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Lawyer & Community. Ask knowing San Franciscans who is their city's most potent figure and they will probably say Banker Herbert Fleishhacker because his finger still is in so many pies. Ask who is the greatest potential force and they will say Jack Neylan. As to whether his power is for good or evil, answers will agree only in their superlatives. To New Dealers he is the "most dangerous" enemy in the land. (After the 1932 election he quickly turned on the Brain Trust denouncing its members as an "intellectual awkward squad.") To left-wing Labor he is the "most dangerous" of Conservatives. (He, more than any other one man broke the general strike in San Francisco last summer.) To followers of Senator Hiram Johnson he is the "most effective" Progressive. Most loyal of friends, he is the bitterest, most remorseless of enemies. Thirty years ago he burst upon San Francisco as "Windy Jack," a noisy brilliant, picturesque young hoodlum reporter with the vocabulary and manners of his teamster days in Arizona. Little about his behavior suggested that he was born of gentlefolk in New York 49 years ago properly educated in New Jersey. After he had been hired, fired, rehired on various San Francisco newspapers, the skyrocket of Jack Neylan's career was touched off in 1910 when the Bulletin assigned him to cover Hiram Johnson's campaign for Governor on the new Progressive ticket. Governor-elect Johnson took him to Sacramento as chairman of the new State Board of Control, for which Neylan had drafted the plan. Chairman Neylan's achievements transcended all legal limitations of the job. When the superintendents of State institutions tried to tell him that oleomargarine was better for insane patients than butter, Neylan barked: "You are more important to the State than your patients. If oleomargarine is so good, you eat it!" He saw that they did. With his toughest teamster tactics he routed so many corrupt officeholders to San Quentin Prison that Governor Johnson called a halt, jokingly told friends that "Neylan was ruining the State Government by putting all the officials in jail."
Jack Neylan drew up California's first budget, walked onto the floor of the Legislature, bulldozed that body into accepting it. When, after six years, California's $2,000,000 deficit had been turned into an $8,000,000 surplus, Budgeteer Neylan had to borrow $1,000 to move his family back to San Francisco where he began practicing law. His first partner was Aaron Sapiro, who silenced Henry Ford's attacks on Jews. After a year he opened his own office, got as his first client Zellerbach Paper Co. which he had lashed unmercifully as Chairman of the Board of Control. Because he knew how to use them, power and wealth gravitated to hard-fighting John Francis Neylan in the next 20 years. Emotional, intelligent, intuitive rather than scholarly, he is a spectacular courtroom performer. Towering, grey-maned, deep-voiced, he baits, bullies, works for an explosion of temper, then strikes home. He despises anything other than a frontal attack. But he is Irish enough to ogle juries, turn his biting wit on opponents.