The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Some of the bump was attributable to the unintended consequences of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, signed by President Reagan, which granted a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who had been in the country for more than five years. In all, about 2.7 million immigrants were able to legalize their status. Some sent for relatives, who might get tired of long waits for legal papers and cross on their own. The law also offered special provision for farmworkers, who qualified for legalization if they had worked in the fields in the past year. California farmworkers granted legal status often were able to move out of the fields into higher-paying jobs; their replacements were typically undocumented.

  By the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of jobs had disappeared during the recession, unemployment had risen, and the number of Mexicans coming to California had declined sharply. That did not stop Republicans from seizing on a politically potent issue. Pete Wilson proposed the federal government deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and cut off health and education benefits. In an open letter to the White House and paid advertisements in national newspapers, he wrote, “Illegal immigration is eroding the quality of life for legal residents of California.”

  His approval ratings went up, with a third of voters saying his position on immigration influenced them favorably. In a September 1993 Los Angeles Times poll, 86 percent of Californians said illegal immigration had become a problem, third only to the economy and crime. Kathleen’s lead over Wilson in polls narrowed.

  In June 1994, the most famous and influential California proposition since Prop 13 qualified for the ballot. Under the Save Our State initiative, better known as Prop 187, undocumented immigrants would not be able to attend public school or receive nonemergency healthcare or welfare benefits. It would require service providers to report any suspected undocumented immigrants to the attorney general and the immigration service, and would make the creation or use of false documents a felony.

  Kathleen opposed the fundamentals of Prop 187 as soon as they surfaced. In a town hall speech in Los Angeles in the fall of 1993, she talked about her great-grandfathers, August Schuckman, an immigrant who built a life and raised a family in Colusa, and Joseph Brown, who emigrated from Ireland and found opportunity in San Francisco. “Immigration and immigrants add immeasurable value35 to California and to our economy and should be celebrated as one of California’s greatest assets,” she said. “Perhaps more than any other force, immigration—legal and illegal—has shaped and will continue to shape California’s destiny. I want to be unequivocal on this point: Immigrants are among California’s greatest strengths.”

  She acknowledged that the porous border caused problems, but pointed out over and over that immigrants came to work, not, as Wilson insisted, to obtain public services. She denounced as cruel the proposal to deny children admission to schools or hospitals. “Visiting the crimes of an adult upon a child is barbaric, and proposals that do so are based on the coldest and most cynical political calculations.”

  Wilson closely tied his campaign to Prop 187 and funded a commercial that became infamous across the country: “They Keep Coming.” Grainy footage showed shadowy, sinister figures dashing across the Mexican border as the narrator ominously intoned, “They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won’t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them.”

  The commercial resonated with an electorate that remained disproportionately white.36 Whites made up 57 percent of the population, but an estimated 80 percent of the voters. Latinos made up a quarter of the population, but only about 8 percent of the voters. Prop 187 would play a major role in changing that arithmetic.

  On the eve of the election, seventy thousand people marched through Los Angeles to protest Prop 187, one of the largest demonstrations the city had seen. Most were ethnic Mexicans, many young, many proudly waving Mexican flags. The flags sparked a backlash, and in the short run, the demonstration may have won more votes for the anti-immigrant initiative. But in the long run, the severe and unconstitutional provisions of Prop 187 spurred a new generation of Latinos to become politically active, encouraged immigrants to become citizens, and instilled a lasting antipathy toward the Republican Party. Prop 187 would be widely viewed in retrospect as an inflection point that drew Latinos into civic participation, bolstering and reshaping the Democratic Party.

  Many California households had become a mix of citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented residents. Workshops sprouted to organize opposition to the anti-immigrant initiatives and to encourage immigrants to continue using services in the wake of reports of lowered attendance in schools. Latino activists began to define the next civil rights movement as one that would focus on preserving the rights of immigrants, regardless of their legal status. Even before Election Day, some saw Wilson’s decision to tie his fate to Prop 187 as a move with long-term political consequences. “That is a major statement that’s going to reverberate37 through the Republican Party and the rest of the country over the next couple years,” Newsweek deputy Washington bureau chief Howard Fineman said presciently on C-SPAN on the eve of the election.

  Toward the end of the campaign, Kathleen mentioned Prop 187 in every speech, not because she entertained any illusion that doing so would win her votes but because it seemed such a moral imperative. “It was a fight for California,”38 she said a week after the election. “For the new California that we’re going to be living with, no matter who’s governor.”

  The Brown campaign ran out of money and was essentially off the air during the final weekend, an unforgivable sin in the world of California campaigns. By then, Kathleen had found her voice, too late to change the outcome but in time to reconcile her sense of her own place in the Brown dynasty and California. “You take what you’ve got and you make the best you can out of it. I think that is what I got from my mother and my father and the life that I’ve had,” she said. “It was: Remember who you represent.39 Remember who you represent when you walk out the door. And I think that’s what leaders are supposed to do.”

