by Miriam Pawel
Jerry paid careful attention to words. When writing, he labored over each sentence. He took issue with words that were becoming popular among Democrats in the Trump era. “Resistance,” he said, meant underground fighters in World War II who gave up their lives fighting the Nazis. “Sanctuary” had a particular religious meaning. He was clear and outspoken about the difference between right and wrong. Building a wall to keep people out was wrong. Deporting immigrants who had built lives in California and contributed to a state that had been built by immigrants was wrong. Denying climate change was wrong; suggesting it was a Chinese hoax was preposterous.
When Donald Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would attempt to renege on its commitment to the Paris climate change treaty, Jerry Brown became the de facto American political leader on global warming, by virtue of his long-standing commitment to the issue and the economic importance of California. He already had standing as an international leader in the climate change fight. A partnership between California and the German province of Baden-Württemberg had led to the formation of the Under2 Coalition, committed to keeping the rise in average global temperature to under the two degrees Celsius that scientists saw as a benchmark for irreversible catastrophic change. In Sacramento on May 19, 2015, a dozen leaders from states and provinces had signed the initial memorandum of understanding, dubbing themselves the Under2MOU. They committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to certain targets and to share technology and scientific research as well as monitoring and reporting. The goal was also to demonstrate at the United Nations climate change summit in Paris the role that states and provinces could play. By the end of 2017, the group included more than two hundred states, nations, and regions representing more than one billion people.
“I come from a mere state,19 or what people like to call a subnational unit,” Jerry said at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. “Nevertheless, we have an impact in the world. Our gross domestic product is about $2.5 trillion. We’re a land of innovation: Google, Facebook, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hollywood. We’re a land of disruption, where we never set in and accept a status quo, but we disrupt and create and build a future that works for everyone.”
Jerry had traveled abroad extensively before Trump’s election. On a trip to China after the election, Jerry was treated like a head of state. The governor continued discussions with President Xi Jinping about how to share best practices and provide assistance as China formed its own cap-and-trade market. Across Europe, Jerry was greeted with motorcades at the airport, standing ovations, and effusive welcomes. At the World Economic Forum in New York, he was introduced as the “man of the moment20 in this country who is taking the reins of the horse and driving the action forward.”
He delivered a call for action with all the urgency he could muster. “Human civilization is on the chopping block,”21 Jerry told a room full of lawmakers and students in Stuttgart. “We have to wake up the world. We have to wake up Europe, wake up America, wake up the whole world to realize that we have a common destiny.”
“At the highest circles, people still don’t get it,” he told religious leaders at the Vatican. “It’s not just a light rinse22 … We need a total, I might say brain washing. We need to wash our brains out and see a very different kind of world.”
Looking grim, he spoke of the dire future. He listened carefully at meetings and took notes, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He never smiled. He derided a reporter who asked him if he enjoyed the foreign travel. Yet he left audiences inspired and energized. They thanked him for his honesty and clarity, and they seemed to respond to his faith, and his excitement.
“There’s a lot of stuff we do in politics23—schools, crime, water, highways … I don’t want to call them little,” he said in Oslo. “They’re important. But it’s not like changing the very basis of how life exists. That’s very exciting. It elicits creativity, energy, building.” He compared the current moment to the challenges described by the historian Arnold Toynbee in his chronicles of the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. “What drives civilization? What drove the Vikings? What drove the Christians? What drove Greece or Rome? You have a challenge. And then you have a response. Challenge, and response … These are opportunities to either destroy humanity or to enlighten and improve it.”
Blunt in his criticism of Trump, Jerry did not dwell on the president, other than to say that his dismissive comments on climate change would only help rally support for much-needed action. Trump as the bogeyman was a simplistic distraction that risked becoming an excuse for delay. The biggest obstacle was “the oil, the cars,24 the way of life, the packaging, the waste, the whole way our society is organized.” The 32 million cars in California traveled 330 billion miles a year. He invoked the image of a rocket launched into orbit: The energy required to escape the gravity field of Earth was once unthinkable but is now routine. That was the level of psychic energy required to confront the existential threat of global warming, to turn the three hundred thousand electric cars in California into 32 million.
In an interview in Norway, he returned to the connection between his theological and environmental beliefs. “Nature, the rules of nature,25 physics, biology, chemistry, ecology, those are rules. They’re laws. We may not fully understand them, you understand little bits of them. And you can’t argue with them. It’s not like politics. Politics is based on the principle, let’s make a deal. You can’t make a deal with nature. Nature is sovereign. And we have to get on the side of nature instead of attempting to destroy it, which will be destroying ourselves … And that’s why I do see it having the importance that I earlier ascribed to theology and religion when I went to study to be a Jesuit priest.”
