FoundSF

Historical Essay

by William Issel and Robert Cherny

Mayor Rolph on the last day of the Montgomery Street streetcar, 1927.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org

Toward the end of James Rolph's unparalleled nineteen-year tenure as mayor of San Francisco, the story was told that he began an address to a group of San Francisco males with the salutation: “Brother Knights [of Columbus] and fellow Masons.” Whether true or not, Rolph must have delighted in the telling of it, for he dearly loved being “mayor of all the people” A critic in 1929 admitted that “he attempts, and usually succeeds, to be all things to all people.” While some have dismissed Rolph's style as glad-handing and baby kissing designed to catch votes, most of his closest associates described him as genuinely gregarious, deeply committed to democratic values, and sincere in his efforts to be mayor of all.(1)

Rolph's first term as mayor included an impressive array of accomplishments—the Panama Pacific International Exposition, construction of the Civic Center, initiation of service on the Municipal Railway, and important steps toward ensuring an adequate water supply. In each case, Rolph closely identified himself with the accomplishment, held up the project as a benefit to the city as a whole, and sought to realize a vision of civic unity based on toleration, a harmony of interests, and symbols of progress achieved through commitment to common goals. Throughout his first term, Rolph brought all his considerable energy to bear on the attainment of unity and progress. He did so in a context considerably different from that of his predecessors and a brief look at this•changed context must precede more detailed treatment of the Rolph years as mayor.

Rolph And Progressivism

Rolph's inauguration coincided with nationwide reforms in the structure and function of government at all levels—local, state, and federal. Taken together, these changes make•up a part of progressivism. San Francisco had already witnessed a number of typically progressive reforms before Rolph became mayor, notably the new charter and the graft prosecution. Several other changes in city government came during Rolph's tenure. In some of those changes, Rolph played the role of initiator or proponent; for others, he was little more than an interested bystander. One set of changes that Rolph did little or nothing to bring about, but which he embraced and came to personify, involved substantial reductions in the power and influence of organized political parties. Changes in the process of balloting, creation of a strong Civil Service Commission, restrictions on the number of patronage positions available for party loyalists, and charter amendments making city offices nonpartisan, all weakened political parties prior to Rolph's election in 1911. State legislation in 1911 and 1913 extended nonpartisan status to other offices, and other state legislation in 1909 and after established and extended the direct primary.(2) As a result, the once-mighty empire of party organization stood in disarray by the midpoint of Rolph's :first term.

Rolph, in 1911, became San Francisco's first nonpartisan mayor, but that distinction did not proceed solely from the new charter provision. Registered as a Republican, Rolph received endorsements in 1911 from both the Republican and Democratic parties. Later, in 1918, he sought both the Republican and Democratic nominations for governor under the provision of the California primary law that permitted cross-filing. Rolph emerged the victor in the Democratic primary, based on a strong showing in San Francisco and elsewhere in northern California. He also did very well in the Republican primary in northern California but lost in southern California and lost the plurality statewide. Rolph smothered partisanship with his hearty conviviality and effusive love for his city. Of all San Francisco's mayors, Rolph stands out as most effective in practicing the politics of personality. At the end of his term as mayor, one journalist noted that Rolph “would rather shed a cheerful light than slay dragons.” Always nattily dressed, with a boutonniere (he preferred gardenias), he exuded urbanity and affability. Partisanship seemed alien to his soul, and he never acquired the sort of organization that would qualify as a machine.(3)

Rolph forms a bridge between the two patterns of political thought and behavior described in Chapter 7 as the traditional and the legal-rational. Whereas Rolph's hand shaking and baby kissing mark him as a highly effective practitioner of the traditional politics of personal relationships, in his decision making he often turned to the advice of experts. In designing the new Civic Center, building the Municipal Railway, and improving the water supply, Rolph first secured the advice of experts, then threw his energy and ability into the political fray in defense of their decisions. During Rolph's first year in the mayor's office, San Francisco even acquired a new agency, the Bureau of Efficiency, headed by E. R. Zion, who set out to find “what methods give the best results and what give the poorest.” Once the best methods were found, through survey and analysis, they were to be extended to all parts of the government to produce the maximum efficiency.(4)

