When Jerry Brown chose Rose Elizabeth Bird to be California’s secretary of agriculture and services, he fulfilled a pledge he had made during his campaign to include women in his administration. He was reminded of this promise shortly after his election, when representatives from the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) visited him in Sacramento. They knew they needed to move quickly because Brown’s transition team, with the exception of Bird, was composed entirely of men. Ann Renner, head of the NWPC’s Sacramento branch, told the governor-to-be that she was “urging women to submit their résumés, so that Brown couldn’t say he is ‘not receiving applications.’ Gov. Brown needs to affirmatively screen in women,” Renner added, “because women in the past have been screened out.”1
Renner and her colleagues were pleasantly surprised, therefore, when Brown eventually named two women to high-profile cabinet positions. In addition to Bird, he tapped Claire Dedrick, an environmentalist, to head the state resources agency. Dedrick became an activist, she told one interviewer, during the battle over a road extension in front of her Bay Area home, when a county engineer ordered her to “get back to your kitchen, lady!” Brown also named the first Latino to head a state agency when he tapped community organizer and lawyer Mario Obledo as secretary of health and welfare. During his first term as governor, Brown made more than two thousand appointments, and nearly half went to women and ethnic minorities. All of Brown’s cabinet secretaries, including Bird, earned the same salary: $43,404 annually.2
He named women to high-profile non-cabinet-level jobs as well. Adriana Gianturco, whom Brown knew from UC Berkeley, became director of the Department of Transportation, and Carlotta Mellon, a women’s studies professor at Pomona College, became his appointments secretary. People often saw her title and thought she was a clerical assistant, Mellon recalled much later. But part of her job was to find and vet female candidates for Brown to interview.
“Jerry showed an early interest in women and minorities,” Mellon said. Since she had been active in the Orange County chapter of the NWPC, she “was asked to go out and recruit women into government.” Brown also suggested that Mellon talk to Bird to get ideas for potential candidates. He “thought that she was terribly bright and able. I remember him saying, ‘you should meet Rose Bird.’”3
By including women and non-Anglos in his administration, Brown strongly signaled his intention to be a very different kind of chief executive than his predecessors. They included his father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr., who led the state from 1959 to 1967. Pat Brown was a liberal Democrat who thought big, particularly when it came to projects he hoped would make California the envy of the nation. He promoted a massive statewide water project and a vast network of freeways, and was instrumental in shaping a world-class higher education system, “where a young man or woman who has the ability can go from kindergarten through graduate school without paying one cent in tuition.”4
Pat Brown also opposed the death penalty, appointed liberal judges, and supported minority rights. But as the progeny of a time when few women sought careers outside the home, he was a decided traditionalist in matters involving gender. All of Pat Brown’s top appointees were white men, though he did appoint women to some prestigious positions. For example, he appointed Shirley Hufstedler to the Los Angeles Superior Court bench.5
People who knew Jerry Brown should not have been surprised at his inclination toward upending tradition. Rose Bird clearly recognized this trait when she agreed to join his administration. “I had a strong feeling that he was going to be different . . . and that it might be exciting to work with him.”6 In fact, Brown had been an iconoclast and rebel for much of his life. He was the third of four children and the only son of Pat and Bernice Brown. The family had deep roots in California, extending back to the 1850s, unusual for a state famous for its vast population of newcomers. Born in April 1938, Jerry spent his childhood in San Francisco as his father worked his way up the political ladder, from district attorney of San Francisco County to California attorney general and finally to governor. While Bird’s disadvantaged background had made her extraordinarily cautious, focused, and diligent from a very young age, Jerry Brown’s experience was markedly different. As the product of a politically powerful family, and the sole male “heir,” he could afford to make mistakes and to change course when the mood struck. He attended a private high school in San Francisco. After graduation, he enrolled at Santa Clara University. A year later, he decided to become a Catholic priest and entered Sacred Heart Novitiate in Los Gatos to train for the priesthood. “Sometimes I’m not really sure I know Jerry,” his father told one writer.7 After three years at Sacred Heart, he decided he did not want to be a priest after all; he wanted “to get into the world.”8
He never cited capital punishment as a catalyst for his decision to abandon the monastic life, but he had urged his father in spring 1960 to commute the death sentence of Caryl Chessman, convicted of kidnapping in 1948 and still awaiting execution. Jerry undoubtedly understood he could be a more effective advocate for ideas and issues he cared about outside the seminary.9
Back in the world, Jerry found that doors opened easily. He was, after all, the governor’s son. UC Berkeley was just fifty miles up the road from Los Gatos, and in fall 1960 Jerry enrolled. He moved into International House, where he met Bird. Following graduation in 1961, he headed east to Yale Law School. He was twenty-six when he completed his studies at Yale in 1964.
