Man of Tomorrow

The San Francisco of Jerry Brown's childhood was normal. Sort of. Few cities have defined themselves more enthusiastically around change—migration, disaster, boom and bust, sleaze and glamour—and the war years were typical in a city where tumult was the norm. On the day of Edmund G. Brown Jr.'s birth, April 7, 1938, the local papers carried news of strikers commandeering a sugar plant, Hitler gaining influence in Germany and strengthening his hold on Austria, and a local nurse stabbing a woman—a crime blamed on the nurse's use of "mad weed."1

Brown was born in a city that had been turned into a battlefield in a country on the cusp of war. In 1934, a general strike, the largest in American history, brought labor and law enforcement into fierce San Francisco combat after a confrontation that left two dead and scores wounded.2 The state called in troops to force open docks; labor mounted barricades and tossed bombs to shut them down. Struggling to recover and with an eye toward the grand, city leaders set out to hold an international exposition and plunged into the task of building a man-made island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Its name: Treasure Island. The Golden Gate International Exposition opened on that whimsical piece of landfill in February of 1939, but sputtered, closed, then reopened in 1940, when exhibits such as Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, featuring half-naked women playing sports, did the trick.3

It was a city of grand gestures and discreet enclaves. Lofty homes in Pacific Heights peered down through the fog into the military base at the Presidio—and the Golden Gate beyond. The Tenderloin teemed with vagrants, their desperation leaking into the nearby Financial District, still reeling from the collapse of the stock market and its slow recovery. San Francisco attracted the early glimmerings of the beatniks, soon to take root in North Beach beneath the city's tribute to its firefighters, Coit Tower, and later to congregate at City Lights bookstore. Newly constructed bridges linked San Francisco to Marin County (via the Golden Gate Bridge) and to Oakland (via the Bay Bridge). As the 1940s opened, the Bay Area was bustling and busy, worried about war but removed from the troubles of Europe and Asia.

That changed on December 7, 1941. Bombs fell on Hawaii, and Americans recoiled at the duplicity of Japan's surprise attack. Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war against Japan the following day. Germany followed by declaring war on the United States. The America First Committee, the leading isolationist group of the period, folded its opposition and retreated into what would prove a protracted state of remission. States of emergency were declared in most American cities. Schools closed along the West Coast. Military recruiting limits were lifted, and recruitment centers stayed open twenty-four hours a day to keep pace with enlistments. The Customs Service blocked departures of all vessels attempting to leave the United States. Authorities called for the distribution of one million gas masks, then asked for more.4

Racial tensions moved up the dial. "Jap town is under strict surveillance," San Francisco police announced.5 In Washington, the Justice Department announced that it had "seized" 2,303 "enemy aliens," including 1,291 Japanese.6 In Tokyo, Japan's Home Ministry announced that it had taken 1,270 American and British nationals into custody.7 In defiance of those actions, some sounded a call for unity. "We are fighting," the Oakland Tribune declared in a front-page editorial. "We must now put to one side all of the petty differences among us. We must mobilize every last resource."8 Pleas for unity and common sense would soon become vanishingly rare.

As America plunged into war—two wars, really, on opposite sides of the planet—San Francisco became the operations center of the Pacific theater and, along with San Diego, emerged as one of two major disembarkation points for sailors, soldiers, marines, and airmen headed into combat against Japan. The Bay Area was anchored by the army's Presidio but also included major air corps installations in Marin County and San Francisco. Fort Mason bordered the Presidio, and the East Bay included major facilities in Oakland and to the north, where Mare Island trained sailors and pumped out vessels. One million soldiers were processed through Camp Stoneman, a little-known base northeast of San Francisco, where as many as thirty thousand men lived at any given time.9

The navy ruled Southern California, though it had a major presence in the north as well. Treasure Island, in fact, served as the navy's western command. To the south, the hastily built Camp Pendleton, with its main entrance at Oceanside, straddled an enormous stretch of the Pacific coast between Orange and San Diego Counties.10 A few miles north, Marine Corps Air Station El Toro shuttled troops and equipment, while to the south, the San Diego harbor hummed with America's growing fleet of carriers, battleships, destroyers and submarines.

