Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 by Franklin Hichborn
page 58 of 366 (15%)
page 58 of 366 (15%)
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machine would have preferred to have made its initial fight in the
Senate. If defeated in the Senate, the enemies of the measure could have jockeyed for delay, prevented the passage of the measure until the closing hours of the session, and then killed it or forced its supporters to accept amendments. But the initial fight did not come in the Senate. The Assembly was the battle-ground. The reason for this lies principally in the fact that while Assemblyman W. B. Griffiths, of Napa, raises fast horses, he is not a gambler, and is as much opposed to the bookmaking, pool-selling features of the track as Senator Walker himself. Griffiths was made chairman of the Assembly Committee on Public Morals. While this committee has sundry sins to answer for, nevertheless it made an astonishingly clean record on the Walker-Otis bill. On January 18, less than three weeks after the Legislature had assembled, Chairman Griffiths called his committee together to take up the Walker-Otis bill. Of the nine members of the committee, seven were present, Mott and Mendenhall alone failing to answer to their names. Those present were: Griffiths, Cattell, Young, Dean, Perine, Fleisher and Wilson. The seven members went through the bill paragraph by paragraph and decided unanimously to recommend it for passage. Had a dynamite bomb been set off under the Emeryville gambling establishment, greater consternation could scarcely have seized upon the pro-gambling element. The gamblers realized that the committee's prompt action threatened the machine's plan to delay action on the measure until the closing days of the session. For the moment all interest centered in Mott and Mendenhall, the two members of the committee who had been absent when the measure had been considered. Twenty-four hours |
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