The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Environmental concerns that would later become key to water wars were not yet paramount. The project was not subject to any environmental review. The importance of the wild rivers as spawning grounds and the protection of fish stock got scant attention. To win support from the small cadre of conservationists, a proposed peripheral canal was added to the project to channel water around the Delta to protect fish.

  The campaign for the bond issue stressed the economic ties between the state’s regions, which depended on one another to buy and sell goods and services. Backing up the idea of a “public good” with more pragmatic benefits, supporters estimated the construction phase would be worth more than half a billion dollars to the economy of each major region—north, south, and central. “Water or no water17—that is the question,” Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson repeated in speech after speech. The Republican mayor became key to the campaign. With six million people in his county, he said, “this will be won or lost in Los Angeles County.”

  An uneasy alliance prevailed between the bond act’s two biggest beneficiaries, Southern California, served primarily by the giant Metropolitan Water District, and the agricultural interests of the Central Valley. Each suspected the other would try to shirk their share of costs, and each tried to lock in as much water as possible. Mayor Poulson threatened to replace his appointees on the Met board if they did not support the project. Days before the election, the board signed a contract to pay upfront for water not expected to flow until 1972. Those payments would be essential to pay back bonds that financed the construction. “Water delivery to Southern California is the cash register,”18 Pat said.

  The building trade unions supported the bond issue because it would mean jobs, an estimated 12 percent of all money spent on construction in the next decade. But the California Federation of Labor was opposed, painting the project as a bonanza for agribusiness at a time the labor movement was trying to organize farmworkers. The San Francisco Chronicle was the most vocal opponent. Stories proclaimed desalination would be commonplace and affordable long before the mammoth water works were complete. Proponents dismissed that as fantasy. Pat chided all sides, reminding them of the need for water to fulfill the state’s destiny. “We must put an end to endless argument19 in which each speaks only his own self-interest,” he told a business group. “There is a need to recognize the larger interest that benefits and brings together all of our state.”

  On November 8, 1960, the water bond passed by only 173,944 votes out of more than 5.8 million. Pat was relieved, but he wrote friends that he still was baffled that so many people voted no. Earl Warren was one of the first to send congratulations on “a great step20 forward. As time passes and our State continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, I become more firmly convinced than ever that it can outgrow most of its growing pains without permanent injury if it first solves its basic water problems.”

  “It was a tough, hard and frustrating fight,”21 Pat responded. “You won some tough ones when you were Governor, and can realize how much I enjoyed this one.”

  The Central Valley Project had been a mammoth endeavor; the 600-foot-tall Shasta Dam had a spillway three times the height of Niagara Falls. The State Water Project would dwarf its federal counterpart in complexity. To oversee the project and its myriad hurdles once the water bond passed, Pat turned to William Warne, whom he called the best administrator he knew in state government.

  Warne had no formal training in engineering, but his life had been shaped since childhood by the water woes of California. His family had moved to California from rural Indiana when Bill was eight because his father accepted a job on the irrigation project that brought Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley. Warne grew up on a 160-acre dairy farm, attended a two-room school, and did homework by coal lamp because electricity didn’t come to the valley until he was in college. He followed his three older brothers to Cal, where he majored in English even though he was expected to return to the family farm. Warne went into journalism instead. He developed expertise in writing about water. In Washington as a regional correspondent in 1933, he wrote mainly about water projects. He asked so many questions at Interior Department Secretary Harold Ickes’s weekly press conferences that Ickes offered him a job. Warne worked for the Bureau of Reclamation and became an expert on irrigation.

  Warne met Pat when he came through Washington for meetings as attorney general, and they stayed in touch. When Pat was elected governor, he appointed Warne to head the Department of Fish and Game and consulted him frequently about water matters. Warne organized a pack trip the first summer to take reporters to see the golden trout program near Mount Whitney, the highest peak in California, where the state captured and transplanted stock to safe areas. Pat went along. They rode horseback over trails into the wilderness and got lost, but there was a pitcher of martinis waiting when they finally reached the camp. They caught golden trout with barbless hooks and put them in ten-gallon milk cans to transport them to new waters. The pack trips became an annual tradition, and Pat went on every one except the year he had a broken ankle. He loved the trips and talked about them for months. At night they played poker, and before breakfast Pat plunged into the icy waters of the nearest lake.

  Warne was one of the few to call attention to the impact of the water projects on the fish he was charged with protecting. He had sounded an alarm when the flow of water from the federal Friant Dam was reduced, threatening to devastate the salmon fisheries and a catch worth more than $1 million a year. As soon as the bond issue passed, he wrote memos22 about the need to protect wildlife during construction and find ways to compensate for the loss of spawning grounds.

