(This is the first of a multi-part series)
There’s an open space preserve in the South Bay called Fremont Older. Many of us locals have hiked or biked there. Jerry Morrison and I went there to see if anyone knows why it’s called that.
It’s a beautiful park that adjoins the better-known Stevens Canyon Park. It’s more difficult to park your car, so more people go to Stevens Canyon (which also has a reservoir you can boat and fish in).
I had expected that almost no one knew who Fremont Older was, since that had been my experience. But actually, our totals when we asked people were:
11 people polled
5 knew who Older was
Amazing.
Like Hearst, But Different
Everyone’s heard of William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst Castle is one of California’s premier tourist attractions. There are four different tours you can take. The Assembly Room
hosted virtually everyone who was anyone in the early part of the 20th Century. There’s even a movie Citizen Kane
a thinly disguised portrait of Hearst. But Fremont Older is not as much a household name, although Hearst himself later hired him.
Who Was This Guy?
Given that Fremont Older was actually his name, and the park has nothing to do with Fremont the city, or “older” as an adjective, who was he?
Of course you could Google and read all you want about Older, but you’re here now, aren’t you? So I’ll tell you about him, skipping the boring stuff.
Most of these quotes come from his book, My Own Story, which is on archive.org.
The Bulletin
Fremont Older grew up in Wisconsin but ended up in San Francisco editing The Bulletin, a struggling newspaper, in 1895. Let’s let Mr. Older tell the story (Crothers was the owner of the paper):
As I remember, at that time I had no ideals whatever about life, and no enthusiasms beyond newspaper success. I was vain of my newspaper talent; that is, the talent that made it possible for me to succeed in getting hold of news and features that would interest the public and increase circulation. Neither Crothers nor myself had any other view in the beginning than to make the paper succeed financially. It had to be done quickly, too, because Crothers had no money and the Pickering estate consisted largely of real estate, so that we could get no help from that source.
The office of the Bulletin was on Clay street, between Sansome and Montgomery, in an old building that was almost on the verge of tumbling down. It had been there for more than thirty years. We had only one old press that was wholly inadequate for handling a circulation of any size, and our type was set by hand.
It was almost impossible to make any improvements, because we had no money. We were running so close on revenue that Crothers was constantly worried for fear we would encounter losses that would entirely destroy our hopes of success.
I worked desperately hard in the beginning. I had a staff of only five men besides myself, and I acted as managing editor, city editor, book reviewer, dramatic critic and exchange editor, thus doing the work of several men. I lived, breathed, ate, slept and dreamed nothing but the paper. My absorbing thought was the task of making it go.
I was perfectly ruthless in my ambition. My one desire was to stimulate the circulation, to develop stories that would catch the attention of readers, no matter what was the character of the stories. They might make people suffer, might wound or utterly ruin some one; that made no difference to me, it was not even in my mind. I cared only for results, for success to the paper and to myself.
It was not long before the paper began to respond to the strong pressure I put upon it. We had only two competitors in the evening paper field, the Post and the Report, and I had the satisfaction of seeing our circulation slowly creep upward, until we had passed the Post and were becoming a serious rival of the Report.
So here we have a struggling yet cocky young journalist, determined to make his paper succeed whatever the cost. But he wasn’t completely amoral, as we’ll discover later. He had to understand who wielded the power in turn-of-the-century California and use that to his advantage.
The Southern Pacific and Mayor Phelan
Nowadays it’s hard to imagine a railroad controlling an entire state, but in the late 19th century, Southern Pacific owned California. Remember: there were no trucks or cars or planes yet. If you needed to ship anything from here to there quickly, you needed either a railroad or a boat. The state was still largely agricultural, and the only way farmers got their crops to market was on the train. They were hostages.
Older says:
The entire state at that time was politically controlled by the Southern Pacific. In order thoroughly to dominate the state it not only controlled the Legislature, the courts, the municipal governments, the county governments, which included coroners, sheriffs, boards of supervisors, in fact, all state and county and city officials, but it also had as complete a control of the newspapers of the state as was possible, and through them it controlled public opinion.
There was hardly an editor who dared criticise to any extent the railroad domination. Country editors, many of them, were satisfied with an annual pass for the editor and his wife. Some of the larger ones expected and got money for advertisements. Some of the metropolitan papers fared better, and among these was the Bulletin.
