Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,035

This is the grave of Culbert Olson.

Born in 1876 in Fillmore, Utah, Olson grew up in the Mormon elite. His parents were active Mormons. But that does not inherently mean some right wing figure and never really did until the 1980s or so. His mother was a major suffragist and the first woman to hold public office in Utah. Meanwhile, at the age of 10 or 11, Olson convinced himself that the entire idea of God was completely ridiculous and he never moved away from atheism his whole life. Let’s think about this for a second, since from the picture, you obviously see he became governor of California. How far would an open atheist who was more than happy to talk about how the idea of God was super dumb get in politics in 2025? Not far.

Olson ended up going to college at BYU, graduating young, in 1895. He took a job as a journalist on a local paper, became a big William Jennings Bryan supporter for president the next year, and then started a law degree at the University of Michigan. He did that for awhile but never finished, moving onto Washington D.C. There, he got a job with a newspaper or two and then became the secretary for Congress. He eventually did get that law degree, but it was at George Washington. He passed the bar back in Utah in 1901. This was a young, ambitious man who wanted some adventures and to be involved in politics.

Olson stuck it out in Utah for awhile. He became a lawyer for social justice and often defended union members and free speech activists against the corporate thugs and their bought political and judicial hacks who would do anything to suppress them. He eventually decided to run for the state senate in 1916. Winning, he worked to end child labor in Utah. He was an early advocate of old age pensions. He also pushed for legislation to expand government regulation over a number of issues. Those Utah mines could lead to some fairly radical people, Mormon or not.

But Olson also decided he wanted to live outside of Utah. He chose Los Angeles, a conservative town if there ever was one. But it was certainly a rising city and there were lots of opportunities for a still young town. So he went west and started a new law practice. He became known for his very public investigations of corporate fraud that got him in the media a lot. He also became a known figure in liberal politics in southern California. He was an open supporter of Robert LaFollette’s Progressive Party in 1924. Then, with the Great Depression destroying so much of American life, he was a major New Dealer and worked to support Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932.

1934 promised to be another wave election for Democrats, the third in a row. So Olson decided he would take another shot at electoral politics himself. This was the wild year of California politics when Upton Sinclair ran for governor and the entire conservative establishment in the state organized itself like never before to stop such a horror from taking over their state. After all, we wouldn’t want someone who took poverty seriously and wanted hold corporate scumbags to account. Well, Sinclair would not win, but many of his supporters would and that included Olson, who won a seat to the state senate.

Olson, always good at playing the media, soon became a leader of Roosevelt Democrats in Sacramento. It’s always worth noting that for all FDR was popular nationally, within the Democratic Party, while people were happy to win on the national level, state leaders were often horrified by much of the New Deal. This had led in 1938 to Roosevelt attempting to intervene in state and congressional elections to kick out anti-New Dealers and replace them with real liberals. Mostly it didn’t work, but Olson became the candidate for governor of California.

Olson was able to win because the employers’ candidate to defeat Sinclair in 1934 was Frank Merriam, a stone right winger. He had used forces of the state to suppress the longshoremen’s strike in 1934 that the federal government eventually intervened in and was a major event in the creation of the National Labor Relations Act. So the California working class really really hated Merriam. Olson kicked his ass.

The first thing Olson did as governor was refuse to say “so help me God” when taking the oath of office in 1939. Unfortunately, he was developing a bad heart, which he discovered on the fourth day of holding the office. He collapsed and doctors discovered the problem. But they were able to manage it and Olson would live a good long while. It was a contentious four years. Olson may have won, but right-wing Democrats and Republicans united to stop most liberal legislation from passing, the same dynamic that was not stopping any New Deal legislation from passing at the national level. Olson tried to get a state health insurance passed but the legislature voted it down. It also stripped his budget drastically. Meanwhile, he got focused on taking on the Catholic Church’s role in education in the still quite Catholic city of San Francisco.

Olson unfortunately was not great on Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor. While he was not frothing at the mouth to evict the Japanese, he did come around to supporting the project and then overtly calling for the complete elimination of the Japanese from the west coast. This is sad and also a sign of both how a generally good person could have horrible positions on race and how even among liberals, the vision of what it meant to be an American was more or less defined by “white,” whatever that means at a given time.

Olson did not win reelection in 1942. His increasingly fiery language about the Japanese certainly didn’t hurt him, but Republicans got smart and ran a centrist by the name of Earl Warren against him. Claiming that he could unite the state in ways that neither Merriam nor Olson ever did, Warren attracted a lot of voters tired of the state’s more extreme figures. Olson blamed Catholics for his defeat.

Largely, Olson spent the rest of his life working his law practice and being involved in atheist circles. He died in 1962, at the age of 85.

Culbert Olson is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit other governors of the late 30s, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Teller Ammons is in Denver and E.D. Rivers is in Lakeland, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.