the ticket who could reassure party regulars, particularly conservatives.”
When Nixon left to become vice president, California Governor Earl Warren chose Thomas Kuchel to fill the vacancy. He was subsequently elected twice and served as minority whip. He was a very moderate Republican. I would say a very liberal Republican, since when he died in 1994, the Los Angeles Times called him “the last of the state’s GOP progressives.”
Kuchel was a strong supporter of Medicare. He managed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1965 on the floor of the senate. Those two laws were the gems of the Civil Rights movement.
He had a huge falling-out with his party because of the party’s failure to disown the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society termed him a communist sympathizer.
He prepared a carefully researched speech taking on the society. The far right of the Republican Party never forgave him. Their response turned him against his own party. He withheld support from many Republican leaders, deeming them “too far to the right,” and lost the Republican primary to conservative Max Rafferty in 1968.
Senator Cranston took the oath of office when the state’s population expanded to 20 million. It would be nearly 30 million when he retired in 1992 and I won the seat.
His first decade was eventful, encompassing the Vietnam War and Watergate. Cranston developed a reputation for being able to round up votes. According to the New York Times, he was “tireless in pushing for an end to the Vietnam War.”
Cranston was a graduate of Stanford and very proud of California start-up companies like Apple and Intel. He supported computer research and development. As the seventies wound down, he led the Senate on arms control, and became a leader of the peace movement in California and the nation. He formed the California Democratic Council in the state, which became a very effective liberal grassroots organization.
Alan’s work on arms control generated support all over the country, and he tried to run for president in 1984. While he won a few straw polls, he failed to generate momentum and dropped out.
He did all he could to help after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In the early 1990s his reputation took a hit due to an ethics investigation into the savings and loan scandal. He was also diagnosed with prostate cancer.
When he announced he wasn’t running for re-election to the Senate, I jumped into the race.
And that’s the story so far from “my” Senate seat.