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Career: His father, oldtime California politician and one-term (1895-97) Congressman, long served Southern Pacific R. R. as counsel. His mother was of French descent. He left the University of California his junior year to become a shorthand reporter. Studying law in his father's office he was admitted to the bar in 1888, moved to San Francisco 14 years later where he has since made his home. As a young assistant to Francis Joseph Heney, famed prosecutor, he helped drive out San Francisco's ''boodlers" and convicted notorious Abe Ruef of bribery after Heney had been shot in the courtroom. A born crusader, he turned on the Southern Pacific to break its political hold on the State. As a result he and his father were not on speaking terms for over ten years. On the railroad issue he stumped the State in a little red automobile, was elected Governor in 1910, re-elected in 1914. His term produced great reforms—the initiative and referendum, the direct primary, workmen's compensation, woman's suffrage.
In 1912 he went to the Republican national convention at Chicago, clashed violently with the Old Guard that renominated Taft, bolted with Theodore Roosevelt whom he had never met. He accepted the Bull Moose vice-presidential nomination. In 1916, still Governor, he was back in the Republican fold when Charles Evans Hughes visited California under Old Guard auspices. They failed to meet, though for some time they were under the same hotel roof. Johnsonites were insulted. Hughes lost the State and the Presidency while Johnson was elected to the Senate where he has served continuously since 1917. In 1920 he missed a White House chance when he turned down the Republican vice-presidential nomination which then went to Calvin Coolidge. His political and personal hatred of Herbert Hoover is proverbial. In November's campaign, he deserted his party, supported the Roosevelt New Deal. To suggestions that the G. O. P. punish him for disloyalty, he hotly retorted: "Talk of reading some of us out of the Republican Party is all poppycock. It's the other way around. ... If those managing and manipulating the Republican party don't stop their clamor and change their attitude we'll read them out. . . . It's got to be a liberalized party; 'its got to recognize the common people."
In Congress: He is a vehement individualist, voting his own convictions, following no one. leading no one. The Western insurgents can count on him no more than can the Old Guard. He plumes himself on his Progressivism, yet he is narrowly nationalistic to the core. When he entered the Senate he promptly enlisted in the "Battalion of Death" against the Versailles Treaty. Because like many another Californian he hates & fears Japan, he believes in the biggest possible Navy for the U. S. and therefore fought the London Naval Treaty (1930) almost singlehanded. He dislikes all foreign powers, suspects them of sinister plots against the U. S. Mention of the World Court infuriates him. His overseas outlook is almost precisely that of William Randolph Hearst whose newspapers glorify him.