by Jim Newton
On June 18, 1920, Taylor was convicted of two counts of violating the Criminal Syndicalism Act. He was sentenced to one to fourteen years in the state penitentiary. His was one of the early convictions under the law, which would eventually see 531 men and women charged with criminal syndicalism and would send 128 of those to California prisons.13
Although Warren later would insist defensively that he had never initiated a syndicalism prosecution as Alameda’s district attorney, the law had run its course by 1925, when Warren took that office. In fact, no prosecution anywhere in California was brought under the act after August 15, 1924.14 Moreover, while Warren did not bring new cases, his office, even after he headed it, played an important role in defending syndicalism nationally. Anita Whitney was among the first defendants convicted under California’s law, and she, like Taylor, was prosecuted in Alameda County. She appealed her conviction all the way to the United States Supreme Court during the years that Warren was rising through that office. The decision, in 1927, was most notable for the concurring opinion of Justice Louis Brandeis, who defended speech over fear—“Men,” he wrote, “feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears”15—but the Court upheld Whitney’s conviction, vindicating Alameda’s prosecution of her. The decision in Whitney stood for forty-two years. When it fell, it was by the hand of Warren’s Court.
In the meantime, young Earl Warren’s pursuit of Taylor won him friends in the office. On the final day of closing arguments in the Taylor case, Warren’s senior colleague, Rogers, praised his associate for his work on the case, predicting “a brilliant career for Warren as a prosecutor.”16 The defendant’s supporters were less impressed. “When future generations read these trials, children of that day will blush and hide because of descent from such brutes,” the IWW wrote.17
Most of Warren’s early cases were not so emotional, and he settled well into the requirements of trial work. He admired Hiram Johnson, but did not emulate him as a lawyer. Johnson was theatrically big. Warren, by contrast, was an understated advocate for the most part, restrained and meticulous—no bombast or tricks, no diversions. Helen MacGregor was a young law school graduate who spotted Warren one day in court. The county was a party to a lawsuit, the case turning on an interpretation of the interstate commerce clause. Warren’s questioning, she remembered half a century later, was thoughtfully constructed—every question yielded an answer that bore directly on the matter before the court. There was, she said, “no wasted motion. The case was like an architectural structure.”18 Moreover, it was delivered by an attractive and sober young man. When, years later, MacGregor got the chance to work for Warren, she took it and then followed him through his rise in California politics.
As Warren honed his courtroom skills, he also expanded his influence in the office, where Decoto learned to rely ever more heavily on his deputy. Often, when a prosecutor would leave the office, and someone would need to pick up his cases, the job would fall to Warren, who already had researched the underlying law. Decoto recalled later that when he would broach a legal question on a Friday, Warren would produce the answer on Monday morning.19 So Decoto moved the ambitious young man through a variety of administrative posts. One of those jobs took Warren out of the courtroom but introduced him to a new arena, as he was assigned the job of giving legal counsel to the county Board of Supervisors. In that position, Warren not only wielded policy influence, he befriended the county’s leaders and found time to frequent local newspaper offices. “He used to make it a practice to cultivate every important person on the [Oakland] paper,” remembered Mary Shaw, a member of the Bay Area press corps in those days. “I always had a feeling that his sticking around the city editors was just a part of the job to get where he wanted to go.”20
Warren was almost all business, but not quite. Although his wartime correspondence with Ina Perham revealed his clumsiness as a suitor, he was a serious and handsome man with a bright future. Women could not fail to notice him. One sunny Sunday morning, one did. Nina Palmquist Meyers was a lovely young woman, mannered and graceful, energetic, intelligent, serious, generous. Born in Sweden in 1893, she had arrived in the United States six months to the day later and then was raised in Oakland.21
She had her quirks: Cats terrified her, the result of a frightening childhood moment when Nina, her arms immobilized in a cast, was attacked by a house cat that scratched and bit her. She never got over it; in fact, her hatred of cats was so intense that she could not even abide fur coats.22 Mostly, though, in 1921, Nina Palmquist was lonely, the consequence of a life too draped, in its early years, with loss. Nina’s mother died at age twenty-nine, leaving five young children, including three-year-old Nina. Her father, a Baptist minister, remarried a hard woman, Sophia Rosenberg. Reflecting on her youth decades later, Nina recalled the year she saved up a dime to buy her older brother, whom she adored, a toy lamb for his birthday. When her stepmother discovered the present, she was outraged at the waste of money. She ordered Nina to return the gift. Sobbing, Nina did.23 As an adult, Nina never made much out of birthdays. She adamantly refused to celebrate her own.24
Nina’s difficulties followed her throughout her young life. Her father died in 1907, and two of her brothers after that. On September 26, 1914, at the age of twenty-one, she married a promising young pianist, Grover Cleveland Meyers.25 In 1919 they had a son, Jim. While Jim was still an infant, his father died of tuberculosis. Nina, her modest savings depleted by Grover’s illness, was now a widow with a baby. Having nowhere else to turn, Nina Meyers moved back home, joining her stepmother in an Oakland flat and taking a job in her specialty shop.26 There the two widows and the young boy lived together.27
One Sunday morning in 1921, Jim, then just two years old, was home while Nina enjoyed a leisurely weekend morning. She went with friends to the Piedmont Baths in Oakland, a popular spot among young people in those days, and she was swimming when Earl Warren spotted her across the pool. “She was in the water, and I could only see her head,” he remembered. “But she looked wonderful to me.”28 He asked a friend to introduce them, and Earl and Nina struck up a conversation; when it came time for breakfast, Warren arranged to be seated next to her, and the following weekend, he took her on their first date. They saw a play, Smilin’ Through.29 They were attracted to each other right away, but both proceeded slowly. Neither would ever be called impulsive. Earl, then thirty years old, was by nature cautious, and twenty-eight-year-old Nina was afraid of chasing off such a promising suitor. Yet slowly they moved together. Their early conversations gave way to a regular Saturday date, the two meeting after she closed up the shop and he put away his legal research for the evening.
