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Way before the Storm: California, the Republican Party, and a New Conservatism, 1900–1930
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2014
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- Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2014
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1. On California Progressivism, see George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (1951; repr. Chicago, 1963); Putnam, Jackson, “The Persistence of Progressivism in the 1920s: The Case of California,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 4 (November 1966)Google Scholar; Spencer C. Olin, California's Prodigal Sons: Hiram Johnson and the Progressives, 1911–1917 (Berkeley, 1968); Rogin, Michael, “Progressivism and the California Electorate,” Journal of American History 55, no. 2 (September 1968)Google Scholar; Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford, 1992); William Deverell and Tom Sitton, California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley, 1994).
2. This article’s argument centers on changes in the Republican Party’s political rhetoric. It takes seriously, therefore, the importance of a party’s electoral appeals in both shaping how voters view that party and, in the end, which voters vote for which party. I make no claim for any consistency between a party’s electoral appeals and the policies a party may enact once in power.
Concerning the history of the Republican Party, scholars commonly use the term “regular” to describe majority Republicans opposed to the party’s progressive wing in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. Applied to California, however, this typology is problematic, as for some of this period progressive Republicans dominated the state party. For my purposes here, the term “regular Republicans” refers to California party members who were loyal to the policy preferences and electoral rhetoric of the national Republicans against the policy preferences and rhetorical postures of state and national reformers.
3. Historians generally see anticommunism, racism, evangelicalism, and libertarian economics as among the major political strains driving the growth of modern American conservatism after World War II. For useful historiographical essays, see Dochuk, Darren, “Revival on the Right: Making Sense of the Conservative Moment in Post–World War II American History,” History Compass 4/5 (2006): 975–99Google Scholar; and Phillips-Fein, Kim, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011): 723–43.Google Scholar On the importance of California’s politics to the rise of modern American conservatism, see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York, 2010); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, 2012); and Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley, 2010).
4. The term “economic antistatism” here refers to the regular Republicans’ increasingly antiregulatory politics, broadly understood to include suspicion of business and labor regulations, the taxes and spending required to enforce them, and public ownership of utilities. It is not meant to imply that in the 1910s regular Republicans were becoming thoroughgoing libertarians. After all, as we shall see, they continued to support an agricultural tariff, advocated immigration restriction and government action against radicals, and many publicly supported prohibition. None of these policy positions fits at all comfortably with an antistatist orientation. In short, the point of emphasis here is that for the regulars in this reformist period, new political appeals urging limited government in economic matters came to outweigh traditional political appeals for broad government support for economic development.
5. The regulars were hardly vocal defenders of the state’s Japanese population; the state party platforms in the 1900s usually included anti-Asian labor planks. But compared with the state Democrats and progressives Republicans, the regulars often proved comparatively tolerant of an economically productive ethnic minority group whose internationally ascendant ancestral homeland increasingly preoccupied Washington’s diplomacy toward East Asia. Michael Meloy, “The Long Road to Manzanar: Politics, Land, and Race in the Japanese Exclusion Movement, 1900–1942” (Ph.D. diss., UC Davis, 2004), 19, 46, 116–17.
6. See the 1904 California Republican platform in the Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1904.
7. See George Pardee Campaign Speech, in San Jose, 1904, carton 12, in the George C. Pardee Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection.
8. Pardee fretted that the legislature would see his fiscal discipline as parsimonious, and he emphasized that his economy program was emergency in nature and not tied to a principled stand against state spending. See Alice Rose, “Rise of California Insurgency: Origins of the League of Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican Clubs, 1900–1907” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1942), 319–25.
9. See the 1904 California Republican platform, in the Los Angeles Times, 20 May 1904, or the 1906 California Republican platform, see the Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1906. See the 1908 California Republican platform in the Los Angeles Times, 14 May 1908.
10. See the Fresno Republican, 13 September 1904, 10 September 1904, 14 October 1904. Of the Democratic Party: “One wing opposes the Republican party because it is too radical, and the other because it is too conservative.” “So the radical and reactionary Democrats are united in opposition to Roosevelt,” in Fresno Republican, 22 September 1904.
