Few cared. It was a
"corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and
meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more
robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost
class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its
shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a
conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when
the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney
charged with their prosecution.
Johnson then felt for the first time something he had never felt
before--the stirring of the storm of angry popular feeling. It woke
something in him, something that he did not know existed before--
his instinct for the expression of public passion; his love of the
platform with yelling multitudes in front of him.
He threw himself into the fray on the side of civic virtue. The
disturbance to the complacency of San Francisco disturbed the
complacency of the State, which had calmly endured misgovernment
for many years. Misgovernment procured by the railroad, the public
utility corporations, the other combinations of wealth, through
their agents, and through the corrupt politicians. Johnson became
the spokesman of public protest and the reform governor of the
State.
After that came battling for the Lord at Armageddon--the most
intoxicating experience in American political history, for a man of
Johnson's temperament.
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