The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  After the president of Santa Clara University impersonated the pope in order to get Jerry to take his call, the governor agreed to deliver the commencement address at the school he had attended two decades earlier. Ben Swig, the wealthy San Francisco real estate developer and financial backer of both Browns, was on the university board. He knew Pat would want to hear his son’s address and sent a helicopter to the Bohemian Grove encampment on the Russian River, where Pat was spending the weekend, to fly him to San Jose.

  Jerry was displeased to find his father seated on the dais. Conforming to his reputation for brevity, he drew a cheer in the eight-minute address when he explained why he avoided public speeches: “If there is any vice that I see more than any other in public affairs, it is the surplus of rhetoric,52 meaningless generalizations, and an abuse of the English language.” He exhorted the students not to look for government help in solving their problems but “to depend on your own energy and your own creative potential.” He declined to wear academic robes, and as soon as he finished speaking, he changed from his dark suit to frayed blue jeans and a denim shirt for a flight to Northern California, where he made an unannounced visit to a Maidu Indian ceremonial ground where tribes held their annual bear dance.

  Pat and Jerry differed sharply in their views about the limit of government to help people, but they shared certain values. As Pat had proselytized the importance of personal responsibility in his booklet “Youth, Don’t Be a Chump,” Jerry infused his decision making with a sense of individual responsibility. He opposed a bill that would have required motorcycle riders to wear helmets, saying the state should not be in loco parentis. People should face the consequences of their actions. He agonized over whether to sign a bill that would shield parents from liability if underage drinkers left a house party and drove drunk; at the last minute, he signed it.

  Asked to name his objectives after six months, he said, “Reduce the sum of human misery53 a bit, I guess. Help people expand their lives a little bit, give them an awareness of their own potential.”

  Not all that different from his father’s goal—to think of the poorest soul and help them exit from purgatory.

  “Jerry is more private,54 a more private person, but I think he’s just as compassionate as Pat, and I think he has the same commitment,” Bernice said. “I think this is what Jerry gets from him—commitment to public service, and I think that’s why he got into politics.” Though she had been bewildered and upset by Jerry’s years in the seminary, she credited the Jesuits with making her son a scholar and instilling values that became his yardstick for life. Jerry had never been particularly sensitive, Bernice said, but he showed flashes of thoughtfulness. He gave gifts only when he found something meaningful, not to conform with a set holiday like Christmas. When he did give presents, they showed a great deal of care. When the old photo of his father and sisters walking the Golden Gate Bridge on opening day began to fade, Jerry commissioned an oil painting to preserve the image.

  He exhibited similar traits in his correspondence. Jerry put little in writing but took pains with the few epistles he penned. He wrote thoughtful condolence notes. Occasionally, a letter caught his attention. In September 1976, Mrs. H. M. Cullers sent the governor a photo of the second Mountain House, rebuilt by Frank Schuckman in 1907.

  The land was still owned by Pat, his brother Harold, and two partners they had recruited to buy the Colusa property in 1962. They leased the fields to local farmers who grew barley and alfalfa and used the land to graze cattle. The property netted about $6,000 a year in income. A few barns and outbuildings remained, but the Mountain House had burned down in 1971, after years of sitting empty and abandoned, a graffiti-ridden hideout for local children.

  Mrs. Cullers remembered the old inn well. She had grown up in nearby Hough Springs at the turn of the century and often ridden the stagecoach that stopped at the Mountain House. In December 1912, she married a man who hauled Bartlett Spring water to Williams via the Mountain House. “Hope you build a house55 up in that country,” she wrote to the governor.

  “I want to thank you for your nice letter,” Jerry wrote back. “No definite plans have been made, but I have thought about the idea of starting a family farm56 near Williams. Sixty-four years is a long time to be married. I hope you and your husband will have a very happy anniversary celebration in December. Warmest regards.”

  14

  Jerry and Cesar

  In a three-evening interview with Playboy magazine that ended around two A.M. in the governor’s office, Jerry Brown was asked to name people who have power. His first response was Cesar Chavez.

