Chapter XVIII · The Real Fight Begins.

Nine months after Heney assumed his duties as Assistant District Attorney, Mayor Taylor named the successors of the Ruef-Schmitz Board of Supervisors.

In those nine months much had been accomplished. Ruef had plead guilty to extortion and had made partial confession of his relations with the public-service corporations. The Schmitz-Ruef Supervisors had made full and free confession, and had been removed from office. Mayor Schmitz had been convicted of extortion, ousted from office, and pending his appeal to the upper courts was confined in the county jail. The back of the Schmitz-Ruef political organization was broken, and its forces scattered.

Had the Prosecution stopped here, the men whose devotion and self-sacrifice had made the undoing of the corrupt administration possible, would have retired with nothing more serious confronting them than the condemnation of the impotent puppets of large interests whom they had brought to grief. But those behind the Prosecution were not content to leave their work at a point where the regeneration of San Francisco had scarcely begun. They proposed to go to the bottom of the graft scandal. It was not sufficient, they held, to punish poor men who were without friends or influence, while their rich and powerful associates went unpunished. The bribe-taking Supervisors might be put in the penitentiary, but other bribe-taking Supervisors would eventually take their places. Ruef, punished by imprisonment, would serve as an example for political bosses that would cause them to hesitate for long before embarking in corrupt enterprises such as had brought the discredited boss to grief. This would make it hard for bribe-giving corporations to secure agents for bribe-passing, and make bribe-giving correspondingly difficult. But the conviction of high corporation officials, responsible for the bribe-giving of public-service corporations, was regarded as more important than all, for this would demonstrate bribe-giving to be unsafe, and check the practice at its very fountain-head. Such conviction, the Prosecution held, would have greater deterrent effect against bribery of public officials than the confinement of 500 bribe-taking Supervisors in the penitentiary.[261]

“I would be willing,” Rudolph Spreckels testified at the Calhoun trial, “to grant immunity to any man who would bring to bar a man of great wealth who would debauch a city government, and who would use his wealth to corrupt individuals and tempt men of no means to commit crime in order that he might make more money.”

Such was the stand taken by District Attorney Langdon and his associates. The announced policy of the Prosecution, therefore, included the prosecution of the bribe-giver to the end. In pursuing this policy, Mr. Langdon and his associates aroused the astonishingly effective opposition of interests representing hundreds of millions of capital. Every indictment of capitalist charged with bribe-giving was signal for a new group of financial leaders, their satellites, beneficiaries and dependents, to array themselves on the side of the graft defense.[262]

With every indictment came a new group of attorneys to raise technical objections to the proceedings, all of which the attorneys for the Prosecution were obliged to meet.

The first attack was upon the validity of the Grand Jury. The attorneys for Ruef and Schmitz had apparently exhausted every point that could be raised for the disqualification of the Grand Jurors, but this did not prevent the heads of corporations who found themselves under indictment making similar attacks. And between them, in this new move to quash the indictments, the defendants enlisted the ablest members of the California bar.[263]

In this new opposition an astonishing number of technical points were raised by one or the other of the groups of defending lawyers. Nothing was overlooked.

Just before the principal indictments were brought, for example, the San Francisco merchants had given a banquet to celebrate the progress which San Francisco had made during the first year following the fire.[264] Langdon and Heney were given places of honor. They were the heroes of the occasion. Every reference to their work was signal for tremendous demonstration. There was no suggestion then that the pursuit of criminals would “hurt business.”

“A severe earthquake,” observed Frank J. Symmes, president of the Merchants’ Association, “is a serious misfortune, and a great conflagration a great trial, and each awake the sympathy of the Nation, but a corrupt government is at once a crime and a disgrace and brings no sympathy.”

“We foresee,” said Bishop William Ford Nichols, another of the speakers of the evening, “the greater San Francisco. We mean to make it fairer to the eye. But how about making it better? Size and sin may go together. Rehabilitated buildings may house debilitated character.”

A month later, after indictments had been brought against some of the most prominent business men of the city, word went out that steps would be taken to disqualify every member of the Grand Jury who had attended that merchants’ banquet.

