In the early 1900s California, along with a number of other states of the Union, reformed itself. Historians group this work of reformation—political and gov­ernmental in the main, but touching also upon other aspects of public life— under the general rubric of "the Progressive movement." Progressivism, we are told, helped to transform the United States from an agricultural nation, owned  by an omnipotent oligarchy and governed by the corrupt party machines which the oligarchy subsidized, into an urban industrial society that had begun to put its political house in good order. Progressivism brought system and benevolence to a haphazard, frequently cruel and capricious Republic. Intense to the point of evangelism, by turns visionary and pragmatic, Progressivism was energized by forces bubbling up from deep within the collective Protestant bourgeois psyche. All this—external reform and an inner drama of search and meaning— flourished most intensely in California. By 1912, in fact, when Hiram Johnson, the Progressive governor of California, was chosen by Theodore Roosevelt his vice-presidential candidate on the Progressive (Bull Moose) ticket, the claim was made that out of all the states of the Union to show signs of Pro­gressive transformation, California had experienced the most profound and ex­tensive upheaval and reform.

The reform and restructuring of California was no easy matter. Despite the fact that most major reforms were pushed through during a five-year period, 1910 to 1915, the gestation period was long and arduous. Early attempts at re­form usually took the form of revolts against the all-encompassing power of the Southern Pacific Railroad, or as Californians were wont to call it, the SP. The SP offered the most obvious instance of what was grossly wrong with California: a very few of the super-rich virtually owned the state—its land, its economy, its government—and were running it as a private preserve. As a creation of the frontier era, the SP epitomized as a corporation all the ruthless energy, the scheming flexibility, the iron will to wealth and power that had characterized the Gold Rush and first frontier era of California through the 18705.

The ownership of the SP, the Big Four, was a Gilded Age plutocracy, Cal­ifornia style. Of relatively simple Eastern backgrounds (three from upstate New York, one from Connecticut), Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Collis P. Huntington all came to California during the Gold Rush, went into retailing in Sacramento, then by sheer cunning and will forged a railroad across half a continent, enriching themselves in the process beyond their wild­est boyhood dreams: in railroads, steamship companies, land holdings (vast acres were granted by the federal government as a subsidy and spur to railroad con­struction), irrigation projects, hotels, and urban real estate.

When Leland Stanford served as governor of California during the Civil War. he served railroad interests as well. From the start, the SP respected politics. Politics, after all, in the form of massive federal loans and land grants, had created the company. Beginning in the 18705, the SP systematically began to gain as much influence over the politics of California as possible. Between 1870 and 1900 the population of California grew from 560,247 to 1,485,053, and the SP grew from the third party of California politics to the only party, holding Democrats and Republicans alike in receivership. The reformist Constitution of 1879 created a three-man railroad commission, intended to regulate the SP. Stacked with genial retainers, the commission soon became waggishly known as the Southern Pacific Literary Bureau. Few adverse regulations came from this enfeebled commission in its thirty-year existence.

Nor did the courts set an opposite example. The SP, for one thing, had a very good friend on the national Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, a for­mer California supreme court justice appointed to the Court in 1863 by Abra­ham Lincoln at the urging of the Big Four. Locally, the state supreme court could usually be counted on. (Years later, Fremont Older remembered the shock he felt when as a young San Francisco reporter in the late i88os he first saw a California supreme court justice shamelessly display his annual pass to a SP railroad conductor.) Between 1895 and 1910, 57 out of 79 rate cases to come before the California Supreme Court were ruled in favor of the SP. No wonder the railroad was able to adjust rates to suit its purposes, favoring some freight shippers (especially those in which it held partial interest) and driving the un­cooperative out of business. Needing oil for its trains, the railroad gained con­trolling interest in Associated Oil, a subsidiary of Standard, then gave rebates to both companies, which is to say to itself. Whatever was lost on oil shipments could be made up elsewhere.