At first glance, they might have struck one as an unusual couple: Earl towered over the five-foot-two Nina. He was booming and hearty; she was softer, gentler. But that surface difference obscured deeper commonalities. They were deliberate, efficient people, intelligent and modest. Each was eager for a family, each capable of great affection and appreciative of the other; he was protective, she was wounded. Over the months, their relationship deepened, and Earl grew close to Nina’s son. On nights when Earl was scheduled to come to the apartment, Jim would grow restless as he awaited Earl’s arrival. When Earl came inside and sat down, Jim would clamber up into the big man’s lap.30 Nina, so protective of her only son, would only have allowed that attachment to grow had she been confident that Earl was destined to be her husband. Still, their romance stretched forward with no wedding date in sight. The reason was practical: Warren had no intention of letting his wife work, and his income in the early 1920s would not support a family. So they waited—patience was another of their common traits—for the break that would push Warren ahead and allow their lives to take the next step.
Warren’s attention to the details of political advancement paid off in 1925, when Decoto was being touted for a position on the state Railroad Commission.
The rumors of his pending appointment
swirled for weeks, creating a tussle among his deputies over who would succeed him. Although the district attorney’s job was an elected position, the five supervisors had the power to fill midterm vacancies, such as those caused by resignation of the incumbent. For Warren, this was opportunity, but also a moment of self-evaluation. The Board of Supervisors was dominated by a local machine boss, Mike Kelly, whose political inclinations were Progressive but whose preference for DA was Frank Shay, a Warren rival in the office. To fight Shay for the position was to challenge the Progressive-backed candidate and to join forces with the traditional Republicans of Alameda County, whose most prominent voice was the Oakland Tribune. To win, Warren would need to tack right ideologically, moving away from the Progressive tradition that had guided him since college and reaching for a more traditional, conservative Republican base. The alternative for Warren would have been to defer to the Progressive candidate and wait his turn.
Warren chose to run. He sought out the backing of the Tribune and its conservative Republican publisher, Joe Knowland. Born in 1873, less than a quarter century after California achieved statehood, Knowland was struck in the state’s early image. He had started in the lumber business and expanded, as the state grew, into banking. He held state and federal offices around the turn of the century—he was featured just at the edge of the infamous “Shame of California” photograph, a young man among much older and established ones, but there nonetheless. In 1914, Joe Knowland left his seat in the House of Representatives to run for the United States Senate. He lost, and that ended his elective career but by no means his life in politics. Instead, Knowland expressed his deeply conservative views through his influential place in the state Republican Party and through his ownership of the Oakland Tribune, the leading paper in Alameda County.
When Warren appealed to Knowland for help in his first effort to secure an office, Knowland gave it. It came in two forms: He backed Warren directly with the paper, and he reined in one of his reporters, a Shay supporter who was using his news stories to promote Shay.31 The contest was close. Shay enjoyed the support of two supervisors, and Warren had the backing of two others. The deciding vote belonged to John Mullins, who had been elected with Kelly’s help but who liked Warren and who decided to vote his conscience, not his interests. Discussing his decision in 1970, Mullins remembered walking with Warren in the Oakland estuary during the days when Decoto’s resignation appeared imminent:
I turned to Warren and I said, “Kid . . . you’re the next District Attorney of Alameda County.”
Earl said, “Well, Johnny, that’s only one vote.”
I said, “Earl, you’re going to be the next District Attorney of this county.”
