California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It all started in the summer of 1929, when Mr. James Duval Phelan took it upon himself to launch an attack on Alma Spreckels’ Palace of the Legion of Honor, which was then less than five years old. Mr. Phelan was a small, white-goateed, very proper gentleman of sixty-eight, who had been mayor of San Francisco and been called “San Francisco’s first honest Mayor.” He had then gone on to serve in the United States Senate from 1915 until 1921. He also wrote poetry and considered himself a connoisseur of art and antiques, and at Montalvo, his eight-hundred-acre estate in Santa Clara County which had an outdoor theater, he often entertained poets, writers, painters, and other artists. His particular friend was the San Francisco novelist Gertrude Atherton, who wrote romantic fiction about life in ancient Greece and Rome, and who more or less lived with him, though their relationship was assumed to be platonic rather than physical.

  What first aroused James Phelan’s ire was an exhibition at the Legion of Honor of the Huntington sculpture collection, part of the famous Huntington library and art gallery that had been assembled by Collis P. Huntington’s nephew, Henry Huntington, after his marriage to his uncle’s widow. Henry Huntington had recently died, and the thirty-million-dollar collection—considered one of the most important collections of rare books, paintings, and sculpture in the world—had been left, handsomely endowed, to the public. But the Huntington sculptures being exhibited at the museum, Mr. Phelan had discovered to his horror, did not include a single example of the work of the “famous” California sculptor Douglas Tilden. Tilden specialized in athletic subjects, and some of his more popular pieces were titled “The Baseball Player,” “The Tired Boxer,” “Football Players,” and “The Indian Bear Hunt.” Douglas Tilden had also executed monuments commemorating the admission of California to the Union, and others dedicated to the California volunteers and the mechanics of San Francisco. For failing to include a piece of Tilden in the show James Phelan publicly branded Mrs. Spreckels “ignorant and incompetent.”

  Alma Spreckels was not the only target of Phelan’s broadside. He also attacked Herbert Fleischhacker, banker and philanthropist; William F. Humphrey, president of the Park Commission and an art critic; M. Earl Cummings, another art critic and also a sculptor; William Sproule, former president of the Southern Pacific as well as an art critic; and John McLaren, who had helped design Golden Gate Park. All these local worthies, in other words, represented at least one side of the San Francisco art establishment (the de Youngs et al. represented the others). All were members of the board of the Legion of Honor.

  In support of his diatribe Mr. Phelan issued the following windy statement:

  When the roll is called [at the Huntington exhibition of sculpture at the Palace of the Legion of Honor] unfortunately Douglas Tilden, one of the great native sculptors of California, will not be represented. He claims he was not invited. If, by charter amendment, we could only organize “art interests” under the stimulus of the Huntington collection, laid before us so magnificently, we would quickly assume our rightful place as an important art center.

  As it is, we have, virtually, the Park Commission in control and the Park Commission, figuratively speaking, consists, as it doubtless should, of gardeners and farmers. No one knows and no one cares.

  I have in mind the case of two distinguished artists, both exhibitors at the Paris Salon for years, who graciously vouchsafed to paint the lineaments* of two representative Californians, wearing the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and who were denied access for these paintings in the very hall of the Palace of the Legion of Honor itself by ignorant and incompetent trustees. What should be done, as a matter of poetic justice, with such commissioners but to reject them?†

  Mr. Phelan then abruptly shifted the focus of his attack. In a non sequitur that perhaps would have made sense only in California, he stopped talking about art and began talking about swimming pools. The Fleischhacker Pool, then one of the largest outdoor pools in the world, donated to the city by one of the “ignorant and incompetent” directors of the museum, was, said he, “another folly in which nobody, speaking of the population generally, desires to swim because of our cool climate.”

