Justice for All (21 page)

By week's end, Olson had confirmed the worst fears of the
Times
and its business allies. During the campaign, Olson had said he would, if elected, consider pardoning Tom Mooney, the long-imprisoned labor activist convicted in the San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing of 1916. On Saturday, January 7, Culbert Olson gave Tom Mooney his chance to go free.

Mooney had been incarcerated at San Quentin ever since his conviction. But after the trial, questions were raised about the evidence against him. Eventually, even the trial judge lost faith in the verdict, and President Woodrow Wilson intervened, concerned that the execution of a man regarded around the world as a labor victim of capitalist brutality would embarrass the United States. Governor William D. Stephens refused to pardon Mooney, but he did agree to commute Mooney's sentence to life in prison.
¹¹
That avoided an international incident but prolonged the issue. The longer Mooney and his codefendant, Warren Billings, sat in prison, the more their case became a divining rod in California politics. Conservatives believed them radicals and rightly placed behind bars. Liberals saw them as wrongly convicted and sentenced by a stiffly right-wing government warped by its pursuit of “reds.” Conservatives drew strength from the
Times
's bombing case, when labor's frame-up cries had proved so humiliatingly false; liberals pored over the Mooney trial record and exposed its many inconsistencies. Undecideds were few, the center invisible for so long that it had effectively ceased to exist.

Warren held few illusions about the Mooney case. He opposed a pardon for a man whom he believed guilty, and Mooney had done nothing to court Warren's favor. It had only been a few months since Mooney had threatened to pull his support from Robert Kenny when Kenny had endorsed Warren for attorney general, a meaningful threat given Mooney's international standing. Still, Warren knew he was unlikely to persuade Olson to keep Mooney in prison—the political gap was too wide. Instead, Warren urged only that Olson refrain from denigrating the police, prosecutors, and judges who had supported the conviction. In an open letter to Olson, Warren wrote,

 

Others were far less temperate. Ben F. Lamborn, the brother of one bombing victim, warned Olson that if he freed Mooney, that act would “form the basis for an impeachment or recall movement.”
¹³

On that Saturday morning, the fifth day of the Olson administration, Mooney was brought to the California legislature's Assembly chamber. He arrived in manacles as the governor addressed a packed audience. Olson asked anyone with objections to his pardon to stand and make his case. Five hundred people sat without moving. None rose. None asked to speak. Olson then noted for the record Warren's wish that law enforcement not be blamed for the conviction. But Olson did just what Warren had urged him not to do. Mooney was convicted, Olson said, by “false testimony.”
¹⁴
That testimony, he added, was “presented by representatives of the State of California.”
¹⁵
Olson asked Mooney to stand, which the graying inmate did, “his features twisting with emotion,” the
Times
recorded.
¹⁶
Olson signed the full and unconditional pardon for Mooney and handed the document to him, instructing the warden “to now release you to the freedom which I expect you to exercise with the high ideals I have tried to indicate.” Mooney took the document and beamed while the audience rose and applauded for a full two minutes until he silenced the room with his hand. Then he spoke:

 

With that, Mooney was free. The pardon was a moment of high triumph for Olson, a symbolic recognition of labor's restoration in California politics, with a new governor at its head. One can imagine the rumblings in American Legion halls and at gatherings of the Masons. For as surely as Olson's gesture was meant to encourage labor, it was just as obviously guaranteed to antagonize labor's opponents—the employers, Republicans, and newspaper bosses who were Warren's core supporters.

In addition to being divisive, the moment was short-lived. Mooney proved a far more effective martyr than spokesman, as the coming months would reveal more of his difficult personality than was apparent during his decades behind bars. His bitter assaults on capitalism, and his contention that Hitler and Mussolini were of the same cloth as American industrialists, would become increasingly hard for moderates to accept as the nation geared for war against fascism. He campaigned for the release of his codefendant, Billings, who could not be pardoned because of a previous offense; that campaign fell short when the State Pardon Advisory Board voted 3-2 against it. The deciding vote was Earl Warren's. With the hyperbole and bombast that would soon wear out his welcome among many Californians, Mooney charged that Warren was a “virtual personification of the rotten, reactionary, corporate-banker-controlled, Republican machine.”
¹⁸
Billings's sentence was then commuted by Governor Olson, and he was freed.

Olson's victory was even briefer. Mooney was freed before noon on Saturday, January 7. For a few hours, Olson relished the acclaim as news of the pardon rocketed around the world. But late that afternoon, the new governor visited the state fairgrounds in Sacramento, where he attended a barbecue with more than 130,000 others. As he took the microphone and began to speak, the governor swayed and stumbled, his speech faltering.
¹⁹
His son, Richard Olson, grabbed the microphone from his stricken, silent father and apologized to the crowd, explaining that the governor “has not had any sleep for 48 hours and hasn't been feeling well all day.”
²⁰
Culbert Olson was helped to a car by friends and from there rushed to a hospital. He spent the next month in bed. Olson then recovered from exhaustion just in time for his wife to die suddenly in April. He was stricken a second time, so devastated that he could not bring himself to continue living at the governor's mansion, where his wife had died. Olson's administration never regained its footing.

