The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  “At our least vigorous we are still the best men’s club1 in the country—but at our best we can be, and often are, something much more,” historian Kevin Starr said in a talk at Bohemian Grove, a few weeks before Pat was to address the complexities of California water. Starr was a fourth-generation San Franciscan who had grown up in an orphanage and a public housing project and made his way in the world thanks largely to his Jesuit education. Two years behind Jerry at St. Ignatius High, Starr had gone east for graduate school and fallen in love with California history in the library stacks of Harvard. The first in what would become an eight-volume intellectual history that he called “Americans and the California Dream” had recently been published to acclaim. Starr cherished the Bohemian Club as a rich piece of that history, he told the audience at the Grove:

  It represents to me some living connection with the California past—a past alive with the hope that in California Americans might have the best of two worlds: nature, with all of nature’s good gifts—the trans-human magnificence of these redwoods, the rich natural life of our Grove; but also civilization, and all of civilization’s good gifts—art, literature, music, intelligent discourse, civility of manners, a passion for the res publica, the public thing. The Bohemian Grove keeps alive some of that fresh, optimistic ambiance.

  The club, founded by writers and artists in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, had a waiting list more than a decade long, though connections or exceptional musical talent could expedite admission. Still overwhelmingly white and Protestant, the club had admitted its first two black members in 1975. Each summer encampment in the Sonoma County grove opened with an elaborately staged Cremation of Care, a ritual, nighttime torching of the shrouded body of Care in front of the Shrine of Owl, performed by actors illuminated only by the fire. Low Jinks and High Jinks followed on successive weekends, productions with a full orchestra and sophisticated staging.

  Members belonged to one of about 120 camps that varied from dormitories to tents, many with ties to specific communities. Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz were in Mandalay, one of the most exclusive. Owl’s Nest had gained prestige when Ronald Reagan joined in 1975. Earl Warren, a devoted Cal booster, was a member of Isle of Aves, a University of California–oriented lodge. Kevin Starr, Clark Kerr, and other academics were in Wayside Log. Pat’s camp was Sheldrake, one of the smaller lodges. Like Starr, Pat loved Bohemian Grove, where he had been a guest for years before he became a member. “Most of them are great singers or great musicians or great actors, but most of them do these things just for fun and not as professionals. They are doctors and lawyers who for a period of two weeks leave their usual work and just have a lot of fun. There is no other club like it2 in the world,” he wrote to his daughter Kathleen in 1957. “They invited your Daddy up there, not because he is a great singer (you know I sing very well), but because I am the Attorney General, and if anybody gets in trouble they think I can put them in jail, but nobody gets in trouble because they are all fine citizens of this country. It is on the banks of the Russian River and I always find time to get down and take a little swim.”

  Jerry loved the beauty of the Russian River, too, and though the Tassajara Zen Center was more his style, he prided himself on his range. “Humani nil a me alienum puto. Nothing human is alien3 to me,” he told an interviewer. “That’s why I can sit with millionaires at the Bohemian Grove one day and [labor leader] George Meany the next.” Jerry stayed at the Grove a few times at Sheldrake and also at Hillbillies Lodge, as a guest of his friend Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead. Typical of the Grove’s eclectic mix, Hart’s fellow members of Hillbillies included U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Republican politician George H. W. Bush, and newscaster Walter Cronkite.

  In theory, business conversations were strictly forbidden at the Grove. In practice, they were legendary. Herbert Hoover described in his memoir the moment Calvin Coolidge revealed outside his tent that he would not be a candidate for reelection; within an hour, dozens of the nation’s power brokers came to Hoover’s camp and asked him to run. Richard Nixon, a member of Cave Man camp, cited his Lakeside Chat in 1967 as the turning point in his political rehabilitation. Honored by the invitation to deliver a Lakeside Chat, Pat worked hard preparing his talk for July 29, 1977. Unlike his son, who never had a speechwriter, Pat always relied on others. Former water advisers Bill Warne and Abbott Goldberg offered suggestions. To forecast the future of the still unfinished State Water Project, Pat turned to Ron Robie, head of the Department of Water Resources. The two got along well, and Robie had arranged several times to fly with Pat over the water project. Pat’s phone calls invariably opened with the familiar question: “How’s Jerry doing?”

  The speech was a big hit. Pat’s jokes included one of his famous malapropisms, after flying over the flood damage caused when the Eel River overflowed in 1964: “When I view the ravages of this flood—I can tell you, this is the worst disaster that has happened to the people of the state of California since the day I was elected Governor.” He talked about how the world had changed since he pushed through the initial project. “A new element4 has entered the water picture since I left the Governor’s office. I am speaking, of course, of the environmental movement. Not surprisingly, California was one of the first states where the environmental ethic surfaced, although it is now a part of the national consciousness.”

  Pat had weathered the changes in his political fortunes with his usual ebullience, still eager to talk with everyone he met, gifted at making people comfortable. He still played golf poorly, read a lot, and made pilgrimages to Yosemite. He no longer went to church.5 “I have a lot of Catholic friends, including some priests, but somehow I just couldn’t believe in some of that stuff any longer. Take the Assumption of Mary. I just can’t bring myself to believe in that,” he said.

