by Jim Newton
Like young Percy Baker, Earl Warren was nine years old when Jee Sheok was sent away to San Quentin, California’s maximum-security prison. As a young boy, Warren was quiet and mannerly, and by the time he was ready to enter school, Methias was sufficiently established to be able to let Chrystal dress her little boy in dapper, if slightly prettified, outfits. Earl was first enrolled in the local elementary school at age five—technically, children were supposed to be six to begin school, but the principal allowed Warren to begin early, perhaps because he already had some reading and writing skills. He was taught in the rough style of the day: When teachers found him favoring his left hand, they tied it to his body and forced him to write with his right. For the rest of his life, Warren would write and eat right-handed but play sports left-handed.17
Even right-handed, he mastered penmanship. His schoolbooks from those days are lined with the careful notations of a young boy with precise handwriting, marking in the margins his questions and definitions of difficult words. Although the family was striving, the children did not suffer. Books, in particular, were never hard to come by, as Methias Warren made sure to set aside enough money to buy his children anything they cared to read. Earl received Peck’s Bad Boy for Christmas in 1901 and a sequel the following Christmas.18 A library, meanwhile, was built just two blocks away, its wide Victorian eaves providing shade to the cool interior on Bakersfield’s hot days. Earl Warren, already young for his class, progressed well enough to be allowed to skip the second grade.19
Away from school, Earl Warren lent his father a hand on the first of many houses that Methias Warren constructed in his off-hours from the Southern Pacific. Or rather, Earl tried to help. He was not much good at construction, and though he admired those who could work with their hands, he had trouble emulating them. Beyond his work with his father, Earl took odd jobs for spending money and his own savings. He delivered the Daily Californian, and was a success at selling ice; it would have been hard to fail in Bakersfield’s 100-degree summers before the days of air-conditioning. But he had his setbacks, too. Young Earl became fascinated by the assassination of President McKinley and the Boer War, two subjects heavily covered in the local papers. Earl rooted for the Boers to rout the English and lamented McKinley’s death at the hands of an assassin. So when a biography of McKinley and another book on the Boer War appeared in the early 1900s, Earl saw an advertisement for them in the paper and believed his enthusiasm for the subjects would make him a natural salesman for the books. But he was too little and too softspoken to be taken seriously; neighbors simply turned him away. When he could not convince his father to buy a copy, Earl realized he was through as a salesman. 20 He dropped the effort.21
The Warrens were never wealthy, but Methias was a frugal man with a steady income, and the family gradually improved its living standards. Although the family lived in a rented house when they first arrived, Methias managed to save enough to buy a house a few years later, and he moved his wife and children, Ethel and Earl, into it. Over time, Methias would acquire other small homes and rent them out, supplementing his railroad income and eventually giving him the means to retire from the Southern Pacific.
Earl’s mother and father both raised him, but his lasting memories and deepest impressions were connected with his father. In a reckless town, Methias was a stable, if somewhat grim, source of constancy. He valued work and careful handling of money. There was no drinking or smoking in the Warren home, a gesture of seriousness as well as frugality. There was music—the Warrens owned a Victrola, and Earl enjoyed the music of John Philip Sousa. But there was little laughter or hugging. When there was punishment to be administered, Methias doled it out, sometimes with a birch rod.22 Methias insisted on education for his children, and he demanded honesty, a lesson that found deep purchase in his son. To his own grandchildren, Earl Warren would insist that the measure of a man lay in his refusal to tell a lie.23 Those were Methias’s words echoing across three generations.
For all its emphasis on virtue, the Warren home was not deeply concerned with religion. Earl and Ethel were raised as Methodists, and the family kept a Bible, but they did not attend services diligently, and Earl absorbed religion in a general way—his was a moral upbringing but not a devout one. Methias was far more vehement about education than he was about God. He supported Earl’s desire to go to college, and he occasionally would take his son to hear speakers as they traveled through the area. One afternoon, the two traveled together to hear an address in town. Earl never forgot it.