11. See the Los Angeles Times, 8 September 1904.
12. On the efforts of national Republicans to appeal to ethnic voters, see Leara Rhodes, The Ethnic Press (New York, 2010), 27, 93; and Ezra Park, Robert, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York, 1922), 377–78.Google Scholar
13. Republican gubernatorial candidates consistently faced much closer races than their party’s presidential candidates in California between 1900 and 1910. Protest votes against the Republican Party’s close links to the Southern Pacific (SP) railroad’s loathed political machine are the likeliest explanation. The SP was the great railroad monopoly of turn-of-the-century California. It held enormous economic and political power, providing the inspiration for Frank Norris’s famous muckraking novel The Octopus. Some late twentieth-century historians have questioned whether the SP held the unquestioned control over state politics that progressives claimed. But there can be no doubt that early twentieth-century California political reformers believed the SP to be a nefarious entity that bent the state’s political system to its own interests. For historians questioning the extent of SP control of California politics, see R. Hal Williams, The Democratic Party and California Politics, 1880–1896 (Stanford, 1972); and William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley, 1996). For reformers’ views of SP power, see Franklin Hichborn, “California Politics, 1898–1939” (manuscript), 1–6. Hichborn’s “California Politics” is available at UCLA Young Research Library and the Robbins Collection at UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law. Philip Bancroft, “Politics, Farming, and the Progressive Party in California,” an interview with Willa K. Baum (UC Berkeley, Regional Cultural History Project, 1962), 48–95. Available at http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/bancroft_philip__w.pdf (accessed 10 October 2012); Rowell Papers, Rowell letter to William Draper Lewis, 29 January 1919, box 3.
On usually reformist Republican voters voting Democratic in the state’s 1906 governor’s race, see Managing Editor of the Los Angeles Express to Dickson, 8 September 1906 in Edward Dickson Papers, Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA, box 1.
14. Rose, “Rise of California Insurgency,” chap. 4; Hichborn, “California Politics,” 627–32, 649–52; Rawls and Bean, California: An Interpretive History, 8th ed. (Boston, 2003), 260–61. See also McCormick, Richard L., “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (April 1981): 247–74.Google Scholar
15. For the Lincoln-Roosevelt League platform, see the San Francisco Chronicle, 2 August 1907. On Midwestern migration to California, see Davis McEntire, “An Economic and Social Study of Population Movements in California, 1850–1944” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1947), 94–97; The Population of California (The Commonwealth Club of California, 1946), 85–95; Gilman Ostrander, Prohibition Movement in California, 1848–1933 (Berkeley, 1957), chap. 4, “The Protestant Migration, 1887–1897”; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 235–37.
16. On the problem of cultural antipluralism and the Republican party in the 1880s and early 1890s, see Jensen, Richard, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888–1896 (Chicago, 1971).Google Scholar Early examples of such moral reformism in California centered on the gambling and liquor trades, zoning laws to regulate red-light districts, see Hichborn, “California Politics,” 757; Ostrander, Prohibition Movement in California, 113.
17. While regular Republicans and regular Democrats had allied against many of the political reforms proposed in 1909 legislature, they failed to block a modified direct primary bill. This reform finally allowed reformist candidates to overcome the usual electoral machinations of the SP machine. Hichborn, “California Politics,” 761, 768–74; Rawls and Bean, California: An Interpretive History, 262; Rogin, Michael P. and Shover, John L., Political Change in California: Critical Elections and Social Movements, 1890–1966 (Westport, Conn., 1970), 37–44.Google Scholar
18. Mowry, The California Progressives, 140–50; Hennings, Robert E., “California Democratic Politics in the Period of Republican Ascendancy,” Pacific Historical Review 31, no. 3 (August 1962), 267–80Google Scholar; Daniel Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent: California Politics, 1920–1932” (Ph.D. diss., UC Berkeley, 1975), 76.
