Justice for All
Page 12
“The foregoing Masonic record closely indicates that, from the beginning of his Masonic career, Brother Warren has shown a keen interest in our ancient and honorable fraternity,” according to the Masons’ official record.10 Not coincidentally, Warren’s Masonic ties also helped bolster his growing political aspirations, and he recognized and appreciated that fact as well. “While the Masonic Order is strictly nonpolitical, friends are friends, however attained, and I have no doubt that these friendships contributed substantially to the success of many of my campaigns,” he wrote.11
Still, friends come with their own ideas, and each of Warren’s affiliations came with attachments, none more troubling than those associated with an organization little known outside California but well established within it. Called the Native Sons of the Golden West, the group extolled California history and its pioneers. The organization was divided into “parlors,” and the Native Sons grew rapidly around the turn of the century, establishing major centers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, forming dozens of groups in a swarm of parlors that covered the state from border to border. Only native-born Californians were allowed to join, which in part accounted for a large of number of politician members; for politicians or aspiring politicians, membership was proof of their California roots. So Warren’s decision to affiliate with the Native Sons was not surprising. Membership accomplished two valuable political objectives: it advertised his heritage as well as his devotion to California. But as Warren well knew, the Native Sons did more than put up plaques and hold their signature Admission Day memorials—two functions that the organization still performs today. In early-twentieth-century California, the Native Sons served as an aggressive proponent of white supremacy.
And yet, on July 24, 1919, soon after becoming a member of the city attorney’s office in Oakland and just a few months before joining the Masons, Earl Warren was initiated into the Native Sons of the Golden West. He joined the Fruitvale Parlor in Oakland, known within the Native Sons as Parlor 252.12 Within months of Warren’s decision to join, United States senator James D. Phelan—another of the Progressives for whom racism and political reform existed as complementary values13—appealed to the Native Sons’ membership by writing in their monthly magazine a screed against miscegenation: “Imagine a Japanese seeking the hand of an American woman in marriage!” he exclaimed. “If you knew how these people raise their garden truck, you would never let a bite of it pass your lips.”14 Soon after, when Governor William Stephens refused to call a special session of the legislature to consider anti-Japanese bills, the Native Sons called for his recall, urging their followers to preserve California as “the White Man’s Paradise.”15
“We have taken an active interest in the conservation of our natural resources,” Fletcher A. Cutler, grand president of the Native Sons of the Golden West, wrote in 1926, “the preservation of our scenic wonders and making them accessible to all; the retention of the State and its soil for the White race; all legislation, Federal and State, affecting the State and its interests.”16
By 1942, when Warren was running for governor and Pearl Harbor had stoked anti-Japanese sentiment in California and across the nation, the Native Sons were bursting with indignation. The May issue of the organization’s newsletter, The Grizzly Bear, approvingly published the remarks of Mississippi senator John Rankin, a man with few peers in race-baiting. “This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of this conflict is concerned,” Rankin wrote. “This is a question we have to settle now, and we might as well understand it. I am for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting him in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible.”17
Warren’s own parlor, in Alameda, took the lead in persecuting the state’s Japanese residents during the crisis months of early World War II, and Warren participated. “The Order of Native Sons of the Golden West has for the past quarter-century warned against the very dangers which have now come upon us,” began a resolution introduced by the president of Warren’s parlor. Approved by the Grand Parlor during its sixty-fifth meeting, held over three days in May 1942, the resolution called for the Sons to file a lawsuit challenging the right of Japanese to hold American citizenship and for the organization to draft a constitutional amendment to exclude all “persons of Japanese ancestry” from citizenship.18 The same resolution called on parlors to raise money for those efforts, and every Native Son was asked to give at least $1. Warren endorsed the resolution.19
Warren’s embrace of the Native Sons’ agenda was ambivalent in some respects. His prepared remarks for the convention that year included no reference to the citizenship debate. But he must have added them at the last minute, and then William Knowland, son of Joseph Knowland, made sure that they would receive attention. After the conference was over for the day, Knowland returned to his office at the Oakland Tribune and read the Associated Press account of the meeting. That story did not quote Warren, so Knowland took it upon himself to edit in the comments of his friend, the attorney general and gubernatorial candidate. “I took off the A.P. dateline and re-arranged the story, putting you in with a few quotes which I remembered which I think were perfectly safe,” Knowland explained in a letter to Warren.20