Friends who had been in the seminary with Jerry—those who stayed and those who left—saw the Jesuit principles as his core operating system. He sometimes carried around his old Jesuit rulebook and pulled it out to quote one of the rules. He pushed the Oakland bishop, a Jesuit, to perform more elaborate rituals each year on the feast day of Saint Ignatius. He often used the phrase agere contra. “I’ve been fighting self all my life,”26 he said, accepting an award from the Asia Society and comparing the Jesuit saying to one of Mao Tse-tung. “And unless you do that, you can’t make any progress.”
At a climate change conference at the Vatican, a local reporter asked Jerry if he was Catholic. Jerry resisted the question. He answered instead how his faith had shaped his work:
I think the formation that I’ve undergone growing up in the Catholic faith,27 the Catholic religion, puts forth a world that’s orderly, that has purpose and that ultimately is a positive. And that’s very helpful when you look at a world that looks very much the opposite, in terms of the wars, the corruption and the breakdown. And so even though from an intellectual point of view it looks very dark, in another sense I have great faith and confidence that there is a way forward. And I would attribute that in some way to my Catholic upbringing and training.
He had long ago broken with the Catholic Church by favoring abortion rights and same-sex marriage. In 2015, he was confronted with another issue on which Church leaders lobbied hard—whether to sign a bill allowing physician-assisted death in certain cases. In an unusually personal message, the seventy-seven-year-old governor explained his decision to sign the bill. “The crux of the matter28 is whether the state of California should continue to make it a crime for a dying person to end his life, no matter how great his pain or suffering.” He had read all the material and arguments carefully and had talked with a Catholic bishop, two of his own doctors, and former Jesuit classmates. “In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death. I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”
He described his belief system as “optimism of the will,29 pessimism of the intellect.” Through
out his public life, that unusual mix had been an essential part of his appeal. He spoke forthrightly about bad news, whether budget cuts or impending nuclear doom, and yet with a confidence about the power of society to tackle what he called not problems but conditions, enduring in nature.
In a conversation with author and historian Studs Terkel shortly after 9/11, Jerry had reflected on how his Jesuit training shaped his worldview in times of crises and despair. “I have a skeptical eye,”30 he said. “At the same time, I have a bedrock confidence in the way our society is organized, in the way I was brought up. It gives me a certain hope, although my critical intelligence tells me that we’re in one hell of a lot of problems in the contemporary world. I’m never satisfied that where I am is where I always need to be, a feeling reinforced in the Jesuit order.”
In California, Jerry’s unique blend of alarm and reassurance became a tonic in the wake of the 2016 election that left the Golden State shaken. Hillary Clinton had beaten Trump in California by a margin of two to one, easily carrying even traditionally more conservative Orange County. In the weeks after the election, Californians responded with marches, protests, fear, confusion, and anger. Students at schools not known for their political activism marched around campus chanting “Not my president.” Immigration activists huddled with lawyers. Legislative leaders in Sacramento issued proclamations of “resistance.” Undocumented students wondered if they would be able to stay in school, or find jobs.
Jerry Brown was quiet in the initial aftermath. Timing was everything, Pat Brown taught his son. Jerry waited for the right moment.
On December 6, 2016, the president-elect announced the head of the Environmental Protection Agency would be the Republican attorney general of Oklahoma, who denied that climate change existed. Five days later, on a Sunday talk show, Trump said “nobody really knows” whether climate change was real and spoke about withdrawing from the global warming agreement reached in Paris a year earlier.
The next morning, almost twenty-five thousand scientists gathered in San Francisco for the start of the annual American Geophysical Union conference, the largest international gathering of earth and space scientists. Their mood was glum. On Tuesday, organizers got a phone call from the governor’s office. Jerry Brown wanted to come address the meeting the next morning. They scurried to spread the word about the last-minute addition to the program.
About twenty-five hundred tired scientists straggled into the Moscone Convention Center in time for the nine thirty A.M. special guest and greeted him with a standing ovation as he took the stage in dark gray suit, blue-and-white-striped shirt, and no tie. He still wrote his own speeches, but his best performances, like this one, were largely extemporaneous.
“We’re facing far more than one or two or even thousands of politicians,” he said, arms waving, hands punching the air for emphasis. “We’re facing big oil, we’re facing big financial structures that are at odds with the survivability of our world. It will be up to you as truth tellers,31 truth seekers, to mobilize all your efforts to fight back.”
He grew more animated as he went on, and the crowd responded. He mentioned the president-elect by name only once, referring to rumors that Trump might shut down data-collecting satellites. “Back in 1978 I proposed a land satellite for California. They called me Governor Moonbeam because of that. I didn’t get that moniker for nothing. And if Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellites!”
He detailed some of California’s recent successes: strict vehicle emission standards that had become the national standard; energy efficiency standards; a goal of 50 percent renewable energy by 2030; new limits on short-lived climate pollutants. He told the scientists their work mattered now more than ever.
“A lot of people say, ‘What the hell are you doing, Brown? You’re not a country.’ Well,” he said, pausing for the scientists’ laughter to subside, “we’re the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world, and we’ve got a lot of firepower. We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the universities, we have the national labs, and we have the political clout and sophistication for the battle. And we will persevere. Have no doubt about that.”