19. Lower, Richard, A Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 32–34Google Scholar; Nash, Gerald D., “The Influence of Labor on State Policy, 1860–1920: The Experience of California,” California Historical Society Quarterly, 42, no. 3 (September 1963), 245–51Google Scholar; Alexander Saxton, “San Francisco Labor and the Populist and Progressive Insurgencies,” Pacific Historical Review 34, no. 4 (November 1965), 434.
20. Oakland Tribune, 20 September 1916; Letter from Hiram Johnson to Lissner, 3 February 1917, in the Meyer Lissner Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, box 19; Rowell Papers, Rowell letter to Hiram Johnson, 24 March 1917, box 3. Also see Rowell’s draft sketch of answer to the question, “What do I think of the political situation in California at the present time?” 1918, Rowell Papers, box 3; Letter from Hiram Johnson to Meyer Lissner, 2 November 1918, in Hiram W. Johnson Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, Outgoing Letters, box 2; Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, chap. 10; Lower, A Bloc of One, 88–91; Mowry, The California Progressives, 278.
21. For many regular leaders, by 1912 the progressives had become “professional agitators” with whom “real Republicans” should not “countenance for a moment . . . joining hands” in the Francis Keesling Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, box 9. For the 1912 California regular Republican platform see the Los Angeles Times, 29 September 1912. For more regular Republican hostility toward the progressives, see the San Francisco Chronicle, 20 July 1912, 6 December 1913; Los Angeles Times 10, 15, and 31 August 1912; 9 October 1913. Delmatier et al., Rumble of California Politics, 177; Lower, A Bloc of One, 34–35, 57–60.
22. Ibid., 171–74; On the difficulty many elected Republican progressives had in leaving the GOP to form a reformist party, see James Holt, Congressional Insurgents and the Party System, 1909–1916 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). Progressives only left the GOP after passing an unusual political reform—cross-filing—that offered protection to progressive Republican officeholders fearful that losing their traditional party label would lose them their seats. It also promised to roil what was left of the regular Republican Party, as most Progressive Party candidates for office would also seek GOP nominations. See Brett Melendy, H., “California's Cross-Filing Nightmare: The 1918 Gubernatorial Election,” Pacific Historical Review 33, no. 3 (August 1964): 317–19Google Scholar; Rawls and Bean, California: An Interpretive History, 269.
23. San Jose Mercury News, 8 August 1914; Lower, A Bloc of One, 64; Mowry, The California Progressives, 212.
24. This barb targeted the Progressives’ approach to government economy, which called for efficient spending and fiscal discipline within a framework of expanding government services and improved administrative capacity.
25. For the 1914 California Republican platform, see the Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1914; On progressives efforts to achieve efficiency and economy in government, see the papers of Governor Johnson’s President of the State Board of Control in the John Francis Neylan Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, box 61. On Republican standpatters’ raising “the cry of extravagance” against the progressive government of California, see Rowell letter to George W. Perkins, 13 February 14, Rowell Papers, box 2.
26. See the California Progressive party platform in the Fresno Republican, 17 September 1914; see Governor Hiram Johnson’s Inaugural Address on 1/5/1915, available at http://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/23-hjohnson02.html (accessed 15 March 2013); Delmatier et al., Rumble of California Politics, 174–75; Mowry, The California Progressives, 212–13; Lower, A Bloc of One, 63–64; California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1914.
27. Lower, A Bloc of One, 32–33; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 39–44; Mowry, The California Progressives, 92–93, 144–48, 291.
28. Johnson himself recognized that voter support for him was shifting. This was true even in northern California where his pro-labor and other socioeconomic reforms rallied urban areas—cool to the progressives in 1910—to his banner. See letter from Johnson to Meyer Lissner, 4/23/1914: “I am, however, confused and perplexed because of the fact that localities formerly against me are now with me, and others that in the past have been with me are now against me.” See the Meyer Lissner Papers, Department of Special Collections Stanford University, box 18; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 35–39, 46–48; Lower, A Bloc of One, 33–35.
