Death of a Gadfly

At first the gruff, bull-like man was one of those pesky gadflies--a minor irritant buzzing around the heads of politicians. They waved him away, slapped at him and tried to ignore his raspy heehawing about big government and confiscatory property taxes. Finally, in 1978, the gadfly took a bludgeon and gave government in California a mighty whack. California is still reeling.

The gadfly was Howard Jarvis; the bludgeon was Proposition 13.

Howard Jarvis, dead at age 83, will be remembered as something of a folk hero, the crusader who launched the tax rebellion of the 1970s, the man who held no public office but turned California’s proud public establishment on its head.

Jarvis was irascible, antagonistic, bombastic, demagogic, profane, uncompromising and persistent. He just would not go away. Try to water down Proposition 13, and he would just promote another initiative. One of those survives him, and is on the November ballot. If, in addition to cutting property taxes, Proposition 13 wreaked havoc in the legislative halls and school-district board rooms, that was not his concern. Fix it if you can, he would say, but don’t fuss with my taxes.

True folk heroes usually have a pleasant or engaging side to them. If there was this aspect to Jarvis, he kept it hidden. His foes claimed that he really was more interested in his own wealth, and in that of his apartment-owning friends, than in the little guy saddled with escalating property taxes and assessments. No matter. Ol’ Howard took a two-by-four to the system and decked it.

Jarvis was not a Sir Galahad, or even a Don Quixote. But by damn, if all the smooth-talking politicians with all their clever assistants wouldn’t put a halt to runaway property taxes, someone would. And by damn, he did.