  “A person in a significant position of power1 can lead by the questions he raises and the example he sets,” Jerry said during the conversation early in his second year as governor. “A lot of political energy comes from a certain vision, a faith that communicates itself to other people. People who stand for an idea that has energy connected with it, that’s power.”

  Cesar Chavez had launched a crusade that led 17 million Americans to boycott grapes so that California farmworkers might earn decent wages. He leveraged the boycott to force the state’s most powerful industry to sign labor contracts with its poorest workers. Along his bumpy, historic path to win dignity and respect for the predominantly Mexican American farmworkers, Chavez had even extracted a rare campaign promise from candidate Jerry Brown.

  One man had grown up in migrant labor camps and dropped out of school after eighth grade to work in the fields, the other had an elite education and often spouted Latin. Yet the two had more in common than their interest in power. Both had carved paths outside establishments they treated with disdain. Both sought to subvert the status quo. Both were spiritual Catholics, uninterested in material goods, steeped in a tradition of asceticism. Both preached the need to reduce consumption and valued individual sacrifice for a common good. Neither had much interest or patience for the mundane. Each an oddly charismatic leader in a nontraditional mold, they were drawn to each other by mutual need that evolved into admiration and even trust. They forged a partnership that achieved goals that most others would not even have attempted.

  The relationship began when Jerry was secretary of state. The boycott had forced more than a hundred table grape growers to sign contracts with the United Farm Workers union in July 1970. The growers responded with the tool that Hiram Johnson had unleashed as a weapon against the railroad: the initiative. Agricultural interests gathered enough signatures to place on the November 1972 ballot a proposition that would invalidate existing contracts, outlaw the boycott, and effectively destroy any future opportunity to unionize farmworkers. The UFW’s survival depended on defeating Proposition 22.

  LeRoy Chatfield, a former Christian Brother who shed his vows to join Chavez’s movement, was in charge of the No on 22 campaign. In the attic of the county registrar’s office, Chatfield’s wife, Bonnie, reviewed petitions that had been submitted to qualify the proposition, hoping to find some useful lead. She discovered hundreds of forged signatures. Chatfield dispatched volunteers to contact the petition signers. They began to unravel a well-orchestrated fraud; even many who signed their own names had been misled into thinking the proposition supported farmworkers’ rights.

  As the only Democrat in a statewide office in Sacramento, Jerry Brown was considered a nominal friend of Chavez and the union he founded, though contact between them had been slight. Jerry traced his interest in farmworkers back to his student days at Cal, when the AFL-CIO briefly attempted to organize in the California fields. Jerry had joined a student support group that picked strawberries for a day, then spent a night in Stockton listening to union speeches, slept on a church floor, and picked tomatoes the next day. In 1962, Chavez moved to the Central Valley city of Delano and began organizing what became the United Farm Workers. Jerry met Chavez briefly four years later when he came to see Pat Brown during the campaign to organize workers at the DiGiorgio vineyards. Dressed in his customary plaid work shirt, the short, dark-sk
inned Mexican American stood out from the usual visitors to the governor’s house. Three years later, Jerry joined a UFW march to the Mexican border to protest the use of Mexican workers as strikebreakers. He stayed in the background as Senator Edward Kennedy and other politicians spoke. “I marched with Cesar Chavez” figured prominently in Jerry’s subsequent campaign literature.

  As secretary of state, Jerry was in charge of certifying ballot measures. Chatfield made an appointment to talk about Prop 22. He brought with him the union’s lawyer and boxes of declarations by petition signers who said they had been duped. Jerry’s initial response was a wary protestation that he could do little to help. “I’m not God,” he said, a line Chatfield later repeated often. Tom Quinn grasped the political potential and calmed everyone down when Chatfield blew up and began to leave. Once Jerry focused, they quickly devised a plan. The UFW would gather sworn statements; Jerry would denounce the fraud in press conferences around the state, demand investigations, and call upon friendly district attorneys to draw further attention to the problem.