The Grand Jurors were again called to the witness stand and put through a grilling to determine whether or not they were biased. Rudolph Spreckels was under examination for hours in efforts to show that his motives in backing the Prosecution were bad.[265]

Every step of the proceedings at the organization of the Grand Jury was scrutinized. The question of the method of employing the stenographer to the Grand Jury was made subject of hours of argument. If she were irregularly employed, it was held, she was an unauthorized person in the Grand Jury room and her unwarranted presence sufficient to invalidate the indictments. Garret McEnerney, representing Eugene de Sabla, Jr., Frank Drum and John Martin, whose indictments grew out of the bribery of the Supervisors to fix the gas rate at 85 cents per 1000 cubic feet instead of 75 cents, was the first to raise this question. But attorneys for other defendants took it up and seriously considered it as valid objection to the sufficiency of the indictments. A further point was raised by several of the defendants that the stenographer had not been properly sworn. The question was seriously debated, whether she had looked at Prosecutor Heney or Foreman Oliver at the moment she was sworn to secrecy.[266]

Another point was brought up by the defendants in the United Railroads bribery case, that inasmuch as the defendants Calhoun, Mullally and Ford, had been called to the Grand Jury room and compelled to fall back upon their constitutional rights to avoid testifying, that they had been placed in a prejudicial position before the Grand Jury, which constituted reversible error.[267] Another objection was that the Grand Jury box had been destroyed in the great fire of 1906, and that no order had come from any department of the Superior Court ordering its restoration. Again, it was asserted, that Grand Juror James E. Gordan was a member of the Grand Jury panel of 1906, while the other Grand Jurors were chosen from the 1907 list. Indictments brought by a Grand Jury thus constituted were claimed to be without effect.

Had any one of these and many other similar objections been sustained, all indictments against the graft defendants would have been invalidated. Every objection had to be met. Days and weeks were spent by the District Attorney’s office in meeting, or preparing to meet objections which to the layman appear trifling and ridiculous.

In the midst of this technical fight to have the indictments against them set aside, the graft defendants received aid from an unlooked-for source. Sympathizers with the United Railroads conductors and motormen, then on strike, whose union Patrick Calhoun was at the time endeavoring to crush—and finally did crush—started an independent attack upon the Grand Jury.

Four union sympathizers had been indicted in connection with street riots. Their attorneys, before Superior Judge Cook, raised the point that as the Oliver Grand Jury had continued in service after a new panel had been drawn in the office of the clerk and put on file, the term of the Grand Jury’s service had expired. It was, therefore, no longer part of the machinery of the Court and had no power as an inquisitorial body. Under this interpretation, not only would the indictments against the strikers be invalidated, but those against the alleged bribe-givers also.[268] Thus four of Mr. Calhoun’s striking carmen, in their efforts to evade trial on charges growing out of opposition to the United Railroads, were making stronger fight to release Mr. Calhoun from indictment than Mr. Calhoun, although enjoying the ablest legal counsel that money could secure, had been able to make for himself.

Eventually, these technical objections were decided adversely to the defense; the validity of the Oliver Grand Jury was never successfully attacked. But the technical objections raised caused delays which the defense was able to put to good account. While the prosecution was battling to force the graft cases to trial on their merits, the graft defense was conducting a publicity campaign to misrepresent and undermine the prosecution. The astonishing success of these efforts were to appear later. By 1909, for example, in the city which when the graft prosecution opened, the practically universal sentiment was for the crushing out of corruption, there was strong opinion that the prosecution of influential offenders had gone too far, had been injudiciously conducted, was “hurting business,” and that for the good of the community the graft cases should be dropped.[269]

The evident policy of the defense was to undermine the prosecution and create public opinion against it, until both prosecution and community should be worn out, and made to quit.

The principal attack was through the newspapers. The prosecution had not been long at work before the weekly papers, with few exceptions, were devoting the bulk of their space to ridiculing and vilifying all who were in any way responsible for the graft exposures and impuning their motives.

What these publications received for their work is indicated by the subsidies paid one of the least of San Francisco weekly papers—a publication since suspended—the Mission Times.

