In 1910, progressives in California won control of the Republican party, enacted a broad reform agenda, and otherwise dominated state politics for a decade. Historians have visited and revisited their movement, seeing it as a vital chapter in the history of the country’s Progressive Era. But scholars have largely ignored study of the California progressives’ opponents—the regulars of the state Republican Party who stayed loyal to the national Republican Party in the 1910s—usually portraying them simply as reactionaries doing a reactionary’s duty of opposing reform.^{Footnote 1} These regular Republicans were reactionaries of a sort, but the nature of their opposition is very much worth studying. For the reformism of the California progressives—in its political, regulatory, and socioeconomic breadth, and in the kind of voters it came to attract—elicited a reaction among the regulars so profound that over the course of the 1910s they altered the rhetorical politics that voters usually associated with turn-of-the-century Republicanism.^{Footnote 2} The postwar political environment gave further force and shape to the development of these new electoral appeals. In this new political rhetoric and the electoral strategy it served—in other words, in the kinds of appeals the regulars made and in the kinds of voters they sought to attract—we can see pre–New Deal roots of modern American conservatism, in whose growth California played such an important part.^{Footnote 3}

To appreciate the profound transformation of Republican political rhetoric in California in the 1910s and 1920s, we must briefly explore how the party appealed to voters during its period of electoral dominance from 1896 to 1910. The political rhetoric of nativism and economic antistatism that came to such prominence among California’s regular Republicans after 1910 was in marked contrast to the kind of rhetoric that dominated the party’s political appeals at the turn of the century.^{Footnote 4} Indeed, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Republican regulars and the party’s emerging reformist forces remained largely united in adhering to the general thrust of national Republicanism—an abiding vision of political economy that advocated for federal and state government activism focused on developing a truly national industrial economy. The party also largely adhered to the politics of ethno-cultural pluralism that William McKinley had campaigned on with much success in 1896 and 1900. Support for nativist organizations fell off sharply after the mid-1890s. And while anti-Japanese sentiment grew sharply among Californians at the turn of the century, the regulars controlling the state Republican Party worked with the national Republicans to blunt the worst of the discriminatory policies this intolerance produced.^{Footnote 5}

California Republicans boasted that theirs was a party committed to the “national idea” over the claims of states’ rights and localism. They consistently supported the protective tariff and “liberal appropriations” to promote agricultural and mining development, education, and internal improvements.^{Footnote 6} Even among progressives committed to political reform, traditional party appeals for an active government remained strong. As independent Republican governor George Pardee noted while campaigning for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, the election “is nothing but protection versus free trade; liberal Republican national appropriations versus parsimonious Democratic ones; Roosevelt versus Parker.” The national election had profound consequences for California, he went on, for “if voters were to send Democrats [to the General Assembly] they must vote for a Democratic United States Senator, who will favor free trade and reduced national appropriations. . . . But if you send Republicans to the Legislature they must vote for a Republican United States Senator, who is in favor of protection and large appropriations for the many things this State needs.”^{Footnote 7} In promoting such active government aimed at broad economic development, the California Republicans could hardly claim to be the party of limited and parsimonious government.^{Footnote 8}

State party platforms and other campaign rhetoric in the presidential election years 1904 and 1908 championed positive government action, calling for tariff barriers to protect American industry and labor and “liberal appropriations” to develop the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine, and likewise the state’s waterways and reclamation of arid lands.^{Footnote 9} California Republicans, like their national counterparts, also called for the increased administrative capacity of government, so as to put increased spending to effective use in promoting economic development. Regular and progressive Republicans alike tended to see small and stingy government as the enemy of progress. As Chester Rowell, editor of the reformist Fresno Republican, editorialized in 1904: under Roosevelt the American people could expect “positive, constructive legislation” guided by “the general doctrine of proved governmental capacity on the part of the Republican party.”^{Footnote 10} Moreover, the Los Angeles Times editorialized against the states’ rights concerns of Democrats, “who are all of them jealous doctrinaires of strict construction” and regularly view with “alarm supposed encroachments upon constitutional safeguards.”^{Footnote 11}

National and state Republican appeals in these elections proved successful in building on the McKinley coalition of 1896 and 1900. Roosevelt and Taft won the state more impressively than did McKinley. The continued migration of traditionally Republican voters into California swelled GOP ranks; but the party, in California and elsewhere, also attracted votes from traditionally Democratic ethnic voters. Appeals for cultural pluralism begun under McKinley helped the party improve its standing among ethnic voters in the 1890s.^{Footnote 12} But ethnic voter support for Republican presidential candidates reached new heights in 1904 and 1908. Roosevelt and Taft performed exceptionally well in California counties with the most foreign-born voters. In the state’s most urban counties—not only in the heavily native-born populations in southern California but also among the multiethnic population in northern cities—Republicans trounced the Democrats, typically winning well in excess of 60 percent of the vote. The GOP continued to win the majority of statewide offices. California did not have a Democratic governor from 1899 to 1939.^{Footnote 13}