  The quasilegal practices that the UFW uncovered and Jerry publicized highlighted a trend with broad ramifications: Initiatives were becoming a powerful, lucrative industry in California. Since 1912, with a few exceptions, there had been only a handful of initiatives each year; in 1972 there were ten. The new emphasis on single-issue politics was driven and facilitated in part by consultants, led by Whitaker & Baxter, who offered expertise for hire that enabled any interest group to buy its way onto the ballot. No longer was a genuine grassroots effort necessary. The publicity over Proposition 22 exposed tactics that were becoming commonplace, like petition gatherers paid by the signature.

  “The initiative was an instrument to give the people the power to make their own laws, but it is very rapidly becoming a tool of the special interests,”2 Jerry said at a state hearing on Proposition 22, where minors testified about illegally collecting signatures and petition gatherers explained the financial incentive to use deceptive practices to fill their sheets. They even had a name for the small cards they used to cover up the real description of the ballot proposition—“dodger cards.”

  Republicans like State Attorney General Evelle Younger, who learned on the radio that he had been asked to investigate Prop 22, dismissed the complaint as another example of Jerry Brown’s publicity machine. “In the future,3 if you request an investigation of this office, it would be appropriate and deeply appreciated by me if you would communicate with us prior to holding a press conference,” Younger wrote to the secretary of state. But the Los Angeles district attorney cited evidence of massive fraud, prompting editorials in the Los Angeles Times. Jerry hired fifteen hundred temporary clerks to check a million signatures and used their findings to sue to remove Prop 22 from the ballot. The suit failed, but the publicity enhanced his statewide profile, helped defeat Prop 22, and cemented important political and personal relationships.

  Within a year, Jerry was running for governor and LeRoy Chatfield was heading his Northern California campaign, the first of numerous UFW volunteers to cross over. The overlap was not surprising; Jerry and Chavez attracted similar disciples. People who demonstrated an ability to make things happen rose rapidly to positions of responsibility. Fanaticism and single-minded devotion to the cause were highly valued.

  Chatfield had grown up in Colusa, not far from the Mountain House. Like Ida Schuckman, he left as fast as he could and never looked back. At fifteen, he entered a Catholic monastic religious teaching order, then became a high school teacher and debate coach in Bakersfield. At a conference on social justice in 1965, he heard about Cesar Chavez’s movement, based just a half hour north of Bakersfield and still virtually unknown. He visited Chavez in Delano and soon decided to work for him full time.

  Chatfield was asked to join the Brown campaign in a typically elliptical manner. Jerry invited Chatfield to the Laurel Canyon house. He arrived to find a party under way and talked for much of the evening not to Jerry, but to a somewhat mysterious Frenchman named Jacques Barzaghi. Chatfield later realized the conversation had been a job interview. Barzaghi, customarily dressed in black and sporting a beret, was a loyal confidant who shadowed Jerry, performed tasks such as buying clothes, and served as an antenna, helping evaluate outsiders.

  As the gubernatorial campaign progressed, Jerry and Chavez had reason to talk. Jerry visited an executive board meeting of the UFW in March 1974 to ask for the union’s support. He was struck by the vitality and sense of mission among the dozens of volunteers who worked and lived at the isolated compound in the Tehachapi Mountains where Chavez had built a communal home that served as the movement headquarters. Nuns typed in the outer office and volunteers shared a vegetarian meal in the dining hall, where Chavez offered Jerry herbal tea. Under pressure amid continued turmoil in the fields, Chavez had reluctantly endorsed the idea of state legislation that would establish a mechanism for farmworker elections, similar to the National Labor Relations Act, which governed union activity but excluded agricultural laborers. Chavez feared a bad law would take away the union’s freedom to boycott and impose a structure that favored agricultural interests. He wanted a commitment that Jerry would veto any bill the union disliked. They made an appointment to talk for half an hour; the conversation lasted almost two hours. The candidate was knowledgeable, and noncommittal.

  Jerry hoped to avoid any promises that might bind his future actions or cost him votes. When a troublesome bill surfaced in Sacramento and the union reached out to Jerry and Tom Quinn, neither returned calls. Early one morning Chatfield arrived for work at the Brown headquarters in San Francisco and found the second-floor mezzanine outside his office filled with farmworkers. The UFW veteran recognized the sit-in as a warning, turned around, and went down to the ground floor coffee shop to quickly evaluate his options. He invited the workers into his office to lessen the chance of publicity. Sandy Nathan, a union lawyer who had organized the protest, had clear instructions: The workers would stay until the candidate agreed to issue a statement immediately that backed the union’s position on legislation. Several hours and phone calls later, the demand was met.

