Henry G. McBride served as Washington state's fourth governor from 1901 to 1905. First elected lieutenant governor in 1900, he became governor in December 1901 upon the death of Governor John Rogers (1838-1901). Most historians consider his term in office to have been steady and well managed. He is primarily remembered as an advocate of a strong commission to regulate the state's railroads during a time when their owners had considerable control over the legislature, and it cost him the Republican nomination for reelection in 1904. McBride ran for the executive's chair again in 1908 and 1916 but was not successful, making him the first governor in the state to hold the office without ever being elected to the position.
Beginnings
Henry McBride was born February 27, 1856, in Farmington, Utah Territory, the son of George McBride (1826-1858) and Ruth Ann Miller McBride (1834-1910). He had a younger brother, David (1858-1862), and many half-siblings – George fathered three children with another wife prior to his 1855 marriage to Ruth, and after his death in 1858, Ruth married his younger brother, James (1830-1899), and had 11 more children. George's early death at age 31 came in an attack by Bannock and Shoshone warriors while he was engaged in missionary work with the Latter-Day Saints at Fort Limhi, Idaho (then part of Oregon Territory). He became a martyr of the church, but his son Henry did not follow the Mormon way. He instead attended an Episcopalian high school and two Episcopalian colleges, Trinity in Connecticut, followed by Hobart in New York. He intended to further his studies in the ministry and planned to attend an Episcopalian theological school after college, but he contracted malaria and became so ill that he was forced to abandon his studies. In 1880, he moved to California to recuperate.
Fully recovered, McBride moved to Washington Territory in 1882. He taught school in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island and began studying law. He soon realized that La Conner, a bigger town 25 miles away on the mainland, was better suited for his work and moved there. He was admitted to the territorial bar in 1884, and he also married that year, to Alice Marie Garrett (1864-1925) of Coupeville. They would have no children.
By 1884 McBride was active in Republican politics. It was a big year in Skagit County, which had been created by the territorial legislature the preceding November. Though the legislature named La Conner the temporary county seat, it also called for a vote in the 1884 general election to determine a permanent seat. There were several contenders, with Mount Vernon or La Conner considered the most likely to prevail. However, there were accusations of the potential for vote fraud. McBride, who was serving on the county's Republican central committee (which provided campaign support for local Republican candidates), took matters into his own hands when he learned of plans for ineligible voters to cast ballots. He explained what happened to a Seattle Times reporter in a 1936 interview:
"I heard that about a hundred persons in Sedro-Wooley who hadn't been in the district long enough to vote were going to vote anyhow – for Mount Vernon. So I saddled up a horse and rode over on election day and challenged their votes. They didn't vote. But when the polls closed and I went outside to ride home, my horse was gone. His saddle and bridle were on the steps outside the door. There was nothing for me to do but pick them up and walk ten miles to Mount Vernon and get another horse" ("Gov. McBride, at 80 …").
From Prosecuting Attorney to Governor
Mount Vernon won the election, and McBride moved to the new county seat in 1887 and formed a short-lived law partnership with E. M. Carr and Harold Preston of Seattle. He continued to pursue politics and was elected prosecuting attorney for Skagit, Whatcom, and Snohomish counties in 1888. He didn't run for reelection in 1890, but the following year he was appointed judge of the newly created Superior Court of Skagit and Island counties. He enjoyed the work so much that he ran for a full four-year term in 1892. An avid bicyclist, he campaigned by traveling throughout the two counties on a bicycle. His efforts paid off, and he won by a comfortable margin. One fellow judge later recalled that McBride's decisions from the bench were "unusually pungent … 'very blunt and to the point'" ("Ex-Governors …"). However, he lost reelection in 1896, perhaps more from the populist fervor that swept many Republicans from office in that desperate, depression-ridden year than from any issue voters had with his work.
McBride continued his work with the Skagit County Republican machine, and he was named chairman of the county central committee for the party in 1898. Two years later, he became the Republican nominee for governor. Before 1908, there was no primary to choose state and congressional candidates in Washington state. Instead, they were selected at party conventions several months before the general election, following a mostly agreed-upon formula in which the candidate for governor was chosen by delegates from King and Pierce counties (since those two counties had most of the votes in the state), while that for lieutenant governor was chosen by the northwestern counties of Skagit and Whatcom. McBride's work in Skagit County had gained attention across the state, and he had also lobbied hard for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, John M. Frink (1845-1914), a state senator from King County. Even before the Republican convention commenced in Tacoma in mid-August 1900, McBride was a leading contender for the nomination for office of lieutenant governor. He was duly nominated and won the November general election by a comfortable margin.
