Heeee’s back. Only this
time, Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t come from the future as
the Terminator. He’s come from the past, a time when some
politicians took contentious issues straight to the people.
Schwarzenegger has announced that he’s fed up with
the Democratic-majority state Legislature and will appeal directly
to voters to impose a cap on state spending. He also wants to
change how teachers are paid, how state workers’ pensions are
managed, and how voting districts get drawn.
The current
governor of California is fashioning himself as the reincarnation
of Hiram Johnson, the California governor who took on railroads and
big business after winning election in 1910. Johnson campaigned to
take issues directly to the voters through ballot measures and
recall elections.
“Special interests in those days ran
over people,” Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared during his
modern-day campaign rallies. “Hiram Johnson stopped them.”
The governor is right in saying that he’s got some
things in common with his early 20th century predecessor. Johnson
was a celebrity of his time, a crusading prosecutor. He and
Schwarzenegger both won office by building on a core group of
dissident Republican supporters who were frustrated and
contemptuous of what they perceived as a corrupt California
government. Both pledged to return the government to the people and
both jumped on a bandwagon.
But Johnson was a latecomer
to a movement that had been sweeping the West since the 1880s.
Direct democracy was a perfect fit for the anti-monopoly sentiment
and interest-group politics of Western states at the turn of the
last century. In 1897, Nebraska became the first state to allow
local ballot measures, and South Dakota the first to allow
statewide initiatives and referenda. Utah followed in 1900. Then,
Oregonians approved statewide direct democracy in 1902, and the
state rapidly rose to the forefront of the movement, instituting a
range of measures from the direct primary to allowing counties to
ban the sale of alcohol.
By 1912, 20 states — most
of them west of the Mississippi — allowed citizens to vote
directly on initiatives and referenda. So the curtain wasn’t
rising on a new act when Hiram Johnson got elected in California;
in fact, it was about to come down. In the 1912 presidential
election, Teddy Roosevelt picked Hiram Johnson as his
vice-presidential candidate. Their Progressive Party ticket
fractured the Republican vote and helped to elect Democrat Woodrow
Wilson president in a landslide.
It wasn’t until
1978, and the passage of Proposition 13, California’s fateful
tax relief measure, that direct democracy began its current
revival.
In California and other Western states since
then, tax cuts and other fiscal matters have made up a huge portion
of ballot measures, with social and environmental issues mixed in.
There are some important differences between the Progressive past
and the present, in which “progressive” has lost some of its
original connotations and picked up others. In Johnson’s day,
popular initiatives and recall votes were a way to wrestle control
from railroads and financial institutions that had a lock on state
government.
In Schwarzenegger’s day, the special
interests include teachers and state workers, both with powerful
grassroots lobbies. And many now worry that the money it takes to
gather signatures and run an advertising campaign ensures that
powerful interests will play an essential role in a form of
governance that was intended to reduce the power of corporations
and big money.
There’s another important
difference. Johnson had the state Legislature on his side, filled
with people who supported his reform agenda. But Schwarzenegger is
trying to go over the heads of a popularly elected Legislature.
The governor is a master at grabbing the spotlight in a
populist style; he’ll even motor to a suburban restaurant in
his Humvee to gather signatures on petitions. But as Schwarzenegger
campaigns, voters should be mindful of another parallel with
Johnson and other fathers of the initiative and the recall: They
weren’t all that democratic. While Progressive reformers used
the support of labor unions and other groups with large political
bases to bring initiatives and referenda to Western ballots, this
was hardly a grassroots movement.
Still, taking a page
from the Progressives’ script, Gov. Schwarzenegger is shaking
up California politics again. But as in the first time around, the
rest of the West will play an important role in determining whether
this revival has legs.
Margaret O’Mara
and Jon Christensen are contributors to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is
deputy director of the new Bill Lane Center for the Study of the
North American West at Stanford University; he is a research fellow
at Stanford in the Center for Environmental Science and
Policy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