In its revised form, the story began, “Vigorous prosecution of suits pending in the Federal courts to prevent land holding and citizenship rights to Japanese was advocated here last night by Atty. Gen. Earl Warren.”21
Two months after Warren and the Native Sons endorsed the exclusion of Japanese from citizenship, Warren advertised his gubernatorial candidacy in The Grizzly Bear. To his fellow members, Warren billed himself as “A Californian for California,” a message sure to appeal to the Native Sons and one that slyly alluded to the Utah birth of his opponent, Culbert Olson. His second ad, which appeared in the October issue of the magazine, similarly identified him as “a true Californian” and appeared just above a letter from a “Native Daughter of Pioneer Parents.” Of the Japanese, she wrote, “If they are allowed to continue their citizenship and their ownership of land, they will always be thorns in the flesh of our democracy.”22
Though he had little involvement with the organization after joining the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren never resigned from the Native Sons or renounced his membership. As with the Legionnaires, he skirted the edges of the Native Sons’ most objectionable positions, but his association with it highlights a weakness of his early, club-based politics: by making philosophy an extension of his affiliations, Warren placed himself in uncomfortable company, and it was difficult for others to assess his true beliefs. To critics, the American Legion was anti-Communist, the Masons anti-Catholic, and the Native Sons anti-Japanese. Even though those groups were, for Warren, more about fraternity than ideology, his membership in them contributed to early misappraisals of his values. He seemed, in short, more conservative than he was.
Compounding that misunderstanding was Warren’s enduring bond with his first and most important political patron, Joseph Knowland. After backing Warren in his initial bid to become Alameda County district attorney, Knowland stayed with the young prosecutor. Knowland joined the Native Sons in 1891, when he was just eighteen years old, and was an enthusiastic member.23 More important, he was a highly influential leader of the California Republican Party’s conservative wing, and he used his influence to advance his politics and protégés. Warren courted Knowland’s favor. Their correspondence through the 1920s and 1930s is replete with favors given and sought by both men. In early 1927, for instance, Knowland inquired about a case involving an Oakland doctor whose wife had died under mysterious circumstances the year before. Warren dispatched one of his investigators, who produced an analysis for Warren on February 14, 1927. Warren forwarded it to Knowland the following day, noting that it was sent “in accordance with your request.”24 That same month, Warren forwarded a divorce file to the publisher, whose newspaper was fascinated by the then-sordid topic of marital breakups and regularly published embarr
assing details about husbands and wives who divorced.25
Not all the favors were sought by Knowland and granted by Warren. Sometimes, the DA had requests of his own. In 1933, for instance, Warren asked for Knowland’s help in securing a commission with the Judge Advocate section of the U.S. Army, acknowledging that such an appointment would be difficult in light of the limited number of spots, but adding that “if you can assist me or offer any suggestions as to a mode of procedure, I will greatly appreciate it.”26
In general, the two friends reciprocated innocent favors, the publisher getting tips and information from Warren while Warren received political support from Knowland. In some cases, however, the information exchanged could have compromised Warren’s office. Having a public official perform an investigation for a newspaper publisher, for instance, was dubious even by the prevailing legal standards of that era. And on March 26, 1935, Warren sent to Knowland “copies of confidential reports concerning the matter we discussed yesterday.”27 Later in life, Warren sought to minimize Knowland’s influence on his early political development. He rejected the implication that Knowland was a machine politician and that Warren benefited from his patronage. Interviewed after his retirement from the Supreme Court, Warren said:
Joe Knowland . . . he was running the newspaper, that’s all. He had nothing to do with county government. You know, I think some of the writing people have overemphasized the position of Joe Knowland in the county. He had no political organization. There wasn’t any political organization. He was one of the anti’s against the Mike Kelly group, but he had no organization of his own, and he was always friendly to me and helpful as far as he could be in his newspaper, but that’s all.28
True, but misleading. While Knowland did not hand out offices in the manner of Mike Kelly, he looked out for his people. And Warren was, from 1925 on, one of Knowland’s people. The Tribune’s backing helped Warren win elections in 1926, 1930, and 1934. That helped protect Warren from challenges at home, and allowed him to turn his political attention elsewhere. He was aided there as well by Knowland, who in 1934 supported the district attorney’s bid to become chairman of the state Republican Party. Knowland’s backing helped Warren land that position, which elevated his stature at a propitious moment, just as California’s conservatives felt a threat unlike any they had experienced before.