When Rolph took the oath of office for the first time in 1912, he carried into city hall a philosophy of government that the Merchants' Association and James Phelan had articulated in their call for charter reform twenty years before. The Rolph coalition rejected the narrow definition of municipal government and refused to limit the city government's role merely to the provision of some essential services (police, fire, education, sewage disposal, paving) and to the franchising of private companies to provide other necessary services (water, gas, electricity, transportation). Rolph's supporters, like Phelan's, denied that the city's proper role in expansion and development was limited to securing land titles, surveying streets and boundaries, and providing (or franchising) necessary services. The charter of 1898-1900 had extended definitions of essential services in allowing for the city to take over municipal transportation and water systems. Even though the city rejected the elaborate planning involved in the Burnham plans of 1905 and 1909, the increased role of the city in directing development, when added to the increased reliance on expertise, inevitably led to formalization of the city's role in the planning of expansion and development. The Panama Pacific International Exposition generated demands for planning for its conclusion, and the supervisors approved an ordinance. Rolph did not implement the ordinance until after some revisions, however, and he did not appoint the city's first planning commission until late in 1917.(5)

From Civic Unity To Political Polarity

When Rolph took his oath of office in 1912, he told the supervisors that “our city may little note nor long remember what we say here, but let us so conduct our administration that it can never forget what we will have done here.” In four years he had done much. He seemed a whirlwind of motion energetically promoting first one bond issue, then another, leading a parade, presiding at a groundbreaking, initiating a new streetcar line, laying a cornerstone, greeting visiting dignitaries, dedicating a new building. Constantly in the public eye, he had a phenomenal memory for names and faces.

An instinctive democrat, he disliked the pretensions of those who considered themselves to be "the best people" or "right-thinking businessmen." He especially questioned the commitment of the Chamber of Commerce to work for "the benefit of all the people" and did not belong to the organization that had been created in 1911, even though he had held high office in two of the organizations that had been merged into it. He strongly and repeatedly supported the right of workers to unionize and to bargain.(32) Through hard work, careful selection of subordinates, reliance on expertise and planning, and his own outgoing personality, he succeeded in creating—briefly—a high degree of unity based on pride of accomplishment and on himself as symbol of the city. It was an extraordinary feat, given the strife of the decade from 1901 to 1911. But the "Era of Good Feelings" was also short-lived.

Europe plunged into war in August 1914, and the specter of that conflict hovered over the PPIE, preventing some nations from attending and limiting the participation of others. The war acted as a catalyst, ,provoking reactions that eventually plunged San Francisco into what one prominent Republican called "a violent class war." Portents appeared during the PPIE. On July 5, William Jennings Bryan spoke in favor of peace and international friendship. "The world," he said, "has run mad,” and he urged the United States to look "toward better things than war.” Theodore Roosevelt spoke fifteen days later, vehemently denigrated "the professional pacifists, the peace-at-any-price, non-resistance universal arbitration people," and advocated an increased army and universal military training.(33)

The war not only divided San Franciscans over the question of preparedness; it also prompted unions to seek wage increases to match rising prices. By early 1916, the city seemed poised on the verge of the long-threatened labor war, for the close of the PPIE signified the end of the truce between the unions and the open-shop advocates. Unions marked some gains in both wages and hours in early 1916, but a waterfront strike in the summer brought the Chamber of Commerce into the fray as a proponent of the open shop. Emulating PPIE tactics, a Chamber-sponsored mass meeting of businessmen established a Law and Order Committee and pledged funds—a half million dollars within a week, one million dollars by year's end—to restore "peace and quiet" on the waterfront. The waterfront strike ended a week later, on July 17.(34)

