Justice for All (5 page)

Still, disorder and vice were among the hallmarks of the young town. The city boasted roughly a hundred saloons—they were, the same editorial writer observed, “as thick as the leaves of autumn forest glades”—and the city's 7,000 residents were said to include 500 prostitutes. Crime was commonplace and widely reported in the
Daily Californian
, where coverage was splashy and at times revealing. A Wednesday evening knife battle was detailed under the headline “Mexican Stabbed in Leg Muscles.” When three Indian men were arrested for public drunkenness, the paper cited the law against supplying Indians with liquor and asked the question in its headline “Who Gave Them Whiskey?”
¹⁴

More serious was a fatal Chinatown shooting that captured local attention as the century turned. Jee Sheok, a Chinese resident of that Bakersfield quarter, shot and killed Jee Duck in the fall of 1899 over what witnesses reported was a disputed business deal. The following January, Sheok came to trial, drawing a large and curious crowd, including many native Chinese—an assembly the
Californian
described as “this outpouring of heathendom.”
¹⁵
The defendant, a “villainous-faced Chinaman,” sat without comment through the early days of the proceeding, which moved slowly in part because of the difficulty of finding twelve jurors in the county willing to give equal credence to the testimony of an Asian as that of a Caucasian. Once a jury was seated, Sheok was convicted largely on the account of a nine-year-old white boy, Percy Baker, who saw the shots fired and told the jury that the dead man carried no gun, rebutting the defendant's argument that he fired in self-defense. “This was the little fellow's story and no amount of questioning by the defendant's attorney Mr. Emmons could shake it,” the
Californian
reported. “The boy knew what he knew, he showed that he understood the oath, and his manner carried conviction to the listener.”
¹⁶
Sheok was sentenced to life in prison.

Like young Percy Baker, Earl Warren was nine years old when Jee Sheok was sent away to San Quentin, California's maximum-security prison. As a young boy, Warren was quiet and mannerly, and by the time he was ready to enter school, Methias was sufficiently established to be able to let Chrystal dress her little boy in dapper, if slightly prettified, outfits. Earl was first enrolled in the local elementary school at age five—technically, children were supposed to be six to begin school, but the principal allowed Warren to begin early, perhaps because he already had some reading and writing skills. He was taught in the rough style of the day: When teachers found him favoring his left hand, they tied it to his body and forced him to write with his right. For the rest of his life, Warren would write and eat right-handed but play sports left-handed.
¹⁷

Even right-handed, he mastered penmanship. His schoolbooks from those days are lined with the careful notations of a young boy with precise handwriting, marking in the margins his questions and definitions of difficult words. Although the family was striving, the children did not suffer. Books, in particular, were never hard to come by, as Methias Warren made sure to set aside enough money to buy his children anything they cared to read. Earl received
Peck's Bad Boy
for Christmas in 1901 and a sequel the following Christmas.
¹⁸
A library, meanwhile, was built just two blocks away, its wide Victorian eaves providing shade to the cool interior on Bakersfield's hot days. Earl Warren, already young for his class, progressed well enough to be allowed to skip the second grade.
¹⁹

Away from school, Earl Warren lent his father a hand on the first of many houses that Methias Warren constructed in his off-hours from the Southern Pacific. Or rather, Earl tried to help. He was not much good at construction, and though he admired those who could work with their hands, he had trouble emulating them. Beyond his work with his father, Earl took odd jobs for spending money and his own savings. He delivered the
Daily Californian
, and was a success at selling ice; it would have been hard to fail in Bakersfield's 100-degree summers before the days of air-conditioning. But he had his setbacks, too. Young Earl became fascinated by the assassination of President McKinley and the Boer War, two subjects heavily covered in the local papers. Earl rooted for the Boers to rout the English and lamented McKinley's death at the hands of an assassin. So when a biography of McKinley and another book on the Boer War appeared in the early 1900s, Earl saw an advertisement for them in the paper and believed his enthusiasm for the subjects would make him a natural salesman for the books. But he was too little and too softspoken to be taken seriously; neighbors simply turned him away. When he could not convince his father to buy a copy, Earl realized he was through as a salesman.
²⁰
He dropped the effort.
²¹

The Warrens were never wealthy, but Methias was a frugal man with a steady income, and the family gradually improved its living standards. Although the family lived in a rented house when they first arrived, Methias managed to save enough to buy a house a few years later, and he moved his wife and children, Ethel and Earl, into it. Over time, Methias would acquire other small homes and rent them out, supplementing his railroad income and eventually giving him the means to retire from the Southern Pacific.

