The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Bernice, a nonobservant Protestant, resisted Pat’s religious proselytizing, but she acceded to the political—in 1938, she, too, became a Democrat. She served briefly as executive vice president of the League of Women Voters, with duties that included monitoring county Board of Supervisors meetings. When Pat picked up legal work representing the union of county employees, he felt that her presence at meetings posed a conflict. She resigned with regret.

  Her focus became her growing household. The Browns’ first child, Barbara, was born in the summer of 1931. Cynthia followed two years later. The family moved several times, living on Fillmore Street, then Chestnut, then Clarendon, where they leased furniture for $20 a month.9 Then Bernice’s mother died, and they moved into the Layne house to help take care of Captain Layne. Pat became a ready audience for his voluble father-in-law’s stories, while the family saved on housing costs.

  On April 7, 1938, the Browns’ son was born. Pat was adamant that they name him Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. Bernice disliked the nickname Ed, so they called him Jerry.

  Ida still lived at 1572 Grove and often babysat her grandchildren. In a safe city and a family that valued independence, the children navigated the streets alone at an early age. By the time she was seven, Barbara walked by herself to catechism class at St. Agnes, then crossed the Panhandle to visit her grandmother. Ida took the children to movies, read them “The Tin Soldier,” and recited poetry by the light of the fire as they huddled in her bed. Her sister Emma came to visit for a month each summer from Colusa, with her granddaughter Pat, whom she was raising. Emma was as much a homebody as Ida was independent. Emma told her granddaughters to be content with what they had; Ida told them to always strive for more. She set the table with white linen and napkins and talked about the Unitarian vision of Jesus as a great man and teacher. She was not argumentative, but strong in her opinions and sure of her judgment in ways that influenced and impressed the young women. She gave them the confidence, her daughter Connie later said, that they could solve their own problems.

  Connie, long the only girl at 1572 Grove, had been thrilled when Bernice joined the family. Now she welcomed her nieces, Barbara and Cynthia, who would remain close to their aunt her entire life. Like her mother and her older brother, Connie was a voracious reader. Back when Pat still lived at home, he had bought small dime books that explained the great philosophers. Connie searched for them in his jacket pockets and read them all. When Pat bought a set of the Harvard Classics, Connie was the one who read them first, cutting the pristine pages. Connie was a strong student who had followed her brothers to Lowell and then enrolled at the University of California, over the protest of her parents. Tuition at Cal was free, and all she had to pay were the costs of commuting. But her family had little understanding of university life and traditional expectations of their only daughter. When her mother was sick the day of a final exam, Connie was expected to stay home. She took the final instead. Only a lengthy illness after her first two years threw her off stride. She dropped out and took a job as a stenographer.

  Although they were a generation younger, Barbara and Cynthia Brown grew up with many of the same limited expectations as their aunt Connie. They would get married, perhaps work as teachers or secretaries, but only until their husbands finished graduate school. Ida, the woman who had left home as a teenager, delivered minimal advice to her children and grandchildren: Work hard. Be a go-getter. She imparted far more by example as a self-reliant woman who had raised children as a de facto single mother. She cherished her independence. She had wanted her daughter to forgo college for secretarial school not because she devalued learning but so that Connie would have a trade to fall back on.

  The boys, of course, were different. Harold had graduated from Lowell, spent two years in college, then gone to law school, apprenticed with his brother, and joined his office. Frank attended the University of California for two years, paying the $26-a-semester student fee and living in a boarding house for $25 a month, which he earned by washing dishes. Then he followed his brothers to law school and worked for them after school, serving and filing papers for $5 a week. They both cosigned his checks, only after he provided a detailed accounting of his work, which he resented. He stopped by the office at lunchtime hoping they would talk to him about law, but they were usually too busy.

  San Francisco did not suffer the same degree of relentless poverty and “Hoovervilles” that plagued the state’s vast agricultural valleys during the Depression, the plight of Dust Bowl migrants popularized by John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. Yet the geography of the city changed during the 1930s, driven by dozens of federally funded New Deal projects. New parks, schools, sculptures, sidewalks, and playgrounds provided short-term employment and long-term recreation and culture. Inside Coit Tower, a signature landmark on Telegraph Hill, artists painted magnificent murals depicting struggling workers, a project financed through the New Deal’s public art program. And in the midst of the Depression, California commenced two colossal public works projects, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. One would serve as a vital link between San Francisco and the East Bay; the other would become a symbol of the city.

  Construction began in 1933 on the bridges needed to provide better access to San Francisco, the tip of the thumb of land that jutted out into the Pacific. Both projects, debated for decades, posed major financial and engineering challenges, requiring cantilever and suspension spans of record lengths, anchored in deep and turbulent waters. President Hoover, a Stanford graduate and engineer, approved a $72 million loan to finance the Bay Bridge, which would largely replace the ferries that shuttled millions of passengers a year between Oakland and San Francisco. When the span opened on November 12, 1936, the trip became a routine drive. The iconic Golden Gate Bridge, which connected the northern tip of the city to Marin County, was financed through the Bank of America and its founder, A. P. Giannini, who had pioneered the concept of branch banks and provided critical support for the agricultural and motion picture industries. When the Golden Gate Bridge opened on May 27, 1937, for “Pedestrian Day,” an estimated eighteen thousand people gathered before dawn, ready to walk across the span in their Sunday best. Among the crowd of more than two hundred thousand that strolled the bridge from sunup to sundown was Pat Brown, holding the hands of his five- and three-year-old daughters, Barbara and Cynthia.