Two years earlier, Pat Brown had appointed a longtime friend, labor lawyer Mathew Tobriner, as an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. Tobriner had written a letter of recommendation for Jerry to Yale, and following graduation, he asked Jerry to become his law clerk. After a brief stint as an attorney, Jerry’s interest in the law began to wane. “I didn’t find the problem solving that interesting, that exciting, or that challenging,” he said. Politics was the family business, and he was willing to start at the bottom. In 1969 he ran for, and won, a seat on the Los Angeles Community College District Board. Soon he was on the fast-track. In 1970 voters elected him California’s secretary of state. Four years later, at the age of thirty-five and with limited political experience, he decided to run for governor. Money and media attention soon followed.
In November 1966 Pat Brown had been defeated in his bid for a third term as governor. By the mid-1960s, Brown’s brand of liberalism had come under attack from a public grown weary of campus protests over Vietnam and exploding racial violence in places like Watts, an impoverished, racially charged section of Los Angeles. Ronald Reagan, a Republican and political neophyte, had successfully harnessed voter anger, branding Brown a “big spender” who “coddled” privileged students by giving them a virtually free education while ignoring the concerns of ordinary, hard-working citizens.
By 1974 Reagan was nearing the end of his second term as governor. He had his eye on a bigger stage—national politics—and Pat Brown, practicing law in Los Angeles, leaned on his former associates and contacts to back his son for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Jerry soon proved his political mettle. His idiosyncratic personality drew as much attention as his political platform. He would not “cut ribbons, kiss babies, christen freighters . . . give out pens at bill signings or ride in motorcades.”10 These were things his father had reveled in doing. Since Jerry was unmarried, some Republicans subtly suggested that he might be gay. The charge failed to stick and was inaccurate to boot, though other observations—that he was “flaky,” had a short attention span, and was inordinately self-centered—dogged him for decades.11
Brown’s “flakiness” did not extend to the women he appointed to high positions in his administration, however. His decision to include them can be viewed from several perspectives. As a product of the 1960s, and that decade’s emphasis on breaking down ethnic and gender barriers, he honestly thought women deserved high-level jobs; he wanted to declare his independence from the political establishment, including his father; and female appointees could serve a useful purpose, since they would undoubtedly work overtime to advance Brown’s political agenda and be grateful for the opportunity. When their diligence paid off, they would be quick to give Brown the credit. When his agenda proved unpopular, he could count on the women to quietly take the heat.
His decision to appoint Bird to head the Agriculture and Services Agency was extraordinarily significant, whatever his reasons for doing so. Agriculture was the largest entity in state government, and the agency’s reach extended far beyond farming. The “and services” portion encompassed eleven separate departments, some of which seemed to be at cross purposes with others, or at least catered to different constituencies. They included food and agriculture, industrial relations, consumer affairs, the Franchise Tax Board, the State Personnel Board, and the Public Employee and Teacher Retirement systems.