Despite its electoral success early in the twentieth century, the state GOP was hardly a unified party. The economic and political power of the Southern Pacific (SP) railroad had provoked a progressive reform movement among Republicans that finally succeeded in organizing California’s reformers statewide under the Lincoln-Roosevelt League (LRL). Public disgust with the corruptions of regulars in the 1907 and 1909 legislative sessions and the perception that the SP machine hand-picked the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1906 certainly helped reformers’ efforts.^{Footnote 14} So did newcomers. From the late 1880s, when a land boom gripped the state, into the next century, migration became dominated by Midwestern Protestant Republicans flowing into Southern California. These new Californians, accustomed to a more developed governmental infrastructure and cleaner politics than their new state had on offer, proved a growing audience that both welcomed and influenced the growth of good-government reform politics in the state. California’s progressives disagreed on a broad agenda—southern Californians pushed for moral reforms, while northern Californians saw the need for socioeconomic reforms. But all saw an urgent need for political reform, which became the unifying focus of the LRL. Indeed, the league’s sole guiding principle urged “the emancipation of the Republican party in California from domination by the political bureau of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and allied interests.”^{Footnote 15}

The rise of progressives in California’s Republican Party threatened the regulars in several ways. First, the LRL’s political reforms promised to destroy the SP machine and otherwise weaken party control over state politics. Offices and business influence in politics were at stake. Second, the moral reforms many progressives urged—those focusing on liquor and gambling—threatened not only business interests but also the culturally pluralist mode of politics McKinley had pushed to great success. The politics of moralistic crusading had hurt Republicans badly at the polls in the early 1890s and taught Republicans like McKinley and Mark Hanna that narrow moral and cultural electoral appeals undermined coalition building.^{Footnote 16} A third threat, that of the regulatory state, also loomed. Focused intently on political reform, California’s reformist Republicans did little to push the cause of socioeconomic reform in its early years of effective statewide organization. But many did embrace government intervention into social and economic relations soon after reformers won state power in 1910. And this turn to the regulatory state pushed regular Republicans toward a rhetorical politics increasingly skeptical of government activism in economic affairs.

The 1910 election in California marked a revolution in the state’s politics. With the inauguration of progressive Republican Hiram Johnson and reformist legislators in 1911, the state party organization became thoroughly reformist in its electoral appeals and policy ideas.^{Footnote 17} Once in power, progressives worked intently to reform state politics, pushing to add initiative, referendum, and recall amendments to the state constitution. These laws weakened the hold of political parties on state politics and hurt weaker and less effectively organized Democrats the most. From 1910, with reformist Republicans dominating the popular politics of progressivism, the California Democratic Party—already marginalized by a string of electoral defeats, weak leadership, and the ongoing flow of midwestern Republicans into the state—began a two-decade slide into near irrelevancy.^{Footnote 18}

After reforming the political system and effectively eliminating the SP’s special influence on state government, the Johnson administration and its allies in the state legislature expanded the ambit of state government activism beyond political reform to address a variety of social and economic problems. Johnson’s administration backed labor proposals addressing workmen’s compensation and workplace safety; morals legislation attacking gambling, prostitution, and the liquor trade; a new bureau to aid European immigrants; and measures to increase economy and efficiency in state government.^{Footnote 19}

Johnson’s socioeconomic reforms soon weakened the unity of the state progressives. For while virtually all California progressives had agreed on the need for political reform, many disagreed with government intervention in social and economic relations. Voters in southern California especially, where an open-shop ethos and ethnically homogenous population prevailed, looked suspiciously at the Johnson progressives’ broadening understandings of state government activism.^{Footnote 20} These cracks in progressive unity gave an electoral opening to Republican regulars. Regulars had reluctantly accepted reform of state politics as the will of the people. But they opposed Johnson’s social and economic interventions, and it appeared at least some political reformers among the progressives did also. Opportunities for the regulars to make effective electoral appeals were limited, as Johnson progressives now controlled the state party organization. National politics soon intervened, however, giving regular Republicans the chance to regain control of their party and campaign on electoral appeals opposing the government activism of the Johnson progressives.^{Footnote 21}

California’s regular Republicans owed this opportunity to the party’s majority progressives, who left to form a state Progressive Party in 1913.^{Footnote 22} After absorbing the national defeat of 1912, California’s regulars used the 1914 election to mark a decisive change in how their party appealed to voters. For the two most important offices at issue, the Republicans nominated Los Angeles District Attorney John D. Fredericks for governor and veteran congressman and Oakland Tribune publisher Joseph R. Knowland for the open U.S. Senate seat. In the past, both had supported traditional Republican statist doctrines of economic development. But both campaigned enthusiastically in 1914 on a Republican platform that signaled a shift away from this kind of Republicanism. Rather, the regulars were developing antistatist electoral appeals aimed at the regulatory activism of the state’s progressives. Regular Republicans took party credit for the first wave of popular political reforms, but claimed that progressives in government had allowed to develop “certain extreme and radical tendencies” and the “Republican party must now check these tendencies.” Progressives, they argued, were now pushing government activism “entirely beyond all reasonable bounds.” Under the Johnson progressives, state laws multiplied “so rapidly, on so many subjects, that the average citizen finds almost his every act subject to legal control.” These same legislators also subjected California’s commercial enterprises to “socialistic and demagogic attacks.” Fredericks ripped into the Johnson progressives for their “freak legislation,” and one of his primary challengers, W. C. Ralston, bemoaned their support for excessive regulations.^{Footnote 23}

