by Jim Newton
As that mass of young men passed through California, it created frictions. In June 1943, just six months after Warren took office, two sailors out for the evening in Venice, a neighborhood in West Los Angeles, approached a pair of Mexican-American young women. Male friends of the women interceded, and pushing and shoving soon became a melee. Local military commanders perversely encouraged the fighting by allowing servicemen to leave their bases to join it. The so-called Zoot Suit riots surged back and forth across Los Angeles for days. The spectacle was dispiriting: American soldiers pausing en route to fight a racist enemy in order to indulge in racist violence.34 When order was restored, Warren convened a commission to examine the outburst, and its clear-eyed criticism of the violence was a model of citizen inquiry. Unbeknownst to the governor, Carey McWilliams was behind the idea but had the sense to lobby for it through Robert Kenny, whom Warren had liked and trusted ever since his influential 1938 endorsement.35
Amidst wartime plenty, wealthy Californians argued that the government could now afford to refund some of the money the state claimed in taxes. Warren naturally was sensitive to the popularity of such a move, especially among his Republican base. He could have proposed deep tax cuts and returned all of California’s surplus to those who had paid it. Instead, he consciously protected the programs and institutions he had trumpeted in his inaugural address, and commissioned a citizens’ panel to study tax reform. That group recommended a measured set of tax cuts, and Warren endorsed its approach. “It is true we should have some tax reduction,” Warren said soon after taking office, “but it should be temperate and without materially affecting the base of the structure.”36
The cuts that eventually were enacted reflected Warren’s evenhandedness, as well as his faith in the citizens’ group that studied the issue. Sales taxes, which hit the poor hardest, were reduced by a half cent per dollar. The maximum income tax rate, which fell most heavily on the rich, was reduced, as were bank and corporation franchise taxes. The overall package reduced California taxes by $56.5 million in a single year, the first overall reduction in taxes enacted in the state’s ninety-three-year history. 37 Although the tax cuts had been approved as a temporary measure, Warren and the legislature extended them year after year until the 1940s were ending, and one of California’s periodic pension measures won voter approval and forced Warren to pay for it.38
His first budget, developed during the transition between the Olson administration and his own, set a pattern that Warren would follow for most of the decade. He found more money for universities, state colleges, and lower education; for new prisons and juvenile correction facilities and programs; for social welfare and state workers. Even after those increases, the state had money left over, and Warren cautioned against those who would either spend it on popular but ephemeral programs as well as against those who would deplete it by tax cuts. The existence of a surplus, Warren said in 1943, “constitutes a sacred trust for those who have the power to spend, for it has been collected from all the people and should be expended or preserved only for uses which will redound to the benefit of all.”39
At his request, the legislature approved a $25 million “war catastrophe fund” to be spent in the event that California was attacked and needed to rebuild quickly. In later years, he would also convince the legislature to set aside $50 million to provide for unemployment relief when the war ended and industries were expected to shut down, and more than $140 million for a postwar construction fund, intended to pay for large capital projects at the war’s conclusion, when materials marshaled for the conflict could be redirected to civilian use and when the predicted economic slowdown would create a need for job creation. Other surplus money was dedicated to retiring the debt that had been amassed under Governor Olson.
Warren’s second full budget, that for 1945-47, added money for a new University of California campus at Santa Barbara, increased spending for public health and industrial relations (“to improve standards of industrial safety and accident prevention”), paid to build new mental health clinics and improve care at state hospitals, and added money for the Corrections Department in order to improve the conditions inside California’s prisons. It added no new taxes. And when all that was spent, Warren and his staff estimated that California would register a two-year surplus of $144,786,145.
Sheer abundance of revenue allowed Warren to avoid choices that might have revealed his core principles. He was never forced to show whether he cared more about tax cuts or public health, because he was able to provide both. “Under such circumstances, Miss Shirley Temple, aided by the same advisers and with the same newspaper support, could make a fairly popular governor of California,” Carey McWilliams wrote in 1943.40 Although McWilliams was rarely wrong over the course of his extraordinary career, his piece for the New Republic that fall must be considered one of his unusual clunkers. Warren’s handling of the state surplus, McWilliams wrote, was solved “quite in keeping with his past record, by reducing taxes instead of husbanding this wind-fall against the emergency demands of the post-war period.”41 In fact, Warren had done both.
Warren shrugged off such sniping and proceeded to overhaul California government. Once assembled, his team of department heads began moving to address areas within their spheres. They were, by all accounts, an impressive group. To a man—and they were all men—the Warren team was professionally well regarded and intensely loyal to the governor. Almost without exception, they agreed to take cuts in pay in order to join the administration (Warren’s generosity for programs never did extend to the salaries of his top deputies). 42
Warren established a clear pattern in recruiting them. He asked experts in a field whom they considered to be their most accomplished peer—in prison administration, say, or public finance, public health, or mental health. After talking to a number of people, Warren would set his sights on a candidate, then invite him for a personal visit. There, knowing his own ability to charm, Warren would grill the man for hours and, if satisfied, offer him a post. In some cases, the candidates had no idea they were even being interviewed for a job until the offer was extended. One, Charles Purcell, was well known as the engineer who designed the Bay Bridge, the industrial-gray span that linked Oakland to San Francisco in 1936, but he also was famous for his bluntness, not a characteristic many politicians appreciate in a manager. When Warren summoned Purcell to his office one day, Purcell assumed he was either being fired or introduced to the new head of the Public Works Department. He even brought along briefcases full of records in case Warren was planning to investigate his work. Instead, Warren offered to make him the department’s director. “Me?” he replied. Purcell took the job and soon established a reputation for removing political considerations from highway planning. Purcell served in that post for nine years, up until his death in 1951.43
Los Angeles County Probation Officer Karl Holton was selected by Warren to draft a new philosophy for handling child criminals. Under the proposal, which Olson had signed, the idea was to train children for the future and treat their problems rather than punish them for their crimes.44 In keeping with Warren’s admission in his inaugural that the state had been wrongheaded for too long on fighting crime, the Youth Authority under Holton’s leadership opened forestry camps and focused on the conditions that child offenders faced in their upbringing, rather than solely on punishing them for crimes once committed.
A third, Wilton Halverson, was a plainspoken Seventh-day Adventist who accepted Warren’s offer to become the state’s health director as a matter of personal mission even though it meant halving the salary he had been making as Los Angeles County’s public health officer. Halverson set out to clean the state of its health hazards, the by-product of California’s phenomenal growth. Warren promised to run political interference for the doctor, and he did, even when it meant closing Los Angeles beaches until voters approved a bond to pay for a new sewage treatment facility. 45 Halverson and his staff worked to care for crippled children and pregnant mothers. T
hey paid for research into communicable diseases. They expanded testing on food and drugs, and they subsidized hospital construction by California counties. When Halverson took the job, he oversaw a budget of about $750,000 a year; before the end of the decade, Warren would see to it that he had more than $4.8 million a year to spend.46
Warren elected not to address the state prison system until late 1943, facing as he did an already long agenda in the early months of that year. Instead, he began the quieter work of drafting a bill—one intended to remove political oversight of the system and to turn it away from strict incarceration and toward a rehabilitative model, again, in keeping with the remarks of his inaugural. “It was our idea,” he said, “to get away from patchwork on our prison system, and to create once and for all a complete, centralized system. ”47 That drafting took place in private, as Warren began looking for a chance to introduce it in a way that maximized its chances. His success with the bill ultimately reflected his shrewd timing, as well as his increasingly confident use of the press to further his objectives. In late 1943, San Francisco police chief Charles Dullea called Warren to warn him of a potentially embarrassing situation: two Folsom Prison inmates, Dullea said, had been leaving the prison every weekend—presumably by bribing authorities—and coming to San Francisco, where they were spending their time in a local hotel, holed up with women and enjoying themselves. To add insult, one of the convicts was Lloyd Sampsell, one of the so-called yacht-bandits. Sampsell was a dashing young bank robber who had set up shop in the Bay Area, living off a luxury yacht and paying for his playboy life by periodically holding up banks. The case drew wide publicity, especially after Sampsell and his cohort nearly escaped from custody while awaiting trial. Given the notoriety of the case, the district attorney of Alameda County had elected to prosecute it personally. And the DA in those days was Earl Warren.
So it was with some trepidation that Dullea called to tell Warren that failures in the prison system that he now oversaw as governor were allowing a prisoner he himself had put away to make a mockery of his incarceration. Other politicians might have seen the potential for ridicule. Warren saw something else. “Charlie,” Warren said, “the next time they come down, you just arrest them and give it all the publicity you can give it.” 48
“The arrest of Lloyd Sampsell during his illegal sojourn away from Folsom was the exact break I needed to do something about the prison system,” Warren realized. 49 On November 29, 1943, Warren appointed the Governor’s Investigating Committee on Penal Affairs. It took just two months, as the committee delivered its report on January 21, 1944.50 Warren then ordered the legislature back to Sacramento for a special session on prisons, and by May 1944, Warren had his bill. Once signed by Warren, the new law created a director of corrections, placed the entire correctional system under that person’s authority, created a new entity for considering eligibility for parole, and also gave the governor the power to appoint special commissions on crime, which Warren would end up doing five times, the most important in 1948 with the formation of the Organized Crime Commission. That gave Warren the structure he wanted, and he then set out to get a manager worthy of it. Legislators were acutely worried that Warren would use the choice to install a political appointee loyal to himself, so he departed from his general recruitment practice and allowed a committee to conduct a national, written test of applicants. That committee recommended Richard A. McGee for the position, and Warren persuaded McGee’s boss, Washington governor Arthur Langlie, that McGee was more desperately needed in California.
Sealing their deal, Warren said to McGee, “Mr. McGee . . . I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I just want to tell you how we’re going to operate in the future. I will never do anything political to interfere with your prisons if you come here. And, if I ever find out that you have done anything political, I’ll fire you. What do you think of that kind of an arrangement?”