Preparedness Day and the Mooney-Billings Case

By then, preparedness advocates were busily preparing a massive Preparedness Day parade, modeled on one held in New York in May. At the head of the parade committee sat Thornwell Mullally. nephew of Patrick Calhoun and his executive assistant at the time of the Ruef bribe and the strike of 1907, former member of the PPIE board of directors, and a leader of a volunteer cavalry troop, which included most of the polo team of the Burlingame Country Club. Others on the parade committee included William H. Crocker, Herbert Fleishhacker, M. H. de Young, and other city business leaders. The Labor Council urged workers to boycott the affair. The Building Trades Council absolutely prohibited participation by members and tied preparedness to Homestead, Ludlow, Coeur d'Alene, and the “skulls of working men, women, and children, shot, murdered and burned to death by militia men.” On July 20, an antipreparedness demonstration brought together some of the city's labor leaders, reformers, socialists, and pacifists. Rudolph Spreckels condemned the organizers of the parade as grafters, and Paul Scharrenberg of the California State Federation of Labor denounced them as “industrial vampires.”(35)

On July 22, Rolph and Mullally, leaders of the parade, started down Market Street at 1:30 P.M., a half-hour behind schedule. Behind them came more than twenty thousand of the city's businessmen and professionals, their wives in a separate women's division, and veterans of past wars. At 2:04 P.M., a bomb exploded on Steuart Street near Market, killing nine and injuring forty. As the parade continued and ambulances took away the injured, souvenir hunters, police, and volunteers vied in collecting fragments and evidence. The search for those responsible quickly narrowed to a small group of radical union members and anarchists. Authorities soon arrested five suspects: Warren K. Billings, recently released from Folsom Prison where he had served two years for illegally transporting dynamite; Thomas J. Mooney, an iron molder, socialist, would-be union organizer, and chief suspect in the dynamiting of a power line south of San Francisco; Rena Mooney, a music teacher who had assisted her husband Tom in an abortive streetcar strike the week before the bombing; Edward D. Nolan, a machinist and anarchist, from Machinists' Lodge 68; and Israel Weinberg, a jitney driver and officer of the Jitney Bus Operators' Union, whose son took piano lessons from Rena Mooney.(36)

Once the suspects were in custody, police and city district attorney Charles Fickert focused their attention exclusively on building a case against them, discarding or ignoring contrary evidence or testimony. Billings was tried first, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Mooney came next, was convicted, and sentenced to death. Then the defense began to discover indications of perjury and subornation; key witnesses did not appear in the trial of Rena Mooney, and the jury found her not guilty. Weinberg received a similar verdict, and Fickert dropped charges against Nolan. Fifteen years later, researchers for the Wickersham commission drew up a report on the cases and presented the following conclusions:

There was never any scientific attempt made by either the police or the prosecution to discover the perpetrators of the crime.... There were flagrant violations of the statutory law of California by both the police and the prosecution.... Immediately after the arrest of the defendants there commenced a deliberate attempt to arouse public prejudice against them, by a series of daily interviews given to the press by prosecuting officials.... Witnesses were permitted to testify at the trials, despite such knowledge in the possession of the prosecutor of prior contradictory stories told by these witnesses, as to make their mere production a vouching for perjured testimony.... Witnesses were coached in their testimony to a degree approximating subornation of perjury.... After the trials, disclosures casting doubt on the justice of the convictions were minimized, and every attempt made to defeat the liberation of the defendants, by a campaign of misrepresentation and propaganda carried on by the official who had prosecuted them.(37)

At first, the defense drew support almost solely from a small group of radicals and anarchists, among them Alexander Berkman, who had been publishing an anarchist journal—ominously titled the Blast—in the city since January 1916, and Emma Goldman, who was in the Bay Area delivering a lecture series in July 1916. Radicals in the labor movement, especially those involved in the International Workers Defense Fund, also took prominent roles in raising funds and agitating. When indications of subornation and perjury began to mount, after Tom Mooney's trial and before that of Rena Mooney, Frederick Koster of the Chamber of Commerce condemned criticism of Fickert, and the Law and Order Committee offered to assist Fickert in the Rena Mooney trial.(38)

