Sunny Jim in the Boiling Cauldron: The Fatal First Year of the Rolph Administration

Abstract

In late 1929 James Rolph, Jr., was nearing the end of an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of San Francisco. He was a flamboyant, charismatic man, whose genuine warmth had made him an icon in the Bay Area and one of the most admired politicians anywhere in the country. Still ambi tious, and with nothing left to prove in the city he had raised from the ashes of the Great Earth quake of 1906, Rolph made a fateful decision. He would give up what Will Rogers called his civic hereditary monarchy and enter the race for gov ernor of California. Running on a twenty-year record of municipal accomplishment, he would reach the summit and write the final chapter in a dazzling political career.