Established in 1893 and headquartered in offices at Fourth and Townsend streets in San Francisco, the unambiguously named Political Bureau of the Southern Pacific, presided over by a skilled corporate attorney, William Frankln Herrin, chief counsel to the railroad between 1893 and 1910, coordinated I the affairs of a statewide, indeed nationwide, political network. Experienced in the service of the oligarchy from his former service on the staffs of the WilliamSharon estate and the vast Miller and Lux holdings in the San Joaquin Valley, Herrin exercised control over local party organizations through the simple tech­nique of placing key individuals on retainer. Elected legislators received free passes and hotel rooms, campaign contributions, special rates for their business friends. Since Republican party nominating conventions were SP-controlled, a steady supply of favorable legislators—such as Grove Johnson of Sacramento, tather of the future reform governor—was insured. There were a few excep­tions, but in the main the governors and United States senators of California were equally friendly. "From the village constable to the governor of the state," observed the reform-minded Dr. John R. Haynes of Los Angeles, "the final selection of the people's officials lay with Mr. Herrin or his subordinates in the railroad machine." Since by 1900 half of California's population resided in four urban centers, the control of city machines was crucial to the preservation of SP interests. The SP initially exercised its influence in San Francisco through Christopher Buckley, a blind saloon keeper turned Democratic boss, but when Buckley sided with Leland Stanford when Stanford broke with Huntington and ran for the Senate against Huntington's wishes (Huntington had another can­didate in mind), Buckley rather precipitously found himself facing indictment, and fled the country. Later the SP dealt with Buckley's more cooperative suc­cessor, the dapper, persistently charming Abraham Ruef, a brilliant attorney of French-Jewish ancestry who ran San Francisco from 1902 onwards as boss of the Union Labor party.

The SP's man in Los Angeles, land agent and lobbyist Walter Parker, was the perfect political boss for Ragtime America: a portly, mustachioed man surveying life through a haze of cigar smoke, by turns ruthless or genial, depend­ing upon whether or not he was getting his way. Parker ran the Republican party in Southern California, keeping a close eye on Los Angeles affairs. Con­trolling the wards, Parker put his men on the city council. In 1906 Parker bla­tantly bribed City Clerk Harry J. Lelande (who succumbed for a mere $1,000) to expedite an ordinance granting the railroad right of way on a dry riverbed running through the center of Los Angeles. Despite outraged protests when the bribe was discovered, a thoroughly domesticated city council passed the ordi­nance anyway.

This was not the first time that the railroad had brazened out adverse public opinion. In 1880 the SP raised prices on land it owned in Tulare County near the Kings River from the "$2.50 upward" it had promised to from $17 to $40 an acre. The settlers who had moved onto the land, building homes and barns and planting in expectation of the $2.50-an-acre price, were understandably enraged. They refused to pay the new price, and they refused to move. The SP went to court and of course won its case. When the United States marshal came to evict the settlers, a gunfight broke out at Mussel Slough near the town of Hanford. Four settlers and one would-be purchaser at the new rates were killed. Two other settlers later died from their wounds. Ultimately, the SP prevailed, sending five ranchers to prison and evicting others from their homes. No rec­ompense or even apology was made to the men and women whose lives had been destroyed.

Three years later, in 1883, the public image of the SP took another down­ward turn. The widow of Collis P. Huntington's trusted associate David D. Colton, in the course of suing the railroad over the disputed value of stocksshe had inherited from her husband's estate, made public hundreds of letters ex­changed between Huntington and Colton between 1874 and 1878. The bulk of these letters dealt with the delicate matter of bribing Washington congress­men and Sacramento legislators to favor pro-railroad legislation. Colton was supposed to have burned the correspondence.

