by Jim Newton
Warren held few illusions about the Mooney case. He opposed a pardon for a man whom he believed guilty, and Mooney had done nothing to court Warren’s favor. It had only been a few months since Mooney had threatened to pull his support from Robert Kenny when Kenny had endorsed Warren for attorney general, a meaningful threat given Mooney’s international standing. Still, Warren knew he was unlikely to persuade Olson to keep Mooney in prison—the political gap was too wide. Instead, Warren urged only that Olson refrain from denigrating the police, prosecutors, and judges who had supported the conviction. In an open letter to Olson, Warren wrote,
I realize that an application for pardon is addressed to the conscience of the Governor and that there is no requirement in the law that he give consideration to any particular fact or to any legal decision involving the applicant. I trust, however, that in any action you may take on Mooney’s application for a pardon you will bear in mind that today law enforcement is, at best, difficult of accomplishment and that you will neither cast any unwarranted reflection upon the agencies charged therewith, nor lend any encouragement to those forces that are opposed to the enforcement of our laws and to the maintenance of security of life and property.12
Others were far less temperate. Ben F. Lamborn, the brother of one bombing victim, warned Olson that if he freed Mooney, that act would “form the basis for an impeachment or recall movement.”13
On that Saturday morning, the fifth day of the Olson administration, Mooney was brought to the California legislature’s Assembly chamber. He arrived in manacles as the governor addressed a packed audience. Olson asked anyone with objections to his pardon to stand and make his case. Five hundred people sat without moving. None rose. None asked to speak. Olson then noted for the record Warren’s wish that law enforcement not be blamed for the conviction. But Olson did just what Warren had urged him not to do. Mooney was convicted, Olson said, by “false testimony.”14 That testimony, he added, was “presented by representatives of the State of California.”15 Olson asked Mooney to stand, which the graying inmate did, “his features twisting with emotion,” the Times recorded.16 Olson signed the full and unconditional pardon for Mooney and handed the document to him, instructing the warden “to now release you to the freedom which I expect you to exercise with the high ideals I have tried to indicate.” Mooney took the document and beamed while the audience rose and applauded for a full two minutes until he silenced the room with his hand. Then he spoke:
Your Excellency, I am not unmindful of the significance of this gathering and the forces behind it. They are the signs of democratic expression of the people of California. I am fully conscious of the fact that new political and economic powers are at work.
This is a far cry from the time when the state was controlled by a reactionary corporate machine which turned thumbs down every time through the years when Tom Mooney sought justice.
I recall the night of my conviction, when the jury filed in with its verdict and one of them, facing the prosecutor, drew his finger across his throat. . . .
The present system is in a state of decay, not just here but throughout the world. It will be replaced, I hope, by a new and better social order. Governor Olson, to that cause I dedicate my life....17
With that, Mooney was free. The pardon was a moment of high triumph for Olson, a symbolic recognition of labor’s restoration in California politics, with a new governor at its head. One can imagine the rumblings in American Legion halls and at gatherings of the Masons. For as surely as Olson’s gesture was meant to encourage labor, it was just as obviously guaranteed to antagonize labor’s opponents—the employers, Republicans, and newspaper bosses who were Warren’s core supporters.
In addition to being divisive, the moment was short-lived. Mooney proved a far more effective martyr than spokesman, as the coming months would reveal more of his difficult personality than was apparent during his decades behind bars. His bitter assaults on capitalism, and his contention that Hitler and Mussolini were of the same cloth as American industrialists, would become increasingly hard for moderates to accept as the nation geared for war against fascism. He campaigned for the release of his codefendant, Billings, who could not be pardoned because of a previous offense; that campaign fell short when the State Pardon Advisory Board voted 3-2 against it. The deciding vote was Earl Warren’s. With the hyperbole and bombast that would soon wear out his welcome among many Californians, Mooney charged that Warren was a “virtual personification of the rotten, reactionary, corporate-banker-controlled, Republican machine.”18 Billings’s sentence was then commuted by Governor Olson, and he was freed.