Warren did not approve of Olson's decision to pardon Mooney, but he held his tongue publicly. He returned instead to the pardon-sale scandal. On Monday, January 9, with Olson still hospitalized, Warren arrived in his office for a scheduled interview with Megladdery. Megladdery stood him up. Instead of appearing as promised, he sent along a statement to an angry Warren, announcing his refusal to cooperate after a week in which he had “been harassed by unjust accusations and rumors.” Warren brusquely responded that Megladdery's refusal to be interviewed was “not an indication of a free conscience, in my opinion.”
²¹
Warren called on old friends in Alameda, where the presiding judge of the Superior Court refused to let Megladdery hear cases until the accusations against him were resolved. Megladdery was increasingly defensive; now he also was isolated, unemployed, and unprotected by his judgeship—just as Warren wanted him.

Even the Republican press gathered around Warren, notwithstanding the potential implications for ex-governor Merriam. The
Times
, after skeptically reviewing Megladdery's public statements defending himself, found that the allegations added up to “an astonishing mess” and concluded, “About the only bright spot in the whole affair is the determined effort of Atty. Gen. Warren to get to the bottom of it, regardless of politics.”
²²

All that remained was for Warren to administer the coup de grâce. After a bruising grand jury proceeding in which Merriam himself was summoned twice and Megladdery took the Fifth rather than answer questions about his actions, support for him disintegrated. Warren's deputies uncovered bank accounts with far more deposits than Megladdery's salary warranted, and witnesses insisted that money he claimed to have accepted for Merriam's campaign never reached the governor's political offices. On January 23, Merriam dumped Megladdery over the side, conceding that he would not have given him a judgeship “if I knew last month what I know now about him.”
²³
Megladdery resigned from the bench on January 25, having never heard a single case. Clarence Leddy, whose last-minute pardon had caught Warren's eye in the first week of the investigation, was indicted on February 3 for lying to the grand jury about his meetings with Megladdery. Then, on February 11, Megladdery and his law partner were charged with bribery and grand theft. Instead of a judgeship, Megladdery would be convicted and sentenced to San Quentin. Merriam, though not directly implicated in the case, was tarred by it beyond redemption. Though some, including Mooney, would fault Warren for not seeking an indictment against the governor, the damage was done: Merriam never again won elected office.

By the end of February 1939, barely two months into the new terms of office, much of California's established political leadership had collapsed: Olson literally and Merriam figuratively. The state's political landscape now suddenly was far more open than it had been when the year began, as the champions of both poles of California's polarized politics were now vastly reduced in stature. Warren's standing, meanwhile, had only grown. He had moved with smart, nonpartisan professionalism—the hallmarks of his candidacy and now of his record. Warren's future was brighter than ever in the spring of 1939.

His position was strengthened as well by a key addition to his staff. Warren Olney III had been a vital aide to Warren in his Alameda County days, but Warren had reluctantly let him go when Olney's father beseeched the district attorney to persuade his son to return to the family law firm. Olney left, but when his father died two years later, Warren immediately asked Olney to rejoin him, now in the office of the state attorney general. Olney buried his father and returned to Warren the following Monday.
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Many good men and a few women enjoyed Warren's trust over the years, but none ever commanded his respect in quite the same way as Olney, with his apolitical devotion to service and family and his strict, unbending principles. When Olney returned in May 1939, he became chief of Warren's criminal division.

As Warren surveyed his personal options during those months, it was at the outset of a momentous time in California and the world. Nineteen thirty-nine was a signature year, one of those bursts of creativity and passion and violence that occur every few decades, and are dazzling in retrospect. In 1939's twelve months, Hollywood released
Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Wuthering Heights
, and
Dark Victory
. In Europe, James Joyce completed
Finnegans Wake
. In California, Steinbeck published
The Grapes of Wrath
to wide acclaim and furious banishment: Warren's hometown of Bakersfield was one of many in California that barred its children from reading the book.

Steinbeck's fictional account paralleled that same year's publication of Carey McWilliams's
Factories in the Field
, which documented those conditions with precise and moving journalism. The appearance of
Factories in the Field
and
The Grapes of Wrath
in the same year was a coincidence; Steinbeck and McWilliams did not even know each other. But together, their two books supplied much of the public with its first sympathetic looks at California's farmworkers. The farmers who employed those workers were accustomed to power and not to questions, and the books convinced them they needed a champion to argue their case. They turned to Warren.

If the arts were prodigious, politics was perilous and growing more so. On April 1, 1939, Franco completed his rout of Spain's Republican forces and imposed his vengeful dictatorship on that nation's people. FDR opened the New York World's Fair twenty-nine days later, proclaiming that “the eyes of the United States are fixed on the future.” The nation's wagon, he said with a firm voice and confident chuckle, was hitched to “a star of peace.”
²⁵
Even as FDR spoke, Hitler restlessly extended the reach of his Reich, and Japan's generals stirred in anticipation of their own coup.

Warren thus came to prominence on a stage of local and international tumult. His first targets were familiar—corruption and vice would always be reliable foes for him. Gambling was a particular peeve, as he had long before watched railroad men gamble away their salaries and had joined the Progressives in part because they tapped his abhorrence of vice. That mandate was reinforced in 1939 by the persistent hold of the Depression, then in its tenth year and stubbornly oppressing the lives of Californians. Faced with widespread poverty and empowered as California's top law-enforcement official, Warren took aim at those who would take advantage of the poor.