In January, 1907, a man by the name of Williams purchased the Times for seventy-five dollars, giving his unsecured note for that amount. In less than a month the new proprietor had received $500 from an agent of the United Railroads. Later on, he received a regular subsidy of $250 a week, something more than $1,000 a month, which continued for thirteen weeks. The subsidy was later reduced to fifty dollars a week. But during the interim between the weekly subsidy contracts, lump sums were paid. It is estimated that in little over a year, Williams received from agents of the United Railroads upwards of $7,000. The Times at first covertly, and later openly, opposed the prosecution. If the unimportant Mission Times, which at the opening of the year 1907 had changed hands for seventy-five dollars, received upwards of $7,000 from agents of the defense, the not unreasonable question may be asked, what did more important weekly papers, whose graft prosecution policy was practically the same as that of the Times, receive? In this connection it is pertinent to say that the majority of these publications gave evidence during 1907, of a prosperity that was quite as mysterious, if not as suggestive, as had been the prosperity of the Schmitz-Ruef Supervisors during 1906.

As has been seen, the entire daily press of San Francisco was, in the beginning, heartily in accord with the prosecution. Gradually, however, The Examiner and The Chronicle[270] shifted their policy. Even while The Chronicle was backing the prosecution in its editorial columns, its reports of the proceedings at the various hearings were colored in a way well-calculated to undermine Langdon and his associates.[271] Gradually the covert opposition of its news columns became the open editorial policy of the paper.

But the most effective opposition came from The Examiner. The Examiner supported the prosecution until the conviction of Schmitz and the change in the municipal administration. Failure to dictate the selection of Mayor and Supervisors may have had more or less influence in the change of policy. At any rate, the invention of The Examiner’s writers and artists was tortured to make the prosecution appear to disadvantage.

The most tawdrily clever of The Examiner’s efforts were the so-called “Mutt cartoons.” The cartoons appeared from day to day, a continuous burlesque of the work of the prosecutors, and of the graft trials.

Heney was pictured as “Beaney;” Detective Burns, as Detective “Tobasco;” James D. Phelan as “J. Tired Feeling;” Rudolph Spreckels, as “Pickles;” Superior Judges Dunne and Lawlor, before whom the graft cases were heard, as Judge “Finished” and Judge “Crawler,” respectively. In these “Mutt cartoons” every phase of the prosecution was ridiculed. For example, when the excitement over the graft trials was at its height, there were rumors that the assassination of Heney or Langdon would be attempted. In ridiculing this, The Examiner pictured “Beaney” with a cross on his neck where the bullet was to strike. A few weeks later, during the progress of one of the graft trials, Heney was shot down in open court, the bullet taking practically the same course which in the “Mutt” cartoon The Examiner had pictured. After the shooting of Heney, The Examiner discontinued the anti-prosecution “Mutt cartoons.”

Mr. William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner did effective service in discrediting the graft prosecution. But Mr. Hearst, with curious inconsistency, outside California, gave the prosecution his personal endorsement.

In his Labor Day address at the Jamestown Exposition, September 3, 1907, for example, Mr. Hearst among other pleasing observations on the work of the San Francisco Graft Prosecution, said: “You hear much today of how a Mayor of San Francisco has fallen, but you hear little of how powerful public service corporations tempted a wretched human being with great wealth and brought a once respected man to ruin and disgrace. You hear much of how a Mayor elected on a Union Labor ticket is in jail, but little of the fact that it was an honest District Attorney, elected on the same Union Labor ticket, who put him there, an honest District Attorney, who is doing his best to put beside the Mayor the men really responsible for all this debauchery and dishonor. While it is the fashion to criticise San Francisco just now, I venture to assert that the only difference between San Francisco and some other cities is that San Francisco is punishing her corruptionists. There is many an official elsewhere who has stolen office or dealt in public properties who would fare like Schmitz if there were more honest and fearless District Attorneys like Union Labor Langdon.”