This growth in government had caused the recent economic downturn, they further charged, and led to the “withdrawal of vast sums from local enterprises and the refusal of investors both at home and abroad to aid in the development of the state.” Regular Republicans of the 1910s emphasized efficient government “at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayers.”^{Footnote 24} The party platform did include long-standing mainstays such as strong support for a protective tariff and government funding for a revived merchant marine fleet. It also pledged support for clearly popular reforms like the direct primary, workmen’s compensation laws, women’s suffrage, and the creation of a state railroad commission. But compared with even the regular Republican platform of 1912, the emphasis two years later on economy, excessive government activity, and the socialistic tendencies of the Johnson progressives is striking.^{Footnote 25}

Given the popularity of progressive Republicans, it was no surprise that the regulars failed to win any of the major state offices at stake. But the 1914 election was notable for at least two reasons. First, while the regulars’ new emphasis on antistatist appeals did not bring victory, it did appear to inform the electoral strategy of the Progressives, as they emphasized the cautious consolidation of recent progressive gains rather than a bold new reform agenda. The public’s weariness with further reform became evident in the results for the ballot initiatives, where voters adopted only six of seventeen measures.^{Footnote 26} Second, the election revealed a remarkable realignment of electoral support for Johnson and his Progressive Party. In sharp contrast to 1910, Johnson’s support in 1914 increased in urban working-class areas and decreased in rural and southern counties.^{Footnote 27} Johnson’s commitment to pro-labor legislation and improving city services in his first term apparently won the gratitude of urban voters, but it elicited a backlash in some of his areas of greatest support in 1910.^{Footnote 28}

Regular Republican control of the party did not last long. The Progressive Party died in June 1916 after Theodore Roosevelt declined its nomination and returned to the GOP. Despite the setback, progressives in California remained electorally formidable, as they quickly regained control of the Republican Party from the regulars and elected Hiram Johnson to the U.S. Senate that November. With progressives back in control, the electoral appeals the regulars had developed, those that gave a new prominence to antistatist rhetoric attacking the socioeconomic and regulatory reforms of the Johnson years, would no longer be part of the official party rhetoric. Instead, the state party platform pledged that the reunited Republican Party “will not take or permit any backward step” in respect to the reforms of the Johnson years.^{Footnote 29} Election results proved the reformers’ confidence in the appeal of their past achievements largely correct, as Johnson won the election to the Senate and progressives maintained control of the state legislature.^{Footnote 30}

Johnson’s 1916 Senate victory, however, appeared to solidify a new voting alignment in California. As in 1914, support for Johnson in Southern California continued to lag that of 1910. And despite running a robust Senate campaign there, election results revealed that Southern California was becoming a center of opposition to Johnson progressivism. He lost the four populous Southland coastal counties in the Republican primary against a party regular, but made up these numbers by running strong in northern urban counties to win by four thousand votes. Coupled with the vote of 1914, these results signaled a shift in the economic basis of support for California progressivism, as laborers, Catholics, and immigrants—those very groups initially suspicious of the movement—began supporting Johnson in large numbers.^{Footnote 31}

Not limited to the Johnson campaign, this new voting alignment was part of a larger national shift of voters into a new coalition supporting Woodrow Wilson’s reelection. Johnson’s strongest support came from voters who approved of his past record as a progressive governor; and that record, with some exceptions, resembled that of the Democrats under Wilson’s leadership. Wilson’s slim victory owed much to the support of progressives and workers in the state, especially in northern California, where he narrowed the traditional Republican advantage in the urban counties. In a sign of coming trends, the Republican Hughes performed best in southern California, with a concentration of support there that far surpassed that of Republican candidates in the 1900s.^{Footnote 32}

The war offered new opportunities for a rejuvenated government activism. War needs entailed government direction of great swaths of American industry, and many progressives hoped to preserve some of that government involvement in economic life in peacetime. The state Republican committee in 1918, still under progressive control, adopted a platform that for the first time advocated “government ownership of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone lines.” This plank signaled what some progressives saw as a new world of reformist possibilities—indeed, an extension of bold wartime government activism into the postwar world. This ambition would reemerge in the battle for control of California’s water-generated power system that roiled state politics in the 1920s.^{Footnote 33}

Yet the war raised suspicions among many voters about a broadly active government. Public demands for not merely economy but retrenchment grew as the war carried on, putting the future of reform at stake. Progressives joined the regulars in speaking “strongly for economy and efficiency, not only as a war measure, but as a condition to be desired at any and all times.” The Republican platform warned, however, that though postwar government retrenchment might be advisable in some cases, “the unqualified statement is made that . . . no specious plea of economy shall be advanced in any attempt to cripple commissions that are declared to have made California a free State.” Progressives clearly worried that the public might now be more receptive to the antistatist appeals that regular Republicans first advanced in 1914.^{Footnote 34}

