by Jim Newton
Some would furiously denounce what would become known as the “Warren Court.” Billboards proclaiming, “Impeach Earl Warren” would dot the nation’s highways, Joseph McCarthy would sneer at Warren’s politics, and Congress periodically would explore ways to curb the Court’s power. Others would welcome Warren and his assertive brethren as little short of salvation. John Lewis, who would go on to a distinguished career in Congress after a youth defined by civil rights protest, never forgot the day that Warren and his colleagues opened the doors of school-houses to young black children; Lewis, like so many others, felt on that momentous morning that promise long denied was now possible.
“Everything,” the fourteen-year-old boy believed that day, “was going to change now.”29
And that was merely the beginning of Warren’s historic role in transforming American legal and social institutions. By the time he was through, Warren influenced his times more than any president with whom he served and became more responsible for America’s sense of itself than any but a small handful of twentieth-century figures. The smiling governor of California, a mild Republican who, at sixty-two, joined the nation’s high court unencumbered by a guiding ideology, would, over the next sixteen years, remake the nation’s voting rights, empower criminal defendants, break down racial segregation, halt the demagogic pursuit of Communists, expand the rights of protest and dissent, embolden newspapers to challenge public leaders, and reimagine the relationship between liberty and security in a free society. Under Warren’s leadership and in the face of bitter opposition, the Warren Court imported the great values of America’s Declaration of Independence and the promises of its Bill of Rights into the working life of the nation. Those changes came to be regarded as a liberal high-water mark in American history, and the “Warren Court” became a deceptively simplistic moniker for a complex series of compromises that created the foundations of contemporary American society. Warren led the Court through those changes, its undisputed chief.
Today, Warren’s legacy stretches across countless courthouses and interrogation rooms, city desks, classrooms, and hospital corridors. It sets the parameters of American politics and extends into the most intimate and personal moments of private life—the pained deliberations of women as they contemplate abortions, the anguished choices given to parents worrying about the education of their children, the whispered confidences of clients to their lawyers, the prayers of children, the protests of young people, the last meditations of the dying. Today’s America is in many ways the America that Earl Warren made.
PART ONE
MADE BY CALIFORNIA
Chapter 1
YOUNG MAN OF CALIFORNIA
Life in California is a little fresher, a little freer, a good deal richer, in its physical aspects, and for these reasons, more intensely and characteristically American.
DAVID STARR JORDAN, 18981
EARL WARREN could not have become the man he was had he been raised anywhere but in the time and place of his upbringing. He was a man for whom experience mattered—philosophy and reading influenced him less than the scratch of life—so geography left its mark. And he grew up in California, a state defined by its cultural and geographic extremism, where one’s association with the industrious cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco or its vast agricultural valleys determined who one was. Warren embodied a bit of each. He was born in Southern California, raised in its San Joaquin Valley, and educated in the north. By the time he was a young man, Warren was a Republican in the fashion of Los Angeles’s leadership, a second-generation union man as one might expect of a San Franciscan, and a bit of Bakersfield rube.
Earl’s parents, Methias and Chrystal Warren, came to California the way so many did—poor, drawn by the promise of work, eager to settle amid storied abundance. Methias was a broad-shouldered man with thin features, clipped with words and parsimonious. Born in Haugesund, Norway, he emigrated to the United States as an infant, carried by his parents along with his brother, Ole, two years older. They settled first in Illinois and then moved to Iowa, bypassing America’s cities, changing their name from Varran, and finding their way, as Earl Warren later would relate, “to the open spaces of the Middle West.”2 Their mother gave birth to two more sons, one dying in infancy, before she herself died when Methias was four years old. Methias’s father remarried and had eight more children by his second wife, but then his health entered a decline, and the three older boys took up too much room in the crowded house. Without their mother there to advocate for them, they were sent away, the youngest to relatives, Methias and Ole to farmers who lived nearby. Methias and Ole worked for their keep, and though separated from the rest of their family, they remained paired with each other for several years until Ole, stricken with tuberculosis and too poor to pay for good medical care, died in his brother’s arms one sad Christmas Eve. Clutching his dying sibling, Methias swore to himself he would never, as an adult, allow himself to be poor.3 Methias then moved to Minneapolis in search of work and there met another Scandinavian immigrant, Chrystal Hernlund. She was Swedish and pretty and particular—her real name was Christine, but she didn’t like it, and instead adopted Chrystal. Chrystal’s family had settled in Chicago after emigrating from Sweden, but had left after the city’s 1871 fire, and, like Methias, had come to roost in Minneapolis. On Valentine’s Day in 1886, they were married.