  As the prospect of U.S. involvement in the European war grew more likely, Pat read up on the conflict, filling in gaps in his education from the stack of newspapers and books always piled by his bed. “I do not see how anything10 but a German ‘blitz’ leading to an immediate defeat of England can … prevent us from getting into the war. We are a cinch to send our men and boats over there within the year,” Pat wrote on February 7, 1941, to a friend who had moved to Hawaii. “I am terribly afraid this time that they will not repeat 1917 and that there is nothing that we can do other than to prolong the war.”

  A few weeks later, he wrote again, more pessimistic and uncertain:

  I personally find it difficult to determine which side is right11 or wrong. This is particularly true after finishing The Road to War 1914–1917 by Walter Miller. It is very enlightening and permits you to understand some of the present day propaganda a whole lot more. I do not believe that I am a fifth columnist, but cannot justify some of the British imperialistic policies. I feel that if they would make a grand gesture to give up some of the things that they have acquired by banditry, that it might cause Hitler to call it quits. This may be wishful thinking, but I believe that something revolutionary must be done.

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, overnight the war went from far-off conflict to imminent danger for California, the nearest mainland state. Pat’s close friend Tom Lynch was an assistant U.S. attorney; he drove to the office that morning and didn’t leave for five days. Someone brought in mattresses and they slept on the floor, anticipating an attack. Newspapers fanned fears of the “Yellow Peril” and suggested J
apan might invade California via Mexico. The coast became part of the theater of war, and nighttime blackouts were mandatory. ENEMY PLANES SIGHTED OVER CALIFORNIA COAST screamed a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times on December 9, 1941. Even inland in Colusa, Emma Schuckman’s granddaughters joined volunteers around the state who scanned the skies and reported the shapes of planes overhead.

  Pat was determined to find a way to help his country. Days after Pearl Harbor, he requested an application to be a special agent of the FBI, though at thirty-six he was too old to qualify. “My practice now returns to me a salary larger than I expect to receive from the bureau, but it is my desire to serve12 in some capacity during the period of the emergency,” he wrote. The next day, he asked for an application to be an investigator in the Air Force. He appealed to friends with political connections, only to learn he would have to provide evidence of support for his family before he would even be considered, a decision Pat protested to California’s senator, Sheridan Downey: “I would prefer something wherein I would be making a real contribution13 to government.”

  When the civil service commission told him he lacked the educational credentials to be a war department investigator, Pat shot back: “I sometimes think that the Civil Service Commission does not know that there is a war going on14 because if you did, you certainly would not have rejected the applications without examination of some of the splendid young lawyers with vast investigation experience who have applied for this position.”

  His brothers, with no children to support, joined the Navy. When Harold’s application to serve in the Intelligence Department was rejected because of his German ancestry, Pat was incensed. “You can have no conception of the feeling of alienage15 that has been created by such advice,” Pat wrote U.S. Navy secretary Frank Knox. “If there is any disunity in this country, such silly rules as this are the cause of it.”

  Pat settled for experiencing military life vicariously. Harold wrote home with detailed accounts16 from the Rhode Island barracks where he trained to become a lieutenant. Hanson Baldwin, military affairs reporter for the New York Times, provided a briefing that “gave us the far eastern picture from his personal observation.” Harold’s most interesting course was on how to identify ships and planes in one twenty-fifth of a second; he took tests called “peep show quizzes” in which he looked through a small hole in “a box-like affair much like the machines we used to have in father’s penny arcade.”

  Frank was an ensign training in San Diego, a city rapidly becoming a major military hub. His wife was pregnant. “I know that you probably feel that it is kind of tough17 that you have to be away at the present time but I sincerely envy you and I am looking at all times for something that might permit me to broaden my view by travel or other change in life,” Pat wrote to his younger brother. “I am not dissatisfied but I am not completely satisfied.” By the spring of 1943, Pat’s envy had been tempered by the reality of war. “I felt very sorry18 to see the young lawyer just about to commence his career halted and ordered off to kill whenever necessary,” Pat wrote to Harold after taking his daughter Barbara to watch Frank’s ship set off for parts unknown. “This is particularly true because to him the reason for such conduct on his part is not quite clear to him.”

  Frank Brown was one of more than a million and a half men and women who sailed to the Pacific from San Francisco, the premier military command center and port of embarkation. The influx of people and wartime industry transformed the region and the state, changes that would last long after the war ended. Southern California became the center of Navy and Marine operations and aerospace manufacturing. Northern California attracted thousands to its burgeoning shipbuilding industry. At the height of the war, fourteen shipyards in the Bay Area operated twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, a pace that created opportunities for two groups that had been shut out of such work: blacks and women. Wielding tools and starring in patriotic videos, the women became known as Rosie the Riveters.