Later on, after Ruef had been sent to the penitentiary, an article on the San Francisco Graft Prosecution appeared in one of Mr. Hearst’s magazines.[272] The article was printed under the signature of Mr. Edward H. Hamilton, one of the ablest of Mr. Hearst’s employees. Mr. Hamilton gave the credit for the work of the graft prosecution to Mr. Hearst and The Examiner. The men whose steadfastness of purposes and high integrity had made even approach to the prosecution of influential offenders possible, upon whom Mr. Hearst’s Examiner had poured ridicule and abuse, were more or less favorably mentioned in the article, but Mr. Hearst was given the bulk of the credit for what the prosecution had accomplished. In California, where The Examiner’s treatment of the prosecution was well known, Mr. Hamilton’s article was received with some amusement and not a little resentment.[273]

Although, with few exceptions, the policy of the San Francisco press was adverse to the prosecution, the principal interior papers gave Langdon and his associates loyal support. But eventually a chain of papers covering the greater part of the interior of northern and central California was enlisted on the side of the defense. The papers were started or purchased by a newspaper publishing company known as the Calkins Syndicate.

The Calkins people had for several years been identified with a number of unimportant papers, printed in the interior. Suddenly, from publishing obscure weeklies and dailies, the Calkins Syndicate became one of the most important, if not the most important, publishing concern in California. A modern printing plant, one of the finest on the Pacific Coast, was installed at San Francisco. The establishment took over much of the printing of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, including the printing of the railroad corporation’s monthly, The Sunset Magazine. The Sacramento Union, the most important California morning newspaper printed north of San Francisco, and the Fresno Herald, an afternoon daily, were purchased outright. A bid was made for the San Francisco Post,[274] but terms could not be made. The Calkins people accordingly started the San Francisco Globe, an afternoon daily newspaper. Less important papers were established at various points. In an incredibly short period, the Calkins Syndicate had a chain of newspapers covering the greater part of northern and central California.

The distinctive feature of these publications was their opposition to the San Francisco graft prosecution. But the abuse of the Calkins newspapers was not so cleverly presented as in the Examiner, nor so adroitly handled as in the Chronicle. So violent were the Calkins papers' attacks, in fact, that they injured rather than assisted the defendants’ cause. This was generally recognized. The Calkins Syndicate, after losing whatever effectiveness it may have had, eventually went into bankruptcy.[275]

Almost as effective as the newspaper publicity against the prosecution, was the opposition of fashionable social circles and of the clubs. The graft defendants became much in evidence at the best clubs in the city. To be sure, their persistent appearance all but disrupted some of the clubs, members in sympathy with the enforcement of the law openly objecting to their presence.[276] But in the end, the defendants prevailed and were loudly apparent at the principal clubs of the city even while under the inconvenience of indictment.

San Francisco’s so-called fashionable society was, during the graft trials, practically organized as an adjunct of the defense. Those in accord with the prosecution were cut off visiting lists. Some of the non-resident indicted ones brought their families to San Francisco. Their wives and daughters at once became prominent in social matters. It was the refinement of the custom of bringing in “the wife and innocent children” of the defendant at a criminal trial.

This character of defense was most effective. The charming entertainment of those wives and daughters of indicted magnates who engaged in the social publicity campaign in the interests of their troubled male relations, went far toward building up public opinion against their prosecutors. The supporters of the prosecutors were treated with scant ceremony. To be a supporter of the prosecution was not regarded as “good form.” All in all, the social side was one of the cleverest and most effective features of the publicity campaign carried on by the graft defense.[277]

The boycott of those in sympathy with the prosecution extended to the larger business world as well as to exclusive social circles. When, for example, the American battleship fleet visited San Francisco on its tour around the world in 1908, the committee appointed by the Mayor to arrange fitting reception and entertainment of its visitors, organized by making James D. Phelan, prominently associated with Mr. Spreckels in the Graft Prosecution, chairman.

That Mr. Phelan should be made head of the committee, or even identified with it, gave serious offense to the large business and financial interests that did not approve the prosecution.[278] The large interests thus offended refused to contribute to the reception fund. William C. Ralston, United States Sub-Treasurer at San Francisco, and treasurer of the Fleet Reception Committee, reported to the committee that several large banks and public service corporations would not contribute to the reception of the fleet unless Mr. Phelan left the reception committee.[279]

The committee, refusing to submit to this arrogant dictation, accordingly proceeded to the entertainment of the fleet without assistance from the anti-prosecution financiers and institutions. The smaller merchants, assisted by those banks and enterprises which had not been offended by the proceedings against the corrupters of the municipal government, contributed upwards of $75,000. The reception to the fleet was thus carried to successful conclusion without the assistance of the graft defense element.

