Justice for All (6 page)

Improbably, then, the shy boy who spent his afternoons with his animals and whose mother liked to dress him in curls and shorts began to imagine a career as a great trial lawyer. It would not turn out quite the way he expected, but the seed of Warren's career took hold that spring, when he was just twelve years old.

It was one thing to daydream of such a life. It was another to work toward it. Methias urged his son to work hard for grades, but that was one admonition that did not register with Earl. He squeaked by in high school with admittedly mediocre study habits—when the final class bell would ring, Warren was the first out the door, classmates recalled. Reflecting on his high school days in 1969, one former classmate called him “the bunk” in physics and described him, simply, as “never outstanding.”
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His high school transcripts are a study in mediocrity. Latin was a particular struggle; in his two years of Latin, he never managed to top a 77. French was similarly disappointing, and his classmate's recollection of his work in physics was accurate. He received a 75, the second-worst grade of his high school career, exceeded only by junior-year algebra (a 70). One telling mark, however: Warren's best grade for all four years of high school came in his last, when he scored a 94 in American history.
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At the same time, school introduced him to poetry, and Warren took to it. In 1904, he received his copy of a collection of English poetry masterpieces; he dutifully inscribed his name and kept the book his entire life.
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Warren's reputation as a lazy student was a shared joke between him and his classmates. In the commencement issue of their school publication,
The Oracle
, the annual “prophecy” for the graduates of 1908 lauded each of the school's sixteen graduating seniors. It remarked of one classmate, “The world ne'er had a wiser man before,” and of another that “greater orator ne'er did audience command.” Of Warren, the description was more modest and the prediction for the future limited indeed:

 

Warren did not argue much more for himself. In the class “will,” he bequeathed to Lorraine K. Stoner “my ability to slide through, doing as little work as possible, hoping that in so doing, he may gain laurels on the Track Team.” His final word on high school: “I know many things, but nothing distinctly.”
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High school thus did not do much to shape the man that Earl Warren was to become, but it did in one sense augur his future. Starting in those early years, Earl would succeed best at what he felt most intimately. He was drawn to the law by sitting in a courtroom, not by the consideration of its structure or principles. Earl drifted in the face of abstraction—Latin, say, or physics. Poetry was the exception that proved the rule. He loved it, but for its stories, not for rhyme or meter.

Earl was, however, learning, if not always in the classroom and sometimes despite himself. Through his high school years, Earl spent some summers working for the Southern Pacific after securing his father's permission—which was granted only on the condition that Earl return to school at the end of his summer employment. Earl's job as a “call boy” was to run through town and gather up crews for departing trains. It was eye-opening work for a teenaged boy. He tramped through the city's underside in order to round up crews, sober them up, and deliver them to their posts. He watched men gamble away their earnings and saw the Southern Pacific strip poor workers of much of their paychecks by luring them to the company store. And he saw some blacklisted because of their union membership, the fate his own father had suffered before escaping to Bakersfield.
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Most shocking to Warren were the injuries he witnessed. Still just a teenager, he watched in horror as men were crushed between cars and carried in agony to the workplace lathe. There, held tightly by their fellow workers, the railroad men had their arm or leg cut clean off with the workplace blade. “My nature,” he remembered years later, “always recoiled against these inequities. All my life, I wanted to see them wiped out.”
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Many years later, even some of Warren's liberal colleagues on the United States Supreme Court would wonder at his insistence that the Court take up seemingly minuscule cases involving workers seeking compensation for injuries; only when they grasped it as an extension of his youth did they understand.
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Earl never did delay a train, and the friends he made with trainmen would help him later in life, when he toed the difficult line in California as a Republican in search of labor support.
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As a boy in Bakersfield, he took his first, modest step in that complicated, lifelong relationship with organized labor: On April 1, 1906, Earl, who learned to play the clarinet and to play it well, joined the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians.
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In time, Warren's love of practical learning and reliance on his personal experience over academic diligence came to help him; they grounded his ideology in real life and infused his politics and jurisprudence with a common, practical touch. But when he was a high school student, that bias nearly sank him. His grades were bad enough, his attitude toward schoolwork worse. Indeed, Warren almost did not graduate at all. During the week of the ceremony, he and several classmates stayed up late rehearsing their end-of-the-year play. Tired the next morning, several were late to school. Their principal smelled a prank, and abruptly expelled the three when they arrived on campus. After a debate in which Warren recalled delicately that the “rhetoric became somewhat heady,” the three were sent home and news of their expulsion ran through the school and community. That night, after a special hearing before the local education board, they were reinstated, the play went on, and they graduated with their class the day after that. Writing of the flap nearly seventy years later, Warren remained revealingly bitter. The principal, whom he did not name, “did not return to the school the next term, but I do not know whether the foregoing incident had anything to do with it.”
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And though Warren took pains to emphasize that he sought out and befriended the principal years later, the near-expulsion remained a burr in the hide of a man who by then had risen to international renown.

For now, however, Warren was headed away, to Berkeley. In the sweltering heat of Bakersfield in August, Warren boarded the train north, riding on the free pass that the Southern Pacific gave its employees. He had $800 saved up for college, plenty in those days to live well as a student. Once he had gone, Warren largely shut the door on his youth. Though he was tragically summoned back to his hometown in 1938 and though he appeared for high school class reunions in 1958 and 1973, life would rarely bring Warren back to Bakersfield. It remained a part of his past, and Warren was not inclined to dwell there. He preferred to move ahead.