California would never be known for its calm, and war only exacerbated the state's tendency to flail and blame. More than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese American men and women lived along the West Coast of the United States, and though two-thirds were American citizens—many having never even seen Japan—their loyalty came into question. No less a champion of fairness than California attorney general Earl Warren surveyed Japanese landholdings and imagined suspicious patterns—farms near rail yards and airports and other sensitive installations. Maps prepared by Warren's office became some of the most convincing, and absurdist, evidence of sinister intent. "Such a distribution of the Japanese population appears to manifest something more than a coincidence," Warren testified before the US House of Representatives' Tolan Committee on February 21, 1942.11 Never mind that Japanese people owned those parcels because they were cheap and because the owners were prevented by racial discrimination from acquiring more desirable property: in the dim light of fear, Warren saw subversion. It was not his best moment.

Nor was he alone. The removal of the Japanese from the West Coast was ordered by FDR in February of 1942 and upheld by the United States Supreme Court twice. Their absence left a hole in the life of the region, a vacuum temporarily filled by the arrival of thousands of young men, most of them volunteers, clamoring to fight the Japanese forces in the Pacific while dreading it as well. Those men swarmed into San Francisco, swelling the city's bars and brothels, both of which it boasted in abundance: indeed, this migration was in some ways reminiscent of California's first, when gold miners, almost all of them men, stopped over in San Francisco for a last taste of women and booze before heading to the Sierras. Then it was for fortune, later for country, but 1940s San Francisco would have been familiar to a forty-niner.

It was there that a young family was setting out on a life that would shape California as abruptly as any earthquake, as profoundly as any migration. Pat and Bernice Brown were compatible but different—he a gregarious, Catholic, ambitious, and outgoing young man, she a more intellectual, Protestant, and retiring young woman. They met in high school and, once their quite different educations were complete, were together the rest of their lives.

Born in San Francisco in 1905, Pat hawked Liberty Bonds in World War I and was so spirited that his friends took to calling him Pat, short for Patrick Henry. The name stuck, and when he took to politics, he recognized the political value of it in San Francisco, where it didn't hurt to be thought of as Irish. In fact, his ancestors were half-German, too. The family patriarch, August Schuckman, first arrived in California in 1852. A few years later, he returned to Germany, where he married his wife, Augusta, and the couple immigrated yet again to California in 1863. They settled northwest of Sacramento, buying a stagecoach stop in Colusa County, tucked into unnamed foothills at a modest crossroads. August established himself as an innkeeper.

Bernice Layne was the daughter of an honest cop and a quietly Episcopalian mom. She was born in San Francisco in 1908, when the city was still recovering from the ruin of its 1906 earthquake and fire, and she was raised there with her four brothers and sisters. Bernice was a solid student, accomplished in math and intoxicated by reading. She plowed through her young studies and entered Lowell High School early, before age twelve. The following year, Pat, a few years older but still at Lowell as well, asked her out. Her parents would not allow her to go. Pat persisted.12

Thus began the pattern of their lives—Pat dogged, eager, and open-faced; Bernice angular, incisive, and quietly determined.

After high school, Pat went to work—first at his father's photo studio, with a dice game in the back, and later as an apprentice to a local lawyer. He skipped college and moved directly to San Francisco Law School. Bernice, true to her form, crossed the bay and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Pat and Bernice courted across the bay, no small feat in the days before the Bay Bridge. Still running ahead of her age, Bernice graduated in 1928, not yet twenty, and took a job as a schoolteacher. One condition of her employment was that she remain single. She defied it.

Bernice and Pat eloped to Reno, Nevada, and were married there on October 30, 1930. She was twenty-one. He was twenty-five.13 They complemented each other. He loved people and crowds and parties; she preferred family and travel and quiet. But he appreciated her calm, and she learned to love more garrulous company. Bernice even came to enjoy politics. Still, they retained their essentials: when the two took up golf, Pat began playing immediately with friends. Bernice took lessons for eighteen months before playing with anyone else. Once she did, she regularly beat her husband.14

Pat and Bernice eventually would live in Sacramento and Los Angeles, but their early years were set in San Francisco. They rented an apartment on Fillmore Street, then moved to Chestnut Street, both in the Marina, then to the Twin Peaks neighborhood, and then to the corner of 17th Street and Shrader Street—on the edge of Haight-Ashbury, which was then far different from what it would become. They settled there with their two daughters, Barbara, born in 1931, and Cynthia, born two years later. Bernice was pregnant with their third child, and the Shrader Street home had an extra bedroom.15 Jerry was born in April of 1938, and a few years later, the family moved one more time, to 460 Magellan Avenue, where the youngest, Kathleen, was born. That neighborhood, known as Forest Hill, would be the Browns' home for the rest of Jerry's youth.