McGee smiled and responded, “That is good enough for me.”51
Two Warren innovations launched early in his tenure helped shape his administration in both style and substance. Tellingly, neither was partisan, and neither was explicitly political in nature. The first was Warren’s “governor’s council,” a cabinet of his top advisers that met monthly to brief him and debate a range of policy issues. The council, reminiscent of Warren’s early staff meetings in the Alameda district attorney’s office, became the forum to resolve financial debates and to set the administration’s spending and other priorities. Just as in the Alameda days, differences were welcomed at the council up to the point that Warren reached a decision. Then, also as in the prosecutorial years, he expected his aides to follow.
The other Warren creation was a series of “conferences” on various topics facing the state. Governor’s conferences were not strictly a Warren invention; many chief executives before and since have convened commissions or committees as a way of soliciting public input or as a means of softening opposition to an idea. Rarely, however, has such an approach more clearly been an extension of a governor’s personality. For Warren, the conferences were an outgrowth of his Progressivism and an expression of his love for clubs. Through the 1940s, Warren convened conferences on a wide variety of subjects, including aging, employment, highways, prisons, public health, mental health, water, juvenile justice, and educational television—sixteen overall, of which ten produced long written reports.52 In addition, Warren turned to smaller citizen groups for advice on taxes, crime, and other subjects, notably his tax committee in 1943 and a slate of crime commissions appointed in 1947 to help the state Department of Corrections analyze the full range of issues confronting the criminal justice system.
Each Warren conference was organized along essentially the same lines—familiar ones to those who followed his practice in picking top aides. Warren asked experts for their thoughts on a subject, as well as their recommendations for others who were knowledgeable. Once he had selected those he considered the best in the field, he turned over the planning of the conference to them. Each conference was attended by 1,000 to 2,000 delegates, gatherings so large that they were held in Sacramento at the city’s municipal auditorium. The sessions usually took place during the legislative session, allowing delegates to consult with legislators and ensuring that legislators were exposed to the work of the groups, either directly or through the extensive news coverage that most attracted. As the conference opened, Warren welcomed the delegates—generally a range of business, social, and civic leaders chosen because they were “people who apprehend that the only certain antidote for disaffection and radicalism is a government whose basis is an enlightened public that will put its hearts and minds to work upon the fundamental problems of life.”53 But once the sessions were under way, Warren did not attempt to direct their work. “This conference is yours,” he said at the outset of one such event, a conference on aging held in 1951. “You will discuss what you choose to discuss.”54
The gatherings could be meandering but they produced results. Warren’s programs on public health and mental health both reflected the work of gubernatorial conferences, as did his proposals for a fair employment practices law, adjustments in worker benefits, an increase in monthly pension payments to the elderly, and plans to construct new facilities for treatment of alcoholism and mental illness.55 In one instance, a 1949 conference on sex crimes, Warren endorsed the work of the conference wholesale and asked the legislature to adopt all its recommendations.56
Even where Warren was less enthusiastic about the substantive work of the conferences, he enjoyed the process. Bringing more than a thousand people from all walks of life under a single roof to hash out a matter of public concern appealed to his sense of a functioning democracy with enlightened leadership. He enjoyed stimulating public conversation, nonpartisan debate, on issues that affected the lives of his state. “These gatherings took much of my time and energy,” Warren wrote later, “but they were also great educators for me as to both public affairs and people.”57 The conf
erence thus became an end unto itself, a fulfillment of citizen democracy, with Warren at its head. He benefited, to be sure, as those who participated left with the strong sense of inclusion in California’s affairs and connection to its governor. But for Warren, the conference was more than the achievement of political advantage; it was “public affairs and people,” the reasons for governing at all.
“What better way was there to plumb group opinion and still control the outcome to a degree?” asks Richard Harvey, an astute political analyst of the Warren governorship. “What superior method to stimulate that unity so cherished by the Governor?”58
Although effective on his own terms, Warren’s style of leadership was curiously impersonal, especially when viewed by a modern eye. Warren rarely attempted to steer the legislature—he proposed, it debated, he decided. That was partly out of respect. Warren honored the separation of powers between his office and those of California’s legislators. It was also a measure of political realism: Squabbling with the Assembly and Senate had reduced Olson’s stature, and Warren preferred the high ground. For the most part, he succeeded, though legislators also found it, on occasion, easy to defy him, knowing that Warren was unlikely to come down off his perch and attempt to get even. In his relations with the legislature, as in other facets of his life, Warren was deliberate rather than emotive. Warren, it was said, never roused an audience to laughter or tears—nor did he put it to sleep. Indeed, a temperamental consistency united his parenting, his governance, and his political style. Warren presented himself to aides, children, and voters in essentially the same way—as a plodding but persistent leader, intolerant of mistakes while generally optimistic and even-tempered. He was attentive to detail—a typographical error in a letter from his office was unthinkable to the secretaries in his pool. He was cautious—as the debate over the Corrections Department demonstrated, Warren liked to wait for a political issue to develop before committing himself, then strike at what he saw as a propitious moment to capitalize on public anger or interest. And once he was committed to a policy, Warren was fierce. He was, as a clerk later would describe him, a “stubborn Swede,” slow to anger, hard to budge.59 Of himself, Warren liked to say that he emulated Lincoln. He took slow steps, Warren said, but never backward.