In California, Politics and Family Don’t Mix

State Treasurer Kathleen Brown is quick to dispute the point if anyone compares the Browns of California to the Kennedys of Massachusetts. The comparison offends her sense of how things work in California.

But was not Treasurer Brown’s father the 32nd governor of California, her brother the 34th? Is not her Uncle Harold a retired justice of the state Court of Appeal? Is not her cousin, Jeff, San Francisco’s Public Defender?

The name Brown certainly carries high political-name recognition in California, and is thus an advantage. But there the comparison to the Kennedys of Massachusetts comes to an abrupt end.

Massachusetts is localized, tribalized, politicized to chthonian intensity. Accents change from town to town. Social status varies with an almost biological determinism, depending upon one’s religion, ethnic background, high school or college, trade, social associations or neighborhood. Metropolitan Boston commands the politics of Massachusetts to an overwhelming degree.

In such a social environment--tribal, xenophobic, parochial--the Kennedys emerged more in the manner of clan leaders in ancient Ireland than modern politicians. As did ancient clan leaders and their successors in the feudal nobility, the Kennedys laid claim to total, mostly uncritical, enduring loyalty of their still tribalized followers. All the rituals of the Kennedys--display of family, touch football games, the nonchalance of son following father or nephew following uncle into office, the carousing--are characteristics of clan leadership.

The Browns, by contrast, lived quietly during the 1950s in the solidly middle-class Forest Hill section of San Francisco, with Jerry, Cynthia and Kathleen taking their sack lunches to St. Brendan’s Grammar School each morning, even when their father was attorney general. No mystique attached itself to any of the Browns, parent or child, despite the fact that Edmund G. (Pat) Brown was, with Hiram W. Johnson, Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan, one of the four most influential governors state history.

California has never developed a political dynasty, at least one that was related to itself by bloodlines. Does the lack of political families bespeak a lack of political loyalties? Absolutely not.

Loyalty, however, has tended since the post-World War II boom to be highly localized. Californians, Southern Californians especially, are intensely committed not to government in the abstract, but to government as the deliverer of local services--schools, police and fire, beaches and parks--many of them organized as autonomous districts cutting across state, county and municipal jurisdictions. Add to these entities neighborhood and homeowners’ associations and you have what political scientists have long considered the Phantom Government of California.

For the overwhelming majority of Californians, in other words, California itself--so vast, so diverse--remains an abstraction in a way that Massachusetts--so local, so uniformly textured, so comprehensible in its geography--can never be. Local life, by contrast, is intensely tangible, linked to self-interest, capable of engendering fierce loyalties. From this perspective, California has been in the forefront, for something approaching 40 years, of a phenomenon in which modernist political structures, largely abstract, are refashioned, even disestablished, by local identities and loyalties.

Still, a number of California’s politicians have been related. Mining mega-millionaire George Hearst, for example, served in the U.S. Senate from 1886-93, and his son, William Randolph, served a term in Congress--but in New York City and only for four years. Oakland Tribune publisher Joseph Knowland served in Congress from 1904-06 and his son, William, served in the U.S. Senate from 1945-1958. In their domination of East Bay Republican politics, with their linkages of publishing and elective power, the Knowlands come closest to a political family in the history of California. But there were only two of them, and Bill Knowland was trounced by Pat Brown in the governor’s race of 1958.

San Francisco is another special case. San Francisco Congresswoman Florence Kahn succeeded her husband, Julius, when he died in 1924. So did Sala Burton upon the death of her husband, Rep. Philip Burton, in 1983. But neither wife was succeeded by offspring or relative, and the line ended. On the other hand, Philip’s brother, John, a former congressman, now serves in the state Assembly and is contemplating a run for mayor. Today, former Mayor Joseph L. Alioto is spearheading the campaign of his daughter Angela, president of the Board of Supervisors, to deny reelection to Mayor Frank Jordan and thus become the first father-daughter mayoral duo in the history of the state.

The rest of California, by contrast, has little political family to show, with the exception of the father-son secretaries of state, Frank Chester Jordan and Frank Morrill Jordan, who dominated the office from 1913 through the 1960s.

The scarcity, even non-existence of political families in California doesn’t mean it lacks families with a consistent record of giving. The Haas family of San Francisco solidly anchored in its ownership of Levi-Strauss since the 1870s, have been ardent political donors for four generations. In this generation, Madeleine Haas Russell has kept up the Democratic side, while Richard and Rhoda Goldman have favored Republican causes and candidates. Similarly, the Fleishhackers--Mortimer and Herbert in the early 20th Century, Mortimer II and Janet in the mid-20th Century, Mortimer III currently--have exercised continuing influence in Bay Area politics, as have the hotel-owning Swig family, real-estate mogul Walter H. Shorenstein and his son, Douglas, and Napa winemakers Barry and Audrey Sterling, and their daughter, Joy.

A noticeable number of two-generation political donors has recently emerged in Los Angeles. Leon T. Garr, founder of Founders’ National Bank, and his son, Carlton Jenkins, the current CEO, are a pioneering father-son donor team in the African American community. Shogo Suzuki, chairman of the board of Suzuki Enterprises, one of the nation’s largest purveyors of airline food, has been followed into political donorship by his daughter, Shelly.

Other two-generation donors include TV executive Barbara Corday of “Cagney and Lacey” fame, president of New World Television, and her daughter, Evan, founder of Politically Speaking, a Democratic forum; Carmen Warschaw and daughter Hope; entertainment lawyer Susan A. Grode and sons, Jason and Josh; attorney Harvey Silbert and daughter, Lynne Weingarten; MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman and daughter Lynn, and the late auto mogul Holmes Tuttle, a member of Ronald Reagan’s kitchen cabinet, and son Robert.

Whether any of these parent-sibling activist-donors will survive into the third or fourth generation remains an open question. Old Republican money, for example, has tended to turn to philanthropy and the arts by the third generation. It is no accident, therefore, that Republican fund raisers in California have been light years ahead of their Democratic counterparts in employing sophisticated techniques of direct mail to raise money.

California is simply not a place where local alliances flourish because its citizens tend to be people from elsewhere. As such, they can hardly be expected to recognize recurring political names.

In the early 1930s, Clem Whittaker and his partner (later his wife) Leone Baxter, recognizing the isolation, the individualism, even the autism of the California voter, invented a new form of political campaign based in mass media. In their first big election, they defeated the efforts of Pacific Gas and Electric to sink the Central Valley Water Project. The following year, the pair was retained by a temporary alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats to defeat the candidacy of Socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair for governor. Whittaker and Baxter destroyed Sinclair in a mass-media blitz that has become a founding classic of the genre.

Whittaker and Baxter grasped a simple but essential truth. Californians could be reached individually--by the millions!--through the mass media, which in the 1930s meant pamphlets, leaflets, newspaper and magazine advertising, planted stories, commentary and cartoons, billboards, spot announcements on radio, slides and trailers in motion-picture theaters, and direct mail. To this program of managed media, they added the values of contest, image and timing.

Each of us inhabit a California that is as much a state of mind as a place. Each Anglo-Californian, especially, stands autonomously before the universe, a figment of his or her imagination, re-invented, reborn in the Golden State. Asian and Latino California still show the strong influence of family. In this matter, family, African American California is experiencing its own distinctive ordeal. The price of such independence among Anglo-Californians is frequently isolation, loneliness, narcissism--not a good beginning for family life, even of the political variety.*

* TIMES INTERVIEWS: The Democratic candidates for governor, Kathleen Brown, John Garamendi and Tom Hayden. Pages 3-5.