Justice for All (34 page)

To them, Warren reiterated his commitment to nonpartisanship—“[W]e must cut out all the dry rot of petty politics, partisan jockeying, inaction, dictatorial stubbornness and opportunistic thinking”—and recited the requisite Republican positions: Taxes should be lowered; the state's windfall, $60 million surplus should be managed, not given away; and all programs should yield to the war effort, for which no expense could be spared. Supporters highlighted those passages. The speech passed into history with little note.

But Warren's address was more than that, and its forgotten sections illuminate the man behind it at this seam in his political life, coming to power after digesting Sweigert's memo and internalizing the lessons of the 1942 campaign. In this speech, Warren's first as a statewide chief executive, he affirmed his determination to govern in a new way. He spoke of broad, humane goals and of an active government committed to intervening to achieve them. He spoke in terms undeniably more liberal than his audience. He decried the miserable health conditions faced by arriving migrants. He demanded that schools be protected from cuts. “The permanence of a democracy,” he said, “will . . . depend upon the training and inspiration provided for its youth.” He cited his long experience in law enforcement and noted that it had led him to the conclusion that crime prevention was more important than crime suppression. “I have come to feel with certainty that we have been making a wrong approach to our crime problem,” he said, surprising words from a man whose entire professional life had been dedicated to that problem. He asked that prisoners be given work and encouraged to reenter society. On the divisive issue of care for California's elderly, Warren called for state pensions, as he had during the campaign, to be based not “upon the requirement of pauperism” but rather “as a social right.”

As Warren spoke, the frost was lifting outside over the fields of the abundant Central Valley, and the afternoon sun burnt off a nearly freezing night. The war industries hummed along California's coasts. Young conscripts and volunteers came by the thousands, landing at airfields and military bases, anxious at what lay ahead. They stayed long enough to be outfitted and trained as sailors and soldiers, and while in California, to experience briefly its allure. Many would never return home; of those who survived the conflict even then raging over the horizon, many thousands would come back to the state where they trained. And all around, an ever-widening flood of farmers and shopkeepers, dockworkers, ranch hands, fruit pickers, and fishermen streamed into California from every state in America—a migration of humanity that, as Warren used to reflect, brought 10,000 new residents to his home state every week.

They were of every race and social class. Some came to manage California's industries, bringing with them wealth and sophistication. Many more crossed the state's borders in rags, owning nothing but what they carried, desperate for homes, schools, hospitals, police officers, running water, and sewers. A trickle of blacks entered the state from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, arriving mostly in Los Angeles to take up jobs vacated by its missing Japanese. In months, Los Angeles's Little Tokyo was transformed into a center of African-American life and culture. In that flood of immigrants and the change they wrought, many of Warren's Republican allies saw depravity and dissolution, a threat to their Mediterranean paradise. But Warren's own mother and father were part of an earlier California migration, and as he looked into that mass of humanity streaming across the borders from Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, he saw the realization of the plea etched in the capitol dome beneath which he spoke that Monday afternoon. “Give me men worthy of my mountains,” it enjoined. The arriving migrants were those men—and women and children.

Warren, too, determined to be such a man, to stand not against but rather with those migrants. As he prepared to govern the nation's fastest-growing state, one that had transformed in Warren's own lifetime and that was in the process of transforming yet again, the new governor imagined ribbons of highway connecting factories and fields. He envisioned the state's resources guarded, not for aesthetic appreciation but rather for future use and enjoyment. He planned for safe, humane prisons, and health care that treated the mentally ill instead of incarcerating them. He wanted clean beaches and safe cities. He imagined a fair, decent place for those men and women to raise children in security and comfort. Warren asked members of both parties to join him in constructing that future. “No clique, no faction and no party,” he proclaimed, “holds priority on all the rights of helping the common man.”

Earl Warren spoke most clearly in one sentence: “I visualize adherence,” Warren said, “to a policy in all government activities which reflects a sincere desire to help men, women and children to develop and unfold the best that is within them.” Just as Sweigert had proposed, Earl Warren's government would not merely incarcerate or educate—it would not confine itself to security. It would undertake big projects for little people. It would reach into their lives to help them. Earl Warren's government would not abstain from activism. It would embrace it. Not one member of the majority Republican legislature applauded that line or any other of his speech.
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Warren spoke to silence.

As their sullen response indicated, California's leading Republicans were in no mood to be lectured about activist government by their new leader, triumphant over a Democrat whose support for just such activism had earned their derision. At the
Los Angeles Times,
editors did what they could to mold the public's sense of their candidate into a vision that conformed with their own. Warren's focal sentence—his call to an activist government intervening on behalf of the development of its people—was edited from the transcript of his speech as reprinted in the following morning's
Times
.
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Gone, too, was Warren's endorsement of crime prevention and his call for protection of schools. The edited transcript removed a passage in which Warren called for sympathy for prisoners—“Procedure could be established,” Warren said, “under which these men could be restored to community life and permitted, through rightful living, to earn pardon recognition from the courts in the community in which they have demonstrated a right to such consideration”—and also his commitment to a pension system even while the federal government debated the matter. “We should not permit this thought to delay our own efforts to build and maintain a pension structure within the limits of our ability to pay,” Warren said. The
Times
clipped that as well.

Space undoubtedly dictated many of the cuts—newsprint, always at a premium, was especially scarce in those war years—and some of Warren's language had been offered and reported during the campaign. But the cumulative effect of the
Times
's published transcript was to make Warren appear more conservative than his own words. When some would later complain that he had changed as governor, had abandoned his early friends, they would in part be right; Warren did learn and grow in his ten years and nine months as governor of California. But they also would misunderstand his transformations because their sense of Warren was based on the view of him allowed by his allies in the Republican press.

