Allen Allensworth
When Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth retired from the army in 1906, he was the highest ranking black officer in American history.
After leaving the army, Allensworth and his family settled in Los Angeles. It was there that he came up with the idea of establishing a self-sufficient, all-black California town, a place where African Americans could live their lives free of the racial discrimination that so often plagued them elsewhere. His dream was to build a town where black people might live and create "sentiment favorable to intellectual and industrial liberty."
In 1908 he founded the Tulare County town of Allensworth, a new settlement in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley about thirty miles north of Bakersfield. The black settlers of Allensworth built homes, laid out streets, and put up public buildings. They organized a glee club, an orchestra, and a brass band.
But the town soon ran into some serious problems. The dry and dusty soil made farming difficult, and poisons seeped into the drinking water. The town lost its founding father in 1914 when Colonel Allensworth was killed in an accident in Los Angeles. The town's discouraged settlers drifted away in the next couple of decades and Allensworth was reduced almost to a ghost town.
Japanese immigration to California steadily increased in the early twentieth century. As the number of immigrants grew, so too did anti-Japanese sentiment.
In 1905 San Francisco labor leaders formed an Asiatic Exclusion League to demand public policies against the new immigrants. Under pressure from the league, the city ordered Japanese children to attend a segregated school along with other Asian children in the city. Protests from Japan led President Theodore Roosevelt to intervene. The president persuaded the city to drop its segregation order in exchange for a promised limit on Japanese immigration. The promise was fulfilled in the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 in which Japan agreed not to allow any more of its workers to come to the United States.
As Japanese immigrants became successful farmers in California, white farmers sought ways to eliminate the competition. The whites succeeded in 1913 when the state legislature passed a law prohibiting aliens ineligible for American citizenship from owning land in the state. Under federal law, all Asians were ineligible for naturalization.
The greatest triumph of the anti-Japanese forces came in 1924 when Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act barring all further immigration from Japan. The Grizzly Bear, a publication of the Native Sons of the Golden West, growled with satisfaction: "And so, after a strenuous campaign, has another advance been made in the battle with the Japs to keep California white."
Hiram Johnson first came to public attention during the prosecution of Boss Ruef in San Francisco. Johnson was a lawyer who served as a special assistant in the district attorney's office.
In 1910 Johnson won the Republican nomination for governor. He was supported by a group of reformers within the party known as "progressives." The progressives hoped that Johnson would clean up corruption in the state, just as he had helped to do in San Francisco.
Like many others, Johnson believed that the greatest source of corruption in California was that dreaded octopus, the railroad. Wherever he went during his gubernatorial campaign, he pledged "to kick the Southern Pacific Railroad out of politics." He was outraged that the railroad charged high shipping rates to cover the costs of the bribes it paid to public officials. "Get us coming and going?" he asked the voters of Los Angeles. "Why they get us every way, and we foot the bill--we pick our own pockets to bribe ourselves with our own money!"
Johnson served two terms as governor, working to achieve a wide range of reforms with the other progressives in power. He ran for Vice President under Theodore Roosevelt on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912, and was elected to the Senate as a Progressive Republican in 1916. He remained a popular public figure throughout his life, being re-elected to the Senate four times. In his later years he became increasingly conservative. He lead the fight against Japanese immigration in the 1920s and was an entrenched isolationist in the 1930s.
Hiram Johnson and his fellow California progressives scored an impressive victory in the election of 1910. Promising to establish a new political order, they gained control of both houses of the state legislature. In the next year, a wide range of reforms came flooding out of the state legislature. Theodore Roosevelt described the California reforms of 1911 as "the beginning of a new era in popular government" and "the greatest advance ever made by any state for the benefit of its people."
First on the list of priorities for the progressives was to establish effective regulation of the railroad. The legislature in 1911 granted the state railroad commission full and effective power to control railroad rates. Separate legislation assigned the commission the power to regulate rates charged by other public utilities.
To insure that the will of the people was truly expressed in government, the progressives in 1911 introduced the initiative, referendum, and recall. The initiative allowed voters to directly create laws or constitutional amendments. The referendum allowed voters to veto acts of the legislature. And the recall permitted voters to remove from office any elected official. California was further "democratized" in 1911 when it became the sixth state in the nation to adopt woman suffrage, thus doubling the size of the electorate.
Among the many other reforms adopted by the progressives were several laws that benefited California workers. The legislature in 1911 enacted a system of workers' compensation, establishing the employers' liability for industrial accidents. Also in 1911 the legislature adopted an eight-hour work day for women. Two years later, prompted by Katherine Philips Edson, the legislature passed a law setting a minimum wage for women and children.