By July 1917, the U.S. district attorney reported to Washington that “the community is at fever heat and deadly divided on the cases.... [I]t was taken up by the Law and Order Committee of the Chamber of Commerce as a chance to suppress the Unions, and the Unions evidently took up Mooney's side of it in order to counter-move against the action of the Chamber of Commerce.” Chester Rowell, a leader of the progressive faction of the state's Republican party, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt of “a violent class war on in San Francisco which is becoming nearly as bitter as was the schism over the graft prosecutions ten years ago.” In December 1917, Fickert's opponents forced a recall election, but Fickert's battle against anarchism won him endorsement by Theodore Roosevelt and support from the Chamber of Commerce and most of the business community. The opposition had the support of the Labor Council and many ministers upset over Fickert's tolerance of vice interests. Fickert secured more than three-fifths of the votes after a bomb demolished part of the governor's mansion the night before the election.(39)

Demonstrations against Mooney's execution took place worldwide in 1917 and 1918, but efforts to secure a new trial failed. Attempts to secure a pardon from the governor enlisted the support of President Wilson, but failed too; instead, Governor William D. Stephens commuted Mooney's sentence to life imprisonment, guaranteeing a continuation of the struggle to free both him and Billings. Their long battle for freedom came to a successful close only in 1939, and Billings did not secure a pardon until 1961.(40)

Throughout the latter half of 1916 and into 1917, as the Mooney case continued to make headlines week after week, other events also contributed to the feeling of “class war.” The Law and Order Committee established itself as the leader of an open-shop campaign, succeeded in breaking the culinary unions despite efforts by Rolph to bring about arbitration, broke a strike against retail lumberyards, and tried to break the Structural Iron Workers' Union but failed when Rolph had police remove private armed guards from construction sites and also canceled city contracts with firms insisting on the open shop. In November 1916, the Law and Order Committee convinced the city's voters to adopt a strict antipicketing ordinance, and in 1917 the Chamber of Commerce persuaded the governor to veto an anti-injunction measure.(41)

Rolph's Retreat from Leadership

By the crisis of mid-1916, Rolph had already begun to trim his activities. He suffered what his aides described as “a temporary breakdown” in January 1916, requiring “complete rest” in “a local sanitorium.” He also had an appendectomy at that time. Thereafter, he cut back his exhaustive schedule. The war brought Rolph serious financial reverses. Between 1915 and 1918, the mayor had made impressive additions to his already considerable wealth by investing in ships and ship construction, but the war ended with three ships partially built and no buyer. By 1921, his export-import firm had gone into liquidation, and Rolph owed $1 million. Much of this debt was due Herbert Fleishhacker of the Anglo and London Paris National Bank, who emerged in the 1920s as a key Rolph political adviser.(42)

During the war and throughout the 1920s, as Rolph won term after term, he continued to be highly visible. William Hines preserved the following picture in early 1929:

Rolph ... will order the siren on the Ferry Building blown, or the streets decorated with flags and bunting, on the slightest provocation. Hardly a week goes by without a parade up Market Street with Rolph leading the show. Most of the time it is a motion picture actress up from Hollywood.

Hines claimed that “the highest dignitary of the nations of the world might be visiting San Francisco and, if paraded up Market Street, Rolph will take as many bows with his silk hat as the dignitary.” Hollywood, especially, seemed to attract Rolph, and he delighted in associating with motion picture celebrities, especially attractive actresses. According to Hines, Rolph's leading of parades constituted virtually his sole exercise of leadership.

