effectively returned the state Republican Party to a more conservative bent. With Stephens out of the 1922 general election, Richardson faced Democrat Thomas L. Woolwine, the popular District Attorney of Los Angeles County. Amongst Richardson's supporters in the election were the Ku Klux Klan, (although the California state Republican committee chairman A. E. Boynton repudiated these claims) which deeply opposed Woolwine's Catholicism, as well as being an organization that was rumored to count Richardson as a member. His campaign manager in the election, California State Assemblyman Frank Merriam, would himself become governor in 1934. In the end, Richardson triumphed in the election, defeating Woolwine by nearly 24 percent of the vote. Governorship Richardson began his governorship on January 9, 1923, promising a no-frills administration to deeply cut governmental expenditures. Despite his past affiliation with the Progressive Party, Richardson blamed both the party and its Progressive movement with excess in his inaugural speech, replacing the Southern Pacific Railroad political machine with a Progressive machine. "In 1911 the people did a good job of political house cleaning," Richardson spoke, alluding the Hiram Johnson and his Progressive majority in the Legislature. "During the past few years another great political machine has come into power which has cost the people millions of dollars. It will be necessary to first wreck this political machine before the state can be put on an economical basis and the government again handed back to the people." Richardson embarked on a program to eliminate "unnecessary boards and officers, by consolidation, and by doing away with overlapping functions," calling it a massive waste of taxpayers’ money. In the preface to his proposed 1923 budget to the Legislature, Richardson declared his opposition to pork barrel politics and that "[m]y chief burden has been to relieve the people of their great burden of taxation." In his various modifications to the state bureaucracy, Richardson appointed various individuals that were favorable to corporate interests. An electoral backlash against his deep-rooted fiscal conservatism came during the 1924 legislative elections, when resurgent Progressives regained control of the California State Legislature, beginning a legislative bulwark against more proposed cuts to the state government and increased corporate influence. A proposal by Richardson to close two state universities, believing that education had become too costly for state coffers, was successfully defeated by the Progressives. Meanwhile, Richardson blocked the Progressives' passage of a bill in the Legislature to create a