“A severe earthquake,” observed Frank J. Symmes, president of the Merchants’ Association, “is a serious misfortune, and a great conflagration a great trial, and each awake the sympathy of the Nation, but a corrupt government is at once a crime and a disgrace and brings no sympathy.”
“We foresee,” said Bishop William Ford Nichols, another of the speakers of the evening, “the greater San Francisco. We mean to make it fairer to the eye. But how about making it better? Size and sin may go together. Rehabilitated buildings may house debilitated character.”
A month later, after indictments had been brought against some of the most prominent business men of the city, word went out that steps would be taken to disqualify every member of the Grand Jury who had attended that merchants’ banquet.
The Grand Jurors were again called to the witness stand and put through a grilling to determine whether or not they were biased. Rudolph Spreckels was under examination for hours in efforts to show that his motives in backing the Prosecution were bad.[265]
Every step of the proceedings at the organization of the Grand Jury was scrutinized. The question of the method of employing the stenographer to the Grand Jury was made subject of hours of argument. If she were irregularly employed, it was held, she was an unauthorized person in the Grand Jury room and her unwarranted presence sufficient to invalidate the indictments. Garret McEnerney, representing Eugene de Sabla, Jr., Frank Drum and John Martin, whose indictments grew out of the bribery of the Supervisors to fix the gas rate at 85 cents per 1000 cubic feet instead of 75 cents, was the first to raise this question. But attorneys for other defendants took it up and seriously considered it as valid objection to the sufficiency of the indictments. A further point was raised by several of the defendants that the stenographer had not been properly sworn. The question was seriously debated, whether she had looked at Prosecutor Heney or Foreman Oliver at the moment she was sworn to secrecy.[266]
Another point was brought up by the defendants in the United Railroads bribery case, that inasmuch as the defendants Calhoun, Mullally and Ford, had been called to the Grand Jury room and compelled to fall back upon their constitutional rights to avoid testifying, that they had been placed in a prejudicial position before the Grand Jury, which constituted reversible error.[267] Another objection was that the Grand Jury box had been destroyed in the great fire of 1906, and that no order had come from any department of the Superior Court ordering its restoration. Again, it was asserted, that Grand Juror James E. Gordan was a member of the Grand Jury panel of 1906, while the other Grand Jurors were chosen from the 1907 list. Indictments brought by a Grand Jury thus constituted were claimed to be without effect.
Had any one of these and many other similar objections been sustained, all indictments against the graft defendants would have been invalidated. Every objection had to be met. Days and weeks were spent by the District Attorney’s office in meeting, or preparing to meet objections which to the layman appear trifling and ridiculous.
In the midst of this technical fight to have the indictments against them set aside, the graft defendants received aid from an unlooked-for source. Sympathizers with the United Railroads conductors and motormen, then on strike, whose union Patrick Calhoun was at the time endeavoring to crush—and finally did crush—started an independent attack upon the Grand Jury.
Four union sympathizers had been indicted in connection with street riots. Their attorneys, before Superior Judge Cook, raised the point that as the Oliver Grand Jury had continued in service after a new panel had been drawn in the office of the clerk and put on file, the term of the Grand Jury’s service had expired. It was, therefore, no longer part of the machinery of the Court and had no power as an inquisitorial body. Under this interpretation, not only would the indictments against the strikers be invalidated, but those against the alleged bribe-givers also.[268] Thus four of Mr. Calhoun’s striking carmen, in their efforts to evade trial on charges growing out of opposition to the United Railroads, were making stronger fight to release Mr. Calhoun from indictment than Mr. Calhoun, although enjoying the ablest legal counsel that money could secure, had been able to make for himself.
Eventually, these technical objections were decided adversely to the defense; the validity of the Oliver Grand Jury was never successfully attacked. But the technical objections raised caused delays which the defense was able to put to good account. While the prosecution was battling to force the graft cases to trial on their merits, the graft defense was conducting a publicity campaign to misrepresent and undermine the prosecution. The astonishing success of these efforts were to appear later. By 1909, for example, in the city which when the graft prosecution opened, the practically universal sentiment was for the crushing out of corruption, there was strong opinion that the prosecution of influential offenders had gone too far, had been injudiciously conducted, was “hurting business,” and that for the good of the community the graft cases should be dropped.[269]