Former president of the First National Bank, Rudolph Spreckels is best known for his role in helping bring criminal charges against San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz and political boss Abraham Ruef for corruption. Son of sugar titan Claus Spreckels.
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Rudolph was born on January 1, 1872 in San Francisco, California, United States, the son of Claus Spreckels and Anna Christina Mangel, both of whom had emigrated from Germany. His father had become the principal sugar refiner on the West Coast, and in 1889 had built a new plant in Philadelphia in order to fight the American Sugar Refining Company, or "Sugar Trust. "

Rudolph suffered severely from asthma as a boy, and his formal education, limited to the public schools of San Francisco and some private tutoring, was often interrupted by this illness.

At the age of seventeen Rudolph Spreckels went to work in his father's new refinery, where he observed the trust's tactics of industrial sabotage and espionage against would-be competitors, and learned to combat these tactics without resorting to them. He learned, in the later words of Lincoln Steffens, "the principles of business and--the lack of them. " At twenty-two Spreckels forced the trust to buy the Philadelphia plant on his terms and to agree to stay out of the western part of the country.

A year earlier he had become president of the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company, owner of the great Spreckelsville plantation that his father had developed on the central plains of Maui. The plantation had not been prospering, but, in cooperation with his brother Claus Augustus ("Gus") Spreckels, he succeeded in putting it on a paying basis. When a family feud erupted in which the father and his older sons, John and Adolph, tried to drive the younger sons from control of the Hawaiian properties, Rudolph and Gus emerged victorious, but they then determined to sell the plantation to interests outside the family, at a large profit.

In 1898 Rudolph thus achieved his ambition of becoming a multimillionaire.

Ultimately he received his father's forgiveness and even became the executor of his estate. Spreckels then organized the First National Bank of San Francisco and the First Federal Trust Company. In 1900 he gained control of the San Francisco Gas Company, reorganized it, and eliminated many corrupt practices from its management.

He had been repelled by corruption in business long before he became particularly concerned about it in politics, but in 1906 he became completely disgusted by a corrupt alliance between politics and big business that had taken hold of San Francisco. The political boss, Abraham Ruef, opportunistic and cynical captor of the so-called Union Labor Party, was receiving huge payments from public utility and other corporations under the guise of attorney's fees.

Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, had begun a crusade against the city machine, and Older and Spreckels became the original organizers of the San Francisco Graft Prosecution of 1906-1909. Older secretly persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to lend the services of Francis J. Heney, then a special federal prosecutor of timber frauds in Oregon, and of William J. Burns, the chief detective in the Secret Service of the Treasury Department.

Spreckels provided a quarter of a million dollars of his own money to pay the expenses of a San Francisco investigation and prosecution. Lincoln Steffens, author of The Shame of the Cities (1904), took part in the planning and strategy, and impressed Spreckels and Heney with his thesis that the wealthy captains of industry who paid bribes were guiltier and more dangerous than the politicians. Thus the prosecution granted immunity to the Union Labor members of the city-and-county board of supervisors to testify against those who had bribed them.

Several leading executives of the street railway, gas, and telephone companies were indicted for bribery; but in the end only Boss Ruef went to prison. Most businessmen turned against the prosecution, and many tried to brand Spreckels as a traitor to his class.

His campaigns for reform were often influenced in part by his feelings of personal hostility toward other leading men of business, and by his reluctance to lose a fight. He saved his mansion in Hillsborough by selling it to his wife, who was wealthy in her own right.

After her death in 1949, he moved to a small apartment in San Mateo, California, where he died.

Although a progressive Republican and an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, he supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912, but was said to have declined Wilson's offer of the ambassadorship to Germany in 1913, an action consistent with his repeated refusals to run for any public office.

Quotations:

"Several financiers jumped out of their windows when they found themselves bankrupt, " he told a reporter in 1958, "but I never lost a night's sleep over it. "

"Perhaps I wanted to assert my independence of my father, " he once recalled. "He always treated us in something of an authoritarian Prussian manner. "