Justice for All (41 page)

In Sacramento, Warren returned to office with barely an interruption. His command of California was confirmed by his reelection, and he now enjoyed surveying his domain from a favorite perk of office. Warren converted a National Guard C-47 plane into one at the service of the governor. He nicknamed it “Grizzly Bear” and loved riding in it up and down his far-flung state, typically logging seven or eight trips a month and eventually amassing more than 250,000 miles in it.
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Warren's second inaugural address, delivered on January 6, 1947, continued along the lines Warren had established in his first term. With the war now over, Warren redoubled his denunciation of partisanship—“There has been little blind partisanship or personal controversy to hinder our attention to the job to be done,” he said—insisted that the state pay for programs as it went, argued for extension of the 1943 tax cuts, and called for expansion of programs and institutions that served the state's growing population. Warren never raised his voice, never harangued or pleaded, but his enthusiasm for the task of leading permeated his address.

“Our task will not be easy,” he said. But he added, “It can be thrilling.”
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Addressing the state's principal problems, Warren identified two, both associated with its rapid growth. Housing was needed to accommodate returning veterans and new immigrants, and Warren was unwilling to wait for the private sector to adjust to the need. Housing materials were available as a result of the federal government's closing of bases and the like, and Warren proposed that the state take over that material and put it to use. “It is the obligation of State Government to assist in every way to make this material easily and promptly available to veterans who desire to purchase it,” he said. Similarly, Warren urged legislators to take advantage of a building boom in order to “make it possible to eliminate the blighted areas of our cities.” Here again, the pattern of previous political advocacy held: Warren used veterans to justify a program, then found ways to extend it to others, largely the poor and middle class. Turning then to another area of concern, Warren added, “Comparable only to the distress resulting from the housing shortage is the tragic situation in which we find ourselves as the result of an outgrown highway system. Our streets and roads have become places of frightful danger, and our economic development is being retarded.”
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The governor did not tell legislators that afternoon what he intended to do about the state's “frightful” highway problem but did announce that he was calling the legislature into special session to address the issue. In California, the special session was—and still is—a device used by governors to focus the legislature on a particular topic and to allow bills enacted at such sessions to take effect more quickly than under normal circumstances. By calling the session on highways, as he had on health insurance in 1944, Warren elevated the issue to the top of the state's political agenda and created a path for quick action.

The following Monday, he made clear what it was precisely that he had in mind: an increase in the gas tax to pay for road and highway construction. Californians in those days paid 3 cents a gallon of state taxes on gasoline, and Warren proposed to double it to 6 cents. That was a significant tax, but one with the potential for real return. Russell H. Conwell, in his “Acres of Diamonds” speech that made such an impression on young Earl Warren, had advised that “he who can give to this city better streets . . . he will be great anywhere.”
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Warren believed that all his life, and his gasoline tax was meant to fulfill it. Under Warren's proposal, the money from the tax would fund highway construction across the state, construction he argued was needed to make roads safer but also to uncork California's economy, which depended in large measure on swift transport of goods across large distances only barely touched by railroads. The state's leading oil executives were flabbergasted. Many had contributed to Warren's campaigns in 1946. And now he proposed to tax them.

As did the medical association, the oil companies fought back. And like the medical association, they did not always fight cleanly. Led by the Western Oil and Gas Association, which represented nearly all of California's oil producers, the oil interests mailed postcards to California car owners, asking such leading questions as “Do you want your taxes raised?” When owners replied that they did not, the cards flooded the legislature.
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While the legislature debated Warren's tax increase, the oil companies raised gas prices, first in August 1946 and again in January 1947. Furious at the increases and still angry at his treatment by the medical association, Warren wheeled on these new right-wing adversaries with the full legal and political force of his office. He denounced the companies and their executives, publicly asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate the antitrust implications of the gas price hikes, and consented to a rare deal in order to win passage of his measure.