Earl's mother and father both raised him, but his lasting memories and deepest impressions were connected with his father. In a reckless town, Methias was a stable, if somewhat grim, source of constancy. He valued work and careful handling of money. There was no drinking or smoking in the Warren home, a gesture of seriousness as well as frugality. There was music—the Warrens owned a Victrola, and Earl enjoyed the music of John Philip Sousa. But there was little laughter or hugging. When there was punishment to be administered, Methias doled it out, sometimes with a birch rod.
²²
Methias insisted on education for his children, and he demanded honesty, a lesson that found deep purchase in his son. To his own grandchildren, Earl Warren would insist that the measure of a man lay in his refusal to tell a lie.
²³
Those were Methias's words echoing across three generations.

For all its emphasis on virtue, the Warren home was not deeply concerned with religion. Earl and Ethel were raised as Methodists, and the family kept a Bible, but they did not attend services diligently, and Earl absorbed religion in a general way—his was a moral upbringing but not a devout one. Methias was far more vehement about education than he was about God. He supported Earl's desire to go to college, and he occasionally would take his son to hear speakers as they traveled through the area. One afternoon, the two traveled together to hear an address in town. Earl never forgot it.

The speaker was Russell H. Conwell, and his talk, “Acres of Diamonds,” was one of the most acclaimed pieces of oratory of its day. Conwell, the founder of Temple University, traveled across America delivering versions of his talk thousands of times in the early twentieth century. He would arrive in a small town, talk to residents, and hear the story of their hamlet. When he rose to speak that afternoon, he would weave their stories into his speech, identifying for the crowd the “diamonds” in their town or village and reminding them to treasure those aspects of their lives and community. One day, Conwell's journey brought him to Bakersfield.
²⁴

Religious in fervor, moral in tone, and yet practical in its advice, the speech foreshadowed much of what Warren would become. “Greatness consists not in the holding of some future office, but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life,” Conwell said. “He who can give to this city better streets and better sidewalks, better schools and more colleges, more happiness and more civilization, more of God, he will be great anywhere.”
²⁵

Sitting in front of the stage, looking up at the orator, Earl Warren was spellbound. “I can still see his towering form and hear his powerful voice as he told his never-to-be-forgotten story,” Warren recalled a half century later. “Of all the lectures I heard in my youth, this one made the greatest impression on my young mind.”
²⁶

If Warren's early life featured exposure to learning and inculcation of values, it also came in a notably narrow home—while Bakersfield had its Mexicans, its Jews, its Chinese, and even a few blacks, they were not guests of the Warrens. Moreover, home was not a place of debate and discussion; it was one where children did as they were told by strict, conventional parents. Its stability appealed to Warren, but it lacked intellectual energy; it was a place of reading but not of sophistication; it was Scandinavian and Protestant, and young Earl had little exposure to the vitality of urban America, or to those raised in families more accustomed to disputatious-ness. As he grew older, Warren would sometimes be confounded by those who enjoyed the clamor of clashing views, of debate as intellectual exercise. His uneasiness with that style of argument would cause some to conclude he was less intelligent than he actually was.
²⁷
They were wrong to underestimate him. Had they appreciated Warren's Bakersfield, they would have better understood that he was taught to live by simple values and formed in the crux between the attraction of a stable home and the appeal of a loose little town.

His companions in his ramblings through the city were Earl's many animals. A rare surviving photograph of Earl as a boy shows a handsome youngster, blond hair tousled, a straight nose and finely drawn bones, a half grin across his eleven-year-old face as he stares directly at the camera. Behind him are fallen leaves, a crate, and a shovel leaned against some brush. Earl's left arm is draped around the neck of a cheerful, bright-eyed hound. His animals—others included more dogs, a sheep, an eagle, and chickens—kept Earl company, but his stalwart was a burro named Jack, “my friend and constant companion for years,” Warren wrote later.
²⁸
The two would hunt together, and chase rabbits in the dry fields that extended from the edge of town to the looming Tehachapis at the horizon. When news broke in Bakersfield, as it did on April 19, 1903, Jack and his twelve-year-old master, Earl, clopped curiously to the scene.