McBride was sworn in on January 16, 1901, serving under Governor John Rogers, the only Democrat to win statewide office in 1900. Then, as now, the lieutenant governor served as president of the Senate, and McBride worked in the original territorial capitol building, which had been in use since 1856. Located away from the downtown core, the building was woefully inadequate, as described in The Oregonian newspaper in January 1901:
"It is two stories high, and there is not even room enough in it for a single committee of either house to hold its meetings. They are forced to secure quarters down town. The Senate meets in the upper story of the building, and the House downstairs. The roof of the capitol leaks, and the whole building is in very bad repair, being too dilapidated to warrant any money being spent in improving it. In the interim between sessions the capitol is the refuge of bats and tramps. Once a cow was found fast asleep in the House of Representatives" (Brazier, p. 57).
To make matters worse, the structure lacked indoor plumbing, forcing legislators outside to an outbuilding when needed. Because of all these issues, 1901 was the last year the legislature met in the original capitol building. That year its members approved the purchase of the Thurston County courthouse in Olympia (for $350,000) to serve as the new capitol building, though it had to be moved and remodeled, a process that took three years.
As Christmas 1901 approached, Governor Rogers came down with pneumonia. Though he was known to be seriously ill, it was a surprise when his condition suddenly worsened on December 26, and he died at 8 p.m. that evening. McBride was spending the holiday in Mount Vernon, but there was no way to reach him; a windstorm had blown through Western Washington on Christmas night, downing both telegraph and telephone lines. "[He] is in all probability unaware of Gov. Rogers' death," predicted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the next morning ("Henry M'Bride Is Now …"), and the paper was right – McBride had been acting governor for 19 hours before he was able to send a short telegram to the capital responding to the news. He hastened to Olympia, arriving just after noon on December 28, and was sworn in at 1:50 p.m. in the Supreme Court chamber by Chief Justice J. B. Reavis in a ceremony that lasted less than a minute. Afterward, McBride stood while members of the court and other witnesses walked by, some silent, others quietly shaking his hand or murmuring well wishes.
Calm and Businesslike
The new governor was a tall, somewhat large man, bald, with a goatee, which was fashionable among many men of the day. He came across as cool and deliberate. He was what later in the twentieth century would be described as a "Good Republican," faithful to the party and its positions, and he wasted little time in letting it be known that he wanted Rogers's Democratic appointees to state positions gone. He made an exception for the Director of the Board of Control, Ernest Lister (1870-1919), and did not remove him until March 1903. This wasn't a personal favor – there was no love lost between the two men – but McBride nonetheless recognized the up-and-coming (and future governor) Lister's competence in managing the new board, formed five years earlier to manage state institutions such as Western and Eastern State Hospital for the mentally ill, the state penitentiary, the state reform school, and others.
McBride was not so swayed by ideology that he let it interfere with his views of his executive responsibilities. His primary goal was the formation of a railroad commission to regulate rates and curb financial abuses by the state's railroad owners. The idea had been around since Washington had achieved statehood in 1889, but despite repeated efforts, no law had been enacted. By the early 1900s the railroad lobby's influence in state politics was becoming more and more blatant, and many legislators had a price. Though many legislators and legislative candidates by this time were giving lip service to the idea of a railroad commission, McBride surprised his party by how emphatically he advocated for one. He successfully argued for a plank that called for a railroad commission to be included in the Republican platform in the 1902 election, but many assumed he was more talk than action. They were not pleased by his 1903 message to the legislature, in which he argued for a commission in strong terms:
"The question has become one of political honesty. Do platform pledges mean anything? A political party that refuses to live up to its pledges deserves defeat at the hands of the people. An individual who betrays his party is deserving of political oblivion. On the one hand we have the solemn pledges of the two great political parties; on the other an unscrupulous and corrupt lobby – a lobby that has become a stench in the nostrils of the people of the state. Which will have the greater weight? This lobby insolently boasts that a majority of the members of the legislature are its creatures, ready to do its bidding. I repel this infamous charge" ("Gov. M'Bride's Message …").