Olson’s victory was even briefer. Mooney was freed before noon on Saturday, January 7. For a few hours, Olson relished the acclaim as news of the pardon rocketed around the world. But late that afternoon, the new governor visited the state fairgrounds in Sacramento, where he attended a barbecue with more than 130,000 others. As he took the microphone and began to speak, the governor swayed and stumbled, his speech faltering.19 His son, Richard Olson, grabbed the microphone from his stricken, silent father and apologized to the crowd, explaining that the governor “has not had any sleep for 48 hours and hasn’t been feeling well all day.”20 Culbert Olson was helped to a car by friends and from there rushed to a hospital. He spent the next month in bed. Olson then recovered from exhaustion just in time for his wife to die suddenly in April. He was stricken a second time, so devastated that he could not bring himself to continue living at the governor’s mansion, where his wife had died. Olson’s administration never regained its footing.
Warren did not approve of Olson’s decision to pardon Mooney, but he held his tongue publicly. He returned instead to the pardon-sale scandal. On Monday, January 9, with Olson still hospitalized, Warren arrived in his office for a scheduled interview with Megladdery. Megladdery stood him up. Instead of appearing as promised, he sent along a statement to an angry Warren, announcing his refusal to cooperate after a week in which he had “been harassed by unjust accusations and rumors.” Warren brusquely responded that Megladdery’s refusal to be interviewed was “not an indication of a free conscience, in my opinion.”21 Warren called on old friends in Alameda, where the presiding judge of the Superior Court refused to let Megladdery hear cases until the accusations against him were resolved. Megladdery was increasingly defensive; now he also was isolated, unemployed, and unprotected by his judgeship—just as Warren wanted him.
Even the Republican press gathered around Warren, notwithstanding the potential implications for ex-governor Merriam. The Times, after skeptically reviewing Megladdery’s public statements defending himself, found that the allegations added up to “an astonishing mess” and concluded, “About the only bright spot in the whole affair is the determined effort of Atty. Gen. Warren to get to the bottom of it, regardless of politics.”22
All that remained was for Warren to administer the coup de grâce. After a bruising grand jury proceeding in which Merriam himself was summoned twice and Megladdery took the Fifth rather than answer questions about his actions, support for him disintegrated. Warren’s deputies uncovered bank accounts with far more deposits than Megladdery’s salary warranted, and witnesses insisted that money he claimed to have accepted for Merriam’s campaign never reached the governor’s political offices. On January 23, Merriam dumped Megladdery over the side, conceding that he would not have given him a judgeship “if I knew last month what I know now about him.”23 Megladdery resigned from the bench on January 25, having never heard a single case. Clarence Leddy, whose last-minute pardon had caught Warren’s eye in the first week of the investigation, was indicted on February 3 for lying to the grand jury about his meetings with Megladdery. Then, on February 11, Megladdery and his law partner were charged with bribery and grand theft. Instead of a judgeship, Megladdery would be convicted and sentenced to San Quentin. Merriam, though not directly implicated in the case, was tarred by it beyond redemption. Though some, including Mooney, would fault Warren for not se
eking an indictment against the governor, the damage was done: Merriam never again won elected office.
By the end of February 1939, barely two months into the new terms of office, much of California’s established political leadership had collapsed: Olson literally and Merriam figuratively. The state’s political landscape now suddenly was far more open than it had been when the year began, as the champions of both poles of California’s polarized politics were now vastly reduced in stature. Warren’s standing, meanwhile, had only grown. He had moved with smart, nonpartisan professionalism—the hallmarks of his candidacy and now of his record. Warren’s future was brighter than ever in the spring of 1939.
