by Jim Newton
Another lead passed for different reasons, ones that spoke to the emerging Earl Warren. As officers conducted scores of interviews, they learned of a man who had been in Bakersfield about the time of the murder and had subsequently been arrested, convicted, and sent to San Quentin on an unrelated charge. Powers proposed putting another inmate in the cell with him, planting a microphone in the cell, and urging the inmate to question that man about his possible involvement in the Warren murder. Earl Warren’s permission was not required—he was, after all, merely the son of the victim; he had no jurisdiction over the criminal case—but Powers thought it would be easier to get the approval of prison authorities if he could forward the request with Warren’s imprimatur. Powers asked Jahnsen to raise the matter with Warren, and Jahnsen soon reported back. “Warren’s answer was ‘I don’t believe in Dictaphones,’ ” Powers recalled.
Few would have blamed Warren for acceding to a common, if marginal, practice in this pursuit of his father’s murderer. But once Warren discovered a position of principle, he held it, as he did here. Powers was struck by his adamancy: “It was a new idea to find this quality of integrity,” he said.20 There was no microphone planted in the cell. That criminal defendant was not the last to receive a break from Earl Warren, but he surely was the one whom Warren must have been most tempted to lean on.
After the first round of suspects were investigated and dismissed, progress on the case slowed and hope faded. “While I shall never be satisfied until this case is cleared,” Powers wrote to Warren as leads were beginning to dry up, “still I feel that everything possible has been done up to the present time.”21 Weeks turned to years, and though Powers stayed in touch with Warren, he was never able to report a breakthrough. In 1944, Warren would express his appreciation to Powers by naming him Coordinator of Law Enforcement Agencies for the State of California. The murder of Methias Warren, however, would drift into history, unsolved and theoretically still an open murder investigation of the Bakersfield police department.
In the meantime, Warren trudged on. He pulled his personal date book from his coat pocket and lightly wrote “Cancelled” across each of fourteen consecutive days, starting on the Monday after his father’s murder and not ending until Monday, May 30, 1938. He then methodically made a list of all those officers and investigators who had participated in the search for the killer and made sure that each one received a note from him expressing his gratitude.22
When he returned home from Bakersfield, Warren talked to his children about their grandfather’s death. As he listened, Earl Warren, Jr., sensed in his father a grim resolve, not sadness so much as resignation. After that, Earl Jr. said, “he never made reference to it again.”23 Nina was left to field the children’s questions.
What is perhaps most striking about Warren after his father’s murder is what did not happen next. Warren did not harden or coarsen. He did not transform the violent death of his father into a campaign of vengeance. He was a prosecutor, and committed to combating crime, and he could easily at this moment have fallen into the angry energy of retribution. Voters would have sympathized. In personal terms as well as political ones, it also must have tempted Warren to succumb to his anger, as so many crime victims do. A conservative, the old saw goes, is a liberal who’s been mugged. In Warren’s case, however, he showed no such response to his father’s murder. He continued to campaign as a law-and-order candidate, but that had been his message prior to the attack on Methias Warren. To the contrary, Warren after the murder flickered with new compassion.
Rather than retreat into the familiar politics of crime fighting, Warren at just this moment evolved a larger self. The impetus was a liberal Los Angeles judge, Robert Kenny. A leading Democrat, a candidate for state senate and the treasurer of Culbert Olson’s gubernatorial campaign, Kenny seemed an unlikely supporter of Warren, the Republican candidate for attorney general. But Fletcher Bowron, a colleague of Kenny’s on the Superior Court bench, drove Kenny home one night and on the way urged him to consider backing Warren. Kenny liked Warren and was willing to consider it, but Warren’s Point Lobos prosecution troubled Kenny. On June 12, less than a month after Methias’s murder, Kenny told Warren his support would depend on Warren’s views of civil rights. Kenny asked if Warren would be willing to put down in writing his views in that area, and Kenny said that if he liked it, he would consider an endorsement.24 Warren agreed to write the statement and then submitted it to Kenny. It read, in part:
I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems because . . . if we ever permit these liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy . . .
As Attorney General, I would do my best to prevent Hagueism [Mayor Frank Hague, in New Jersey, had violently turned on protesters there] from gaining a foothold in California. I am unalterably opposed to any species of vigilantes or to any other extra-legal means of a majority exercising its will over a minority. . . . I believe that if majorities are entitled to have their civil rights protected they should be willing to fight for the same rights to minorities no matter how violently they disagree with their views.
I believe that the American concept of civil rights should include not only an observance of our Constitutional Bill of Rights, but also absence of arbitrary action by government in every field.25
Those were significantly liberal views coming from a California Republican in the 1930s. The protection of “minority” rights did not much enter into that party’s prewar lexicon, and a public willingness to defend protesters and picketers was certainly not part of Governor Merriam’s response to the waterfront disturbances of that decade. Warren himself had never shown much public interest in those protections—he had, after all, seemed a dedicated protector of the status quo and a prosecutor of labor. Kenny was delighted, and announced his endorsement as promised. The Hollywood Central Young Democrats condemned him, saying, “Every loyal Democrat should know that Earl Warren is a reactionary Republican.” 26 Tom Mooney, still politicking for his pardon from his jail cell in San Quentin, warned Kenny that he would withdraw his support for Kenny’s senate candidacy unless Kenny reconsidered his support for Warren.
