The California that Pat built

The life and career of Edmund G. Brown, the two-term governor universally known as “Pat,” spans a tipping point in the state’s history, as we are reminded in “California Rising,” journalist Ethan Rarick’s colorful and masterful biography of the lovable old pol.

In 1962, California became the most populous state in the nation, an event that, as Brown himself put it, shifted “the balance of the most powerful nation in the world ... from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” It was during his administration that the UC Berkeley campus and the community of Watts exploded in violent protest against the status quo. And, although Brown beat Richard Nixon in the 1962 gubernatorial election, Brown’s defeat by Ronald Reagan four years later marked a sea change in the politics of both California and the United States.

Nowadays, as Rarick points out, Brown is recalled as “the grand man of the California boom,” an unapologetic liberal politician who presided over the good old days of the Golden State: Freeways, water projects, state college and university campuses, and suburban sprawl all proliferated during his administration, and California, for better or worse, is living with his legacy.

Rarick writes of Brown as “a man of joyful geographic bias,” a reference to Brown’s pride of being a native son whose grandparents came to California during the Gold Rush. But the operative word here is “joy.” He was “the most inveterate of glad-handers,” and at the end of his long life, Brown still liked to roll down the window of his car at a stoplight and address a passerby: “Hi, I’m Pat Brown. What’s your name?”

Born in San Francisco in 1905, he grew up street-smart and street-tough. Young Brown, for example, joined the Grove Street Gang. “You had to be able to handle your dukes,” he recalled. Early on, his father sent him out to sell a home-bottled elixir called Fire of Life. And, after graduating from high school in 1923, he was the cashier in his father’s cigar store -- “but his real task,” Rarick writes, “was to guard the door to the poker game in the back room.” To supplement his wages, Brown ran a craps game of his own.

Brown, however, was too ambitious to stay long at the back door. He completed a law degree at night and embarked on the practice of law, but politics was more alluring -- Brown ran for the state Assembly as a Republican at age 23, losing badly but going on to promote his political career in the burgeoning Democratic Party of the Depression era. Still, it was not until 1943, at age 38, that he won his first elective office as district attorney of San Francisco and not until 1950 that he achieved statewide office as attorney general.

Brown was always a “do-gooder,” as Rarick writes. He campaigned against slumlords, argued for the repeal of an old law that prohibited the sale of liquor to Indians and insisted that liquor licenses be restored to Japanese American bar and restaurant owners who had been interned during World War II. A devoted Catholic, he declared that the Constitution protected the rights of all Americans, “even atheists and agnostics.”

Rarick clearly loves politics as much as Brown did, and he writes expertly about the personalities, stratagems and rivalries that so absorbed the man. For some readers of “California Rising,” however, the detailed coverage of Brown’s political career may be less compelling than the intimate glimpse that Rarick affords into the Brown family -- young Gerald Jr., better known to us as Jerry, “drove his teachers nuts” and was “occasionally a hellion,” or so Rarick tells us.

“I am sure that you brush your teeth, wash your hands and face and say your prayers at least three times a day,” wrote the elder Brown when his 10-year-old son was away at summer camp. “I hope you have not gotten into any fights, but if you have, I hope you haven’t lost them.”

Still, the peak moments in Brown’s long and richly accomplished political career remind us that there was a time when a politician could proudly proclaim that it was the duty of government to make things better for its citizens.

“I deeply believe we still have a great state to build,” declared Brown at the outset of his first gubernatorial campaign in 1957. “We have water to transport.... We have highways to build.... We have discrimination to dispel, genuine underprivileged to provide for.”

Once out of office, Brown was a diminished and mostly forgotten man. At perhaps the saddest moment in Rarick’s mostly upbeat book, Brown was reduced to pleading with his own son for a role to play during Jerry Brown’s governorship. “Please give your father a chance to meet with you alone,” wrote the former governor to the incumbent. And yet, at his death in 1996, more than a thousand people turned out for his funeral -- Pat Brown had long been “an icon of California politics,” as Rarick writes, and he was still beloved if also obsolete. *