by Jim Newton
The primary was in August, and Warren appeared on the Republican and Democratic tickets. Olson, having eschewed bipartisanship as a value, ran only as a Democrat. With Election Day approaching, Whitaker reached out to a reliable friend in the press for advice. In a telegram to Kyle Palmer, the political editor of the Los Angeles Times, Whitaker asked for his “frank analysis” of the approaching vote.51 Palmer’s reply demonstrated both his acumen and the unembarrassed place that the Times occupied in state Republican politics:
Unless I am more mistaken than usual, Warren can pile up a very impressive showing in the Democratic primaries if his campaign gets the gun from now on, until Election morning. Our checks here show him to be giving Olson a real run which is sufficient reason in my opinion for going all out. This plan is being followed in this area to the best of our ability and resources. 52
On August 25, Warren smashingly defeated Olson. The attorney general swept the Republican primary, to no one’s surprise, but also tallied 404,778 Democratic votes, barely coming in behind Olson’s 514,144 on the governor’s own ticket. Added to Warren’s Republican tally of 635,230 votes, his primary victory was a two-to-one drubbing. Those returns gave Warren a decided, almost insurmountable advantage heading toward the general election.
So ringing was Warren’s victory that he allowed himself a rare moment of gloating in a private letter to his friend and confidant William Knowland:
There is no doubt but what they are panic stricken by the results. Olson is now in Washington and I was told that he is begging for support of the administration as a drowning man clutches for straws. Whether he gets it remains to be seen, but I think it is at least doubtful whether the President would enter a fight way out here in California, where the Republican candidate has made his campaign on the basis of supporting his war effort more faithfully than has the Democratic Governor during the past couple of years. I would like to believe that, of course.53
Warren was right. FDR, who had let Sinclair sink rather than ride to his rescue in 1934, did the same with Olson. With the Democrat clearly in trouble, the same donors who had shunned Warren during the primary now were eager to take command of his fundraising. Warren refused, leaving it in the hands of Gordon Campbell, the lone Southern California business leader who had stood up for Warren in the primary. Campbell took the position that latecomers to the campaign were somewhat suspect. “Why are you offering to contribute now?” Campbell would ask prospective donors. “Don’t think there is anything for it because there is nothing for sale.” Warren described that as “abrasive honesty” and added, “I gloried in his spunk.”54
Warren was in command of the race, but it was not over yet. In October, Warren had his one brush with political danger. Before a packed and partisan crowd whose affections were for Olson, the two candidates met on the same stage in San Francisco for their only debate on October 11. It was a rollicking encounter—“a fire in the Curran Theater” was how the San Francisco Chronicle described it.55 Olson and Warren had not spoken in private in nearly four years, and they now took the chance to flail each other in front of a raucous audience. Warren accused Olson of frittering in the face of war, of excessive partisanship, and of allowing relations with the legislature to fall apart. Olson charged Warren with subverting his efforts to defend California, of fronting for the state’s reactionaries, and of lying about his commitment to nonpartisan government. Nonpartisanship, Olson said, “in the presence of these sharp and fundamental differences is sheer nonsense. Moreover, to profess nonpartisanship is to confess a lack of honest, firmly held convictions, without which no man is fit or competent to be a governor.”56 Abundantly clear from the debate was that by that point the two men had come genuinely to dislike each other. During one exchange, for instance, Warren attempted to explain his criticism of Olson’s State Defense Council, only to be interrupted. “You’ve been as dumb as an oyster,” Olson snorted. “If I’ve been that dumb, I couldn’t have been as much of an obstructionist as you’ve tried to make me,” Warren responded, his best retort of the afternoon.57
The debate did not go especially well for Warren. As the front-runner, he had more to lose than Olson, and Olson proved puckish. Nina Warren, listening to the radio broadcast while doing housework, heard the boos directed at her husband and was so distraught that she cried. She feared “all was lost.”58 Warren shrugged it off. It “didn’t prove anything, but it did put a little fire into the campaign,” he wrote later.59 And it came too late to affect the outcome. Olson challenged Warren to more debates, but Warren refused. Newspaper attention moved to other, closer races, a sure sign that Olson’s time was running out.
Already, the campaign had broadened Warren’s politics. In the final weeks, he continued to press for Democratic votes, espousing liberal positions and affiliating himself with FDR. Critics questioned his sincerity. Olson accused him of cowardice for refusing to acknowledge his partisanship, and bitterly denounced the attempt to curry Democratic support. “This non-partisan, non-political propaganda is a piece of colossal deceit,” he said during the waning days of the primary campaign. “It is essentially a lie.”60 It was natural that Olson should think that, just as it was predictable that he would have seen Warren’s early civil defense efforts as politically motivated; in both cases, Warren’s moves were without much precedent in California’s political history, and Olson’s interpretation was a natural act of projection from his own partisanship.