Kenny held his ground. His endorsement was brave and influential, as the election returns were soon to show. But his real contribution to Warren was putting the Alameda district attorney to the exercise of the statement. It forced Warren out of his natural tendency toward problem solving and required of him a rare trip into philosophy. As a result, the statement, along with subsequent remarks elucidating it, marked an unusually expansive public reflection by the still-developing politician. Having put his views into words, Warren now set out to live up to them. The statement that Kenny extracted from Warren in the summer of 1938 was delivered for political purposes, but its commitments would be fulfilled many times over by a man destined to leave a deep imprint in the fabric of American civil liberties. Remarkably, it flickered first in the summer of 1938, with Warren’s father’s murder still fresh in his mind.
As Warren campaigned through the summer of 1938, his effort was largely overshadowed by the gubernatorial contest of that year, one that saw Sinclair’s failed efforts from 1934 resurrected in milder form by Culbert Olson. Olson undeniably looked like a governor. He had a lean, handsome face, set off by a shock of white hair. His life was devoted to liberal causes and to firm principles. Raised in Utah as a Mormon by a mother committed to women’s suffrage, Olson rejected his faith and successfully secured office in Utah as a Democrat. He worked for child labor laws and other Progressive legislation but became frustrated by Utah’s conservative politics. In 1920, Olson made his way to California. Then, in 1934, he naturally endorsed Sinclair’s EPIC campaign, and while Sinclair’s defeat ended his own political career, Olson survived the contest, becoming Democratic Party chairman and winning a seat in the state legislature along with a number of other EPIC candida
tes who rose even as Sinclair fell. In 1938, Olson attempted to pick up the EPIC banner and carry it forward without the distracting presence of Sinclair. Although Olson would never electrify California the way Sinclair had, nor would he terrify it. He was blessed with a weak opponent in Governor Merriam, whose pointy-elbowed politics seemed more tiresome in 1938 than in 1934, when they were contrasted with the grandiose alternatives offered by Sinclair. That fall, Olson became the first Democrat of the twentieth century to win the governorship of California.
Warren cross-filed on the Republican, Progressive, and Democratic tickets (the Progressives had, by 1938, split from the main guard of the Republican Party). He easily won the Republican and Progressive party nominations for attorney general. More surprising, he edged out his closest Democratic contender, though by a margin so small that he might have lost without Kenny’s endorsement. A write-in campaign for a dark-horse candidate buzzed Warren until November, but he overcame it without much trouble, and on November 8, the same Californians who picked Culbert Olson to be their governor overwhelmingly elected Earl Warren as the state’s attorney general.
In time, Warren would put his father’s murder behind him. Back came the reserve that characterized so much of Warren’s public image. Never again would he cry in public over the murder. Never again would his children see him mourn their grandfather. What were left were lessons and a more nuanced politician and man than the one who began the year: To Warren’s abhorrence of crime was added a new appreciation for civil liberties, an appreciation tested by the murder and found stronger. That commitment would waver in the coming war, as it would for many of America’s great civil libertarians, but civil liberties were now part of Warren’s quiver. By the time he sat to write his memoirs, Warren, back under control again, had transformed the murder of his father from a personal tragedy into an object of cool reflection.
“My father’s death,” he wrote, “must go down in history as one of the thousands of unsolved murder cases that plague our nation each year and cause such general apprehension for the security of our loved ones, ourselves, and our homes.”27
Chapter 6
PROGRESSIVE
His tasks of early manhood
Were never known to fail;
He chased all lawless villains
And locked them up in jail.
And when his neighbors bade him
Their pirate foes to vex,
Forthwith he cracked the masthead
Of the gambling schooner “Rex.”
WILLIAM SWEIGERT ON WARREN1
EARL WARREN’S first sixty days as California’s attorney general in 1939 exhumed his past and foretold his future. In those two months, Warren unveiled the modern attorney general’s office as he had recast it with the constitutional amendments of 1934. He reprised his corruption-busting days as a prosecutor in the tradition of Hiram Johnson, using the new powers that he had written for himself. And even as he did so, he tiptoed through the astonishing collapse of his chief Democratic rival for power. Earl Warren took the oath of office on January 2; by the end of February, he was the only consequential politician left standing in California.
Warren arrived early for his first day of work on January 2, 1939. He found two phone messages, one from Walter Jones, the editor of the McClatchy newspapers in California, the other from Joseph Stephans, president of the State Prison Board.2 Warren assumed them to be social calls welcoming him to his new job, and he happily sat down to return them. It was not yet nine A.M.
