The press throughout the State was a unit in approving the Grand Jury’s action. The San Francisco Chronicle fairly expressed the general sentiment. It said:
“Every decent man in San Francisco breathes freer to-day. The fact cannot be concealed that there was an uneasy feeling in the community that the machinations of the boss would again secure immunity for himself and those who were with him in the grafting business. The facility with which he turned the Grand Jury preceding the present one into an instrument to accomplish his own purposes inspired the fear that by hook or crook he may have obtained control of the one now sitting; but the promptitude with which the first indictment was brought allays all apprehension and converts it into confidence that the body now in session is in deadly earnest and that it will earn the gratitude of its fellow citizens and cover itself with glory by striking an effective blow which will put an end to flagrant venality in office and restore the good name of San Francisco.”
The San Francisco Examiner said of the indictment of Schmitz and Ruef: “The light breaks, the reign of political terror seems at an end. Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz and Abe Ruef, his mentor and master, have been indicted for extortion. The move of political regeneration and civic reform that has been sweeping the country has hit San Francisco with the force of all the other successes behind it. In other cities and other States the powerful rascals as well as their satellites have been sent to prison. Evidently San Francisco and California are to rid themselves of the arch political criminals.... Thursday, November 15, 1906 (the day on which Ruef and Schmitz were indicted), is a day to be remembered. It marks the beginning of San Francisco’s regeneration. It is a day of heroic events to be told to children and grandchildren. It is the day of the declaration of independence of California’s great metropolis.”
Ruef denounced his indictment as absurd, insisting that he had merely taken fees for services rendered. In an interview published in the San Francisco Chronicle of November 16, 1906, he said:
“The whole thing is absurd. I was simply acting in the relation of attorney to a client. I took my fee for rendering legal services. I was retained by a contract as attorney by the restaurant keepers. If it is extortion for an attorney to accept a fee from his client, we all might as well go out of business. This is exactly the same charge that was made against me once before and was found baseless. I have nothing to fear.”
On November 17 the Chronicle, touching upon Ruef’s defense, said: “Every branch of the city government which is controlled by Ruef men is known to be utterly rotten. The only question has been whether under the advice and direction of low legal cunning, the grafters have kept themselves immune from the law. And the question is about to be settled.”
On his arrival in New York after being indicted for extortion in the French Restaurant cases, Mayor Schmitz in an interview widely published at the time gave his attitude toward the French Restaurants. The Mayor explained that these restaurants had existed so long in the city that they had become a recognized adjunct of a gay life of a gay town. He had not favored their suppression, and whenever the Police Commissioners agitated the revoking of their liquor licenses, he had opposed them.
“The French restaurants did no great harm,” he is quoted as saying, “and to destroy them would be to ruin the men who had invested money in them.” The character of some of the heavy investors in these establishments was brought out in the report of the commission appointed by Mayor E. R. Taylor to ascertain causes of municipal corruption in San Francisco, as disclosed by the investigations of the Oliver Grand Jury. The report set forth: