by Jim Newton
For now, however, Warren was headed away, to Berkeley. In the sweltering heat of Bakersfield in August, Warren boarded the train north, riding on the free pass that the Southern Pacific gave its employees. He had $800 saved up for college, plenty in those days to live well as a student. Once he had gone, Warren largely shut the door on his youth. Though he was tragically summoned back to his hometown in 1938 and though he appeared for high school class reunions in 1958 and 1973, life would rarely bring Warren back to Bakersfield. It remained a part of his past, and Warren was not inclined to dwell there. He preferred to move ahead.
THE FRESH dash of a new start would always brighten Earl Warren’s memory of his arrival in San Francisco on an August evening in 1908, when The City’s political tribulations were in full swing. Warren never forgot the cool air, the sense of life unfolding, of promise reaching out to him and finding his comfortable grasp. No other place would ever again feel quite like home.
Warren’s arrival in the north placed him in the center of social and political traditions vastly different from those of either Los Angeles or Bakersfield. Where Southern California had grown from the Mexican land grants and the steely businessmen who snapped them up—and where the San Joaquin Valley of Warren’s youth was built on oil, agriculture, and ranching—San Francisco was made by gold. Gold was discovered in 1848, and extensive lodes eventually were uncovered throughout the Western Sierra Nevada Mountains east of Sacramento. Gold brought people, arriving frantically at mid-century, and gold gave California its first and most enduring identity. In 1849, California’s population stood at just over 100,000; by 1852, it was 255,12242 and characterized by what Hubert Howe Bancroft, the state’s first great historian, called its “two remarkable features . . . youthfulness and paucity of women.”43 In 1850, under the full flood of the Gold Rush, California was more than 92 percent male, an imbalance that subsided slowly. Females made up just over 10 percent of the state’s population in 1860 and about one-third by 1880.44 Few of those who came to California—of the many men or few women—made their fortune in gold, but they stayed to trade; to farm; to hunt for bear; to trap beaver and otter; to fish; to work the railroads then under furious construction; or to man the docks of one of the world’s great natural ports in San Francisco. In 1887, before earthquake and fire would remake the city—not for the last time—it was home to 290,000 raucous residents.
Built up by the influx of young men, San Francisco was, from the outset, an undisciplined city. It was California’s first great metropolis and a happily decadent one. Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington (uncle of Southern California’s Henry), and Mark Hopkins maintained opulent residences on Nob Hill, from which they oversaw their intertwined railroad and trading businesses. Beneath and behind them lay the Chinese ghetto and the teeming red-light district. In the city’s twenty central blocks were whole streets given over to brothels and saloons, with room for just one school and three churches45—scant refuge for a growing middle class, devout and serious. Northern California life centered around The City, as generations of Californians would know it, with its bustle, its docks, its powerful unions, and its austere political bosses, dressed in high collars and stiff suits. Horses clattered across glass-cobbled streets, and a battle-tested working class—Catholic and liberal—engaged in escalating conflict with corrupt politicians and their vigilante allies.
The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, had given new structure to working-class grievances, and Germany, France, and England thereafter were gripped by Communism and the rise of the First International. So, too, did San Francisco ebb and wrestle beneath the firm tug of radical politics. In the winter of 1849, carpenters and joiners in San Francisco waged what is believed to be the first strike in the state’s history (actually, prehistory, since California’s formal admission came in 1850).46 With that, San Francisco embarked on a long drama of organization, strike, resistance, and violence that waxed and waned with its tumultuous economy.
When Warren arrived, San Francisco still was struggling to right itself from its greatest crisis and was in the midst of confronting yet another. At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, California’s preeminent city, its cultural and economic jewel, had fallen into a heap. Some locals called it the “ground shake,” forty-seven seconds of earthquake. 47 South of Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, cheaply built tenements fell like cards; hundreds died in the first wave alone. Gazing out on the wreckage in the minutes immediately after the first blow, John Barrett, the city-desk news editor of the San Francisco Examiner, described the “earth . . . slipping quietly away from under our feet. There was a sickening sway, and we were all flat on our faces.” Outside was pandemonium. “Trolley tracks were twisted, their wires down, wriggling like serpents, flashing blue sparks all the time. The street was gashed in any number of places. From some of the holes water was spurting; from others, gas.” Barrett turned to two reporters for the paper and remarked, “This is going to be a hell of a day.”48
It was, in fact, a hell of a week. Fires were the second act of California earthquakes. In San Francisco, city fire crews, hindered by the death of their chief, were overwhelmed and resorted to dynamiting buildings in order to deny the fire fuel. Block after block of The City fell.
