The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  The two men agreed on a strategy: The governor would introduce a bill, and the union would attack and support a more radical alternative. The governor’s bill would then be amended to become acceptable to all sides. On April 7, 1975, Jerry celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday at the Tassajara Zen retreat. Two days later, the governor unveiled his proposal. “This is a bill that attempts to give farmworkers self-determination through secret ballot elections,”9 Jerry said. “It is a unique effort, and I enlist everyone’s support for that endeavor.”

  The weeks that followed were a round robin of private negotiations and public posturing, long days and late-night sessions fueled by beer and wine. Chavez tossed insults. When he said the governor wouldn’t know anything about potatoes, Jerry was miffed; he protested that he had had a victory garden when he was three years old. Chatfield organized what the governor called the necessary “theatrics,” bringing in groups of clergy and labor allies, cultivating favorable press, courting legislators, and building momentum. Jerry spent hours in meetings and phone calls with supermarket executives, black clergy, prominent growers. He listened intently to all sides to understand what mattered to whom and who had room to move where.

  A front page story in the Wall Street Journal on April 29, 1975, noted that the young governor was so popular in California he was already touted as a national candidate. Yet his fiscally conservative agenda had disappointed liberal supporters and he lacked any major accomplishments to date. “Jerry’s mistrust of government isn’t enough,” Stephen Reinhardt, the labor lawyer who had played a key role in Jerry’s campaign, told the newspaper. “His questioning has to lead to conclusions. Whether he’s a serious national contender depends entirely on the next few years. He’s got to do something.”

  Reinhardt’s phone rang the next evening; only Jerry Brown, oblivious to all professional sports, would call while the Golden State Warriors were playing the Chicago Bulls in game 2 of the Western Conference Finals. Jerry challenged Reinhardt to come to Sacramento and help out in the denouement of historic legislation. Reinhardt accepted. He helped draft language during the early morning hours of the first weekend of May as Jerry shuttled from room to room among parties that had been implacable enemies for years. The UFW was in one room, Teamsters in another, growers in a third. Jerry drew upon his training as a debater and trial lawyer. He immersed himself in the smallest details and then emerged to summarize issues in clear, persuasive language and rebut counterarguments. He had studied the issue from every point of view, understood each protagonist’s bottom line, and functioned as an honest broker. In the final negotiations, with impressive mastery of complex nuances, Jerry sold the UFW’s adversaries a measure that had everything Cesar Chavez demanded.

  California became the only state to grant basic labor rights to farmworkers. The law protected union activity, imposed penalties on employers who bargained in bad faith or retaliated against union leaders, and established a state agency to oversee secret-ballot union elections. The Agricultural Labor Relations Act was hailed as the most pro-labor law in the country, preserving the right to boycott under certain circumstances and giving labor unions the sole right to determine members in good standing.

  “A law of itself can’t solve human problems, but it can provide the framework,”10 Jerry said as he signed the bill. “It gives for the first time a group of people in our society who are at the lowest end of the economic scale the self-determination to assert their own dignity and their own rights and their own views on what they want and what they don’t want. And that is a very significant step forward.”

  Jerry saw himself as a catalyst who seized the right moment; without the power that Chavez had amassed and demonstrated, the others would not have been willing to deal. “Many problems depend on an intangible like that,” he said. “On dedication, on a principle, on an idea. And an idea is more powerful11 than anything else. If that idea is grounded within the structure of a people, there is no stopping it if it fits with the time.”

  Jerry also understood that the victory marked a fundamental turning point that would change the nature of Chavez’s movement and send him searching for the next crusade. That had been part of Jerry’s argument to the growers. “Cesar needed a movement.12 His movement was drained of its, of its, what’s the right word, its charisma, or its enthusiasm, by virtue of the domestication of the law,” Jerry said a few years later. When Chavez had said he did not really want a law, the concern was more than a negotiating ploy.