Agriculture was the agency’s preeminent focus, however. In the 1970s, as today, food crops represented a significant slice of California’s economy. The state’s mild climate and long growing seasons enabled virtually every region to cultivate at least one product for export. California produced almost all of the country’s artichokes, avocados, olives, and tomatoes, and many of its other fruits and vegetables. It produced nearly 60 percent of all the domestic wine sold in the United States. As a result, agribusiness had long enjoyed unparalleled political clout in the state.12
Farmers and ranchers donated to campaigns, sponsored and promoted legislation, fought against regulations, and set their own terms on hiring and working conditions for the vast population of migrant workers who planted and harvested their crops. Efforts to improve working conditions for farmworkers over the decades had been met with violence and arrests amid charges that organizers were communists. Any proposed legislation nearly always died before it could be passed by lawmakers. In 1960, for example, agribusiness interests beat back an effort to include farmworkers in a proposed minimum wage bill. One grower got so “carried away with the debate, he claimed the proposal . . . had been conceived in hate.”13 Even liberal politicians like Pat Brown feared reprisals from growers if they appeared to favor farmworker rights, though they privately sympathized with the laborers.14
In ordinary times, growers might have expected to continue with business as usual. But political sentiment was shifting toward farmworkers by the time Jerry Brown became governor. This might seem counterintuitive, since public tolerance for government-sanctioned civil rights efforts was waning, but California’s population growth occurred mostly in cities. Urbanites had little emotional investment in agricultural politics; they just wanted reasonably priced and easily accessible food. Additionally, the emergence of attractive, media-savvy activists such as Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez raised the profile of farmworkers. Both Huerta and Chavez had led community organizations in rural areas of California. In the mid-1960s they joined forces with other workers’ groups to create the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA).15
Both came from backgrounds that rendered them particularly effective spokespeople for what came to be called “la Causa.” They were young, articulate, and committed to bettering conditions for farm laborers. Huerta had been a teacher in Stockton, California, where she worked with migrant families, and she was the daughter of farm laborers. Chavez had worked in the fields from a young age and had firsthand experience of the deprivation and degradation migrants experienced—hours of “stooped” labor for low pay, lack of clean water and toilets, traveling from farm to farm, living in shacks with no plumbing and unsafe working conditions, constantly being sprayed with pesticides.
“We had no money at all and had to live on the outskirts of town and under a bridge and dry creek,” Chavez told Studs Terkel for Hard Times, Terkel’s oral history of the Depression.16 He told another writer that “probably one of the worst jobs was [harvesting] broccoli. We were in mud and water up to our necks and our hands got frozen. We had to cut it and throw it on a trailer; cut and throw, cut and throw.” This went on for three months, December to March. Afterward, the workers moved on to harvesting other crops on other farms, an endless cycle of spirit-killing, mind-deadening toil with little downtime.17
The UFWA, like other civil rights organizations, utilized strikes and sit-ins and espoused nonviolent tactics. The group first captured public attention in 1965, when it joined a strike organized by the mostly Filipino farmworker group Agriculture Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) against grape growers in Delano. By the 1970s, UFWA and AWOC had merged and added a new strategy—boycotts against grape and lettuce growers and secondary boycotts that targeted grocery stores and other outlets that carried and sold the produce. The boycotts, particularly secondary boycotts, devastated growers financially, leading many to decide to drop their opposition to organizing workers.
To thwart the more “radical” UFWA, however, farmers turned to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, an established union under the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board that forbade secondary boycotts.18 Farmers believed—accurately—that Teamsters would prove friendlier to grower interests. Teamsters had never tried to organize farmworkers before the 1970s but entered the fields with a vengeance, unleashing a brutal war on the UFWA. Teamsters patrolled the fields, beating UFWA organizers with clubs, bats, brass knuckles, and pieces of irrigation pipe. They ran down UFWA members with cars. The UFWA retaliated by burning down storage facilities.19
By 1974 the struggle had exhausted both growers and labor organizers, many of whom pronounced themselves ready to accept collective bargaining rights. Both sides hoped to control the process and its outcome. Growers hoped to ban secondary boycotts. UFWA leaders had long resisted legislative remedies, viewing them as unduly bureaucratic, but Jerry Brown’s election signaled new possibilities, as did the election to the state legislature of men like Howard Berman and Richard Alatorre, Los Angeles Democrats and farmworker allies.
Brown strongly supported farmworkers and had marched on picket lines with them. As secretary of state, he blocked a progrower ballot initiative after determining that many signatures had been obtained illegally. The first order of business of his new administration, he announced in his January 6, 1975, inaugural address, would be to compel growers to deal fairly with their workers.20
As secretary of the Agriculture and Services Agency, Rose Bird stood on the front line of this battle. Brown would remain in the background, while she led negotiations certain to fuel acrimony, disagreements, and resentment among all parties. As Brown arm-twisted, she would shepherd whatever bill emerged through both houses of the state legislature and to Brown’s desk. Finally, she would work to write regulations to implement the law. At some level, Bird must have realized that taking a lead role in implementing such a landmark agenda was bound to make her powerful enemies.
