Now that our founders had the mayors of both San Francisco and Los Angeles in their corner, the next logical step, in 2011, would be to look upward, to the California government.
Except they already knew the new governor. The man who had just won the governor’s office was Hiram Johnson, who they had met and fed future information to while he was assisting the prosecution of prosecution of Abe Ruef and Mayor Eugene Schmitz.
Thus a meeting happened in mid-January, 2011. It’s unclear exactly how it was set up, it was intended to stay secret and the only reason we know about it is that some passages about it were discovered in the notes that Harriman put in order to write his autobiography, although he then didn’t put those events in it. So let’s just quote his private notes:
The meeting itself was extraordinarily odd. Under my best recollection, I had the assumption it had been called by Governor Johnson, who presumably wished to meet with the mayors of two most populated cities in the state. He was a Progressive Republican, and I had prepared a list of possible common ground. I tried to carefully plan this entire meeting out, to show that Socialists could work with progressives in other parties, despite our own history of barely being able to work with other Socialists. The first step in my plan being not to tell him I voted against him for Wilson.
I was less sure about Mayor Older’s possibly political positions, I knew was anti-corruption, and had a reputation for being a friend to the poor and even public women. He also had helped me with the trial and I needed to thank him for that, he might be expecting for me to owe him a favor, and I would have to see what that was. I had never met the man, but friends I still had in SF spoke highly of him.
I also knew that Older and Johnson were friends, from back in SF, and I hoped they were not planning on ganging up on me.
So I walked into the meeting with a list in my head of policy ideas of Johnson’s that I agreed with, and at minimum we all three had the fallback conversation of opposing Southern Pacific. I would write down these policy ideas here, but they have gone completely from my head, as that was not what the meeting was about in any sense.
It had apparently not even been called by Governor Johnson.
It had instead been called by two of the social set in San Francisco, Marie Mullins and Elizabeth Beccari. Marie was a quiet individual, but Elizabeth presented an astonishing idea.
It seemed that the two owned a detective agency. Or had controlling access to it in some manner, they were extreme cagey. They refused to even name it. That agency, and its research, had been behind Mayor Older’s broadsheet. Older confirmed this.
Elizabeth also claimed that employers had been using Pinkertons and other detectives to do research, and the situation that had happened in LA, with Herbert Hockin being employed by a conspiracy of employers working to break unions, was much more common than anyone understood.
And she could find all of it. Every single one.
She didn’t ask for anything in return for this, which was, perhaps, the most astonishing part of this at all. The only thing she wanted was to remain in the shadows. She wanted us, essentially, to operate as connections. She was also planning on, or perhaps already had started, to approach various unions, but needed political contacts.
I’m not sure what to make of any of this.
-Job Harriman’s private notes
It seems clear that this unnamed ‘detective agency’ was Res Ops, and the offer was of future knowledge, although it wasn’t intended for them to know.