With a charter that gives the mayor of San Francisco extreme powers, Rolph has practically turned the reigns of government over to the chairman of the finance committee [Franck Havenner]. They are bitter enemies, but the leading banker of San Francisco [Herbert Fleishhacker] has found it advisable to make the lion and the lamb lie down together.(43)

These observations coincide with those of Andrew Gallagher, member of the Board of Supervisors throughout much of the 1920s and a personal friend of Rolph. In an interview in 1960, Gallagher recalled that “as the years passed the Mayor gave a decreasing amount of his attention to the problems of administration, and he relied increasingly on his capable secretaries, advisors, and political supporters to attend to the day-by-day problems of government.”(44) As Rolph retreated from the active leadership style of his first term, as he came increasingly to preside (perhaps “reign" would be more appropriate), the politics of the city became increasingly factious. Some projects begun during the period before the war continued almost as if they had a life of their own; other political issues closely reflected the labor-management conflicts of the decade; and in still other political arenas the locus of decision making shifted away from city government to private associations claiming to act in the public interest.

Controversy Over Public Ownership

The Municipal Railway and the Hetch Hetchy project continued to occupy a prominent place in the politics of the war period and the 1920s. By the time of the PPIE in 1915, the Municipal Railway had grown to a system of ten lines and the close of the exposition did not bring a slackening of streetcar construction. City Engineer O'Shaughnessy, usually with the political support of Rolph, worked to implement most of the suggestions in Bion Arnold's comprehensive report of 1912. The construction of the Stockton Street tunnel in 1914, financed by assessments on the property owners benefiting from improved service, provided a model for the financing of the Twin Peaks tunnel, the longest streetcar tunnel in the world. Arnold acted as consultant, O'Shaughnessy was engineer, and Rolph proudly drove the first car through the completed bore in 1918. Rolph's dedication speech candidly linked municipal enterprise—termed “socialism" by the Illustrated World in 1915—with urban development:

With the coming of the rails and the operation of streetcars through the Twin Peaks Tunnel, it will no longer be necessary to move down on the peninsula or across the Bay to Marin or Alameda Counties to find suitable home sites. Enough will be provided west of Twin Peaks.

Real estate agents came in force to the dedication exercises, ready to take celebrants to prospective homesites in the southwestern third of the city. Arnold had long since pointed out that a commuter could travel from across the bay to downtown San Francisco as quickly and cheaply as from the southwestern third of the city, and he was not alone in attributing the undeveloped state of that area to inadequate transportation and water. Municipal enterprise-socialism only in the eyes of the most conservative-remedied those deficiencies, and the postwar period saw a construction boom west of Twin Peaks, including creation of such exclusive areas as St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill. By 1928, construction of the Duboce tunnel and the Judah Street line marked the virtual completion of the Arnold plan of 1912.(45)

End of the Rolph Era

James Rolph left the mayor's office while the freeholders were still in the midst of their work. He had won the Republican nomination for governor in the 1930 primary, defeating the progressive incumbent C. C. Young, and went on to an easy victory in November, winning 86 percent of the vote of his own city and 72 percent statewide.

The right to fill the vacancy in the mayoralty rested with the Board of Supervisors. The only other time the supervisors had exercised this power under the charter was in 1907 when the graft prosecution had dictated that they choose an outsider, Edward Taylor. In 1931, however, the supervisors made it clear that they intended to elevate one of their own. Several were interested, but Angelo Rossi soon emerged as the leading candidate. Rossi was, in many ways, cut from the same pattern as Rolph. Successful businessman, long-time active member and officer of the Downtown Association, he won election to the Board of Supervisors in 1921, was defeated for reelection in 1925, but came back to win again in 1929 with the highest vote of any candidate. He became chairman of the Finance Committee, the most powerful position on the board, in 1930. Rolph had followed his usual practice of designating the Finance Committee chairman as acting mayor during his many absences in 1930, and he soon made clear his preference that Rossi fill the mayoralty on a permanent basis. Rossi drew opposition from a number of supervisors, especially those with labor endorsements and those who saw themselves as candidates. No anti-Rossi coalition emerged, however, especially after Tom Finn joined the Rossi camp. Rossi won by fourteen to two, with one supervisor absent and with Rossi himself not voting. In office, Rossi quickly established himself as a carbon copy of his predecessor—always nattily dressed, with a fresh boutonniere, an inveterate booster of San Francisco, but more constitutional monarch than a prime minister.(74)

