As the special election drew near, the governor braced for defeat.
"I am rather fearful that our people are sick of campaigns and probably sick of the campaigner," he confided in a letter to a friend, "but I don't know how else to arouse the interest necessary for success."
The man who wrote those words was a showman with a tough-guy image, a political outsider who had never sought public office until his successful run for governor, a Republican who championed direct democracy and had used it to get what he wanted.
He wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was Hiram W. Johnson, who started a California revolution by persuading voters in 1911 to legalize the recall of elected politicians, and to establish the referendum and the ballot initiative.
Schwarzenegger has found a role model in Johnson, a charismatic character who railed against "special interests," took on the railroad barons and ruled the state from 1911 to 1917. When Johnson wanted to change the system, Schwarzenegger has said, "Johnson did not call the lobbyists or the union bosses. No, he went directly to the people. Ninety-four years later, we will do exactly the same."
The parallels between California's 23rd governor and its 38th do run remarkably deep, as a review of the thousands of Johnson papers on file at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley shows. They also show that a politician today might want to compare himself to Johnson--up to a point.
"It's very interesting to me that the Schwarzenegger administration might be thinking about Hiram Johnson," says Bill Deverell, a historian and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. "Because the real question for him might be: How do you prevent yourself from becoming Hiram Johnson?"
Like Schwarzenegger, Johnson was famous, but not as a politician, when he decided to run for governor. It was 1910, and the state was holding its first direct Republican primary. Before then, an outsider wouldn't have had a chance, because party leaders picked the nominee for governor.
But this new kind of election was a perfect match for Johnson, a 44-year-old lawyer who knew how to put on a show. Once, he pulled a dagger out of the waistband of a witness on the stand. To defend a Chinese organized crime figure, he brought six Asians wearing yellow overcoats into the courtroom, placing his client among them; the wrong man was identified as the guilty party.