29. See the California Republican Party platform in the Oakland Tribune, 9/20/1916.
30. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1916; Mowry, The California Progressives, 249–52, 265–66. On the decline of support for the Progressive Party in California, see the San Jose Mercury News, 1 June 1914; Lower, A Bloc of One, 67–68.
31. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1910; California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1914; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 35–48; Lower, A Bloc of One, 33.
32. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1916. On ethnic and labor support for Johnson, see Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 37–38; 46–51.
33. For rifts among progressives on foreign policy during the war years, see Thomas G. Paterson, “California Progressives and Foreign Policy,” California Historical Society Quarterly 47, no. 4, (December 1968), 329–42; Lower, A Bloc of One, 100–103, 107, 109. For a summary of the 1918 California Republican platform, see the San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September 1918, and the Los Angeles Times, 18 September and 26 August 1918. Of the candidates seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 1918 San Francisco mayor James Rolph’s platform was the most progressive. It included an ambitious social insurance plank, see Los Angeles Times, 25 July 1918.
34. San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September 1918; Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1918.
35. Ibid., 16 August, 24 August, 1 August, and 16 August 1918.
36. Los Angeles Times, 25 August 1918; San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September 1918. See H. Brett Melendy, “California’s Cross-Filing Nightmare: The 1918 Gubernatorial Election.” See the Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1918.
37. Ibid., 27 July, 18, 21, 24, and 25 August 1918.
38. Los Angeles Times, 18 September and 25 August 1918; San Francisco Chronicle, 18 September 1918; Statement of the Vote, Primary Election, 1918.
39. Ibid.; Whitten, Woodrow C., Criminal Syndicalism and the Law in California, 1919–1927 (Philadelphia, 1969), 14–26.Google Scholar
40. Lower, A Bloc of One, 28–37; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, chap. 3; Mary Ann Mason, “Neither Friends nor Foes: Organized Labor and the California Progressives,” in William Deverell and Sitton, California Progressivism Revisited, 57–71.
41. Layton, Edwin, “The Better America Federation: A Case Study of Superpatriotism,” Pacific Historical Review 30, no. 2 (May 1961): 141–45Google Scholar; Merriam Papers, box 3; Edson letter to Mrs. Medill McCormick, 19 August 1920, in the Katherine Edson Papers, Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA, box 1; Rowell letter to Marshall Hale, 6 October 1922, in Rowell Papers, box 3; see also John R. Haynes Papers, Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA, box 59.
42. San Francisco Chronicle, 13 May 1921; Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Champaign, 1988), 245–65.
43. Franklin Hichborn, Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1921 (San Francisco, 1922), Preface, 9–17, 310–19; Mowry, The California Progressives, chap. 11, 285.
44. The national Republican Party in 1920 called for “greater economies” in government spending, hit at the Wilson administration’s “failure to retrench” after the war, and claimed that the “burden of taxation imposed upon the American people is staggering.” For the 1920 national Republican platform, see http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29635 (accessed, 20 March 2013). Republican nominee Warren Harding also famously called for “less government in business and more business in government,” see World’s Work 16, no. 1 (November 1920), 25.
45. Though it had made great gains in the state through the 1910s, the prohibition movement reached the peak of its political power in 1920. Prohibition did little to threaten Republican control of California politics given their overwhelming advantages in voter registration and their skill at massaging the issue. In the end, during the 1920s, prohibition did more to divide the minority Democrats, as the northern and southern wings of their party experienced statewide version of the culture war that rent the national party in the 1920s. Ostrander, Prohibition Movement in California, 149–79. On the League of Nations in the 1920 campaign, see Los Angeles Times, 12 June, 5 August, and 26 September 1920; San Francisco Chronicle, 15 August, 19, 26, and 30 September 1920; Rowell letter to Warren Gregory, 13 August, and Rowell letter to Mark Sullivan, 29 April 1920, in Rowell Papers; Hiram Johnson letter to C. V. McClatchy, 9 November 1920 in Hiram Johnson Papers, Outgoing Letters, box 3; Articles on 1920 campaign in Hiram Johnson Scrapbooks, Hiram Johnson Papers, carton 19.