And from that minute on I figured it out that I could put it over, even though Mike Kelly, the political boss and power at that time, was for Frank Shay, which was equivalent to election. He wanted Shay. I wanted Warren.32
Mullins won. In his memory, Mullins not only tipped the vote to Warren but also led the move to draft him. Others recalled it differently, noting that Warren had by then already begun to cultivate backers, some of whom weighed in on his behalf, helping to lobby Mullins. What is clear is that Mullins was the swing vote, and without him Warren’s plans would have ended there. Instead, on January 12, 1925, Decoto resigned his position, and Mullins backed Warren. Faced with a 3-2 vote to confirm the new district attorney, the other supervisors folded and made it unanimous.33
Mike Kelly did not bear a grudge against Warren, but he did extract his vengeance on Mullins, defeating him with a candidate of his own in the next election. Mullins never regretted the role he played in launching Earl Warren’s political career. It was, he would say as he grew old, his greatest political achievement.34 Frank Shay, Warren’s defeated colleague, did not take it so well. As soon as the vote was taken, Shay walked out of the district attorney’s office and never returned.35
Decoto, by contrast, remained a friend of Warren’s for the rest of his life, and Warren reciprocated. Their correspondence through the 1930s was affectionate and thoughtful, Decoto breezily thanking Warren for the loan of five dollars, advising him on his political options, and movingly expressing gratitude in 1930 when Warren offered to look after his business affairs when he was scheduled for a hernia operation.36
Warren’s elevation to the district attorney’s job gave him his first taste of politics, made him a ranking county official, and opened new professional and political opportunities that ultimately would set him on a path to the governor’s office. He was now a prosecutor, yes, but also an administrator, and he would develop a talent for selecting gifted associates and supervising their work in a plain, direct manner that made an impression on subordinates and cultivated loyalty. Warren was a good boss—not an effusive one and not without his flare-ups, but greatly admired by those he worked with.
For the moment, however, the implications of his victory were more personal. He and Nina could finally marry. Their initial planned date had to be reset when Warren’s mother took ill—a severe abdominal ailment required surgery—but she recovered and was in attendance when, on October 14, 1925, Alameda County’s district attorney and his bride were united. Earl was a Methodist and Nina a Baptist, but she felt more strongly about her faith than he did, so the wedding took place at the First Baptist Church in Oakland. They were accompanied by a thrilled six-year-old Jim, whom Warren now adopted. Warren had hoped to have a quiet wedding with little fanfare, but two friends—an associate from the district attorney’s office and the manager of the Alameda County garage—got wind of the event and showed up with the local contingent of the highway patrol. Warren then invited them to join the wedding party, and the highway patrol escorted the newly-weds through town, sirens blaring.37
Once married and back from a short honeymoon in Vancouver, the Warrens set about fulfilling their family plan—three sons for her, three daughters for him, they liked to say in later years. And so the children came. Jim, of course, was there first, and he was so thoroughly integrated into the growing Warren family that not until 1948, when Warren was a candidate for the vice presidency, did the other children learn that their brother had a different father from the rest of them (Earl Jr. recalls suspecting it after rummaging through some old family records one day, but none of the children knew it officially until later).38 Virginia was born in 1928 and named for the sister of one of Jim’s friends. Two years later, Earl and Nina had their first son together, and chose to name him Earl Jr.—Ju Ju, he would be called later. Dorothy was born in 1931; Nina Elizabeth, named for her mother and the first Warren child to have a middle name but known to her siblings and to a generation of Californians as “Honey Bear,” in 1933; and, finally, Robert, forever known as Bobby, in 1935.
Sundays were Nina Warren’s day off, and Earl’s to tend to the children. He often took them on weekend outings, which became part of the Warren lore. On those outings, the children would be allowed to vote on where they wanted to go, and their father would transport them according to the majority’s will.39 So cherished were those outings, and so central were they to the Warren family, that Warren overcame his reluctance to put down personal thoughts in writing in order to memorialize them years later. His recollection is undated, though references to himself as governor place it between 1943 and 1953, and the form is unusual: It was written for Nina to deliver, and thus in it, Warren describes himself in the third person, but the note is in his hand and clearly reflects his memory. It was filed among his family papers at the Library of Congress, but it is marked “unused.” Warren wrote:
The trips were almost a ritual. They would leave directly from Sunday school, he bringing those that were too young because five of them were born between September 1928 and January 1935 and there was always at least one who had to be in in [sic] one of those little seats that clamp on the top of the front seat. His equipment would consist of a few toys, one bag of bottles of milk, another of cookies and a third of diapers; simple equipment but all necessary. Som
etimes they would come home at ten o’clock at night, but you could always tell that they had been having fun. And they all slept like logs until morning.40
In interviews more than sixty years later, the faces of Warren’s children brightened at the memory of those Sunday afternoons, recalling trips to swim at the Athens Club or the Piedmont Club, where the Warrens were members, or to the Oakland Zoo or to the park for an afternoon picnic. “I’ve ridden thousands of miles on merry-go-rounds,” Warren remembered later, and visited the zoo “so many times I’ve forgotten.” 41 Often, they recalled, the day would end with their reuniting with their mother, either at the Athens Club or at a local restaurant—the children especially enjoyed the Four Seas in San Francisco’s Chinatown. When she joined the rest of the family for those dinners, the children regaled her with stories of their day. Nina would sometimes skip dinner, though, particularly if the family was heading out for Chinese—Nina never did like Chinese food. On those nights, she’d stay home, and when the children piled back inside, they’d find her at the table snacking on toast, jam, and cheese—Swedish fare was more to Nina’s taste.42