Progressivism and After
On the evening of 21 May 1907 a group of fifteen reform-minded young men, journalists and lawyers, nearly all of them Republicans, gathered for dinner at Levy's Cafe in downtown Los Angeles. They had been convened by Edward Dickson and Chester Rowell, two of the journalists among their number, just back from covering the horrors in Sacramento, and by Marshal Stimson and Russ Avery, two Los Angeles attorneys. At an earlier series of luncheon meetings at the University Club in Los Angeles, Dickson of the Los Angeles Express, Rowell's office-mate in the press room at the Capitol, had given the vivid details of the buying and selling of votes underway in the legislative session of 1907. Stimson and Avery had also attended these University Club meetings, where certain preliminary discussions had occurred concerning the formation of a reform league, a topic that Dickson and Rowell had already been discussing in Sacramento. Seated around the dinner table at Levy's that evening were Rowell, Dickson, Stimson, and Avery, the conveners of the meeting, together with Dr. John R. Haynes, the millionaire physician-reformer; attorneys Robert N. Bulla and Meyer Lissner of Los Angeles; oilman S. C. Graham; and Colonel Ed Fletcher, a San Diego businessman. The remaining six were journalists: T. C. Hocking, publisher of the Modesto Herald; G. B. Daniels, publisher of the Oakland Enquirer; Irving Martin publisher of the Stockton Record; Colonel E. A. Forbes, publisher of the Sacramento Union; A. J. Pillsbury, the Sacramento Union editor; and Harley W. Brundige, editor of the Los Angeles Express.
Talk during the meal revolved around the deplorable state of California politics, and when Dickson called the meeting to order over coffee and cigars, a more formal agenda of needed reforms was discussed: a direct primary system, so as to take the nomination of political candidates out of the control of the
SP-dominated party machines; an initiative provision in the state constitution and local charters as well, so that the public could have direct access to the lawmaking process or revoke laws that it did not like; a local and state referendum provision, allowing the public to express its opinion on bills in the process of being enacted into legislation; and lastly, a recall provision making it possible to remove corrupt or inept officials from public office. These four measures— the direct primary, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall—were of special interest to Dr. Haynes, founder of the Direct Legislation League of Los Angeles, but other measures were discussed as well: the regulation of public utilities; the conservation of forests; the outlawing of child labor, prostitution, and gambling; hospital and prison reform; women's suffrage and a minimum wage law for working women; the direct election of United States senators; the systemization of public finance; charter reform; public transportation. Overriding all issues, however, asserting itself as the beginning, the sine qua non of any reform program, was the necessity of curbing the Southern Pacific—what one dinner discussant at Levy's Cafe termed the "constructive destruction of the Southern Pacific machine."
From this meeting emerged a loose coalition of Tory reformers, Theodore Roosevelt Republicans to a man, who promised each other that they would not seek elective office personally but would band together to put independent, honest men into state and local office. Chester Rowell, Edward Dickson, Russ Avery, Meyer Lissner, and Marshal Stimson (the last three all young Los Angeles attorneys) constituted the inner core of leadership of what developed up and down the state through the spring and summer of 1907 into an informal affiliation of reform fraternities. By August, when the league gathered in Oakland for its first statewide meeting, there were about fifty activists involved, thirty-eight of whom were able to attend the meeting. At no time would the league exceed a hundred members. On i August 1907 the clubs formally adopted the name League of Lincoln-Roosevelt Republican Clubs to suggest the membership's dedication to a heritage of reforming conservatism which these young attorneys and journalists considered the best and most usable heritage of the Republican party.
Who were the men of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, and who were their counterparts among the Progressive Democrats of California? They were young men, for one thing, the majority of them in their thirties, largely Protestant and small-town in origin, upper-middle-class, university-trained professionals, abhorrent of both the corporate oligarchy and labor unions, forward-looking and reform-minded, yet at the same time slightly nostalgic for a lost myth of American self-reliance and individualism that was, at bottom, the indispensable myth for their own continuing professional success. The majority of them were born elsewhere, especially in the Midwest, Wisconsin leading the list. (By 1910, in fact, a full 60 percent of California's entire population was Midwest-born.) There were exceptions to this Midwest rule. San Francisco City Attorney Franklin