For now, however, Warren's challenge was to govern. In the months after his election but before his inauguration, Warren began the methodical business of building his staff. Helen MacGregor was one of the first. Warren had appreciated her signature calm and professionalism during his district attorney years and had kept her with him through the attorney generalship. After winning the governor's race, Warren received a letter from a woman seeking a job; MacGregor read it first, as she did most of his mail. The woman, a politically active Republican, asked for a job as his staff secretary and suggested that he should consider her because it was important to have a woman on his senior staff. As she and Warren were driving to Sacramento one day and going over business in the car, MacGregor passed that message along without comment. Warren took it in and said he agreed with the writer. “But I'm not going to appoint her,” he said to MacGregor. “I'm going to appoint you.”
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As he moved to fill his other ranks, Warren shrugged off demands from Republican supporters that they be rewarded for their political loyalty. Sweigert, a Democrat, came with Warren as his executive secretary, and a few other Democrats were selected for top positions. Warren later would insist that he never asked about a job candidate's political makeup, an exaggeration but only a slight one. In fact, a few of the memos composed by Sweigert and MacGregor noted a potential nominee's politics—considering a candidate for the post of director of natural resources, Sweigert described him as “Republican, geologist, sportsman, fine citizen”—but politics never dominated Warren's considerations. Indeed, his refusal to give more weight to political allegiance annoyed many of his Republican backers.

“[A]fter I was elected,” Warren recalled, “many of my supporters said, ‘We have had enough of this nonpartisan foolishness. Now we will get down to business.' ”
⁶

They underestimated Warren's commitment to his word. One of the first to discover that was Murray Chotiner, a lawyer and political operative who had supported Warren but was soon to become chiefly associated with a new star in California's political constellation, the up-and-coming Richard Nixon. After Warren was elected, Chotiner complained on behalf of himself and other Southern California Republicans. “Chotiner,” Sweigert said, “is concerned over failure to give hearing to some who were active in campaign.”
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Sweigert said Chotiner specifically cited Raymond Haight, who had steered Warren's Southern California effort, but also asked for personal consideration. “Murray Chotiner wants some prestige,” Sweigert wrote to Warren, “and expected Professional and Vocational Standards.” So sure was Chotiner of his pending appointment that he pushed Sweigert to act quickly “in order that he may arrange his professional affairs concerning his law practice.” Warren ignored him.

At home, the new governor moved with his family to the ramshackle governor's mansion, and faced a problem his constituents could appreciate: The house was a mess. Warren's predecessors had been older men, none with young children, and had neglected to care for the house. After Olson's wife had died inside, he had abandoned it altogether. Rooms were boarded up inside the stately Victorian. Floors were ridden with termites, drapes with moths. The front steps were worn and dilapidated. The third floor had been shut off entirely, and had become a home to bats. When Nina Warren first laid eyes on the mansion, she burst into tears.
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California's legislature, however, was not prepared to house the state's new governor and his photogenic family in a hovel, so a modest appropriation for renovation was approved, and Warren asked ever-faithful Oscar Jahnsen to supervise the project. For months, laborers crawled over the house, and Nina Warren shuttled back and forth from Oakland, consulting decorators, supervising the work.
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The first floor was public space—greeting and dining areas. The second floor was reserved for bedrooms, while the third, formerly a ballroom, was converted into an office for the governor. It perched more than fifty steps above the ground, with views to Sacramento's intersecting rivers.

Nina worked on a budget, but she was resourceful. A California store, W. & J. Sloane, had a set of oversized Oriental rugs that it could not sell in the middle of the Depression. It offered to donate them to the mansion rather than let them sit out the years in storage. Nina and Oscar Jahnsen picked out four they liked—glowing red for the parlor, blue in the living room, garnet in the music room, and a fourth, its color now forgotten, for the dining room.
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The rugs brought color back to the mansion. To appoint it, Nina picked out department-store imitations of Victorian furniture and inexpensive pieces. When two visitors admired antique portraits of what they assumed to be Warren ancestors in one of the downstairs living areas, Nina laughed and confessed, “I bought them at Gump's last month.”
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Finally, as the school year neared summer break, the renovation was complete. The Warren children finished up their studies in Oakland, then joined their father in Sacramento, seventy miles to the northwest. The Sacramento telephone book listed California's new governor with conspicuous lack of pretense. “Earl Warren, 1526 H Street,” the notation read, alongside the listed phone number, there for anyone to call. And inside the newly refurbished rooms, Earl and Nina Warren set out on the next phase of their family's life.

First was the business of installing the children. Room assignments followed an unmistakable theme: Girls got big ones, boys little ones. Earl Jr. was given a corner, overlooking the carriage house, quiet for the studious young boy to tend to his work; inside, Earl Jr. set his mind on his studies and his passion for taxidermy. Outside, he took over a nearby lot and converted it into a victory garden, to the delight of many Californians and his own oldest brother, Jim, who designed the family Christmas card that year around the theme of the garden. Bobby's quarters were spare as well, built over the covered driveway along the home's western edge. (Although small, Bobby's room later was distinguished by a snarling boar's head, the prize of a hunting trip in 1947 during which he, the youngest member of the party, shot and killed the wild animal and was allowed its head as a trophy.)
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Virginia, by contrast, drew a front room with a fireplace. Dorothy secured a quiet space in the back of the house; it was decorated with busy wallpaper that she never liked and chose instead to cover with Hollywood movie stills and posters. And Honey Bear took the second floor's most opulent room, one with its own shower, quarters that later generations of first ladies would occupy. Her father, ever doting, allowed it with a private chuckle.