San Francisco Labor and the Populist and Progressive Insurgencies

Abstract

ISTORIANS OF THE Populist and Progressive insurgencies have frequently assumed that the Populists failed to win support of urban labor, and that the Progressives, led as they were by middle-class professionals, remained hostile to labor's interests.' The course of events in San Francisco, in the light of an examination of assembly district voting records, appears not to have conformed to this generalization. San Francisco in 1890 contained 25 per cent of the population of California,2 including a substantial proportion of the non-agricultural labor force. Throughout both the Populist and Progressive periods, the city completely dominated the organized labor movement of the state. It would seem difficult to argue, therefore, that a generalization with respect to labor's political relationships which did not fit the city could have applied to the state. But if the state of California represents an exception to the generalization, it is rather a large one. That question, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. What follows here will be an analysis of voting behavior of San Francisco labor electorates in several decisive Populist and Progressive contests. Working-class politics had been traditional in San Francisco at least since the late seventies.3 By the time of the first Populist campaigns,