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William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (California, 1994) and coeditor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (California, 2001). Tom Sitton is Associate Curator of History, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and the author of John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (1992).

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California Progressivism Revisited

University of California Press

The reinterpretation of the political nature of progressivism in the past two decades has enlightened our perception of how this movement developed in California. Past analyses of progressivism treated its leaders as like-minded "liberals" struggling to solve the problems of urbanization and industrialization and to modernize American institutions; as conservatives bent on controlling the lower classes, advancing their own entrepreneurial opportunities or professions, and ameliorating some defects in the socioeconomic system to undermine the arguments of radicals; as a displaced elite trying to reestablish its role in society; and so on. More recent conceptions of progressivism define it as a "dynamic general reform movement composed of many specific reform movements and shifting coalitions of self-interested groups uniting temporarily over different issues and behind different political leaders." This formula makes a little more sense of a complex phenomenon that on various occasions joined together altruists laboring to raise the downtrodden; conservatives advocating structural political changes to nullify the voting power of the lower classes; young people looking for vehicles of social advancement; opportunists, egotists, socialists, and reactionaries; and other groups with countervailing agendas.1

Among those comprising the "shifting coalitions" of progressivism was a left wing composed of individuals who occupied the ground between the Socialist Party of America and the more moderate reformers. Benjamin Parke DeWitt, an early participant and promoter of the movement and the Progressive party, portrayed this left wing as an integralcomponent of progressivism, a bridge between two political parties that differed mainly in the emphasis each placed on extending the power of government. "Radical Progressives and conservative Socialists, therefore, could almost meet on common ground," he wrote, optimistically believing that socialism "is an ideal which the [progressive] movement hopes someday to see realized." Historians such as Otis L. Graham, Jr., have found it difficult to define the boundary between the two, the point where "the progressive movement spilled over, on its Left edge, into socialism." Graham, Robert Crunden, and others include gradual socialists and even party members such as Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell in the progressive fold, since they frequently worked with more moderate progressives, sharing common values and goals. In fact, right-wing Socialists who collaborated with organized labor for more palliative reforms aptly demonstrated their similarity to left-wing progressives, especially in campaigns to win municipal ownership of utilities and social welfare improvements. The occasional partnership of right-wing Socialists and left-wing progressives, most notably at the local level, pushed progressivism slightly to the left and often painted the Socialist party as a less radical entity.2

The left wing of California progressivism has received scant notice in the major works on the subject. Overshadowed by mainstream moderate leaders of the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, such as Hiram Johnson, Chester Rowell, and Meyer Lissner, a number of middle-class individuals with much more advanced views on social change were active in state and local progressive campaigns. Calling themselves Fabian or gradual socialists, they joined party members in advancing major reforms along the road to a cooperative commonwealth, while working with conservative peers for small incremental changes. Some of the more notable progressives, such as William Kent, Fremont Older, and Francis Heney, were not socialists but did favor more far-reaching economic changes than the moderates did. Others—for instance, self-avowed Christian socialists such as John Randolph Haynes and Caroline M. Severance—joined the Lincoln-Roosevelt League very late or not at all, but nonetheless contributed significantly to the progressive cause.3

Left-wing progressives in California were in the forefront of campaigns for more advanced social welfare objectives, such as protective legislation for workers (especially women), better health care, and public ownership, as well as the drives for women's suffrage, regulation of corporations, and direct legislation. They collaborated with Socialists and labor unions to increase economic opportunity for the lower classesand social services for the needy. The left wing forced progressive election platforms leftward, so much so that at times they almost mirrored those of the Socialists. (The result was evident in portions of San Francisco and Los Angeles County, where Socialist and progressive candidates received votes from the same constituency in consecutive elections.) At a time when Socialist party fortunes were on the rise in California municipal elections, left-wing progressives prodded their more moderate brethren to cooperate with Socialists in the quest for social reform goals.4

In many respects similar in their middle-class, professional backgrounds to right-wing Socialist leaders such as Job Harriman of Los Angeles and Reverend J. Stitt Wilson of Berkeley, some left-wing progressives could almost embrace the ideology of right-wing Socialists, sans the red card and Marxian notions of class revolt. As Kevin Starr has noted, these frequently wealthy social democrats became conduits allowing reform ideas to "flow from the far left to the reforming conservatives" unhindered by class barriers. With a strong commitment to fundamental change, left-wing progressives infused into their movement an altruistic zeal and a higher purpose, forcing it to embrace more far-reaching reform than it would otherwise. When reform enthusiasm waned during and after World War I as moderates tired or thought the job finished, it was the old left wing that inspired progressives to continue.5

The most active figure in the California progressive left wing was Dr. John Randolph Haynes. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1853, and reared in coal-mining country, Haynes graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with Ph.D. and M.D. degrees and established a lucrative medical practice in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia. He and his wife, Dora Fellows Haynes, amassed a small fortune there until John's chronic bronchitis and various ailments of his family members dictated their move in 1887 to the more salubrious climate of Southern California. In Los Angeles he became one of the city's busiest physicians and joined the social elite, which included many of his patients. He also continued to invest wisely in real estate and other financial ventures, thereby enhancing the fortune he later used to bankroll his social reform crusades.6

In his first decade in the City of Angels, Haynes rarely indulged in politics, although he claimed to be interested in major changes in America's socioeconomic structure. He had witnessed poverty and inequalityin the coal-mining region during his boyhood and in the slums of Philadelphia while a young doctor, but was not quite sure how one person like himself could help bring about meaningful changes. The watershed of his activism occurred in early 1898, when his local Episcopal church sponsored a series of lectures by Reverend William Dwight Porter Bliss, a national spokesman for the Christian socialist movement. Bliss...