  When Gail Sheehy asked dozens of friends to define Kathleen’s passion, her husband, Van Sauter, offered the clearest response: “She has a mystical feeling40 about California. Her belief in this state and the people’s potential is profound. I don’t want to sound New Age touchy-feely, but she has almost a sense of responsibility for speaking to its best sentiments, its economic and social potential. It comes directly from her father. Not diluted. From the father.”

  Prop 187 passed 59 to 41 percent, with unusually high turnout in counties with large white populations. Forty percent of the people surveyed said the initiative was what drew them to the polls. Support ranged from a low of 29 percent in San Francisco to a high of 77 percent in Colusa. Immediately challenged in court and ultimately ruled unconstitutional, the provisions of Prop 187 never went into effect. An earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision had established the rights of undocumented children to public education, and a federal judge also concluded the initiative was an illegal attempt to regulate immigration, a federal prerogative.

  Pat Brown was fading. When Kathleen had visited during the campaign, as often as she could, they would have the same conversation over and over. He asked what she was running for, and they talked about the race. Their first conversation after the election, she told him she had lost. He asked by how much. She gave him the numbers: Wilson won 55 percent of the vote; she won 40 percent. The old politician’s mind clicked into focus. “That’s a loss!” he said, and he never asked her about it again.

  During the election, Kathleen had thought about her father and his unbridled effort in 1964 to defeat Proposition 14, the measure to undo the Rumford Fair Housing Act. How he called people bigots for supporting the initiative, even when his handlers discouraged him from talking about race. “There was pressure41 on me not to talk about 187,” she said, as she readjusted to life as a private citizen. “But that was ridiculous. The t
radition of politics I believe in is one where you stand for things. That’s the way I was raised. I was never tempted to soften my stand, even when I slipped in the polls. I wanted to give people a sense of standing up, of being counted. Let that be my legacy.”

  Whatever her legacy in the political world, she loomed large as a role model in the extended Brown family. In a clan descended from generations of strong, smart, determined women, Kathleen was the first female offspring of August Schuckman to succeed as a high-powered professional on her own terms. She ushered in a generational change.

  Kathleen Kelly idolized both her aunt Kathleen, twelve years her senior, and her grandmother Bernice. Cynthia and Joe Kelly’s oldest child wanted to go to Stanford, like Kathleen. When she ended up at Cal, Kelly took French, because Bernice had studied French. Bernice returned the affection, paying special attention to her oldest granddaughter. She bought Kathleen her first bikini, miniskirt, and go-go boots. When Pat and Bernice went on a month-long trip to China in 1980, among the first westerners in the country, Bernice insisted Kathleen Kelly come along as a college graduation present.

  Kelly admired her Uncle Jerry, too, and had worked in the governor’s office for a high school externship. She did a project about redlining for Marc Poché, Jerry’s friend since college, and Poché became a mentor. He encouraged Kelly to pursue her interest in the law. By the time she was in her final year at law school, Jerry had appointed Poché a judge on the appellate court. He gave Kelly a clerkship her last year of school.

  For Pat Brown, Jerry’s initial failure to pass the bar still loomed large. He worried that an internship would distract his granddaughter from her studies. When she found out she had passed the bar, her grandfather was the first person she wanted to tell. Kelly tracked him down at dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. She excitedly told him the news, only to hear dead silence. After a minute, Bernice got on the line and anxiously asked Kelly what was wrong. Pat was crying.

  Kathleen Kelly was the same age as Anne Gust, and as Jerry spent more time with Anne and brought her to family functions, the two women became friends. Anne went on the last of the big Brown family trips to Hawaii. Jerry showed her the California of his youth—Camp Curry in Yosemite; the Boy Scouts’ Camp Royaneh on the Russian River. She met the childhood friends, with whom Jerry had happily reconnected when he moved back to San Francisco—the Magellan Avenue boys and the St. Ignatius crowd. The S.I. Class of ’55 had lunch in North Beach the first Friday of every month, and Jerry went whenever he could. Even at the early dinners with his old friends, when Anne was quiet, her intelligence and sharp wit were readily apparent. Anne was the first woman, Jerry told the wife of his Magellan Avenue friend Pete Roddy, with whom he was never bored.

  As Pat faded, Bernice took particular comfort in Anne’s presence, in her life and in that of her bachelor son. Anne was outside the room when Jerry visited with his father toward the end. How’s your marriage going? she overheard Pat ask. To her relief, for once, Jerry did not feel compelled to set the record straight.

  Pat Brown died on February 16, 1996. His youngest daughter was first to arrive at the house, and Kathleen began to make decisions. She picked the cheapest casket she could find in the catalog. When Jerry arrived, he found a cheaper one: a plain pine box with a Star of David. Llew Werner, one of Jerry’s aides from long ago, offered to arrange a police motorcade, a twenty-one-gun salute, and a flyover for the funeral. Jerry objected to the pomp and circumstance. He was overruled.