In fact, agribusiness leaders had expressed stunned outrage when Brown announced her appointment; the position of agriculture secretary had historically gone to a farmer no matter which party was in power. Eugene Chappie, an agribusiness supporter and Republican assembly member, undoubtedly summed up the attitude many growers held about Bird when he claimed that she “didn’t know the difference between a cucumber and a kumquat. She didn’t know what a labor contractor was. She was just totally out of her element.”21
Bird’s seemingly flippant attitude in her first published interview seemed designed to irritate growers further. The reporter took note of the fact that she was the first woman to hold a cabinet position in California and asked if she had any experience or “special interest in agrarian matters.” Bird replied, “No, I really hadn’t. I did work at Stanford University, but I take it that’s not the right kind of farm” (Stanford was sometimes affectionately dubbed “the farm”). Growers might have been alarmed, but few others paid much attention at this point, since Bird was not yet deemed interesting enough to garner much media attention.22
Bird’s first task before starting work was to get her bearings in Sacramento. She had worked briefly in California’s capital in the early 1960s, as a Ford Foundation fellow, but she had been only a temporary resident. In 1975 she was an important member of the Brown administration. At that point, California’s capital was still a decade away from explosive growth. Later, suburbs would surround the city, marching relentlessly outward until no plot of land seemed safe from development, but when Rose Bird took up residency, Sacramento still had a somewhat rural ambience.
Driving east from the San Francisco Bay Area, motorists passed through nearly fifty miles of flat farmland—fields of alfalfa and wheat, herds of dairy cows, stands of walnut and almond trees, and acres of tomatoes and rice. A dozen miles from Sacramento, the city’s skyline emerged like a shimmering mirage. California’s capital sits at the junction of two major rivers—the Sacramento and the American—at the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The region bakes with heat in summer and wears a shroud of heavy fog in winter.
The surrounding areas may have been rural, but Sacramento’s primary industry was government. State employees and those tangentially connected to politics—lawyers, public relations experts, lobbyists, analysts, journalists—composed a tight-knit coterie, virtually all men. One writer dubbed Sacramento’s 1970s ambience a “locker-room political culture.”23 The men gathered for long lunches and after hours at downtown bars and restaurants such as Frank Fats and Poseys. One watering hole entertained its male clientele with a huge fish tank featuring a woman swimming inside. In this environment, women remained in the lowest-level political jobs where they mostly were seen and not heard. In 1975, for example, only three women served in the eighty-member state assembly and none in the forty-member state senate. The next year, Rose Ann Vuich, a Democrat from California’s rural Central Valley, became the first woman elected to the senate. She kept a bell on her desk and each time a colleague began a speech with the word “Gentlemen,” she rang it.24
Vuich’s pointedly humorous approach to gender slights differed significantly from the way Bird approached such matters, which was generally to put her head down and work harder. As secretary of agriculture, however, Bird faced challenges far more difficult than Vuich, who was, after all, equal in stature to her male colleagues. Bird oversaw the work of hundreds of employees, many accomplished men not used to taking directions from a woman.
Male cabinet secretaries and department heads could follow the example of Jerry Brown, who defused tensions and smoothed over political disagreements at numerous and sometimes raucous late-night drinking sessions. Brown may have been an ascetic, living minimally in a spare downtown apartment, sleeping on the floor on a box spring and mattress with sheets and blankets borrowed from Napa State Hospital, and driving a battered Plymouth, but as he recalled much later, he spent many nights—and early mornings—closing down Sacramento bars with his contemporaries.25 Bird would not have been welcomed at such gatherings, even if she had sought to participate. Instead, after a long day at work, she went home to her small apartment. Many weekends, she drove home to Palo Alto, where she had purchased a small home.