The SP did not win any friends in Los Angeles either with its ten-year effort, beginning in 1890, to impose on the City of the Angels an SP-owned port in Santa Monica. Even the affluent oligarchy of Los Angeles, normally well dis­posed to the railroad, balked at Collis P. Huntington's plan, backed by his friends in Washington, to organize the Port of Los Angeles as an SP monopoly. The business community instantly realized what the future of Los Angeles as a ship­ping center would be with both the port and all rail access to the port exclu­sively in SP hands. At the height of the port controversy, Huntington had the chutzpah to propose to Congress that the SP not be asked to pay back the $50 million due the federal government by 1899, when the thirty-year loan from Congress with which the railroad was first financed came due. Huntington sought instead a fifty-to-a-hundred-year delay in repayment, with the SP paying only one-half of one percent interest on the principal. Otherwise, Huntington ar­gued, the SP would be forced into bankruptcy. Few believed him. When Con­gress rejected Huntington's proposal in January 1897, Governor James H. Budd, a Democrat, declared a public holiday.

Governor Budd, a University of California-trained engineer; Adolph Sutro, the Prussian-born Populist party mayor of San Francisco (also an engineer by profession); and San Francisco Examiner editor William Randolph Hearst openly fought the SP through the last years of the nineteenth century. Their opposi­tion prepared the way for the bold challenge in 1899 of the Ventura County oilman and rancher Thomas Robert Bard. The fight against the SP had been spearheaded in the 18905 by the short-lived Populist party. Bard, by contrast, was no free-silver Populist, but a conservative, corporately oriented Republican, one of the creators of the Union Oil Company and its first president, angry at SP domination of his part) and of his ranching, land development, and oil interests. Over the years a conservatively oriented anti-SP faction of Southern Californian Republicans, most of them entrepreneurs fearful of the growing SP monopoly, had gathered around Bard, a somewhat aloof Pennsylvania-born patrician, surprisingly high-minded for having made such a success in the rough-and-tumble world of oil, land development, and ranching.

By 1899 this reform Republican faction had grown powerful enough in the legislature to deny election to the United States Senate to Colonel Daniel M. Burns of San Francisco, whom the SP was advancing as a candidate after the collapse of the candidacy of San Diego businessman Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., the son of the late president, who had desperately wished to return to Washington in triumph. A hearty hedonist with a checkered political past, mining interests in Mexico, and a taste for liquor, women, flashy clothes, and the race track, Colonel Burns was just the sort of United States senator the SP had in mind: a longtime political ally who, for a price, could be depended upon in Washing­ton. Thomas Bard, however, believed that to send Burns to the Senate would constitute "a shame to our People and to Christian Civilization." Reluctantly at first, Bard yielded to the urging of the reform Republican leader, Dr. Chester Rowell of Fresno, and entered the Senate race. It took a year of wrangling and a special session of the legislature for the anti-railroad Republicans to get Bard elected. At one point in the contest Governor Henry Gage, a railroad man, met secretly with William F. Herrin of the SP Political Bureau in rooms rented under a fake name in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco to plot strategy. Bard's public reception in Sacramento following his election contrasted dramatically with what would undoubtedly have been a more robust affair for Colonel Burns. Only lemonade was served, a small string orchestra played, and no ladies of the demimonde were in evidence. Whether out of boredom or pique, pro-SP Governor Gage boycotted the affair.

Two years later the SP was further assaulted. Neither candidate to succeed Gage as governor—Republican George Pardee, mayor of Oakland, and Dem­ocrat Franklin Lane, city attorney of San Francisco—was out of the SP politi­cal stable. Had Lane won the election, an avowed SP enemy would have sat in the governor's chair, but the prospect of the independent-minded Lane as governor also frightened an ambitious Democrat by the name of William Ran­dolph Hearst, by then based in New York, who did not want Lane, a brilliant journalist and lawyer, to threaten Hearst control of the Democratic party in California. At Hearst's behest the San Francisco Examiner failed to get behind Lane's candidacy. Defeated, Lane went on to Washington in 1906, appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to the newly formed Interstate Commerce Commission. Lane probed the SP with a special vengeance, finding, among other things, that the SP favored 103 large California corporations and ranches and price-gouged the others.