  In the indolent summer of 1929—the great stock market crash was still months away—the Phelan attack hit San Francisco like a bombshell. Eagerly, reporters scurried after statements from members of the museum board who had been subjected to Phelan’s vitriol. Comments ranged from “most unfortunate” to none at all from those who “refused to dignify Mr. Phelan’s statements.” Across her copy of the San Francisco Call, which broke the story, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels wrote in her large, bold hand, “He overestimates his own value,” and across the photograph of James Duval Phelan she wrote, “Some James!” And then, more or less quoting Robert Burns, she added, “‘That we could see ourselves as ithers see us.’” In the press the controversy was compared with the uproar raised by New York City women when Frederick MacMonnies’ statue “Civic Virtue” had been placed in City Hall Park, depicting a muscular youth towering over a servile girl crouching at his feet. It was compared with the public outcry in London over Jacob Epstein’s Hyde Park memorial to W. H. Hudson—a futuristic interpretation of Rima the bird-girl in Green Mansions.

  The furor in the artistic community, and in the press, went on for days. Finally Park Commissioner William Humphrey was persuaded to issue a statement on behalf of the museum’s board. Mr. Phelan’s outburst, he pointed out, was simply a case of sour grapes. The person who had attempted to present the “lineaments” of a prominent Californian had in fact been Mr. Phelan. He had offered a portrait of himself to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, “but in the judgment of the trustees, based on competent advice, the quality of the painting as a work of art was not considered of such merit as to entitle it to a place in that gallery.” Mr. Phelan’s nose was out of joint, in other words, and Mr. Humphrey added, “The personal animus that prompted the statement destroyed the usual balance of Mr. Phelan. Evidently he did not investigate to ascertain the facts. His statement abounds in erroneous statements.”* Mr. Humphrey then went on to rebut, one by one, the entire list of Mr. Phelan’s charges.

  Actually, the “personal animus” of James Phelan toward the widow of Adolph Spreckels and the members of her museum board may have had its roots in events that had occurred more than twenty years earlier, in which Mr. Phelan and another member of the Spreckels family had been heavily involved. Rudolph Spreckels, Adolph’s younger brother, had spent his time, when not quarreling with his father and brothers, amassing a large personal fortune of his own—including his First National Bank one—and working as an unofficial reformer of public morals. Like the other Spreckels men, Rudolph was tall and Teutonic-looking, with the bearing of a Hanoverian archduke, but unlike his brother John, Rudolph lacked a sense of humor. Indeed, he was a bore, because although everyone knew that everything he said about official malfeasance was true, no one wanted to do much about it. To San Franciscans, Rudolph Spreckels was righteous to a fault.

  By the early 1900s, San Francisco had become as politically corrupt as any city in the world, corrupt beyond measure, beyond the wildest dreams of Edward Doheny. Corruption was so widespread and commonplace, in fact, that it was taken for granted. In order to obtain an ordinance, a building permit, an easement, a city contract, a change in the building code, money had to change hands. Even minor officials in the city government grew rich from selling licenses and permits, and, to the builder or the businessman, paying the necessary bribes had become accepted as part of the normal cost of doing business.

  By 1901 the unquestioned boss of San Francisco, though he held no political office, was a man named Abraham Ruef. Ruef was a lawyer, and he had as his clients nearly all the most powerful corporations in the city, including the telephone and telegraph company, the water company, the gas and electric company, and the Crocker Bank. Ruef had never even met many of the men who ran these companies—socially, as a Jew, he was considered beyond the pale—and yet he had become a
vital intermediary for them, since it was Ruef who seemed to know exactly which city official had to be bribed, and for how much, for whatever the businessman wanted to do. As the Chronicle put it—rather daringly, considering Ruef’s enormous power to crush all opposition to his regime: “If you wish a job for yourself or your friend, you must see Ruef. If you wish a license for a grog-shop or a theater, you must see Ruef. If you wish to construct a building in defiance of the fire ordinances, you must see Ruef.… Ruef is by all odds the most dangerous boss this city has hitherto endured.”