The speaker was Russell H. Conwell, and his talk, “Acres of Diamonds,” was one of the most acclaimed pieces of oratory of its day. Conwell, the founder of Temple University, traveled across America delivering versions of his talk thousands of times in the early twentieth century. He would arrive in a small town, talk to residents, and hear the story of their hamlet. When he rose to speak that afternoon, he would weave their stories into his speech, identifying for the crowd the “diamonds” in their town or village and reminding them to treasure those aspects of their lives and community. One day, Conwell’s journey brought him to Bakersfield.24
Religious in fervor, moral in tone, and yet practical in its advice, the speech foreshadowed much of what Warren would become. “Greatness consists not in the holding of some future office, but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life,” Conwell said. “He who can give to this city better streets and better sidewalks, better schools and more colleges, more happiness and more civilization, more of God, he will be great anywhere.”25
Sitting in front of the stage, looking up at the orator, Earl Warren was spellbound. “I can still see his towering form and hear his powerful voice as he told his never-to-be-forgotten story,” Warren recalled a half century later. “Of all the lectures I heard in my youth, this one made the greatest impression on my young mind.”26
If Warren’s early life featured exposure to learning and inculcation of values, it also came in a notably narrow home—while Bakersfield had its Mexicans, its Jews, its Chinese, and even a few blacks, they were not guests of the Warrens. Moreover, home was not a place of debate and discussion; it was one where children did as they were told by strict, conventional parents. Its stability appealed to Warren, but it lacked intellectual energy; it was a place of reading but not of sophistication; it was Scandinavian and Protestant, and young Earl had little exposure to the vitality of urban America, or to those raised in families more accustomed to disputatious-ness. As he grew older, Warren would sometimes be confounded by those who enjoyed the clamor of clashing views, of debate as intellectual exercise. His uneasiness with that style of argument would cause some to conclude he was less intelligent than he actually was.27 They were wrong to underestimate him. Had they appreciated Warren’s Bakersfield, they would have better understood that he was taught to live by simple values and formed in the crux between the attraction of a stable home and the appeal of a loose little town.
His companions in his ramblings through the city were Earl’s many animals. A rare surviving photograph of Earl as a boy shows a handsome youngster, blond hair tousled, a straight nose and finely drawn bones, a half grin across his eleven-year-old face as he stares directly at the camera. Behind him are fallen leaves, a crate, and a shovel leaned against some brush. Earl’s left arm is draped around the neck of a cheerful, bright-eyed hound. His animals—others included more dogs, a sheep, an eagle, and chickens—kept Earl company, but his stalwart was a burro named Jack, “my friend and constant companion for years,” Warren wrote later.28 The two would hunt together, and chase rabbits in the dry fields that extended from the edge of town to the looming Tehachapis at the horizon. When news broke in Bakersfield, as it did on April 19, 1903, Jack and his twelve-year-old master, Earl, clopped curiously to the scene.
The events of that day capped a wild winter and spring in the life of Bakersfield. A new sheriff, John Kelly, had taken office and set out to shut
down the city’s gambling houses. Kelly informed the owners that he intended to enforce the law—a view novel only by the standards of Bakersfield, where gambling had been allowed for virtually all of its history. Kelly’s actions were cheered by the Bakersfield establishment, but the gamblers struck back, hiring as their lawyer E. J. Emmons, the same man who had represented Sheok at his murder trial. Emmons persuaded a judge that Kelly had exceeded his authority in closing down the houses. Instead of the gamblers going out of business, Kelly himself was placed under arrest. And then, with the town divided and unprotected, it came under attack.
