The Browns of California Read online

  For those who believe in the geography of hope

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

  The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement

  Contents

  Preface

  The Mansion

  1. The Pioneer

  2. The Paris of America

  3. The Yell Leader

  4. The Roosevelt Democrat

  5. Forest Hill

  6. The Governor and the Seminarian

  7. Fiat Lux

  8. Down but Not Out

  9. “Water for People. For Living”

  10. The Turbulent Term

  11. The Browns of Los Angeles

  12. The Candidate

  13. The New Spirit

  14. Jerry and Cesar

  15. To the Moon and Back

  16. The Fall

  17. Winter Soldiers

  18. A Different Shade of Brown

  19. Oakland Ecopolis

  20. Son of Sacramento

  21. Second Chances

  22. Fiat Lux Redux

  23. Past as Prologue

  The Mountain House

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Preface

  The genesis of this book was a conversation several years ago, on an isolated ranch in Northern California, with Jerry Brown. The governor had talked in recent speeches about this land, settled by his great-grandfather soon after the Gold Rush and still in the family four generations later. I was curious to see the homestead and understand what had drawn the last heir of California’s storied political dynasty to spend his weekends in a small cabin with no running water, off the grid.

  Amid the rolling hills dotted with oaks, Jerry Brown talked about “reinhabitation.” He explained his desire to return to his ancestral home, his quest to research every aspect of the land, and his effort to trace his family roots. It is a history worth studying, he said, because history offers anchors in time of disruption and helps us understand how to respond to change.

  The same could be said, of course, about the history of California. I came away from that conversation struck by the parallel arcs of the Browns and California. Jerry Brown traced a family history that spanned the life of the state he and his father had governed. I thought the story of four generations might offer a lens through which to tell a unique history of the thirty-first state.

  It is, by definition, a selective history, shaped by the paths of the extended family. It is more Northern California than Southern, more modern than early, more political than cultural. Yet, because the family is so intertwined with California, the Browns’ story illuminates core values, concepts, places, and events that have molded the world’s fifth-largest economy. There is arguably no family more passionate about California, more closely identified with the Golden State, or more influential in determining its fate. The heart of this book is the story of two men who collectively governed California for almost a quarter century—an ebullient, beloved, old-style politician and his cerebral, skeptical, visionary son.

  The book is first and foremost a family saga, a narrative history built around collective lives and actions—from far-reaching policy decisions to private, personal choices. My goal is to convey through that tapestry a sense of the sweep and spirit of California, to highlight that which has stayed the same over time and that which has changed. I leave it to future historians to pass judgment on the Brown legacy, which will become clearer with distance.

  Given that the two principal protagonists have the same name, and many other characters share the same surname, I refer to the various Browns by their first names. I did this for clarity and readability; it is also true that for many Californians, the state’s two longest-serving Democratic governors are known simply as Pat and Jerry.

  The Mansion

  The corner of Sixteenth and H was just a vacant lot when August Schuckman reached Sacramento in 1852, a square of frontier dirt awaiting its destiny.

  August drove a stagecoach, peddled fruit, and dreamed big. The German immigrant had come west seeking land, not gold. Within a decade, he staked his claim to a ranch sixty miles north of the state capital in Colusa County. August’s daughter Ida was born there in 1878, the same year a prosperous Sacramento merchant moved into a majestic Victorian mansion he had built at Sixteenth and H. The empty lot had become the most elegant house in town: Seven fireplaces of Italian marble. Elaborate bronze hinges and doorknobs engraved with hummingbirds. Intricate wood inlay on the ballroom floor.

  By the turn of the century, more than a million people had been lured to California by visions of gold, land, and sun. Sacramento needed a residence suitable for its governors. In 1903, the state bought the wedding-cake house at Sixteenth and H for $32,500. Two years later, August’s daughter Ida gave birth to her first son, Edmund Gerald Brown. He would grow up to be the twelfth governor to live in the Mansion.

  Sixteenth and H would become the coordinates where the history of the Golden State intersected with the destiny of August Schuckman’s descendants. A family shaped by California would grow into a dynasty that transformed the state, with ambition and audacity to match the grandeur of the towering, turreted Mansion.

  Edmund Brown, known to all but his mother as Pat, loved his life in the Mansion, where he seamlessly blended work and family. Most days began with meetings in the breakfast room. That’s where Senator John Kennedy asked Pat for support in 1959, and where Pat took a congratulatory call from President Kennedy three years later after defeating Richard Nixon in the governor’s race. Most nights, Pat stayed up late reading files from his overstuffed briefcase in the mustard-colored easy chair in the living room or the upstairs office with the special panic button hidden in a drawer. Weekends brought grandchildren splashing in the kidney-shaped pool and sliding down the curved mahogany banister. Pat’s sister might arrive with Ida to find Frank Sinatra at dinner. Adlai Stevenson stayed overnight, and Earl Warren often stopped by his old home.

  Each Thanksgiving and Christmas, four generations of Browns gathered in the Mansion. News photographers snapped photos of Pat with the turkey, fresh out of the oven. At Christmastime, the Browns chartered a bus to bring San Francisco friends to the Mansion, decorated with lights on the turrets and towers, with 14-foot Christmas trees in the parlor and hall and smaller trees in almost every room.

