by Jim Newton
The governor did not tell legislators that afternoon what he intended to do about the state’s “frightful” highway problem but did announce that he was calling the legislature into special session to address the issue. In California, the special session was—and still is—a device used by governors to focus the legislature on a particular topic and to allow bills enacted at such sessions to take effect more quickly than under normal circumstances. By calling the session on highways, as he had on health insurance in 1944, Warren elevated the issue to the top of the state’s political agenda and created a path for quick action.
The following Monday, he made clear what it was precisely that he had in mind: an increase in the gas tax to pay for road and highway construction. Californians in those days paid 3 cents a gallon of state taxes on gasoline, and Warren proposed to double it to 6 cents. That was a significant tax, but one with the potential for real return. Russell H. Conwell, in his “Acres of Diamonds” speech that made such an impression on young Earl Warren, had advised that “he who can give to this city better streets . . . he will be great anywhere.”12 Warren believed that all his life, and his gasoline tax was meant to fulfill it. Under Warren’s proposal, the money from the tax would fund highway construction across the state, construction he argued was needed to make roads safer but also to uncork California’s economy, which depended in large measure on swift transport of goods across large distances only barely touched by railroads. The state’s leading oil executives were flabbergasted. Many had contributed to Warren’s campaigns in 1946. And now he proposed to tax them.
As did the medical association, the oil companies fought back. And like the medical association, they did not always fight cleanly. Led by the Western Oil and Gas Association, which represented nearly all of California’s oil producers, the oil interests mailed postcards to California car owners, asking such leading questions as “Do you want your taxes raised?” When owners replied that they did not, the cards flooded the legislature.13 While the legislature debated Warren’s tax increase, the oil companies raised gas prices, first in August 1946 and again in January 1947. Furious at the increases and still angry at his treatment by the medical association, Warren wheeled on these new right-wing adversaries with the full legal and political force of his office. He denounced the companies and their executives, publicly asked the United States Department of Justice to investigate the antitrust implications of the gas price hikes, and consented to a rare deal in order to win passage of his measure.
The Justice Department’s announcement that it would open an antitrust case rattled the oil companies; in Warren’s dry retelling, “the cohesion of the opposition disintegrated.”14 In the state Assembly, however, the oil companies pressed on, and seemed to have victory in hand, though by the barest of margins. Warren, unwilling to lose two battles in two terms, stumped hard for the tax and lashed back at the oil companies: “While the slick lobbyists of the oil companies are overwhelming the capital with false propaganda and presumably are sobbing for the motorist, who is being asked to pay only his fair share for decent highways which will protect the lives of our people, the oil companies have connived to siphon off the loose change of the people before the Legislature arrives at a conclusion.”15
This was unusually prickly coming from Warren, but the governor had been checkmated in the health insurance debate by one group of conservative opponents and their lobbyists; he was in no mood to lose again. That is also evidenced by his rare departure from his self-imposed ban against horse trading for votes. The Assembly was closely divided over the measure, and Warren’s aides told him it might come down to a single vote. One Los Angeles assemblyman, they added, might be willing to deal his vote in exchange for Warren’s willingness to sign a piece of legislation close to his heart, a bill requiring that any pet food containing horse meat be labeled as to whether its contents had been inspected. Warren looked at the bill, saw no reason to object, and agreed. With that, the assemblyman joined the gas-tax ranks, and dog food sold in California thereafter was labeled “inspected” or “un- inspected.”16
“This was the only time I ever made a trade with a legislator for his vote,” Warren wrote later, “but it was for an important one.”17 Warren had his victory, and with it, California had its highways.
Warren and the oil companies parted as enemies in that debate, and one in particular would come back to haunt the governor. William Keck, head of the Superior Oil Company, had angrily fought the bill, and the oil industry had threatened to pull the companies out of California if the tax passed. Warren called the bluff, and won.18 Keck, whose wealth and family foundation would make him a significant force in California social history, went away mad, but his pique must rank among the most shortsighted in the history of special interest complaints. The tax that Warren succeeded in passing over Keck’s objections helped to pay for paving thousands of miles of California highways. Cars multiplied and took to those roads. By the mid-1950s, California’s image was inextricable from that of the automobile. Those cars ran on the gasoline that Keck and his company sold, and they piled up miles on highways that Keck had fought against.
Beyond the gas tax, Warren pressed the balance of a social agenda whose liberal tilt was becoming undeniable. In 1947, he submitted the first single-year budget in California history, the state having outgrown its practice of budgeting in two-year cycles. “We are dealing with a bigger and more diversified postwar California, with expansion in almost every field,” he announced. Given that, Warren found almost every one of the state’s problems worthy of more government spending. He proposed the construction of two new mental health clinics; improvements in medical, surgical, and hospital care; a new school for juvenile delinquents and a medium-security prison for adults; more money for crime prevention, for education, and for a vast expansion of the state’s social welfare system, whose spending Warren boosted from $6.7 million a year to $61 million a year, mostly in grants to counties for taking care of the problems of California’s poor and indigent. As before, he proposed those expansions not only without new sales or income taxes (he was supporting the gas tax hike, but only for the specific purpose of road and highway construction), but actually with the continuation and extension of his 1943 cuts. Warren’s budget, like those before, survived the legislative process largely intact. As much as conservatives might find to dislike in him, they also found him persistently difficult to beat.19
Over time, Warren’s spending bore witness to his ideology—not once as governor would he substantially curtail any program that benefited poor or working people; not once but twice did he seek tax increases in the face of determined special interest opposition. Moreover, his commitment to social justice found purchase in a much smaller but telling act, only barely noticed at the time or remembered later. It was executed with Warren’s signature professionalism and calm. The results, not the rhetoric, testified to its importance.
