Mayor Feinstein to stay

I keep wanting to start these letters 'My dear Dad...' since I've been reading an engrossing book, a collection of letters written to his parents by a 19-year-old Lancashire boy who took off for America in 1863, enlisted in the Union army and went through the Civil War.

As a native Lancastrian, I would like to boast that this young son of a cotton mill owner was inspired, at 3,000 miles, to help save the American union as, 80-odd years earlier, the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette heard in France about the outbreak of the American Revolution against British rule and wrote, 'At the first news of this quarrel, my heart was enrolled in it'.

But the heart of this Lancashire boy, I regret to say, was not enrolled in the fight for a united America. He was moved by the menacing presence of a 16-year-old girl who found herself pregnant and pointed to young James Horrocks and said, 'He is the man'. A court upheld her and young James, like very many later immigrants, and on the same ground, beat it to America. In all other respects, he seems to have been an engaging and upright character and sometime we ought to dip into his fascinating notes on America, the people, the war.

Well, 'My dear Dad...' we'd guessed for the past, unbelievable month that this must have been the wettest April there's every been, but now the weathermen have come out and told us that April 1983 was the wettest month in New York since 1882 and then, and now, typically enough, we wake up one morning and, bam! It's 80 degrees.

The foliage in the parks festoons overnight and the cherry blossom and the magnolias explode, causing a simple neighbour of mine, an old grocer round the corner, to recall probably the most quoted line in American or Canadian popular poetry, 'I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree'. I didn't dampen his good spirits with the recollection of Ogden Nash's amendment written after a couple of decades of new motor highways, 'I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all'.

However, just now, I have in mind another bosky state whose government enjoys or endures the purest, the most downright, form of democracy and has a pretty turbulent time maintaining it. Before I go on about it, let me remind you that the 50 states have powers beyond anything imagined by English counties or the provinces of France.

I remember a famous – and, I must say, rather obnoxious – English journalist whom I once had the painful privilege of travelling with on a train from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The train left New Orleans around, say, four in the afternoon. A couple of hours later was always the time in this man's life when he heard the tinkle of ice and the glug, glug of the whisky bottle. We retreated to the observation car and he snapped his fingers and summoned the, in those days, inevitably, the black waiter in the white coat. He ordered a whisky and soda. The waited looked at him with tender compassion, 'I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid,' he said, 'that's not possible.' 'I suppose,' retorted my peppery companion, 'you have some ridiculous rule about seven o'clock or some such rubbish?' 'No, sir,' says the black man, 'but we've just crossed the Texas line.'

Before my friend, my companion, burst a blood vessel, I explained to him that Texas was a dry state. You could not, anywhere, buy an alcoholic drink. (By the way, Texas was dry till about 15 years ago.) 'Well,' said my humphing friend, 'we'll have to wait a while.' Since Texas is 1800 miles wide, we had to wait quite a while till, in fact, the next evening, when we'd crossed over into New Mexico.

By that time, the frustrations of the eminent journalist had been dissolved by several stiff belts of the poteen and I dared to give him a little lecture on the individual powers of the states, their own liquor laws, property laws, education, banking, their own criminal codes, their own constitutions.

Well, the ultra democratic state I have in mind is none other than California. Imagine for a moment an eminent Prime Minister – a Gladstone, a Disraeli, a Churchill – rising in the House of Commons and saying, 'We have just witnessed the most comprehensive programme of constructive legislation ever passed at a single session of a British legislature' and suppose he was not talking of anything done in the House, by the national government, but about a body of laws just passed by the Lancashire County Council!

Well, I'm thinking of the first of the great Roosevelts – Theodore, Teddy Roosevelt – who in 1911 watching the arrival of a new governor in California and the whirlwind passage through the California legislature of 22 amendments to that state's constitution, said the sentence I've just quoted and added, 'It marks the beginning of a new era in popular government – the greatest advance ever made by any state for the betterment of its people.'

