for the reform City Charter of 1898 in San Francisco. He served as the first president of the League of California Cities, which was created in 1898. Phelan was elected as a Senator of the United States and served from 1915 to 1921. During this time, Phelan established himself as a leader in what fellow anti-Japanese agitator V. S. McClatchy described as the "holy cause" of Japanese exclusion. He remained active in the anti-Japanese movement after leaving office, securing then-presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson's support for restricting Japanese immigration in 1912 and helping to push through California's discriminatory alien land law in 1913. Phelan was also an advocate for excluding Chinese from the United States. He promoted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and wrote an article "Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded"(1901) in the North American Review, to increase support for the extension of these laws. In a debate with Imperial Chinese Consul Ho Yow, Phelan mentioned that the Chinese were an undesirable population because they had strong ties to their native country and were incapable of assimilating to the American society. This debate occurred just nineteen months after the outbreak of plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. Phelan mentioned that the Chinese had different mindsets and that after twenty years, they remained unchanged in their values. He concluded that American progress would be stunted if the United States continued to allow Chinese immigrants to remain in the country, and that the Chinese workers were taking work away from white workers. Water and land rights In the 1900s, Phelan bought land and water acreage in various places around the San Francisco Bay Area, and he obtained the rights to the water flow of the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley. Ethan A. Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior under President Theodore Roosevelt, tried to stop Phelan, but Roosevelt decided that the wild area could be used for "the permanent material development of the region." Phelan's plans for the region included publicly funded water and electricity for a geographical entity he called "Greater San Francisco." With his Bohemian Club fellows, Phelan sought to annex land at the perimeter of San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Plague In 1900, San Francisco citizens distrusted government for previous waste of taxpayers' money as well as previous refusal to enhance community resources. Government officials refused to invest in public health because health was seen as a personal concern