Despite his entreaties, no bill to create a railroad commission was passed by the 1903 legislature. (The session that year was held in the armory at the Farquhar Building, located at 7th Avenue and Adams Street in Olympia, as a stopgap measure while the new capitol building was being remodeled.) However, McBride didn't limit his focus just to the creation of a railroad commission, and he was no shrinking violet when he dealt with other issues. He aggressively pruned an appropriations bill that had been passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, and though he supported the formation of a tax commission, he vetoed a bill to create one that passed during the session on the grounds that it was too weak. He vetoed a local-option bill that required a majority of voters in any city to sign a petition calling for an election to abolish saloons in their community, arguing that the law was impossible to enforce. He said politics should be kept out of educational institutions, and he refused to fire any of the regents at the University of Washington as was suggested by some Republican leaders. Finally, he angered several anti-newspaper legislators by vetoing a new, punitive libel law that had been passed by the legislature.
McBride went on to a what is generally remembered by historians as a steady, successful term. "He pursued a calm and businesslike course," wrote Edmond Meany in his 1915 book, Governors of Washington. But his support for a railroad commission doomed McBride's candidacy for the Republican nomination in 1904. It was already known that he would not be nominated when the Republicans gathered in Tacoma in May to select the party's slate of state candidates. There wasn't even a plank calling for a railroad commission in the Republican platform that year. This incensed some of the state's rural voters who threatened to vote for Democrats until an acceptable nominee was found in Albert Mead (1861-1913), a congenial Bellingham attorney with a solid reputation.
Mead won the general election in November, and on January 11, 1905, he was sworn in as governor in the newly opened capitol building on Washington Street. Shortly before, McBride delivered his farewell message to the legislature. He said that the state was continuing to reduce its outstanding debt and its finances were sound, argued for continued limited spending, and concluded by congratulating the people of Washington for their "sentiment (that) is now almost unanimous in favor of the passage of a railway commission bill … Their sincerity will be put to the test during this session" ("Parting Message …"). The 1905 legislature did indeed pass a bill creating a railroad commission, though it was generally considered weaker than the more activist commission that McBride had favored.
Afterward
McBride ran again for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1908. The 1907 legislature had passed a new law that created a direct primary election for nominating state and congressional candidates, doing away with the backroom politics of party conventions such as the one which had shut McBride out of the nomination in 1904. The 1908 primary in September was the first test of the new system, but it was more confusing than successful. The law contained a provision that required both a first and second choice be selected on the ballot when four or more candidates were running for a position, and there were eight Republicans competing for governor that year. Many voters were confused and either voted for the same candidate twice, did not vote for a second candidate, or voted for more than two. This caused thousands of votes to be thrown out, and many of them were for McBride; The Seattle Times estimated that he lost at least 8,000 votes across the state, which translated into about 4 percent of the Republican vote. Whether this prevented his nomination seems improbable – he finished third in the primary that year, losing by 10,000 votes to the first-place finisher, Samuel Cosgrove (1847-1909). But it exposed a flaw in the law that was allowed to continue for another decade before the 1919 legislature finally repealed the two-candidate requirement.
McBride moved to Seattle and formed a law firm, McBride, Stratton, and Dalton, but quit after a few years. He formed the Lake Goodwin Shingle Mill Company and managed its affairs for a time, but he remained interested in politics and ran again for the Republican nomination for governor in 1916. The two-candidate requirement to properly complete the ballot was still in effect, and once again there were eight Republican candidates in the primary that year, but this time McBride won the nomination. However, this success did not follow him into the general election against Governor Ernest Lister. Though Lister enjoyed only lukewarm support from his fellow Democrats, McBride's support from his party was similarly tepid. Nevertheless, given the Republicans' hold on state politics in the early twentieth century, it was a mild surprise when Lister prevailed in the November election by a margin of about three-and-a-half percent.
McBride returned to his shingle business, and later served as the president of Seattle's Provident Savings and Loan Association before failing health forced him to retire in the early 1930s. His wife died in 1925, and the following year he moved to the home of E. J. and Olive Bouchard in Juanita (now part of Kirkland). He spent the next 11 years there, taking long strolls with his beloved collies and occasionally granting interviews, and a 1933 interview with The Seattle Times showed that he remained a man of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. He argued that the direct primary "is all that is wrong in politics today. It took away allegiance to party and fear of party punishment. It has resulted in the election of an inferior type of man to public office" ("Ex-Governors …"). And he poo-pooed the ongoing Great Depression, wrongly predicting that it would soon be over and forgotten.
Henry McBride died in his sleep from heart failure on October 7, 1937, at the Bouchard home.
