Justice for All (18 page)

 

Nor were Warren's efforts confined to public appeals. Seeking to build Democratic opposition to Sinclair, Warren arranged for a series of secret payments from the state Republican organization to a Democratic front group, whose headquarters happened to be just down the hall from the GOP offices at San Francisco's Palace Hotel. The full extent of Warren's support for the Merriam-Hatfield Democratic Club is not recorded, but the general chairman of that group wrote to Warren on October 31, 1934, thanking the Republican chairman for the latest weekly check and expressing confidence that, because of his support, the club was sufficiently funded to make it through election day. At the conclusion of the campaign, the chairman, J. Pendleton Wilson, cabled Warren his appreciation: “The Democrats of California have been proud of the privilege of serving with you in accomplishing a patriotic duty.”
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Warren also lent his support to voter-suppression measures intended to intimidate Sinclair supporters. Through late October and early November, Warren received house-by-house tallies of Alameda voters whom Merriam alleged were illegally registered, and in his capacity as Republican chairman, Warren chastised Sinclair for relying on what Warren described as illegal voters. “My personal respect for Upton Sinclair has abated since he has denounced efforts to purge the rolls,” Warren said. On October 25, Warren, who still held the elected position of Alameda County district attorney, called on all state and county political leaders to join in the effort to “strike the spurious registrations from the records” and suggested that evidence of such fraud be submitted to district attorneys, himself included.
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The following day, Warren proposed for a statewide conference to purge voting rolls “so that these frauds could be stamped out and that voters not properly qualified shall be kept from the polls.”
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For Warren, aggressiveness was not to be confused with partisanship. He understood that asking voters to reject Sinclair because he was a Democrat could easily backfire, so Warren fended off attempts to rally Republicans as Republicans. On October 29, with National Republican Chairman Henry P. Fletcher preparing to go on nationwide radio, Warren telegrammed to warn him against invoking partisanship in the California governor's race. “The gubernatorial campaign in California has been organized along non-partisan lines and large number of Democrats have joined with us in support of Gov. Merriam,” Warren wrote. “Our campaign is now in satisfactory condition. We hope that no partisan mention will be made of California's situation in your broadcasts.”
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On Election Day, Merriam tallied just over 1.1 million votes, outpolling Sinclair's 879,000. A third candidate, Raymond Haight, received 300,000 votes, enough to keep Merriam from being able to claim a majority for his candidacy. Sinclair was exhausted and now rejected. On Election Night, he arrived at a Beverly Hills radio station as the ballots still were being counted, and angrily discovered that Merriam already was there. Sinclair refused to join his rival on the radio, but spoke after Merriam finished. “My face burns when I think of the lies and forgeries circulated by men with millions to spend to defeat me,” he told that night's audience. “But it won't go on. Be of good cheer. We're not going to stop. This is only one skirmish, and we're enlisted for the war.”
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Warren, his work completed, was more restrained. He wired his congratulations to Merriam and then went quietly back to work.

Sinclair's strong showing and the respectable turnout for Haight helped doom Merriam to a short life at the top of California politics. Republican strategists recognized that he could not carry the party forward and began to search for a new leader. The victory was, as Warren noted the day after the election, “a progressive victory . . . non-partisan in character and . . . consistent in every respect with the highest ideals of our American form of government.”
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Merriam was no Progressive—he never would be. Earl Warren was.

Warren's role in the Sinclair campaign seemed consistent with his prosecution of the IWW, his membership in the Native Sons, and his friendship with Joseph Knowland. To friends as well as critics, Warren appeared firmly set on the much-traveled path to Republican leadership in California, one vested in the state's business and propertied interests. In fact, however, Warren was subtly creating his own way, under the aegis of the Republican Party but not in its thrall. Warren's actions were taken not so much in defense of the Republican Party as in defense of what he saw as California's faltering political center. Since Sinclair offended not Warren's sense of partisanship but rather his belief in order and reason, Warren struck back in alliance with the state's right wing. Still, Warren did not oppose Sinclair because he was a Democrat; he did so because he believed—and his friends believed—that Sinclair was a radical.

 

 

ONCE SINCLAIR was finished, the new state Republican chairman turned at home to the
Point Lobos
prosecution, still then under way, and within state political circles to the effort to defeat Roosevelt's reelection. Both undertakings helped affirm for California's Republican leadership, principally the Chandlers and Knowlands, that Warren was trustworthy. In 1936, as Republican chairman, Warren sealed their loyalty by leading the California Republican Party through a duel between former President Herbert Hoover and self-appointed Republican newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst.

Since his defeat in 1932, Hoover had sulkily returned to Palo Alto, where he plotted a return to national politics. As the party's nominal leader, Hoover was hard to ignore, but more astute observers realized that his smashing by Roosevelt and association with the Depression made Hoover a sure loser. When he began campaigning to head the California delegation to the 1936 Republican National Convention, party insiders did their best to cut him off.

Hearst, meanwhile, was a latecomer to California politics and to the Republican Party. He had supported FDR in 1932 but quickly lost patience with the president, and now, four years later, schemed to defeat him. Hearst, whose newspaper empire had major outlets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, realized he would have a difficult time winning for himself, but signed up Governor Merriam to head his delegation, reasoning that Merriam would give him a figurehead through which to control the California delegation. Those two camps—Hoover's and Hearst's—united the opposition, especially the balance of California's Republican newspaper baronage. The Chandlers and the Knowlands, as well as their counterparts at the
San Francisco Chronicle
, could not stomach the ascent of their rival, Hearst, nor could they sanction defeat of the party in order to gratify Hoover. Together with a new moderate group of Republicans known as the California Republican Assembly, they backed a proposal to send an uninstructed delegation to the convention—that is, one that could vote its will, without allegiance either to Merriam or Hearst. The threshold question of who should run that delegation was answered easily enough. They chose Warren.

