"I Object"

However history may judge him, Hiram Warren Johnson was always in character.

He was the last of the great isolationists.

He was the "Billiken with a Bellyache," fighting as often for progress and reforms as for "the good old days." No person,

cause or party ever fully controlled him.

This obstinate independence cost him his father's love and the support of liberals who once adored him. It also cost him the Presidency of the U.S.

California remembers him best as one of its great reform governors. To win that office (in 1910) he smashed the grip which the Southern Pacific had long held on California politics. After his victory, his father, the railroad's attorney, refused to speak to him for ten years. Hi Johnson, the rebel, went on to establish workmen's compensation, woman suffrage, the initiative, referendum and recall. In 1912 he entered national politics when he bolted the G.O.P. with Teddy Roosevelt.

This richer taste pleased his palate. In 1916 he won his U.S. Senate seat, but let California -- and the Presidency -- slip from Charles Evans Hughes to Woodrow Wilson, because the G.O.P. candidate snubbed him in the campaign. Wilson found him no friend. Hiram harangued the Senate until U.S. adherence to the League of Nations was dead. In 1920, Johnson stubbornly ignored G.O.P. demands that he be Harding's running mate, later sulked when Coolidge succeeded to the White House. Unpredictable as ever, he supported Herbert Hoover in 1928, turned against him for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, turned against Roosevelt on the World Court fight and the Third Term.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, when the bill authorizing the President to send troops overseas was up for debate, he pushed himself feebly to his feet on the Senate floor to croak: "I object." Since that day, Hi Johnson, tired, sick and sore, had spent more of his time in his office or in hospitals, dreaming of the Presidency he never won. This week, as it must to all men, Death came in the 79th year to the California dissenter, one of the great independents of U.S. politics.

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