Pat Brown was excited by politics early and for good reason. His combination of intelligence, engagement, and genuine compassion made him a natural for public service—and, specifically, for elected office. Many politicians resent campaigning—the showmanship, the grubbing for money, the pleading for attention. Indeed, although those aspects of politics would later irritate Jerry, once he sidestepped into his father's business, the demands of vote getting did not bother Pat. Pat loved the rub and hustle.

Pat Brown started his political life as a Republican and made his first stab at elected office at the age of twenty-three, when he ran for the California state assembly. He got walloped, but defeat did not deter him. After switching his party affiliation in 1935, he supported Democrat Culbert Olson for governor only to be disappointed by not landing a job in the administration. He then took aim at San Francisco's district attorney, Matthew Brady, a veteran with a reputation for losing cases and prosecuting union activists. Brown lost again, but this time he made an impression on the electorate. In 1943, Pat Brown was elected district attorney for San Francisco. His son, Jerry, was five years old.

Given their common careers, Jerry would most often be compared to his father, but he was more his mother's son. They looked alike, for one thing. Jerry inherited his mother's profile and her incisive eyes. She read for pleasure, unlike her husband, who devoured newspapers and reports but was never much drawn to books. There, too, Jerry followed after his mom. Pat was so extravagantly extroverted that it would be difficult for anyone to resemble him there: Jerry was less shy than some assumed, but he found greater succor in close company, again resembling his mother.

Finally, and perhaps most relevant to Jerry's career, Bernice Brown was studiously frugal, a coupon clipper from the earliest days of her marriage into her husband's governorship and beyond. Pat never got the hang of counting pennies, but Jerry did. Once grown, he would elevate government parsimony to a near-moral command, and his devotion to balanced budgets and limited government would set him apart from his Democratic colleagues and rivals for most of the rest of his life. He had his mother's example, reinforced by later vows of poverty and a general inclination toward cheapness, to thank for that.

At West Portal Elementary School, the kindergarten class assignment one day in November was to draw. Jerry, not destined for a career in art, sketched a colorful but uninspired clown. To his surprise, the teacher gathered all her students' work into a book and presented it to Pat Brown, the newly elected district attorney, to congratulate him on his victory. Naturally, the teacher put Jerry Brown's work on the cover: Jerry sensed the favoritism—he knew his picture was not the best and did not deserve the special attention it received—and he was mortified, the first of many instances when he drew extra, sometimes unwanted, praise for being his father's son.

Bernice Brown ran the family home. She cooked, often with assistance from her daughters. When things broke—a hinge twisted or a light burned out—her brother, who lived down the street, came to lend a hand. Pat Brown, at least in the memory of his children, did not change a lightbulb or boil a pail of water. He responded with a flash to the problems of his constituents, but he did not help around the house.16

The family often skipped breakfast—Bernice liked to sleep in—but gathered for dinner.17 They would wait for Pat to return home from work and then would sit down together. There were "big, volatile conversations," Kathleen Brown recalled. "You were expected to have a position and defend it." Not everyone enjoyed it. The oldest, Barbara, was entering high school and was enchanted by literature and learning; the dinner table conversation didn't have much place for Chaucer. Her aversion to politics started early.18

As young Jerry grew older, he and his father often clashed, as fathers and sons will, especially when both are as strong-willed as Edmund Brown senior and junior. The two would remember these conversations differently over time. To Pat, they were exciting and provocative. Jerry sometimes regarded them as oppressive, forcing him under rather propelling him upward.

Jerry veered from his father's approach to debate. Pat stirred the pot, urging his children to join in boisterous disputes. Jerry staked out more cerebral ground. Pat was in the world; Jerry somehow beyond it. Even their Catholicism was different. Pat was culturally Catholic but hardly devout. It was not until Barbara was seven years old that her mother and father were married in the church. Until then, they were bound by the civil ceremony of their elopement, without any religious blessing.19