Author argues that the Brown family helped make California
In an elegantly structured and engrossing new book, “The Browns of California” (Bloomsbury, $35, 480 pages), writer Miriam Pawel argues one family in particular has helped California become an ever-updating blueprint for all the ways America can be better.
In the spring of 1848, San Francisco consisted of just 575 men, 177 women and 60 children. Fattened shortly thereafter by residents seeking gold, the city grew to 25,000 within a year. “Unburdened by tradition, open to experimentation,” Pawel writes, these new Californians “devised routines, invented machines and established lifestyles that suited their needs. They could not wait for supplies and knowledge to migrate from the East.”
Ida Schuckman, the last child of German immigrant to rural California August Schuckman, fell in love with the turn-of-the-century Bay Area, marrying an Irish Catholic and giving birth to a son they named Edmund G. Brown. In 1917, he acquired the nickname Pat, when in a speech to sell war bonds, the seventh grader quoted from Patrick Henry’s famous line, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Originally a Republican, Pat found inspiration in President Roosevelt’s ethic of service and the promise of a more benevolent government. It was, in fact, while standing at a urinal beside his best friend, Mathew Tobriner, that the young lawyer officially resolved to become a Democrat — a detail Tobriner “delighted in recalling,” writes Pawel.
The state was changing as well. During World War II, military and aerospace dollars arrived; Pawel reports that in the year 1940, total federal spending in California was $728 million, but by 1945, the feds spent as much as $8.5 billion. Operating more like cities than companies, outfits such as Lockheed and Douglas begin to offer daycare, healthcare, banking, meals and entertainment. When the war was over, nearly a million veterans stayed in California — in part to embrace the idea that benevolent services could help make life better.
Energized by a growing sense of the power of government to ensure justice, Pat pivoted from law to politics, becoming attorney general and dreaming bigger. He loved to talk: The twohour trip from San Francisco to Sacramento, Pawel writes, could take him all day, because he stopped to chat “at every restaurant or bar along the way.”
Meanwhile, his precocious son — in high school, he pestered friends, talking all night about “the difference between Kant and Greek philosophers —joined his friend Frank Damrell in fishing out all the money from their pockets and tossing it out the car window. The year was 1956, and they were joining a Jesuit seminary. “The material world,” Jerry said later, “didn’t interest me as much as a life of quiet contemplation.” While the son studied, the father governed a state that had grown to 15 million. Every night, Pawel reports, the governor tried to imagine the constituent who needed his help the most, and then he prayed for that individual, whom he called “the most forgotten soul in California.”
In addition to the state’s frontier spirit (and the family’s faith), another major factor in the Browns’ ability to chart a pattern-breaking course for the Golden State was the growth in California of a new kind of American populace. In the 1950s, the equivalent of one high school opened a week. Newcomers poured in from all over the country and the For some of the time Pat Brown was governing the state of California, his son Jerry was spending his time in the seminary.
world. As governor, one of Pat’s lasting achievements was a new master plan for the state’s public education, which established the California State University system and emphasized free tuition at all public universities — the latter which achievement Ronald Reagan and subsequent governors (including Jerry) slowly unraveled.
Growth also brought smog and traffic and even
the paving of some of Pat’s beloved Yosemite. Yet it was generational discord that stumped Pat most, especially when a protest movement arrived at his favorite place: Berkeley. Jerry wasn’t particularly sympathetic, either. Said his father: “This is not a matter of freedom of speech. We must have — and will continue to have — law and order on our campuses.”
In the spirit of a changing
California, the savvy Browns pivoted to Los Angeles. “People in the Bay Area,” Pawel writes, “might regard Southern California with disdain as a cultural wasteland, but people in Los Angeles didn’t much care.” In 1966, the city went from one state senator to 14. The eight counties of Southern California controlled more legislative seats than the other 50 combined. More than half of the state’s voters
lived in the L.A. TV market.
If Pawel’s portrait of Pat is a bit sepia-toned, the book gains speed when the author focuses on a maturing Jerry. The promising son started in L.A. at a boutique law firm, arriving late, struggling into his jacket, tie flying, rolling through town in an old white Chevy Malibu that Pat gave him when he failed to pass the bar. In