Johnson at this time was a practicing attorney, not noted for the quality of his community service. The administration of San Francisco had been a scandal for years. Few cared. It was a "corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney charged with their prosecution.
Johnson then felt for the first time something he had never felt before—the stirring of the storm of angry popular feeling. It woke something in him, something that he did not know existed before—his instinct for the expression of public passion; his love of the platform with yelling multitudes in front of him.
He threw himself into the fray on the side of civic virtue. The disturbance to the complacency of San Francisco disturbed the complacency of the State, which had calmly endured misgovernment for many years. Misgovernment procured by the railroad, the public utility corporations, the other combinations of wealth, through their agents, and through the corrupt politicians. Johnson became the spokesman of public protest and the reform governor of the State.
After that came battling for the Lord at Armageddon—the most intoxicating experience in American political history, for a man of Johnson's temperament. It was a revolution, not in a government, but in a party. Bonds were loosed. Immense personal enlargement came to those who had known the ties of regularity. It was an hour of freedom, unbridled political passion, unrestrained political utterance. Docility did not exist. Vast crowds thrilled with new hopes yelled themselves hoarse over angry words.
Association with Roosevelt on the Progressive ticket lifted Johnson from a local to a national importance. The whole country was the audience which leaped at his words. It was a revolution in tittle, a taste, a sample of what the real thing would be, with its breaking of restraints, its making of the mob a perfect instrument to play upon, its unleashing of passion to which to give tongue. Johnson has felt its wild stimulation and like a man who has used drugs the habit is upon him.
Moreover, his one chance lies that way. I have said that he is, by accident, radical. Let us imagine a great outburst of popular passion for reaction. And suppose that Johnson was, when it arrived, a political blank, as he was when Heney was shot. Johnson would have raised his angry voice against radicalism, just as readily as for it.
The essential thing with him is popular passion, not a political philosophy. He has no political philosophy. He has no real convictions. He does not reason or think deeply. His mentality is slight. He is the voice of many; instinctively he gives tongue to what the many feel; that is all.
Suppose the strong-lunged Californian were a political blank, just reaching the national consciousness, when the reaction against Wilson began and when the public swung to conservatism.
You know those vast tin amplifiers employed in big convention halls, or in out-door meetings, to carry the voice of the speaker to the remotest depths of the audience; Johnson is a vast tin amplifier of the voice of the mass. When the people had become "docile" he would have thundered "docility" to the uttermost bounds of the universe, if he had not by earlier utterances been definitely placed on the side opposed to docility.
But he had been definitely placed in the battle of Armageddon. A thousand ennuies located him for all political time. No convictions hold him where he is in case there be profit in changing sides; other men habitually conservative would have the preference over him on the other side. In this sense he is accidently radical, accidently because he happened to emerge in politics at a radical moment. That takes into account only the mental background of his political position. There is an element that was not chance. Public passion is almost invariably radical, springing as it does from the resentment of inequality, and Johnson is the tongue of public passion.