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Newspapers and Politics

J. R. Knowland was fascinated by the Civil War stories told to him by his mother and father. A "northern political belief" and the fact that the country had been Republican during his formative years led him to embrace Republican philosophy. He was particularly impressed by the slogan "As the Grand Old Army had saved the Union, the Grand Old Party would save the nation."^[1] This line of thinking set the stage for his political and newspaper career. Already as a young boy, J.R. was interested in journalism, and he frequented local newspaper offices in Alameda and Oakland. During his teenage years, he wrote many stories for the local Alameda papers. He also started a paper at the private boys' school he attended in Oakland; during the summer, he worked in the offices of the Alameda Argus and the Oakland Enquirer .

He went on to write articles for San Jose newspapers while attending the College of the Pacific, then in San Jose. Still in college, J.R. met Ellie Fife, the daughter of a prominent Tacoma, Washington, family, and the couple married on April 2, 1894. Their first child, Eleanor, was born in 1895. Six years later, in 1901, their first son, J. R. (Russ) Knowland Jr., was born. Seven more years passed before William Fife Knowland was born, on June 26, 1908. That third and youngest child would be the Knowlands' favorite, and one day would become one of the nation's most powerful political figures.

After working for several years in the lumber business with his father, J. R. Knowland began making his move in politics. He joined the

newly formed Alameda Good Government Club, which was open only to prominent citizens. Young, wealthy, idealistic, and intelligent, J. R. Knowland was a perfect choice for the club.^[2] At age twenty-four, the politically ambitious Knowland was asked to speak before the Unitarian Club in Alameda about newspapers. Because newspapers are "our daily companions," he explained to the audience, "we are likely to feel that . . . we have a special license to criticize their policies and to offer suggestions as to what they should and should not publish. The average individual's knowledge of newspapers is but superficial and the reforms which many of us are so free in suggestion might be found inexpedient, if we were ever placed in the position to carry them out." Knowland added, "If we should pick out, indiscriminately, twenty citizens from this or any other locality and request their respective views of what a newspaper should publish, the result would undoubtedly be that what any one of the single twenty would publish the other nineteen would severely criticize."^[3]

J. R. Knowland used his connections with the Alameda Good Government Club and a seat on the Alameda Library Board of Trustees to start his career as a politician. At the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest person ever elected to the state assembly, beating his Democratic opponent, E. A. Holman, by more than 1,500 votes. In 1902 Knowland was elected to the state senate and served as chairman of the committee on banking. A year later, at the age of thirty, he was nominated by Governor George Pardee, a former Oakland mayor, to fill out the unexpired term of U.S. Representative Victor H. Metcalf who had been appointed secretary of commerce and labor.

In the next election, in 1904, J. R. Knowland won his seat by more than 17,000 votes. He was reelected four more times. While serving on the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, he supported construction of the Panama Canal and sought exemptions from toll payments for intercoastal American shipping. He made four trips to the canal during its construction and, after a 1907 visit, wrote an article for Overland Monthly extolling the canal's virtues. A ship leaving the West Coast, he pointed out, could cut forty-six days off the trip to the Caribbean by going through the canal rather than around the Horn. "For the first time, California will have direct navigation between our Pacific ports and those on the Gulf and on the Atlantic," he declared. "No state is watching the progress of the canal with greater interest than California, and her people will support the present administration and future administrations until the project is finally completed."^[4]

Knowland also led the fight to bring the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition to San Francisco, initiated appropriations for the Alaska railroad, and obtained funds for Oakland's first harbor development.

In 1914, however, Knowland passed up what would have been easy reelection to the House to try for the U.S. Senate. He was defeated as a direct result of a split in the Republican Party, caused by the formation of a strong Progressive movement in California headed by Governor Hiram Johnson. Fear and distrust of the railroads, specifically the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad, led many Californians to embrace the Progressive Republican cause. As Thomas Storke, a longtime publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press , explained, Southern Pacific "extended its evil influence . . . to Sacramento and Los Angeles, up into Oregon, and as far East as Washington, D.C. . . . I saw the Octopus nominate and elect governors. . . . U.S. Senators, judges, and even town constables owed their jobs to the machine bosses."^[5]

J.R. Knowland appeared to be untouched by the widespread corruption in California, with one exception. As a congressman he had attended the 1906 state Republican convention in Santa Cruz, where Southern Pacific favorite James Gillett was nominated over the sitting governor, former Oakland mayor George Pardee. Historian George Mowry later proclaimed, "Never in the history of California had the Southern Pacific been so brazen in dominating a state convention as it was at Santa Cruz, threatening the wavering, providing for the faithful."^[6] After Southern Pacific bought the nomination for Gillett, a victory dinner was held and its attendees photographed. One picture—featuring Knowland along with Gillett, Justice Frederick W. Henshaw of the state supreme court, and Abe Reuf, the San Francisco political boss who was in Southern Pacific's pocket—was published in the San Francisco Call . Headlined "The Shame of California," the picture proved to be a political embarrassment to Knowland for years. Every reform paper in the state and even some national magazines reproduced the notorious photograph.