  First lady Bernice Brown oversaw the formal entertainment, dozens of dinners for legislators and lobbyists that eased partisan divides and smoothed important deals. Visitors knew to check for the small black ceramic cat on the table in the entryway; as long as the sleeping cat was on display, conversations were off the record.

  Pat Brown was the twelfth governor to live in the Mansion, originally the home of a wealthy hardware merchant. More than four decades later, Jerry Brown became the thirteenth. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS Cal,34-SAC,19-1)

  Only the Browns’ youngest child grew up in the Mansion. As a teenager, Kathy painted red nail polish on the toes of the clawfoot tub, held slumber parties in the old ballroom, and sought privacy by using the telephone hidden in the music room closet. One Halloween, she climbed the two flights of walnut spiral stairs to the gaslit cupola and dropped water balloons out the porthole window on trick-or-treaters six stories below.

  Her older brother, Jerry, lived in the Mansion only briefly, just long enough for the house to hold sway. Jerry first visited the day his father took office in 1959, a young Jesuit seminarian in cassock and collar posing stiffly next to Grandma Ida at a celebratory dinner. Within
a year he was in college, then law school. In 1965, Jerry studied for the bar in his father’s office on the third floor of the Mansion. He found the lessons tiresome. Wandering out onto the stair landing one day, he heard his father in heated conversation with the Assembly Speaker over which man would run for governor the following year. The debate was as exciting as the studies were tedious. At that moment, Jerry decided that he would be governor, too.

  When Pat Brown was voted out of office, the Mansion became another California boom-and-bust tale. Governor Ronald Reagan moved to a classic estate in the Fabulous Forties neighborhood, shunning the house his wife called a “firetrap.” The Mansion, eulogized by Sacramento native Joan Didion as “an extremely individual house,”1 perhaps her favorite in the world, became a museum. Visitors toured rooms full of relics a dozen families had left behind: The 1902 Steinway piano from George Pardee, the first governor to live in the Mansion. The plum velvet sofa and matching chairs selected by Mrs. Hiram Johnson. Hand-knotted Persian carpets from the Warren era. Bernice Brown’s self-cleaning oven. In the upstairs bedroom, her inaugural gown.

  In 1975, a decade after his epiphany on the Mansion stairs, Edmund G. Brown Jr. became the youngest California governor in modern times. He preached “small is beautiful” and spurned the sixteen-room suburban residence that Reagan had commissioned, opting for a spartan apartment near the capitol. He soon became the state’s most popular governor, and just as quickly among those held in lowest esteem.

  In the land of reinvention, both the man and the Mansion would have a triumphant second act. In 2010, decades after he had left Sacramento, written off as a political has-been, Jerry Brown was elected governor once again. One of the first things he did was bring his wife to see the house at Sixteenth and H.

  The state finally began a renovation. Craftsmen restored the original Victorian details while they discreetly added modern plumbing, appliances, and solar panels. Jerry invited relatives to lunch at the Mansion to celebrate his seventy-sixth birthday. On November 4, 2014, he hosted a dinner for staff on the evening he was elected to a historic fourth term. He claimed victory on the Mansion steps.

  One year later, the Browns moved in, just in time to celebrate Christmas. The family gathered once more in the elegant house at Sixteenth and H. They posed for pictures. A news photographer watched the governor inspect the turkey. The children who had learned to swim in the kidney-shaped pool showed their children the secret places in the special house.

  A photo of August Schuckman sat on the fireplace mantel in the old music room. Jerry called his new home a spiritual place. On a fall afternoon, he recalled the moment he had decided he would be governor. He gestured toward the bottom of the grand staircase a few feet away.

  “Every day I come down the stairs,2 my whole life is unfolding.”

  1

  The Pioneer

  Long before the discovery of gold conferred upon the state its universal, enduring epithet, the land imbued California with its seductive, lyrical promise.

  Its name was bestowed by early Spaniards, in homage to a popular sixteenth-century romance novel about an island paradise ruled by Queen Califia. In the centuries that followed, explorers discovered the wonders of Yosemite, the fertile valleys, natural ports, blooming deserts, and breathtaking coastline.

  Then came the Gold Rush, catapulting California forward with the warp speed that would become one of the state’s defining characteristics.

  In the spring of 1848, the population of San Francisco was 575 men, 177 women, and 60 children. Within a year, the city had close to twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Doctors and lawyers abandoned practices; tradesmen, laborers, and professionals from around the world arrived in California by boat and stagecoach. In the early days, the mines yielded as much as $50,000 a day in gold (more than $1.5 million in 2016 dollars), money that fueled the region’s explosive growth. First the pioneers sought fortunes in gold, then they created the infrastructure and provided the services demanded by this brave new world. An American frontier that had been gradually inching westward suddenly leapfrogged across the country. Californians improvised, unburdened by tradition, open to experimentation. They devised routines, invented machines, and established lifestyles that suited their needs. They could not wait for supplies and knowledge to migrate from the East. They had neither time nor inclination to adopt the staid wisdom or customs of the Eastern establishment.