When Rolph first took the oath of office in 1912, he did so in a city without a city hall, a city still rebuilding from the disaster of 1906, a city divided over the proper role of unions and the political power of labor, a city in which the business community was just emerging from disputes over planning and the graft prosecution. Within a short time, Rolph initiated construction of a magnificent city hall and Civic Center, inaugurated the nation's first municipally owned streetcar system, launched the Hetch Hetchy project, and presided over the Panama Pacific International Exposition. While Rolph was very much at the center of all these, as initiator or energetic booster, his drive and enthusiasm failed to survive the Preparedness Day parade bombing, the war, and the labor strife that came in its wake.

In the absence of both mayoral leadership and political parties, city voters polarized between business and labor. Rolph found himself unable to accomplish his ideal of amicable labor relations achieved through collective bargaining, and the Industrial Association moved to cripple once-powerful unions. As Rolph behaved more and more like a chairman of the board rather than a corporation president, the movement to create a city manager grew, guided by the Bureau for Governmental Research. The bureau, the Industrial Association, the Panama Pacific International Exposition, and—of course—the Chamber of Commerce strongly expressed the unity and determination of the business community. While the business community never completely dominated city government, the paralysis of city government over key issues of municipal ownership not only produced outcomes acceptable to the business community but often created them.

Notes

1. The quotation at the head of the chapter is from Rolph's letter to the Public Ownership Association, Apri1 15, 1913, Rolph Papers, California Historical Society; see also Morley Segal, "James Rolph, Jr., and the Municipal Railway, A Study in Political Leadership;” master's thesis, San Francisco State College, 1959, p. 89; William M. Hines, "Our American Mayors: James Rolph, Jr., of San Francisco;” National Municipal Review 18 (March 1929):163-167, esp. p. 163; see also Moses Rischin, "Sunny Jim Rolph: The First 'Mayor of All the People;" California Historical Quarterly 53 (Summer 1974):165-172; David Wooster Taylor, The Life of James Rolph, Jr. (San Francisco, 1934); and Sabraw, "Mayor James Rolph;” ch. 4.
2. Bruce Allen Hardy, "Civil Service in San Francisco: The Rationalization of Municipal Employment, 1881-1910;” master's thesis, San Francisco State College, 1967, esp. chs. 1, 2; Franklin Hichborn, Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 (San Francisco, 1909), chs. 8-11; Franklin Hichborn, Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1911 (San Francisco, 1911), chs. 5-7, 10, 27; Franklin Hichborn, Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1913 (San Francisco, 1913), ch. 28.
3. H. Brett Melendy, "California's Cross-Filing Nightmare: The 1918 Gubernatorial Election;” Pacific Historical Review 33 (1964):324; Duncan Aikman, "California's Sun God;” Nation 132 (Jan. 14, 1931):37; Rischin, "Sunny Jim Rolph;” p. 169; Taylor, Life of James Rolph, pp. 15-20, 44, 68-69, 76-78, 95-96.
4. E. R. Zion, "San Francisco's Bureau of Efficiency;” Chamber of Commerce Journal, Sept. 1912, p. 13; Schiesl, Politics of Efficiency, ch. 6, esp. pp. 111-112;]. Rogers Hollingsworth, "Perspectives on Industrializing Societies;” in Emerging Theoretical Models in Social and Political History, ed. Allen G. Bogue (Beverly Hills, 1973), pp. 109-110.
5. Scott, San Francisco Bay Area, pp. 162-167; Lawrence Kinnaird, History of the Greater San Francisco Bay Region, 3 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:214; Kahn, Imperial San Francisco, chs. 4, 5, 8, and Conclusion; see also ch. 7 above.

32-45
74. Marylou Almada, "The Appointment of Angelo J. Rossi as Mayor (San Francisco, 1930);” seminar paper, San Francisco State University, 1979.

Excerpted from San Francisco 1865-1932, Chapter 8 “Politics During the Reign of Rolph, 1911-1932”

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