The return of prosperity in wartime California, occasioned in part by agricultural growth, made it easy for Republican Earl Warren to defeat Democratic incumbent Culbert L. Olson in the gubernatorial campaign of 1942. With the depression ended, Warren’s tax cuts resonated with business interests. A state economy booming with federal wartime spending allowed him to save public money that in the late 1940s could be invested in highway construction and higher education. These later expenditures made him popular and able to withstand criticism of his essentially progressive policies from his party’s right wing.
Born in Los Angeles in 1891, Warren grew up in Bakersfield and graduated from UC Berkeley and its law school before gaining notoriety as a public prosecutor. He had served as attorney general before winning the governorship, and went on to establish a record by
Occupying that office for 10 years and 8 months, having been elected in 1942, 1946, and 1950. Warren’s electoral successes and rise to national prominence by mid-century were due in part to his and the state’s non-partisanship orientation.
Non-partisanship favored Republicans. Though Democrats outnumbered Republicans in California from 1942 to 1958, the former usually elected Republicans to the higher state offices. This peculiar pattern developed for mainly two reasons: first, cross-filing allowed candidates’ names to appear on the primary ballots of the opposing party with no affiliation indicated; and second, incumbents’ names appeared at the top of those ballots. Generally, Republicans were better educated and informed about party affiliation and their candidates played down their party membership. Democratic voters gravitated toward choosing the name at the top of the primary ballot, which was usually that of a Republican. Those candidates winning the primaries of both parties, as Warren did in 1950, won elections.
Republicans were also helped greatly by the wealth of business interests in their party and editorial assistance from the state’s most influential newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Oakland Tribune. As businesses themselves, these powerful newspapers liked the Republicans’ emphasis on low taxes and minimal regulation. All of these factors benefited Warren, despite his drift toward progressivism, which antagonized the Republican right but appealed to Democrats and unions.
The first indications of Warren’s center-left leanings came in 1945. As western European countries were repairing and strengthening their welfare states, Warren alarmed California conservatives by urging passage of a compulsory health insurance law, a measure that had been unsuccessfully promoted by a few progressives in 1916. Opposition from the California Medical Association, insurance companies, and political conservatives blocked action on Warren’s proposal, distancing him from right-leaning Republicans. In 1947 oil and trucking lobbies fought unsuccessfully Warren’s bid to increase the gasoline tax to finance the system of highways and freeways that he saw as necessary for the state’s postwar economic growth.
Warren’s staunch support for the University of California and his environmentalism endeared him to many liberals. He served on the UC Board of Regents, and all six of his children graduated from the university’s various campuses. Earl Warren College, founded in 1974 on the campus of UC San Diego, was named in his honor, as was a legal institute at UC Berkeley’s law school. Though the term environmentalist had not yet come into use, Warren was an outdoorsman who loved to hike, hunt, and fish in the wilds of the state. He worked with UC Berkeley Professor Emanuel Fritz to expand the state’s Forestry Service and replenish timberland, while promoting wildlife preservation and the licensing of fishing and hunting.
Though Warren was an unsuccessful contender for the Republican nomination for the White House in 1952, he remained a national figure in that party. The following year President Eisenhower appointed the then California governor as chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the nation and California were caught up in the Cold War and combating Soviet influence abroad and at home. California politics became polarized, even frenzied, in the late 1940s and early 1950s as Richard M. Nixon first gained statewide and then national attention in the fight against communism.
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