The damage to San Francisco was overwhelming, and the reconstruction was protracted. For more than a year, the grand clock above the city’s Ferry Building, one of few prominent edifices to survive, stood hauntingly stuck at 5:16, the moment at which the trembling of the earth threw its works apart. Even in 1908, when Warren arrived, the city remained in tatters. It was, he said, a “sad sight to behold. . . . Downtown, the place was a mass of rubble, with the frames of a few buildings, gutted by fire, standing skeleton-like in the midst.”49
Then, from the rubble of the earthquake and the detritus of the fire, came the great reckoning of San Francisco politics. It was to be the catapult by which Progressivism was heaved into the history of California—and the life of Earl Warren.
By the early twentieth century, San Francisco was among the most nakedly corrupt cities in America, a place where bribery was institutionalized and where candidates sought office for the explicit purpose of enrichment at the public’s expense. Behind the government’s elaborately constructed municipal scam were an erudite, dapper lawyer, Abraham Ruef, and his handpicked mayor, Eugene “Handsome Gene” Schmitz. Under their simple scheme, those seeking franchises or other business with the city hired Ruef, who divided up his “earnings” among himself, the mayor, and the city supervisors, also under Ruef’s control after the elections in 1905, when Ruef’s slate won the entire membership of the supervisory board. As a general rule, Ruef took about twenty-five percent, as did Schmitz. The supervisors then divided the other half among themselves. Telephone companies, rail service agencies, fight promoters, gas companies, and others paid their bribes and got their business. At the height of their power, Schmitz and Ruef even arranged for the construction of a city-supported brothel—the Municipal Crib, it was called.
Their system grew increasingly brazen. In one case, Charles Boxton, the chairman of the city’s public works committee, minced few words in putting the grip on the president of the Parkside Realty Company, then seeking approval for trolley service to reach its development project along San Francisco’s western dunes. After a tour of the property and a lavish lunch with much wine, Boxton rose before the developers and his colleagues. The Parkside president, he said,
should bear in mind that we are the city fathers; that from the city fathers all blessings flow; that we, the city fathers, are moved in all our public acts by a desire to benefit the city, and that our motives are pure and unselfish. . . . But it must be borne in mind that without the city fathers there can be no public service corporations. The street cars cannot run, lights cannot be furnished, telephones cannot exist. And all the public service corporations want to understand that we, the city fathers, enjoy the best health and that we are not in business for our hea
lth. The question at this banquet board is: “How much money is in it for us?”50
As its rapaciousness grew, so did public uneasiness, particularly among the city’s reform-minded elites. One of San Francisco’s wealthiest businessmen, the young and charismatic Rudolph Spreckels, soon to become a stalwart of the California Progressives, struck a deal with the city’s district attorney, W. H. Langdon, who was not part of the bribery web. Spreckels agreed to put up $100,000 to pay for a corruption inquiry, while Langdon pledged to wage it. Trust-busting, corruption-battling President Roosevelt supported their efforts from offstage by dispatching two special investigators to help conduct the inquiry. Closer up, the investigation was promoted and driven by Fremont Older, a rampaging San Francisco newspaper editor who once had accepted stipends from the Southern Pacific but who now leapt to the head of the attack on San Francisco corruption.51
Older, Spreckels, and their allies conferred quietly in early 1906 and concluded that they had enough evidence to warrant a full investigation. Although they did not know how far their inquiry would lead, all were confident that Ruef and Schmitz would be targets, and Spreckels in particular wanted to go even further: He had in mind the Southern Pacific railroad and its emissaries as the ultimate targets. 52 Although they did not yet call themselves Progressives, their effort was a clear predecessor of that movement, with its corporate targets, aversion to public corruption, and reformist zeal.
