Justice for All (8 page)

When he did, when Earl Warren became governor in 1943, he hung just one photograph in his office, that of Hiram Johnson.

Chapter 2

AWAY FROM HOME

NEWTON DRURY, ON HIS CLASSMATE EARL WARREN
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA at Berkeley greeted Earl Warren with a young and growing campus—the monumental neoclassical architecture that today helps convey its grandeur and yet nods to its place in the California that was just then taking shape, financed largely by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Though the university was just a quarter-century old, it already was established as California's foremost center of higher education, and Warren's arrival there signaled his admission into an emerging California elite, more open than the baronages of San Francisco and Los Angeles and yet selectively meritocratic. Beneath the live oaks and redwoods of the East Bay, with its signature view of the then-unbridged Golden Gate, Berkeley represented the early forming point of California culture and intelligentsia. Warren was thrilled to be there.

Warren was a “freshie,” and as such was expected to adhere to Berkeley's light-hearted repression of its youngest students. No caps, no pipe smoking, no entering North Hall by the front steps—those were just a handful of the freshman restrictions, violation of which subjected a student to “a much-needed submersion in that slippery, slimy, slushy slough of stagnation . . . Chem Pond.”
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And yet Warren had barely set foot in Berkeley before he was in trouble. On his first Sunday after arriving, Warren joined members of La Junta Club, a local fraternity where he had an introduction, for dinner. Eager to impress, the young incoming freshman boasted of his friction with his high school principal, of the events that nearly saw him expelled on the last day of school, and of cheating on schoolwork to harass the hated administrator. One of the seniors who overheard Warren's story pulled him aside later in the week and warned him that he was out of line. Ethics at Berkeley were important, and grading was on a curve. As a Berkeley student now, Warren was expected to understand and obey its honor code. The lecture sobered Warren. “I was deeply touched by the kind manner in which he talked to me, and promised him I would never violate the honor system,” Warren said.
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The members of La Junta soon invited Warren to join, which he happily did. He moved into the house on College Street, at the edge of the Berkeley campus, and set about discovering the town, nestled between the austerity of the school and the lure of the nearby docks and their longshoreman bars. Not for the first nor the last time would Warren find himself pulled between those poles.

Warren's classmates were to become a storied group of Berkeley students, even today referred to as the Illustrious Class of 1912. Horace Albright and Newton Drury, two early and important environmentalists, were among the members of the class, as was Herman Phleger, a San Francisco lawyer and adviser to President Eisenhower; others, men and women who became judges and lawyers and people of influence, rounded out the class. Warren ended up being the most significant of them all, but in his student days, he gave little indication that he would rank with them in history. Drury went on to California fame as a savior of the state's redwood forests. He admired Warren greatly, but recalled him as a charming but shallow student. “He matured a little later, I think,” Drury gently remembered.
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Warren tried out for the university baseball team but did not make it. He took classes but didn't study hard. “I'm afraid I didn't have any craving for knowledge,” he admitted years later. It was, instead, camaraderie that he enjoyed. “Companionship,” he said, “was the greatest thing I found at the university.”
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Warren had barely arrived before he began to make a name for himself as a hearty, boisterous classmate. He ate with gusto that first year, piling on weight. He gained thirty pounds as a freshman and kept growing, eventually reaching his full height of six-foot-one and weight of 200 pounds.
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As he did, Warren's high school shyness also seemed to melt away. “He was a hail-fellow-well-met,” Drury remembered.
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He was handsome and might have been a natural ladies' man, but still he carried the residue of his awkward youth; he could be clumsy around women. That is not to say he avoided them entirely. His sophomore hop dance card had a few entries—Dorothy P and Miss Eggert each got a spin around the floor—and he socialized now and again.
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For now, however, his principal relations were with men. He was a welcome fixture in his fraternity, Sigma Phi (Sigma Phi initially was La Junta, but changed its name when it affiliated with the national fraternity). Throughout his life, Warren would enjoy the hearty company of male friendship, of ball games and bars, of male clubs and duck blinds. And he would long retain a trace of awkwardness in the company of women.

Among his growing group of friends, Warren soon acquired a nickname—“Pink,” though some preferred “Pinky.” It appears to have resulted from an encounter with a young nurse, whom Warren visited for treatment of a bout of pinkeye.
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“Come on, Pinky, it's time for your medicine,” he recalled the nurse calling out to him.
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It, too, stuck. For the rest of his life, college friends would address Earl Warren, even as Chief Justice of the United States, as “Pink.”

