The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Forced to reinvent himself again, Ed jumped on the next hot trend: quick-finish photo studios. A quarter bought three pictures, developed and printed in ten minutes. Ed opened a novelty store on Market and Fourth with a photo studio in the back. The pennants and souvenirs sold well during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and the photos proved even more popular. Ed expanded the photo booths to several more locations on Market Street. He was able to offer enough money to lure photographers away from more prestigious jobs. As he explained to one photographer who was reluctant to leave a classier job at the upscale Gump’s department store: When you take your girl to the Palace9 Hotel, she won’t ask where you made the money.

  Ed and Ida were sharp dressers, he in three-piece suits and a gold watch and chain, she in elaborate dresses and feather hats. The photo studios featured picturesque backdrops of arbors and bridges, and Ed often posed his family on the faux park bench or motorcar. Edmund was about twelve when he began working for his father after school and on weekends, helping develop and enlarge pictures. Business boomed when the United States entered the Great War in 1917. Soldiers wanted photos before they shipped out or when they came back on leave. Ed doubled the price to fifty cents and added several more photo booths.

  In a significant historical footnote, the United States declaration of war against Germany also affected the Brown family legacy.

  Within weeks of entering the war in April 1917, the United States issued Liberty Bonds to underwrite the military campaign. The first sale of $5 billion worth of bonds at 3.5 percent interest met with a tepid response from large investors. Before the second bond sale in the fall, the Treasury Department launched a public relations campaign to promote the sale of bonds to individuals, a relatively new concept. By marketing bonds as a patriotic act, the government hoped to raise cash and build support, after voters had just reelected President Woodrow Wilson on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.”

  UNCLE SAM NEEDS MONEY AS WELL AS MEN, read Liberty Bond posters. BECOME AN INVESTOR AND HELP YOUR COUNTRY FIGHT! Movie stars like Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin appeared at rallies to help sell Liberty Bonds. Chaplin made and starred in a short film, “The Bond,” which moved from the bond of friendship to the bond of marriage to Liberty Bonds and ended with Chaplin using a Liberty Bond to knock out the German kaiser.

  The Federal Reserve coordinated contests tied to another public relations effort of the Wilson administration, the “Four-Minute Men.” Tens of thousands of men, women, and children were recruited to proselytize for the war bonds in speeches that lasted exactly four minutes—the time it took to change reels at a movie theater. While the speaker delivered the four-minute pitch, volunteers went through the theater aisles selling Liberty Bonds.

  Edmund Brown was in seventh grade in the fall of 1917 when he entered a school contest to compose and deliver one of the four-minute speeches. He won. The prize was an opportunity to give the speech at the Fox Theater. Edmund wound up his speech by quoting Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Edmund’s friends began to good-naturedly kid him and call him Pat. The nickname stuck. From then on, only his family called him Edmund. To the rest of the world, he was Pat Brown.

  3

  The Yell Leader

  In high school, Pat Brown said, only half-jokingly, he ran for president of every club even if he was not a member.

  Because the Browns lived two blocks away, Pat attended Lowell, one of the oldest public high schools west of the Mississippi and one of the most prestigious. The school’s opening in 1856 augured the state’s extraordinary commitment to accessible higher education and was celebrated as a milestone in the quest to build a democracy around an educated populace. “The citizens of San Francisco have,1 with their accustomed liberality, cheerfully devoted their means and influence in planting upon these Pacific shores the seeds of virtue and knowledge, which, if properly nourished and guarded, will soon ripen into a rich harvest of intelligent citizens,” the city school superintendent said at the opening celebration. Sixty years later, the interest in higher education had spawned multiple high schools in San Francisco, but Lowell remained the most renowned. Its focus on college preparation attracted high-achieving students from wealthy families around the city.

  Pat was a member of the debating society, the rowing team, and the camera club, and at various times president of all three. He was the shortest boy at Mrs. Chase’s dance school, but his stature did not deter him from joining as many sports teams as possible. He competed in broad jump for the track team and played on the basketball team for those weighing less than a hundred pounds—until he skipped practice to be in the soccer team picture and the basketball coach threw him off.

  As a junior, Pat ran for yell leader, defeated the incumbent, and took to the field decked out in white flannel trousers and a red jersey emblazoned with white megaphones. The next year he was elected class secretary after shying away from the office he really wanted, student body president, to avoid competing with the captain of the football team. He never enjoyed being secretary and later said he took from the experience a determination not to avoid a campaign solely for fear of losing.

  Pat was both popular and an outsider. The wealthier boys hung out at the Bonbonniere candy store across the street; Pat went home for lunch fixed by his mother. He was invited to join a fraternity but spurned the offer when they wouldn’t accept his good friend Arnold Schiller because he was Jewish. Outraged, Pat started an ecumenical fraternity, the Nocturnes, later renamed Sigma Delta Kappa. His popularity confounded the better-dressed students from upper-class families who looked down on the short kid in corduroys. But Pat’s decency, drive, and moral convictions won him lifelong friends. His exuberance compensated for any lack of polish.

