by Jim Newton
Leone Baxter pressed hard. “Nina didn’t want to do that,” she remembered. “She didn’t want to exploit her family. But we knew we had to get that family. . . . He wasn’t very colorful, and he didn’t say anything particularly directed to women. You couldn’t get a feel for him. So she finally agreed that it would be alright to use the picture.”38
“The picture.” In it, Earl Warren stands at the end of a line of his family. Dressed in a dark suit, his tie neatly cinched at his throat and his wife’s hand gently entwined around his right elbow, Earl Warren is straight and tall. And he smiles, a wide grin of pride and appreciation. To his right, Nina beams as well. Jim Warren, handsome and tall like his dad, grins between big ears, his skinny frame tucked into a wool suit. To his right the younger Warrens are arrayed in descending order of age. Virginia wears a cheerful summer dress, Earl Jr. and Dorothy sport Scout uniforms, bandannas knotted in front. Honey Bear, always the picture of beauty and charm, laces her fingers together at the waist of her jumper. And rounding out the family is Bobby, in uniform and tie, a delighted smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he looks offstage, tickled by something out of view.
The picture was mailed first to Warren’s clubs and the friends in his card files. After that, requests came pouring in. By the time Election Day arrived, more than 3 million copies of the cards had been printed, distributed, and clucked over in homes throughout California. It was more than just a political photograph, as its popularity proved. It captured a slice of California itself—sunny and healthy, friendly, sturdy, and captivating. Displayed together, caught happily in motion, in full stride, the Warrens were pretty without being soft. They spoke to California’s sense of itself, of hopefulness and health, of promise. In political terms, the picture accomplished exactly what Whitaker and Baxter had desired: It humanized their law-and-order candidate, presented him as a father, not just a prosecutor. Running against Earl Warren was bad enough, California’s politicians learned right then. Running against his family was impossible.
The photograph softened and expanded Warren’s image, but he was not just altering his appearance for political purposes. Day after day, Warren was facing California’s people and slipping the ideological bonds of his upbringing. These men and women out in California’s mining towns were not newspaper publishers or members of the Grove. They were not wealthy or powerful. But they were Californians, and he liked them. People turned out to hear him speak and stayed to share their problems with him. Many politicians treat campaigns as a necessity, a burdensome undertaking required in order to govern, or as a contest, a battle of strategies intended to yield a winner and crush a loser. For Warren, they were all those things, but they also were a chance to listen to people, to think about issues, and to learn. As the 1938 campaign for attorney general forced Warren to contemplate the significance of civil rights, so the 1942 race required him to think beyond prosecutions and public safety.
As he did, Warren began to express a more liberal vision—protective of schools and the elderly, willing to compromise on health care, and eager to embrace a new conception of the government’s role in labor-management relations, not just of suppressing violence but of actual, constructive neutrality. It was not so much that Warren was becoming more liberal; it was more that he was expanding his political vocabulary. He spoke less of law enforcement, more of society and the needs of working people. All those would come to define Warren’s governorship and foreshadow his jurisprudence. Only in the area of security, where Warren already had developed opinions and where his support for the internment became an important part of his election rhetoric, was he a doctrinaire Republican in 1942.
Warren’s growth during the campaign of 1942 was influenced by many people, but one in particular provided the candidate with his new template. First introduced to Warren by Jesse Steinhart, Bill Sweigert had helped out in the 1938 campaign and then dropped away. In 1939, Sweigert’s wife Gertrude died. He fell into a depression, took up the habit of ducking out of the office to smoke, and drifted for a time, lost in grief. Warren would not let Sweigert fade away, however. He sought Sweigert out during those months and approached him about taking a job in the attorney general’s office. Sweigert saw the prospect of a restored life, and he accepted. Coming to Warren’s side, Sweigert grasped his new work with the fervor of the resurrected. He took charge of the office’s litigation section and went to work reorganizing holdovers from the Webb administration into an aggressive, principled group along the lines that Warren insisted on.39 Warren liked Sweigert, and the two would often lunch together, talking about politics. They did not generally agree, but their differences drew them together, not apart. Sweigert was as enamored of the New Deal as Warren was skeptical. Over their lunches, Sweigert would argue the merits of the president’s economic recovery efforts, and Warren would counter with defenses of states’ rights. Sweigert trumpeted the Democratic Party’s leadership, Warren complained that the Democrats were crippled by the “unholy combination” of their liberal Northern wing and their conservative Southern base.40
Disagree they might, but Sweigert was a man Warren trusted. Just as Warren admired Olney’s thoroughness and MacGregor’s efficiency, so he saw in Sweigert a man of contrasting views against whom he could test and sharpen his own. In that vein, soon after Warren entered the governor’s race, Sweigert prepared a memo for him. It was plainspoken and serious, and it helped give Warren ballast, grounded his observations in a unifying theory. “There is no place today for the so-called reactionary,” it began, “the person who still thinks that government exists only to protect the power of a successful few against the demands of plain people for a greater measure of health, comfort and security in their daily lives.” After that brusque dismissal of California’s right wing, Sweigert painted a picture of California during and after the war, and of a democratized, civilized America:
The aspirations of our people today are not extravagant. Few of us today still want to be millionaires or tycoons. This is going to be the century of little people, little homes and little pleasures. . . . [O]ur big country, our big projects, are, and always must be, the servants of our little people, our little families.