When she needed advice, she turned to old friends and acquaintances—Gordon Winton, for example. She had worked for Winton as a Ford Foundation fellow. He had left the state legislature by 1975 and worked as a lobbyist; Bird met him occasionally for lunch, where she “asked questions about procedure and dealing with the legislature.” Winton had carried farm bills as a lawmaker and proved to be an invaluable source of information. Bird acknowledged to Winton and others that she initially felt overwhelmed by the immense scope of her responsibilities. “I’m trying to get a handle on all the different departments,” she said in one early interview. James Stearns, her predecessor, sympathized with her predicament. He described Bird as “pleasant, intelligent, very much interested but overawed at the magnitude of state government. Not intimidated, but overawed.”26
Many, if not most, cabinet secretaries would have looked to established politicians for advice on hiring assistants, but Bird was not part of the political elite, not comfortable in the role of supplicant, and (as soon became apparent) suspicious of strangers. Thus she reached back to Santa Clara and Stanford to recruit her former intern and law student, Stephen Buehl, as her chief aide.
Over the years, Buehl came to be ubiquitous, ever on duty as Bird’s gatekeeper and protector. If one wanted to meet with Bird, he or she first had to go through Buehl, who then sat nearby in meetings, silently taking notes on every conversation. Bird never explained why she required Buehl’s hovering presence, but it soon came to irritate her colleagues, who viewed it as evidence of her untrusting and controlling nature.27
Growers who feared that Bird would advance a progressive agenda favoring farmworkers did not have long to wait. Less than three months after taking office, she announced a ban on the short-handled hoe. Used primarily for weeding and thinning crops, the hoe’s handle was only slightly longer than a ruler. It forced workers to bend from the waist, facing downward as they walked between rows. After a decade or so using the hoe, many workers could not stand up straight and suffered from spinal injuries. Among those who had worked with it was Cesar Chavez, who estimated that perhaps half of all farmworkers in California had used the hoe.28 Farm labor advocates had long targeted the use of the hoe as excessively cruel, and many growers had abandoned the practice. But producers of beets and lettuce said they needed the shorter implements. Additionally, some growers argued that their workers used long-handled hoes as leaning posts, making it look to onlookers as if they were working when they actually were resting.
In the early 1970s, attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an antipoverty group, petitioned the California Industrial Safety Board to outlaw use of the short-handled hoe, but the board refused to do so. CRLA took its case to the state supreme court and was awaiting action when Jerry Brown appointed Bird agriculture secretary. The safety board fell within her jurisdiction, and she prevailed on its members to reconsider. They agreed, declaring the use of the hoe to be “a violation of safety” regulations.29
Bird admitted to journalists that “there may be some additional costs” involved in eliminating the use of the hoe, but she was decidedly unsympathetic. Costs, she declared, were “insignificant in comparison to the suffering to be prevented.” CRLA attorneys later acknowledged Bird’s contribution to their cause. “A strong supporter of workers’ rights,” she “worked assiduously to pave the bureaucratic road toward a formal ban,” one CRLA leader said.30
The effort to craft a farm labor bill proved much more daunting. Brown assembled a team that included Bird, several other top aides, and Democratic assemblyman Howard Berman, as well as other lawmakers. Brown tasked Bird with meeting all the affected groups to determine whether such a bill was even feasible, given the level of acrimony among the parties. She drove around California, interviewing farmworkers, growers, and Teamsters representatives. She met with legislators and attorneys at sessions where participants brainstormed how to craft a law that gave all parties enough to keep them involved in the process.
Key to any deal, Bird soon realized, was crafting a compromise on the secondary boycott, which had led markets in states outside California and even other countries to stop buying grapes, lettuce, and wine from targeted growers. Gallo, one of California’s largest winemakers, had been hit particularly hard. Farmers wanted legislation to replicate the National Labor Relations Act, enacted in the 1930s, which forbade secondary boycotts. Without them, farmers believed they could “negotiate with the union [on] terms more favorable to the employer.”
