Justice for All (7 page)

Their system grew increasingly brazen. In one case, Charles Boxton, the chairman of the city's public works committee, minced few words in putting the grip on the president of the Parkside Realty Company, then seeking approval for trolley service to reach its development project along San Francisco's western dunes. After a tour of the property and a lavish lunch with much wine, Boxton rose before the developers and his colleagues. The Parkside president, he said,

 

As its rapaciousness grew, so did public uneasiness, particularly among the city's reform-minded elites. One of San Francisco's wealthiest businessmen, the young and charismatic Rudolph Spreckels, soon to become a stalwart of the California Progressives, struck a deal with the city's district attorney, W. H. Langdon, who was not part of the bribery web. Spreckels agreed to put up $100,000 to pay for a corruption inquiry, while Langdon pledged to wage it. Trust-busting, corruption-battling President Roosevelt supported their efforts from offstage by dispatching two special investigators to help conduct the inquiry. Closer up, the investigation was promoted and driven by Fremont Older, a rampaging San Francisco newspaper editor who once had accepted stipends from the Southern Pacific but who now leapt to the head of the attack on San Francisco corruption.
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Older, Spreckels, and their allies conferred quietly in early 1906 and concluded that they had enough evidence to warrant a full investigation. Although they did not know how far their inquiry would lead, all were confident that Ruef and Schmitz would be targets, and Spreckels in particular wanted to go even further: He had in mind the Southern Pacific railroad and its emissaries as the ultimate targets.
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Although they did not yet call themselves Progressives, their effort was a clear predecessor of that movement, with its corporate targets, aversion to public corruption, and reformist zeal.

The earthquake postponed the investigations as all attention naturally shifted to the recovery effort, a monumental task that seemed to bring out the best in Schmitz. He would often remark in later years that he felt reborn by the earthquake, and his actions in the hours and days after the quake suggested new energy and honesty. For months, the investigation went underground as San Francisco struggled to its feet.
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Even the earthquake, however, could not stop the gathering determination to topple San Francisco's leadership. After the admirable recovery interlude, Ruef and Schmitz resumed their work, and Ruef extended his reach to state politics. In return for $20,000, he delivered San Francisco's nominating votes in the 1906 Republican state convention to James Gillett, Southern Pacific's choice for governor.
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And in his crowning arrogance, Ruef gathered with California's boss leadership for a photograph, memorializing the deal. In the picture, Gillet stands behind Ruef, his arm on Ruef's shoulder. They are surrounded by state Republican leaders, cigars and drinks in hand. When the photograph was made public and reprinted in reform papers under the headline “Shame of California,” it stood as an icon of smug Southern Pacific manipulation of California politics.
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Kevin Starr's description of the photograph is itself worthy of reproduction: “Perusing it today—the walrus mustaches, the amply distended vests, the high starched collars, the smiles of men at their ease after wine and dinner, so pleased with themselves after having insured the election of the next governor of California—one can almost hear a background of Scott Joplin music.”
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The photograph captured the high-water mark of Southern Pacific domination. After it, the public's anger hardened to resolve, and Ruef turned increasingly desperate to hold on to power, attempting even to remove Langdon from the case.

On November 15, 1906, the grand jury in San Francisco handed up the first of many indictments, charging Schmitz, Ruef, and the city's police chief. Ruef eventually pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his former friend and ally. Convicted and cast aside by his sponsor, Schmitz fought on.

Schmitz's efforts took place against a deepening backdrop of public crisis in San Francisco. In May 1907, a sick man was brought to the hospital and died soon after, the cause at first undetermined. As more and more victims straggled in, it became clear that San Francisco was in the grip of a public health emergency: the earthquake had ripped apart sewer hookups and unleashed a wave of rats upon the streets, scattering them to neighborhoods rich and poor. The rats carried the plague. Now, in addition to burned and devastated buildings, The City was confronted with a deadly disease and a dithering administration. “In San Francisco,” the Citizens' Health Committee wrote in an extraordinary report on the period, “plague met politics. Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was open popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State, and Federal health authorities.”
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Schmitz was eager to suppress news of the epidemic. (He was, incidentally, remarkably successful; even today, few accounts of it survive.) To squelch coverage and fallout, he refused, among other things, to allow health reports to be printed; his administration fired a federal health officer who raised alarms. By his actions, Schmitz allied the enemies of reform with the threat not just to public morals but to public health as well. The efforts of their opponents, the nascent Progressives, thus acquired additional respectability. Only Schmitz's removal from office by the corruption probe eventually cleared the way for an aggressive health effort. Cases peaked in September 1907 and continued through the fall until the Citizens' Committee took command; seventy-seven people would die before the committee succeeded in halting the spread of the disease, but it did succeed and did so in spite of the city's politics. That triumph of the Citizens' Committee made a deep impression on Warren, demonstrating vividly the potential for enlightened public participation. Warren would adopt a similar model in later years, as he crafted policy for California. In the meantime, the enlightened citizens of San Francisco hunted rats and dipped their dead bodies in flea-killing poison.
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After protracted delaying tactics by the defense, the trials of the San Francisco political elite reached their critical stage at precisely the moment that Warren arrived to begin college. The young would-be lawyer who had so enjoyed the Tibbet case in Bakersfield now was treated to an even grander act of civic moralism in the hands of a trial lawyer.