This use of money and favors was quite open. No one seemed to criticise it. At every session of the Legislature, in addition to the secret money that was distributed, blue tickets were openly handed about. On Friday or Saturday when the Legislature adjourned until Monday, railroad lobbyists passed these blue tickets around among all the members and all the newspaper men and all the attaches of both houses. These tickets entitled the holder to a free passage to San Francisco and return.
Even Supreme Court judges traveled on annual passes and made no secret of it, and all influential people traveled to and from the East without any cost. I have been on an overland train when there were only three or four people on the entire train that had a ticket they had paid for. In the Pullman I was in none had even paid for their berths. One man, a cigar drummer, had a pass for meals at the eating stations.
I remember one session of the Legislature in the early nineties, when a certain assemblyman from San Francisco told me that all of his leading constituents had told him to get all he could up there, and he was quite open in taking money, discussing boodle in committee meetings, and rising to make inquiries as to whether or not there was any money coming up from Fourth and Townsend. The railroad building was located there at that time.
No fight of any consequence had been made against this state of affairs. Corporations were regarded as legitimate business enterprises bound up with the welfare of the community, and people believed that they should have special privileges, that they must have special privileges in order to succeed, and that they must succeed if the community was to be prosperous.
Silver or Lead?
This is what they say in Mexico about the choice the drug cartels offer: either take our money (and thus we own you), or we kill you. It wasn’t quite that brazen in California, but pretty close: the Bulletin received $125 a month from the railroad for “friendliness.” As he said, they were so close to going broke that they couldn’t do without that money. Nowadays, Google or Chevron or the Teachers Union have more subtle ways to get favorable media coverage.
Still, Older needed to build circulation, and pushing a candidate who opposed the railroads and won might do it. Ordinary newspaper-buying citizens hated the railroads.
Journalistic Objectivity
You might be thinking, “I thought newspapers were supposed to just report the news, not create it!”
This was 1896. The New York Times was distinguishing itself by trying to practice objectivity [ed: they’ve given up on that lately], but other newspapers did not. The Bulletin could push a political candidate purely for economic reasons, and Older proceeded to do so. James Phelan seemed like the right guy to run as a Democrat.
Still, it was just a teensy bit unseemly to be seen taking money for favorable coverage. Watch how he threads the needle here. This is a long excerpt because it’s very rare that you see a newspaperman (or anyone!) being that honest about money:
At this time I had never met Phelan, but I knew that he had taken considerable interest in civic affairs. He had been a director of the World's Fair at Chicago; he had made some contributions of works of art to San Francisco; he was a good public speaker, and a very rich man. I felt that his being wealthy would prevent him from following the corrupt practices that had always been in vogue in San Francisco, would enable him to make a fight against the Republican machine, and would leave him free, if elected, to give the city an independent government.
With these things in mind, I called upon Phelan in his office and introduced myself. I told him that my name was Older, that I was managing editor of the Bulletin, and that I thought he ought to run for mayor.
He looked at me sharply and said, "Why, what put that in your head? What gave you that idea ?" I said that I understood that he was a man of leisure with an interest in civic affairs, that he had ability, that he would give the city a good, clean government. I made a strong plea to him to run for the nomination. I told him that I knew it would be very difficult to persuade the owner of the Bulletin, Crothers, to permit the paper to support any one not a Republican, but I thought it could be accomplished if he would ask a friend of his who had great influence with Crothers to talk with him.
Phelan was noncommittal, but I saw that I had made an impression on his mind.
A few days later Phelan's friend called at the Bulletin office and talked with Crothers.
After he had come and gone I approached Crothers myself and urged that the paper support Phelan. At first he demurred at leaving the Republican party and supporting a Democrat, but I insisted that the election was only local. We could still be Republican nationally and in state affairs; we could go so far as to be Democratic locally and it would not be held against us. I argued strongly that a successful city campaign would largely increase our circulation and aid in putting the paper on its feet. I minimized the possibility of resentment on the part of the railroad.
Finally he reluctantly consented, and on the following day I published the first article suggesting Phelan for mayor. His being a millionaire, of course, made him popular at once. All the politicians felt it would be a fat campaign and there was much enthusiasm for him.
This feeling permeated Crothers' mind also. He felt that our scant finances should be somewhat improved by our support of Phelan. I feared this thought in Crothers' mind because of the public-spirited attitude I had taken with Phelan. I felt ashamed that Phelan should ever know that we would take money from political candidates or from any source other than the so-called legitimate sources.
