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4. Waiting
- University of California Press
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WHEN PAT BROWN TOOK statewide office for the first time, California was experiencing one of its periodic population explosions. The bustling shipyards of World War II had started the most recent boom, luring thousands of workers westward with the promise of better jobs. In the years after the war, the flood of migrants persisted. The 1950 census figures, released just days before Brown’s election as attorney general, showed that during the previous decade, more than 3.5 million people had moved to the state, a rate of about 1,000 a day. In ten years California had added more new residents than in its first seventy years of statehood, 1850 to 1920. California had surged past Pennsylvania to become the second most populous state in the nation, and metropolitan Los Angeles was now the country’s third biggest urban center . In a phrase that Brown would use often in later years, Earl Warren called it “the greatest mass migration this country has ever known.”1 The westward torrent showed no signs of abating, and it was catching the nation’s attention. California was more than just big; it was gleaming. Sunshine and beaches and a healthy outdoorsy brio made the state seem, more than at any time since the Gold Rush a century before, like a magical place. In one poll Americans cited it as their favorite vacation spot.2 John Gunther ’s Inside U.S.A., a popular book of the time that sought to capture the mood of various parts of the country, described California as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state[,] . . . ripe, golden, 66 4 WAITING yeasty.”3 Gunther devoted four chapters to California. Ohio, which at the time had almost as many people, got just one. Even the old Gray Lady of American journalism, the New York Times, announced that the very core of the country had been pulled toward the Pacific. “After a hundred hurrying years,” the Times said, California was “something to marvel at.”4 Yet for those who ran the state—a group that now included Brown more than ever—the excitement was mixed with challenge.The newcomers were so numerous they threatened to destroy the good life they sought. Old roads were overwhelmed by the modern rush hour, which in many places was bloating well past sixty minutes. Schools were packed: new elementary schools were needed immediately, new high schools soon enough, new college campuses in the years to come. Experts predicted that for the next two decades, merely to keep pace with its expanding population, metropolitan Los Angeles would have to open a new hospital every five months.5 Without a burst of public energy and investment, California risked being overwhelmed by its own good fortune, a business where the rush of customers tramples the merchandise. ——— In the district attorney’s office, Brown had only a few dozen employees, all centrally located and almost all exempt from civil service protections. He could hire and fire at will, and when he first took office he had done so, bringing in an almost entirely new staff. The state Department of Justice, by contrast, had six hundred employees spread among offices in San Francisco , Los Angeles, and Sacramento.6 Nearly all were civil servants, and their new boss wondered to himself if they would be entirely on his side.7 It proved a needless worry: Within six months he declared in a letter to a friend that his new staff was “very cooperative.”8 The civil service structure made the office less valuable to Democrats as a political tool. Just as twelve years before Brown had hounded the Olson administration for a job, hundreds of people now looked to the only statewide Democratic officeholder as a potential sugar daddy. There was little candy to give away. “There are so few exempt employments in the of- fice of the attorney general,” Brown wrote to Assemblyman Glenn Anderson , who would eventually become his lieutenant governor, “that the Democratic Party will have a difficult time building on the basis thereof.”9 Aware of Howser’s squabbles with Warren, Brown wasted no time trying to mend fences with the governor, though they faced one potentially major WAITING 67 [44.204.196.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:48 GMT) 68 RISING disagreement. Although during the campaign, in what was surely an early attempt to curry favor with Warren, Brown had endorsed the idea of making the governor’s commission on organized crime...