The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Each summer, Pat took two weeks off and went with his brother Harold and three friends on a pilgrimage to Yosemite, a place both familiar and wild, a touchstone of the outdoor world he loved. They hiked during the day and danced at night. Pat and Harold scaled summits and posed for photos on high ledges. Pat was thin, 140 pounds on his five-foot-ten-inch frame, and he smoked. On one trip, Pat met Tom Lynch, who would become one of his closest, lifelong friends. Lynch was also San Francisco Irish. Orphaned at a young age, he attended Jesuit schools until he had to drop out and work, then enrolled in night law school. Lynch and Pat bonded over a shared fondness for the Red Nichols and His Five Pennies jazz band and the American Mercury, a review founded by H. L. Mencken. Pat introduced Lynch to his future wife, a sorority girl from Cal who had registered at the Yosemite hotel under an assumed name she took from an old Jeanette MacDonald movie.

  Hiking, camping, and outdoor excursions were essential parts of the California lifestyle from the state’s earliest days. All over the vast state, mountains and valleys were covered with trails, and tens of thousands took advantage of the mild weather to hike during much of the year. In addition to visiting Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada range, the Browns made short jaunts to the nearby Russian River, where groups had gone for vacation and summer encampments since the 1860s, a tradition called the paseár.

  The stunning beauty of Yosemite drew Pat back year after year. From 1864, when President Lincoln made Yosemite the first nationally protected wilderness area, the valley attracted thousands of tourists by train, stagecoach, and horseback. Yosemite was painted, photographed, and written about so much that it became a symbol of California to the rest of the world and a symbol of their identity to Californians—a scene of immense natural beauty, an outdoor playground, and an environmental battlefield. The fights over the destruction and degradation of the pristine wilderness led John Muir to found the Sierra Club in San Francisco in 1892. Charter members included academics and outdoor enthusiasts who became the vanguard of the conservation movement.

  In 1926, twenty-one-year-old Pat Brown (seated in front) and his brother Harold (squatting) climbed Half Dome with three friends on their annual summer vacation in Yosemite. (Courtesy of Karin Surber)

  During the school year, Pat used his free time to court Bernice, who was a student at Cal. On Saturdays, his only day off, Pat dressed in his best suit and told the family he had to see a client. They all knew he was going to see Bern. During the week, Pat collected nickels and called her from the pay phone in the Palace Hotel near the law school. He wrote her letters on any paper handy—a pad swiped from the Hotel Whitcomb or stationery from Yosemite’s Camp Curry cabins.

  Always a strong student, Bernice enjoyed college, particularly language classes. She studied Spanish and French and joined the French club. Her only poor grade was an E in archery. Students were required to go outside to the field when it rained and be marked present, even though class was canceled. She viewed this as a waste of time and refused. Bernice commuted from home to school her first three years and then shared an apartment with a friend who worked part time as a secretary for Senator Hiram Johnson. She finished the necessary credits to graduate in December 1927; just as in grammar school, she was told to stay for another six months because she was only nineteen.

  Bernice’s options after college were limited to the traditional paths for women—teaching, secretarial work, or marriage. She pursued a teaching credential, worked as a substitute teacher during the day, and taught naturalization classes at night. By 1930 she had become a probationary teacher. One of the conditions of her job was that she remain unmarried.

  On the evening of October 30, 1930, a telegram arrived from Reno, Nevada, at the Browns’ house at 1572 Grove Street: “Married this morning at Trinity Cathedral. Now staying at Riverside Hotel.” Pat’s fourteen-year-old brother Frank was awakened by the news, and shrugged. The timing may have been a surprise, but the outcome had long been expected. The elopement was typical of Pat. Like the decision to skip college, eloping was efficient and financially expedient. As it was, Bernice had to buy her own wedding ring. (It would be six years before Pat’s finances allowed him to buy her an engagement ring.) Bernice would later regret the timing of their wedding, because October 30 always fell the week before Election Day.

