CHAPTER XVIII.
The Real Fight Begins.
Nine months after Heney assumed his duties as Assistant District Attorney, Mayor Taylor named the successors of the Ruef-Schmitz Board of Supervisors.
In those nine months much had been accomplished. Ruef had plead guilty to extortion and had made partial confession of his relations with the public-service corporations. The Schmitz-Ruef Supervisors had made full and free confession, and had been removed from office. Mayor Schmitz had been convicted of extortion, ousted from office, and pending his appeal to the upper courts was confined in the county jail. The back of the Schmitz-Ruef political organization was broken, and its forces scattered.
Had the Prosecution stopped here, the men whose devotion and self-sacrifice had made the undoing of the corrupt administration possible, would have retired with nothing more serious confronting them than the condemnation of the impotent puppets of large interests whom they had brought to grief. But those behind the Prosecution were not content to leave their work at a point where the regeneration of San Francisco had scarcely begun. They proposed to go to the bottom of the graft scandal. It was not sufficient, they held, to punish poor men who were without friends or influence, while their rich and powerful associates went unpunished. The bribe-taking Supervisors might be put in the penitentiary, but other bribe-taking Supervisors would eventually take their places. Ruef, punished by imprisonment, would serve as an example for political bosses that would cause them to hesitate for long before embarking in corrupt enterprises such as had brought the discredited boss to grief. This would make it hard for bribe-giving corporations to secure agents for bribe-passing, and make bribe-giving correspondingly difficult. But the conviction of high corporation officials, responsible for the bribe-giving of public-service corporations, was regarded as more important than all, for this would demonstrate bribe-giving to be unsafe, and check the practice at its very fountain-head. Such conviction, the Prosecution held, would have greater deterrent effect against bribery of public officials than the confinement of 500 bribe-taking Supervisors in the penitentiary.[261]
“I would be willing,” Rudolph Spreckels testified at the Calhoun trial, “to grant immunity to any man who would bring to bar a man of great wealth who would debauch a city government, and who would use his wealth to corrupt individuals and tempt men of no means to commit crime in order that he might make more money.”
Such was the stand taken by District Attorney Langdon and his associates. The announced policy of the Prosecution, therefore, included the prosecution of the bribe-giver to the end. In pursuing this policy, Mr. Langdon and his associates aroused the astonishingly effective opposition of interests representing hundreds of millions of capital. Every indictment of capitalist charged with bribe-giving was signal for a new group of financial leaders, their satellites, beneficiaries and dependents, to array themselves on the side of the graft defense.[262]
With every indictment came a new group of attorneys to raise technical objections to the proceedings, all of which the attorneys for the Prosecution were obliged to meet.
The first attack was upon the validity of the Grand Jury. The attorneys for Ruef and Schmitz had apparently exhausted every point that could be raised for the disqualification of the Grand Jurors, but this did not prevent the heads of corporations who found themselves under indictment making similar attacks. And between them, in this new move to quash the indictments, the defendants enlisted the ablest members of the California bar.[263]
In this new opposition an astonishing number of technical points were raised by one or the other of the groups of defending lawyers. Nothing was overlooked.
Just before the principal indictments were brought, for example, the San Francisco merchants had given a banquet to celebrate the progress which San Francisco had made during the first year following the fire.[264] Langdon and Heney were given places of honor. They were the heroes of the occasion. Every reference to their work was signal for tremendous demonstration. There was no suggestion then that the pursuit of criminals would “hurt business.”