In 1945, five Mexican-American fathers, fed up with the segregation of their children into so-called Mexican schools in Southern California, filed a lawsuit, led by Gonzalo Mendez, challenging the existence of that separate school system. The Orange County school district defendants argued that the separation was based on language, not race, but the reality of their schools belied that. Language testing was rudimentary, and assignment to the schools was based not on one’s command of English but rather on one’s appearance and last name. Students assigned to a Mexican school were not permitted to leave it once they mastered English; they remained there until graduation. The result was unambiguous racial discrimination. In the small town of Westminster, for instance, two elementary schools educated local children. One, Westminster School, enrolled 628 Anglo children and 14 Latino children. The other, Hoover School, had 152 students, all of them of Mexican descent .20 In another district, two schools shared the same property, their entrances just 120 yards apart. One had 83 “English-speaking” students and 25 “Spanish-speaking” students; the other had 249 “Spanish-speaking”
children and not a single white .21
The United States Supreme Court still sanctioned “separate but equal” education in those years, so the federal judge who heard the Mendez lawsuit, Paul J. McCormick, could easily have dismissed it. Instead, he ruled on behalf of the Mexican-American families that the districts were deliberately discriminating on racial grounds and denying those families the equal protection of the law. His ruling amazed and angered the school districts, whose lawyer then appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal was taken up in 1946, and then Attorney General Robert Kenny, serving out the end of his term after having lost to Warren in the governor’s race, entered an amicus brief for the State of California on behalf of the families. There is no evidence that Warren himself participated in the filing of that brief, but he soon made his views clear on the subject of segregated education. While the appeals court upheld McCormick’s ruling, it did not embrace some of his reasoning, finding on narrower grounds. The Ninth Circuit ruling could have ended the matter; had it, the Orange County schools would have been desegregated but California’s education code would have remained burdened by two racist artifacts of the Progressive era. Those code sections, while not authorizing discrimination against Mexican-Americans, did allow for the segregation of Indian children and those of “Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage.”22
In June 1947, those sections were struck from the code upon the signature of California’s governor, Earl Warren. For those who would later express surprise at Warren’s position in Brown v. Board of Education, the Mendez case should have offered a clue. But, like much of Warren’s building legacy in those years, it was accomplished with little fanfare. By the end of 1947, racial segregation in California schools was illegal; by the end of 1954, it would be for the nation as well. The same man was responsible for both.
AS GOVERNOR, Warren was surrounded by aides and acquaintances, many of them eager to presume friendship. In fact, he befriended few. He was guarded and cautious, and not many men, and even fewer women, crossed the threshold from cheerful acquaintance to trusted friend. His top staff, including MacGregor and Sweigert, were devoted but subordinate, trusted aides but not exactly friends. Bill Knowland was a political friend and a good one, but he was in Washington, placed there by Warren.
And yet a few did penetrate Warren’s reserve. Warren Olney never was far away for long. And during the years that Warren served in Sacramento, he met three men who would find their way through into the closest circle of his friendship. Bart Cavanaugh, the city manager for Sacramento, shared a love of sports and children with Warren. The two started by taking in local games together—their boys attended high school together, and Warren and Cavanaugh liked to sneak over to the stadium to catch their football games. In time, they settled into the robust life of fans, traveling to San Francisco or Los Angeles and taking in a weekend full of sports. Warren usually would root for the local team—he enjoyed his partisanship on the field if not in the office—and during baseball games, he would keep a meticulous scorecard.23 One exception to Warren’s local centrism was the Yankees, for whom he rooted faithfully. Even there, the reason was based in California: The Yankees’ great star Joe DiMaggio came from San Francisco. Warren, later to become a habitué of Toots Shor’s in New York, came to know DiMaggio on and off the field, even attending the funeral of DiMaggio’s mother with Cavanaugh. For their trips to games, Cavanaugh made arrangements, taking care to line up with the rest of the fans and to buy their tickets so as not to be accused of accepting freebies. Their devotion to sports established their bond, which deepened over their children. Each suffered the illnesses of their youngsters, and confided his pain in the other. Their friendship stretched across decades and led, in later years, to an annual pilgrimage; the World Series has known few more devoted fans than Earl Warren and Bart Cavanaugh.
Another lifelong friendship was struck by happenstance in the clattering comfort of a train. It was the summer of 1944, and Earl and Nina were returning to California from Chicago on the City of San Francisco, which ran the route in those days. Jesse Steinhart was on board as well, and he introduced the Warrens to another passenger, Benjamin H. Swig. Swig was one of the most ambitious and successful real estate investors in America, having mastered a system of purchasing expensive properties with little cash outlay of his own. None of that would have impressed Warren much, but Swig also nurtured an abiding appreciation for public service, and as the two men talked, they found much to like about each other. Swig was on his way to take over his newest acquisition, the Fairmont Hotel, an iconic San Francisco monument that had survived the 1906 earthquake, only to fall into shabbiness during the Depression. Swig appreciated luxury, and he would soon refashion the Fairmont into one of San Francisco’s great hotels—it would become The City’s traditional Election Night home for Democratic candidates, and in later years the Warrens’ home away from home, when they would return to California from Washington for holidays. With his canny eye for a deal, Swig also assumed another role for the Warrens. A lifetime of public service gave Warren power and importance, but it did not make him rich. As a result, he worried about money, and Swig helped ease those concerns by guiding Warren’s investments. He kept an eye out for promising real estate opportunities in the West, and eventually got Earl and Nina Warren a share of the Fairmont itself.24
The third of Warren’s new friendships in those years was, in at least one way, the least likely. Reporters liked Warren. His professionalism was so thorough that it overcame their doubts, and they allowed that he was straight and honest. But that admiration was not often reciprocated. With rare exceptions, Warren did not confide in reporters. He presented to them and answered their questions, but they were kept apart from him. One exception was Drew Pearson. A sharp-tongued liberal, educated in elite private schools, Pearson was an enthusiastic champion of the New Deal and a fierce advocate of American involvement in World War II (as with Warren, Pearson’s support for the war had triumphed over his commitment to civil liberties; he too supported the internment of the Japanese). Pearson launched his career as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun but moved in the early 1930s to the Washington Post, where he wrote a widely syndicated and much-feared column, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Pearson was flashier than most Warren friends—no one would ever accuse Warren Olney or Bart Cavanaugh of coveting the limelight. But Pearson was passionate about his work and his country. He was connected to power but not in awe of powerful men or women. All that appealed to Warren, who appreciated Pearson’s work more and more as they came to know each other—Pearson would, in fact, help Warren decode some of Washington’s mores when Warren’s career took him there in 1953.
They first met on November 7, 1947, “on a floodlit platform on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,” as Pearson remembered it.25 Pearson then was stumping for a project he had conceived and promoted in his column, a Friendship Train intended to solicit food contributions for Europe and to embarrass President Truman for not doing more to help the continent then paralyzed by strikes, suffering under a poor harvest, and still trying to shrug off the ravages of war. Pearson hoped the train would stir American sympathies and invited governors to join him in order to drum up support for the idea; their endorsement, he hoped, would bring the campaign credibility and seriousness, would elevate it beyond a mere columnist gimmick. “I confess therefore to a feeling of considerable gratitude when I met the Governor of California on the platform,” Pearson wrote, adding that Warren arrived with Nina and “one statuesque blond daughter.” They rode together on the train that day, and Warren spoke at each stop, “nothing very pretentious,” but sincere and political—Warren made a point of telling each audience that no federal official was aboard the train. At each little city, local volunteers brought another bundle of food. By the time the Friendship Train arrived in Sacramento, the project was a success, and Earl Warren and Drew Pearson were friends.26
At home, the Warrens were settled into their public life. Their c
hildren were growing, and, as Pearson was hardly the only one to notice, attracting attention. Virginia was an eye-catching young woman, and men and boys regularly would write to her unbidden. During the war, she took to corresponding with servicemen. She did it as a wartime duty, and most appreciated the notes in the spirit they were sent, but at least one of her correspondents took it too far. He showed up one day at the mansion to ask Virginia on a date and explained to the guard that they had been writing each other. Virginia was suddenly confronted with her own growing effect on men: “I got kind of scared,” she confided to her mother’s assistant. “I sort of stopped writing letters after that.”27 Earl Jr. was more studious, while Dorothy was quiet and levelheaded, and she sometimes seemed forgotten between her magnetic older and younger sisters.28 Bobby and Honey Bear were the family spitfires, athletic and spirited. There was little they would not attempt. Honey Bear took up skiing as a youngster, and headed off on adventures by herself. Before dawn on Saturday mornings, sometimes as early as three-thirty A.M., she trudged to the local bus stop with her skis and equipment and caught the bus for Lake Tahoe. She spent the day on the slopes, then came back the same night (the bus trip took four to five hours). It was nine P.M. by the time she got home, but Nina would run her a bath and bring her dinner in bed. The next morning, she was off again. Honey Bear was a fixture on the slopes as she was in the California imagination; when Squaw Valley opened in 1949, Honey Bear was the first person after the ski patrol to ski the mountain. A friend on the patrol got her the first ride.29 One person who watched her grow up remembered that Honey Bear “had no physical fear of anything.”30