  In 1901, having created his own political party, Abraham Ruef selected as his candidate for mayor a man named Eugene Schmitz, whose only political experience had been as president of the local musicians’ union. Ruef’s party was called the Union Labor party, and when Schmitz won the election handily—defeating both the Democratic and Republican candidates—there was considerable comment in the press across the country. No American city had ever had a Labor mayor, and it was widely assumed that San Francisco’s Mayor Schmitz would soon be locking horns with the city’s powerful capitalists. This, however, was not true. In fact, the opposite happened, and it was not long before the new mayor, a former fiddle player, was being invited to the perfumed gatherings of the city’s most exclusive hostess, Eleanor Martin. Soon the mayor was building himself a new house, at a cost of $30,000—though his salary was only $6,000 a year—and gifts to help him furnish it were pouring in from the city’s bankers and businessmen, including a $1250 Persian rug, which was a housewarming present from Eleanor Martin’s son.

  Before the 1906 earthquake and fire the city had begun laying plans for a street railway system. This could be built in either of two ways. The cheap way was to string overhead wires up and down the streets, but overhead wires were unsightly. A more expensive and esthetically pleasing system involved streetcars powered by cables buried under the streets. Rudolph Spreckels, then thirty-four, and James Duval Phelan, thirty-five, decided that for beauty’s sake San Francisco deserved the more expensive underground system. Spreckels and Phelan were not only friends but brothers in the cause of good government and reform. The two men approached Mayor Schmitz and offered to build a street railroad for the city with their own money and then sell it to the city at cost, for they also believed that the city and not a private company should own and operate the transit system. Mayor Schmitz said he would think about it.

  In the weeks following the fire, as the city struggled to rebuild itself, and while building permits and city construction contracts were being bought and sold like candy, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, under the direction of Abraham Ruef, awarded the contract to build the street railway system, with overhead lines, to United Railways, a private company. The corporate counsel for United Railways was also Abraham Ruef, who was on United’s payroll at a thousand dollars a month.

  This flagrant conflict of interest was too much for Phelan and Spreckels. Certain that the Board of Supervisors would never order an investigation of its own improprieties, Phelan and Spreckels decided to use their own considerable funds to mount an investigation of corruption in San Francisco’s city government. They hired Francis J. Heney, a well known attorney of the day, as their prosecutor, and William J. Burns, an equally well known detective, to gather evidence.

  When Phelan and Spreckels announced their intention to clean up City Hall, their statement was applauded by the city’s leading bankers, merchants, and businessmen, who had grown weary of paying bribes to city officials. But when Phelan and Spreckels subsequently announced that they would also bring to justice those bankers, merchants, and businessmen who were doing the bribing, they were castigated by the same group as traitors to their class. All at once they found themselves treated as pariahs, ostracized by San Francisco society.

  In San Francisco, paying bribes had long since become socially acceptable. But taking them was not. The person who took a bribe was regarded as an extortionist, but it was unthinkable that the briber, his hapless victim, should be punished for his complicity. The double standard, to use a familiar analogy, decreed that the prostitute might go to jail but that her customer should go free. But Rudolph Spreckels was taking the unpopular position that all of this was wrong.

  The business community was furious. Most furious of all perhaps were Rudolph’s father and brothers, who no doubt had been guilty of paying a bribe or two in their day. Rudolph’s motives were questioned by a suddenly hostile press. He was accused of wanting to run the street railway himself, of wanting to be mayor, of trying to dictate the morals of the entire city. But Spreckels and Phelan and their investigatory team pushed on undaunted. Evidence of wrongdoing at City Hall was almost ridiculously easy to find. The first to be indicted were Ruef and Mayor Schimtz, for extortion. Next came the chief of police, and the entire Board of Supervisors, who resigned en masse.

  Now it was time to descend upon the business community, and indictments were handed down against the head of the telephone company, officials of the gas and water companies, a prominent real estate man, a leading lawyer. Suddenly it seemed as if every important person in San Francisco was under indictment or had a good friend who was.

  In an effort to quell the rising public outcry against him Rudolph Spreckels issued an impassioned statement:

  I do not want to be mayor. I do not want the franchise of the United Railroads. The peculiar position in which I have been placed is distasteful to me. Do you suppose I enjoy prosecuting and bringing disgrace and public odium upon men who have been associated with me in business, and perhaps men who have been my dearest and best friends?