The Mountain House
Jerry Brown recognized many of the faces in the crowd gathered1 on the Williams town square the first Saturday in November 2014. His sisters, Barbara, Cynthia, and Kathleen, who had come from their respective homes in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Half a dozen of his extended family from nearby Colusa. The mayor of Williams. The local congressman, who had started in the Assembly in 1975, the year Jerry first became governor. Staff members who had driven an hour north from the capital to cheer for their boss the weekend before Election Day.
The candidate was a little disappointed by the turnout, sorry he hadn’t done more than the one robocall and mailing. In the old days, his rule of thumb had been to hand out ten flyers to get one person to an event. Not that it mattered. He held such a large lead in his reelection bid that he had barely campaigned. He had not come to Williams seeking votes. Jerry had planned the final event of his final campaign as a tribute to his great-grandfather August Schuckman.
Jerry was introduced by August’s oldest living great-grandchild, ninety-year-old Patricia Schaad. She still lived in Williams, not far from the Mountain House, where she had spent childhood evenings on the porch with August’s son Frank, her great-uncle. She had been raised by her grandmother Emma, but inspired by Great-aunt Ida. Emma told her grandchildren to be content; Ida said go after what you want. Schaad had wanted badly to attend Cal. With no way to afford the university, she rode a bus thirty-five miles to Yuba Junior College. When the bus stopped picking up kids in Williams, she found a place to stay in Colusa. Schaad was the first woman student body president at the community college. She married, had a son, grew bored, and went back to school. She drove an hour each way to Chico State, which offered teacher training programs to meet the shortage in the postwar years. Schaad taught for many years at the Williams school she had attended.
On November 1, 2014, she welcomed her cousin back to his ancestral home. “Governor Brown places great value on his Schuckman descendants and the property and is in the process of establishing a residence out there,” she said. “We will be proud to have him as part of our community and are proud to have him in Williams today.”
Jerry had been spending a lot of time in the hot, barren land where his great-grandfather had settled a century and a half earlier. “I don’t want you to feel this is some walk down memory lane,” he told the crowd at the Williams rally. “But it’s really important that we know where we came from, if we want to figure out where we’re going. Certainly, I’ve always been one to try to keep my eyes on the stars but keep my feet on the ground. And I can think a lot, and care a lot, about Williams and our Mountain House ranch, and all the different places of California, and I also can look to the future.”
For almost half an hour, he jumped from past to future and back, his speech mirroring the way his mind made associations. From the history of Williams, the town called Central before the railroad came, to his plan for high-speed rail. From the diary of August Schuckman’s journey across the Plains to Governor Moonbeam. From the frugality of his ancestors to the need for a state rainy day reserve fund. “This is a very big complicated state, that has an extremely rich and diverse history. We only are here for a while, and we pass on, and that’s the story. But what do we leave as we go?”
He veered into what might have been mistaken for a non sequitur. “By the way,” he said, one of his favorite phrases, “I did another charter school, which is called the Oakland Military Institute …”
Though he spurned the word “legacy” as irrelevant until he stopped working, which would be when he was dead, the Oakland charter schools he founded would be there when he moved on. He had stayed closely involved, selecting the superintendent, monitoring progress, attending graduations, and raising millions of dollars for them each year. Jerry pointe
d to his windbreaker, which bore the insignia he had designed for the Oakland Military Institute—the California bear flag with the motto AGE QUOD AGIS. He told the story of how as a Jesuit seminarian he preferred to pose philosophical questions when he should have been picking grapes. Age quod agis, the novices would tell him. Do what you are doing, Brother Brown. Pick the grapes.
Four years earlier, Jerry had wound up an intense campaign with a traditional fly-around of the state, firing up supporters in half a dozen cities from San Diego to Oakland. The relaxed Williams rally in a town square festooned with balloon arches and red-white-and-blue bunting seemed a throwback to another era. Jerry spoke without notes, waving one hand instead of the usual two, because he clutched a red folder. He pulled from it a copy of his great-grandfather’s diary from 1852 and read the section about oxen and horses that died on the journey, and the discarded wagons that littered the Plains.
“The spirit of August Schuckman is still here,” Jerry said. “It’s still in Williams, it’s still affecting California, by all his descendants, which now number in the hundreds. I think it is well to keep in mind, as we look to the future, to understand what we owe to those who got us this far, and what we owe to those who are going to come after us.”
In his younger years, Jerry had been to the family ranch only once, with his father in 1961 when the land was in limbo. Frank Schuckman had died and the ranch was up for sale. Jerry’s main memory was of the State Police driver waiting for sheep to cross the road. A year later, Pat and his brother Harold had bought the land, with financial help from friends. The family kept a majority stake in the small corporation. When Pat died in 1996, Jerry told his mother he wanted the shares. Bernice signed them over to her son. None of his sisters cared.