In the work of undermining the prosecution, the humbler circles of municipal life were not neglected. The claquer in labor union, and wherever groups of laboring men and women met, was quite as active as his prototype at club and exclusive function. In labor circles the prosecution was described as a movement to discredit labor and to disrupt the unions. Here, Rudolph Spreckels was described as the unrelenting foe of labor organizations. At club and function, on the other hand, the prosecution was condemned as agent of “labor organization and anarchy,” and Mr. Spreckels denounced as a man who had “gone back on his class.” In all quarters stories were circulated, questioning Spreckels’ motives. The most persistent charge against him was that he had started a street-car system of his own, and had instituted the graft prosecution to drive the United Railroads out of business. This story was told and retold, although the purposes for which Mr. Spreckels had contemplated engaging in the street-car business were well known.[280] It was quite as well known, too, that the briberies alleged against officials of the United Railroads were committed long after the graft prosecution had been inaugurated.

Heney[281] was also made target for criticisms. His whole life was gone over in the search for flaws. It was discovered that in self-defense he had, years before, shot a man in Arizona.[282] This was made basis of a charge that Heney had committed murder. The new version of the Arizona incident was fairly shouted from San Francisco housetops.

Heney was denounced as a “special prosecutor, a human bloodhound, engaged in hounding of men to the penitentiary.” It was charged against him that he had received excessive fees from corporations; that he had accepted fees from the Federal government while acting as deputy to the San Francisco District Attorney, and that therefore his San Francisco employment was illegal;[283] that he had been a drunkard.

A most effective attack consisted in charging connection of the graft prosecution with the California Safe Deposit and Trust Company.

This institution closed its doors during the 1907 panic. It had carried an enormous volume of deposits. Thousands of homes were affected. The California Safe Deposit and Trust Company was, as a result, very unpopular. Stories were circulated that the company had backed the prosecution, and had contributed funds for its work. J. Dalzell Brown, one of the leading spirits of the company, was also described as one of the prosecution’s backers. It was shown at the Calhoun[284] trial that neither Brown nor his company had contributed a dollar toward the prosecution fund. Nevertheless, persistent reports that the prosecution had had this support, unquestionably had its effect upon the losing depositors. Hiram W. Johnson had acted as Brown’s attorney. Johnson had appeared as assistant to the District Attorney at a number of the graft trials. Johnson was condemned for taking the case of a criminal guilty of the offenses charged against Brown. Mr. Johnson’s critics did not, however, condemn the attorneys who had taken the cases of the alleged bribe-givers.

Another charge was that the prosecution was hurting business; that the material prosperity of California demanded that the proceedings be stopped; that capital would not seek investment in California until the disturbance caused by the prosecution had subsided.

Every move of the prosecution was made subject of criticism. Announcement, for example, that immunity had been given the Supervisors was received by the anti-prosecution press with a storm of protest, and used by the pro-defense claque most effectively.

The treatment accorded Ruef was subject of constant objection and criticism. During the period of Ruef’s apparent co-operation with the prosecution, when he was in custody of the elisor, the pro-defense press harped on the uselessness of the expense of keeping Ruef in the luxury of a private jail.[285] The Chronicle even went so far as to say it would be well if Ruef forfeited his bail, provided the bail were set high enough. Ruef was, at the time, thought to be a willing witness for the prosecution. That the case of The People would be weakened were he to leave the State did not seem to appeal to the Chronicle. Later on, when it became evident that Ruef was not assisting the prosecution, there were outcries against the alleged cruel treatment that had been imposed upon him during his confinement in the custody of the elisor.

But this potent and far-reaching opposition did not cause a moment’s hesitation on the part of the prosecution. The work of bringing influential offenders before trial juries went steadily on. As soon as the Schmitz extortion case had been disposed of, Louis Glass of the Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company, the first of the indicted capitalists to face a jury, was brought to trial.