Biography

Hiram Johnson was born on September 2, 1866 in Sacramento, California, USA. He was married to Minnie L. McNeal. He died on August 6, 1945 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Republican U.S. senator from California (16 March 1917 - 6 August 1945). Postponed being sworn in for his first term (which should have begun 4 March 1917), continuing to serve as governor of California. Died in office.

Governor of California (3 January 03, 1911 - Mar 15, 1917). Resigned from office and was sworn in as a U.S. senator from California 16 March 1917.

U.S. vice presidential nominee in 1912 on the Progressive ticket with Theodore Roosevelt.

Candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 and 1924. Declined GOP nominee Warren G. Harding's request to be his running mate on the 1920 Republican ticket, saying he would not let himself be chosen "for a hitching post." If Johnson had accepted he, not Calvin Coolidge, would have become president when Harding died in August 1923.

[on his 1924 presidential campaign, 1923] We will be buffeted by politicians and press alike, our motives will be misconstrued, our actions will be distorted, our words will be misrepresented, but we will be men; and if in the end defeat comes, we can accept it with equanimity and philosophy, say good-by forever to our ambitions and live our lives in the consciousness that we fought a good fight, our fight, as we saw the light.

[on his journalistic enemy Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, 1910] In the city from which I have come [San Francisco] we have drunk to the very dregs the cup of infamy. We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. We have had men who sold their birthright, we have dipped into every infamy. Even form of wickedness has been ours in the past; every debased passion and every sin has flourished. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco, nor did we ever have, as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent - that is Harrison Gray Otis.