UPTON SINCLAIR was earnest and occasionally brilliant—his masterwork, The Jungle, stands as one of the century’s great pieces of journalism—and sometimes painfully naïve. Sharp of tongue and in appearance, Sinclair was a gifted polemicist, an author of novels and journalism, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a long-standing member of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Sinclair had run for office as a Socialist, though without success. On September 1, 1933, however, Sinclair paid a quiet visit to Beverly Hills City Hall, where he reregistered, this time as a Democrat, and set out to run again.29 At first, the only people who seemed bothered by that were Socialists, including Sinclair’s son, who saw him as a traitor for abandoning the cause and party with which he had long been associated.30
But Sinclair, operating out of his Sunset Avenue bungalow in Pasadena, campaigned with the manic energy that had allowed him to produce more than forty books. Characteristically, when he launched his campaign for governor, he did it with a pamphlet. It was released in October 1933, just over a year before the gubernatorial election day. The title of Sinclair’s debut work of his first bid for office as a Democrat bore his signature enthusiasm and hubris: I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future.
“This is not just a pamphlet,” the cover declared. “This is the beginning of a Crusade. A Two-Year Plan to make over a State. To capture the Democratic primaries and use an old party for a new job. The EPIC plan: (E)nd (P)overty (I)n (C)alifornia!” 31 The sixty-four-page document sold for twenty cents a copy. It raced out of its author’s hands. Within months, it was the biggest-selling “book” in the history of California. In it, Sinclair outlined a twelve-point program for eliminating poverty and doing it so quickly that he envisioned having time to spare in his four-year term before then bowing back out of office and returning to life as a writer. The EPIC plan called for the creation of state-owned land colonies and factories, which would trade with one another in a special California-issued scrip, to be monitored by a new state agency known as the California Authority for Money. It represented a staggering assault on free-market capitalism.
EPIC’s promises can strike a modern ear as naïve or outlandish, but they were directed toward a society perched at the edge of ruin. The Depression in those years painfully gripped the American economy, shadowing millions of its souls, stripping them of homes, sustenance, income, and at times even the will to live. California’s suffering was particularly acute. By 1932, an estimated 28 percent of Californians were out of work, and by 1934, more than 1.25 million Californians were receiving public relief, along with millions more scraping by on reduced wages.32
So when Sinclair complained that the state and national economies were in shambles, his appeal reached despairing workers in fields and cities, in relief lines and outside shuttered factories. It struck a chord with intellectuals as well, as it tapped a growing effort to comprehend the depth of the California crisis. Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, and others vividly captured the woefulness of California’s Depression in their haunting photographs; economist Paul Taylor documented the depth and breadth of the crisis. “There is,” John Steinbeck would write in 1939, “a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.”33
The woe of poverty was joined by a burning, building anger, cresting just as Sinclair began his campaign for the governorship. San Francisco’s docks in 1934 were busy, prosperous, and ready to explode. Labor was itching to reclaim ground lost to employers during the 1920s and to eliminate a humiliating employment practice known as the “shape-up,” a daily dock call in which workers were forced to gather and be picked for work. The practice led to corruption—a man in charge of picking workers often could be induced to pick the right ones for a share of their wage—and even at its best it demeaned those forced to plead for work day after day.