In fact, however, Warren was steadily acquiring new politics and cutting away the old. As he drew closer to the ideas of Sweigert and Steinhart, he moved further from those favored by his own campaign managers, Whitaker and Baxter. Ten days before the final vote, Warren tossed them over the side. They would forever disagree about what caused their final break. Reflecting on it thirty years later, Baxter blamed Warren’s temper. According to her, Warren authorized the release of a text of a speech he was to deliver on the elderly. Whitaker sent embargoed copies to leading reporters, giving them the chance to read it before publishing it a few days later. In the meantime, however, Warren changed his mind about the speech and demanded that Whitaker retract it. When Whitaker refused, “Earl got very angry,” Baxter recalled. “He wasn’t accustomed to being reversed on anything.”61
Whitaker was just as stubborn as his boss. He said he would quit if Warren recalled the speech. Warren retracted it anyway. Although Baxter said that other Warren supporters talked them into staying with the campaign, Warren did not call on them during the final days, effectively ending their relationship on the eve of victory.
As Warren remembered it, Whitaker and Baxter were under pressure from another client, Frederick Houser, running as a Republican for lieutenant governor, to produce an endorsement by Warren for his candidacy. Houser had been dogging Warren for weeks for an announcement of their joint campaign, but Warren refused. Such an announcement, Warren reasoned, would undermine his claims of a commitment to nonpartisanship. As Houser became more desperate for Warren’s support, he threatened to pull out of the race and say Warren had double-crossed him.62 Nothing could have been more calculated to incur Warren’s resistance, and he stiffened in the face of Houser’s demands. But Houser continued to press Whitaker to secure Warren’s help, and with just days remaining before the election, Whitaker issued a press release in the name of both candidates, subtly suggesting that they were working together. “I called [Whitaker] and told him to close the office and issue no more bulletins,” Warren wrote. “That was my last personal experience with Whittaker,” he added in his memoirs, adding insult to injury by misspelling Whitaker’s name.63
Warren coasted into the final days, a 4-1 favorite among bookies to win. He delivered. On Election Day, 1942, there were 1,275,287 ballots cast for Earl Warren; in a state that had a solid Democratic majority, just 932,995 voted for the Democratic incumbent, Culbert Olson. Olson would never again return to elected politics.
For Warren, the campaign had been enlightening and uplifting. He ended it a winne
r, of course, but the victory was more than a political one. It was transformative, not just satisfying. Warren had felt his way to a new political center and then had proven that it could win. He created a space between the cranky, old-guard Republican Party and the testy, self-destructive liberal Democratic Party. He had created Warrenism, a blend of hard politics and genuine compassion for the poor and underprivileged. Warren sensed the importance of what he had gone through, and he was elevated by it. “It is a great experience even to campaign for the governorship,” he reflected a few months later. “No one can really appreciate the size and complexity of our State until he has tried to cover it in a campaign and discuss the problems with the people. Whether I had been elected or not, I would have considered the campaign one of the great experiences of my life.”64
Olson ended the campaign in a far darker mood. As he prepared to vacate his office, he ran into Earl and Nina Warren. “Warren,” he said to the governor-elect, “if you want to know what hell is really like, just wait until you have been governor for four years.”
“Governor,” Warren replied, “I hope it won’t be that bad.”65
Two days after the election, the new governor-elect of California went fishing. Clem Whitaker called the office. Finding Warren out, Whitaker left a message instead. “Clem Whitaker,” it read, “is as happy as you are over the results.”66 Warren never returned the call. Instead, the new governor and his former consultants moved into opposing corners. The state’s fierce politics eventually would reunite Whitaker and Baxter with Warren. It would not be as friends.
Chapter 10
ASSUMPTION OF POWER
Warren was our first real “serendipitist” in California politics, one who has the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.
ROBERT KENNY 1
TO THE ATTENTIVE EAR, Earl Warren’s first inaugural address, delivered beneath the state capitol dome on January 4, 1943, heralded the changes in the man who now ascended to California’s governorship. Warren rose to the dais in California’s General Assembly at three in the afternoon. He stood beneath the Assembly’s motto, emblazoned in gold letters across a pale green background: Legislatorum est justas leges condere, “It is the duty of legislators to pass just laws.” The shade of green was taken from the British House of Commons (and snickered over by generations of California reporters as having been chosen because it resembles the color of money), and the columns to Warren’s left and right were meant to evoke ancient Rome. Warren took the oath of office from California chief justice Phil Gibson, and then was introduced to the legislature and audience by Charles Lyon, speaker of the California Assembly.2
Warren spoke for nineteen minutes. Before him, Warren’s principal audience was the California state legislature, composed largely of grim, wizened men, mostly conservatives, pleased to have a Republican leader back before them after four exasperating years of Culbert Olson.
To them, Warren reiterated his commitment to nonpartisanship—“[W]e must cut out all the dry rot of petty politics, partisan jockeying, inaction, dictatorial stubbornness and opportunistic thinking”—and recited the requisite Republican positions: Taxes should be lowered; the state’s windfall, $60 million surplus should be managed, not given away; and all programs should yield to the war effort, for which no expense could be spared. Supporters highlighted those passages. The speech passed into history with little note.