Their first child, Ethel, was born a year later, and the young family came to California soon after, settling eventually in a five-room rented cottage on Turner Street, near the Los Angeles train depot. Methias found work with the Southern Pacific Railroad. There, on March 19, 1891, Earl Warren—too poor to have a middle name, his father later would joke—was born.
Those were hard days in Los Angeles. It was known formally as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, and as the name suggested, its emotional and cultural ties were with Mexico. As an American city after 1850, however, Los Angeles grew under the grim guidance of an oligarchy determined to build a great city and to profit by its growth. Their city was struck in their image, one startlingly in contrast to San Francisco’s. The City, as San Francisco would forever be known to Californians, was liberal, Catholic, and organized around the sea and its workforce. Los Angeles was Protestant, conservative, oriented toward its dry valleys, and staggeringly effective at keeping labor in its place. Methias would soon learn, as would many others, what it meant to be a union man in nineteenth-century Los Angeles.
In the time of Warren’s youth, Los Angeles’s leaders included land barons and water pirates, engineers, rail men, and an extraordinary newspaper publisher. Henry Huntington was among those pioneers. He lived in the hills above Los Angeles in an unorthodox cohabitation with his aunt. His uncle, her husband, San Francisco railroad baron Collis Huntington, had died and left his fortune to his wife and nephew. They consolidated it by marrying each other and then multiplied that fortune by investing in land and streetcars. It was brilliantly simple—new plots with new homes would open on Huntington land; they would be served by a Huntington streetcar service. The arrivals came and the Huntingtons prospered. So did George Chaffey, a clever engineer and master irrigationist, who built an empire of water beginning on Thanksgiving Day of 1881, when he purchased the land for what became the farming community of Etiwanda.4 From it he spiraled towns and projects that made him rich and drew immigrants into new homes stretching through once-arid valleys, watered by Chaffey.
The region’s true general, however, was Harrison Gray Otis, a Civil War colonel, Spanish-American War general, land baron, and founder of the Los Angeles Times. He was brusque, determined, and vicious. To advance his vision of Los Angeles as a place of salvation, he hired a singularly energetic, eclectic city editor, Charles Fletcher Lummis, who tried to save his shaky health by walking from Ohio to Los Angeles. He filed dispatches for the Times along the 143-day journey, and, reaching the outskirts of the city, was met there in person by Otis. The two conferred beneath an oak tree outside the
city, and Otis offered him a job on the spot. For decades thereafter, Lummis would survive bouts of exhaustion, drinking, and depletion to join with Otis in trumpeting the virtues of their region. They sold Los Angeles as a Mediterranean paradise, as a destination that would cure the sick and make the poor rich, as a business center unfettered by the government. And they built a giant and influential newspaper.
Together, Otis and Lummis—the general and his deputy—refashioned Los Angeles into an extension of its paper. “From the ‘wide-open,’ saloon-ridden, raw frontier town I first knew, to the Los Angeles of today,” Lummis wrote in 1900, “is not only a long-distance march but a long war—with more picket-firing, skirmishes and pitched battles than most of us realize today. . . . But our army of lions has had a lion for a leader. Now this is a large thing to say, but a true one: I cannot recall a single considerable reform or forward movement in Los Angeles in 15 years of which the Times was not the standard-bearer.”5
True enough, though that influence cut many ways. While Lummis and Otis touted Los Angeles to the East, they also struck hard against labor. For decades, the Times carried in its banner the slogan “True Industrial Freedom,” advertising its commitment to the fight against union representation. As fierce as he was determined, Otis enforced that precept vigorously. When typographers balked at a twenty-percent pay cut in 1890, Otis refused to negotiate. The unions struck, and Otis responded by hiring scabs and vowing to remake Los Angeles as an open shop.6 Otis won, as he usually did. And in winning, he gave his city a platform from which to compete with San Francisco—lower wages combined with the climate as two of Los Angeles’s chief selling points to new business.