And indeed wartime and postwar experiences created a political climate increasingly hostile to reformism. Wartime hysteria and the shock of the Bolshevik Revolution increased the public’s suspicion of radical labor and gave rise in 1918 to widespread political appeals denouncing, in particular, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which had been active in California since 1910. The radical labor organization’s opposition to the war and its links, however tenuous, to the 1916 Preparedness Day parade bombing in San Francisco and the bombing of progressive governor William Stephens’s house in 1917 made it vulnerable to wartime jingoism. In the race for governor in 1918, candidates made liberal use of appeals against the IWW and other radical organizations. Republican regular candidate and San Francisco district attorney, Charles Fickert, made antiradicalism a centerpiece of his campaign. He railed against “I.W.W. Reds [and] their anarchist sympathizers” and warned that Governor Stephens’s “policy of vacillation and timidity” only emboldened them.^{Footnote 35} The Stephens campaign countered that the governor “has stood firmly against I.W.W.’s and the insidious propaganda of disloyal elements.” The party platform also, if less vividly, denounced “in strong terms the activities of the I.W.W.” Progressivism was not radicalism, of course, but the growing intolerance of radicalism and its association in the public mind with the extremism of Bolsheviks and autocratic Prussians tainted for many any political creed favoring economic statism.^{Footnote 36}

Even more than growing intolerance of radicalism, public demands for sweeping economy in government during the war put reformers in a bind. Appeals for a pullback in government activity were everywhere in the 1918 campaign season. A leading regular Republican candidate for governor, Judge Bordwell, made retrenchment his campaign focus. Right-thinking people agreed, he claimed, that “retrenchment is the dominant issue in this campaign.” Bordwell charged that Stephens could not possibly succeed in scaling back government, for he is “a product of the system that has fastened upon California the incubus of unnecessary and overlapping commissions, and that system cannot reform itself from within.”^{Footnote 37} When not denouncing radicals, Charles Fickert also urged retrenchment through the “consolidation of many of the commissions performing similar functions and elimination of others which are merely dead wood.” He also opposed “the proposed compulsory State health insurance, which would add a huge burden annually to the load of the taxpayer, merely to indulge in a made-in-Germany social scheme.” When the state Republican convention convened in September, Stephens, having won the primary, got the message on the public demand for less government, conceding that if various boards and commissions are redundant then “there should and will be such reorganization.”^{Footnote 38} He went onto win reelection easily, proving that progressive victories, even if muted, were still possible in postwar California. But, at the very least, a hostility to government activism was claiming more and more rhetorical ground within the divided Republican Party.

The 1918 Republican primary fight gave clear indication of a changed political atmosphere. Retrenchment of government and vigilance against radical influence on state policy were now paramount issues. They had forced even victorious progressive Republicans to understate their reformism and otherwise campaign defensively under the rhetorical assaults of regular candidates. This new political environment carried over into the postwar period and indeed appeared to spread throughout much of the United States. The California legislature passed a stringent criminal syndicalism law in 1919 to make it easier to prosecute members of radical organizations. Legislators first made an attempt to pass such a law in early 1917. Despite the country’s impending entry into the war and concerns that subversive forces would hamper mobilization, the bill failed. That a similar measure passed after the war in 1919, and with many of the progressive opponents of the 1917 version now supporting it, is one measure of the changing political climate in California.^{Footnote 39}

Another measure is the surge in hyperpatriotic and antiunion thinking among the state’s business interests. Southern California had a history of strong antiunionism and an open-shop ethos that had dominated in Los Angeles since the turn of the century. This did not prevent the beginnings of state government regulation of industry during Johnson’s years as governor, when Sacramento passed a number of labor-friendly laws. Moreover, nationally labor was on the offensive in the immediate postwar years, bidding to maintain wartime gains. Open-shop advocates rose to the challenge of keeping organized labor weak in southern California, capitalizing on the postwar hyperpatriotism and antiradicalism, and indeed inflaming it.^{Footnote 40}

The Better America Foundation (BAF), formed in 1920, was the primary tool for blunting any postwar surge in labor activism. A successor organization to the more staid Commercial Federation, the BAF went on the attack against threats, real or imagined, to business interests in California by touting Americanism and working to link unionism, labor legislation, and progressivism with worldwide revolutionary radicalism. The BAF advocated a broad rollback of business regulation and was quick to denounce government influence over business as evidence of “socialistic and bolshevistic” tendencies. The BAF also linked its strident Americanism with a professed belief in the sanctity of the Constitution, whose immutable truths subversives and their fellow travelers sought to undermine.^{Footnote 41}

Southern California provided a receptive audience for the BAF’s aggressive postwar antistatist rhetoric. But even in San Francisco, a stronghold of unionism since 1900, business interests moved to undercut labor unions. In 1921, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce launched a new Industrial Association dedicated to creating an open shop in the city by implementing the American Plan for industrial organization based on “the constitutional right to freedom of contract and government protection of that right.” While not as broad and feverish as the attacks of the BAF, San Francisco business interests did succeed in undermining the city’s closed-shop ethos in the 1920s.^{Footnote 42}

