Justice for All (15 page)

California's novel politics augmented the looseness of Warren's party affiliation. Among the reforms that distinguished the tenure of Hiram Johnson was the so-called cross-file, under which a candidate could seek the nomination of more than one political party at a time. Cross-filing was intended to liberate candidates from the strict dictates of party domination and thus to wean them from the Southern Pacific and its domination over the party machinery in the early twentieth century. In Warren's hands, it would become that and more, as he used his centrism and pragmatism to carve out a viable California center, between California's mean right wing and its loopy left. Democrats would join Republicans in supporting him, and thus Warren could and did assemble enough votes to win without the enthusiastic support of ideologues in either party.

At the outset, however, Warren gave every indication of following a more traditional Republican path. Although Warren joined the Republican Party casually, he came to affiliate with it more strongly during his years as a prosecutor. He genuinely disliked criminals. He had from his boyhood, and his offense at vice only grew during his years as a prosecutor.
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As a result, he prosecuted vigorously and found much support for his approach from conservative Republicans, notably Joseph Knowland and his
Oakland Tribune
. Since Republicans held sway in Sacramento, a law-enforcement agent in those years—as Warren was—also tended to enforce Republican will. His courtroom victories therefore reinforced his party identification.

Moreover, Warren attempted through his entire political life in California to draw a distinction between himself as a local official and as a national advocate. When he ran for Alameda County or later statewide offices, Warren presented himself to voters as a nonpartisan, but in alternating election cycles, when the presidential race appeared on the ballot, he affiliated with the Republican Party and backed its nominees. That embrace of partisanship at the national level extended to his views of national affairs, where he hewed a more traditionally Republican line. Nowhere was that more evident than in his curt rejection of FDR and the New Deal.

To Warren—at least the Warren of the early 1930s—the New Deal was worse than impractical. It was immoral. Its fluid experimentation offended his sense of stability, and its challenge to the established rules of business and regulation upended the order to which Warren was committed, even in the crisis of the Depression. As FDR improvised with the economic engines of American society, searching for ways to stimulate consumer spending and production, Warren fumed. When, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld the federal government's abandonment of the gold standard, Warren stormed around the district attorney's office, slamming shut law books. “Throw them away, forget them,” he complained. “They're no good now, contracts don't mean anything anymore.”
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The machinations of the New Deal offended Warren all the more because they were drafted in Washington. Once he himself governed from the nation's capital, Warren would view centralized authority with less suspicion and would see states more as obstacles to freedom than protectors of it—as indeed they were during much of the long struggle for civil rights that Warren helped to lead. For now, however, Warren viewed politics from California, and saw Washington as a somewhat foreign power, capable of great action but also of roughshod tactics. “The doctrines of individual freedom and personal property rights,” he warned in 1934, “as laid down by our forefathers in the Constitution of the United States [are] under dangerous attack. These attackers must be repulsed.”
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And yet Warren was more complex than that rhetoric implied. In August 1933, apparently at the request of Raymond Moley, Warren submitted to the Roosevelt administration a detailed memo proposing ways to overcome what he termed the “three great factors which are largely responsible for our failure to suppress crime in this country.”
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The memo captures Warren at that interesting juncture in his life. Warren's “three factors”—decentralization of enforcement, ignorance on the part of local police and prosecutors, and politics—summed up his blend of pragmatism and Progressivism. His more specific suggestions, however, went beyond those areas. Warren proposed expanded congressional authority in controlling crime and increased federal presence in investigating certain crimes. He also recommended that the government deport “every alien convicted of a felony or any crime involving moral turpitude,” an idea he would disavow as chief justice, when his commitment to citizenship would deepen. He also recommended universal fingerprinting, if not of all Americans, then at least of all children in public schools “for their own protection,” and for all adults on a voluntary basis. Finally, he proposed a national ban on the manufacture and sale of machine guns, which, he said, serve “no good purpose and should be prohibited.”
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Those proposals suggested that while Warren might still harbor objections regarding federal interference in local affairs, he recognized the importance of national values and rules—in effect of the federalizing of certain offices and offenses in order to establish minimum national standards. “In view of the changes in recent years of economic conditions, modes of transportation, and population factors, it would seem as though the time has arrived when both Congress and the Courts could agree that the United States Government must enlarge upon its concept of the obligations due from it,” Warren wrote. His willingness to accept national standards in those areas resembled, on a smaller scale, the view of national rights Warren would express as chief justice, when he found intolerable the actions of states to subvert what he saw as basic human and constitutional principles. In 1933, those ideas were still undeveloped—and to the extent that they were developing, they remained limited to law enforcement. So although the memo expresses Warren's 1930s federalism, it also hints at his later reconsideration of that idea, once he was wielding federal authority and state officials were those standing in his way.

