Bill Boyarsky, a retired Los Angeles Times reporter, has written a new biography of Jesse Unruh, the legendary former speaker of the California Assembly, state treasurer and nationally powerful political leader who was partly responsible for the legislative reform movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, entitled Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics.
A promotional blurb for the book by University of Southern California historian Kevin Starr captures Unruh as I remember him, as "this flamboyant but enigmatic politician, this gruff giant, this wizard of the legislative process, this ardent advocate and fierce opponent, the late great Jesse Unruh."
The LA Times has a good review of the book by Peter Schrag. Perhaps even more interestingly, the Times has reprinted all of "Chapter One: The Death of a Boss." The perhaps too titillating first paragraph of this excerpt reads:
The last days of Jesse Marvin Unruh were a fitting end to the life of a great American political boss: drinks, stories, and friends and family mourning, not only for the boss but for themselves. He was dying of prostate cancer, having refused to permit his prostate to be surgically removed. Unruh spoke to several people about this decision, including family and friends. A radical prostatectomy might have saved him but he dreaded that it would leave him impotent, taking him out of a game that was very important to him, the game of sex, played over and over again, with many, many women. Impotence in sex, politics, or anything else was unacceptable to this domineering man, who had raised himself from Texas sharecropper poverty to becoming, at the height of his power, the single most influential politician in California, first as an assemblyman, then as state assembly speaker, and finally as state treasurer. Unruh was one of those rare elected officials whose power reached far beyond the offices he held. Other state assemblymen, assembly speakers, and state treasurers have served and been quickly forgotten. Unruh took these jobs in new directions, and during his lifetime and long afterward, he exemplified the word politician in its finest sense.
Just in case the LA Times links go away sometime soon, I will include several other paragraphs from the Schrag review and the book's first chapter below the jump.
From Peter Schrag's review:
...Not only was Unruh a central player in the forging of California's great postwar highway, university and water systems and the creation of its progressive governmental institutions, he also was a man with a voracious appetite for food, drink, sex and power -- a larger-than-life personality that matched his political career. It's those two things combined that makes this story so compelling.
Boyarsky sheds a lot of light on California's less-than-sedate politics in the decades after World War II, providing a telling perspective on the present state of our political affairs. To paraphrase a bon mot attributed to Will Rogers: Things in California politics were never as good as they used to be.
Unruh, who grew up in hardscrabble sharecropper poverty in rural Texas -- an Okie in all but name -- was an angry, sometimes disagreeable man most of his life. He was angry particularly about the great gap between the privileged and the poor. But he also was a pragmatic politician who relished the game and played it hard, especially for the causes he embraced -- sometimes verging on political blackmail.
Paradoxically, this tough-guy populist, nicknamed for Tennessee Williams' bullying character in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," so strengthened the power of the state treasurer's office, never a sexy post, that he ended up hobnobbing with -- and cashing in on -- the very Wall Street bigwigs he was born to hate. California had a lot of money to invest and a lot of bonds to sell, and the treasurer was the key player who picked which brokers and bankers got the fat fees.
Through it all, Unruh lived hard, boozing, playing cards in the hotel suites of Sacramento's lobbyists and proudly womanizing -- all perks of power -- in a misogynist legislative environment that Boyarsky characterizes as an "animal house"....Boyarsky's book has both the virtues and the self-imposed limits of good reporting -- and he is an outstanding journalist. "Big Daddy" is full of great stories. Yet one wishes he had risked offering more analysis: How was it possible for the animal house Legislature, often in thrall to special-interest lobbyists, to put in place the great infrastructure projects pushed by Govs. Goodwin Knight and Edmund G. "Pat" Brown -- water, schools, roads -- as well as Unruh's political reforms?...
All that said, "Big Daddy" is a major addition to the distinguished Californian political biographies -- Ethan Rarick on Pat Brown, James Richardson on former Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Jacobs on Burton -- published over the last dozen years by the University of California Press. And it's a fun read.