Jim McKinney was a Western bandit, a thief and a murderer who lay in wait by the side of a trail in order to kill two men, then held up a rancher, forced him to shoe two horses, and disappeared into the badlands of Southern California and Arizona. Newspapers followed his exploits, posses were gathered to capture him, and rewards were posted for his return, “Dead or Alive.” The gambling dispute suddenly seemed less urgent, and Kelly won his release from jail to lead his men in pursuit of the outlaw. At four P.M. on April 12, they found him. Shots were fired, and deputies believed they had hit McKinney, but the bandit got away, fleeing on the speedy horses he had stolen a few days before. A second battle, the following morning, deprived McKinney of his horses, but he continued to elude capture, and now turned toward Bakersfield. “Fugitive May Attempt to Come Down Kern River,” the Californian warned.29
And so he did. On the morning of Sunday, April 19, deputies closed in. They found him at the Duvall Hotel, a local Chinese gambling house. One of the deputies, Bert Tibbet, staked out a spot in back and, when shots rang from inside the building, burst through a gate on the heels of a colleague. Inside, another deputy, Jeff Packard, was bleeding from a shattered arm. “Look out, look out for God’s sake, he’ll get you,” Packard called. Tibbet wheeled and fired his shotgun. It struck McKinney in the neck, but he raised himself. Tibbet shot him a second time, killing him. “M’Kinney’s Head Shattered with a Load of Buckshot,” the Californian proclaimed the next morning.30
Earl Warren was twelve years old when the McKinney shootout occurred in his hometown. The gunshots had barely stopped ringing that morning when Earl and his donkey came trotting up. In the days after the shooting, Earl stayed rapt with interest as it morphed into a legal drama. It turned out that McKinney had had an accomplice, and not just anyone, but a sheriff’s deputy named Al Hulse. Earl had met Hulse a few months earlier at a turkey-shooting contest. There, Earl had admired Hulse’s marksmanship, and the deputy gave Earl a turkey. Now Hulse was accused of aiding the bandit and of firing the shot that killed Tibbet’s brother, Will. The cornered Hulse first offered unconvincing explanations of his whereabouts, then gave a halting statement to town leaders, including a reporter from the paper, from his cell.
Hulse claimed innocence and went to trial. Earl went, too, sitting in the back with other boys from town. From that seat, surrounded by friends and neighbors, Earl watched the drama unfold, and a surprising idea took root. Earl decided to become a lawyer. That was odd in some respects. He was still a shy youngster, small for his age and unassuming. How, he might have wondered, could a boy who could not convince his neighbors to buy books on McKinley persuade a jury to believe his client? Other boys his age gravitated toward oil exploration and mining. But as Earl watched the town grapple with its gamblers and its outlaws, he allowed himself to appreciate the dazzle of the lawyers as well as their importance. They restored order when gamblers threatened it, but they were not stark or repressive. Denied much fun at home, he found excitement in the law, in the tale of Hulse and McKinney, which ended on a shocking note: Hulse was convicted of second-degree murder, and as he awaited transfer to state prison, he asked for a razor to shave. He used it to slit his throat.
Improbably, then, the shy boy who spent his afternoons with his animals and whose mother liked to dress him in curls and shorts began to imagine a career as a great trial lawyer. It would not turn out quite the way he expected, but the seed of Warren’s career took hold that spring, when he was just twelve years old.
It was one thing to daydream of such a life. It was another to work toward it. Methias urged his son to work hard for grades, but that was one admonition that did not register with Earl. He squeaked by in high school with admittedly mediocre study habits—when the final class bell would ring, Warren was the first out the door, classmates recalled. Reflecting on his high school days in 1969, one former classmate called him “the bunk” in physics and described him, simply, as “never outstanding.”31
His high school transcripts are a study in mediocrity. Latin was a particular struggle; in his two years of Latin, he never managed to top a 77. French was similarly disappointing, and his classmate’s recollection of his work in physics was accurate. He received a 75, the second-worst grade of his high school career, exceeded only by junior-year algebra (a 70). One telling mark, however: Warren’s best grade for all four years of high school came in his last, when he scored a 94 in American history.32 At the same time, school introduced him to poetry, and Warren took to it. In 1904, he received his copy of a collection of English poetry masterpieces; he dutifully inscribed his name and kept the book his entire life.33
Warren’s reputation as a lazy student was a shared joke between him and his classmates. In the commencement issue of their school publication, The Oracle, the annual “prophecy” for the graduates of 1908 lauded each of the school’s sixteen graduating seniors. It remarked of one classmate, “The world ne’er had a wiser man before,” and of another that “greater orator ne’er did audience command.” Of Warren, the description was more modest and the prediction for the future limited indeed:
On the corner an old street faker stands
And the attention of the passing crowd commands.