The Justice Department's announcement that it would open an antitrust case rattled the oil companies; in Warren's dry retelling, “the cohesion of the opposition disintegrated.”
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In the state Assembly, however, the oil companies pressed on, and seemed to have victory in hand, though by the barest of margins. Warren, unwilling to lose two battles in two terms, stumped hard for the tax and lashed back at the oil companies: “While the slick lobbyists of the oil companies are overwhelming the capital with false propaganda and presumably are sobbing for the motorist, who is being asked to pay only his fair share for decent highways which will protect the lives of our people, the oil companies have connived to siphon off the loose change of the people before the Legislature arrives at a conclusion.”
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This was unusually prickly coming from Warren, but the governor had been checkmated in the health insurance debate by one group of conservative opponents and their lobbyists; he was in no mood to lose again. That is also evidenced by his rare departure from his self-imposed ban against horse trading for votes. The Assembly was closely divided over the measure, and Warren's aides told him it might come down to a single vote. One Los Angeles assemblyman, they added, might be willing to deal his vote in exchange for Warren's willingness to sign a piece of legislation close to his heart, a bill requiring that any pet food containing horse meat be labeled as to whether its contents had been inspected. Warren looked at the bill, saw no reason to object, and agreed. With that, the assemblyman joined the gas-tax ranks, and dog food sold in California thereafter was labeled “inspected” or “un- inspected.”
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“This was the only time I ever made a trade with a legislator for his vote,” Warren wrote later, “but it was for an important one.”
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Warren had his victory, and with it, California had its highways.

Warren and the oil companies parted as enemies in that debate, and one in particular would come back to haunt the governor. William Keck, head of the Superior Oil Company, had angrily fought the bill, and the oil industry had threatened to pull the companies out of California if the tax passed. Warren called the bluff, and won.
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Keck, whose wealth and family foundation would make him a significant force in California social history, went away mad, but his pique must rank among the most shortsighted in the history of special interest complaints. The tax that Warren succeeded in passing over Keck's objections helped to pay for paving thousands of miles of California highways. Cars multiplied and took to those roads. By the mid-1950s, California's image was inextricable from that of the automobile. Those cars ran on the gasoline that Keck and his company sold, and they piled up miles on highways that Keck had fought against.

Beyond the gas tax, Warren pressed the balance of a social agenda whose liberal tilt was becoming undeniable. In 1947, he submitted the first single-year budget in California history, the state having outgrown its practice of budgeting in two-year cycles. “We are dealing with a bigger and more diversified postwar California, with expansion in almost every field,” he announced. Given that, Warren found almost every one of the state's problems worthy of more government spending. He proposed the construction of two new mental health clinics; improvements in medical, surgical, and hospital care; a new school for juvenile delinquents and a medium-security prison for adults; more money for crime prevention, for education, and for a vast expansion of the state's social welfare system, whose spending Warren boosted from $6.7 million a year to $61 million a year, mostly in grants to counties for taking care of the problems of California's poor and indigent. As before, he proposed those expansions not only without new sales or income taxes (he was supporting the gas tax hike, but only for the specific purpose of road and highway construction), but actually with the continuation and extension of his 1943 cuts. Warren's budget, like those before, survived the legislative process largely intact. As much as conservatives might find to dislike in him, they also found him persistently difficult to beat.
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Over time, Warren's spending bore witness to his ideology—not once as governor would he substantially curtail any program that benefited poor or working people; not once but twice did he seek tax increases in the face of determined special interest opposition. Moreover, his commitment to social justice found purchase in a much smaller but telling act, only barely noticed at the time or remembered later. It was executed with Warren's signature professionalism and calm. The results, not the rhetoric, testified to its importance.