And if that sounds a little heady in the usual way of a president's airing his presidential rhetoric, I ought to add that so late as the 1940s, one of the most distinguished of California historians called the reforms of Governor Hiram Johnson in 1911 'still the high watermark in California's political achievement'.

What were they talking about? Well, briefly... By 1911 California had been a state annexed from Mexico – the memory still burns in Mexico – California, this huge littoral 900 miles long, 200 miles wide had been a state for only 63 years because of its headlong growth after the Gold Rush and the polyglot mobs that came hurtling in from Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, France, Cornwall and a practical slave population from China. California had, in the beginning, a pretty rough-and-tumble life and, for a time, no effective government at all. Down two dreadful decades, the government of San Francisco was so impotent that it was taken over by vigilante committees which went out, caught the crooks, shady landlords and the vice lords, as they were called, and lynched them.

Once the state constitution really went into effect and a stable government was established, it was, for many years, a prey to what they called 'vested interests'. One interest vested more than another – the tycoons of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It's no exaggeration to say that when this populist reformer, Hiram Johnson, came along in the early 1900s, the state legislature was owned lock, stock and barrel by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Well, a liberal coalition rose up in revolt and, in those days, the liberals were Republicans to a man. The people rose to it and in 1908 passed an election primary law to throttle the railroad's power to elect their own people. They brought in health laws, workmen's compensation and all sorts of, well, becoming familiar reforms, but the innovation I'm thinking about came in 1911 when the state constitution passed something called 'initiative referendum and recall'.

Doesn't sound like a battle cry as rousing as 'Liberty, equality, fraternity!' or 'For king and country!' but it's a democratic weapon that to this day very few nations or states have on the books. It meant that the people – this initiative meant the people, the voters – were not bound to the legislators they'd elected once an election was over. At any time, the people could, by petition, initiate a new law which would go before the legislature right away. 'Referendum' meant that a popular vote could be taken at any time on any issue that was burning up the legislature.

And, most of all, the institution of 'recall' – this meant and means no more and no less than the right of the people, if enough of them were fed up with the governor, a member of the legislature, a judge, a mayor, to hold an impromptu election and recall, that is, fire from office, that office holder.

To anyone who firmly believes that democracy may be a woeful system of government but better than all the others, it's certainly an inspiring, a splendid buffer against corruption and government shenanigans. Well, last winter, 20 San Franciscans, relics of the hippy Sixties, now their beards grey but their radicalism undimmed, raised a storm out of all proportion to their numbers when the mayor, Mrs Diane Feinstein, tried to pass a city ordinance prohibiting the possession of handguns.

The state declared it illegal but 20 members of the White Panthers had the bit between their teeth. They got out a petition for the recall, the sacking of the mayor. All you need to do this, on any grounds, is six per cent of the total vote in the last mayoral election. Well, the White Panthers began with 20. They were joined by thousands of homosexuals who were sore when Mrs Feinstein vetoed a bill that would have given the same sort of benefits to live-in lovers in any sexual combination as were available to married city employees. By then people of all sorts with other grievances signed up, including middle-class people denied a rent control law, hotel owners whose taxes had been raised to relieve the tax burden on the householders.

Well, you can see where this could lead to in any democratic state. You'd have not 'government by the people' that the people elected, the people could call for a vote of confidence any time enough of them didn't like, for any reason, their governors. Well, the malcontents needed only 19,000 out of 350,000 registered voters to force a recall election. They got 35,000 and last Tuesday, it cost the city several million dollars to decide whether Mrs Feinstein should be dumped.

Well, months ago, a reaction set in. Business was for her, so was most of the middle-class who agreed with her claim that the city's schools had improved, crime was down, the city had a surplus. Moreover, in the nick of time last weekend, she snaffled next year's Democratic presidential nominating convention, which will fetch into the city something like $35, 40 million in trade and general rejoicing.

So, last Tuesday, she came in with a romping 85 per cent of the vote. She will stay.

The whole process was very invigorating and can be seen either as an example of the glory of democracy or democracy gone mad.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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