Our people want an opportunity to work, they want decent working conditions, they want their own homes and gardens, they want available education and vocational training for their children, they want available hospitalization and medical attention for their families, they want a few of the basic machines that make for comfort in and about the home in keeping with our modern age, they want a little time for leisure and a chance to enjoy a bit of their countryside. . . .
[W]e must never forget that government is the instrument set up by the people to preserve their security and their freedom and that, therefore, it must never neglect the one nor destroy the other.
The primary obligation of government is to develop policies that will advance the welfare of the people as a whole in their efforts to live decently under modern conditions.41
The modesty of those aspirations resonated with Warren and was confirmed by his contact with the people Sweigert described. In Modoc and Modesto, in the Sierra foothill towns and northern redwood glens, along the Mexican border, in the irrigated mud of the Imperial Valley or the apricot and almond orchards south of San Francisco, the people Warren met wanted just what Sweigert suggested—not exorbitant riches or fortunes but health care for themselves and their children, schools and roads, police officers and iceboxes, jobs and the promise of a comfortable retirement after decades of hard work. Sweigert argued that government could help, and that because it could, it should. Warren had objected to the New Deal’s intrusions on a free-market economy, but there was no denying what California’s people were telling him: that the government owed its citizens a chance. Warren was never one to stand on abstraction, and the theory of capitalism he had espoused as a young man seemed painfully theoretical next to the pleas of the men and women who gathered to meet him. He listened.
And as he
listened, Warren also began to speak in new and revealing language. Up to this point, labor regarded Warren with suspicion at best. His 1938 commitment to civil liberties was encouraging, but next to Point Lobos it struck many as hollow. When Warren would protest that he was a long-standing member in the Musicians’ Union, some labor leaders dismissed that as hypocritical. Now, however, Warren reached beyond his friends in the Masons or at the Grove and met with union members. As he did, Warren explored the middle in a state that up to that point had had little experience with a neutral politician on the subject of unions.
“We need a great deal more intelligence and less force in the handling of our labor problem,” Warren said on June 17, 1942. “[W]e need government officials who don’t belong to either side, but who can command the confidence of both. There is no more critical problem facing us in the reconstruction period ahead—and as Governor I would do my utmost to deal with it fairly and constructively, not as a partisan of either labor or management, but as the Governor of the people of all California.”42 In some cases, that meant avoiding the organized labor tempest of the moment rather than entering such debates on behalf of business. The so-called “Hot Cargo” bill, for example, was intended to win back for labor what the legislature in 1941 had taken away, the right of unions to join together to strike back at an employer by refusing to handle goods of another company. The legislature, over Olson’s veto, had barred such secondary boycotts, under which union members refused to buy products of one employer in order to put pressure on another—boycotting a department store, say, for its advertisements in a newspaper that was the target of a strike or labor action. Thwarted in the legislature, where Warren’s Republican allies dominated, labor exercised its rights under one of California’s Progressive-era innovations—the referendum—and took the issue to the ballot in 1942. Olson instinctively and predictably backed labor, and Warren was just as naturally expected to side with employers. Instead, he refused to take a position, and the Republican Party’s platform for 1942 similarly skirted it. “I believe it is absolutely imperative that bitterness and controversy should be avoided at this time on any issue which tends to divide our people,” Warren declared.43 That was tactical, but it disappointed some Republicans, and it telegraphed Warren’s determination to keep the right wing at arm’s length.
Similarly, the campaign forced Warren to think broadly about the question of state pensions for the elderly, a dominant concern in those years, as the economy at last shrugged off the Depression, but its effects continued to haunt a generation of Americans. Here again, the appeal of the issue was partly political. Well-organized groups, taking advantage of California’s referendum laws and the large population of anxious elderly Californians, sponsored a series of crackpot pension schemes during the Depression years. Olson had disappointed backers of one of them by giving some help to its supporters, only to then oppose the proposal itself. That proposal, known as “$30 every Thursday” or “Ham and Eggs,” was pandering economics—it attempted to alleviate the suffering of California’s jobless by having the state issue $30 worth of warrants every Thursday44 to every unemployed Californian over the age of fifty. FDR denounced the plan, as did Upton Sinclair, so Olson was hardly alone among liberals in viewing the giveaway as unsound economics (FDR even questioned its constitutionality, on the grounds that only the federal government is empowered to issue currency). Where Olson stumbled, however, was in suggesting that he was with its backers, whose enthusiasm for the idea bordered on the obsessive. Olson’s abandonment of the Ham-and-Eggers thus was not bad government, but it was bad politics. “Thousands have been bitterly disappointed,” Warren reminded Olson supporters, as if they needed reminding.