 

 

THE FRESH dash of a new start would always brighten Earl Warren's memory of his arrival in San Francisco on an August evening in 1908, when The City's political tribulations were in full swing. Warren never forgot the cool air, the sense of life unfolding, of promise reaching out to him and finding his comfortable grasp. No other place would ever again feel quite like home.

Warren's arrival in the north placed him in the center of social and political traditions vastly different from those of either Los Angeles or Bakersfield. Where Southern California had grown from the Mexican land grants and the steely businessmen who snapped them up—and where the San Joaquin Valley of Warren's youth was built on oil, agriculture, and ranching—San Francisco was made by gold. Gold was discovered in 1848, and extensive lodes eventually were uncovered throughout the Western Sierra Nevada Mountains east of Sacramento. Gold brought people, arriving frantically at mid-century, and gold gave California its first and most enduring identity. In 1849, California's population stood at just over 100,000; by 1852, it was 255,122
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and characterized by what Hubert Howe Bancroft, the state's first great historian, called its “two remarkable features . . . youthfulness and paucity of women.”
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In 1850, under the full flood of the Gold Rush, California was more than 92 percent male, an imbalance that subsided slowly. Females made up just over 10 percent of the state's population in 1860 and about one-third by 1880.
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Few of those who came to California—of the many men or few women—made their fortune in gold, but they stayed to trade; to farm; to hunt for bear; to trap beaver and otter; to fish; to work the railroads then under furious construction; or to man the docks of one of the world's great natural ports in San Francisco. In 1887, before earthquake and fire would remake the city—not for the last time—it was home to 290,000 raucous residents.

Built up by the influx of young men, San Francisco was, from the outset, an undisciplined city. It was California's first great metropolis and a happily decadent one. Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington (uncle of Southern California's Henry), and Mark Hopkins maintained opulent residences on Nob Hill, from which they oversaw their intertwined railroad and trading businesses. Beneath and behind them lay the Chinese ghetto and the teeming red-light district. In the city's twenty central blocks were whole streets given over to brothels and saloons, with room for just one school and three churches
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—scant refuge for a growing middle class, devout and serious. Northern California life centered around The City, as generations of Californians would know it, with its bustle, its docks, its powerful unions, and its austere political bosses, dressed in high collars and stiff suits. Horses clattered across glass-cobbled streets, and a battle-tested working class—Catholic and liberal—engaged in escalating conflict with corrupt politicians and their vigilante allies.

The Communist Manifesto
, published in 1848, had given new structure to working-class grievances, and Germany, France, and England thereafter were gripped by Communism and the rise of the First International. So, too, did San Francisco ebb and wrestle beneath the firm tug of radical politics. In the winter of 1849, carpenters and joiners in San Francisco waged what is believed to be the first strike in the state's history (actually, prehistory, since California's formal admission came in 1850).
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With that, San Francisco embarked on a long drama of organization, strike, resistance, and violence that waxed and waned with its tumultuous economy.

When Warren arrived, San Francisco still was struggling to right itself from its greatest crisis and was in the midst of confronting yet another. At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, California's preeminent city, its cultural and economic jewel, had fallen into a heap. Some locals called it the “ground shake,” forty-seven seconds of earthquake.
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South of Market Street, San Francisco's main thoroughfare, cheaply built tenements fell like cards; hundreds died in the first wave alone. Gazing out on the wreckage in the minutes immediately after the first blow, John Barrett, the city-desk news editor of the
San Francisco Examiner
, described the “earth . . . slipping quietly away from under our feet. There was a sickening sway, and we were all flat on our faces.” Outside was pandemonium. “Trolley tracks were twisted, their wires down, wriggling like serpents, flashing blue sparks all the time. The street was gashed in any number of places. From some of the holes water was spurting; from others, gas.” Barrett turned to two reporters for the paper and remarked, “This is going to be a hell of a day.”
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It was, in fact, a hell of a week. Fires were the second act of California earthquakes. In San Francisco, city fire crews, hindered by the death of their chief, were overwhelmed and resorted to dynamiting buildings in order to deny the fire fuel. Block after block of The City fell.

The damage to San Francisco was overwhelming, and the reconstruction was protracted. For more than a year, the grand clock above the city's Ferry Building, one of few prominent edifices to survive, stood hauntingly stuck at 5:16, the moment at which the trembling of the earth threw its works apart. Even in 1908, when Warren arrived, the city remained in tatters. It was, he said, a “sad sight to behold. . . . Downtown, the place was a mass of rubble, with the frames of a few buildings, gutted by fire, standing skeleton-like in the midst.”
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Then, from the rubble of the earthquake and the detritus of the fire, came the great reckoning of San Francisco politics. It was to be the catapult by which Progressivism was heaved into the history of California—and the life of Earl Warren.

By the early twentieth century, San Francisco was among the most nakedly corrupt cities in America, a place where bribery was institutionalized and where candidates sought office for the explicit purpose of enrichment at the public's expense. Behind the government's elaborately constructed municipal scam were an erudite, dapper lawyer, Abraham Ruef, and his handpicked mayor, Eugene “Handsome Gene” Schmitz. Under their simple scheme, those seeking franchises or other business with the city hired Ruef, who divided up his “earnings” among himself, the mayor, and the city supervisors, also under Ruef's control after the elections in 1905, when Ruef's slate won the entire membership of the supervisory board. As a general rule, Ruef took about twenty-five percent, as did Schmitz. The supervisors then divided the other half among themselves. Telephone companies, rail service agencies, fight promoters, gas companies, and others paid their bribes and got their business. At the height of their power, Schmitz and Ruef even arranged for the construction of a city-supported brothel—the Municipal Crib, it was called.