  Federal dollars suddenly poured into California. In 1940, total federal spending was $728 million,19 mainly on social services. In 1945 alone, the federal government spent $8.5 billion in the Golden State, almost half the total personal income, which was triple what Californians had earned in 1939. The presence of the military and aerospace industries would drive growth and prosperity for the next two decades. The war years became a dividing line, an era that permanently altered California’s economy, social structure, and urban development.

  For Pat and Bernice and their children, the war years meant frequent air raid sirens and drills, blackout curtains that darkened windows at night, and a victory garden to help with fresh food. Bernice managed the coupon books that rationed food staples as well as gasoline and tires. Barbara wrote her uncles letters on tissue paper and helped collect tinfoil and grease. “I feel that we should live each day to the fullest20 and try to give it all that we have,” Pat wrote to an old friend, predicting difficult times ahead. “I do not feel that we should have any time to waste on hating anybody and this includes the Japs and everyone else. We have to ‘lick’ them and kill them but we must do it like talking sharply to our children.”

  The lack of prejudice instilled in Pat by his mother made him an exception to the prevalent and long-standing racism against the large Japanese community that had settled in California. In the early part of the century, Japanese workers had replaced Chinese in many of the agricultural valleys, and many moved quickly from field hands to growers and businessmen. Like the Chinese, the Japanese became targets of racist, exclusionary policies. The Alien Land Initiative, passed in 1913 and strengthened in 1920, banned Japanese from owning property in California and made leasing land all but impossible. Nonetheless, Japanese came to California in record numbers. Most worked in agriculture. By 1940, more than five thousand Japanese-operated farms21 produced 42 percent of the state’s crops.

  They were people like Yoneo Bepp,22 born in California to Japanese immigrants, the same year as Pat Brown. Bepp had graduated in 1927 from Cal, where he majored in social science and math, played on the 130-pound basketball team, and led the Japanese Students Club. He managed a successful agricultural supply company in San Jose, and Pat was his lawyer. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Northern California Fertilizer Company had just incorporated and was preparing to issue stock.

  On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, mandating the internment of all Japanese Americans in a broad swath of the West Coast defined as a military zone. More than a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry, most of them in California, most of them American citizens, were rounded up and imprisoned.

  Bepp, his wife, Yoshi, their one-year-old daughter, Miyo, and his elderly parents, Kiroku and Sumi, were sent to Los Angeles and temporarily detained in the Santa Anita race track, one of a dozen hastily set up holding facilities, where families lived in converted horse stalls. From there they were sent to Heart Mountain, a Wyoming prison camp that already housed more than ten thousand people. The Bepps were late arrivals, squeezed into a small barracks room. Bepp sounded stoic when he wrote to Pat from block 2-11-E in the fall of 1942. The weather had not yet turned cold, and the dry air was healthful.

  Pat’s response reflected his perennial optimism, coupled with the tenor of the times:

  Whether the reason for the movement23 is for reasons of National Defense or protection of the Japanese people, it will, in the long run, turn out to be better for everybody. As a matter of fact I am quite a fatalist and believe that things always turn out for the best. When the war is over, and I hope it will be soon, your health and that of the family will probably be much better than that of us who remain in the Cities. With food rationing and tire and gasoline rationing, we will be pretty near as restricted in movement as you are. When I think of you up in the Country and the beautiful mountains of Wyoming, I am frankly somewhat envious. I hope that you will have time to do some of the things that you probably wanted to do all your life
and this enforced restriction of movement will give you that opportunity.

  Bepp dashed Pat’s romantic notions. “This place is virtually a ‘concentration’ camp,”24 he wrote, describing the surreal experience of living in a village surrounded by barbed wire and manned watchtowers. “We have no civil rights here and are subject to many restrictions, and our individual status is nothing more than that of a common laborer, all of which contributes to make this existence very miserable.” His family was healthy so far, but medical care was scarce and a measles epidemic had spread. They lived in one of 467 tarpaper barracks, each subdivided into small rooms with a bed, light fixture, and stove for heating. Each block had a communal mess hall and partitioned toilet and shower facilities. “Life as we have lived it and enjoyed in the past was beautiful compared to the circumstances and unnatural surroundings in which we now find ourselves. We try to be philosophic about the whole thing, for after all, this is war, and this is the sacrifice we have been called upon to make.”

  In January 1943, the temperature at Heart Mountain hit 28 below zero. An official with the War Relocation Authority visited the camp and interviewed people who might be placed in jobs; Bepp asked Pat for a letter of recommendation. “I can say without the slightest bit of hesitation that Mr. Bepp is as much of an American as I am,”25 Pat wrote. “He is not only honest but competent and able and to me it is a tragedy that men of his caliber should be immobilized during the war.” By the end of the year, the Navy hired Bepp to teach Japanese to intelligence officers at a school in Colorado. He wrote Pat that he was happy not only to get out of the camp, but to “be able to make my contribution to the war effort.”26