These pro-business and antiradical groups took advantage of a new postwar political environment that looked askance at activist government and associated it with radical politics. They also helped consolidate this new rhetoric of economic antistatism and broad antiradicalism as a potent force within the California Republican Party. It goes too far to state, as some historians have, that from this time progressivism was largely a spent force in California politics. But from the war years on, it was fighting a rearguard action.^{Footnote 43}

Despite tensions between the party’s two wings, the state GOP worked hard for harmony in the 1920 election. An off-year election in California state politics, the 1920 Republican campaign there focused on races for the presidency and a U.S. Senate seat. The state party platform steered clear of the national party’s rhetorical emphasis on smaller government and lower taxes (though these issues would soon reemerge in state politics) and other divisive issues like prohibition and the League of Nations.^{Footnote 44} What could pass for reformism in the platform included child and convict labor laws and support both for farming cooperatives and for greater government involvement in the “mediation and conciliation” of labor issues.^{Footnote 45}

But the top two planks were the most detailed and clearly received support from nearly all ranks of the California Republican Party. The first outlined California’s demand that Washington amend the country’s laws to allow the restriction of Japanese immigration. In the 1900s, many state Republicans had worked with their national counterparts to restrain extreme anti-Japanese immigration restrictions demanded by voters. By the middle of the next decade, however, California under Republicans became a national leader in pushing for immigration restriction. In response to state Democratic efforts to exploit Republican weakness on Japanese exclusion in 1912, progressives under Hiram Johnson began pushing legislation to restrict land ownership by the state’s Japanese residents.^{Footnote 46}

In the 1920 election, Japanese exclusion was a paramount issue. Progressive and regular Republicans—with hapless state Democrats, ever seeking a winning electoral issue, still goading them—now firmly supported banning Japanese immigration. A state Republican delegation traveling in September to Ohio to meet with Warren Harding took as its main charge to secure the nominee’s pledge of national support for California’s stance on Japanese immigration.^{Footnote 47} By 1920, then, Republicans on both coasts had embraced forms of immigration restriction—easterners emphasizing European ‘undesirables’; westerners concerned with Asians—that marked a sharp nativist turn in national Republican Party policy and electoral appeals.

For California, as with much of the rest of the nation, this turn was part of a new emphasis on racial difference and the need to protect white privilege. Californians—and their dominant political vehicle, the Republican Party—saw themselves at the “frontier of the white man’s world,” which needed a more rigid policing. Especially in the comparatively homogenous and still-developing southern California, ambitions to create a new urban world—a “white spot,” free from the social problems and multiethnicity of eastern cities—proved strong in the postwar world.^{Footnote 48} Had the nativist turn among Republicans focused solely on California’s widespread anti-Japanese sentiment, its effect on voting patterns may have been negligible. But California’s anti-Asian racism informed, and then fused with, the broader anti-immigration efforts that the national Republicans championed in the early 1920s, and would come to hurt Republicans among European ethnic groups in California later in the decade.

The second plank offered unambiguous support for Republicans to reenact high tariff barriers. Such an appeal was hardly consistent with the new trend in economic antistatist rhetoric in the Republican Party’s electoral appeals. Yet California’s strong support for tariffs in the early postwar years was something of an anomaly in national Republican politics. In traditional manufacturing states like Ohio and New York, the tariff did not figure prominently at all during the 1920 election, a sign that in the postwar world it might no longer be the central economic tenet driving the party’s national policy. The abiding influence of the progressives in California politics and concerns for party harmony kept economic antistatist rhetoric out of the platform. This omission gave the tariff a standing among the party’s economic appeals that it did not have in other Republican states, where the progressives were much weaker and regulars could freely emphasize antistatism in their economic appeals.^{Footnote 49}

Outside these major issues in the party’s platform, Harding’s surrogate campaigners in California also emphasized some of the economic antistatist rhetoric—such as government economy, lower taxes, and criticism of centralized government—that regular Republicans had used in 1918 and that the national Republican platform emphasized.^{Footnote 50} Which issues played strongest among Republican voters in 1920 is difficult to determine given the scale of the GOP victory. Harding not only won over 66 percent of the vote, he won all of the state’s fifty-eight counties; this in a state that the Democrats won narrowly four years earlier. The Wilson administration’s unpopularity in California was pervasive, and it clearly undercut James Cox’s campaign. Cox ran behind down-ticket Democratic candidates in all five of the state’s prominent races. Beyond traditional Republican voters, Harding succeeded in reducing traditional ethnic support for Democrats—as had Republican presidential candidates before the Republican split. Indeed, Harding did just about as well in northern California, with its heavy ethnic populations, as he did among the largely native-born voters of southern California.^{Footnote 51}

In the 1922 election, the California Republicans finally matched the national party in broadly emphasizing economic antistatism in their campaign rhetoric. Progressives continued to control the state organization, but only tenuously. Rather, resurgent regular Republicans claimed their greatest victory since before the Johnson years when state treasurer, and progressive apostate, Friend Richardson won the party’s gubernatorial primary over incumbent William Stephens. Richardson ran nearly a one-issue campaign centered on a sweeping pledge to reduce the cost and reach of state government.^{Footnote 52}