  California was a land “now engrossing the attention of the civilized world1 with its future importance,” Polish immigrant Felix Wierzbicki wrote in California As It Is, and As It May Be, the first book published in English in California. The 1849 guidebook foresaw transcontinental railroads, millions of residents, trade with China, and a booming agricultural economy. “It is not necessary to be gifted2 with an extraordinary foresight to predict that as soon as the industry and enterprise of the Americans take a fair footing on this soil, the commerce of the country will grow daily.”

  The carpenter John Marshall had first spotted gold in early 1848, just as officials were signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded California to the United States. When the Gold Rush began, California had only a makeshift government. Suddenly, the need for laws became urgent. Congress proposed that California skip territorial status and move directly to statehood. But lawmakers deadlocked for months over whether to allow slavery, a decision that could upset the fragile compromise that had been crafted to hold the Union together. In a pattern destined to be repeated, Californians took matters into their own hands. They called a convention and adopted a constitution that banned slavery, on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Delegates argued that the nature of work in California was unsuitable for slavery; left unsaid was the fear that large slaveholders could have posed unwelcome competition. The free state of California joined the union on September 9, 1850, which would become an official holiday, Admission Day.

  The story of those early years, wrote California’s first great philosopher, Josiah Royce, was the story of how “a new and great community3 first came to a true consciousness of itself.” Writers like Royce witnessed that evolution and penned words that shaped lasting visions of California: A land of immigrants. A place of reinvention. A spirit of openness. An incubator of innovation.

  That was the world that drew a young German named Simon August Schuckman.

  The boy known as August was the second son of Friedrich Kixmöller Schuckman and his wife, Caroline Wilhelmine Luise. Because the Schuckmans had property but no male heirs, Friedrich’s father had taken his bride’s surname, Schuckman, when they married. Friedrich and Caroline had eight children; five boys and one girl lived into adulthood.

  Born July 10, 1827, August grew up in Wüsten, a tiny town in the principality of Lippe-Detmold, in the middle of what was then Prussia. His father operated an inn. August’s older brother stood to inherit the family business, leaving the younger son an uncertain future. As revolution spread across Europe in 1848, August, believing he would soon be drafted, made his way north to Hamburg and used savings to book passage to a new life. Two months shy of his twenty-second birthday, August Schuckman arrived in New York on May 8, 1849, on the ship the Perseverance.4

  He was among almost one million Germans who emigrated to the United States in the decade that followed, driven by political and economic upheaval. By 1855, German immigrants were outnumbered only by those from Great Britain. Many had read about California, both at home and once they arrived in the new land. They had heard about the exploits of John Sutter, a Swiss German (né Johan August Suter) who founded, with his son, the city that became Sacramento; gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill. The Emigrants’ Guide to California, published in St. Louis in 1849, was quickly translated into German, the first of numerous guidebooks that outlined ways to reach the new frontier. Travel “around the Horn” could take nine months and cost $600; cutting across Panama saved time but entailed a dangerous, disease-ridden land crossing; the overland
route from Missouri cost as little as $55, the most popular option.

  By the time August Schuckman headed for California, the perilous trip had become increasingly routine. Maps laid out detailed routes; books offered guidance on where to find water and grass for cattle; and additional ferries expedited the river crossings. A journey first made almost exclusively by men now included women and children. By 1852, an overland trip that had taken an average of 136 days could be completed in fewer than 90, though many took longer.

  August was part of a record number of pioneers5 who crossed the Plains in 1852, following the Oregon Trail to one of the branches that headed southwest into California. More than fifty thousand people and a hundred thousand cattle and sheep crossed that summer, according to estimates, most in ordinary farm wagons drawn by oxen. They left behind ruts that lasted into the twenty-first century. Dysentery and cholera were common, and letter writers told of graves dug before travelers were even dead. They also wrote of the camaraderie. Women took care of other women’s children; men warned other travelers of hostile Indians and dangerous river crossings; families cared for one another’s sick and shared food and water when supplies dwindled.

  August was vague in his accounts of his first few years in the United States, during which he worked as a hired hand on boats on various rivers and the Great Lakes. But he kept a diary6 when he joined a party that set out from St. Louis on March 10, 1852.

  Six foot one, blue-eyed, sandy-haired, and strong, he hired on with a captain shepherding a group of fifty-three pioneers. They traveled up the Missouri River to Jefferson, where the captain stopped to buy seventy-two oxen and cows he planned to sell in California. Then they headed to St. Joseph, Missouri, their progress slowed as men on horseback chased after oxen that strayed into nearby forests. A month into the journey, on Easter Monday, they reached St. Joseph, minus three cows and two oxen.

  The captain bought nine more oxen and eight horses and collected provisions that had been shipped up the river by steamer, and they set off. After six miles they reached the first mountains, where they stopped for six days to rest the cattle, which had walked more than two hundred miles. They set out again on April 24: nine wagons, eighty-one oxen, and eighteen horses. They traveled between eight and twelve miles a day, and by the fifth day, water and wood ran short and tempers flared. They stopped cooking with water and rationed it out to drink.