Within minutes, Warren was being briefed. Stephans and Jones had heard rumors that an extraordinary sale accompanied the final hours of the administration of Governor Merriam. As of that morning, Merriam had only been gone for a few hours, but according to the reports that Stephans and Jones were hearing, Merriam’s private secretary, a cocky young lawyer named Mark Lee Megladdery, who also was Merriam’s nephew, had spent those waning moments selling gubernatorial pardons. Prisoners who had access to cash allegedly paid Megladdery, who in turn secured them release from custody by convincing Merriam to sign orders freeing them. Warren called Megladdery, who confirmed that he’d been paid $500 by a San Francisco tavern owner named Clarence Bent, but said the money was a contribution to Merriam’s campaign fund and not given in return for a pardon. Megladdery also boasted that he was now out of reach, as Merriam had awarded his aide with a Superior Court judgeship in those same final hours of his administration. Warren, who insisted on modesty in his staff, was unimpressed by Megladdery’s swagger—he answered Warren’s questions “glibly but not truthfully,” Warren recalled later.3 He ended their conversation convinced that there was more to the story than Megladdery was admitting.
Faced with an investigation that threatened to implicate the outgoing Republican governor, Warren conferred with Culbert Olson. The two met in Olson’s suite, as new to Olson as Warren’s was to him. If Olson had reservations about entrusting such a task to a Republican, he did not share them; instead, he directed Warren to press ahead. “I am going to continue this investigation to develop the facts,” Warren told reporters after his conversation with Olson.4 Amazingly, that would be the last face-to-face meeting that Olson and Warren would ever have alone.5
Within a day, Warren’s doubts about Megladdery were deepening. After preliminary inquiries, Warren determined that the money Bent paid was made on behalf of a convicted murderer, Clarence A. Leddy, and witnesses now put the amount at $1,250.6 In addition, a retired member of the California Assembly, C. C. Cottrell, told Warren’s staff that when he had raised the possibility of a pardon for a constituent, a member of Merriam’s staff—unnamed by Warren—had offered to secure it in return for a deal to “split the fee” with the assemblyman. Cottrell said he told the governor’s aide to “go to hell.”7
Warren was in a familiar, if risky, position. He was at home prosecuting political corruption, but such cases always involved some hazard—in this case, Warren proposed to take on the outgoing governor and standard-bearer for the state’s Republican Party, which was, after all, Warren’s party, too. And Warren had only barely moved into office. Still, there was the upside. How better to prove one’s nonpartisanship than to prosecute a fellow Republican? Besides, there was his deep offense at graft. If Warren felt conflicted, he did not show it. There is only scant suggestion that he altered his routine at all in those early days of 1939. His calendar, compiled daily by Helen MacGregor, was filled with the customary club and group meetings. Warren supplemented her entries in his handwriting, adding, for instance, an eleven A.M. meeting with Cottrell during that first week.8 That Friday night was the governor’s Inaugural Ball. Unlike his other responsibilities, this one was easily missed. His handwritten note dismissed it. “Not attended,” he wrote.9
As Warren hunted for witnesses in the pardon-sale investigation, Olson took command of the state government—and for one brief moment it seemed he might succeed. His inaugural speech urged that both sides put the election behind them, and he promised to work with a skeptical business community long accustomed to Republican governors. For the most part, the message was well received. The Stockton Record called the message “conciliatory and conservative.” The Los Angeles Times was more guarded. Although the Times allowed that the speech was “restrained, dignified, conciliatory and considerably less leftward than many had expected,” the paper added that it was “less informative than might be desired and self-contradictory on some important points.”10
By week’s end, Olson had confirmed the worst fears of the Times and its business allies. During the campaign, Olson had said he would, if elected, consider pardoning Tom Mooney, the long-imprisoned labor activist convicted in the San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing of 1916. On Saturday, January 7, Culbert Olson gave Tom Mooney his chance to go free.
Mooney had been incarcerated at San Quentin ever since his conviction. But after the trial, questions were raised about the evidence against him. Eventually, even the trial judge lost faith in the verdict, and President Woo
drow Wilson intervened, concerned that the execution of a man regarded around the world as a labor victim of capitalist brutality would embarrass the United States. Governor William D. Stephens refused to pardon Mooney, but he did agree to commute Mooney’s sentence to life in prison.11 That avoided an international incident but prolonged the issue. The longer Mooney and his codefendant, Warren Billings, sat in prison, the more their case became a divining rod in California politics. Conservatives believed them radicals and rightly placed behind bars. Liberals saw them as wrongly convicted and sentenced by a stiffly right-wing government warped by its pursuit of “reds.” Conservatives drew strength from the Times’s bombing case, when labor’s frame-up cries had proved so humiliatingly false; liberals pored over the Mooney trial record and exposed its many inconsistencies. Undecideds were few, the center invisible for so long that it had effectively ceased to exist.
