Simeon Meads (1849-1940): Inventor and Prohibition Candidate for Governor

Simeon Meads and Grave marker

Plot 25, Lot 186

Simeon Pease Meads was born on January 11, 1849, in South Limington, Maine, at a moment when the boundaries between science, moral reform, and public life were far more porous than they would later become. He belonged to a recognizable American type of the late nineteenth century: the earnest educator–inventor who believed that rational instruction and personal virtue could improve not only individual lives, but the republic itself.

Meads made his professional home in California, where he built a long career in public education. By the late 1880s he was teaching at Oakland High School, and in 1891 he rose to the post of vice-principal. His interests extended well beyond classroom management. A practical scientist by temperament, he devised and patented an electric alarm clock designed to ring bells simultaneously throughout a school building—an innovation meant to impose order and efficiency on the daily rhythms of education.

Mead's Autobiography

His intellectual ambitions were equally evident in print. In 1884 he published Chemical Primer: An Elementary Work for Use in High Schools, Academies, and Medical Colleges, a concise and methodical introduction that reflected the period’s confidence in structured scientific learning. He later revised and expanded this work as Elements of Chemistry (1891), and followed it with Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools in 1894. These textbooks placed Meads squarely within a generation of educators who sought to bring modern science into American classrooms at a time when chemistry and physics were still novel subjects for many students.

From 1908 to 1916, Meads served as principal of Cole Grammar School in West Oakland, closing out his formal educational career as an administrator rather than a polemicist. Yet outside the schoolhouse, he was increasingly drawn to moral reform—specifically temperance. Like many educators of his era, Meads believed that alcohol undermined personal discipline, family stability, and civic virtue, and that scientific reasoning supported total abstinence.

That conviction carried him into politics under the banner of the Prohibition Party. In 1902 he was the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor of California, and in 1910 he headed the Prohibition ticket as its candidate for governor. His 1910 campaign included street-corner speeches, church appearances, and factory-gate addresses, reflecting the party’s reliance on moral suasion rather than political machinery. Meads did not come close to victory. The election was dominated by Republican Hiram Johnson, who won decisively amid the progressive wave sweeping California, while Democratic and Socialist candidates divided much of the remaining vote. Meads finished far back in the totals, his support amounting to only a small fraction of the electorate.

Yet his defeat was typical rather than exceptional. Prohibitionists in the early twentieth century rarely won high office, but they exerted an influence disproportionate to their vote totals. By keeping temperance before the public, pressing the issue in churches and schools, and aligning themselves with reformist causes, they helped normalize the idea that alcohol was a social problem requiring legislative solutions. Figures like Meads functioned less as viable governors than as moral advocates, laying groundwork that would eventually culminate in statewide and national prohibition a decade later.

Simeon Pease Meads never achieved political power, but his life traced a coherent arc: science in service of education, education in service of moral reform, and moral reform in service of the state. In that sense, his unsuccessful campaigns were not failures so much as extensions of a lifelong belief that knowledge, discipline, and virtue could—and should—be engineered into the fabric of everyday life.

Sources: Prohibitionists.org, “Simeon P. Meads Bio and Vote Totals”; Chemical Primer (1884); Elements of Chemistry (1891); Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools (1894); Oakland public school records; Los Angeles Herald, Oct. 23, 1910; California Secretary of State election returns (1910).