Facing a still-divided party, Richardson was sure to credit past progressive political reforms, but claimed his work as treasurer gave him a keen understanding of how reckless state government had become. Richardson warned that his economy drive was no bluff. Moreover, it was not the Johnson progressives’ understanding of economy—emphasizing efficiency while embracing an expanding government—but rather a call for real retrenchment that would “save the people millions of dollars.” Richardson pushed for strict economy by abolishing unnecessary offices and “substituting business for politics.”^{Footnote 53} Richardson won all but two counties in Stephens’s home turf of southern California. These results again demonstrated that outside of Los Angeles progressivism’s hold on voters in southern California remained slight. Stephens ran well in the cities of northern California, while Richardson won many of the rural and suburban counties. Results here revealed that the rural and suburban counties of northern California might be slipping from the progressive orbit.^{Footnote 54}

The 1922 election confirmed that California’s regular Republicans were in step with the postwar national party in embracing a rhetoric of economic antistatism. As governor, Richardson made good on his pledge for retrenchment, becoming what one historian calls “the force behind the budget-driven efforts to dismantle progressive programs and state agencies during the 1920s.” Richardson also vetoed nearly half of all bills sent to him.^{Footnote 55} The breadth of Richardson’s economy program enraged many of the party’s progressives. Chester Rowell claimed that the regulars were “taking advantage of Richardson’s campaign slogan of economy to drive him into producing the particular sort of economy they most desire. . . . What they want to do is to get rid of the newer functions of government on the old-fashioned plea of economy.” Reformers responded in 1923 by forming the Progressive Voter’s League (PVL), tasked with winning state power back from the regulars.^{Footnote 56}

As in the previous national election, California Republicans in 1924 worked for harmony, studiously omitting contentious issues like Friend Richardson’s retrenchment program from the party platform. During the campaign, however, Coolidge surrogates emphasized much of the economic antistatist rhetoric being used by national Republicans and that had been part of regular Republican politicking in California since at least 1918. As with the national campaign, California Republicans targeted La Follette as the president’s main opponent. La Follette revived old Progressive Party ideas for a more radical democracy, advocating—as Theodore Roosevelt had done in 1912 to the distress of regulars—that Supreme Court decisions be subject to invalidation by Congress or even state governments. Against this, California Republicans stressed the sanctity of the Constitution against the strivings of radical reformers, a political appeal that superpatriotic groups, such as the Better America Federation, had used to some effect in the early postwar years. “As Constitution Week is being observed in the United States an attack is being made upon the document by a third party, which advocates the transfer of the powers of the Supreme Court to Congress and the various states,” thundered the Oakland Tribune. Burton Fitts, an aspiring Republican regular and chairman of the Republican Veterans’ League of California, warned of “the big peace-time battle for the country and its time-honored institutions against old-time enemies who would destroy them.”^{Footnote 57}

La Follette’s radical socioeconomic ideas amounted to dangerous experimentation in activist government, Republican campaigners argued. His call for government ownership of railroads and utilities and radical pro-labor policies meant a drift toward the kind of state socialism that had “the entire continent” of Europe “in a ferment.” Congressman John Fredericks, former gubernatorial candidate in 1914, explained at a campaign rally: “We rejoice under a stable government, insured by the Constitution, while European governments tumble overnight. America citizens under the Constitution, are assured rights and privileges unheard of in other countries. This condition . . . will remain under Coolidge, whereas a vote for La Follette . . . is taking a long and serious chance.”^{Footnote 58}

Governor Friend Richardson saw the election as a campaign “between those who stand for the Constitution and the best tradition of our country, and those who would tear up the very foundation of our temple of liberty.”^{Footnote 59} In marked contrast to their latitudinarian approach to constitutional limits before 1910, postwar regulars often betrayed in their rhetoric a new appreciation for the virtues of strict constructionism.^{Footnote 60}

Though the California Republican platform avoided the contentious issue of state economy, Coolidge supporters in the press and on the stump regularly lauded his administration’s parsimonious virtues. The Coolidge administration had done the hard and necessary work of reducing the public debt left by the Democrats, the Los Angeles Times explained, “reducing the cost of administering the Federal government [by] more than $2,000,000,000,” and returned more than “100,000 government employees . . . to private occupations. What this means to the average taxpayer is shown in the 25 per cent cut in income taxes this year.” E. P. Sample, a Republican candidate for Congress from San Diego, linked Governor Richardson’s retrenchment efforts with those of President Coolidge. “Our Governor,” Sample said, “is practicing in State affairs the same ideas our President is advocating nationally. The burden of taxation must be relieved.” The Oakland Tribune praised Coolidge’s work in reducing the national debt and lowering taxes, noting that in “its triumphs in economy” his “administration will take its place in history.”^{Footnote 61}

