by Jim Newton
On January 8, 1945, Warren welcomed the legislature back to Sacramento. His address to the legislators, carefully tuned by his staff and pored over by him in the early days of the year, reflected his optimism about California and his commitment to its betterment.14 In terms reminiscent of his Inaugural Address two years earlier, Warren again sounded the call to Progressive state action, embarked upon by a state flush with tax revenue. And he again trumpeted the virtues of cooperation between his office and the legislative leadership, alluding to the darker period during Olson’s administration when no such cooperation existed. “I report to you that your government is sound,” Warren said, “sound in finances, in integrity and in conformation to the spirit and the policies established by your honorable body.”15
As Warren spoke, World War II was entering its final months. Paris had been liberated the previous August, followed by Brussels and Antwerp. Rommel, implicated in an attempt to kill Hitler, was dead by his own hand. Soviet troops pressed Hitler from the east, the Battle of the Bulge was under way, and the American fleet had regained control of the Pacific, moving toward the recapture of the Philippines on its way toward Japan. With the end of the war in sight, Warren framed his speech through the eyes of California’s soon-to-be-returning servicemen:
As I visualize their return to the homeland, these service men and women of ours will want to have the opposite of what they have experienced in foreign lands. First, they will want peace—peace that comes from the elimination of racial prejudices, religious bigotry, and political intolerance. They will want an opportunity to work and to help develop the vast natural resources of our State. They will want industrial peace. They will want to be protected against the ravages of mass unemployment. They will want to see new evidence that we realize the importance of strong and vigorous health programs, for they will have seen sights which give urge to a search for perfection in this field.
They will want wholesome recreation for their families, as well as for themselves, and a high standard of educational opportunity offered in every part of the State. They will want safety at their work and in their homes and justice in all their relations with government. 16
Health insurance—sensitive to the implications of the word “compulsory,” Warren chose to label his program “prepaid” medical insurance—was squarely a part of the society that Warren argued those veterans were entitled to come home to. “Public health has always been considered the responsibility of community and State,” Warren said. “I want to see it remain such a responsibility. . . . We have had enough investigation and enough talk to be ready for action. We have ample evidence that our people desire the protection. This is the time for action.”17
The fundamental liberalism of Warren’s inaugural had escaped notice. Not this time. The California Medical Association turned its full legislative energy to the defeat of Warren’s proposal, and to do that it enlisted a natural ally, Clem Whitaker. They instructed him to kill any compulsory health insurance bill advanced by Warren or anyone else. Angered by their treatment by Warren in 1942 and philosophically opposed to a proposal they saw as socialistic, Whitaker and Baxter set out to destroy the principal policy objective of the Warren administration. For Whitaker and Baxter, this was business but also something more—a chance to get even.
Clem Whitaker believed in attack. “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win,” he liked to tell clients.18 When he had worked for Warren in 1942, Whitaker had been most pleased by the campaign’s challenge to Governor Olson’s war record; now he and Warren were on different sides, and Whitaker recognized that Warren’s plan was vulnerable to criticism from the same quarter that had criticized Olson’s—the conservative California press. In one sense, such criticism was unlikely: Warren was a Republican, after all, and one elected with overwhelming press support in 1942. But this plan was different, and Whitaker knew his audience. He had been working reporters and editors for years, through initiative campaigns, the anti-Sinclair effort in 1934, the campaign to defeat Ham and Eggs. And he knew publishers, too. In California, they were generally Republicans and conservatives, and though many supported Warren, Whitaker suspected he could sour them on the health care proposal if it was presented to them as a challenge to the free market. So Whitaker and Baxter labeled Warren’s plan “socialized medicine,” and they tapped the CMA’s vast political budget—every member of the organization was levied a mandatory fee to help support the campaign19—and began to work on the press. They took out ads, they wrote feature stories and analyses, and they and their employees personally visited hundreds of newspaper offices up and down the state. Initially, about 50 of California’s papers expressed at least mild support for Warren’s proposal; after Whitaker and Baxter had gotten to them, the number dropped to about 20. Those opposing the plan started at about 100; by the end, 432 California papers had expressed opposition to its passage.20
Whitaker occasionally put pen to paper himself, and one of his columns captures the inflated sense of alarm marshaled against Warren’s proposal. “National Health Insurance,” Whitaker wrote, “with the cost being deducted from workers’ paychecks, as proposed in California, has existed in England since 1911—and has been in operation long enough, therefore, to permit of realistic appraisal. Except for Nazi Germany, where the system may be considered in suspension, the British system furnishes the outstanding example of a government-controlled medical program.”21 “Government-controlled,” “National Health Insurance,” the wry evocation of “Nazi Germany”—these were all earmarks of a Whitaker and Baxter effort. In his column and in the campaign he managed, Whitaker went on to sneer at British inefficiencies and to complain of oppressive state oversight. As the campaign built, the Warren program thus became synonymous simultaneously with soft socialism and dangerous fascism, a neat trick of political invective.