Student office might have seemed a natural for Warren, who liked joining and leading, but he ignored the opportunity. He did dabble in the local politics of the area, however, his first participation in active political life. One candidate Warren helped was John Stit Wilson. He was “an avowed Socialist” who sought in 1911 to unseat Beverly Hodgehead, whom Warren characterized as “a conservative corporation lawyer” representing “some of the large public utilities on which the campaign was focused.”
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During the election, Berkeley students took over a political rally and rousted the speakers—an event that Warren participated in. He added that on other occasions, “we stopped traffic on the streets, put streetcars out of commission for hours, overrode the police by disproportionate weight of numbers, made loud tumultuous noises until all hours of the night . . . and even broke up political meetings.” Wilson won the election, and Warren wrote, “contrary to dire predictions, the heavens did not fall and tranquility soon returned to the campus and the city. Mayor Wilson was an honest man, a good mayor, and was reelected at the end of his first term.”
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Warren was an extrovert, hearty and boisterous in his politics and his friendships. And yet Berkeley also deepened his love of poetry. Even there, the intellectualism was subsumed by fellowship, in this case in the membership of a group called the Gun Club. Drury was a member as well. As he recalled it:

 

Warren favored American and British poets—Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling were two favorites. He liked stories in his poems and shied away from modernists. As his grandson and great admirer Jeffrey Earl Warren once noted, he liked “manly poets.”
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Viewed in the light of the defining tension of his youth—between the romance of Bakersfield's taverns and the order of the Warren home—poetry was a natural amusement for Warren. It balanced creativity and structure, humor and seriousness. He took to it. With several classmates, Warren founded a new poetry society as well and gave it a mischievous name: U.N.X. The initials were un-revealing enough that U.N.X. found its way to official recognition in the university's annual yearbook, the
Blue and Gold
, but in fact the name disguised an etymology from a ribald drinking song.
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Versions of the song have evolved over the years but they have a common theme. In it, a sultan eyes his harem on Christmas Eve:

 

U.N.X., unbeknownst to the administration, stood for “eunuchs.” Poetry thus also supplied an outlet for Warren's ribald streak, as well as a form of expression for a man who would often admire and even envy those with a greater gift than his own for eloquence. He never lost his love for it. Many years later, when he had reached one of the pinnacles of his professional life, a friend and aide named Bill Sweigert chose to memorialize the occasion with a poem, and he began it with Warren's days at Berkeley.

 

His literary interests stirred by poetry, Warren became a member of the college literary society, Skull and Keys, as well as the Gun Club, his fraternity, and an esteemed honorary society known as the Order of the Golden Bear. That order, which continues today, honors Berkeley's most admired students, not for their academic work but rather for their contribution to the campus and society. Warren was a natural member.

Inside the classroom, meanwhile, Warren survived but without distinction. He fared decently in subjects he liked, less well in those in which he saw little relevance. And yet despite his lackluster academic performance, Warren did in fact expand intellectually. Interviewed by biographer John Weaver, Warren could not cite a single book or author that influenced him,
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but by the time he sat down to write his memoirs, the names of three came back to him: Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Significantly, all three struck a personal chord with Warren.

Consider, for example, Warren's appreciation of Norris. Like Warren, Norris attended Berkeley and was a founder of Skull and Keys. That may be what first drew Warren to Norris's work, and once there, Warren found himself and his life contained within it.
The Octopus
, Norris's great novel, is the only book mentioned by name in the section of Warren's memoirs devoted to his college years. Thus, while its precise impact on Warren is difficult to assess, the novel stayed with him for more than fifty years, earning it an exclusive place in the college memories of the retired chief justice.

The Octopus
tells the intertwined stories of California wheat farmers and their war with a terrifyingly powerful railroad, called, in the novel, the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad but conspicuously meant to be the Southern Pacific. Modeled after an actual violent battle between the Southern Pacific and California wheat farmers in 1877,
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The Octopus
helped gird the California public for its showdown with the Southern Pacific. In
The Octopus
, subtitled
A California Story
, Norris encouraged just such a campaign, portraying the railroad as a ruthless exploiter of land and wealth, immune to the pleas of farmers and others dependent on its services. When Magnus Derrick, an imposing central character of the novel, contemplates an attempt to buy the elections of railroad commissioners in order to even the fight against the railroad, his wife despairs:

 

How could such a description not hold Warren's attention? It described the company that employed him and his father—after having first fired and then blacklisted him—and that abused the men Earl was responsible for as a teenager. The novel thus tapped his personal experience and provided a literary underpinning for the politics he was then developing: anticorporate, anticorruption, rudimentarily populist. The novel also gave voice to a darker side of Warren's youth. As with much popular fiction of the time, Norris's attack on the railroad was woven together with the subtle lacings of racism, and in Norris's case that racism was consistent with the dominant culture of California and its nascent reform movement. In his novel, Norris more than once describes an act of cheapness as “Hebraic,” and as California's great modern historian Kevin Starr notes, Norris's active characters invariably are white and of European descent. The Mexican and other Latin characters in the novel exist mainly to provide color for a barn dance and to take the lead in a slaughter of rabbits too repulsive for whites to join: “Blindly, furiously, they struck and struck. The Anglo-Saxon spectators drew back in disgust, but the hot, degenerated blood of Portuguese, Mexican and mixed Spaniard boiled up in excitement at this wholesale slaughter.”
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