business-political leadership. He also helped the mayors of other cities in California and Oregon to create jobs for the homeless, instead of sending them from city to city as was a common practice at the time. As mayor, Lane was an enthusiastic host for a national convention in support of women's suffrage in 1905, and he was thereafter recognized as a friend of the movement for equality between the sexes. He took a further step for the advance of women's rights when he swore in Lola Baldwin to the Portland Police Bureau as one of the first female police officers in the United States on April 1, 1908. While mayor, at the end of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, he advocated for a "permanent rose carnival", leading him to be called the "Father of the Portland Rose Festival", which continues today. Lane was an advocate of direct democracy and led an unsuccessful voter referendum to establish municipal ownership of the Portland electric system. A flurry of measures were taken before the voters — 32 proposals in 1909 alone. Among his successes at the polls in these direct votes, Lane was instrumental in winning approval of a new mandate that future utility franchises granted by the city should be subject to popular vote rather than back-room dealmaking between interested parties and elected politicians. Throughout his life Lane was committed to exposing and correcting the wrongs suffered by Native Americans at the hands of European immigrants to America. At a 1905 unveiling of a statue of Sacajawea Mayor Lane declared that violence between native and white populations had always been the result of "white people ill-treating the Indians who had befriended them." Member of the U.S. Senate The 1912 Oregon ballot for United States Senate was cluttered. In addition to the Democrat Harry Lane and Ben Selling, a candidate of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, progressive Republicans had other electoral alternatives, including the Progressive Party candidate and the incumbent senator Jonathan Bourne Jr., who had failed to win the renomination of the Republican party and ran as the "Popular Government" nominee as a result. Meanwhile, Benjamin Ramp stood for the Socialists and yet another candidate was the nominee of the Prohibition Party. Astoundingly, each of these six candidates took more than 5% of the vote — a fact which enabled the Democrat Lane to win election with a plurality