Job Harriman was born in Indiana in 1861, and moved to California in 1886. He was a clergyman and then a lawyer. Around 1890 he became interested in socialism, and in the early 1890s joined a Nationalist Club in San Francisco. (The "Nationalists" were disciples of Edward Bellamy, author of the utopian socialist novel *Looking Backward.*) With a group of Nationalists in 1892 or 1893 he successfully petitioned the Socialist Labor Party for a charter for a local unit. During the 1890s he worked his way up into the higher echelons of the California SLP; in 1898 he was their candidate for governor, though he received only 5,143 votes of 287,064 cast. He was the party's state organizer in 1899, and the party's nominee for the presidency of the United States. Jack London described him as "the best socialist speaker on the coast." However, as a result of the negotiations for unity between the SLP and the Social Democrats, the newly united party (henceforth to be known as the Socialist Party) drafted a new slate which dropped Harriman to the vice-presidential slot, with Eugene Debs as presidential nominee. (As usual with such mergers, the "unity" was not complete, because the Daniel De Leon faction of the SLP would not go along.)
During the 1900 campaign, Harriman came to believe that the Socialist Party required an economic rather than a purely political base; he began to advocate ideas such as a requirement of prior labor union membership for membership in the SP. (He had a debate with De Leon, opposing De Leon's "dual unionist" Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance; Harriman argued that socialists should work within the existing "pure and simple" AFL unions.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/pdf/1900/1900ddl_ha.pdf In one form or another, this subject would be hotly debated on the American Left for decades to come.)
Subsequently, Harriman practiced criminal law in Los Angeles, while continuing to press his new ideas at socialist and labor meetings and among his friends. During the metal workers' strike on the West Coast in 1910, local socialist units mobilized to help the striking workers, and Harriman considered such cooperation an excellent economic base for politics. In 1911 organized labor strongly backed Harriman as the Socialist candidate for mayor against the pro-business incumbent George Alexander. Alexander was considered by labor to be a tool of conservative business interests, above all of Harrison Gray Otis' *Los Angeles Times.*
The background of the 1911 campaign was dominated by a bombing on October 1, 1910 at the *Times* printing plant, which killed twenty men and turned the eyes of the nation toward southern California. Not surprisingly, Otis immediately placed the blame for the bombing on union activists. Ortie McManigal and the McNamara brothers (James B. and John J.), union organizers from the Midwest who had purportedly been assigned the job in Los Angeles as part of a nation-wide conspiracy, were tracked down and arrested. "Labor throughout the country rallied to the defense of its brethren, throwing dimes and dollars into a McNamara Fund for the expected lengthy trial. Clarence Darrow accepted the defense, and Job Harriman, already at work on the case, remained as one of Darrow's chief counselors." Robert V. Hine, *California's Utopian Colonies*, p. 116; most of the facts about Harriman in this post are from Hine's book.) "Ubiquitous throughout the campaign were buttons reading 'McNamara Not Guilty! Vote for Harriman!'" Jack Ross, *The Socialist Party of America, *
https://books.google.com/books?id=fud1BwAAQBAJ&pg=PR43
As it turned out, the McNamara trial in Los Angeles never progressed beyond jury selection. On December 1, 1911 the McNamara brothers reversed themselves and pleaded guilty. (See
http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi06e.htm for some of the details.) This reversal is generally considered to have had a devastating effect on Harriman's campaign; four days later he lost to Alexander, but still got 51,423 votes of 136,915 cast. (Ironically, as the Socialists pointed out after the confessions, the McNamara brothers were not Socialists but AFL men; the "conservative" AFL was no stranger to violence in those years...) Hine concludes that "Harriman would probably have been elected if not for the McNamara confession, but after this upset he never again entered the political arena." (p. 117) That last clause is not correct; he ran again in 1913, but got only 26% of the vote in the primary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Harriman In any event, defeat convinced Harriman that socialists should concentrate on economic rather than political activism; to win people to socialism, it was necessary to show them a concrete example of successful co-operative life. Consequently he helped to found the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony in the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles.
http://ereserves.mcneese.edu/depts/archive/newllano261.htm Harriman later joined some of the colonists in moving to Louisiana, but returned to California where he died in 1925.
