Hiram W. Johnson and the American Liberal Tradition

Few people better exemplify the shifting currents and odd turns of twentieth-century American political thought and behavior than Hiram Warren Johnson, a California Progressive, U.S. senator, and isolationist who was fiercely independent in thought, more often in opposition than in agreement. His life, spanning the period between the Civil War and World War II, encompassed three significant historical phenomena: the decomposition of the political party system, the rise and fall of liberal reform, and two world wars and the resulting commitment to world affairs. In a thoroughly researched and beautifully written study, the first and probably the last comprehensive biography of Johnson, Richard Coke Lower places this California governor and U.S. Senator at the center of the evolution of American politics and public policy during the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Sacramento, California, in 1866, Johnson belonged to a generation of Progressive-era reformers who came of age intellectually and politically during the late Gilded Age. In some respects, he derived his personal and political traits from his father, Grove Lawrence Johnson, a New York native who emigrated to California in 1863, entered the legal profession, established himself in that state’s Republican Party and, in 1894, was elected to Congress with the support of railroad interests. In contrast, Hiram spent much of his career challenging authority. Grove Johnson, whom Lower describes as “self-centered and often overbearing” (p. 4), was an authority figure, and in the late 1890s, Hiram broke with him, leaving the family law firm after only a few years. Striking out on his own politically, Hiram Johnson joined a new group of Republican insurgents who contested the California GOP’s Old Guard leadership. But Johnson was frustrated in his first efforts at insurgent politics, and he moved from Sacramento to San Francisco, where, in 1908, he became well-known for successfully prosecuting machine boss Abraham Ruef for graft. The Ruef prosecution catapulted Johnson to statewide fame. In 1910 and again four years later, Johnson was elected — like Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa — as a Progressive Republican governor of California.

In Johnson’s two terms as governor, the most important aspects of the state-level Progressive reform agenda were realized in California. Unlike reformers east of the Mississippi River, California reformers — and western reformers generally — sought structural changes in the political system that at least partially opened up politics and governance. Under Johnson’s leadership, California adopted the “Oregon Plan” of directly electing U.S. senators; it also provided for the election of school officials and judges. Two measures typical of western progressivism, the recall of elected officials and the ability to legislate by popular referendum, were adopted during the first year of Johnson’s governorship. As important as these changes was the transformation of the state government, an objective that Progressive-era reformers supported nationwide. Under Johnson’s leadership, the California legislature rationalized the state’s finance and budgetary process. Johnson, who (in contrast to his father) favored limiting the political power of the Southern Pacific Railroad, obtained the establishment of an independent state commission that could set rates that railroads charged consumers. Johnson, who was elected with few working-class votes in 1910, forged an alliance as governor with union leaders; supporting the expansion of workmen’s compensation legislation, he also sponsored the creation of new commissions to investigate and regulate working conditions of women and children.

A skillful parliamentary and political leader, Johnson enjoyed a national reputation; “in no other state,” Lower observes, “had so bold a set of reforms been put into place in so short a span of time” (p. 37). But there were limits to Johnson’s record as a liberal reformer; attitudes of class and race constricted his conception of democracy. Sharing the anti-Asian prejudices of most white Californians, Johnson acquiesced in (although he did not initiate) legislation in 1913 prohibiting the ownership of land by...