  Bernice had hoped the marriage would stay secret, but she was front page news in the Examiner and the Chronicle: POLICE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER ELOPES4 WITH ATTORNEY. She lost her job. At first the newlyweds lived in the basement of the Gaylord Hotel; the $45-a-month rent was all they could afford. Bernice was not enamored of the windowless apartment, although the twelve-story Spanish Colonial Revival building, open only two years, was in an up-and-coming neighborhood. The Gaylord had been built5 at the end of a housing boom on the south slope of Nob Hill, an area leveled by the 1906 earthquake. More than three hundred multistory residential buildings were erected in a three-by-five-block area adjacent to the Tenderloin, stucco-and-brick structures with cornices and bay windows, attractive for their design and proximity to the business districts.

  A precocious student, Bernice Layne was only fifteen when she entered the University of California. She graduated in 1928.

  San Francisco had been known since the Gold Rush as a town of hotel dwellers, with accommodations that spanned bare-bones to luxury. Transients needed cheap lodging, while many who could afford fancier homes preferred the convenience of full-service accommodations. The 1929 Blue Book, the social register, listed permanent residents for half the rooms at the elegant Fairmont Hotel. Apartment hotels like the Gaylord were a transitional hybrid during a period when apartment buildings started to edge out residential hotels as multifamily housing.

  On the second Saturday in January 1931, Pat sat on their new sofa in the basement apartment late at night. The radio played music. He had given up trying to read his book, Mixed Marriages. Several drinks of moonshine emboldened Pat to write down his thoughts.6 He wanted to preserve the moment. He was feeling overwhelmed. He had been married for just two and a half months, and he had learned he was going to be a father.

  I have a peculiar, lackadaisical somewhat remote feeling. Difficult to understand, more difficult to write. I just feel the urge to jot it down … I feel that genius lurks somewhere in my system. I am not thinking. I am writing just as the thought enters my head. The liquor (if it can be dignified by calling it liquor) has permeated my system until my surroundings seem strange, unreal and not true.

  I meditate. I am a young lawyer, recently married. I doubt my own ability but will to push it forward with bromides I read.

  It is an interesting evening—a Saturday night which used to be depressing unless I did something. Now I am married. In a short three months I am faced with the knowledge that I have obeyed the dictates of the mother church not by choice but by ignorance and will soon have a child. Life—how peculiar. Here it is continuing—soon—very soon I will pass on—then this unborn child will pass on.

  The law—how hard to eke out an existence. My pals—my classmates—what are they doing—night law school. Will I lack the knowledge that follows a college education. Ignorant parents—unable to give us the luxuries … Terrific ambition … opportunities that seem to fall or rise. Where will I be 25 years from now? What difference does it make? Questions—questions. They seem to have no answer but let’s hope to hell and give all that has been given to us.

  What does it matter but it does—life is short—live with your power—you soon will die and any plaudits that might follow you will know little about.

  Edmund Gerald Brown. Nearly 26—Jan. 10, 1931

  4

  The Roosevelt Democrat

  Pat Brown set out to build his law practice in the Depression, but at least his small office had a prestigious address. The thirty-one-story Russ Building was the tallest building west of Chicago, a title it would keep for several decades. Opened in 1927, the neo-Gothic complex took up a block of Montgomery Street between Bush and Pine and
housed a branch library, a department store, and the first indoor parking garage in San Francisco.

  Pat was renting room 1241 when another young lawyer moved in down the hall. Mathew Tobriner had so little furniture in his tiny office at 1224 that clients sat on boxes. Tobriner had graduated from Lowell High School a few years ahead of Pat, and they overlapped in the Debating Society. Like Pat’s ancestors, Tobriner’s grandparents had emigrated from Germany and settled in California shortly after the Gold Rush. Tobriner also was interested in public policy and politics. And, like Pat, he was a Republican.

  The similarities pretty much ended there. Their differences, though, drew them into a close friendship. Tobriner had grown up1 in an intellectual Jewish household. His father, a doctor, built one of the first residences in San Francisco after the earthquake. Listening to his grandfather talk about the Talmud, Tobriner had become interested in labor issues—though he didn’t know any working-class people or union members. He entered Stanford at sixteen and began to write for labor newspapers on issues like compulsory arbitration. Active in the English club, along with John Steinbeck, Tobriner graduated magna cum laude in three years. He delivered the Phi Beta Kappa graduation speech, in which the nineteen-year-old critiqued Stanford for not providing real-world experience and community interaction, recommendations met with silence and then rebuke.

