California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

12. Race and Politics

EVENBEFOREBEATINGRICHARDNIXON, Pat Brown decided it was time for a celebration. In the middle of October, with the campaign at full throttle, Brown declared he would follow through on an idea he had nurtured privately for a year. California was about to pass New York in total population—taking “its rightful place on top,” in Brown’s words—and he wanted to mark the great day.1 The result was a three-day bash just before New Year’s, 1963, including an extra day off for state employees and an oddball collection of observances for the public. In San Diego the mayor asked motorists and ship captains to blow their horns in a single, cacophonous moment of glee. In the Bay Area a savings and loan company erected an electric sign that flashed population estimates showing California ahead of New York. In Truckee, high up in the mountains near the Nevada line, the town fathers went out to the highway, where they found a family of newcomers driving into California and pounced on them with an official welcome.2 The ballyhoo was a little phony. The Census Bureau insisted for months afterward that New York remained bigger than California, and even the governor admitted he might have been premature. “I have told the people of the world that we passed New York on December 21,” he wrote to Adlai Stevenson’s son, “but no one can really be sure.”3 Even if it were true, not everyone thought demographic preeminence was 255 12 RACEANDPOLITICS 256 FALLING worth celebrating. The public events drew slim crowds, and in Brown’s hometown of San Francisco—a city born of a boom in the nineteenth century but slowly being eclipsed by one in the twentieth—the establishment was positively grumpy. City administrators rejected a proposal that their workers get an additional day off, and the San Francisco Chronicle complained that the whole affair was a commemoration of failure. Rather than take extra holidays, the paper editorialized, Californians should work to lessen “the blight and the miseries that planless growth has brought to this golden state.”4 Almost nobody had been saying such things four years earlier , when Brown started his first term, and the dissent was an early sign that some Californians had begun to commit heresy, to question the old certitude that bigger is always better. ——— Barely a week later, on January 7, 1963, Brown stood in front of the Capitol on an unseasonably warm winter’s day and took the oath of office for his second term. It was the first time in thirty-two years that a California governor had been inaugurated outside, but location was not the important novelty. In the state’s entire history, Brown was the first Democrat to serve a second term as governor. He swore fealty to the constitution and then, re- flecting the fevers of the Cold War, also had to promise that he was not a subversive, had not been one for five years, and did not plan to become one during his term. When he finished, National Guard howitzers stationed nearby let loose a nineteen-gun salute.5 The ensuing speech took fifty minutes. The opening was pure boast. In the first four years, he said, his administration had laid plans to build an arti ficial river down the spine of the state, had started a vast expansion of the greatest system of public colleges and universities in the world, and had vowed that race would be no bar to work. Promising a second term like the first would have been foolish valor, so Brown focused most of his talk on smaller hopes. He wanted strict controls on the placement of billboards, for example, and said he would insist on top-flight architecture in state buildings . Only toward the end did he come around to his most powerful theme. A century had elapsed since Lincoln promised the slaves they would be “forever free.” The country had fallen short. “In conscience,” Brown said, “we cannot say today that we have redeemed Lincoln’s promise.” The answer lay in an aggressive civil rights agenda, and the governor outlined the particulars. Housing discrimination would be outlawed. Bias in state agen- RACEANDPOLITICS 257 cies would be eliminated through muscular use of the governor’s executive powers. Anyone seeking a state license of any kind should have to promise fair treatment for all. The crowd pounded out...