46. Meloy, “The Long Road to Manzanar,” 19, 46, 63, 94–96, 116–17, chaps. 2–3. See also Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (1962: repr. Berkeley, 1977), chap. 4.
47. San Francisco Chronicle, 15 September 1920; Bakersfield Californian, 15 September 1920; San Francisco Chronicle, 19 October 1920; Los Angeles Times, 19 October 1920.
48. Meloy, “The Long Road to Manzanar,” 11, 197; Mead, Elwood, “The Japanese Land Problem of California,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 93, 51–55Google Scholar; For 1920s California as a racial frontier, Moses Rischin, “Immigration, Migration, and Minorities in California: A Reassessment,” Pacific Historical Review 41, no. 1 (February 1972): 78. In 1926, Chester Rowell spoke of white supremacy in California thus: “The American Pacific Coast is the window through which one world looks out upon another. . . . Here is visibly the final portal of the white man’s world. . . . Whatever the truth or the right of the matter may be, there is no doubt [that] the European peoples around the Pacific unanimously think of . . . their borders as a racial frontier, which they are determined to maintain inviolate.” Quoted in Rischin, “Immigration, Migration, and Minorities in California,” 78. On Los Angeles as a “White Spot,” see the Los Angeles Times, 16 November 1924.
49. On the lack of emphasis on tariff issue by Republicans in major industrial states like Ohio and New York, see Campaign Issues in the Nation and in Ohio, Republican Textbook 1920 (available at the Ohio Historical Society) and the New York State Republican platform in the New York Tribune, 26 July 1920.
50. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1920, 8 and 12 October 1920, 11 November 20; San Francisco Chronicle, 6 and 12 October 1920.
51. Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 118, 122–23; California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1920. On GOP harmony efforts in California, see James Gillett Letters to Warren Harding, 25 June and 8 July 1920; Gillett letter to John W. Weeks, 7 July 1920 in Gillett Papers, Outgoing Correspondence, 1917–21.
52. Oakland Tribune, 20 September 1922. A main secondary issue in Richardson’s campaign involved a bit of turnabout, as he labeled the Johnson progressives as leaders of a state political machine. Los Angeles Times, 20 August 22.
53. San Francisco Chronicle, 24 September 1922; Los Angeles Times, 21 October 1922.
54. San Francisco Chronicle, 31 August 1922; California Statement of the Vote, Primary Election, 1922.
55. Clemens, Elisabeth S., The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago, 1997), 285Google Scholar; Sitton, John Randolph Haynes chap. 10; Letters from Richardson to Merriam, 22 April and 2 June 1922, in Frank F. Merriam Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, box 23; Gillett letter to H. N. Swan, 14 February 1922, in James R. Gillett Collection, State Library of California, Outgoing Papers, 1922–24; Posner 251–52; Bancroft letter to Herbert C. Jones, 10 June 1923, Philip Bancroft Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, box 1. For more on Richardson’s efforts to roll back state government and their links to the plans of regular Republicans since the early postwar years, see Hichborn, “California Politics,” 2060–75. See also Jackson Putnam, “The Pattern of Modern California Politics,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 1 (February 1992): 28.
56. Quote in Rowell letter to John Haynes, 11 September 1922, in Rowell Papers, box 3. See also Neylan letter to W. R. Hearst, 21 September 1922, in John Francis Neylan Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection; Rowell letter to William Allen White, 7 May 1921, and Rowell letter to Al McCabe, 12 May 1921 in Rowell Papers, box 3; Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, 150–80. On the PVL, see Russell M. Posner, “The Progressive Voters League, 1923–26,” California Historical Society Quarterly 36, no. 3 (September 1957).
57. For the California Republican platform, see the Los Angeles Times, 17 September 1924; Oakland Tribune, 15 September 1924, 2, 10, and 14 October 1924; Los Angeles Times, 9 October 1924.