  Three years at Harvard Law School solidified Tobriner’s conviction that labor unions were essential to equalize opportunities for workers. He didn’t know any labor lawyers, or whether such a specialty existed, but returned to California to find out. In 1933, he started his own practice on the twelfth floor of the Russ Building, where he and Pat Brown, who knew a great deal about working people, had long conversations about how to change the world.

  Both had grown up in Republican families, imbued with a sense that Democrats were not respectable. They were also not in power. The Depression changed both the reputation and the reality. Pat listened to President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and discussed them with Tobriner. They watched the Socialist and prominent novelist Upton Sinclair run for governor as a Democrat in 1934 on the platform of End Poverty in California (EPIC), promising guaranteed work and pay for all. Sinclair lost, his populist campaign defeated in large measure through the work of the original political consultants, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who combed through everything Sinclair had written, pulled incendiary quotes from fictional characters, and fed them to the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper ran a daily front page box that attributed the quotes to the candidate. Whitaker and Baxter would go on to national prominence, popularizing the tactics and dirty tricks they had pioneered in California.

  Despite his admiration for Roosevelt, Pat viewed the idea of changing parties as a leap akin to changing religions. He had campaigned for Republican Herbert Hoover, the orphan who graduated from Stanford and became the first president born west of the Mississippi. Pat’s father had been friends with San Francisco’s Republican boss, Tom Finn, since they were classmates in grammar school. But when Tobriner began to consider changing parties, his persuasive arguments influenced his friend. Tobriner delighted in recalling2 their final conversation on the subject, which took place over adjoining urinals in 1936. Tobriner told Pat he was heading to the registrar’s office to become a Democrat and vote for Roosevelt; Pat, typically impulsive, said he would go along and switch, too. Notwithstanding the impetuous decision, he fundamentally embraced the Democrats’ vision of a government that helped people, a concept that would be central to the rest of his career.

  In California, Democrats had for many years offered largely token opposition, and Republicans had controlled state government in Sacramento since 1898. In part, this was a function of migration; many new arrivals came from Republican-leaning states. The constant influx of newcomers and transients offered little opportunity to build loyalty to a political machine and made East Coast–style ward politics impractical. California’s unusual system of allowing candidates to run simultaneously in Democratic and Republican primaries, without indication of party affiliation, also undercut attempts to develop party loyalty. Often an incumbent lawmaker won both Democratic and Republican primaries and ran unopposed in the general election.

  The cross-filing system had been the idea of Governor Hiram Johnson, though it was neither his most significant nor his longest-lasting political initiative. Johnson had been elected in 1910 on the strength of his promise to take on the so-called third party in California, the Southern Pacific Railroad. He promised to act to dilute the railroad’s power, and the changes that ensued during the Progressive Era had a profound impact on California. Direct democracy enabled voters to make laws, repeal laws, or amend the constitution at the ballot box. Citizens could place initiatives and referenda on the ballot by collecting petitions with a requisite number of voters’ signatures. Propositions that passed could be changed only by another popular vote. Californians could ever after bypass the legislature and governor to enact laws that affected everything from taxation to immigration. And they did. Used sparingly at first, the initiative and referendum measures grew to become a common way of budgeting as well as legislating social policy.

  Pat Brown would soon witness that firsthand, but in his early days in politics, the impact of cross-filing was a more immediate concern. His initial foray into electoral politics had shown Pat the difficulty of challenging an entrenched incumbent. To groom candidates and build a base outside the party structure, Pat and a few friends formed a group called the New Order of Cincinnatus. Modeled after a nonpartisan group in Seattle, Cincinnatus took aim at government corruption and championed politicians who worked for the public good rather than their own private benefit. Members had to be under forty. Most were under thirty-five. They were a mix of Republicans and Democrats, many recruited by Pat through two other groups he had founded for young professionals, the Barristers Club and the Contact Club.

