Way before the Storm: California, the Republican Party, and a New Conservatism, 1900–1930

In 1910, progressives in California won control of the Republican party, enacted a broad reform agenda, and otherwise dominated state politics for a decade. Historians have visited and revisited their movement, seeing it as a vital chapter in the history of the country’s Progressive Era. But scholars have largely ignored study of the California progressives’ opponents—the regulars of the state Republican Party who stayed loyal to the national Republican Party in the 1910s—usually portraying them simply as reactionaries doing a reactionary’s duty of opposing reform.¹ These regular Republicans were reactionaries of a sort, but the nature of their opposition is very much worth studying. For the reformism of the California progressives—in its political, regulatory, and socioeconomic breadth, and in the kind of voters it came to attract—elicited a reaction among the regulars so profound that over the course of the 1910s they altered the rhetorical politics that voters usually associated with turn-of-the-century Republicanism.² The postwar political environment gave further force and shape to the development of these new electoral appeals. In this new political rhetoric and the electoral strategy it served—in other words, in the kinds of appeals the regulars made and in the kinds of voters they sought to attract—we can see pre-New Deal roots of modern American conservatism, in whose growth California played such an important part.³

To appreciate the profound transformation of Republican political rhetoric in California in the 1910s and 1920s, we must briefly explore how the party appealed to voters during its period of electoral dominance from 1896 to 1910. The political rhetoric of nativism and economic antistatism that came to such prominence among California’s regular Republicans after 1910 was in marked contrast to the kind of rhetoric that dominated the party’s political appeals at the turn of the century.⁴ Indeed, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Republican regulars and the party’s emerging reformist forces remained largely united in adhering to the general thrust of national Republicanism—an abiding vision of political economy that advocated for federal and state government activism focused on developing a truly national industrial economy. The party also largely adhered to the politics of ethno-cultural pluralism that William McKinley had campaigned on with much success in 1896 and 1900. Support for nativist organizations fell off sharply after the mid-1890s. And while anti-Japanese sentiment grew sharply among Californians at the turn of the century, the regulars controlling the state Republican Party worked with the national Republicans to blunt the worst of the discriminatory policies this intolerance produced.⁵

California Republicans boasted that theirs was a party committed to the “national idea” over the claims of states’ rights and localism. They consistently supported the protective tariff and “liberal appropriations” to promote agricultural and mining development, education, and internal improvements.⁶ Even among progressives committed to political reform, traditional party appeals for an active government remained strong. As independent Republican governor George Pardee noted while campaigning for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the election “is nothing but protection versus free trade; liberal Republican national appropriations versus parsimonious Democratic ones; Roosevelt versus Parker.” The national election had profound consequences for California, he went on, for “if voters were to send Democrats [to the General Assembly] they must vote for a Democratic United States Senator, who will favor free trade and reduced national appropriations. … But if you send Republicans to the Legislature they must vote for a Republican United States Senator, who is in favor of protection and large appropriations for the many things this State needs.”⁷ In promoting such active government aimed at broad economic development, the California Republicans could hardly claim to be the party of limited and parsimonious government.⁸

State party platforms and other campaign rhetoric in the presidential election years 1904 and 1908 championed positive government action, calling for tariff barriers to protect American industry and labor and “liberal appropriations” to develop the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine, and likewise the state...