In 1945, five Mexican-American fathers, fed up with the segregation of their children into so-called Mexican schools in Southern California, filed a lawsuit, led by Gonzalo Mendez, challenging the existence of that separate school system. The Orange County school district defendants argued that the separation was based on language, not race, but the reality of their schools belied that. Language testing was rudimentary, and assignment to the schools was based not on one's command of English but rather on one's appearance and last name. Students assigned to a Mexican school were not permitted to leave it once they mastered English; they remained there until graduation. The result was unambiguous racial discrimination. In the small town of Westminster, for instance, two elementary schools educated local children. One, Westminster School, enrolled 628 Anglo children and 14 Latino children. The other, Hoover School, had 152 students, all of them of Mexican descent .
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In another district, two schools shared the same property, their entrances just 120 yards apart. One had 83 “English-speaking” students and 25 “Spanish-speaking” students; the other had 249 “Spanish-speaking” children and not a single white .
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The United States Supreme Court still sanctioned “separate but equal” education in those years, so the federal judge who heard the Mendez lawsuit, Paul J. McCormick, could easily have dismissed it. Instead, he ruled on behalf of the Mexican-American families that the districts were deliberately discriminating on racial grounds and denying those families the equal protection of the law. His ruling amazed and angered the school districts, whose lawyer then appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal was taken up in 1946, and then Attorney General Robert Kenny, serving out the end of his term after having lost to Warren in the governor's race, entered an amicus brief for the State of California on behalf of the families. There is no evidence that Warren himself participated in the filing of that brief, but he soon made his views clear on the subject of segregated education. While the appeals court upheld McCormick's ruling, it did not embrace some of his reasoning, finding on narrower grounds. The Ninth Circuit ruling could have ended the matter; had it, the Orange County schools would have been desegregated but California's education code would have remained burdened by two racist artifacts of the Progressive era. Those code sections, while not authorizing discrimination against Mexican-Americans, did allow for the segregation of Indian children and those of “Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage.”
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In June 1947, those sections were struck from the code upon the signature of California's governor, Earl Warren. For those who would later express surprise at Warren's position in
Brown v. Board of Education,
the
Mendez
case should have offered a clue. But, like much of Warren's building legacy in those years, it was accomplished with little fanfare. By the end of 1947, racial segregation in California schools was illegal; by the end of 1954, it would be for the nation as well. The same man was responsible for both.

 

 

AS GOVERNOR, Warren was surrounded by aides and acquaintances, many of them eager to presume friendship. In fact, he befriended few. He was guarded and cautious, and not many men, and even fewer women, crossed the threshold from cheerful acquaintance to trusted friend. His top staff, including MacGregor and Sweigert, were devoted but subordinate, trusted aides but not exactly friends. Bill Knowland was a political friend and a good one, but he was in Washington, placed there by Warren.

And yet a few did penetrate Warren's reserve. Warren Olney never was far away for long. And during the years that Warren served in Sacramento, he met three men who would find their way through into the closest circle of his friendship. Bart Cavanaugh, the city manager for Sacramento, shared a love of sports and children with Warren. The two started by taking in local games together—their boys attended high school together, and Warren and Cavanaugh liked to sneak over to the stadium to catch their football games. In time, they settled into the robust life of fans, traveling to San Francisco or Los Angeles and taking in a weekend full of sports. Warren usually would root for the local team—he enjoyed his partisanship on the field if not in the office—and during baseball games, he would keep a meticulous scorecard.
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One exception to Warren's local centrism was the Yankees, for whom he rooted faithfully. Even there, the reason was based in California: The Yankees' great star Joe DiMaggio came from San Francisco. Warren, later to become a habitué of Toots Shor's in New York, came to know DiMaggio on and off the field, even attending the funeral of DiMaggio's mother with Cavanaugh. For their trips to games, Cavanaugh made arrangements, taking care to line up with the rest of the fans and to buy their tickets so as not to be accused of accepting freebies. Their devotion to sports established their bond, which deepened over their children. Each suffered the illnesses of their youngsters, and confided his pain in the other. Their friendship stretched across decades and led, in later years, to an annual pilgrimage; the World Series has known few more devoted fans than Earl Warren and Bart Cavanaugh.