In later years, as Warren's politics expanded and to some degree moved to the left, his friendship with his early supporters would be tested, but the personal bonds usually held—Knowland, for instance, never wavered in his admiration of Warren. With Knowland's help, Warren rose to more prominent office and eventually became, as governor, the leading Republican in a state dominated by Democratic voters. In that position, he acquired the additional value to the state's Republican old guard of being able to win and hold office against political odds, protecting them against Democratic landslides. It endeared him to such leading members of the party as Harry and Norman Chandler, scions of the
Los Angeles Times
.

With such strong conservative backing, Warren was protected from right-wing criticism even when he embraced issues that conservatives did not like, as would become common during his gubernatorial years. In the parlance of today's politics, Warren shored up his base before moving to the middle. And yet his early moves seem more reflexive than calculated, more the result of a law-enforcement focus and allegiance to Knowland than of a deliberate attempt to fashion a political base. As late as 1930, Warren still did not think of himself as a lifelong politician. He seriously considered leaving politics that year, and was counseled to do so by one of his mentors, Ezra Decoto, who believed the time was right to pass the office to a subordinate and for Warren to embark on a more lucrative private legal practice.
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After giving the idea thought, Warren rejected it—he was in the middle of the graft cases, and public service, he concluded, was simply too fulfilling to give up. Private practice offered money but neither fulfillment nor prestige.

If the Republican Party was Warren's somewhat by happenstance, his community affiliations were more deliberately developed, though initially as an outgrowth of his personality and only later as a device to expand his political reach. Starting in 1918 and 1919, Warren, already active in University of California alumni affairs, joined the American Legion, the Elks, and the Masons. Each of those groups brought Warren acquaintances and friends, though also entanglements. The American Legion in those years was distinguished by its virulent, sometimes extralegal, anti-Communism—its attacks on the Wobblies were vicious. But Warren, while seconding the Legion's views on Communism, never supported violence; indeed, he explicitly urged fellow Legionnaires to respect the rights of citizens and to leave law enforcement in the hands of the government.
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Warren also took care to soften the edges of his Masonry, whose quasi-religious order and reliance on ancient rites subjected it to charges that it was anti-Catholic. John Mullins, whose vote as a county supervisor had given Warren the position of district attorney, was Catholic, and some friends warned him about associating with Warren. “They said to me, ‘Earl Warren is a Mason and you know what that means,' ” Mullins told Warren biographer Leo Katcher in the mid-1960s. “I answered I knew what it meant. It meant each year when the Shrine entertained Earl Warren as a Past Potentate, he had the band play ‘My Wild Irish Rose' for me.”
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The draw of the Masons for Warren took the same form as the attraction of the Progressives. Both were bourgeois, professional, and gently elitist—sufficiently selective to appeal to Warren's clubbiness but not so selective as to prevent a young man from a working-class Bakersfield background from joining. The Masons, like the Progressives, took themselves and their moral mission seriously, believing in their responsibility as professionals to lead and to improve society. Moreover, the Masons drew upon an ancient history of service, and Warren enjoyed that sense of attachment to a larger tradition—it bound him to the Masons as it did to Berkeley and the Order of the Golden Bear. Warren's attachments in each instance worked in two directions: He thrived in the Masons because he shared their ideals, but those ideals also helped to shape him, nurturing his commitment to service, deepening his conviction that society's problems were best addressed by small groups of enlightened, well-meaning citizens. Those ideals knitted together Warren's Progressivism, his Republicanism, and his Masonry.

Warren was, in the vernacular of the Masonic order, “raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason” on November 1, 1919, in Sequoia Lodge No. 349 at Oakland. Year after year, he advanced, becoming a steward (1922 and 1923), then a junior deacon (1924), then senior deacon (1925), junior warden (1926), senior warden (1927), and master (1928). His schedules through those years show his active participation; rarely did a month go by without his attending some meeting or event put on by the Masons. After five years of committee work for the “Grand Lodge,” he won a series of senior positions that culminated in 1935 with his election as grand master of the Masons for California.

“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.
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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.
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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.
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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 values
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—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.”
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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.”
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