The 1914 race marked the first popular election of U.S. senators, who previously had been appointed. Knowland, with almost six terms in the House, was the dean of the California congressional delegation, and he seemed a likely candidate to move up to the Senate. His opponents in the race were Francis J. Heney, the Progressive candidate, and former San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan, who was supported by the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson. Knowland stood for free tolls, higher tariffs, "and a return to the safe-and-sane business

methods of the good old GOP."^[7] In contrast, Phelan backed repeal of free tolls and low tariffs, and Heney campaigned for a steeply graduated income tax, an inheritance tax, and government ownership of utilities and natural resources. Phelan backers were confident of victory, claiming that old-line Republicans would reject Knowland's "standpattism" and, rather than see Heney elected, would switch over to Phelan.

Both nationally and in California, the Progressive candidates fared poorly, although Hiram Johnson was reelected. The biggest setback came with Phelan's victory over Heney and, of course, J.R. Knowland. Phelan received 279,000 votes to Heney's 255,000 and Knowland's 254,000. This fatal blow to Knowland's political ambitions touched off a bitter political dispute with Hiram Johnson, whom he blamed for causing his defeat. When Johnson gave up the governor's office in 1916 to make his own run for the U.S. Senate, Knowland remarked that it would be better to elect a Democrat than Johnson. But Johnson won anyway, and held that seat until his death in 1945.

Despite his dislike for Johnson, J.R. later would put his personal views aside in the interests of party solidarity. In 1920, when Johnson sought the GOP's presidential nomination, Knowland supported him at the party convention to show the nation that the Old Guard Republicans and the "Bull Moose" Republicans were joined in loyalty to their party.

William Fife Knowland was born during his father's third term in the House of Representatives. A month later, his mother died of an embolism and influenza. At the time William's brother, Russ, was just seven and his sister, Eleanor, twelve.

The death of a mother with young children is always hard, but J.R.'s marriage a year later caused a long-lasting division in the family. It was in a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., that thirty-six-year-old J.R. met and fell in love with Emelyn S. West, the daughter of the boardinghouse owner. The couple was a study in contrasts—he a wealthy, urbane politician; she a woman from the back roads of Virginia, with little education.

Family members described her as a "Marjorie Main in furs," referring to the woman who played Ma Kettle in the popular 1950S movies. In the words of her grandson, Joseph W. Knowland, Emelyn "could easily give you the shirt off her back as well as cut you right down to the knees." A flamboyant character, she dominated the family and all those

around her. She would often push her chauffeur aside and drive the family limousine from her four-story mansion in Piedmont, a rich enclave surrounded by Oakland, to go shopping. She would race from market to market, haggling over prices, buying clothes at thrift shops and inexpensive jewelry at dime stores. She then would drive to poor sections of town and dispense bags of groceries.^[8]

When the newlyweds returned to California, Emelyn—later called "Mamoo" by her grandchildren (who called J.R. "Papoo")—took Billy, as he was called, to her heart. He was less than a year old. In adopting Billy as her own child, Emelyn virtually shunned Eleanor and Russ. Billy became the pride of Emelyn and his father. He emulated his father, and his father in turn had high expectations for this special son. "He was spoiled," said Bill Knowland's own son, Joe, in an interview. "This motherless child was taken to the bosom of his strong stepmother, who declared him as her son at the expense of shared parental love and attention to his older sister and brother." Billy only learned Emelyn was not his mother when he was seven years old. While delivering newspapers in Alameda, he dropped off a paper at a local pharmacy, and the pharmacist asked him, "How's your fine stepmother today?" He was devastated to learn that the woman he had called Mom was not his birth mother.

Years later J.R. often forgot Russ and Eleanor when introducing his family at public gatherings. Not surprisingly, Russ became jealous of his little brother and they were never close, although they were always cordial toward each other. Nor was Russ particularly close to his father, although they worked side by side at the newspaper for years. Russ was the more social brother, the one who fraternized with Tribune reporters and rolled dice for drinks with friends in the neighborhood bars. Bill had a single interest—politics—and his father loved him for it. For J.R., the boys' father and family patriarch, Billy was the heir apparent.

When the Knowlands went back to Washington, they took their youngest child with them for the half-year sessions, leaving Russ and Eleanor with their grandparents. In the next few years Billy spent at least half of each year in the nation's capital. As soon as he could read, he began collecting autographs—of politicians. He managed, for example, to get Herbert Hoover's signature during a meeting between his father and Hoover, who was then secretary of commerce.^[9] Bill Knowland would later take up a related hobby, creating scrapbooks of articles about his political career.

It's not surprising that Billy would grow into a politician, for talk

around the dinner table in J.R. Knowland's Washington home centered on politics. Billy also became a familiar figure in the corridors of the Capitol, accompanying his father on his political rounds. "His idea of a game," J.R. said, "was to get a box to stand on and make a speech."^[10] At age eight, a year after he returned to California from Washington, D.C., Billy met a young girl, Helen Davis Herrick. "Wepwesentative government ith the way we do thingth in thith country," he explained to her.^[11] Eleven years later this girl became his wife.

J.R.'s father, Joseph, died November 13, 1912, after a long illness. A week before his death at the age of eighty, he summoned up the strength to get out of bed and go to the polls to vote for another term in Congress for his son. It was his last public appearance.