RUEF, ABRAHAM

RUEF, ABRAHAM (1864–1936), U.S. politician. Ruef, who was born in San Francisco, was a precocious student at the University of California, graduating at 18 with high honors and gaining admission to the bar three years later. A brilliant attorney, he first entered city politics as an idealistic young Republican reformer, but he soon lost faith in the possibilities of reform. In 1901, when the Union Labor Party of San Francisco was created, Ruef opportunistically took control of it and secured the election of his friend Eugene E. Schmitz as its candidate for mayor. Four years later, he also secured the election of the entire Union Labor ticket for the board of supervisors, which had authority over both city and county, and thus gained almost complete control of the government. The San Francisco Graft Prosecution revealed that Ruef had received huge attorney's fees from public utility corporations and had bribed most of the supervisors with part of the money. He was convicted of bribery in 1908 and served a sentence in San Quentin penitentiary from 1911 to 1915. Released partly through the efforts of Fremont Older, the newspaper editor who had helped initiate the investigation, Ruef amassed a fortune in real estate; it was swept away in the depression of the 1930s. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Bean, Boss Ruef's San Francisco (1952). (Walton Bean)