  In history class his junior year, the yell leader launched another determined quest. Pat began to court Bernice Layne, the precocious daughter of a police captain. He walked her home sometimes, almost two miles to the house at the corner of Seventeenth and Shrader. When Pat asked her out on a date, Bernice accepted, then backed out at the last minute without explanation. She was embarrassed to tell him her mother wouldn’t allow her to date. She was only thirteen.

  Bernice’s mother had seen that her daughter was bored as soon as she entered grammar school and enrolled her in a small experimental school for training teachers. Students progressed at their own pace. Bernice completed eight grades in three and a half years. Math was her favorite subject. Accumulating points for every book read, she plowed through Horatio Alger, the Rover Boys, and Little Women. After school, she learned to sew, making dresses for Belgian babies in a program set up by the Red Cross to help with the war effort. She was still ten when she finished all the coursework necessary to enter high school, so she spent six months working in the school library and the cooking classroom. She turned eleven and entered Lowell High School at the start of 1920.

  Like Pat, she was the child of a mixed marriage. Arthur Layne, a well-known police captain in the toughest precinct in the city, traced his Protestant roots back several generations in Texas and the South, where his ancestors had been strong supporters of the Confederacy. Captain Layne’s reputation for honesty in a department known for corruption was bolstered during a year-long graft investigation. His testimony helped get five of nine captains fired.

  On her mother’s side, Bernice was a mix of French, Italian, and Irish Catholic, harking back to the polyglot community formed around the California gold mines. Bernice’s great-grandmother Zelia Rouhaud had emigrated from France in 1854 to keep house for her brother, a French diplomat. The French played a big role in the early mining days, but their dominance faded because, unlike Spain, France did not allow dual citizenship and the United States did not allow noncitizens to acquire property. While taking care of her brother, Zelia met and married an Italian merchant, Giovanni Baptiste Cuneo. Their first child, named Hippolyte after her brother, grew up to be an ironworker and labor activist in
San Francisco, serving as secretary of the Iron Moulders’ Union. Hippolyte married Julia Roche, a Californian of Irish descent. Their oldest daughter was Alice Cuneo. She married Arthur Layne in 1904.

  Bernice was born to the couple four years later. She and her four siblings were raised as Episcopalians. When she was thirteen, Bernice was allowed to attend Friday night dances that her mother helped organize at All Saints Episcopal Church. Pat began to show up at the dances.

  Although he was not religious, Ed Brown wanted his children raised Catholic. Ida acquiesced and sent the boys off to church on Sundays. When he was twelve, Pat skipped his own confirmation and stopped attending services. His mother, initially indifferent, grew increasingly skeptical of the Catholic Church and then openly hostile. Several things sparked Ida’s strong and vocal rejection of the Church. She bristled at derogatory remarks that Ed’s sisters made about Ida’s insistence on sending her children to public school. Her reading caused her to question some Catholic dogma. And a priest tried to harangue her into conversion, warning that her children were bastards until she was married in the Church. For the strong-willed Ida, such admonishments backfired.

  Ida’s antipathy to the Catholic Church did not stem from lack of faith or spirituality, which were integral to her character. She studied the Bible and read Bible stories to her children before bed. So Ida set out, in her methodical fashion, to find a satisfactory place to worship. She auditioned religious leaders in visits to church services around the city. In the end, she chose the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, an institution with a reputation for social justice and a storied past.

  The First Unitarian Church had risen to prominence during the Civil War under the leadership of Thomas Starr King, who came west with some reluctance in 1860 and died four years later as a state hero. The story of the young minister who rose from relative poverty based solely on his talent became an important brick in the California legend. King embraced his adopted state and wrote extensively about its natural beauty, particularly the Yosemite Valley. His writings, published in the East, were credited with helping naturalist John Muir in his crusade to establish Yosemite as the first national park. During the Civil War, King delivered so many passionate speeches around the state urging support for Lincoln that he became known as “the man who kept California in the Union.” King was thirty-nine years old when he died from pneumonia and diphtheria; twenty thousand people lined his funeral route.

  When Ida joined the Unitarian Church, Dr. Caleb S. S. Dutton, known as Sam, was preaching inspired sermons in the lilting accent of his native Britain. Dutton had come to San Francisco from Brooklyn, where he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In his first sermon in San Francisco in 1913, he laid out his vision for the congregation:2 “To identify ourselves with social causes wherever apparent and bring them to their full, complete fruition in all just expression, to stand for that complete democracy which is the demand of idealism, to fight as champions of the God of Righteousness every form of oppression—economic, social or political—and consecrate ourselves to that form of spiritual religion.”

  This was a vision Ida could embrace. The Unitarians’ Channing Auxiliary, a pioneering women’s group, offered a range of literary and cultural programs. The church had a relationship with Temple Emanu-El that dated back to Thomas Starr King and included a joint Thanksgiving service. Ida brought her children to debates between reform and orthodox Jews. She enrolled in a course about the Old Testament and took Pat to a synagogue. One of her favorite quotes, recited often to her family, was from the Book of Micah: “What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?” If people lived like that, Ida told her offspring, there wouldn’t need to be any laws.