His position was strengthened as well by a key addition to his staff. Warren Olney III had been a vital aide to Warren in his Alameda County days, but Warren had reluctantly let him go when Olney’s father beseeched the district attorney to persuade his son to return to the family law firm. Olney left, but when his father died two years later, Warren immediately asked Olney to rejoin him, now in the office of the state attorney general. Olney buried his father and returned to Warren the following Monday.24 Many good men and a few women enjoyed Warren’s trust over the years, but none ever commanded his respect in quite the same way as Olney, with his apolitical devotion to service and family and his strict, unbending principles. When Olney returned in May 1939, he became chief of Warren’s criminal division.
As Warren surveyed his personal options during those months, it was at the outset of a momentous time in California and the world. Nineteen thirty-nine was a signature year, one of those bursts of creativity and passion and violence that occur every few decades, and are dazzling in retrospect. In 1939’s twelve months, Hollywood released Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Wuthering Heights, and Dark Victory. In Europe, James Joyce completed Finnegans Wake. In California, Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath to wide acclaim and furious banishment: Warren’s hometown of Bakersfield was one of many in California that barred its children from reading the book.
Steinbeck’s fictional account paralleled that same year’s publication of Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field, which documented those conditions with precise and moving journalism. The appearance of Factories in the Field and The Grapes of Wrath in the same year was a coincidence; Steinbeck and McWilliams did not even know each other. But together, their two books supplied much of the public with its first sympathetic looks at California’s farmworkers. The farmers who employed those workers were accustomed to power and not to questions, and the books convinced them they needed a champion to argue their case. They turned to Warren.
If the arts were prodigious, politics was perilous and growing more so. On April 1, 1939, Franco completed his rout of Spain’s Republican forces and imposed his vengeful dictatorship on that nation’s people. FDR opened the New York World’s Fair twenty-nine days later, proclaiming that “the eyes of the United States are fixed on the future.” The nation’s wagon, he said with a firm voice and confident chuckle, was hitched to “a star of peace.”25 Even as FDR spoke, Hitler restlessly extended the reach of his Reich, and Japan’s generals stirred in anticipation of their own coup.
Warren thus came to prominence on a stage of local and international tumult. His first targets were familiar—corruption and vice would always be reliable foes for him. Gambling was a particular peeve, as he had long before watched railroad men gamble away their salaries and had joined the Progressives in part because they tapped his abhorrence of vice. That mandate was reinforced in 1939 by the persistent hold of the Depression, then in its tenth year and stubbornly oppressing the lives of Californians. Faced with widespread poverty and empowered as California’s top law-enforcement official, Warren took aim at those who would take advantage of the poor.
“Professional gamblers,” Warren wrote to police and prosecutors in 1939, “are the most persistent of law violators. They have no scruples as to how they secure immunity for their illegal operations and their large profits make them a power in any community where they obtain a foothold.”26 In addition, as he once wrote a lawyer with a client inquiring as to whether Warren enjoyed the support of gambling interests, the men who backed wagering were “the most corruptive influence in local government.” To the lawyer, Warren added, “you may assure [your client] that it will meet with no sympathy from my office.”27
Good to his word, Warren moved first against California’s dog tracks. John “Black Jack” Jerome was at the top of the list. Warren summoned the tough track owner to a meeting in early 1939, informed him that his business was illegal, and told him he would soon be shut down, by force if necessary. Jerome briefly protested and asked for time to consult with a lawyer. Warren agreed, and Jerome made a call. The three then discussed the matter further, and Warren promised that he was not singling Jerome out but rather launching a larger effort against dog tracks in general. Warren’s record of that conversation illustrates the depth of his loathing for gambling and its social consequences, as well as his compassion for those affected by it. “You are employing a number of men to assist you in these operations and are thereby directly causing each of them to commit felonies in the course of their daily employment. I do not believe that these men, if left to their own devices, would thus be violating the law,” Warren wrote to Jerome.28 If the track was closed down immediately, Warren added, the employees would not be arrested or prosecuted, sparing them “the resulting hardship and suffering to their wives and children.” Jerome agreed, and closed his track that weekend.
