| Pat Brown | |
|---|---|
| 32nd Governor of California | |
| In office January 5, 1959 – January 2, 1967 |
|
| Lieutenant | Glenn M. Anderson |
| Preceded by | Goodwin Knight |
| Succeeded by | Ronald Reagan |
| Personal details | |
| Born | April 21, 1905 San Francisco, California |
| Died | February 16, 1996 (aged 90) Beverly Hills, California |
| Resting place | Holy Cross Cemetery |
| Political party | Republican (1928) Democrat (1932-1996) |
| Spouse(s) | Bernice Layne Brown |
| Alma mater | San Francisco College of Law |
| Profession | Lawyer |
| Religion | Roman Catholicism |
Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, Sr. (April 21, 1905 – February 16, 1996) was the 32nd governor of California from 1959 to 1967, and the father of current Governor of California Jerry Brown.
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Brown was born in San Francisco, California, one of four children of Edmund and Ida Schuckman Brown. His father was an Irish Catholic, his mother a German Protestant.[1][2] He acquired the nickname "Pat" during his school years; the nickname was a reference to his Patrick Henry-like oratory. When he was 12 and selling Liberty Bonds on street corners, he would end his spiel with, "Give me liberty, or give me death."[3]
He was a debate champion as a member of the Lowell Forensic Society at San Francisco's Lowell High School, from which he graduated in 1923. Brown skipped college and worked in his father's cigar store while studying law at a local night school. He graduated from San Francisco College of Law in spring 1927, passed the California bar exam the following fall,[4] and started a law practice in San Francisco.
Brown ran as a Republican for the State Assembly in 1928, but lost; he joined the Democratic Party in 1932. He waited until 1939 to seek public office again, this time running for District Attorney of San Francisco, a race he lost to Matthew Brady.[1]
He ran again for District Attorney in 1943, and this time won. He served in that position for seven years, and made his name attacking bookies and underground abortion providers. In 1949, he raided Sally Stanford's elegant San Francisco bordello.[5]
In 1946, as the Democratic nominee, Brown lost the race for Attorney General of California to Los Angeles County District Attorney Frederick N. Howser. Running again in 1950, he won election as Attorney General and was re-elected in 1954. While he was Attorney General, he was the only Democrat to win statewide election in California.
In 1958, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of California. He defeated U.S. Senator William F. Knowland by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points and a plurality of over 1 million votes. He was reelected in 1962, defeating former Vice President Richard Nixon by 52% to 47%. He lost the 1966 election to another future Republican President, Ronald Reagan. Reagan unseated Brown with 58%, winning a plurality of some 990,000 votes.
Brown's two terms were marked by an enormous water-resources development program. The California Aqueduct built as part of the program now bears his name. He also presided over the enactment of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, fair employment legislation, a state economic development commission, and a consumers' council. He sponsored some forty major proposals, only five of which failed to pass in the Legislature.
During his two terms in office, Brown commuted 23 death sentences, signing the first commutation on his second day in office.[6] One of his more notable commutations was the death sentence of Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker, whose execution in the gas chamber for first-degree murder had been postponed some hours before it was to take place because of an attempted suicide. After recovering, Walker's execution was postponed again while he was being restored to mental competency. After Walker was declared sane in 1961, Brown commuted Walker's death sentence to life without the possibility of parole. Walker would later be paroled anyway after the California Supreme Court held that Governor Brown could not legally deny a prisoner the right to parole in a death sentence commutation. Another prisoner whose death sentence was commuted by Brown committed at least one murder after being paroled.[6]
In contrast, Governor Brown allowed 36 executions, including the highly controversial case of Caryl Chessman in 1960 and Elizabeth Duncan - the last female put to death before a national moratorium was instituted.[6] Though he had supported the death penalty while serving as district attorney, as Attorney General, and when first elected Governor[7], he later became an opponent of its use.[8] While Governor, Brown's attitude towards the death penalty was often ambivalent, if not arbitrary. An ardent supporter of gun control, Brown was more inclined to let convicts go to the gas chamber if they had killed with guns than with a knife or (in one actual case) with a bowling pin.[9] He later admitted that he had denied clemency in one death penalty case principally because the legislator who represented the district in which the murder occurred held a swing vote on farmworker legislation supported by Brown, and who told Brown that his district "would go up in smoke" if the governor commuted the man's sentence.[6]
During the Chessman case Brown proposed that the death penalty be abolished, but the proposal failed.[6] His Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, was a firm death penalty supporter and oversaw the last pre-Furman execution in California in 1967.
