William Dennison Stephens (26 December 1859 – 25 April 1944) was the Republican Mayor of Los Angeles from 15 to 26 March 1909 (succeeding Arthur C. Harper and preceding George Alexander), a member of the US House of Representatives (R-CA 7) from 4 March 1911 to 3 March 1913 (succeeding James McLachlan and preceding Denver S. Church) and from CA-10 from 4 March 1913 to 22 July 1916 (preceding Henry S. Benedict), and Governor of California from 15 March 1917 to 8 January 1923 (succeeding Hiram Johnson and preceding Friend Richardson).
Biography[]
William Dennison Stephens was born in Eaton, Ohio in 1859, and he worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a railroad engineer. He then relocated to Los Angeles and worked as a traveling salesman and grocery manager before serving on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce from 1902 to 1911, on the Los Angeles Board of Education from 1906 to 1907, as a bank vice-president, as Mayor of Los Angeles in March 1909, and in the US House of Representatives from 1911 to 1916 as a member of the progressive Bull Moose Party. He identified as a member of the Bull Moose Party until its dissolution in 1916, on which he returned to the Republican Party. He served as Lieutenant Governor of California from 1916 to 1917, when he succeeded Governor Hiram Johnson after Johnson was appointed to the US Senate. Stephens controversially supported the imprisonment of Industrial Workers of the World member Thomas Mooney following the 22 July 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, although President Woodrow Wilson persuaded Stephens to commute Mooney's sentence from death to life imprisonment. On 17 December 1917, Stephens was targeted in an IWW dynamite bombing of the state capitol, and he cracked down on left-wing radicalism with the California Criminal Syndicalism Act. During his second term, he supported veterans' benefits and Prohibition, and he remained highly suspicious of Asian immigration to the United States; he urged the state legislature to restrict Japanese immigration. He defended Johnson's progressive reforms until he left office in 1923, and he returned to Los Angeles to practice law until his death in 1944.