William M. Malone

William M. Malone (1900–1981) chaired the California Democratic Party during and after World War II. He was the most powerful Democratic Party leader of San Francisco (and, arguably, of California) during the later Roosevelt and Truman Administrations.

An attorney with only a small personal injury law practice he shared with Raymond L. Sullivan, Malone was akin to a political "boss" whose influence extended throughout the state. He controlled most of the federal patronage appointments in the state until his friend President Harry Truman left office in 1953.

The son of Irish immigrants, Malone began his political career by allegiance to political "boss" Thomas Finn. A veteran California politician who was Under-Sheriff and then Sheriff of San Francisco from the time of the 1906 earthquake through the later years of Prohibition, Finn was the Republican political boss who had supplanted the Buckley and Ruef machines that dominated San Francisco municipal government after the turn of the century. Still in power in 1930, Finn was also the early political mentor of Arthur Samish, later the notorious liquor lobbyist whose enormous influence in the California Legislature of the 1940s led to a national political scandal.

Malone's rise to power as the Democratic counterpoint to Finn is still undocumented, but by 1940, he had consolidated his hold on the San Francisco Democratic Party organization, in partnership with labor leader John F. Shelley (later Congressman and Mayor of San Francisco), and was recognized by the Democratic National Committee in New Deal Washington as arbiter of the "Federal Brigade", those California Democratic stalwarts appointed to political patronage positions in a vast number of federal agencies.

Though colleagues believed his personal philosophy to be considerably more conservative than that of most liberal New Dealers, Malone rarely spoke about "issues". His interest was in dispensing patronage and winning elections to gain and maintain power and his campaign expertise was highly regarded by such liberal candidates as Helen Gahagan Douglas, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in 1950 who was defeated with "red-baiting" tactics by Richard Nixon.

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