  “The thing about Brown, I think, that’s probably amazing, is that more than any other party, he played it straight13 with us,” Sandy Nathan said to Jerry Cohen two weeks after the bill passed, as the two UFW attorneys relived the tumultuous past month. Cohen credited Jerry’s respect for Cesar, the values of the movement, and its power. He also cited the increasing buzz about Jerry as a presidential candidate. “If Brown doesn’t have national ambitions,” Cohen said, “our strength isn’t as great as it was.”

  Though Jerry had been in office less than a year, his unprecedented popularity in California and the lack of a clear Democratic front-runner in the 1976 race had fueled speculation about a presidential bid. “The success of his farm-labor negotiations had as much impact in New York14 as it did in Los Angeles—perhaps more,” wrote California political reporter Ed Salzman in the summer of 1975, as the new law went into effect. What mattered was not the disenchantment of California liberals unhappy with budget decisions but the embrace of those on the East Coast, where Cesar Chavez and la causa had strong support.

  Just after Labor Day, thousands of Mexican American farmworkers lined up at polling places in the California fields, many casting the first vote of their lives. The rival Teamsters union appealed to workers on bread-and-butter terms and tried to overcome its history of top-down, sweetheart contracts. By far the more popular choice was the organization workers simply called “la union de Cesar Chavez.”

  Jerry had delivered on his promise to Chavez to appoint a sympathetic board to oversee the new agency. LeRoy Chatfield was a member. As chair, Jerry tapped Fresno bishop Roger Mahony, the most knowledgeable cleric on farm labor issues and a key participant in negotiating the early UFW contracts. The intricacies of the unprecedented elections overwhelmed the board and challenged the young UFW organizers to develop strategies to play by a new set of rules. “The fact is, there is no deus ex machina15 that can drop in and solve this in one month,” Jerry said. “To think that merely by signing a piece of paper and creating a board … that you can resolve the disputes of decades is a premise that just doesn’t face the reality that we have to deal with.”

  He remained unusually engaged, committed to make the law work, and the UFW maintained the pressure necessary to hold his attention. When farmworkers were fired unjustly for union activity, a group staged a multiday vigil outside the governor’s office, sleeping on sofas and the floor. Jerry returned to Sacramento at midnight and talked to them for three hours. One worker placed his jacket on the governor’s chair and snapped a photo, still in disbelief the conversation had happened. When sheriffs raided labor camps on the eve of an election and picked up key union supporters for immigration violations, the governor’s office figured out a way to issue temporary permits so the workers could stay through the election. The workers returned triumphantly with their permisos, the kind of victory the UFW used to show the power of the movement.

  That power was the quality that intrigued Jerry and that he sought to adapt to the political arena. “To be a politician in America is not generally to be a movement leader,16 and yet the need that I perceive is that there has got to be a coherent platform or vision that will be able to organize effective political action in a period of increasingly ineffective political action,” he said. “That’s what I’m working on. It’s not easy. I don’t see anyone else doing it.”

  On Friday March 12, 1976, talking with a few reporters around six P.M., Jerry Brown mentioned, almost in passing, that he planned to enter the Maryland pr
esidential primary. He deliberately avoided a formal announcement. The deadline was the following Monday. Ignoring those who had urged him to jump in earlier, he had skipped the first sixteen primaries and followed his own dictum: Postpone decisions as long as possible, since they foreclose options.

  “I represent a generation17 that came of age in the civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War movement and can put behind us the malaise of the 1960s, Watergate, the CIA and FBI violations,” Jerry said as he launched his campaign. “I am unencumbered by the baggage of the last ten years.”

  He left California for the first time since his election sixteen months earlier. On the flight to Maryland18 with him was Allard Lowenstein, the liberal Democratic activist and former congressman who had worked briefly for Jerry; among Lowenstein’s projects had been supervising interns who researched election laws on presidential primaries in all fifty states. Lowenstein, a networker before the term was in vogue, carried his legendary phone book with several thousand home numbers of key Democratic players around the country. “His unconventionality is his strongest trait,” Lowenstein said on the flight to Maryland, dismissing Jerry’s relatively slim list of achievements as irrelevant. Like Robert F. Kennedy, Lowenstein said, Jerry Brown had the ability to convey to people the sense that they could accomplish things.