  Through church and civic activities, Ida immersed herself in a circle of educated and intellectually engaged friends. Dutton held Thursday evening book club discussions. Once or twice a week Ida attended lectures, the principal form of intellectual entertainment in the era before radio became popular. She took Pat to hear politicians like Hiram Johnson, the Progressive ex-governor who was running for Senate. Lectures sent her back to the library in search of books to decipher or deepen her knowledge of what she had heard. A reference to something she did not understand—“Trojan horse,” for example—became an excuse to further her self-education. She read voraciously and eclectically; Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson were favorites, as were Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll. She read Hubert Howe Bancroft on California history and William James on religion and psychology. For several years, she taught Sunday school at the Unitarian church.

  She passed along to her children the value of learning and also her condemnation of bigotry. She believed fervently in civil rights, religious tolerance, and the need to crusade for equal rights for blacks. By nature and by nurture, her children grew up with the moral certainty that prejudice was wrong and must be fought. She conveyed her spirit of independence through actions as well as words. “To thine own self be true,” she would often cite.

  Increasingly, that advice took her further away from Ed. They pursued parallel lives and had less and less to do with each other. At home, the tension increased. Frank, the youngest child, would sit at breakfast hoping that his father would find the two-minute soft-boiled eggs satisfactory; if not, Ed threw them out the window. Ed slept in the front bedroom, Ida slept in the back, Pat and Harold shared the third bedroom, and Connie and Frank slept in the dining room. Eventually, Ed moved into an apartment downtown. Though they had little use for each other, neither parent denigrated the other to their children, rather praising each other for working hard to provide and care for the family.

  After the end of World War I, business slowed down at the photo studios. Ed hired a barker in top hat and cane who stood in front and tried to drum up business. Then he fired two employees and replaced them with Pat and Harold. Both boys found additional work at the city’s four competing newspapers. Harold put together inserts for the Sunday edition of the Examiner, earning fifty cents an hour for twelve-hour shifts that started Friday afternoon. Pat had a newspaper route for the Call-Bulletin and then the Chronicle.

  On weekends, Pat took the ferry across the bay with friends to attend home games of the Golden Bears, the football “Wonder Team” at the University of California that was in the midst of a fifty-game unbeaten streak. The university charged no tuition and only a token student fee, and most of Pat’s high school classmates expected to end up on the Berkeley campus, known as Cal. Some preferred rival Stanford, which also charged minimal tuition and fashioned itself as an entry point for working-class Californians. “In no other state3 is the path from the farmhouse to the college so well trodden as here,” boasted Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan (who had taken Starr as his middle name in honor of the Unitarian tradition of public service and the man who “saved California for the Union,” Thomas Starr King). Ida later traced her love of literature to a talk that Jordan had delivered at the Unitarian church.

  Pat seemed likely to head to Cal, closest to home. But as high school graduation approached, the eighteen-year-old made a major decision: He scrapped plans for college. His friend Arnold Schiller’s brother had gone directly from high school to night law school, and Pat saw that path as both financially and politically expedient. College was not automatic for many people, and attending Cal would have required a lengthy commute to Berkeley—streetcar to ferry to another streetcar on the other side, about a three-hour round trip. By attending night law school, Pat could earn money during the day and also fast-track his career. He was always in a hurry to get where he was going; he had no use for men who smoked pipes, because he felt it slowed them down.

  Pat entered San Francisco Law School in 1923. Adjusting to the work meant average grades the first few semesters. By the third year, he hit his stride, and by the fourth and final year he was first in his class. Just as at Lowell, Pat also excelled at extracurricu
lar activities. He started a student organization, a law journal, and an affiliate for a legal fraternity—and headed all three.

  The part-time class schedule—three to four nights a week and summer courses—gave Pat plenty of time to work. For the first two years he worked for his father, who ran a quasilegal poker club. Poker was legal only if played at a private club. Pat’s job was to guard the door to give the operation a veneer of exclusivity, though in reality anyone could play. He earned $150 a month sitting outside the Railroad Men’s Social Club, then made another $150 to $200 running his own dice game. He often ended up giving much of that to his father, who was perennially broke.

  In his third year, Pat accepted a job with a well-known lawyer, Milton Schmitt, who had lost his sight and needed an assistant. The switch meant a pay cut, but it netted Pat experience in a law office and in the courts. During his two-year apprenticeship, he made connections and became familiar with the milieu.

  Schmitt was a conservative Republican who had served four terms in the state Assembly, and he discouraged Pat when he talked about running for office. But the twenty-three-year-old was in a hurry. One year out of law school, Pat challenged an incumbent assemblyman in a Republican primary, campaigning with the indisputable slogan “23 years in the district.” Some of his fraternity brothers helped, and Bernice rang doorbells on one side of the street while Pat went down the other, up and down hills on Castro Street. She told people she was his sister. He spent about $500 and fell far short, winning only about five hundred votes.