  The commitment figured prominently in Jerry’s very brief inaugural address, one of the only substantive issues he mentioned. He vowed to bring peace to the fields after a decade of chaos, intraunion disputes, economic uncertainty, and mass civil disobedience. “It is time that we treat all workers alike,4 whether they work in the city or toil in the fields,” he said. “It is time to extend the rule of law to the agriculture sector and establish the right of secret ballot elections for farm workers. The law I support will impose rights and responsibilities on both farmworker and farmer alike.”

  The promise took a back seat in the early whirlwind days of the new administration. To exert pressure, the UFW ramped up its national boycott of Gallo wine, targeting the well-known Central Valley vintner who had spurned the union. Consumers had lots of alternatives, and Gallo sales in California dropped six percent in the first quarter of 1975 while sales of other brands increased. Like many growers, Ernest Gallo had wearied of the harassment from a union that Chavez proudly described as “the nonviolent Viet Cong.” The winemaker took out full-page ads urging that farmworkers be placed under the National Labor Relations Act. When the UFW organized a march on Gallo headquarters, the company hung a banner in San Francisco’s Union Square, where the marchers gathered: MARCHING WRONG WAY, CESAR? The union should aim its power at Sacramento instead.

  Four days and 110 miles later, the march reached Gallo headquarters in Modesto. “As the song says, we’re going to roll this union on,” Chavez told the cheering crowd of about ten thousand. “No doubt in our minds and our hearts that we’re going to win.” Then he addressed the governor, who had not been in touch: “Brothers and sisters, we have a final message to another person. We want to tell him, ‘Dear Governor,5 you know, we once went to Sacramento to visit your daddy.’ ” The crowd cheered “Si se puede” (Yes we can) at the reference t
o the 1966 pilgrimage from Delano to the capitol, when Pat Brown snubbed the workers and spent Easter in Palm Springs.

  Unlike most politicians, Jerry welcomed crises. They focused attention, spurred people to embrace change, and offered an opportunity to exert leadership. Three days after Chavez’s jibe, farmworkers were on the agenda at the governor’s weekly Monday meeting with Senate and Assembly leaders. Chatfield, who had segued from the campaign to the governor’s office, placed an urgent call to UFW counsel Jerry Cohen: The governor wanted a full, detailed briefing on farm labor legislation before the Friday cabinet meeting.

  On Saturday morning,6 March 15, Chavez and Cohen joined Jerry, Barzaghi, and Chatfield at the Laurel Canyon house. Chavez’s strategy was to say as little as possible. “Find out where Brown stood. Let him know that legislation wasn’t what we were after. We wanted damn contracts7 more than anything else,” he explained to his executive board. He hoped to persuade the governor to use the threat of legislation to pressure growers to sign contracts. He thought his demands for proposed legislation were so favorable to the union that they could never be met. Chavez underestimated Jerry’s determination and negotiating skill.

  Jerry subtly wooed Chavez. The governor underscored their philosophical compatibility with unrelated references, like a comment about his contention that University of California professors were overpaid and underworked. And in the middle of deliberations, Jerry asked Cesar to go for a walk. Cohen and Chatfield exchanged glances. They knew Chavez avoided being alone with politicians. But he agreed. He instinctively trusted Jerry.

  “We walked out,8 and that’s where we made some deals,” Chavez told his board. Jerry said he was serious, and Chavez said he was, too, but the bill had to have teeth, allow workers to choose the union of their choice, and impose penalties on employers who failed to negotiate in good faith. Chavez said if the bill passed, they wanted Jerry to speak at their convention. Jerry asked if they could win elections. Chavez said of course. Chavez gave Jerry a dozen specific points they needed, and Jerry indicated most were doable. As Chavez would learn, Jerry’s negotiating style was marked by unusual transparency.