California’s first Commissioner of Corporations, Herschel L. Carnahan, took office in 1914, the same year that the office of the Commissioner of Corporations ceased to exist. This seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that the office abolished that year belonged to a federal, not state, official who headed an agency known as the Bureau of Corporations.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt pressed Congress to enact legislation creating a Bureau of Corporations as a division of the Department of Commerce and Labor. The following year, President Roosevelt described the Bureau’s approach in his fourth annual message to Congress:

The policy of the Bureau is to accomplish the purposes of its creation by co-operation, not antagonism; by making constructive legislation, not destructive prosecution, the immediate object of its inquiries; by conservative investigation of law and fact, and by refusal to issue incomplete and hence necessarily inaccurate reports. Its policy being thus one of open inquiry into, and not attack upon, business, the Bureau has been able to gain not only the confidence, but, better still, the cooperation of men engaged in legitimate business.