The earthquake postponed the investigations as all attention naturally shifted to the recovery effort, a monumental task that seemed to bring out the best in Schmitz. He would often remark in later years that he felt reborn by the earthquake, and his actions in the hours and days after the quake suggested new energy and honesty. For months, the investigation went underground as San Francisco struggled to its feet.53
Even the earthquake, however, could not stop the gathering determination to topple San Francisco’s leadership. After the admirable recovery interlude, Ruef and Schmitz resumed their work, and Ruef extended his reach to state politics. In return for $20,000, he delivered San Francisco’s nominating votes in the 1906 Republican state convention to James Gillett, Southern Pacific’s choice for governor.54 And in his crowning arrogance, Ruef gathered with California’s boss leadership for a photograph, memorializing the deal. In the picture, Gillet stands behind Ruef, his arm on Ruef’s shoulder. They are surrounded by state Republican leaders, cigars and drinks in hand. When the photograph was made public and reprinted in reform papers under the headline “Shame of California,” it stood as an icon of smug Southern Pacific manipulation of California politics.55 Kevin Starr’s description of the photograph is itself worthy of reproduction: “Perusing it today—the walrus mustaches, the amply distended vests, the high starched collars, the smiles of men at their ease after wine and dinner, so pleased with themselves after having insured the election of the next governor of California—one can almost hear a background of Scott Joplin music.”56 The photograph captured the high-water mark of Southern Pacific domination. After it, the public’s anger hardened to resolve, and Ruef turned increasingly desperate to hold on to power, attempting even to remove Langdon from the case.
On November 15, 1906, the grand jury in San Francisco handed up the first of many indictments, charging Schmitz, Ruef, and the city’s police chief. Ruef eventually pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his former friend and ally. Convicted and cast aside by his sponsor, Schmitz fought on.
Schmitz’s efforts took place against a deepening backdrop of public crisis in San Francisco. In May 1907, a sick man was brought to the hospital and died soon after, the cause at first undetermined. As more and more victims straggled in, it became clear that San Francisco was in the grip of a public health emergency: the earthquake had ripped apart sewer hookups and unleashed a wave of rats upon the streets, scattering them to neighborhoods rich and poor. The rats carried the plague. Now, in addition to burned and devastated buildings, The City was confronted with a deadly disease and a dithering administration. “In San Francisco,” the Citizens’ Health Committee wrote in an extraordinary report on the period, “plague met politics. Instead of being confronted by a united authority with intelligent plans for defense, it found divided forces among which the question of its presence became the subject of factional dispute. There was open popular hostility to the work of the sanitarians, and war among the City, State, and Federal health authorities.”57
Schmitz was eager to suppress news of the epidemic. (He was, incidentally, remarkably successful; even today, few accounts of it survive.) To squelch coverage and fallout, he refused, among other things, to allow health reports to be printed; his administration fired a federal health officer who raised alarms. By his actions, Schmitz allied the enemies of reform with the threat not just to public morals but to public health as well. The efforts of their opponents, the nascent Progressives, thus acquired additional respectability. Only Schmitz’s removal from office by the corruption probe eventually cleared the way for an aggressive health effort. Cases peaked in September 1907 and continued through the fall until the Citizens’ Committee took command; seventy-seven people would die before the committee succeeded in halting the spread of the disease, but it did succeed and did so in spite of the city’s politics. That triumph of the Citizens’ Committee made a deep impression on Warren, demonstrating vividly the potential for enlightened public participation. Warren would adopt a similar model in later years, as he crafted policy for California. In the meantime, the enlightened citizens of San Francisco hunted rats and dipped their dead bodies in flea-killing poison.58
After protracted delaying tactics by the defense, the trials of the San Francisco political elite reached their critical stage at precisely the moment that Warren arrived to begin college. The young would-be lawyer who had so enjoyed the Tibbet case in Bakersfield now was treated to an even grander act of civic moralism in the hands of a trial lawyer.