  “A conversation with Pat now6 is just like a conversation with him in the midfifties, diffuse and warm and funny and self-deprecating,” said Fred Dutton, who came back to California for meetings of the Board of Regents, where Pat had appointed him to a twelve-year term. Pat and Bernice remained close to many of his political friends and appointees. Every year, a group of Pat’s judges threw a special birthday party. “It’s a pleasure to be around you because you take such a delight in life,”7 wrote Superior Court Judge Robert Wenke after Pat’s seventieth birthday gathering.

  Pat worked with writers on several books, the most notable a look at his death penalty cases. He still felt an inferiority complex about his lack of higher education and vacillated on whether, if he had it do over again, he would have gone to college. “I was always a young man in a hurry,”8 he said. “I see people now who have gone to colleges and universities, maybe four years there would have done some good. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

  Bernice focused on what she called the three G’s—gardening, grandchildren, and golf. Her kitchen drawers were full of coupons she clipped, though there was no need. After preparing meals for a large family for so many years, she still cooked in bulk and froze extra portions. She was often asked to compare the two Governor Browns. “I think they’re two different personalities,9 and I think Jerry has a few of my genes, so he’s a little different from Pat,” she said. Jerry was reserved, like his mother. “Pat is very outgoing … he loves people and, oh, he stops and talks to them, like on trips in foreign countries. He can carry on a conversation with anyone and become acquainted and know more about them before you get through.”

  Never shy about giving his son advice, Pat chastised Jerry for his lack of support for the University of California. “Anything that diminishes that stockpile of intelligence10 diminishes us. I told Jerry so the other night on my birthday,” Pat said in the spring of 1978. “I come on awful strong with him. You should see me sometimes. He doesn’t resent it, but he’s afraid of it. He shrinks away from it.”

  As Jerry neared the end of his first term, Pat grew increasingly concerned about the groundswell of anger ove
r rising property taxes, a movement centered in Southern California and gaining strength every month. By the summer of 1978, the whole country would know about California’s tax revolt.

  Each of the more than five thousand counties, cities, schools, and special districts in California had the power to levy property taxes. Homeowners were billed the tax rate multiplied by the assessed value of their house, a number set by the county assessor. As elected officials, assessors were sensitive to voters. During the years of explosive growth in the 1950s and ’60s, when new schools, roads, and services were needed every week, assessors sheltered homeowners from the brunt of the increased cost by assessing businesses at a higher percentage of market value. In the mid-1960s, assessors in San Francisco and several other counties were caught taking bribes to lower assessments. In response, a 1967 state law required counties to reassess all property at 25 percent of full market value. The impact was to shift more of the tax burden from businesses to homeowners, whose bills began to rise.

  Efforts to place tax cut initiatives on the state ballot in 1968 and 1972 fell short. Then, as California came out of the recession of the early 1970s, housing prices soared. Driven by inflation, the value of the average home in California went from $34,000 in 1974 to $85,000 in 1978. Municipalities could have lowered tax rates and still collected the same amount of money. They didn’t. Most increased overall spending. Over five years in the mid-1970s, total property taxes collected in California almost doubled, to $12 billion. Many people were paying taxes on homes now valued at prices at which they could never have afforded to buy them. By 1977, Jerry’s tax bill11 for his Laurel Canyon home was $2,822—double what it had been just four years earlier.

  The governor was initially not eager to wade into the escalating debate over taxation, which he considered primarily a local problem. He repeated his refrain about the need to enter an era of limits. Governments should spend less. Protesters should demand that their cities and schools cut expenses, not look to the state for help.

  The tax mess was complicated by a landmark California Supreme Court decision, known as Serrano v. Priest, which found that the state’s system of funding school districts through property taxes was unconstitutional because homeowners in poor areas were taxed at higher rates—and even then their school districts spent less per student than neighboring communities with more expensive real estate. The court ordered the state to redress the inequities.

  In his January 6, 1977, State of the State address, Jerry promised to deal with school and local taxes. “Last night I was reading some of my past statements, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t find them all that impressive,” he began in typical Jerry Brown fashion. “So this morning I’m just going to share with you some of my thoughts for the coming year. Obviously, number one on the agenda is property tax. It’s the issue people have been talking about. We need an immediate solution. We also need a long-term solution.” He proposed short-term assistance targeted to those in gravest need, taxpayers whose bills exceeded a certain percentage of family income. For the longer term, he supported a proposal for a so-called “split roll” that would enable municipalities to tax residential and commercial properties at different rates—much as the local assessors had done informally in the 1950s and ’60s.

  The measures languished amid competing proposals and agendas. Jerry lacked the focus and intensity he had applied to break earlier stalemates. And his relationship with legislative leaders had deteriorated. His absences from the state while campaigning for president, his unusual style, his disdain for the traditional niceties and protocols had all taken a toll. Tom Bane, a Democratic assemblyman from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, the heart of the tax revolt, ran into the governor on a plane. Jerry wondered why Bane never dropped in to talk. The legislator took that as an invitation and stopped by the office. Jerry said to call his staff to set up an appointment for the next day. Bane did, and cleared his calendar. Three weeks later, he was still waiting for a call back. “I realize I am only an Assemblyman,12 only represent 280,000 people and am only one of eighty votes in the Assembly,” Bane wrote Jerry. “It strikes me, however, that your office exhibits a lack of concern for the normal courtesies and considerations due a legislator, not only as a representative of people, but as a human being. Such an attitude is not restricted to your office, but pervades much of your administration.”