Opponents took the threat personally. Warren aides complained that once the doctor learned who their boss was, they would be refused treatment; political allies reported that they suddenly found themselves accused of being Communists.22 “It was amazing,” Virginia Daly, Warren’s eldest daughter, recalled more than sixty years later. “Suddenly, my father was hated.”23
Warren was understandably taken aback, but he professed to have expected this reaction. “I was not surprised, of course, to witness opposition to the program develop,” he said in a radio address on February 21, 1945. “Such proposals invariably develop passionate friends and violent foes. Such is the case here. But the comforting thing from my viewpoint is that the opposition has not argued, and I believe will not attempt to argue, that the people of our state are receiving or have ever received adequate medical care. On the contrary, it is generally admitted that such care is not now available.”24 Warren tried to return the issue to “facts,” citing the health problems of draft-age young men uncovered by the Selective Service system, and stressing that he was open to suggestion for amendments to his proposal as written, so long as any alternative provided for universal coverage of the state’s middle class. Trying to cool the debate off, Warren urged listeners to ask that “further light instead of heat be turned upon the subject.”
The California Medical Association responded with a denunciation that called Warren’s proposal “outrageously impractical.” Its adoption, the CMA contended, would drive business from California and force huge tax hikes to pay for a program that would quickly spiral out of control.25 Warren counterpunched again. California’s climate, economy, and infrastructure would always make it attractive to business, he argued, and industry would only be further enticed by the prospect of a “healthy, happy working population.” Warren reiterated that no patient would be forced to see a certain doctor, and that no doctor would be forced to participate. Those decisions would continue as before. The difference, Warren said, would become evident only in the moments that a working family most dreaded. Speaking of a hypothetical father, who had had 1.5 percent of his paycheck deducted for payment to the state insurance program, War
ren then described that moment:
Let’s look ahead to a night when he is suddenly awakened to learn that his young daughter is seriously ill. What does he do? He calls the family physician. I hope you are following me closely now for I am talking about the procedure under the prepaid health plan. He calls the family physician just as he has always done and when the doctor arrives, he entrusts the child to the doctor’s care just as he has always done.
Should the family physician determine the child must be moved to a hospital, he consults with the doctor in regard to which hospital, just as he has always done.
For this father and for most of us, it will be at this point that the real distinction between present-day procedure and procedure under the plan begins to become definitely apparent. It will come in the form of a sense of relief from financial worry, for the father will know when his child goes to the hospital that the bill is already paid.26
This time, Warren’s foe was not Culbert Olson or Japanese-Americans. He was up against a determined and wealthy adversary acting in defense of what it believed were its core interests. What’s more, though the CMA pushed its argument with hyperbole, it had genuine points to make. The threat of a health care bureaucracy was real, and though Warren and his allies argued that it paled beside the reality of an underinsured state, it alarmed some legislators, particularly Republicans. Whitaker and Baxter capitalized on that, as did the medical profession’s lobbyists. Warren had tangled with banking lobbyists in considering his tax plan in 1943 and 1944; now the assembled medical lobby turned on him as well, deepening his conviction, which he never abandoned, that lobbying was a pernicious business that served to undermine democracy. Complicating matters still further, organized labor drafted legislation of its own, even more aggressive health insurance legislation. This was the prospect Warren had warned about—that more extreme voices would demand to be heard. The introduction of the labor bill probably increased public awareness and support for mandatory insurance, but it also had the effect of dividing support between labor’s legislation and Warren’s.
The Warren and labor bills were referred to the Assembly’s Public Health Committee, where the Republican strategy soon became obvious: stall the matter in committee and avoid a roll-call vote that would expose members to retaliation. Warren worked furiously to dislodge his program—by March, Sweigert had convened a daily five P.M. meeting of cabinet secretaries to plot strategy.27 In speeches and press conferences, Warren hammered at his opposition. When they refused to yield, Warren’s comments reflected his deepening irritation. “They reminded me of the people whom Abraham Lincoln said ‘could not distinguish between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse,’ ” he wrote later.28 The tension surrounding the bills grew as the Public Health Committee staged hearings in March. At one, Warren’s point person on his bill, Nathan Sinai, fended off sharp questions about the program. Then one Republican opponent of the legislation, who had promised reporters a show at the hearing, grilled Sinai about his credentials. Sinai explained that he had multiple degrees, but the assemblyman wanted specifically to know about his medical education. When Sinai reluctantly admitted that he was credentialed as a veterinarian, the room burst into laughter. Merrell “Pop” Small, then a small-town newspaperman but soon to join the Warren administration, was watching from the press section. He realized at that moment that Warren was done. “Warren’s health insurance bill,” he wrote later, “was laughed to death.”29 It was, Sweigert admitted, “very embarrassing.”30
Still, Warren fought on. Working through his chief legislative ally, Assemblyman Albert Wollenberg, Warren pushed for a vote to dislodge his bill from committee and force full consideration by the Assembly. On April 10, 1945, Wollenberg requested that the full Assembly consider the bill; his motion failed by a single vote, 39-38. Warren’s bill was finished.