Up until that point, Hiram Johnson, still a relatively obscure young prosecutor, occupied the second chair at the graft prosecution table, toiling away behind Francis Heney as the senior lawyer took the lead in prosecuting businessmen said to have paid bribes to Schmitz, Ruef, and their cohorts. As lead prosecutor, Heney had responsibility for jury selection, and in the spring of 1908, one San Francisco man, Morris Haas, had been dismissed from jury service after an ugly courtroom joust with Heney. Heney had allowed Haas to be seated as a juror, but then discovered evidence that Haas had served time in prison. Heney confronted him with evidence of his criminal record and accused him of covering it up in order to land a seat on the jury and then parlay his influence in order to help Ruef. Haas was dismissed, and he stewed over it for months. He then arrived in court on November 13, while Warren was in his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, pulled a revolver, and shot Heney in the head. Heney was rushed to the hospital and feared dead. The mantle then fell to Johnson. Blustery and truculent, Johnson performed with the panache that was to become his trademark. His closing appeal to the jury, including four members thought to be in Ruef’s pocket, was stunningly effective. Naming each juror and pointing at him, Johnson boomed, “You, you dare not, acquit this man!”59 Ruef was convicted. Johnson was on his way to a historic career in law and politics.
All of this made for sensational coverage, and it left its mark on Warren, who saw in Johnson a people’s champion—not a demagogue but a lawyer, a man of California’s middle class empowered by the law to restore order and health to one of its great cities. Warren had set out to become the lawyer that Johnson was. The following year, Warren volunteered for service as an election monitor to help guarantee a clean vote for the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, the reform party of which Johnson was then secretary. Heney, who miraculously recovered from his wounds, was running for district attorney that year, asking voters to put him in office in order to keep the prosecutions alive. Picked to oversee a rough neighborhood south of Market Street on that Election Night, Warren, still too young to vot
e, admitted that he was not sure how much good he’d done. “No wrongdoing was visible to me,” he said, “but throughout the night I wondered what I could have done in those intimidating surroundings even if I had seen any skullduggery.”60
Warren remembered the reformers’ winning, but his memory recorded his hopes, not the true outcome. In fact, Heney lost. He was replaced by a new district attorney, Charles Fickert, who promptly shut down the prosecutions of The City’s business elite. The graft trials ended without ever reaching the bribers, a failure that Warren vowed to avoid when his turn came two decades later. In the meantime, the Progressive forces behind the investigation turned instead to statewide office. They launched their first such effort in 1910, with Hiram Johnson as their gubernatorial candidate.
Johnson was a barnstorming, energetic campaigner, and on August 16, 1910, he won the Republican primary. His strongest support came from the areas near Warren’s hometown of Bakersfield, and he also carried Alameda County, home of Berkeley. Johnson was a humorless standard-bearer for the movement, but he was tireless and intense, motivated in part by his abiding hatred for his father, Grove Johnson, a member of the legislature and, of all things, a lawyer for the Southern Pacific. When Hiram Johnson joined the graft prosecution, his father contemplated signing on with the defense. Hiram was elected governor that year, and Warren cheered the results. Grove Johnson was less impressed: He resigned from the legislature rather than serve with his son.
Johnson may not have had much to offer young Warren as a personal mentor, but there was much to commend him as a political one. As governor, Johnson would move with extraordinary vigor to upend California politics. Measures such as the recall, the initiative, and the referendum—all trumpeted by Johnson and the Progressives—sharply curtailed the power of the Southern Pacific and other big-business bosses. Moreover, they injected into California politics a seriousness of purpose and a sense of reform as moral calling.61 Johnson resembled much of what Warren imagined for himself—Johnson was a tough, uncompromising lawyer who had taken on the serious business of the people as his own moral mantle. And Progressivism gave Warren’s instincts a political identity—an affirmation of the place in politics for middle-class men and values. As one Progressive journal observed in 1908: “Nearly all the problems which vex society have their sources above or below the middle-class man. From above come the problems of predatory wealth. . . . From below come the problems of poverty and of pigheaded and brutish criminality.” 62 The proposition that the middle class was the locus of reform and progress undergirded Johnson’s success and spoke directly to Warren. Edward White, a brilliant historian of the Supreme Court who clerked for Warren, understood its mark on him:
