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| ISBN-13: | 9780520955011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Trailblazer
A Biography of Jerry Brown
By Chuck McFadden
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95501-1
CHAPTER 1
Early Years
Politics and Religion
It is not just my family but every Californian is heir to some form of powerful tradition, some history of overcoming challenges much more daunting than those we face today.
Jerry Brown, third inaugural address, January 3, 2011
Californians in 1938 were busy. In Hollywood, producer David Selznick was masterminding a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O'Hara in the forthcoming supercolossal epic Gone with the Wind. (There were salacious rumors that he was conducting part of his talent hunt on the casting couch.) In the hills above Berkeley, Ernest Orlando Lawrence was working on his atom-smashing cyclotron, a scientific advance that would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 and contribute to the development of the atomic bomb. The San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner carried headlines about distant war in Asia and potential war in Europe, but they had little immediate significance to most people, who were still getting used to driving on the Golden Gate Bridge, just eleven months old, and the Bay Bridge, a mere seventeen months old. The Golden State's burgeoning population was soaring from 5.6 million in 1930 on its way to 6.9 million in 1940, even while families were feeling the effects of the Great Depression.
An ambitious young San Francisco attorney named Edmund G. "Pat" Brown became the father of a baby boy on April 7, 1938, the third of what would be Pat and his wife Bernice's four children. They named the new arrival for his father, Edmund Gerald Brown, but most people called him Jerry. He had no brothers. His three sisters were Barbara and Cynthia, both older than Jerry, and Kathleen, the youngest, who came along in 1945, seven years after Jerry.
Jerry Brown is a fourth-generation Californian, born into what passes in that state for a family with ancient roots there. One side of the family came from Germany, the other from Ireland, and both arrived in 1852. Augustus Fiedler Schuckman, from Westphalia, settled in the Colusa County town of Williams, amid wheat and barley country. He was one of the thousands of settlers who flooded into California four years after gold had been discovered in the tailrace of a lumber mill in the Sierra foothills owned by an enterprising Swiss immigrant named John Sutter. But Augustus sought his fortune in settled, peaceful farming in California's Central Valley, not panning for gold in a rough miner settlement.
He came to a place isolated from the rest of the nation and, indeed, the world. A popular song of the era declared of those who would come to California:
They swam the wide rivers and crossed the tall peaks
And camped on the prairie for weeks upon weeks.
Starvation and cholera and hard work and slaughter,
They reached California in spite of hell and high water.
Augustus kept his own more personal record of his six-month trip to California. It was a classic pioneer saga. Here are excerpts from the diary he kept during the trek:
On the 26th of June, we came to the first sand desert—it was 41 miles. We went there at night and rode 19 hours in it....
On the 26th of July, we came to the second large plain—also 40 miles long. Here we lost seven oxen which died of thirst Thousands of cows, horses and mules were lying about dead....
The discarded wagons by the hundreds were driven together and burned. We saw wagons standing that would never be taken out again and more than 1,000 guns that had been broken up. Here on this 40 miles are treasures that can never be taken out again.
Schuckman did well enough in his new surroundings to build Mountain House eventually, a stage stop in Sonoma County that included a bar, a post office, lodging, and a small store. He and his wife, Augusta, had eight children. One of them, Ida, found herself drawn in 1896 to the glamour and wealth of San Francisco, the commercial center of the West Coast with a growing population of three hundred thousand.
Amid the towering ten- and fifteen-story buildings, plush hotel lobbies, and breathtaking views of sparkling San Francisco Bay, Ida met and married Edmund Joseph Brown, the son of an Irish Golden Gate Park gardener named Joseph Brown. Joseph and his wife, Bridgette, had come from Tipperary, in County Cork. They sought their fortune in a two-year-old state where, it was well known, one could pick gold nuggets right up off the ground, the climate was always miraculously sunny, and the scenery was astonishing. The settlers found that at least the last part was true.
Joseph managed to stay married to Bridgette and employed by the city and was apparently a satisfactory gardener, even though he did occasionally go off on three- or four-day benders. It happened only two or three times a year, however, and Joseph took vows of sobriety after each frolic.
Joseph was content to remain in his humble job, tending the flowers in Golden Gate Park, but that was an unusual characteristic among Jerry Brown's ancestors. Joseph's son Edmund, Ida's new husband, aimed higher. Edmund was a merry, free-spirited Irish Catholic who wanted to make his fortune in business. And why not? San Francisco was full of opportunity. Edmund started by opening a cigar store on Market Street and in 1905 branched out, opening a nickelodeon. As the years went by, the family's fortunes gyrated with the prudence of freewheeling Edmund's various financial ventures, which in addition to the cigar store and the nickelodeon included at one time or another a laundry, a penny arcade, and a full-scale vaudeville theater that tanked. The great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire forced the Browns to move briefly across the bay to almost-untouched Oakland, the city that would elect Jerry Brown as its mayor ninety-three years later.
Along with the nickelodeon acquisition, the year 1905 saw the arrival of a son, named Edmund Gerald Brown. When he was twelve years old, the future governor would acquire his nickname, "Pat," for Patrick Henry, after giving a sales pitch for World War I Liberty Bonds and ending it with "Give me liberty or give me death!"
Young Pat was an intelligent and convivial child who grew up to be an outgoing, likable man and a natural politician. He was not fond of the up-and-down entrepreneurial life led by his father and sought something that would give him respectability and a more secure income—like the law. There was the added advantage that it would provide an appropriate springboard for the political career Pat was already thinking about. Pat attended the San Francisco College of Law, won his law degree in 1927, passed the bar that same year, and went into practice, working for Milton Schmitt, a blind attorney who became his mentor.
By the time Jerry came along, Pat was prospering as an up-and-coming young attorney who could now afford some of the better things in life. Even though their circumstances were comfortable, Pat Brown disputed the idea that his son was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
"We never had any money to speak of," he told interviewer Orville Schell. "When I ran for DA of San Francisco, I was only making $8,000 a year. I had won some lawsuits, but I never had any money. We never took any trips."
Jerry was born at St. Mary's Hospital, the first in a series of institutions that had "St." or "Sacred" or "Santa" as part of their names and would largely influence his first two decades. He grew up in a white, five-bedroom Mediterranean-style house on Magellan Avenue in the desirable Forest Hills section of San Francisco.
Magellan Avenue today seems little changed from the time young Jerry Brown was there. Despite the nearby busy streets, it is a quiet, pleasant, tree-lined upper-middle-class neighborhood, with a mixture of large Italianate, Tudor, and Spanish-style houses. Home prices today range from $1.5 million and up, with most fetching far more than that.
His parents had a lifelong love affair. Bernice Layne Brown was the stunningly good-looking and enormously intelligent daughter of a San Francisco police captain. She graduated from high school at age fourteen and from the University of California's Berkeley campus at eighteen; she was teaching school at nineteen. If the career straitjackets imposed on women at the time had not been present, there is no telling what Bernice Layne Brown might have attained in a professional life had she been inclined to pursue one.
Bernice had first attracted Pat's eye when she was only thirteen, when they were in the same history class at Lowell High School. Lowell was and is an elite public school that numbers among its graduates actors Bill Bixby and Benjamin Bratt, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Stephen Breyer, Alexander Calder, the artist who invented the mobile, and actress-singer Carol Channing. Pat had almost immediately tried to get a date with pretty Bernice, but her parents ruled that she was too young to go out with boys. But Pat persisted, and after years of courtship, he and Bernice eloped to Reno, Nevada, on October 30, 1930. They had to elope and marry on the sly because women teachers in 1930 were not allowed to marry. Pat was twenty-five.
In contrast to her ebullient, politicking husband and her non-ebullient, intellectual, politician son, Bernice was ambivalent about politics. In a 1960 news release, the governor's office said, "Mrs. Brown frankly admits that she never would have chosen a political career for her husband if the choice had been hers to make." But she "gracefully assumed the role of First Lady. As First Lady, she was a popular speaker, often offering intimate stories of family life in the governor's mansion."
Pat made friends easily, an asset that fueled his political ambitions. Just one year into his law career, in 1928, he ran for the state Assembly as a Republican but lost. At the urging of a friend, labor lawyer and fellow Lowell High alumnus Matthew Tobriner, he switched to the Democratic Party in 1932, and in 1939 he ran for San Francisco district attorney against incumbent Matthew Brady. He lost again. But in 1943, when Jerry was five, indomitable Pat ran again, and this time he won. He would be in public office for the next twenty-three years.
As the district attorney of San Francisco with an eye for higher office, Pat eventually performed what was almost a rite of passage for law enforcement officials of that era, even in wink-at-sin San Francisco. He launched a headline-seeking campaign against vice. He cracked down on bookies and led a raid on San Francisco's most elegant bordello, run by Sally Stanford. Most political observers at the time credited the antivice campaign, especially the 1949 raid on Ms. Stanford's popular establishment, as a major factor in Pat's successful campaign for California attorney general a year later.