And from Boyarsky's chapter one:
...Unruh was much more than a California politician. He was part of a line of postwar Democratic political leaders, beginning with Harry Truman, who espoused the center of American liberalism. It was a position that would be made untenable in the 1960s by conflict over race and the Vietnam War. Unruh's effort to keep California Democrats on this centrist path anticipated and encapsulated the struggles that were to tear the Democratic Party apart.
Unruh embodied much of what was accomplished in postwar California. In his prime, California was already the most important state in the union, exceeding the wealth and influence of most nations. Its impact on national policy and politics was huge, and Jesse Unruh was part of it every step of the way as a lawmaker, policy maker, and political prophet. Unruh foresaw the challenges and problems of the postwar era, and proposed and enacted solutions that were accepted both in his own state and in the other places where he had influence, on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. In doing so, he made his way between the extremes of a volatile California. If his path had been followed by his party in later years, it might have saved the Democrats from their estrangement from working-class America....
Knowing that a legislature intellectually and financially subservient to lobbyists and state bureaucrats could not prescribe for the new postwar California, Unruh persuaded the voters to approve a full-time legislature with a large staff of its own experts, a pattern adopted around the nation. Eventually, it became clear the new system was flawed, although not as badly as the old one. Full-time status and higher pay did not make the lazy more productive or the greedy more honest. But in their early years, Unruh's innovations turned the assembly into a creative body that originated policies preparing California for the changes in economic and social conditions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Unruh's state assembly team of legislators and consultants initiated a vast change in the treatment of the retarded and mentally ill, improving their care, as well as giving them civil rights. The warehousing of children was ended, as was the practice of shipping the mentally ill to state hospitals after only perfunctory hearings. Sharing Unruh's belief that civil rights laws alone were not enough to overcome generations of discrimination and segregation, assembly consultants developed a policy of tutoring and aid that, if enacted, would have made college much more available for the needy of all races, accomplishing the purposes of affirmative action without falling into the bottomless pit of racial politics....Other women were a constant with Unruh. He was always on the prowl, and as his power grew, the chase became easy. He mixed long- and short-term relationships. In the short term, his criterion was availability. "He'd [have sex with] a filing cabinet," said one friend. "As long as it was a girl filing cabinet," another friend said. But other relationships were long term and deep, and his partners in them spoke of him with admiration and affection long afterward....
There have been enormous changes since Unruh's death. Leaders without a common goal struggle to appease rival interests. For example, the new symbol of California is not a university but a prison, a monument to interest groups that have exploited the public's fear of crime. Drive through rural California, and you are likely to see one, constructed by a new generation of governors and legislators afraid their constituents will vote them out of office whenever a murder or robbery is reported on the television news. Legislators, their terms now limited by the state's constitution, merely pass through the Capitol on their way to other public offices or other careers.
How did we get from there to here? Where did California go wrong? By looking at those bright days through the life and career of Jesse M. Unruh, we can chart the peaks and valleys. The past can't be recaptured. The experiences that shaped Unruh are history. Yet the promise of California, with its natural and human resources, remains, just as it did when Unruh was beginning his career.
One Unruh quote of which I'm fond:
"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, f*** their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don't belong here." (Referring to lobbyists.)"
Posted by: Doug | December 04, 2007 at 08:00 PM
Unruh had a way with words, sometimes not so modulated as in Doug's quote. There are lots of quotes attributed to him. "Money is the mother's milk of politics" is the most widely quoted one. A few others are listed in the Wikipedia entry for Unruh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Unruh).
One of my favorite Unruh stories has to do with the then very young Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown, to show his populist tendencies, chose a Plymouth as the car that he got from the state and made a big deal of it in the press. Unruh, then the state treasurer, had a Lincoln (or a Cadillac or somesuch). When reporters asked him about why he had such a fancy car in contrast to the governor, he responded, "When I was Gov. Brown's age, I had a Plymouth, too."
Posted by: Karl Kurtz | December 07, 2007 at 08:17 PM
Was Jesse Unruh any relation to Otto Unruh and David Unruh? I understand that Jesse was born in Newton, Kansas... Both Otto and David were football coaches at Bethel College in Newton... anyone have any idea?
Posted by: Paul McDonald | February 27, 2011 at 09:48 PM