UFWA leaders viewed secondary boycotts as crucial to the union’s ability to compel growers to bargain honestly, and they wanted union elections to be held at the peak of harvest, when more workers would be available to vote on representation. In spite of backing from the Brown administration, Chavez—who by the mid-1970s had emerged as the face and voice of the farmworker movement nationally—was a reluctant participant in the legislative process. He feared losing the grassroots “social movement aspect of the UFWA and getting bogged down in . . . a lawyer’s game that threatened to sap the power the movement had worked so hard to build.”31
The Teamsters were also reluctant participants, believing that the deck would be stacked against them, since Brown and Bird seemed to so obviously favor Chavez and the UFWA. Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles, in late April 1975 Bird told the governor she believed a deal was possible and that all parties could be convinced to participate. To get to this point, Bird had to promise the Teamsters, who had contracts with more than four hundred farmers, covering fifty thousand workers, that any legislation would not automatically invalidate their agreements. Existing contracts would remain in place until new worker elections, she promised. By May, all parties had begun intense negotiations.
Negotiating sessions often took place late at night and early in the morning. LeRoy Chatfield, an ally of Cesar Chavez, remembered weeks of “three or four meetings going on at the same time. These things took place at 2 or 3 in the morning and went on for hours and hours and hours.” At one meeting “there must have been 30, 40 people there sitting on chairs, on couches, on the floor.” Brown hosted some meetings, either at his home in Laurel Canyon, north of Los Angeles, or in his sparsely furnished Sacramento apartment. Bird carefully wrote down ideas and suggestions in “neat spiral binders” and then moved among the various groups, trying to find consensus. When final agreement came, participants felt like they had “been through the ringer. . . . It was a dramatic, historical moment,” Chatfield later said.32
By spring 1975, Bird was no longer “overawed.” Any reticence or concerns over her ability to handle such a sprawling agency had disappeared. “I remember being in a meeting one time and she flounced in,” recalled legislative counsel Bion Gregory. She wore what appeared to be “a pair of . . . Chinese pajamas. They had the mandarin collar and very loose fitting . . . baggy trousers and her hair was pulled back and tied with a piece of yarn. I mean yarn, just a plain old yellow piece of yarn. She pontificated on something and then left and somebody made a comment like, ‘Well at least with Rose . . . you get the pure unvarnished, not truth because everybody’s truth is just a little bit different, but pure unvarnished opinion.’”33
Some of Brown’s aides were grateful to Bird for her directness. The governor disliked meetings and “linear thinking,” and he frequently wandered off topic, became easily distracted, and engaged in meandering discussions. Bird “had . . . a sort of Yankee panache that could shut down debate with a few well-chosen words,” said a colleague. Once, Brown and some aides were conducting a spirited conversation about a political demonstration scheduled to take place at the state capitol. “The issue was whether providing toilets would make the demonstrators so comfortable” they would refuse to leave.
“The debate had gone on for an hour, when Bird walked in. ‘People have to go to the bathroom, give them toilets,’ she said. That was it, end of discussion.”34 She also stood up to Brown on financial matters. Early on, a budget shortfall led the governor to suggest postponing state employee raises. “Rose singlehandedly threw a fit,” said Marty Morgenstern, who headed the office of employee relations. “She . . . made a speech that it was unethical, that state employees weren’t a bunch of fat-cat bureaucrats, but little people.”35
Like other cabinet members, Bird often became frustrated with Brown’s haphazard approach to governing, which she viewed as “a technique of keeping everyone around you off base because people around you don’t know what you’re going to do. You have control over almost uncontrollable situations because everyone else is thrown off base. . . . Initially I was told to do everything through the governor, but I could never get an answer and finally came to the understanding that he wanted you to make your own decisions.” At one point, she decided to respond in kind. When Brown contacted her—usually days or weeks after she first contacted him—she “made it a point to be less available to him just to let him know it’s a two-way street.”36
The “genius” of Brown’s system had to do with the issue of accountability, Bird said. “If you do something wrong then it is your fault. After some period of time, increasingly I found I couldn’t work within the system as an organized person who is predictable. . . . If you’re looking for positive reinforcement, go work for someone else.”37
