Frank Merriam

Frank Finley Merriam (December 22, 1865 – April 25, 1955) was an American

Merriam was born in 1865 in Hopkinton, Iowa, the eldest of 11 children. In 1861, his father Henry C. Merriam and uncle Charles E. Merriam enlisted in Company K, 12th Iowa Infantry. Both were captured at the Battle of Shiloh, held as prisoners of war at Libby Prison, and returned to Iowa.

After graduating from Lenox College at Hopkinton in 1888, Merriam served as the principal of the Hopkinton schools for two years and superintendent of schools at Postville for one year. He was a school superintendent in Wisner, Nebraska.^[1] He next became the editor of the Hopkinton Leader, a newspaper.

In 1904, he moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he owned and published the Muskogee Evening Times. He moved to Long Beach, California in 1910 with his second wife, Nellie, to attend to family obligations. There he worked in the advertising department of the Long Beach Press.^[2]

Iowa and California legislatures

Merriam was elected to the

Following his departure from the Assembly that year, Merriam took a two-year hiatus from state politics. He returned in the 1928 elections after he was elected to the California State Senate. After two years in that body, Merriam won the nomination for lieutenant governor and, along with the Republican candidate for governor, San Francisco Mayor James Rolph, was elected to office.^[5][6]

Governorship

On June 2, 1934, Governor Rolph was pronounced dead of heart failure at Riverside Farm in Santa Clara County. Upon the news of the Governor's death, Lieutenant Governor Merriam was sworn in as governor.

Longshoremen's strike

Nearly immediately after assuming the governorship, Merriam faced labor agitation, particularly by members of the

As governor, James Rolph had consulted with other West Coast governors such as

On July 5, 1934, as more attempts to open the

Merriam, only governor for a month, threw the state government into the fray. As reports of growing violence in San Francisco reached

Merriam also ordered the halt of construction on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge until the violence in San Francisco subsided.

Within the day, 1,500 Guardsmen armed with fixed

In the aftermath of the Longshore Strike, Merriam was highly praised by the conservative San Francisco press for his perceived victory over the longshore strikers. During the strike, state Republicans nominated the Governor as its party nominee for the general elections that November. Merriam, however, had threatened not to deploy the California National Guard to San Francisco if the party would not nominate him.^[10]

Running against Merriam in the 1934 elections was former

During the campaign, Sinclair promoted the

The result of the 1934 general elections saw Merriam defeating Sinclair with 48 percent of the vote, opposed to Sinclair's 37 percent. Haight garnered 13 percent.[12] After the election, Merriam announced that the result was "[a] rebuke to socialism and communism."^[13]

The 1934 general election is generally remembered as one of the most hotly contested elections in California history. It has also been cited by political historians as one of the first modern elections, due to the various uses of popular media and rhetoric to both popularize and demonize candidates.

Rest of term

Upon beginning his first elected term, Merriam immediately faced an ever-shrinking state budget and growing deficit. In an effort that later angered many powerful conservative backers who had originally supported his 1934 candidacy, as well as challenging his own deep-seated conservativism, Merriam proposed to the

William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers provided one of the bulwarks of the governor's 1934 campaign, complained bitterly over the reformed tax laws. The Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner's editorial shortly after the reform bills' passage read: "[e]xtortionate and confiscatory taxation will mean ... devastation of business, paralysis of industry."^[10]

Fanning the growing rift between Merriam and conservative Republicans,

Hearst supporters challenged Merriam's and the Legislature's 1935 reform laws during a special referendum in 1936 with Proposition 2. The proposition would automatically repeal the tax reforms, and would in the future require the support of two-thirds of the Legislature and approval of voters by statewide referendum before any new income tax could be imposed. The measure, however, was defeated.^[15]

While the State Senate was controlled by Republicans, the crucial lower house Assembly, where finance bills originated, was split between conservative and socialist-leaning Democrats. Merriam proceeded with appeasing the closely divided Legislature by praising the federal Townsend Plan, while complaining to conservatives and other capitalist supporters that he was surrounded by fanatics.^[10]

By the 1938 general elections, Merriam had lost much support from the right due to the 1935 tax reform laws and support for

Merriam resided in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California.^[16]

After his defeat, Merriam retired from public life. In 1941 he joined the California Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Following the death of former Governor and U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson in 1945, a brief write-in campaign for Merriam appeared, though it only garnered 500 votes. He died at home in Long Beach, on April 25, 1955, of a heart attack at the age of 89.^[17]

References

External links

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