It was a week of elections in Berkeley a century ago, in 1924, just as it is this week in 2024.
This ad supporting Republican President Calvin Coolidge for president ran in the Berkeley Daily Gazette during November 1924’s election week. Berkeley voters supported Coolidge, who won, by more than two to one. (courtesy of the Berkeley Historical Society & Museum)
On Nov. 1, 1924, Berkeley held a special election on two measures to issue bonds for school construction and renovation. Voting was light — about 40% of the registered electorate — and the bonds won a majority but failed to gain the necessary two-thirds approval to pass. There had been some organized opposition to the bonds, which presumably drove down the “yes” vote.
The Berkeley Daily Gazette provided some interesting details of how elections worked a century ago while relating problems with the voting. Apparently, rules were looser for school bond measures than for other sorts of elections. Some voters objected that the ballots weren’t numbered.
At one precinct voters said they were told they could mark their ballots in pencil, then apparently 18 ballots were thrown out during the counting because they were written in pencil, not ink.
“Lack of sufficient light in many of the election tents” resulted in slow counting of the ballots after dark, and it was after 11 p.m. on election night when the last precincts brought their preliminary results and ballots to a central location, the Board of Education office, which was “crowded with citizens, mostly supporters of the bonds.”
“Here a corps of mathematics teachers compiled the returns. The figures were posted on large blackboards,” the Gazette reported.
Initially, partial returns were accidentally combined with full returns in the tallies, so parts of the calculations had to be done over again and reposted. Three days later — on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 1924 — Berkeley voters again went to the polls for state and national elections.
President Calvin Coolidge won a decisive reelection victory, and Republicans solidified control of Congress. The presidential race had been a three-way contest between Coolidge, Democrat John Davies and the Progressive Party’s Robert La Follette, a senator from Wisconsin.
Semi-official returns from Berkeley, reported the day after the election, gave Coolidge nearly 17,000 votes, Davis nearly 2,000 and La Follette about 6,200. (Keep in mind that though party characteristics were quite different a century ago, Berkeley did overwhelmingly vote for the Republican in 1924, and the Democrat came in a poor third.)
Related Articles
Berkeley, a Look Back: Theater reopening’s 30th anniversary celebrated
Berkeley, a Look Back: World-circling aviators welcomed at Greek Theatre
Berkeley, a Look Back: Residents hope to see large new military dirigible
Berkeley, a Look Back: Library officials in 1924 press for expansion
Berkeley, a Look Back: Idea of subway through Berkeley dates back to 1924
The national presidential electoral map went blood-red from California to New England, with the only exceptions being 136 electoral votes for the Democrat, Davis, in the Solid South, from Texas to Virginia. La Follette won his home state of Wisconsin.
There was an upset of a sort in local Alameda County elections when Oakland’s Albert Carter won a seat in Congress, defeating that city’s mayor, John Davies, who had been an independent candidate for the position.
One of Berkeley’s representatives in the state Assembly, Anna Saylor, won reelection to her seat, with no other candidate on the ballot. Saylor, readers may remember, was one of the first four women elected to the California Legislature after women won the right to vote in the state.
Days after the national election, Henry Cabot Lodge, a prominent Senator from Massachusetts, died. Lodge was probably best known as a historian and the Senate’s leader in opposing the League of Nations.
(An interesting historical footnote. When Lodge died, he was the Senate majority leader. He was replaced by Kansas Sen. Charles Curtis, who as a member of the Kaw Nation was the first person of Native American ancestry to serve in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Curtis would later be elected vice president in 1929, running on the Republican ticket with Herbert Hoover.)
Bay Area native and Berkeley community historian Steven Finacom holds this column’s copyright.