58. Ibid., 9 October 1924.
59. Ibid., 25 October 1924.
60. Fresno Republican, 13 and 10 September 1904; Los Angeles Times, 8 September 1904.
61. Ibid., 26 October, 3 August, and 25 October 1924; Oakland Tribune, 20 September 1924.
62. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1924.
63. John L. Shover, “The California Progressives and the 1924 Campaign,” California Historical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (Spring 1972): esp. 67–68; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 179–90.
64. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1924; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 179–90.
65. Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1924; Chester Rowell letter to John R. Haynes, 25 February 26, Chester Rowell Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, box 5; Shover, “The California Progressives and the 1924 Campaign,” 68–71.
66. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1924; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 179–89, 222–26; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 100; Lower, A Bloc of One, 237–39; Shover, “The California Progressives and the 1924 Campaign,” 68–69.
67. Los Angeles Times, 18 August 1922, 6 November 1922; San Francisco Chronicle, 15 August 1922, 7 September 1922, 1 October 1922. See address to Greater California League entitled “Shall California Be Sovietized?” in Francis Keesling Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, box 115; Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1922, 6 November 1922.
68. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1922; Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1924. See also Neylan letter to W. H. Hearst, 20 September 1922, in John Francis Neylan Papers, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Manuscripts Collection, box 63. California Statement of the Vote, 1924; Los Angeles Times, 13 and 30 October 1924, 2 November 1924, 19 September 1924. Los Angeles Times, 22 and 31 October 1926; Hichborn, “California Politics,” chap. 40, 1953–58, 2118–64, 2371–80; Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, 164–65, 181–85; Progressivism Revisited, 26–27; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 190, 222. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1924; California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1926.
69. For 1926 California Republican platform, see the Los Angeles Times, 23 September 1926; Putnam, “The Pattern of Modern California Politics,” 28–29.
70. California Statement of the Vote, Primary Election 1926; Rawls and Bean, California: An Interpretive History, 292–93; Progressivism Revisited, 252–53; Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, 203–4. The California Democratic party had had a reformist wing since 1890s as the fight against SP power gained strength, and in the 1910s it surely saw embracing the popular politics of progressivism as a way to stay electorally relevant. The 1922 move of Woodrow Wilson’s Treasury Secretary and son-in-law, William McAdoo, to California in an attempt to build a power base for his presidential ambitions also helped sustain progressive politics within the Democratic party in the 1920s. Despite McAdoo’s presence, however, the ongoing problems of party organization and ineffectual leadership endured. On progressivism in the California Democratic party, see Curtis E. Grassman, “Prologue to California Reform: The Democratic Impulse, 1886–1898,” Pacific Historical Review 42, no. 4 (November 1973), 530–36; Robert E. Hennings, James Phelan and the Wilson Progressives of California (New York, 1985); Hennings, Robert E., “California Democratic Politics in the Period of Republican Ascendancy,” Pacific Historical Review 31, no. 3 (August 1962): 267–80.Google Scholar
71. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1928; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 240.
72. California Statement of the Vote, General Election, 1928; Melcher, “The Politics of Discontent,” 240–43; 269, 272–76.
73. Los Angeles Times, 7 September 1928, 4 November 1928; Oxnard Daily Courier, 19 September 1928.
74. Oakland Tribune, 12 and 13 August, 18 and 31 October 1928; Los Angeles Times, 23 September, 4 October, and 4 November 1928.
75. Ibid., 12 August 28 and 23 October 1928. The “experiment” barb cut two ways, as a charge similar to that used to taint the radical reformism of La Follette four years earlier, or as a veiled nativist allusion to Smith’s immigrant Catholic origins.
76. H. Brett Melendy, The Governors of California: Peter H. Burnett to Edmund G. Brown (Georgetown, Calif., 1965), 339–46, 382–86; Hichborn, “California Politics,” 2532, 2576–77.
77. For more on the Republican party’s loss of electoral support among ethnic voters in the 1920s, see Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (1979; repr. Boston, 2000), 98–119.
78. On voter registration, see Hichborn, “California Politics,” 2681–83; Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 112–13.