His specialty is “Warren’s New Hair Dope.”
Put up in form of tonic and of soap.
He says his motto is “My goods are not bush.”
Good luck, Earl, in your business is our wish.34
Warren did not argue much more for himself. In the class “will,” he bequeathed to Lorraine K. Stoner “my ability to slide through, doing as little work as possible, hoping that in so doing, he may gain laurels on the Track Team.” His final word on high school: “I know many things, but nothing distinctly.”35
High school thus did not do much to shape the man that Earl Warren was to become, but it did in one sense augur his future. Starting in those early years, Earl would succeed best at what he felt most intimately. He was drawn to the law by sitting in a courtroom, not by the consideration of its structure or principles. Earl drifted in the face of abstraction—Latin, say, or physics. Poetry was the exception that proved the rule. He loved it, but for its stories, not for rhyme or meter.
Earl was, however, learning, if not always in the classroom and sometimes despite himself. Through his high school years, Earl spent some summers working for the Southern Pacific after securing his father’s permission—which was granted only on the condition that Earl return to school at the end of his summer employment. Earl’s job as a “call boy” was to run through town and gather up crews for departing trains. It was eye-opening work for a teenaged boy. He tramped through the city’s underside in order to round up crews, sober them up, and deliver them to their posts. He watched men gamble away their earnings and saw the Southern Pacific strip poor workers of much of their paychecks by luring them to the company store. And he saw some blacklisted because of their union membership, the fate his own father had suffered before escaping to Bakersfield.36
Most shocking to Warren were the injuries he witnessed. Still just a teenager, he watched in horror as men were crushed between cars and carried in agony to the workplace lathe. There, held tightly by their fellow workers, the railroad men had their arm or leg cut clean off with the workplace blade. “My nature,” he remembered years later, “always recoiled against these inequities. All my life, I wanted to see them wiped out.”37 Many years
later, even some of Warren’s liberal colleagues on the United States Supreme Court would wonder at his insistence that the Court take up seemingly minuscule cases involving workers seeking compensation for injuries; only when they grasped it as an extension of his youth did they understand. 38 Earl never did delay a train, and the friends he made with trainmen would help him later in life, when he toed the difficult line in California as a Republican in search of labor support.39 As a boy in Bakersfield, he took his first, modest step in that complicated, lifelong relationship with organized labor: On April 1, 1906, Earl, who learned to play the clarinet and to play it well, joined the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians.40
In time, Warren’s love of practical learning and reliance on his personal experience over academic diligence came to help him; they grounded his ideology in real life and infused his politics and jurisprudence with a common, practical touch. But when he was a high school student, that bias nearly sank him. His grades were bad enough, his attitude toward schoolwork worse. Indeed, Warren almost did not graduate at all. During the week of the ceremony, he and several classmates stayed up late rehearsing their end-of-the-year play. Tired the next morning, several were late to school. Their principal smelled a prank, and abruptly expelled the three when they arrived on campus. After a debate in which Warren recalled delicately that the “rhetoric became somewhat heady,” the three were sent home and news of their expulsion ran through the school and community. That night, after a special hearing before the local education board, they were reinstated, the play went on, and they graduated with their class the day after that. Writing of the flap nearly seventy years later, Warren remained revealingly bitter. The principal, whom he did not name, “did not return to the school the next term, but I do not know whether the foregoing incident had anything to do with it.”41 And though Warren took pains to emphasize that he sought out and befriended the principal years later, the near-expulsion remained a burr in the hide of a man who by then had risen to international renown.