Warren hesitated at first. He was the chairman of the party, and accepting the leadership of the delegation risked antagonizing both Hoover and Merriam, a Republican ex-president and a sitting Republican governor. Moderate friends pressed him to do it anyway. “A number of us visited Warren and urged him to keep up the fight for an uninstructed delegation,” said Ed Shattuck, a longtime leader of the state party. “We felt that this was the way to clean house in the party.”
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Warren agreed, then faced the challenge of convincing voters that he was not merely fronting for Hoover, just as Merriam was for Hearst. Over lunch at the
San Francisco Chronicle
in the days leading up to the election, Warren advised Hoover to squelch those rumors by announcing that he had no intention of running. Hoover, Warren later remembered, “hit the ceiling. I have never seen anyone so sore.”
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Hoover never forgave Warren the impertinence.
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Soon after, Warren spoke out brashly against Hearst, charging in a radio address that a man who kept an official residence in New York in order to avoid paying California taxes should not be allowed to play a meaningful role in its politics. Hearst's reaction is not recorded, but it is not difficult to imagine his rage.

Warren and the delegation he headed ran under the slogan “Are You Handcuffed by Hearst? And Muzzled by Merriam? Or Are You Independent, Progressive California Republicans?”
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Warren's delegation won, and his victory marked a generational as well as an ideological transition. In just two years, Warren had defended Merriam against a serious challenge from his left by appealing to the voters' nonpartisanship; now he had vanquished Merriam with a new variant of that theme—that “independent, Progressive” Republicanism was needed even within the Republican Party. Hoover and Merriam, leaders of California's traditional conservative Republicans, were being consigned to the status of elder statesmen. Warren's string of victories was growing longer.

Warren already enjoyed Knowland's unqualified support, and his actions through 1934, 1935, and 1936 brought the Chandlers on board as well. Although he was never theirs—and though they would eventually bring their own champion, Richard Nixon, to the contest—for the present, Warren sufficed. He was tough, young, unblemished, and able to carry votes in a state dominated by Democrats. His handling of Hoover and Hearst proved he did not shrink before power. The
Los Angeles Times
became a supporter in those years, and would give him vital backing in Southern California for the rest of his state political career.

With his newspaper support lined up and his conservative base solid, all Warren needed was an opening. Given his background, the obvious next step was the California attorney general's office, a job that would make use of Warren's prosecutorial credentials but expand his reach beyond Alameda County. Warren had eyed the office for several years. Indeed, even as he had helped defeat Sinclair, Warren and his staff first drafted and then advocated passage of a set of amendments to the California Constitution to invigorate the office of the state attorney general. Until then, the attorney general had acted as lawyer for the government and little else. Under the amendments, the attorney general's duties and office would be expanded and he would be turned into the foremost law-enforcement officer of the state, with the power to initiate investigations anywhere in California and with supervisory authority over the state's police and sheriffs. The attorney general also would receive a raise to $11,000 a year. Warren stumped for the changes and took advantage of a spate of crime to convince voters to agree with him. A series of bank robberies tested law-enforcement coordination in the state, and then an appalling mob lynching of two men who had been arrested for the kidnapping of a young man named Brooke Hart helped persuade voters that local authorities could not handle certain types of violence. Convinced that new authority was needed at the state level, voters approved the Warren-backed changes in 1934, making the attorney general's office into one that Warren might now like to hold.
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The office was good for Warren, and Warren was ready for the office, but impeding that path was U.S. Webb, the wizened incumbent attorney general who had been in office since 1902 and whose tenure was marked more by longevity than accomplishment. Warren knew better than to challenge Webb directly, but Warren did ask Webb to let him know should he ever prepare to retire.

In 1937, the call came. The seventy-year-old Webb told Warren that he would not stand for reelection. Warren announced his candidacy on February 17, 1937: “[T]he future of our democracy depends on the quality of our local and state governments and on whether or not we have an honest, fearless and uniform enforcement of the law.”
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Backed by Republicans and their newspapers and unchallenged by united Democratic opposition, Warren appeared in the early months of the campaign to be coasting toward victory.

It was an exhilarating moment. Warren's diligence had created a coveted office, and his attention to politics had made him the presumptive holder of it. Warren was forty-seven years old, the head of a large and healthy family. His youngest was still just a toddler, but college loomed for the Warren brood, and the pay hike—from $7,200 a year to $11,000 a year—boded well for the family's future.

But before Warren could move to Sacramento to assume the spot that seemed destined to be his, he was jolted. On a Sunday morning in May 1938, Warren was speaking at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley to a Masonic gathering when he was handed a telegram. It informed him of a murder the night before in Bakersfield. The blood-soaked body had been found that morning at 9:10 A.M. The victim was Methias Warren.

Chapter 5

MURDER

WILLIAM REED TELEGRAM TO EARL WARREN
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EARL WARREN HAD PLANNED an average day for Sunday, May 15, 1938, at least by the standards of a politician in the middle of his first campaign for statewide office. After addressing the Masters' and Wardens' Breakfast of the Masons at 8:30 A.M. in Berkeley, he was planning to take his son, Earl Jr., to a barbecue lunch at the Golden Gate Gun Club in West Alameda. Like much of his schedule in those days, Warren's stops were partly social and partly political. They involved meeting old friends and sometimes even included family, but they also were chances to talk about crime in California and what he, if elected attorney general, intended to do about it.
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