I hoped to convince Charley Pay, Phelan's manager, to accept the same plan in Phelan's fight that I used in the McKinley campaign; that is, to get Phelan to buy a certain number of extra Bulletin editions. I suggested the idea to Pay that if I could be allowed several 10,000 editions of the Bulletin in addition to our regular circulation, for which we would charge $500, I thought I could hold the paper in line throughout the campaign.
Pay agreed to the plan, and it was understood that a certain number of Saturday nights would be selected for this extra Phelan edition of the Bulletin. I promised him that we would have our regular carriers distribute them and the cost to Phelan would only be 5 cents each, our regular retail price on the streets.
This arrangement seemed to me quite legitimate. I trusted that it might meet Crothers' hope that some money would flow in from Phelan. As the campaign progressed this sum did not entirely satisfy him. It was not the custom at that time to give something for nothing in political affairs, and he felt that the Bulletin's support was worth more than an occasional $500.
His pressure upon me for more money finally became so strong that I called on Charley Pay and told him that I would have to get out another extra edition to the number agreed upon between us. Otherwise I was afraid that Crothers could not be restrained from sending some one from the Bulletin office to make a demand upon Phelan personally. Pay agreed to allow me to get out the extra edition, and by doing so I prevented Phelan from being directly importuned for money. We got through the campaign with no other contributions from Phelan except the payments for these editions.
For years a great many people believed that Phelan had subsidized the Bulletin. Many thought he owned it. These amounts, however, were the only sums paid the Bulletin by Phelan through that campaign. He was elected and, as I had hoped, the fight gave us some standing in the community and materially increased our circulation. Many of our readers believed that we were a free newspaper, as free, that is, as any newspaper could be.
Think about that: A newspaper editor picks someone to be Mayor who wasn’t running, convinces him to run, gives him favorable coverage, puts out a special edition that he buys (which is sort of a payment to the newspaper), and he gets elected. The newspaper’s owner says, “No, we need more money from Phelan!” and the editor mollifies him (but maintains appearances) by putting out another special Phelan edition.
Left unsaid in Older’s book was Phelan’s anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese record, both in office and after. Wikipedia says:
He promoted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and wrote an article "Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded"(1901) in the North American Review, to increase support for the extension of these laws.
“Politics is a dirty business” my mother always said. You stamp out one form of evil for a while, and another one takes its place.
In 1902, Eugene E. Schmitz was elected Mayor. He was backed by Abraham Ruef, who was a power in the Republican party. Older opposed Schmitz and Ruef and thought they were going to usher in a new era of corruption, undoing all the good that Phelan had done. That’s what they did.
If you know your history, you know that 1906 was the great earthquake in San Francisco,
and it was followed by a Great Fire
Historynet tells us:
Since City Hall was a total loss, a temporary command post was set up at the Hall of Justice near Portsmouth Plaza. When the quake hit, Mayor Eugene Schmitz was at his home at 2849 Fillmore St., a short ride from the Hall of Justice, so he lost no time in reporting for duty. He had been under a cloud lately, accused of graft and taking bribes, and this disaster was a chance for political salvation. Schmitz was originally president of the local musicians’ union, but in city affairs he really played second fiddle to political boss Abraham Ruef.
Ruef was a Republican Party organizer who saw greater opportunities for riches by switching to the newly formed Union Labor Party. A master manipulator, Ruef used Schmitz’s handsome looks and Irish Catholic-German roots to win votes. Although he was a charismatic speaker and charming family man, Schmitz was still considered a lightweight who did the bidding of his ‘puppet master,’ Ruef.
Since the entire slate of Union Labor candidates had been elected in 1905, that party now controlled the entire board of supervisors, with predicable results. Ruef, himself no stranger to accepting ‘fees’ for political favors, characterized his rapacious supervisors as ‘the paint eaters,’ because they ‘were so greedy that they would eat the paint off a house.’ Crusading editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Bulletin had begun printing a series of exposés on the corruption, and Schmitz was heavily implicated.
In the next article, we’ll see the huge events that Older initiated, which put Abraham Ruef in San Quentin, and got Older kidnapped and nearly killed.
In the SF Bay Area we just opened our Fremont older exhibit at Cupertino history museum stelling Ave open Wednesday through Friday
10-5 exhibit runs through mid October free admission come and check it out
I’m going to be there today I am normally there Wednesday but I worked from home as I a had a doctor appointment. Our big annual fundraiser is tomorrow and that’s the “official” reopening. I am there 12-5 I now have the museum software on my Mac so I now work from home Thursday and other days but I am ALWAYS there on Friday 12-5 with my coworker Anya. Hopefully you will be in the area again