  Hundreds waited in line to pay respects at the wake in Los Angeles, some old friends, some total strangers. “He touched so many lives42 and helped so many people,” Bernice said. Days later, hundreds more filled St. Cecilia’s Church in their old Forest Hill neighborhood in San Francisco. Jerry had planned the funeral mass.

  Kathleen Kelly recalled43 in her eulogy that her grandfather would ask her boyfriends three questions: Are you Catholic? Are you Irish? Are you a Democrat? “This is just where Grandpa loved to be,” she said. “Right up front, surrounded by his family and dear friends, the clergy, distinguished dignitaries, the press—and hundreds of voting Democrats.”

  Jerry spoke about what his father had told him was his proudest achievement. Not the water project, or the university. The law that extended old age pensions to noncitizens. It meant so much to people. He “just didn’t understand that business of ‘lower your expectations.’ ” Jerry said. “Expanding and building.44 That’s what his life represented.”

  Anne Gust had been warned by Jerry’s sisters about Bernice’s reserve. The Browns were not an expressive family. Not like her own large clan where relatives said “I love you” to one another all the time, without a second thought. As Bernice Brown mourned the man she had met when she was thirteen and married sixty-five years ago, she turned to Gust and told her she loved her.

  19

  Oakland Ecopolis

  In 1878, the year Ida Schuckman was born, four-year-old Gertrude Stein moved to Oakland.1 The rural city of thirty-five thousand boasted one Main Street and the terminus of the transcontinental railroad, which had arrived almost a decade earlier. Gertrude grew up on a ten-acre lot in East Oakland, in a wood-frame house surrounded by trees and gardens. In 1935, she returned to Oakland for the first time in more than four decades, a celebrated writer on a national lecture tour. Stein sought out her childhood home, only to find the orchards and oaks replaced by a drab subdivision in a city that had grown almost tenfold. In her dismay, she penned one of the most famous quotes about Oakland, a nostalgic lament invariably misconstrued as a put-down: “There is no there there.”

  By the time Stein died in 1946, Oakland had been transformed again by the largest shipbuilding industry in the country. The round-the-clock operation in the East Bay during World War II drew thousands of workers, many of them Southern blacks, who joined a thriving community that became known as a Harlem of the West. For a time, Oakland prospered as a relatively integrated, multicultural city. But in the 1960s, freeways sliced through the city, working-class neighborhoods were demolished, and a ring of suburbs sucked out industry and middle-class homeowners.

  Stein would scarcely have recognized Oakland in the twilight of the twentieth century: Art Deco masterpieces abandoned downtown, mansions in the hills, poverty and violence in the flatlands. But perhaps the writer who flourished in the salon life of Paris would have felt at home at 200 Harrison Street, a small commune in a modernist warehouse that hosted Cosmic Rave Masses, a Martin Buber study group, sustainability workshops, and yoga classes. The building was the home of We the People and its founder, Jerry Brown, who had come to Oakland seeking community and political redemption.

  Jerry had made good on his vow to the Winter Soldiers to continue his movement in some form. A month after the Democratic convention, he incorporated We the People on August 20, 1992, “to promote better government2 in the United States, educate Americans concerning the American political system and issues facing the nation, and promote honesty and integrity in government through reforms in the electoral and governmental system.” When he looked for a home for his work in progress, he looked across the bay to Oakland, where land was cheap and problems plentiful. Big enough to receive national attention and small enough to make an impression, Oakland, too, was a work in progress. “You can’t take America back3 from Pacific Heights,” he said when the news of his move from San Francisco was bannered across the front page of the Oakland Tribune. “You know, Oakland really is the All-American city.”

  Jerry bought a lot near Jack London Square, the waterfront complex named for the city’s most famous son, and hired an architect to design a 17,500-square-foot commune that included a three-hundred-seat auditorium, a kitchen and dining area, and ten living units, most with private bathrooms. He planned a rooftop vegetable garden that would employ students to harvest and sell crops, a food co-op, and a law office to help low-income residents. He defined his most important battles as reversing inequality and environmental destruction. “Oakland is
a reality that in itself represents the diversity of America,4 the potential of America, and the suffering of America,” Jerry said. “It’s all here. And what happens to Oakland, in all probability, happens to the United States.”

  In his quest to create communal living, Jerry consulted Cesar Chavez, who had turned his attention from labor organizing to cooperatives, which he saw as the only viable alternative for working people. Jerry revisited the isolated UFW headquarters in the San Joaquin Valley in early 1993. After mass, over breakfast in the cafeteria-style dining room, Chavez lamented his failure to persuade his own family to eat communally. He advised Jerry not to allow refrigerators in the apartments.

  “For Chavez, some form of common life5 was the most natural way for human beings to live,” Jerry wrote in a eulogy a few months later after Chavez died unexpectedly in his sleep, only sixty-six years old. “He had an overwhelming sense that modern life was disordered and that human beings were being cut off from the soil and a harmonious balance of friendship and nature. He recoiled from the pervasive waste and poisoning that we call our affluent modern life … in a mechanical age full of plastic and loneliness, he stood against the crowd: unbossed, undoctored and unbought.”