  In instituting this graft investigation, I was actuated by a broader motive than the mere punishment of wrongdoers and the moral cleaning up of a city. Any man who thinks can see that this country is in danger of a revolution. Our menace is the growth of bitter class feeling. Poor men are coming to believe that very rich men may break the law when and where they choose. Some rich men, I am sorry to say, are coming to believe so too.

  My greatest purpose in using my resources as a private citizen and bringing these rich corporations and rich bribe-givers to justice is to try to do something toward healing this terrible and growing breach between the classes.… I went into this resolved to let justice hit whoever was found guilty, be it my friend, my business associate, my enemy, or myself.*

  Why, the newspapers pointed out, this was right out of Marx and Engels (“In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end”). Now a new label was hurled at Spreckels: Bolshevik! And Rudolph Spreckels, although he denied wanting to be mayor, had indicated earlier his willingness to run for the United States Senate.

  In the midst of the furor the press delightedly uncovered a juicy scandal, involving none other than Rudolph Spreckels in one of his periodic battles with his father. Claus Spreckels and his wife, Annie, had sued Rudolph to recover some five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of sugar stock which, they claimed, was their community property and which Rudolph allegedly had malconverted. In his defense Rudolph and his lawyers maintained that the stock could not have been Rudolph’s parents’ community property, because, as far as Rudolph was concerned, he was not at all sure that his parents were really married. In other words, in order to keep his stock, Rudolph was prepared to go on public record as a bastard. And when he did so in open court, Claus Spreckels exploded. According to the court transcript, Claus cried out to his son, “You ingrate! You unworthy son! You are worse than an ingrate. I disown you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. You who would lie about your own father.”

  The press had a heyday. In a front-page banner headline the Oakland Tribune demanded to know, is THIS THE RUDOLPH SPRECKELS CALIFORNIA WANTS TO SEND TO THE U.S. SENATE? The news of the sensational trial of Henry K. Thaw for the murder of Stanford White, which was being held simultaneously in the East, was buried in the back of the paper. Undaunted by the untidy publicity, Rudolph
announced his determination to pursue his investigation.

  At this point the proceedings got very ugly indeed, as people anxious to save their own necks began betraying and informing on their friends and business associates. Former supervisors had been promised immunity by prosecutor Heney if they would testify against others. One of these, James Gallagher, was to be a witness in a bribery charge against Ruef. Shortly before Gallagher was to testify, a bomb exploded in his house. A few days later another bomb went off, this time in an apartment house Gallagher had been scheduled to visit. Then Gallagher disappeared.

  One afternoon, while prosecutor Heney was working in his courtroom, an unidentified man approached him, drew a pistol from a holster, and shot the lawyer in the throat. Miraculously Heney survived, but the motive of the assailant was never clear, because the next morning he was found in a jail cell with a bullet in his head. The police ruled his death a suicide, but a few days later, under heavy criticism for allowing a pistol in the prisoner’s cell, the police chief was pushed, jumped, or fell from a police launch in the Bay and was drowned. The books of United Railways were subpoenaed, and on their way to the courtroom mysteriously disappeared. More witnesses vanished.

  Still, the corruption hearings continued, and convictions began coming down. Mayor Schmitz was sentenced to five years in prison, and the head of the telephone company was found guilty of bribery. But as defense lawyers for the convicted men pressed on with appeals and other delaying tactics, one by one the verdicts of guilty began to be reversed. Mayor Schmitz’s conviction was thrown out by the State Supreme Court on the flimsiest of technicalities—because the indictment against him had been addressed to “Eugene Schmitz” instead of to “Mayor Eugene Schmitz.” The conviction of the telephone company head also was reversed, by State Supreme Court Justice Frederick Henshaw, who was later convicted of accepting a bribe of $410,000 from the heirs of silver king James Fair in their attempt to break Fair’s will.