The people of that city were employing the recall provision of their charter against the machine Mayor trapped in corruption. Although the then Mayor is a "Democrat" and Parker a "Republican," Parker's presence was required at Los Angeles to back the machine's efforts to hold the Mayor in his job.
So Parker could not be at Sacramento, where the machine really needed him. The machine leaders did not think it possible that a real Mayor - especially a machine Mayor - could be dismissed from office through such a "fool innovation" as the recall. But that's what, in spite of machine efforts, happened at Los Angeles.
These experiences and others like them, forced it upon the understanding of machine leaders that the initiative, recall and similar "innovations," have a business end; that they put altogether too much power into the hands of the people for the machine's safety.
Up to the session of 1909 there had been practically no opposition to the ratification of charters adopted by the several municipalities. But this year the machine leader in the Senate, Wolfe, let it be known that he would henceforth oppose "freak charters," "freak charters" to Senator Wolfe being those of the initiative-referendum-recall order.
Several municipalities - Berkeley, San Diego, Palo Alto, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Richmond, Los Angeles, Pasadena and Oakland - had either sent new charters or important amendments to existing charters to the Legislature for ratification. Many of the charters and amendments came decidedly under Wolfe's ideas of "freak." But there are some extremes to which the machine dare not go, and it did not dare to go on record as against popular municipal government. Wolfe and his associates could and did grumble, but they did not dare refuse the several charters and charter amendments ratification.
So they let the charters and charter amendments go by them and braced themselves against granting Statewide initiative.
That issue came up in the form of a proposed amendment to the State
Constitution introduced by Senator Black, which gave the people of the
State the power enjoyed by the people of Oregon and of the more advanced
California municipalities, the power to initiate laws.
Black's amendment provided that on petition of eight per cent of the electors of the State proposing a law or Constitutional amendment, such law or amendment must be submitted to a vote of the people at the next general election, precisely as Constitutional amendments are now submitted. If the proposed law or amendment received a majority vote it was to become a law of the State, independent of Legislative action. In a word, the people of California, had the amendment carried, would have been able to initiate the laws which govern them.
Naturally, the machine, always on thin ice at best, thoroughly aroused to what the initiative means, opposed any such "wicked innovation."
In its opposition, the machine was backed by that extreme conservatism, which, while sincere enough, forever hangs on the coattails of progress; the conservatism which even in New England as late as 1860 drew back its respectable skirts from abolition; the conservatism which, dragged protesting over a crisis, never fails to assume for itself all the credit for what has been accomplished. Thus the machine had some very respectable assistance in its efforts against the Initiative Amendment, the measure which more than any other before the Legislature was calculated to take the government of California out of machine hands[84].