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Authors: Jim Newton

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It was not a placid time to accept responsibility for enforcing the laws of California, particularly not for an idealistic, moderate young man. The state was divided into opposing camps, moving further apart with each passing year. On one side were the state's business leaders, largely Republican, consolidating their fortunes and trying to build a modern economy; on the other was organized labor, powerful but confused in San Francisco, suppressed in Los Angeles. Neither side had much patience for compromise; both were all too willing to reach for the bludgeon or the dirk.
There was no single event that caused that fissure; indeed, the state's history seemed to ordain it. But the particular set of calamities that set the temper in 1920 began a decade earlier, with the bombing of the
Los Angeles Times
by three union activists. They first denied their crime, and labor furiously rose to their support. Then two confessed, humiliating those who had championed them, setting back labor's campaign in Los Angeles and sealing the paper's violent antipathy toward labor; even in the 1950s, Norman Chandler, grandson of General Otis, could boast, “I have never bargained with a labor organizer or negotiator in my life.”
4
Six years after the
Times
's bombing in Los Angeles, another explosion, in San Francisco, scattered more victims across more pavement. This time, a belligerent union tough named Tom Mooney was arrested, along with Warren Billings, another Socialist.
They were prosecuted by San Francisco DA Charles Fickert—the same district attorney who had beaten the Progressive candidate in the election that Warren monitored as a student. On February 9, 1917, the jury in the Mooney case filed back. Its foreman caught the eye of one of the prosecutors and drew a finger across his throat. Mooney was convicted, and on February 24, sentenced to hang. Barely had the case concluded, however, before problems began to appear regarding the witnesses against Mooney and his codefendant. Some admitted to having concocted their accounts, others to embellishment. Strong evidence suggested that Fickert and his staff had offered bribes and doctored physical evidence. One witness, confronted with a contradiction in her testimony that put her in two places nearly a mile apart at the same instant, insisted that her flesh was in one location but that she had witnessed the bombing with her “astral eyes.”
5
Eventually, even the trial judge became convinced that the case against Mooney had been unfair.
Mooney went to San Quentin and there became an international labor martyr. From his cell, he demanded his release and rejected attempts to cut a compromise under which he would accept parole.
6
Mooney became, as historian Starr notes, both the “most revered martyr of the labor movement” and, after Douglas Fair-banks and Mary Pickford, the “best-known Californian in the world.”
7
As the 1920s began, Tom Mooney was alive, angry, and in prison—a spark in California's superheated politics.
At about the same time, another player added fuel. The International Workers of the World, formed in Chicago in 1905, came to California to organize its poorest workers, including migrants and minorities—groups beyond the interest of most of the state's labor organizers. The IWW was ramshackle and its aims were at times incoherent, but it was ambitious as well. It embraced revolutionary rhetoric. Its organizing campaigns cut across industries and racial groups—unlike Debs's American Railway Union, the IWW welcomed black and Asian members. That was enough to enrage California's elites. The IWW's loose-knit leaders—the
Times
was apparently the first to call them “Wobblies”
8
—were demonized and persecuted. They were subjected to sadistic assaults in Fresno (1910 to 1911), San Diego (1912), and Wheatland (1913), among other places, and vilified in the California legislature, a reliable engine of repression. It was during Warren's brief service there in 1919 that the legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Act, intended specifically to give law enforcement additional power to suppress the IWW. The act prohibited advocacy of “any doctrine or precept advocating, teaching or aiding and abetting the commission of crime, sabotage . . . or unlawful acts of force and violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing a change in industrial ownership or control or effecting any political change.”
9
By allowing prosecutions for advocacy, rather than action, the Criminal Syndicalism Act vastly broadened the scope of illegal activity related to union organizing, at least as practiced by the IWW. Within months, scores of IWW members across the state were under arrest, charged with violating the act not by committing violence but for giving speeches or otherwise expressing the belief that force was justified in changing “industrial ownership or control.”
Under those circumstances, moderation was a hard value to practice, especially for a young lawyer in his first courtroom job. Earl Warren was assigned his first case less than a month after he joined the office, and he was paired with a senior prosecutor, A. A. Rogers. Warren's assignment was to secure a conviction of John Taylor, a union leader and onetime Socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland whose affiliation with the Communist Labor Party brought him afoul of California's Criminal Syndicalism law. With less than a month on the job, Warren entered California's fast currents of labor, violence, and repression.
Taylor's offense was not that he had committed acts of violence but rather that he believed in the principles of the Communist Labor Party and that he had admitted to once being a member of the IWW. Taylor represented himself at trial. He maintained that his beliefs might be radical but they were not violent, and he contended that police and police informers tilted their testimony against him and paid money to secure damning evidence. Warren rose on June 16, 1920, to deliver the prosecution's response to those charges in the form of a closing argument. He accused Taylor of slander and demeaned Taylor's attempts to introduce nonviolent socialist teachings into the case. Those writings were irrelevant, Warren told jurors, because Taylor had stayed with the Communist Labor Party when that party broke from the less violent socialists.
10
Warren condemned Taylor's attacks on prosecution witnesses, though in fact the prosecution had relied on a number of shady informers to make its case that the IWW was a violent organization. Labor fiercely resented those informers, describing one as a “self-confessed burglar convict, a stick-up man and trench dodger,” and another as “a twelve-time deserter from military and naval service . . . identified by hospital officials as evilly diseased and paretic.”
11
Later, Warren too would express reservations about the witnesses used in that and other syndicalism cases. In his memoirs, Warren described the witnesses as “repulsive” and confessed to having felt “squeamish about them.”
12
The jury in Taylor's trial did not hear any of that, at least from the prosecution. Instead, Warren reminded jurors of the law and accused Taylor first of breaking it, then of lying to save himself from the consequences.
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.
BOOK: Justice for All
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