  When he became head of the Department of Water Resources in 1961, Warne took on a project that, like so much in California, was characterized by superlatives: The largest dam in the world. The biggest water and power development in the country. “The greatest mass movement of water ever conceived by man is charted to become a reality in California’s State Water Project,” Warne said in advertisements circulated around the world to entice civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers. The project included 16 dams, 444 miles of aqueduct, and multiple power plants and pumping plants. By 1965, the construction costs were $1 million a day. “California must always in the future be willing, as no one else is willing, to sustain growth and development,”23 Warne said in a speech he called “California Comes of Age.”

  One of the greatest engineering challenges was how to pump water up 3,415 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains, which formed the northern border of Los Angeles County. There was no model or precedent. Admiral Hyman Rickover, in charge of developing nuclear propulsion for the Navy, proposed a demonstration nuclear power plant that the federal government would help finance. California signed a contract with the Atomic Energy Commission to construct and operate a breeder reactor, but at the last minute the deal fell through. Federal officials said the cladding on the fuel rods was not strong enough to prevent radiation from polluting the cooling waters. Warne and his team went back to more conventional solutions, ultimately putting in place a system that lifted 4,100 cubic feet of water a second the last two thousand feet over the Tehachapis.

  The second significant collaboration with the federal government went more smoothly. One of the final pieces of the federal water project was to be the San Luis Reservoir, created by a massive dam on the San Joaquin River. In order to save costs and avoid duplication, the State Water Plan assumed the state and federal governments would jointly build and use the dam. The Interior Department set a deadline of December 30, 1961, to reach an agreement, or the Bureau of Reclamation would proceed alone and not include capacity needed for the state project. At the very last minute, they made a deal. The state would have the right to use its share of the water without restrictions imposed by the 160-acre federal limit—an agreement made possible because Pat Brown and Abbott Goldberg had successfully argued the Ivanhoe case up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Four pipes emanate from o
ne of the five pumping plants that lift water more than 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi mountains that separate northern and southern California. (Courtesy of California Department of Water Resources)

  The groundbreaking for the San Luis Dam took place on August 18, 1962. President John F. Kennedy’s helicopter landed in a cloud of dust near a platform erected in the middle of a grassy slope facing the saddle that would become the dam. Kennedy arrived from Yosemite,24 where he had been the first president to visit the park since Theodore Roosevelt. He talked about the importance of people from the East Coast, who have water everywhere, seeing firsthand what water means in the West. He described what he saw out the window on his flight from Yosemite, “the greenest and most richest earth producing the greatest and richest crops in the country, and that a mile away see the same earth and see it brown and dusty and useless, all because there is water in one place and there isn’t in another.”

  The joint project, he said, was a model of how Americans could work together:

  There is no other project in the history of the United States where a state has put in such a large contribution to the development of its own resources, and where the national government has joined with the state … the benefits that will come from it are unique and special. All those years when people in this state said it was impossible, and those who had water wanted to hug it and not make it available to all those who lived in dry areas. Many state administrations in California, including some of the most distinguished, wrestled with this problem, but I believe that all Californians will remember the leadership which your distinguished governor has given to this great cause of making water available to the people of this state.

  Engineers had planted multicolored smoke bombs across the center of the dam-to-be, marking the diameter of the large span. Bill Warne would look back a decade later25 and remember the next moments as the most memorable of his career, when the president turned to the governor and said, “It is a pleasure for me to come out here and help blow up this valley, in the cause of progress. We are able to do anything on this occasion.”

  Amid laughter and applause, on the count of three, the men simultaneously lowered the handles of two plungers, and colored fireworks raced across the valley.

  10

  The Turbulent Term

  In the spring of 1961, Pat Brown cut short his Easter vacation and left Acapulco on a two A.M. flight to return home for the Sierra Club’s seventh biennial wilderness conference. He arrived in San Francisco in time to board an Army helicopter to tour the Point Reyes seashore with the newly appointed interior secretary, Stewart Udall, who was working to preserve the area as a national park. From the air, Pat pointed out Muir Woods, Rattlesnake Camp, Big Lagoon—places he had hiked in his youth. He proudly said he had slept on the beach, only to be told the state had since outlawed the practice.

  “In California, as elsewhere, the face of the wilderness is less and less apparent, and the struggle to retain it grows more difficult,” Pat said that evening in an address to conservationists.1 He reminisced about spending summers as a student hiking in Yosemite. “The effect that it had upon me lives with me every day.”

