Governors Goodwin J. Knight and Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the first a moderate-to-liberal Republican and the second a liberal Democrat, were progressive-minded. “Pat” was a nickname traced to an impassioned Patrick Henry-like speech Brown delivered as a youth. Both politicians saw government as an instrument for ensuring social justice and advancing the well-being of the public through an impartial justice system, regulatory oversight, and infrastructure projects. During Brown’s administrations reforms were implemented regarding government operations.
Goodwin Knight, who had once campaigned for Hiram Johnson and worked his way through Stanford, practiced law before entering politics as a self-made millionaire. His work experience as a hard-rock miner made him sympathetic to organized labor, which, in turn, supported him. As lieutenant governor under Earl Warren, Knight assumed the governorship in 1953 when Warren became chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. The following year, Knight was elected governor in his own right.
As governor, Knight continued Warren’s progressive policies. The new governor repelled conservative attempts to pass “right to work” legislation that would have hobbled unions by undermining the solidarity needed in workplaces for effective collective bargaining. Knight supported a Feather River dam, raised benefits for the unemployed and seniors, increased the state’s education budget, addressed Los Angeles’ smog problem, tightened regulations on alcohol and boxing, appointed the first female regent of the University of California, and oversaw the transfer of Hearst Castle in San Simeon to the State of California.
Despite these achievements, Knight’s reelection bid in 1958 was hurt by a rift within the state’s Republican Party between himself and challenger William F. Knowland. Knowland was the candidate put forward by conservative, anti-union southern California Republicans, aircraft and oil companies, and Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler. Stung by this development, Knight withdrew from the governor’s race and ran for the U. S. Senate, leaving the Republican gubernatorial nomination to Knowland.
With Republicans split by the Knight-Knowland feud, the way was clear for a Democrat to win the governorship. That Democrat was the affable former attorney general Pat Brown, who garnered support from the state’s 1.5 million union members who detested Knowland. With a slowing Californian economy, candidate Brown said that Knowland offered only “a bigger dose of trickle-down economics,” referring to the Republican Party’s faith in the free
Market as the remedy for economic ills coupled with an aversion to income redistribution through taxes. According to this theory, only by the rich getting richer would prosperity trickle down to the rest of society in the form of more jobs and higher wages. Brown, on the other hand, had a New Dealer’s faith in an activist state that redistributed wealth in order to make “life a little more comfortable for the average human being.”
Brown won in a Democratic landslide, capturing 60 percent of the vote, while his party won all of the top state offices, as well as majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Moreover, Democrats won a 16 to 14 majority in California’s House of Representatives delegation, and a seat in the U. S. Senate that went to Clair Engel, who defeated Knight. The 1958 election would prove a major turning point in the state’s history.
The Golden State’s new governor did not attend college but graduated from an evening law school, and was a lifelong Catholic who openly opposed the death penalty. In 1960 his delaying of the execution of Caryl Chessman, a convicted rapist, brought public scorn. Brown embraced the liberal view that in church-state relations the Constitution must protect everyone “even atheists and agnostics.” Never an ideologue nor shrill anticommunist Cold Warrior, the new governor was a pragmatic politician. He counted on the support of his wife, Bernice, who had little love for politics, and his three children, one of whom would occupy the statehouse later. Buoyed by a sunny countenance, a belief in California’s greatness, and his family, Brown’s governorship ushered in liberalism’s high tide.
To make politics more transparent and responsive to the masses of voters, Assemblyman Jesse M. Unruh, chair of the Ways and Means Committee and later assembly speaker, oversaw reforming government operations. In 1959 cross-filing was abolished so that voters would know candidates’ party affiliations. Additionally, hitherto underrepresented urban voters received more equitable treatment through reapportionment. In 1964 the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims that legislative voting districts in states must have approximately equal numbers of voters. Before this ruling, hugely populated Los Angeles County with some 6 million residents had the same number of votes in the state senate as the Alpine-Mono-Inyo District with slightly more than 14,000 inhabitants. As a result of reapportionment control of the state senate passed to southern California, which had enjoyed assembly majorities since the 1930s.
Heartened by his first term, Brown ran for reelection in 1962 against Richard Nixon, who had lost his bid for the presidency two years earlier to John F. Kennedy. Nixon charged that Brown was “soft on communism,” a strategy that had worked well for the red-baiting Orange County Republican in years past. Still, Nixon lacked Brown’s command of California issues and had made some enemies among his fellow Republicans who found his methods unsavory. Brown won a second term, and an angry Nixon made newspaper headlines, saying that journalists would not have him “to kick around any more.” The victor was now positioned to continue building the progressive mega-state of his dreams.
World History
