CHAPTER ONE
Early Years
Politics and Religion
It is not just my family but every Californian is heir to some form of powerful tradition, some history of overcoming challenges much more daunting than those we face today.
Jerry Brown, third inaugural address, January 3, 2011
Californians in 1938 were busy. In Hollywood, producer David Selznick was masterminding a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara in the forthcoming supercolossal epic Gone with the Wind. (There were salacious rumors that he was conducting part of his talent hunt on the casting couch.) In the hills above Berkeley, Ernest Orlando Lawrence was working on his atom-smashing cyclotron, a scientific advance that would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 and contribute to the development of the atomic bomb. The San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner carried headlines about distant war in Asia and potential war in Europe, but they had little immediate significance to most people, who were still getting used to driving on the Golden Gate Bridge, just eleven months old, and the Bay Bridge, a mere seventeen months old. The Golden State’s burgeoning population was soaring from 5.6 million in 1930 on its way to 6.9 million in 1940, even while families were feeling the effects of the Great Depression.
An ambitious young San Francisco attorney named Edmund G. “Pat” Brown became the father of a baby boy on April 7, 1938, the third of what would be Pat and his wife Bernice’s four children. They named the new arrival for his father, Edmund Gerald Brown, but most people called him Jerry. He had no brothers. His three sisters were Barbara and Cynthia, both older than Jerry, and Kathleen, the youngest, who came along in 1945, seven years after Jerry.
Jerry Brown is a fourth-generation Californian, born into what passes in that state for a family with ancient roots there. One side of the family came from Germany, the other from Ireland, and both arrived in 1852. Augustus Fiedler Schuckman, from Westphalia, settled in the Colusa County town of Williams, amid wheat and barley country. He was one of the thousands of settlers who flooded into California four years after gold had been discovered in the tailrace of a lumber mill in the Sierra foothills owned by an enterprising Swiss immigrant named John Sutter. But Augustus sought his fortune in settled, peaceful farming in California’s Central Valley, not panning for gold in a rough miner settlement.
He came to a place isolated from the rest of the nation and, indeed, the world. A popular song of the era declared of those who would come to California:
They swam the wide rivers and crossed the tall peaks
And camped on the prairie for weeks upon weeks.
Starvation and cholera and hard work and slaughter,
They reached California in spite of hell and high water.1
Augustus kept his own more personal record of his six-month trip to California. It was a classic pioneer saga. Here are excerpts from the diary he kept during the trek:
On the 26th of June, we came to the first sand desert—it was 41 miles. We went there at night and rode 19 hours in it. . . .
On the 26th of July, we came to the second large plain—also 40 miles long. Here we lost seven oxen which died of thirst. . . . Thousands of cows, horses and mules were lying about dead. . . .
The discarded wagons by the hundreds were driven together and burned. We saw wagons standing that would never be taken out again and more than 1,000 guns that had been broken up. Here on this 40 miles are treasures that can never be taken out again.2
Schuckman did well enough in his new surroundings to build Mountain House eventually, a stage stop in Sonoma County that included a bar, a post office, lodging, and a small store. He and his wife, Augusta, had eight children. One of them, Ida, found herself drawn in 1896 to the glamour and wealth of San Francisco, the commercial center of the West Coast with a growing population of three hundred thousand.
Amid the towering ten- and fifteen-story buildings, plush hotel lobbies, and breathtaking views of sparkling San Francisco Bay, Ida met and married Edmund Joseph Brown, the son of an Irish Golden Gate Park gardener named Joseph Brown. Joseph and his wife, Bridgette, had come from Tipperary, in County Cork. They sought their fortune in a two-year-old state where, it was well known, one could pick gold nuggets right up off the ground, the climate was always miraculously sunny, and the scenery was astonishing. The settlers found that at least the last part was true.
Joseph managed to stay married to Bridgette and employed by the city and was apparently a satisfactory gardener, even though he did occasionally go off on three- or four-day benders. It happened only two or three times a year, however, and Joseph took vows of sobriety after each frolic.
Joseph was content to remain in his humble job, tending the flowers in Golden Gate Park, but that was an unusual characteristic among Jerry Brown’s ancestors. Joseph’s son Edmund, Ida’s new husband, aimed higher. Edmund was a merry, free-spirited Irish Catholic who wanted to make his fortune in business. And why not? San Francisco was full of opportunity. Edmund started by opening a cigar store on Market Street and in 1905 branched out, opening a nickelodeon. As the years went by, the family’s fortunes gyrated with the prudence of freewheeling Edmund’s various financial ventures, which in addition to the cigar store and the nickelodeon included at one time or another a laundry, a penny arcade, and a full-scale vaudeville theater that tanked. The great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire forced the Browns to move briefly across the bay to almost-untouched Oakland, the city that would elect Jerry Brown as its mayor ninety-three years later.
Along with the nickelodeon acquisition, the year 1905 saw the arrival of a son, named Edmund Gerald Brown. When he was twelve years old, the future governor would acquire his nickname, “Pat,” for Patrick Henry, after giving a sales pitch for World War I Liberty Bonds and ending it with “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Young Pat was an intelligent and convivial child who grew up to be an outgoing, likable man and a natural politician. He was not fond of the up-and-down entrepreneurial life led by his father and sought something that would give him respectability and a more secure income—like the law. There was the added advantage that it would provide an appropriate springboard for the political career Pat was already thinking about. Pat attended the San Francisco College of Law, won his law degree in 1927, passed the bar that same year, and went into practice, working for Milton Schmitt, a blind attorney who became his mentor.
By the time Jerry came along, Pat was prospering as an up-and-coming young attorney who could now afford some of the better things in life. Even though their circumstances were comfortable, Pat Brown disputed the idea that his son was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
“We never had any money to speak of,” he told interviewer Orville Schell. “When I ran for DA of San Francisco, I was only making $8,000 a year. I had won some lawsuits, but I never had any money. We never took any trips.”3
Jerry was born at St. Mary’s Hospital, the first in a series of institutions that had “St.” or “Sacred” or “Santa” as part of their names and would largely influence his first two decades. He grew up in a white, five-bedroom Mediterranean-style house on Magellan Avenue in the desirable Forest Hills section of San Francisco.
Magellan Avenue today seems little changed from the time young Jerry Brown was there. Despite the nearby busy streets, it is a quiet, pleasant, tree-lined upper-middle-class neighborhood, with a mixture of large Italianate, Tudor, and Spanish-style houses. Home prices today range from $1.5 million and up, with most fetching far more than that.
His parents had a lifelong love affair. Bernice Layne Brown was the stunningly good-looking and enormously intelligent daughter of a San Francisco police captain. She graduated