In 1946, as the well-regarded Democratic district attorney of a major California city, the ever-ambitious Pat had thought himself well poised to run for state attorney general. He took on Frederick Howser, a former member of the Assembly who was the district attorney for Los Angeles County. Howser beat him. But four years later, with the Sally Stanford raid under his belt, Pat tried again and beat Republican opponent Ed Shattuck by 225,000 votes. In what would be regarded as freakish today, parts of California were plastered with billboards urging voters to cast ballots for Democrat Brown and the ever-popular Republican governor Earl Warren. The governor had not liked Howser, but he did like the affable Brown and looked favorably on Brown's use of his name. Brown was the only Democrat to win statewide election in California that year, which saw Earl Warren win a third term as governor. Brown's son Jerry, in a somewhat parallel triumph, was to be a Democratic victor in a mostly Republican year when he was elected secretary of state twenty years later, in 1970.
Although he was a politician to his core with an eye for the next chance to move up, Pat had a strong sense of right and wrong—most of the time. He opposed the forced relocation of some ninety-three thousand California residents ofJapanese descent, including those who were U.S. citizens, during the early days of World War II. It was a courageous stand, especially for a politically ambitious young man. The relocation had been endorsed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and most other army and civilian authorities, and Brown's opposition stood in marked contrast to the position of his friend Earl Warren, who as governor endorsed the policy. (Warren later said he regretted his role in the relocation.)
Pat Brown was a visionary and an idealist who sought to make California a better place by being a civic booster on a grand scale, building freeways, opening new university campuses—three University of California branches in one year, 1965—and creating an enormous water project. Jerry absorbed his father's sense of vision but manifested it differently. More reserved, intellectually inclined, and with a strong commitment to personal austerity, he grew up questioning his father's backslapping ebulliency and unswerving devotion to pouring concrete. Despite his more self-reflective nature, however, Jerry also internalized his father's ferocious ambition.
Both Pat and Jerry were entranced by the rough-and-tumble game of moving masses of people in a desired direction, and both were prepared to do what was necessary to accomplish political goals. Pat could pull an occasional dirty trick; if Jerry ever did, it escaped public notice.
Jerry's political heritage was therefore formed as he grew up in a serious, but certainly not gloomy, household where law, politics, religion, and ambition dominated the adult conversation that Jerry eagerly absorbed and would adumbrate his lifelong interests in politics and various intellectual or spiritual pursuits. He was an inquisitive, intelligent child who listened closely to adult dinner-table discussion and asked endless questions. Despite his idealism, he learned early the value of playing on voters' fears and ignorance, campaign tools used even by candidates such as his father, who told fearful voters he would stand up against eastern hoodlums and communist subversives.
There is little evidence that humor played much of a role in Jerry's upbringing. While it is true that Pat Brown was an outgoing man who was extremely likable, he was not known as a great teller of jokes, nor was Bernice. Young Brown grew up in an atmosphere emphasizing achievement, substance, and serious concerns. Humor was not a mainstay of life on Magellan Avenue. Politics was. "I was attracted and repelled by what I saw of politics in my father's house. The adventure. The opportunity. The grasping, the artificiality, the obvious manipulation and role-playing, the repetition of emotion without feeling—particularly that—the repetition of emotion I've always felt I could see the limitations because I was brought up in it," Jerry said years later. Jerry also got a close-up look at California politics on the campaign trail, accompanying Pat as a twelve-year-old in 1950 when his father endeavored to show voters up and down the state that a good family man was running for attorney general.
But it wasn't all politics in the serious Brown home. Spiritual concerns have always been an important part of Jerry's life. In his first twenty years, they manifested themselves in his intense devotion to the Catholic Church. He attended St. Brendan's, a Catholic grammar school near his home, then San Francisco's St. Ignatius High School—now known as St. Ignatius College Preparatory—founded by the Jesuits in 1855. He graduated in the school's centennial year, 1955. He was devoted enough to the Catholic Church to attend services on his seventeenth birthday, causing him to miss a surprise birthday party his friends threw for him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Trailblazer by Chuck McFadden. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Comeback Codger
1. Early Years: Politics and Religion
2. Going Statewide: Learning the Ropes and Hunting Headlines
3. The Big Show
4. Romance, Flip-Flops, and Moonbeams
5. Back and Forth: Zen and Politics
6. The Governor-Turned-Mayor and Marriage
7. The Remarkable Election
8. Difficult Choices
Afterword
Appendix 1: Three Inaugural Addresses
Appendix 2: Author’s Note on California’s Constitution: Bigger, but Not Necessarily Better
Notes
Bibliography
Index