  Udall followed Pat to the podium at the Palace Hotel and read a letter he had recently been handed by the writer Wallace Stegner. “It was so powerful and so eloquent and so poetic a statement concerning wilderness that I thought, when I attempted later to write a text of my own, that it would be foolish not to read it,” Udall said. Stegner, who lived in Los Altos, a few miles from the Jesuit center where Pat had gone on retreats, had penned a plea to preserve wilderness areas not only for recreation but as spiritual sanctuaries, essential ties to the frontier history of the West. Stegner would later marvel that a letter written in half a day spread around the world faster than novels he had worked on for years. The final four words that Udall read were the ones that resonated so strongly: Stegner called the prairies, deserts, mountains, and forests an essential part of “the geography of hope.”2

  Stegner and Pat crossed paths only a few times; in 1958, the Stanford professor helped draft a campaign speech, and four years later, Stegner would sign on to a Professors for Brown committee. Their disparate worlds overlapped in a shared reverence for the Western landscape and the fear that it might disappear. “The most beautiful place3 in the entire world is a little High Sierra camp near Glen Aulin,” Pat wrote when asked to name his favorite spot in California. “It lies at the base of a waterfall on the Tuolumne River. In early summer when the water is rushing down, it is one of the most remarkable works of nature that I have ever seen. It is quiet, except for the roar of the river and the beautiful aspens, ferns and pines.” Always an optimist, Pat Brown instinctively embraced the geography of hope.

  Ansel Adams, whose images of Yosemite had etched the valley in the national imagination, spoke to the Sierra Club conference about the historic arc of wilderness in California. For August Schuckman’s generation, wilderness had been an environment to overcome, tame, and exploit. Once conquered, wilderness had become over time a source of recreation and inspiration. “We painfully realize4 there is not much wilderness in this category left to us and to the future,” Adams said. “The next few years are to tell a tragic or a wonderful story.”

  Adams’s warning presaged the tensions that would frame Pat’s second term. For months, he had anticipated the moment California would pass New York to become the most populous state. An electronic counter5 installed on a billboard near the Bay Bridge tracked the numbers: one more Californian every 54 seconds. By the end of 1962, the counter hit the magic number: 17,341,416. Pat proclaimed New Year’s Eve the start of a four-day “California First Days” celebration.

  Stegner watched the governor chortle with delight at reaching the long-awaited milestone. Long before Pat recognized that bigger might not always be better, Stegner foresaw how the magnificent present would beget a complicated future:

  More spectacularly endowed6 than any other of the 50 states, culmination of the American movement westward, neighbor to Asia, raw, young, powerful, yet with oases of extraordinary sophistication and a smattering of every cultivated grace, California is a place where you can find whatever you came looking for, and right next to it that which you most hoped to avoid.

  In the mid-1960s, California became the world’s fifth-largest economy, a state of more than 18 million. Every day for a decade, planners calculated, a thousand people had moved to California, and another thousand babies had been born. The new arrivals gravitated to the cities, and each year, two hundred square miles of rural land turned into housing, shops, and urban landscape. California built the equivalent of a city a week,7 erected a thousand traffic lights a month. Smog worsened, and even the Bay Area suffered days when the air burned the eyes. Public transit in Los Angeles was all but nonexistent, isolating people too poor to own cars. At Yosemite, the old Camp Curry apple orchard had been turned into an asphalt parking lot, as many as five thousand visitors crowded into one square mile on summer days, and the bumper-to-bumper traffic prompted calls to end the famous Firefall. “It stood to lose what it most loved8 and treasured—its magnificent landscape and brilliant climate, its easy, spacious, lavish way of living, its cosmopolitan cities—the whole proud young California civilization,” Ansel Adams wrote.

  The growth strained municipal budgets. Officials estimated every new arrival cost California $13,000 the first year in capital outlays—and paid no taxes until the following year. The legislature rebuffed Pat’s proposals to institute tax withholding to help balance the state budget. Roy Bell, assistant director of finance, had started in the Warren administration, when his main job in the postwar years was finding “little pockets”9 in which to squirrel away surplus money. By the early 1960s, all the pockets were empty. The legislature approved only temporary one-year taxes, while the gap between revenues and expenditures grew. The state compensated in part by its resourcefulness at obtaining federal funds. California became a popular testing ground for programs such as m
igrant education and Kennedy’s “New Frontier” poverty initiatives. Often out front and always outsized, California in turn influenced how regulations were written and programs administered.

  “California plans big10 because it has no choice,” Stegner wrote. “And just as certain California acts such as the compulsory smog-control device on automobiles have set examples taken up by the whole nation, so some of the state’s preparations for further growth offer models of how far a single commonwealth can go to solve its problems.”

  That tradition of independent self-reliance had built unprecedented waterworks, colleges, and freeways, a record that had propelled Pat Brown to his come-from-behind victory over Richard Nixon. He celebrated the start of his second term with a lavish inaugural celebration, undeterred by the looming financial problems. The Sacramento Bee described the 1963 inaugural festivities as “more glitter and glamour11 than Sacramento has seen in many a day … one of the most outstanding social events ever held in the city.” Dean Martin sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Gene Kelly danced a soft shoe routine. Frank Sinatra’s medley included a special request from seventeen-year-old Kathy Brown, “All the Way.” Steve Allen joked, with more prescience than anyone realized, “If Dick Nixon had won, you’d be sitting here listening to Roy Rogers and Ronald Reagan.” Ida Brown partied until three A.M. “I didn’t dance,”12 she told a reporter a few days later. “After all—I am 85—but I so enjoyed meeting the people there.”