As the century turned, a deep national depression dampened life across the nation and reached the town of Earl Warren’s birth. In rail yards from Chicago to the Pacific, the American Railway Union, headed by Eugene V. Debs, gained strength among white workers (blacks and Chinese were not permitted to join). One new member was Methias Warren, who joined the union in early 1894. When a strike was called later that year, Methias Warren struck.
The Pullman strike of 1894 was reluctantly launched but then stirringly engaged. The Pullman car company was notorious for its abuse of its nearly captive workforce, and when the company cut wages in the midst of the Depression, its workers, already stretched to their limits, walked out in protest. Debs had not asked for this strike, but when he visited the Pullman yards, he endorsed it. He tried to lure Pullman officials into negotiations, but they refused. At noon on June 26, 1894, Debs ordered railway union members to pull the sleeping cars from trains and sidetrack them. The railroads refused to move trains without sleeping cars, and so the strike was joined. Within days, it had escalated into a historic confrontation of national scope. More than 100,000 men walked off their jobs; railroad service between Chicago and the West Coast was all but ended.7 The strike was particularly effective in the West, as strikers there took to the ramparts with enthusiasm and resolve. They were, however, met by a powerful adversary, General Otis. “In the great railroad strike of ’94, the Times was the only daily on the Pacific Coast which ‘stood fast, stood firm, stood true’ . . . for law and order,” Lummis wrote in 1900.8
With the Times’s encouragement, the federal government moved against the union. Debs was imprisoned (the Supreme Court would later uphold his jailing), and after riveting the nation and paralyzing its transportation, the strike was crushed. Methias Warren had made a hard choice to walk off his job—he was no activist, just a man loyal to his colleagues. Now he paid the price for that. He was fired and blacklisted by the railroad. He had brought his family to Los Angeles for work, but had butted up against its leadership code. He risked poverty again, the poverty he had vowed since boyhood to avoid. Methias was unable to find other work in Los Angeles, so he set out in search. He was successful, in a fashion. He was hired by the Santa Fe railroad to work its yards in the blinding-hot desert east of Los Angeles. That restored Methias to a payroll, but those little yards were no place for a family, so he sent back money as he searched for something better, permanent. Eventually, he settled outside Bakersfield—a hundred hard, hot, dusty miles north and inland from Los Angeles, but a real town, not a mere desert depot. Methias then sent for his family.9
Earl Warren carried more impressions than memories of his early childhood in Los Angeles. He vaguely absorbed the colors and sounds of its Mexican culture, of flowers and sonorous music drifting in the city’s flat light. Mexico would always retain a romantic place in Warren’s heart—he was an annual guest at Santa Barbara’s summer fiesta, a celebration of its Californian and Mexican heritage, and one of Warren’s lasting Army friendships would be with Leo Carrillo, who would have a successful acting career as the sidekick to the Cisco Kid and thus be one of Hollywood’s first Mexican-American stars, and who would campaign for Warren among Mexican-Americans. Though Warren would, of course, go on to great fame for his role in ending school segregation against blacks, his quieter first act of that mission would be in the liberation of Mexican-American children in California.