The 1924 election proved another landslide win for Republicans in California. Coolidge won 57 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race. Though impressive, the 1924 Republican victory did not match Harding’s in 1920. Some decline in vote totals was inevitable given the sweeping victory in 1920. But Republicans in California lost votes among particular groups—the working class, ethnic groups, and usually Republican progressives—that foreshadowed the future of its base support in California.^{Footnote 62}

Coolidge did best in economically vibrant southern California, where he won nearly 64 percent of the vote. He was the first statewide candidate ever to draw a majority of his vote from the eight southern California counties. Middle- and upper-class, and even some working-class, voters, steeped in the region’s pro-business and open-shop ethos, warmed to the small government rhetoric of the Republican campaign. The same held true in other areas of the state, especially in the most prosperous and ethnically homogenous. Coolidge won nearly 60 percent of the vote in the suburban areas of the San Francisco Bay, though his support lagged markedly in the cities there.^{Footnote 63}

Coolidge performed worst among the economically marginalized, ethnic voters, and the working class. His campaign failed to consolidate the strong support that Republicans had won from working-class and ethnic voters in 1920, many of whom now voted for La Follette. Coolidge lost Sacramento, and though he won San Francisco, his vote total failed to surpass the combined vote for Davis and La Follette. Republicans would not win San Francisco again for nearly thirty years.^{Footnote 64}

Coolidge and the Republicans in California also saw losses among many progressives who had traditionally associated themselves with the GOP. Some high-profile California progressives supported Coolidge, especially those who saw La Follette as too radical; but others went for La Follette and carried many progressives with them.^{Footnote 65} Common understandings hold that La Follette’s candidacy drained more votes from the Democrats than the Republicans, but California’s results in 1924 suggest something different. The election upended the already weak Democratic Party in California—John Davis won only 6 percent of the vote—as it hemorrhaged votes to both the Republicans and La Follette. But given the turnout rate and the number of votes Davis did receive, a majority of La Follette’s votes must have come from registered Republicans, surely those with progressive leanings. In 1924, then, California Republicans failed to consolidate the ethnic support they had won in 1920 and saw defections among the state party’s progressives. These losses were particularly marked in northern California, where the La Follette vote proved strongest.^{Footnote 66}

Factionalism roiled Republican politics in the 1920s, with many of the fiercest battles contested over the governorship and control of the state legislature. But statewide initiatives were also sites of struggle between postwar regular and progressive Republican approaches to government and politicking. This was especially true of the Water and Power Acts—public ownership plans for the California state government to develop and control hydroelectric power resources—placed before the voters three times in the 1920s.

The Water and Power Acts drew immense opposition from private power utilities and other business interests who feared competition from the state in the future development of California’s power infrastructure. Drawing on postwar anti-Wilson appeals and the antistatist rhetoric regular Republicans had been developing since 1912, opponents denounced the act for centralizing “unlimited powers” to tax and spend in the proposed Water and Power Board. In its threats to property rights and private enterprise, the act was a species of state socialism, an entering “Soviet Wedge” that “is openly a communistic plan and provides for the communization of basic industries, not confining itself even to water, light and power. It is especially dangerous because it proposes to substitute an autocratic bureaucracy for our representative form of government.”^{Footnote 67} In 1924, the opponents had a convenient tie-in with the Republican efforts to run against Robert La Follette. One political analyst linked the 1924 amendment to “the campaign of the La Follette party. The California leadership advocating La Follette and those advocating the Water and Power act are the same men. Their principles are the principles of Communism.” And La Follette’s supporters in California would use this “Communistic and Socialistic experimental measure” to tax the “state treasury without restraint.” Supporters condemned private-sector opponents of the acts for spending millions to mislead voters. If so, they appeared to get their money’s worth as the proposed amendments lost each year by an average of four hundred thousand votes.^{Footnote 68}

California progressives rebounded in the 1926 election, as their recently formed Progressive Voters’ League worked diligently to defeat Friend Richardson’s bid for reelection. Richardson defended his retrenchment policies and warned that, if back in power, his challenger C.C. Young and the progressives would return state government to spendthrift ways. Young embraced the cause of economy but sought to resuscitate the progressive understanding of the issue as one that combined careful spending with the necessity of growing state budgets to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding population. The party’s 1926 convention, controlled by progressives, at first drafted a platform denouncing the Richardson years, but after protests from the sizable regular minority settled for one emphasizing the tariff, water-power development, government economy, a defense of the state’s political reforms, and the need for humanitarian and regulatory agencies.^{Footnote 69}

As with other statewide reformist candidates since 1914, Young owed his narrow victory over Richardson in the party primary to strong vote totals in the state’s northern urban centers. Richardson’s best performance came from southern California, where regulars now consistently outperformed progressives in statewide and national elections. Had the state’s Democratic Party, for years now progressively oriented, had better leaders and better organization, it likely would have benefited from the ongoing realignment of voters in California.^{Footnote 70} These new voting patterns underlined again not only a broad sectional split in state politics, but more specifically a divide between the older, multiethnic urban areas of the north and the more ethnically homogeneous and faster growing cities of the south.