Brown and his wife, Bernice (née Layne), the daughter of a San Francisco police captain, were childhood sweethearts. They married in 1930 and had four children (all born in San Francisco):
In 1970, Pat's son Jerry Brown was elected Secretary of State of California; in 1974 he was elected as the 34th Governor of California. Re-elected Governor in 1978, Jerry Brown was defeated in a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1982, served as mayor of Oakland from 1998–2006 and was elected California Attorney General in 2006; he was again elected Governor in 2010. Kathleen Brown was elected California State Treasurer in 1990 and was defeated in a bid for Governor of California in 1994.
In 1958, as Governor-elect, Pat Brown appeared as a guest challenger on the TV panel show "What's My Line?"
Pat Brown died at age 90 in Beverly Hills and is interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma. His funeral was the most recent gubernatorial funeral to be held in the state of California to date. Ronald Reagan was the most recent former California governor to die but his final funeral service was held at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
| “ | My son asked me what I hoped to accomplish as Governor. I told him: essentially to make life more comfortable for people, as far as government can. I think that embraces everything from developing the water resources vital to California's growth, to getting a man to work and back fifteen minutes earlier if it can be done through a state highway program. | ” |
Unlike his son, Jerry, Pat Brown never seriously ran for President of the United States, but he frequently was California's "favorite son." At the quadrennial American national political party conventions, a state delegation sometimes nominates and votes for a candidate from the state, or less often from the state's region, who is not a viable candidate. The technique allows state leaders to negotiate with leading candidates in exchange for the delegation's support. The technique was widely used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Since nationwide campaigns by candidates and binding primary elections have replaced brokered conventions, the technique has fallen out of use.
During the 1952 Democratic primaries Brown placed distant second to Estes Kefauver in total votes (65.04% to 9.97%),[10] losing California to Kefauver.[11]
During Governor Brown's first term (1959–1963), the national census confirmed that California had become the nation's most populous state.[12] Brown's political popularity, multiplied by the state's population, would contribute to the following two national Presidential victories, when he pledged his votes to the national candidates, (Kennedy in 1960, and Johnson in 1964), at the Democratic conventions.
While Governor, Brown was again California's favorite son in 1960, winning his home state with a large margin to his only opponent George H. McLain.[13] Brown joined favorite sons Ohio's Albert S. Porter, Governor Michael DiSalle and Florida Senator George Smathers.
More serious primary candidates were Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson II and Stuart Symington in 1960, with the nomination going to John F. Kennedy. Brown ran only in the California state primary. Yet his popularity with the largest state electorate in the nation gave him second place in the national Democratic primary vote, just behind Kennedy.[14] Thus he repeated his 1952 state and national rankings. However, only one delegate cast his vote for Brown for President at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.[15]
During the 1964 primaries, by running again only in California, the nation's largest state electorate vote[16] led Brown to place first this time in both the California and the Democratic national primary total,[17] besting the eventual nominee. Brown, as well as over a dozen other candidates except George Wallace, was a stalking horse for incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, whose nomination was assured.
As for the Vice Presidency, he briefly sought nomination at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, winning one vote.[18]
Prior to 1959, loyalty to a political party was not important in California. Through a practice known as cross-filing, a person could run in both the Democratic primary and the Republican primary at the same time. As indicated in the article on the California Democratic Party, Governor Earl Warren did so in 1946 and 1950. Cross-filing was abolished in 1959. Thus the fact that Brown first ran for office as a Republican and later as a Democrat was not, at that time, as significant in California as it would have been elsewhere.
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