“The trust is not fulfilled if the primary leader assumes that because the people elected his primary ticket they want him in office. They don’t want him, for they don’t want primary politicians in the Mayor’s chair.
“The theory of any convention is that it is assembled to choose the best man in the party for its candidate. The spectacle of Mr. Dan Ryan holding a caucus with himself, and deciding that he is better qualified to be Mayor of San Francisco than any other man in the Republican party, is a grotesque piece of effrontery.
“All sorts of men rise to the top in primary fights, but most of them have a sufficient sense of modesty, if not of the fitness of things, to abstain from making themselves the recipients of what the delegates have to give.
“For the primary leader to appropriate the office to himself Is like the agent of a charity fund determining that he is the most worthy object of the charity and putting the money in his own pocket.”
It was anything to defeat Langdon, even though a pro-prosecution attorney be employed against him. Hiram W. Johnson, for example, was suggested as his opponent. But Johnson let it be understood, and with characteristic positiveness, that under no considerations would he be a candidate against Langdon.
The members of the Good Government League Executive Committee were: E. L. Baldwin, J. E. Cutten, George Renner, Gen. Samuel W. Backus, George R. Fletcher, Sigmund Bauer, B. H. Gurnette, Frank W. Marvin, Frank W. Gale, L. C. McAfee, George Uhl, Rev. Chas. N. Lathrop, Isidor Jacobs, Rudolph Spreckels, Edgar A. Mathews.
The minority which voted for Taylor, in a memorial to the convention, charged “that the majority of the delegates to this convention have betrayed the confidence reposed in them by their constituents” and gave notice that it would not be bound by the nomination of the convention for Mayor and would not support the nominee, but would do all in its power to further the election of Dr. Edward R. Taylor.