Less than a month later, on May 7, Admiral Karl Dönitz, having ascended to command of the German Reich upon Hitler’s suicide a week earlier, announced his nation’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces. At 11:01 P.M. the following day, fighting in Europe ended.31 In the Pacific Theater, the war continued and appeared destined to culminate in a protracted and devastating island-to-island campaign. Military leaders predicted that hundreds of thousands would die on each side. Parents anxiously awaited word of the war’s next turn. And then, on August 6, the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and on August 9, Nagasaki fell in a single blast. With those cities reduced to rubble by the only atomic weapons ever used in combat, Japan’s emperor surrendered. He spoke to his nation over the radio on August 15 to announce that its war was lost. It was the first time the Japanese people had ever heard his voice.
World War II restructured the world. It left a scarred and devastated Europe, its fields trod upon by millions of boots, its cities gutted by gunshot and bombs. Germany lay in ruins, as did Poland, Italy, the Low Countries, and the western Soviet Union. Britain was resurrected from the Blitz, and staggered back to its feet. Europe’s Jews were not so fortunate. Across the globe, two of Japan’s industrial cities had evaporated in a single blast each, and the world contemplated the implications of those blinding explosions on the future now before it.
Beyond the physical ruin of Europe and Japan lay the political reassembly that the end of the war wrought. A curtain, as Churchill put it, came down across the center of Europe. Behind it, the menacing Soviet empire consolidated its territorial gains and girded for the next war, the global struggle between communism and capitalism foreseen by Marx and encouraged by the Soviet heirs to his ideology.
The world’s peace was America’s victory, but it came at a staggering price. World War II cost America 405,399 lives in battle. Another 78,000 men, more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, were simply lost, forever declared missing in action. Thousands of children would grow up without fathers, thousands of widows would raise those children alone. And yet the war also had freed the nation from the Depression and unleashed its industry. The era defined by streams of Okies heading west, straggling across the California border in search of promise—the ravaged faces captured by Dorothea Lange, the dusty, dissipated lives memorialized in fiction by John Steinbeck—ended with the vitality of war. Now there was work and industry, and with them wealth. “At the end of the Depression decade, nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families had still lived in poverty. One in seven workers remained unemployed,” writes David Kennedy in his unsurpassed account of that era. “By war’s end unemployment was negligible. In the ensuing quarter century the American economy would create some twenty million new jobs, more than half of them filled by women.”32
California lost its share of young men in combat during World War II. All told, 23,628 Californians perished in that conflict, dying in the myriad ways that the battlefield claims victims—of shots and explosions, of wounds, injuries, and illness, on ships at sea, in trenches, on cobbled streets and stifling jungles, and in the slow death of prison camps. Another 176 Californians vanished, their families deprived even of the solace of their remains.33 And yet nowhere was the resurgence of American might more evident than in California. In place of those nearly 24,000 men lost to battle would come 850,000 more, streaming into the state from which many had shoved off during the war.34 Most settled into the suburbs of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. And just as their forebears had sent for family after the Gold Rush had peaked, so now did these men gather wives and children around them. They desperately needed housing, and a sizzling home-building industry hastened to supply it. They bought cars and set out on the new highways California was hurrying to pave. They brought energy and optimism—they had survived a war and were ready to live again.
“Along the highways into California,” Life magazine reported in 1946, “are lines of automobiles bearing license plates from every state. New Californians are flooding auto courts, drive-ins, super-markets and schools.”35 Life’s pictures illustrated that cavalcade of newcomers: a farm family from Okl
ahoma in California for picking season but hoping to stay; an Ohio veteran dishing out ice cream at the local soda fountain; a Navy lieutenant who passed through California on his way to the war and came back to sell Buicks (cars were in such demand that the lieutenant started off by repairing cars, waiting for more Buicks to arrive); a doctor unable to find office space and instead working out of a lean-to; a sign painter from Memphis who shipped out to Manila from California during the war and who settled there afterward for the climate and because, as Life put it, “he noticed there were more signs there than anywhere else in the country.”36 Those men and women needed schools and electricity and water and jobs and every other amenity that modern life had to offer. Warren flogged the state government to supply them.
The war’s end brought that new era to California, and as the conflict drew its final breaths, the state and its governor experienced a moment that brought past, present, and future together. On August 6, 1945, the same day that the United States exploded the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren’s idol and California’s principal contribution to Progressive politics in America, died at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.37
Johnson’s final bequest to his political heir, the sitting governor of California, was an opportunity: Warren had the chance to fill the vacancy created by Johnson’s death, the power to appoint a United States senator. Warren used the opportunity to repay an old family friend, his first patron and trusted adviser, J. R. Knowland of the Oakland Tribune, whose support had helped Warren win his first seat as Alameda County district attorney and whose son had guided Warren into the 1942 contest for governor. William Knowland, then an Army officer stationed in England, was plucked from his military service and installed in the United States Senate. It was, self-evidently, the repayment of a personal and political debt, made easier by the competence of the man whose appointment fulfilled it. Still, for Warren, who loathed the notion of alliances based on anything but merit, it was hard to repay the family that had launched him. One reporter at his news conference announcing the appointment recalled years later that it was the only time he ever saw Warren uncomfortable. 38