If labor had its grievances, employers felt the press of battle, too. They had fought to a tie in the previous decade, but now set their jaw in opposition to labor’s effort to unify the dockworkers of the West Coast under a single union, the International Longshoremen’s Association. Just as Eugene Debs had hoped to bring railway workers under the unifying banner of the American Railway Union—and had confronted the talons of business when he did—so now did longshoremen seek common representation. Employers and their allies showed no less restraint in response to dockworker power than they did when faced with railroad workers. Warren, whose Alameda County was home to the docks of the East Bay, warned against the rising agitation, calling for law enforcement across the state to band together to resist encroaching Communism.34 Police prepared to lay siege.
Through the spring, the two sides engaged in a series of preliminary skirmishes, until, on May 9, 1934, the longshoremen walked out and the locus of their strike settled on San Francisco. May and June of 1934 were violent months in The City, as labor staged a series of protests, provoking police, who responded with escalating violence and weaponry—tear gas in some cases, specially made clubs in others. Complicating the matter politically, Governor James Rolph, a likable if unimpressive Republican whose single noteworthy contribution to California politics was his tragic endorsement of a 1933 lynching in San Jose, died on June 2, just as the conflict was gathering in danger. Rolph was replaced by Lieutenant Governor Frank Merriam, a Long Beach real estate salesman who was neither likable nor moderate. Merriam unabashedly sided with employers. His embrace of their cause—typical of the state’s Republican leadership—emboldened employers, who held fast against labor and counted on Merriam to supply the muscle if conflict erupted.
It did. The crescendo of the Great Maritime Strike
occurred in early July 1934, in the form of a series of bloody, spectacular, and theatrical confrontations movingly reconstructed in Kevin Starr’s Endangered Dreams. On July 3, thousands of longshoremen and 700 policemen faced each other at San Francisco’s Pier 38, where police had forced their way in the day before and symbolically restored the port to the employers. The police clanked open the pier doors just after noon. As thousands watched, police escorted five trucks along the waterfront, protecting their cargo from the angry dockworkers outside. The police cordon was intended to agitate, and it succeeded. By midafternoon, the two sides were at war, giving vent to decades of anger and desperation. Longshoremen hurled bricks and pavement, and helmeted police swung clubs and fired gas and bullets. The battle raged and spread for days. Sixty-four people were injured and two strikers died as San Francisco was engulfed in the worst labor violence it had ever experienced.35 Merriam, meanwhile, declined to declare martial law, but delivered troops to San Francisco to secure state property along the waterfront. At his instruction, the 40th Infantry Division of the California National Guard took up positions in The City, and held the areas around Fisherman’s Wharf, while two regiments claimed property along the Embarcadero. By mid-July, more than 4,500 soldiers were ensconced in San Francisco, their guns and bayonets symbols of where the state’s sympathies lay.36
Labor recognized the force arrayed against it, and opted to shut The City down rather than to challenge the army in combat. At their call, a general strike closed San Francisco from July 16 through July 18. Through those eerie days, San Francisco lay quiet, its normal bustle tamped down by force of labor’s will.37 Finally, on July 18, labor’s organizing council narrowly approved a motion to lift the general strike, and order began to return the following day. Streetcars resumed operation, and all workers other than Teamsters returned to their jobs. The San Francisco Call Bulletin, its pages sighing with relief, observed a “ground-swell indicating return to work.” “Expect S.F. Peace in 24 Hours,” the newspaper headlined to an exhausted, tremulous city.38