The 1928 election results again confirmed these voting patterns. Hoover, running on his sterling reputation and the Coolidge prosperity, won an overwhelming victory. But the state Democrats, running under the Al Smith banner, easily made their best showing in a presidential race since 1916. Smith had his best and broadest support in northern California’s multiethnic, working-class cities and its struggling rural areas. Smith also drew Republican votes as his support easily outpaced the number of registered Democrats in the state. Indeed, his vote correlated with the La Follette vote of 1924 at 80 percent. Showing surprising strength for a Democratic presidential candidate in California, Smith won at least 45 percent of the vote in fifteen counties, all in the northern part of the state.^{Footnote 71}

As did Coolidge, Hoover performed best in southern California, averaging 70 percent of the vote in those counties. Though Smith proved highly competitive in northern California, Hoover still won majorities everywhere outside San Francisco. He did especially well in the wealthy suburban areas surrounding San Francisco. For the second straight presidential election, then, Californians were revealing a new voting alignment. More prosperous native-born whites throughout the state, but especially those in southern California, embraced the largely antistatist rhetoric of Coolidge-Hoover Republicanism, while a less prosperous, multiethnic coalition of voters, including many laborers and struggling farmers, especially in northern California, supported the candidate—La Follette in 1924 and Smith in 1928—most committed to reform and an otherwise more activist state.^{Footnote 72}

While the particular candidates in the 1928 presidential race in California appeared to dictate much of the electoral rhetoric the Republicans made to voters, they did employ what were now postwar perennial appeals. The party had resolidified tariff protection for the state’s agricultural products in the postwar years as a top appeal for the party, and assured voters that Hoover understood its importance for California.^{Footnote 73} But state Republicans also continued the drive for continued economy in government and sought to link Smith’s moderate progressivism as New York’s governor with greater spending and higher taxes.^{Footnote 74} The Los Angeles Times highlighted Hoover’s October Madison Square Garden speech criticizing Al Smith’s support for government ownership of water-power resources as state socialism. Progressive governor and Hoover supporter, C. C. Young implied that a Smith presidency was an unwarranted “experiment,” the kind of “blunder” that could derail the nation’s continuing prosperity.^{Footnote 75}

Regular Republicans also gained control of the state party organization in 1928. They already controlled Hoover’s campaign and soon managed to oust a recently reelected progressive party chairman in favor of leading southern California regular, Frank Merriam. Even C. C. Young ran as a Coolidge-like protector of the public purse in his failed bid for reelection in 1930. For the progressive journalist and activist Franklin Hichborn, this marked the end of Progressivism in California, as party “control had passed from progressive to reactionary hands. Once again a new order had dawned in California.”^{Footnote 76}

By the 1920s, a political rhetoric of economic antistatism and cultural antipluralism became central to the electoral appeals California’s regular Republicans made to voters. It had developed in the 1910s in response to the progressive takeover of the party and state government in 1911. The hyperpatriotism and antiradicalism of the wartime and early postwar years only accelerated the development of these appeals among regular Republicans, as they sought to recapture the party from progressives. The support base for these conservative regulars lay primarily in southern California among its largely prosperous and native-born population, one that continued growing enormously in the 1910s and 1920s, as Midwestern Republicans still flowed there. Conversely, after 1910 regulars ran relatively poorly among the more multiethnic urban and poor rural populations of northern California. By the early 1920s, these voting trends had become a settled realignment in state and national races. The Republican majorities in the presidential races of 1924 and 1928 were deeper (among prosperous and native born Republicans) but narrower than they were in 1904 and 1908. For national candidates, this new kind of coalition first revealed itself in the narrow loss of 1916. Though the 1920 election appeared a return to the broad coalition of support Republicans had received in the 1900s, it was really a false dawn. The party’s antistatist, antiradical, and nativist appeals did little to fortify enduring support among ethnic, working-class, and progressive voters. Many of them had supported the GOP in its period of electoral dominance in the century’s first decade. After 1920 they looked elsewhere.^{Footnote 77}

The economic antistatist appeals of the Republican Party, of its state regulars and presidential candidates, hardly held enormous electoral appeal in the Depression years. Californians voted overwhelmingly for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932 and 1936, and Democratic registration surged dramatically, making it the state’s majority party in 1934. Republican regulars kept control of state government for much of the 1930s, even as it lost its edge in voter registration, but this owed much to the California Democratic Party’s ongoing organizational weaknesses.^{Footnote 78} The 1938 election brought a Rooseveltian Democrat to the governorship, and the Republicans who soon succeeded him ran as pragmatic progressives. Republican electoral emphasis on the perils of government activism and cultural pluralism did not reemerge as an electoral force in California politics until the 1950s, then achieved its first great triumph in the election to Ronald Reagan to the governorship in 1966. But the rise of modern conservative electoral rhetoric among California’s Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s—based primarily in the Southland—was not strictly a postwar reaction to the Cold War or New Deal state, nor even a prewar reaction to the New Deal itself. Its roots, the roots of modern conservatism’s economic antistatism and cultural antipluralism, lay further back in a reaction to the triumphs of early twentieth-century progressivism.