  Each Cincinnatus member signed a pledge not to dispense favors to fellow members of the organization nor to request special treatment from friends who might end up in office. Honesty and idealism were the watchwords, and their attacks on the well-known graft in city government soon attracted attention. Cincinnatus nominated four candidates for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1935 election. Members chipped in to rent a small headquarters office. One member with journalism experience put together a newspaper that they published a week before the election. Cincinnatus members gathered at the Ferry Building, parceled out bundles of papers, and streamed into the streets handing them to streetcar commuters. “Our New San Francisco Requires New Methods and New Men,” was the Cincinnatus motto. One of the four candidates won.

  Pat juggled his political ambitions with his law practice, making a living during the Depression mainly with bill collection work.3 Small businesses like J. J. Dinneen Groceries and Progress Fruit Market gave him names, addresses, and amounts owed by customers—as much as a few hundred dollars, as little as three dollars. Pat’s commission was 40 percent. Through a friend of Bernice, Pat picked up a big client, a lumber company that placed liens on construction materials. The uncertainty of the Depression left many projects in limbo, and the lumber company would have a claim to the unfinished construction. Pat also handled bankruptcy cases, along with a scattering of probates and divorces.

  He ended 1938 with $120 in the bank, net income for the year4 of $4,932.67, and the prospect of a state job that would bring political cachet as well as financial security. He was confident that Culbert Olson, the first Democrat elected governor in more than forty years, would recognize Pat for the campaign work he had done with his friend down the hall, Mat Tobriner. Tobriner had written much of the candidate’s platform. Pat helped raise money and headed the Northern California speakers bureau, which arranged for surrogates to address various groups. The two lawyers roomed together5 at the state party convention in Sacramento—Tobriner holed up in the hotel room writing while Pat worked the convention floor. At the end of the wee
kend, none of the delegates knew Mat Tobriner. Everyone knew Pat Brown.

  Both men were disappointed when the Olson administration declined to reward their efforts. Pat asked for an appointment to a municipal court. He inquired, several times, about a vacancy on the State Board of Prison Directors. He tried for a week to arrange a meeting but couldn’t get past Olson’s secretary. “I have been using all of the pressure that I can think of6 to bring my abilities to the attention of the Governor, but whether it will suffice or not, I do not know,” Pat wrote to friends in July 1939. With no appointment forthcoming, he asked for legal work on bank liquidations. “I cannot understand why my name7 should be cast aside without any consideration unless someone has told you that I was not one of your supporters during the past campaign,” he wrote Olson, recalling how he had raised money and organized speeches. Though he felt he had been treated “shabbily … I was, and am now, and have been since January of 1938, an Olson man.”

  Privately, Pat blamed his treatment on anti-Catholic bias. Pat had had little to do with the Church for years, but that changed in 1939. A friend he had met during the Olson campaign invited Pat to a weekend retreat at El Retiro, a Jesuit center in Los Altos, just south of San Francisco. The experience had a profound and unexpected impact.

  During the retreat, Pat wandered the acres of winding paths in the hills that overlooked the Santa Clara Valley, the rich farmland and apricot groves known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From Thursday night until Monday morning, he followed the strict schedule: early morning prayers, breakfast, spiritual exercise, five lectures a day about different aspects of faith. He walked the Stations of the Cross and maintained the vow of silence, except for thirty minutes during dinner. The retreat was led by Father Harold Ring, who presented a vision of Catholicism starkly different from what Pat had been exposed to as a child. Rather than hell and brimstone, Ring emphasized an intellectual vision of Catholicism based on love of God, not fear. Pat found himself intensely interested and surprisingly moved. Back home, he read books on Catholic philosophy, The Preface to Morals by Walter Lippmann and The Spirit of Catholicism by the German theologian Karl Adam. Then he went to confession at St. Ignatius Church, for the first time in twenty years. Pat embraced Christianity anew, and he determined to raise and educate his children as practicing Catholics. He asked Bernice to marry him in the church. They obtained a dispensation for the mixed marriage and exchanged vows on May 27,8 1940, at St. Agnes, the Jesuit church where Pat had been baptized. Three days later, he returned to El Retiro for the second of what would become annual retreats.