Up until that point, Hiram Johnson, still a relatively obscure young prosecutor, occupied the second chair at the graft prosecution table, toiling away behind Francis Heney as the senior lawyer took the lead in prosecuting businessmen said to have paid bribes to Schmitz, Ruef, and their cohorts. As lead prosecutor, Heney had responsibility for jury selection, and in the spring of 1908, one San Francisco man, Morris Haas, had been dismissed from jury service after an ugly courtroom joust with Heney. Heney had allowed Haas to be seated as a juror, but then discovered evidence that Haas had served time in prison. Heney confronted him with evidence of his criminal record and accused him of covering it up in order to land a seat on the jury and then parlay his influence in order to help Ruef. Haas was dismissed, and he stewed over it for months. He then arrived in court on November 13, while Warren was in his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, pulled a revolver, and shot Heney in the head. Heney was rushed to the hospital and feared dead. The mantle then fell to Johnson. Blustery and truculent, Johnson performed with the panache that was to become his trademark. His closing appeal to the jury, including four members thought to be in Ruef's pocket, was stunningly effective. Naming each juror and pointing at him, Johnson boomed, “You, you dare not, acquit this man!”
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Ruef was convicted. Johnson was on his way to a historic career in law and politics.

All of this made for sensational coverage, and it left its mark on Warren, who saw in Johnson a people's champion—not a demagogue but a lawyer, a man of California's middle class empowered by the law to restore order and health to one of its great cities. Warren had set out to become the lawyer that Johnson was. The following year, Warren volunteered for service as an election monitor to help guarantee a clean vote for the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the reform party of which Johnson was then secretary. Heney, who miraculously recovered from his wounds, was running for district attorney that year, asking voters to put him in office in order to keep the prosecutions alive. Picked to oversee a rough neighborhood south of Market Street on that Election Night, Warren, still too young to vote, admitted that he was not sure how much good he'd done. “No wrongdoing was visible to me,” he said, “but throughout the night I wondered what I could have done in those intimidating surroundings even if I had seen any skullduggery.”
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Warren remembered the reformers' winning, but his memory recorded his hopes, not the true outcome. In fact, Heney lost. He was replaced by a new district attorney, Charles Fickert, who promptly shut down the prosecutions of The City's business elite. The graft trials ended without ever reaching the bribers, a failure that Warren vowed to avoid when his turn came two decades later. In the meantime, the Progressive forces behind the investigation turned instead to statewide office. They launched their first such effort in 1910, with Hiram Johnson as their gubernatorial candidate.

Johnson was a barnstorming, energetic campaigner, and on August 16, 1910, he won the Republican primary. His strongest support came from the areas near Warren's hometown of Bakersfield, and he also carried Alameda County, home of Berkeley. Johnson was a humorless standard-bearer for the movement, but he was tireless and intense, motivated in part by his abiding hatred for his father, Grove Johnson, a member of the legislature and, of all things, a lawyer for the Southern Pacific. When Hiram Johnson joined the graft prosecution, his father contemplated signing on with the defense. Hiram was elected governor that year, and Warren cheered the results. Grove Johnson was less impressed: He resigned from the legislature rather than serve with his son.

Johnson may not have had much to offer young Warren as a personal mentor, but there was much to commend him as a political one. As governor, Johnson would move with extraordinary vigor to upend California politics. Measures such as the recall, the initiative, and the referendum—all trumpeted by Johnson and the Progressives—sharply curtailed the power of the Southern Pacific and other big-business bosses. Moreover, they injected into California politics a seriousness of purpose and a sense of reform as moral calling.
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Johnson resembled much of what Warren imagined for himself—Johnson was a tough, uncompromising lawyer who had taken on the serious business of the people as his own moral mantle. And Progressivism gave Warren's instincts a political identity—an affirmation of the place in politics for middle-class men and values. As one Progressive journal observed in 1908: “Nearly all the problems which vex society have their sources above or below the middle-class man. From above come the problems of predatory wealth. . . . From below come the problems of poverty and of pigheaded and brutish criminality.”
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The proposition that the middle class was the locus of reform and progress undergirded Johnson's success and spoke directly to Warren. Edward White, a brilliant historian of the Supreme Court who clerked for Warren, understood its mark on him:

 

Present at the birth of Hiram Johnson's career, Warren never lost his awe for him. “There ensued an administration of reform measures never equaled in California or probably in any other state before or since,” Warren wrote later.
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In 1934, when Warren, then the state Republican Party chairman, sent off congratulatory notes to his fellow Republicans, most were formal and restrained. Only the note to Johnson, then serving in the United States Senate, could be described as effusive, as Warren congratulated the party's senior Washington representative on the support he had received for a fourth term, “which has been so deservedly voted by the people of the state you have served so well.”
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Johnson's two gubernatorial terms were California's first serious attempt to fashion a political center after the blisteringly factional politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He ran outside the normal two-party system, and his wide appeal was demonstrated by his reelection in 1914 as well as his long Senate career after that. But Johnson and the Progressives achieved a kind of negative center: They successfully cast off much of what had corrupted and diminished government and installed political reforms intended to democratize the process. They did not, however, create any lasting social system to connect California's polarized classes, economic reforms to bridge its disparities of wealth, or great physical structures to connect its vast landscape. Those accomplishments—the calming of labor-management disputes; the construction of school and transportation networks; the harnessing of northern water for southern agriculture; the construction of a modern, cosmopolitan state—would await the emergence of a politician with Johnson's drive and integrity but with a more complete vision of constructive politics. It would take a generation until that politician finished the work that Johnson and the Progressives left undone.