Not pure, not simple

If ethnic relations in Los Angeles seem tense now, it is enlightening to know how much worse they were in the segregated, racist L.A. of post-World War II, when Jesse M. Unruh, an overweight, angry GI Bill vet, enrolled at the University of Southern California.

Eventually, Unruh went on to hold state political offices and, for a time, was the most powerful politician in California. He was part of a generation of visionaries that included former governors Earl Warren and Edmund G. Brown Sr. They believed in a greater California, a vision that ended with the election of Ronald Reagan and later advocates of smaller government.

As I researched Unruh’s life for a book, the subject of race jumped out at me, particularly his feelings about it and how they led to the passage of the 1959 Unruh Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination by businesses against minorities and the disabled. The law was later expanded to include gays and lesbians. It is still the strongest civil rights law in California.

Unruh was elected to the Assembly in 1954, was speaker from 1961 to 1969, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1970 against Reagan and was state treasurer from 1975 until his death. But he was bigger than the offices he held. He was something now all but extinct: a political boss who accumulated enormous power in ways that would appall today’s reformers, and then used it to help the underdog. He was Machiavellian and complex, a contrast to the more conventional Warren and Brown.

Unruh was a dominating character, a combination of intelligence, political power, idealism, wit, anger and cynicism. His behavior encompassed woman-chasing vulgarity and charm, intellectual acuity and drunken excess, all wrapped up in one huge package, which earned him a nickname he hated: Big Daddy.

His story has classic American elements. Born in Kansas in 1922, he was raised on a sharecrop farm in segregated Texas. He migrated to California late in the Depression and returned to the state after World War II. At USC, Unruh majored in economics and journalism, but his great interest was student politics. He fought for better housing and other benefits for veterans, a passion that drew him into Democratic politics and a race for the Assembly.

In the 1950s, the Los Angeles that Unruh represented was grappling with a huge wartime migration of African Americans from the South. They were packed into neighborhoods around Central Avenue in South L.A. As blacks began to move west, they faced massive, often violent, resistance from residents. Files in the offices of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and old newspaper stories tell the story. In 1942, a real estate agent sued the Laws family for buying a house with a covenant that barred selling to minorities, and a judge jailed them for refusing to move. In 1952, bombs destroyed a duplex and a house occupied by black families in a white mid-city area, one of the areas where whites organized to stop blacks from moving in. A cross was burned in the yard of an African American family’s house on 42nd Street.

Much of the resistance occurred in Unruh’s Assembly district, which extended west from USC. Most of his constituents were like him, working-class whites. And yet Unruh, who never forgot the depredations of poverty and segregation he’d lived with and witnessed in Texas, despised bigotry. Those days left him with an anger that persisted throughout his life. However, he also understood the need to walk the fine line between his own feelings and those of his white constituents. But when his friend and aide, Marvin Holen, told him about an African American girl being denied admission to a Hollywood professional school, Unruh acted. He had Holen, a lawyer, write the bill that became the 1959 civil rights law.

The conservative state Senate tried to kill the bill, which the Assembly had already passed. By then, Unruh was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which voted on every important measure. Although Unruh had only been a legislator for four years, he was steadily gaining power.

One day after having drinks at lunch, he returned to his office to find that the Senate had refused to schedule his bill for a hearing. In an impulse perhaps sparked by alcohol, he used his muscle. “We’ll show them,” Holen recalled Unruh saying. “Take every Senate bill off the hearing schedule. Every Senate bill.”

That meant every Senate bill pending in the Assembly was dead. The Senate relented, and Unruh’s bill eventually became law and served as a model for other anti-discrimination reforms, including fair housing laws.

That episode shows how Unruh used his power. It wasn’t pretty, but as the late Texas columnist Molly Ivins, writing about Lyndon Johnson, explained: “In order to get anything done, first you have to get the power; if you don’t get the power, you can’t help people. But getting power is usually ugly. The way one judges politicians . . . is by what they do when they have power: Help people or screw people.”

Unruh helped people. He was smarter and tougher than anyone else. He was better than the others at raising money from lobbyists and their business and union employers. He knew how to take care of their legislation, and the money they gave him allowed him to elect Assembly members indebted to him. But he also never forgot the poverty and humiliation of his youth. He understood the plight of others who have suffered. Long after his death, victims of discrimination can fight back with the Unruh Civil Rights Act.

Unruh’s example provides a powerful dose of reality to those who want politics to be pure and simple.