  Jerry’s quixotic campaign was based on the power of an idea. “What can a president do?19 He gets up in the morning and he goes to bed at night. There isn’t all that much he can do except set a tone and chart a vision,” he said at a rally. “I don’t think the president runs the country, nor do I think the governor runs the state,” he told supporters at a fundraiser. “Government is a part of an overall, complex equation—social, economic, and environmental. Within that limited framework, a leader can set a tone,20 can express a philosophy, and can describe a future that is either consistent with what is possible or not.”

  For a brief time, anything seemed possible. In Maryland the young governor was treated like a rock star. At his first rally, people reached out to touch him. Someone ripped a button off his suit.21 In later years, Jerry Brown would refer to the Maryland campaign as a political high that was hard to match. Months later, he would return to the state, anonymous and unrecognized.

  Just as Pat Brown had lined up old-time political support for his son, Jerry benefited in Maryland from more traditional Democratic support through the connections of a young San Francisco politician, Nancy Pelosi, whose father and brother had served as Baltimore mayors. Jerry’s stance as the outsider and his tactic of challenging assumptions won support from liberals and conservatives. His penchant for avoiding specifics made him the object of ridicule in the comic strip Doonesbury, which invented a new campaign chant for Brown supporters: “Hey, ho! Go with the flow!”

  On May 18, 1976, Jerry Brown defeated front-runner Jimmy Carter in Maryland, 49 to 37 percent. The band played “California, Here I Come” as the candidate entered the victory party in his customary three-piece suit. Eating linguine at two A.M. in Baltimore’s Little Italy, he said, “I can really win.”22 His oldest friends were not surprised. “If Jerry Brown decides to run for president,” said his former roommate Frank Damrell, “it’s because he thinks he can be president.”

  Pat Brown dismissed suggestions that his son was too young. “Jerry’s contemplative.23 He’s not like your regular politician,” Pat said. He had measured his own career by what he called the “laundry list” of accomplishments. His son was different. “He believes a president should lead the people to a better quality of life, and not read a laundry list. He’s in this campaign just for himself because he is convinced that he is a leader.”

  Even as he savored the success, Jerry wrestled with his Jesuit values. He talked about the conflict between politics, which fed the ego, and the Christian admonition to rid oneself of selfish desires. “You’ve got to have purpose,” he said. “Save souls, or bring about the new order, protect the environment, save the whale, provide full employment. This is my job. This is my vocation.24 This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  As the campaign moved into other states where election rules posed logistic hurdles in a tight timeframe, the Brown team needed lots of bodies and creative strategy. The solution to both came from the farmworker movement.

  Action had slowed in the California fields. Excitement over the new law and pent-up demand by farmworkers had resulted in 423 elections in the first five months. By February 1976, the state agency had exhausted its initial appropriation. The legislature declined to allocate more, and the board shut down for the rest of the year, suspending all elections. The UFW had dozens of volunteers with nothing to do. Cesar Chavez dispatched them to help his favorite politician.

  Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt, who met in 1971, were both public figures who valued their privacy. The couple did not often appear together at public events. But when Jerry ran for president, Ronstadt headlined a fundraising concert at the Capital Center in Maryland on May 14, 1976, four days before Jerry Brown won an upset victory in the Maryland primary. (Associated Press/Karin Vismara)

  Marshall Ganz, son of a Bakersfield rabbi, had spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi and dropped out of Harvard to stay and work in the civil rights movement. A year later, he joined a different crusade, close to home, and learned to organize from Chavez. Ganz’s only experience with a political campaign was watching Chavez turn out the vote for Robert Kennedy in 1968. Sent to Canada to stop the sale of grapes, Ganz had organized one of the union’s most successful boycotts. Then he figured out tactics to win union elections under the new law. Both operations required ingenuity with little resources. Like all successful leaders in the union, Ganz knew how to make things happen, fast.