  The legislature went home in 1977 without taking action on taxes. Property taxes kept rising. So did inflation, which pushed incomes up and workers into higher personal income tax brackets. Seventy-five-year-old Howard Jarvis, a bombastic, salty gadfly tax fighter and onetime candidate for U.S. senator and Los Angeles mayor, finally had his chance. For fifteen years, he had tried to force tax cuts, building a small following and a large reputation as a nuisance. His efforts were not taken particularly seriously in Sacramento. But among beleaguered taxpayers, he found plenty of support. Shifting demographics and lawsuits over school finance and desegregation added a racial overtone to the complaints; older, predominantly white homeowners were being asked to pay more for services that would increasingly benefit younger black and brown students. More than a million people signed petitions in support of a sweeping tax cut initiative that would radically change the way California funded public services. Jarvis filed paperwork in November, and the initiative was assigned the thirteenth position on the June 1978 ballot.

  Even without the unforeseen consequences that would shape California for decades, Proposition 13 was breathtaking in its scope. Assessments would revert to 1975 levels, and the tax rate would be fixed at 1 percent of market value. Absent significant renovations, assessments could be raised no more than 2 percent a year until a property was sold, which essentially eliminated the ability of schools and local governments to increase taxes. To make future tax increases more difficult, all tax measures would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority vote. The immediate tax cuts—reductions in government revenue—would total more than $7 billion, more than one quarter of the total state budget.

  Supporters dismissed as alarmist the predictions of shuttered libraries and parks, tens of thousands of layoffs, and cuts that crippled police and fire departments. Government spent too much money anyway. The state would make up the difference; there was a large surplus. People were in danger of losing their homes because they could not pay their tax bills. Nothing was more sacrosanct.

  Jerry, running for reelection as voters decided the fate of Prop 13, did not speak out against the popular initiative right away. When he did, he was circumspect. “I suggest to you that the evil you know13 is better than the evil you don’t know,” Jerry finally said more than two months after the proposition qualified. “If you take $7 billion off the table one place, you’ll have to probably come up with almost the identical sum someplace else.” There were not many places to look; income tax revenue for the entire fiscal year was projected to be $4.5 billion and sales tax would bring in $5 billion.

  The governor and legislative leaders tried to craft an alternative that would provide comparable tax relief with less draconian impact, shift more burden to businesses and provide relief to renters, who gained nothing under Prop 13. The ultimate compromise offered much lower savings and could not compete. As the June election neared and the consequences grew clearer, Jerry joined political leaders of both parties, business executives, and union leaders in denouncing Prop 13. He called the measure a consumer fraud and Howard Jarvis a demagogue: “It’s a rip-off,14 a legal morass, and is in reality a long-term tax increase, not a reduction.”

  A few days before the election, when the passage of Prop 13 seemed all but inevitable, New York columnist Jimmy Breslin visited Jarvis15 in his Los Angeles living room. “He is a man setting fire to dry grass,” Breslin wrote. Jarvis chortled at the response he had provoked. “Every time Brown kicks me, he kicks Brown,” Jarvis told Breslin. “If I were Brown, I’d ignore Jarvis. They did it for years, it worked for them. I was regarded as a nuisance, and nothing else.�
�� Jarvis laughed. “He seems to laugh a lot these days,” Breslin wrote. “And it is a laugh that almost surely is going to be heard in almost every section of the country. And it is the kind of laugh that this movement is merely starting.”

  The poorly crafted measure not only upended the tax structure, it set a July 1 deadline for implementation, three weeks after the election. Gray Davis, the governor’s chief of staff, was on leave to run the November reelection campaign. Tom Quinn met with finance officials to plot a response that might avoid the catastrophic service cuts that schools, cities, libraries, and counties anticipated. Department heads laid out triage plans. The Finance Department predicted job losses that would increase the state unemployment rate, already a point above the 6.2 percent national average. The state’s Washington office estimated that California could lose billions in federal funds that required matching contributions from state and local governments.

  After a conversation with his son the day before the vote, Pat Brown was dismayed. “He’s going to say now that he’s going to be able to make the Jarvis plan work, and I said, ‘You can’t do it.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to show some compassion16 for the people who are going to be thrown out of work and the special programs for the blind and the autistic children and the mentally retarded, all of which will have to be circumscribed.’ ” Jerry had already faced criticism from liberal Democrats for his perceived lack of compassion, particularly in the treatment of the mentally ill. Pat urged Jerry to temper his acknowledgment of the people’s will with a message of empathy. “I told Jerry, I’d say, ‘I’m a servant of the people. Whatever they want I’m going to do. But I’m not going to be hypocritical and tell you that it’s not going to hurt human beings. It is. And I’m going to do everything I can to see that their hardships are mitigated.’ ”