So let's suppose that even at the risk of their own lives, the McNamara brothers refuse to plead guilty--at least until after Election Day. Harriman, we will assume, is elected. (This is actually less certain than some commentators assume. As noted at
https://web.archive.org/web/20090510111011/http://www.cresswellslist.com/ballots2/harriman.htm although Harriman had won more votes than Alexander in the first-round election on October 31, still this was a plurality rather than a majority, and the other candidates backed Alexander in the run-off. Yet it is not clear to me that the voters for these candidates would necessarily have gone along with such endorsements; after all, Alexander was the incumbent, and was well-known to have the backing of the business community--and any vote for another candidate was an anti-incumbent vote, and at least some of those votes might have gone to Harriman in the runoff on an anybody-but-Alexander theory. In any event, without the pre-election confessions, the runoff would have been much closer, and I don't think a Harriman victory could be ruled out.)
What would a Socialist administration in Los Angeles be like? There were of course Socialist mayors elected in numerous American cities--Milwaukee, Reading, etc.--and in general their administrations were hardly revolutionary, emphasizing efficient municipal administration, not class struggle. However, in Los Angeles, with its reputation as a bitterly anti-union, open-shop town (the anti-San Francisco, in this and other respects), a Harriman administration might be "revolutionary" in a way simply because he was pro-labor. The LAPD under Alexander had rounded up hundreds of labor activists under anti-picketing ordinances which gave police authority to arrest picketers and persons "speaking in public streets in loud or unusual tones."
http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi06e.htm I'm not sure how strong the Los Angeles mayor was in relation to the City Council as of 1911; but assuming that the mayor had some power over the police department, a pro-labor mayor could make a big difference in making the city a more union-friendly town.
A few more possible effects:
(1) Will the movie studios be more reluctant to locate in a Socialist-run, heavily unionized Los Angeles? To be sure, southern California was in many respects an ideal location for the industry (though other places like Florida are possibilities) but southern California is much larger than Los Angeles. Could some other part of southern California--say, San Diego or Santa Barbara--become the center of the film industry?
(2) Will the annexation of the San Fernando Valley be delayed or maybe even permanantly prevented? "Through the late 19th century court decision Los Angeles v. Pomeroy, Los Angeles had won the rights to all surface flow water atop an aquifer beneath the Valley, without it being within the city limits.[9] San Fernando Valley farmers offered to buy the surplus aqueduct water, but the federal legislation that enabled the construction of the aqueduct prohibited Los Angeles from selling the water outside of the city limits.[10] This induced several independent towns surrounding Los Angeles to vote on and approve annexation to the city so they could connect to the municipal water system. These rural areas became part of Los Angeles in 1915.[11] The Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, a syndicate led by Harry Chandler, Hobart Johnstone Whitley, president of the company,[11] Henry E. Huntington, extended his Pacific Electric Railway (Red Cars) through the Valley to Owensmouth (now Canoga Park) and laid out plans for roads and the towns of Lankershim (now North Hollywood) and Van Nuys.[citation needed] The rural areas were annexed by Los Angeles in 1915.[12] The growing towns voted for annexation – for example: Owensmouth (Canoga Park) in 1915,[13] Laurel Canyon and Lankershim in 1923,[14]:45 Sunland in 1926,[14]:29 La Tuna Canyon in 1926, and the incorporated city of Tujunga in an eight-year process lasting from 1927 to 1935.[15] These annexations more than doubled the area of the city."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley Will these annexations still take place with a less businesss-friendly administration?
(3) If elected, and especially if he is re-elected in 1913 and 1915 (Los Angeles mayors were elected for two-year terms in those days) Harriman would look like the ideal Socialist candidate for the presidency in 1916, when Debs refused to run for that office. In 1912, Debs had received 79,201 votes in California (11.68 percent); in 1916 the colorless Socialist presidential candidate Benson received only 42,898 (4.29 percent). I do not think that Harriman (or for that matter Debs himself) in 1916 could do nearly as well as the Debs of 1912--too many 1912 Socialist voters thought it urgent in 1916 to defeat Hughes, whom they saw as a tool of pro-war elements and reactionaries. But I am quite certain that Harriman would do better than Benson, especially in California, and if he got just a few thousand more votes in the state than Benson, that could be enough to cost Wilson California's 13 electoral votes--and therefore the election.
Thoughts? Incidentally, to consider the consequences of a Socialist mayor of Los Angeles, we don't even have to make Harriman win in 1911; as Jack Ross notes, "two years earlier, Socialist councilman Fred Wheeler had come just 1,700 votes shy of being elected mayor..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=fud1BwAAQBAJ&pg=PR42