But while Mexico supplied a warm backdrop to Warren’s youth, two sharper Los Angeles memories stabbed through his gauzy recollections of those early years. They both would echo through his consciousness for three-quarters of a century, haunting him as he sat to write his memoirs in the early 1970s. One was the sound of a young neighbor, stricken by polio or meningitis—Warren could not remember which—crying and sobbing in pain as she died a few feet away, her family unable to comfort or cure her. The other was of the railroad strike, and of a raucous evening when strikers set a bonfire and burned an effigy above it. That night, Warren recalled, “gave me a horror of mob action which has remained with me to this day.”10 Indeed, those two memories stand for the most enduring lesson of Warren’s youth—his abhorrence of disorder. No matter how much Warren would grow as a boy, no matter how hard he would tug at his parents or school administrators or teachers, he always found security in structure.
Bakersfield hardly seemed the place to find it. In Bakersfield, the Warrens—and particularly their young son—would discover a frontier town in California clothing, romantic and dangerous, tantalizing to a young boy but frightening as well. Bakersfield had no business titans to impose order. It was chaotic and freewheeling. Its streets, one visitor recorded in 1882, were “generally full of horses, caparisoned in the Spanish style, tied to the hitching posts and awaiting their owners in the stores and taverns. The sheep-herders are a lonely class, who become morose and melancholy through long wanderings with their flocks far from the habitations of men and human speech.” The city’s shops, the writer noted, were “kept by Jews,” while Chinatown stood apart, separated by an irrigation ditch “like a moat.” Gypsies lived on the edge of town, while the great ranches of the era were located just outside.11
Upon arriving in 1895, Methias Warren went to work inspecting cars for the Southern Pacific. So eager was the company to attract workers to its new facilities that the blacklist was forgotten. He was based in Kern, a small knot of homes and railroad buildings erected two miles from the center of Bakersfield after Bakersfield refused concessions to bring the rail into the city center (Kern later was annexed by Bakersfield). The young family at first moved into a small rented house near the railroad tracks. Methias walked to work.
The Warren family settled into Kern and Bakersfield just as the area burst to life. The city opened the twentieth century with $4,347.24 in its treasury, and oil was bringing in plenty more. Sidewalks were being paved, and roads were under construction. Respectable establishments were taking root—three major land companies produced cattle, grain, and hay, while growers harvested peaches and apricots.12 One visiting editorial writer noted, “ [S]ubstantial business buildings, an atmosphere of business thrift and engagement, a satisfied and unconcealed air of content, activity, briskness, good order on the streets and general observance of the dignity of the peace left upon the minds of the visitors . . . the impression that Baker
sfield is a steady, growing, pushing and successful city.”13
Still, disorder and vice were among the hallmarks of the young town. The city boasted roughly a hundred saloons—they were, the same editorial writer observed, “as thick as the leaves of autumn forest glades”—and the city’s 7,000 residents were said to include 500 prostitutes. Crime was commonplace and widely reported in the Daily Californian, where coverage was splashy and at times revealing. A Wednesday evening knife battle was detailed under the headline “Mexican Stabbed in Leg Muscles.” When three Indian men were arrested for public drunkenness, the paper cited the law against supplying Indians with liquor and asked the question in its headline “Who Gave Them Whiskey?”14
More serious was a fatal Chinatown shooting that captured local attention as the century turned. Jee Sheok, a Chinese resident of that Bakersfield quarter, shot and killed Jee Duck in the fall of 1899 over what witnesses reported was a disputed business deal. The following January, Sheok came to trial, drawing a large and curious crowd, including many native Chinese—an assembly the Californian described as “this outpouring of heathendom.”15 The defendant, a “villainous-faced Chinaman,” sat without comment through the early days of the proceeding, which moved slowly in part because of the difficulty of finding twelve jurors in the county willing to give equal credence to the testimony of an Asian as that of a Caucasian. Once a jury was seated, Sheok was convicted largely on the account of a nine-year-old white boy, Percy Baker, who saw the shots fired and told the jury that the dead man carried no gun, rebutting the defendant’s argument that he fired in self-defense. “This was the little fellow’s story and no amount of questioning by the defendant’s attorney Mr. Emmons could shake it,” the Californian reported. “The boy knew what he knew, he showed that he understood the oath, and his manner carried conviction to the listener.”16 Sheok was sentenced to life in prison.