Over the coming months, Warren shut down the rest of California’s dog tracks, and every time the owner of one threatened to defy him, Warren’s deputy, Oscar Jahnsen, asked, “Do you think you are tougher than Black Jack Jerome?” Warren’s efforts wiped dog racing out of California; it has never returned.29
While the dog track owners went quietly, the operators of a fleet of gambling ships in Southern California put up more colorful resistance. There, Warren and Olney set out to clean the seas of four ships that had taken up anchorages off the coast of San Pedro and Santa Monica, two small cities south and west of Los Angeles. The planning for the raids involved extensive legal maneuvering, as Warren built the case for his authority to act against the vessels by arguing the theory that bays encompassed by headlands fell within the state’s jurisdiction, even when the closest point to shore was more than three miles away. Olney and Helen MacGregor supplied research arguing the attorney general’s right to abate the nuisance of the ships, in part on the headland-to-headland theory and also by maintaining that the nuisance extended to shore, since servicing the ships with customers required a fleet of water taxis. Satisfied that he could win in court, Warren then directed a careful operation for the raids—one that required restraint and a dash of high-seas swashbuckling.
One option never discussed was that of simply leaving the ships alone. Their presence off the coast, and their water taxis delivering gamblers to them at all hours, seemed to mock law enforcement. “With things like this going on, nobody can take us seriously,” Warren told Olney. “We have to find some practical way of bringing these operations to a stop.”30
On July 28, 1939, Warren and law-enforcement executives in Southern California warned the gamblers to close immediately or “we will take all necessary steps to compel them to cease their activity.”31 They refused, claiming a legal right to operate off the coast, and on August 1, Olney, assisted by Oscar Jahnsen, took command of his armada. “When the time came, I found myself, to my great surprise, the commander for all practical purposes of a fleet of four patrol boats, sixteen water taxis and seventy-five or 100 men,” Olney recalled later. “We were to board and take possession of four large ships located in two widely separated bays and manned by hostile crews and all in the presence of unfriendly and excitable public participants. Quite an assignment for a young man who had never commanded so much as a corporal’s guard.”32
Olney may h
ave been new to the business of admiralty, but he was no stranger to detail. The officers involved were carefully briefed, and Olney even thought to bring along Price Waterhouse accountants to vouch for the disposition of the money that the raiders knew they would find on board the casinos (a few photographers went along as well; Warren was not immune to the lure of publicity). As the spectacle unfolded in Santa Monica Bay, Warren played the role of theater commander. He watched through binoculars from a beach headquarters and sent in directions via shortwave radio.
The little fleet under Olney and Jahnsen’s command shoved off early that morning, and three of the ships—the Texas, the Showboat, and the Tango—surrendered without a fight. Boarding, the investigators tossed gambling equipment overboard from one ship, causing the owner later to threaten a lawsuit for piracy. But for the most part, captains allowed their vessels to be raided, and passengers were moved back to shore without incident. The exception, and the case that made the raids a running state story for days, was that of a daring gambler named Tony Cornero and his vessel, the Rex. Cornero was a smuggler and rumrunner from Prohibition days whose exploits had made him a minor celebrity and longtime irritant to federal and California law enforcement. He’d once commanded a fleet of speedboats used to ferry liquor into California after dark, and rumor was that Al Capone supplied the cash that got him into the gambling business. Cornero believed he’d outfoxed local authorities with his offshore gambling ships, reasoning that California could not regulate activity beyond its waters. Indeed, by 1939, Cornero’s operations were so public that they advertised in Southern California newspapers.33 (At Warren’s request, the attorney general’s staff analyzed those advertisements and in June 1939 concluded that $24,375 was spent on advertising for the Rex in the Times during May and early June, another $27,075 in the Examiner, and $15,750 in the Herald-Express . Lesser sums were spent on advertising for other ships in those and other local papers.34)