But Warren’s address was more than that, and its forgotten sections illuminate the man behind it at this seam in his political life, coming to power after digesting Sweigert’s memo and internalizing the lessons of the 1942 campaign. In this speech, Warren’s first as a statewide chief executive, he affirmed his determination to govern in a new way. He spoke of broad, humane goals and of an active government committed to intervening to achieve them. He spoke in terms undeniably more liberal than his audience. He decried the miserable health conditions faced by arriving migrants. He demanded that schools be protected from cuts. “The permanence of a democracy,” he said, “will . . . depend upon the training and inspiration provided for its youth.” He cited his long experience in law enforcement and noted that it had led him to the conclusion that crime prevention was more important than crime suppression. “I have come to feel with certainty that we have been making a wrong approach to our crime problem,” he said, surprising words from a man whose entire professional life had been dedicated to that problem. He asked that prisoners be given work and encouraged to reenter society. On the divisive issue of care for California’s elderly, Warren called for state pensions, as he had during the campaign, to be based not “upon the requirement of pauperism” but rather “as a social right.”
As Warren spoke, the frost was lifting outside over the fields of the abundant Central Valley, and the afternoon sun burnt off a nearly freezing night. The war industries hummed along California’s coasts. Young conscripts and volunteers came by the thousands, landing at airfields and military bases, anxious at what lay ahead. They stayed long enough to be outfitted and trained as sailors and soldiers, and while in California, to experience briefly its allure. Many would never return home; of those who survived the conflict even then raging over the horizon, many thousands would come back to the state where they trained. And all around, an ever-widening flood of farmers and shopkeepers, dockworkers, ranch hands, fruit pickers, and fishermen streamed into California from every state in America—a migration of humanity that, as Warren used to reflect, brought 10,000 new residents to his home state every week.
They were of every race and social class. Some came to manage California’s industries, bringing with them wealth and sophistication. Many more crossed the state’s borders in rags, owning nothing but what they carried, desperate for homes, schools, hospitals, police officers, running water, and sewers. A trickle of blacks entered the state from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, arriving mostly in Los Angeles to take up jobs vacated by its missing Japanese. In months, Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo was transformed into a center of African-American life and culture. In that flood of immigrants and the change they wrought, many of Warren’s Republican allies saw depravity and dissolution, a threat to their Mediterranean paradise. But Warren’s own mother and father were part of an earlier California migration, and as he looked into that mass of humanity streaming across the borders from Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon, he saw the realization of the plea etched in the capitol dome beneath which he spoke that Monday afternoon. “Give me men worthy of my mountains,” it enjoined. The arriving migrants were those men—and women and children.
Warren, too, determined to be such a man, to stand not against but rather with those migrants. As he prepared to govern the nation’s fastest-growing state, one that had transformed in Warren’s own lifetime and that was in the process of transforming yet again, the new governor imagined ribbons of highway connecting factories and fields. He envisioned the state’s resources guarded, not for aesthetic appreciation but rather for future use and enjoyment. He planned for safe, humane prisons, and health care that treated the mentally ill instead of incarcerating them. He wanted clean beaches and safe cities. He imagined a fair, decent place for those men and women to raise children in security and comfort. Warren asked members of both parties to join him in constructing that future. “No clique, no faction and no party,” he proclaimed, “holds priority on all the rights of helping the common man.”
Earl Warren spoke most clearly in one sentence: “I visualize adherence,” Warren said, “to a policy in all government activities which reflects a sincere desire to help men, women and children to develop and unfold the best that is within them.” Just as Sweigert had proposed, Earl Warren’s government would not merely incarcerate or educate—it would not confine itself to security. It would undertake big projects for little people. It would reach into their lives to help them. Earl Warren’s government would not abstain from activism. It would embrace it. Not one member of the majority Republican legislature applauded that line or any
other of his speech.3 Warren spoke to silence.
As their sullen response indicated, California’s leading Republicans were in no mood to be lectured about activist government by their new leader, triumphant over a Democrat whose support for just such activism had earned their derision. At the Los Angeles Times, editors did what they could to mold the public’s sense of their candidate into a vision that conformed with their own. Warren’s focal sentence—his call to an activist government intervening on behalf of the development of its people—was edited from the transcript of his speech as reprinted in the following morning’s Times.4 Gone, too, was Warren’s endorsement of crime prevention and his call for protection of schools. The edited transcript removed a passage in which Warren called for sympathy for prisoners—“Procedure could be established,” Warren said, “under which these men could be restored to community life and permitted, through rightful living, to earn pardon recognition from the courts in the community in which they have demonstrated a right to such consideration”—and also his commitment to a pension system even while the federal government debated the matter. “We should not permit this thought to delay our own efforts to build and maintain a pension structure within the limits of our ability to pay,” Warren said. The Times clipped that as well.