  He landed in Oregon with a team of UFW volunteers dispatched to run a write-in campaign. They recruited and trained dozens of people and assigned them to specific polling places, where they would explain on Election Day how to vote for Jerry Brown, even though he was not on the ballot. The novelty of the campaign and the youth of the candidate drew large crowds. Students at the University of Oregon in Eugene hung out of balconies in the quad and climbed trees for a better view of the candidate in his double-breasted suit, who arrived late because he had signed a bill that morning that gave tax credits for solar heating installations. Jerry told the students the most important thing was to “restore honesty25 to Washington” and “rebuild the cities of America.” Without that, “no matter how many missiles we have in our silo we lack the collective strength and political will to defend anything.”

  In the May 25, 1976, Oregon primary, Jerry was just edged out by Carter, an impressive showing for a write-in candidate. The next day, Ganz and his group of boycott volunteers were in the airport headed for New Jersey when they were paged and diverted to Rhode Island26 to tackle a tougher campaign. Jerry was not on the ballot. Write-ins were illegal. The only way for Jerry to win required voters to follow a complicated set of instructions and pull multiple levers to elect an uncommitted slate. The Brown team had five days, including Memorial Day weekend.

  Most businesses were closed for the holiday. UFW volunteers went through the phone book until they found a union printer willing to produce posters, billboards, and handouts the next day. One group of volunteers hit the streets. They created instant rallies by using “the Dragnet”—a team swarmed through any offices near a campaign event and dragged people out into the street with them. Another team worked the phones, with sleeping bags under their desks. They called voter lists until they couldn’t stay awake, slept on the floor, then started all over. Ganz divided the state into seven areas and assigned a coordinator to each, tasked with recruiting and training poll watchers for every precinct. On Memorial Day, 550 poll watchers gathered in a Catholic high school auditorium cheered loudly when Jerry arrived to address the volunteers.

  The next day, Ganz adapted a tactic he had used in farmworker elections. Poll watchers handed out sample ballots that showed step by step exactly
how to vote for the Brown slate. In a major upset, the uncommitted delegates edged out Carter, 32 to 30 percent.

  Jerry won two more states—Nevada and California—and beat Carter in New Jersey with an uncommitted slate of delegates. He had entered too late to mount a serious challenge, but the meteoric campaign made the California governor a player. Jerry was already out of contention when a celebrity crowd that included Andy Warhol, Harry Chapin, Betty Comden, Earl McGrath, Bayard Rustin, and Diane von Fürstenburg gathered for a fundraiser on June 1 at the Central Park West apartment of Allard Lowenstein’s brother.

  “Every eight years27 I come to you to introduce some leading Jesuit theologian who has suddenly decided to run,” Lowenstein said, and the guests looked over at Eugene McCarthy and laughed. Lowenstein recalled working with Jerry on the Peace Slate that morphed into the McCarthy campaign in 1968. For people bruised by the aftermath of that loss, “there is a feeling that again that somehow it’s worth being involved,” he said. “If this campaign has done nothing more than to make clear that it is not impossible to generate electricity and excitement and a sense of hopefulness … it will go down as a very significant contribution.”

  Jerry’s campaign was “typically unorthodox,” Lowenstein said. “So we have tonight somebody who is twice as frugal as Ronald Reagan, twice as Jesuit as Eugene McCarthy, twice as ruthless as Robert Kennedy, twice as garrulous as Hubert Humphrey.”

  Jerry said he had entered the race because he didn’t see any candidate generating the necessary enthusiasm. The national campaign had reinforced cultural and geographic divides. In the West, people wanted less government. In the East, they wanted help in crises like the New York City financial bailout. “I think the very issue that people have raised about my candidacy is its greatest virtue and that is that I would come to Washington as a new force out of the West, unencumbered with a lot of the alliances of the past, not untried in the political process—I’ve been around it all my life and I think I understand it—but with the ability to bring people together, to inspire some hope and try to get this country back on the up-beat.”