The events of that day capped a wild winter and spring in the life of Bakersfield. A new sheriff, John Kelly, had taken office and set out to shut down the city's gambling houses. Kelly informed the owners that he intended to enforce the law—a view novel only by the standards of Bakersfield, where gambling had been allowed for virtually all of its history. Kelly's actions were cheered by the Bakersfield establishment, but the gamblers struck back, hiring as their lawyer E. J. Emmons, the same man who had represented Sheok at his murder trial. Emmons persuaded a judge that Kelly had exceeded his authority in closing down the houses. Instead of the gamblers going out of business, Kelly himself was placed under arrest. And then, with the town divided and unprotected, it came under attack.

Jim McKinney was a Western bandit, a thief and a murderer who lay in wait by the side of a trail in order to kill two men, then held up a rancher, forced him to shoe two horses, and disappeared into the badlands of Southern California and Arizona. Newspapers followed his exploits, posses were gathered to capture him, and rewards were posted for his return, “Dead or Alive.” The gambling dispute suddenly seemed less urgent, and Kelly won his release from jail to lead his men in pursuit of the outlaw. At four P.M. on April 12, they found him. Shots were fired, and deputies believed they had hit McKinney, but the bandit got away, fleeing on the speedy horses he had stolen a few days before. A second battle, the following morning, deprived McKinney of his horses, but he continued to elude capture, and now turned toward Bakersfield. “Fugitive May Attempt to Come Down Kern River,” the
Californian
warned.
²⁹

And so he did. On the morning of Sunday, April 19, deputies closed in. They found him at the Duvall Hotel, a local Chinese gambling house. One of the deputies, Bert Tibbet, staked out a spot in back and, when shots rang from inside the building, burst through a gate on the heels of a colleague. Inside, another deputy, Jeff Packard, was bleeding from a shattered arm. “Look out, look out for God's sake, he'll get you,” Packard called. Tibbet wheeled and fired his shotgun. It struck McKinney in the neck, but he raised himself. Tibbet shot him a second time, killing him. “M'Kinney's Head Shattered with a Load of Buckshot,” the
Californian
proclaimed the next morning.
³⁰

Earl Warren was twelve years old when the McKinney shootout occurred in his hometown. The gunshots had barely stopped ringing that morning when Earl and his donkey came trotting up. In the days after the shooting, Earl stayed rapt with interest as it morphed into a legal drama. It turned out that McKinney had had an accomplice, and not just anyone, but a sheriff's deputy named Al Hulse. Earl had met Hulse a few months earlier at a turkey-shooting contest. There, Earl had admired Hulse's marksmanship, and the deputy gave Earl a turkey. Now Hulse was accused of aiding the bandit and of firing the shot that killed Tibbet's brother, Will. The cornered Hulse first offered unconvincing explanations of his whereabouts, then gave a halting statement to town leaders, including a reporter from the paper, from his cell.

Hulse claimed innocence and went to trial. Earl went, too, sitting in the back with other boys from town. From that seat, surrounded by friends and neighbors, Earl watched the drama unfold, and a surprising idea took root. Earl decided to become a lawyer. That was odd in some respects. He was still a shy youngster, small for his age and unassuming. How, he might have wondered, could a boy who could not convince his neighbors to buy books on McKinley persuade a jury to believe his client? Other boys his age gravitated toward oil exploration and mining. But as Earl watched the town grapple with its gamblers and its outlaws, he allowed himself to appreciate the dazzle of the lawyers as well as their importance. They restored order when gamblers threatened it, but they were not stark or repressive. Denied much fun at home, he found excitement in the law, in the tale of Hulse and McKinney, which ended on a shocking note: Hulse was convicted of second-degree murder, and as he awaited transfer to state prison, he asked for a razor to shave. He used it to slit his throat.