Warren could have stopped there—the reminder had served its purpose. It highlighted Olson’s ineffectiveness as well as his untrustworthiness. But Warren was no longer campaigning as a prosecutor or merely as an opponent of the incumbent. He was asking to be a governor, and those old people who shook his hand as he passed through their towns impressed him. Warren never endorsed Ham and Eggs or the various pension schemes that resembled it, but over the course of the campaign, he came to see government-supported pensions not as a luxury or an extravagance but rather “as a right.”
“I believe that we should stop thinking of an old-age pension as a dole which we grant to the needy,” Warren said on June 21. “I believe that every elder citizen, when he reaches the age fixed in the statute, should have the right to retire on an annuity, or a pension.”45 As the primary campaign neared conclusion, Warren amplified that idea. By then, even his defense of states’ rights was wavering. “[T]he solution of this problem lies in a uniform Federal Old Age Pension System, so that progressive, liberal States will run no risk of being penalized for their generosity. But in the meantime, I believe that here in California, where we have cradled many of the liberal reforms of the nation, that we should blaze the path and light the way for a sound, humane, progressive pension system.”46 Until Earl Warren, California Republicans did not often stand for “humane, progressive” social programs, especially expensive ones. He was changing. And because he was now his party’s leader, Republicans were now along for Warren’s ride.
In the area of education, Warren the candidate discovered for the first time some of the fundamental values that Warren the justice would extend to all citizens. In 1942, the emphasis was on protecting education from wartime cuts; in 1954, it would be on extending education to citizens regardless of race. The principles Warren discovered during the 1942 campaign, however, would underlie both. He vowed that even the war would not close schools. The alternative, he argued, was the erosion of American society itself. “Education,” he said, “has been recognized and acclaimed as the very foundation of democracy. A people without the education that will give them a knowledge of the world in which they live and the mental training to think out their problems cannot function efficiently as citizens under a democratic system of self-government.”47 Warren himself had never been much of a student, but he understood education’s place as an engine of progress and opportunity. It was, as he said, “the foundation of democracy,” and thus it had to be available to all for democracy to have meaning. Never after the 1942 campaign would Warren’s commitment to educational opportunity waver; few people of his time would do more to secure that opportunity.
Finally, the 1942 campaign, taking place as it did against the backdrop of war, caused Warren to think more expansively about America’s role in the larger world. Although he was never an isolationist, Warren now asserted with vigor the notion not only that America was part of a larger international community but also that it was required to lead other nations and reform domestically to be worthy of that leadership. He described that mission as “one hundred percent Americanism,” the slogan used by the American Legion. But Warren’s use of the phrase was a mischievous appropriation. Where the Legion was quick to identify enemies of Americanism and to punish them for perceived disloyalty, Warren argued that patriotism required tolerance. The war, he said, had created a new camaraderie in America. It had “wiped out all lines of demarcation, social, political and racial.” In 1942, America abroad faced enemies motivated by racism; Warren recognized that America had to be fair to be different.
The war and the campaign were working on Warren. “We must,” Warren said at an Independence Day gathering, “accept as an unalterable fact that we are a moving part of the world, that this is the American Century—the century in which we attain our maturity as a nation and assume a leadership among the society of nations; the century in which we will make come true the dream of Thomas Jefferson that all men are created equal.”48 Those values blossomed in 1942, ripened through his governorship, and eventually defined his tenure as Chief Justice of the United States. In the meantime, Warren’s internationalism would reach a symbolic high point in 1945, when he hosted the San Francisco meeting of delegates from fifty nations who gathered at The City’s Opera House on June 25 of that year to sign th
e charter creating the United Nations.
Warren’s embrace of social justice and international leadership, and his solidifying identification with working people, was not to be confused with softness. He kept up his attack on Olson throughout the campaign, and regularly derided the incumbent as bungling, partisan, inept, and unfit to lead a great state in a time of war. One particularly hard-edged piece of campaign literature was entitled “California Indicts Governor Olson.” It listed area after area in which the Warren campaign contended that Olson had put the state’s defenses at risk, and contrasted Olson’s wavering sympathies toward California’s Japanese with Warren’s firm resolve. Olson, it said, received delegations of Japanese in Sacramento and “intimated he ‘had his own plans’ for dealing with the Japanese situation—a plan to the rather vague effect that evacuation was unnecessary.” At the same time, the flyer noted, Warren created his maps of Japanese land holdings and supplied “federal authorities with factual data necessary for the prompt evacuation of the Japanese from California.”49
Whitaker distributed copies of that mailer to key civic groups and campaign leaders in mid-August. More than 100,000 were printed. Whitaker, always happy to be on the attack, was pleased. “To my mind,” he wrote to a friend, “this is the most effective thing we’ve had in the campaign.”50
That duality—Warren as tough on foreign enemies but generous toward children, the elderly, union members—made him a formidable candidate in 1942. And yet, despite his strong appeal, Warren did not receive lavish financial support in the primary. Many of the state’s conservative Southern California financiers remained uncertain about Warren’s ability to win, and believed their money would be better spent on legislative races, where they hoped to build Republican representation and check any initiatives by Olson. Although that limited Warren’s campaign at the outset, it was to prove a blessing, as it encouraged him to run a frugal effort, unencumbered by the interests of financial backers. Warren made no promises in return for money, and thus later there were none to be redeemed.
