Hiram Johnson

Hiram Johnson

Hiram Warren Johnson (September 2, 1866 – August 6, 1945) was an American attorney and politician who served as the 23rd governor of California from 1911 to 1917. Johnson achieved national prominence in the early 20th century. He was elected in 1916 by the state legislature as the United States Senator from California, where he was repeatedly re-elected and served until 1945.

As a governor, Johnson was a leading American progressive. He ran for vice president on Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive ticket in the 1912 presidential election. As a US senator, Johnson became a leading liberal isolationist, among those "Irreconcilables" who opposed the Treaty of Versailles and rejected the League of Nations. Later, Johnson was also a vocal opponent of the United Nations Charter.

Attributed

• The first casualty when war comes is truth.
  • Widely attributed to Johnson, but without any confirmed citations of original source: "The first casualty when war comes is truth," remarked Hiram Johnson, "and whenever an individual nation seeks to coerce by force of arms another, it always acts, and insists that it acts in self-defense" (Locomotive Engineers Journal, February 1929, p. 109). Arthur Ponsonby earlier said: "When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty", but the first recorded use seems to be by Philip Snowden in his introduction to Truth and the War, by E. D. Morel. London, July 1916: "'Truth,' it has been said, 'is the first casualty of war.'" Samuel Johnson expressed a similar idea: "Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." Cf. Aeschylus#Misattributed.

Quotes about Johnson

• In fact a de facto state of war between Germany and the United States had existed since September 11, 1941, when Roosevelt had authorized American naval commanders who encountered German vessels to fire at them 'on sight'. This was possible because the tide of American public opinion had been running against the Axis powers, despite the best efforts of isolationists like Senator Hiram W. Johnson, neutralists like the lawyer and legal historian Charles Warren and crypto-fascists like the aviator Charles Lindbergh. Ordinary Americans did not want war. Many believed they had been duped into the last war by the machinations of British imperialists and North-Eastern business interests. They were strongly attracted to the neutralists' idea that by prohibiting military supplies or loans to combatant countries Congress could avoid another such entanglement. But they supported American rearmament from as early as 193 6. They clearly favoured Britain over Germany from 1938 onwards. Above all, Americans did not want to see an Axis victory - and by September 1939 a majority of voters saw that this was best insured against by supplying arms and material to Britain. The German victories of 1940 caused that view to spread. There was public support, too, for the sanctions imposed on Japan which set the course for Pearl Harbor.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 526