Her take-charge approach did not sit well with everyone. Farmers long used to deference from politicians and their aides resented what they viewed as Bird’s brusque manner, directness, and impatience with dithering. Grower and state assemblyman Eugene Chappie undoubtedly spoke for many agribusiness interests when he accused Bird “and her people” of using “state vehicles to transport Chavez and his terrorists around.” When growers tried to argue with her, she dismissed their concerns, Chappie said. “You absolutely could not get her to sit down and reason and listen to the laments of the ag[riculture] community. She just had her mind made up and that was that.”38
Even people who liked Bird and agreed with her politics sometimes found her difficult to deal with. Some Brown staff members took to calling her “the nun” for her ascetic lifestyle and no-nonsense persona. Donald Burns, another Brown cabinet member, told a reporter that “whenever she disagreed about something, she would personalize the disagreement. There would be the suggestion, and sometimes it was pretty explicit, that if you disagreed with her you were selling out.”39
J. Anthony Kline, another Brown administration official who later became an appellate judge, said, “There is somewhat of a stiff-necked quality about Rose. She could be a bit self-righteous and was sometimes unduly suspicious of the motives of others. She tended to see people as either for her or against her, and I think she thought that many more people were against her than actually were.” Over time, however, “her suspicions did generate animosities and thus became in some sense a self-fulfilling prophesy.”40
Bird tamped down her brusqueness and suspicious nature during intense negotiations over the farm labor bill, however. In early May, she appeared before a state senate committee to announce that a deal had been reached. “It’s impossible,” declared Republican state senator Lou Cusanovich. Bird assured him it was not and that proposed legislation would be forthcoming. A spokesman for the Central California Farmers Association spoke admiringly about the agreement. “The governor’s bill is a hell of a lot better than we expected him to propose.” Nonetheless, farmers still objected “to the boycott issue,” which they hoped would be resolved in their favor by the legislature.41
The bill was introduced during an “extraordinary” legislative session in May 1975, which allowed the governor to “fast-track” it. This meant the provisions of what came to be called the Agriculture Labor Relations Act (ALRA) would go into effect immediately after passage, rather than the following January. Since September was “peak harvest” time, farmworkers could almost immediately participate in elections to determine representation. Democratic state senator John Dunlap was designated to carry SB813, which was introduced first in the state senate before moving on to the state assembly. “I was merely the author of it, in the sense that I was the person whom the governor requested to carry it,” Dunlap said much later. The bill “was actually drafted under the direction of Rose Bird.”42
Initially Bird told lawmakers she would accept no changes to the settlement she and other members of Brown’s team had negotiated, a declaration that caused head-shaking amazement among veteran legislators not accustomed to taking orders from a political novice, a woman no less, who was not yet forty years old. “I was afraid the whole thing would unravel,” she said much later, expressing some chagrin at the recollection of her brashness. However, the insistence on no changes actually came from Brown himself. Ultimately, Bird and Brown had to accept several amendments as the legislation went through several committees before going to the floor for final votes in both chambers. Late in May, after defeating an effort to exempt farmworkers whose religious affiliations forbade union participation, lawmakers in both houses passed the bill by lopsided margins.43
In early June, Brown signed the ALRA. It mandated secret ballot elections, with petitions filed when 50 percent of workers agreed they wanted to be represented by a union. Elections were to be held within seven days after certification of petitions and during peak harvest time, when more farmworkers were available to vote. All parties needed to bargain in good faith or face claims of unfair labor practices. Much of the act seemed to favor the UFWA, but Bird and lawmakers managed to finesse the secondary boycott issue. The ALRA allowed the practice but only by unions certified via elections to represent workers.
Unions that lost elections could not organize secondary boycotts against businesses purchasing products from growers whose workers had voted against that particular union. And they could not organize secondary boycotts against farms whose workers voted not to join a union at all, a choice mandated by the ALRA. The new law gave Teamsters something as well: it was limited specifically to agricultural laborers. Teamsters had feared the legislation would also sweep in construction workers and machinists who worked on farms.
The legislation also set up a five-member Agriculture Labor Relations Board (ALRB) to oversee elections and handle complaints of unfair labor practices. Immediately after passage, Bird gave an interview to the New York Times. She allowed a bit of pride to seep into her comments. “Traditionally, farm labor has been organized from the top down. . . . We wanted to change that. We wanted to give farm workers themselves the power. We wanted secret ballot elections to encourage democratization among farm workers.” She called secret ballot elections a “key institution in American life.” By giving farmworkers this right, “we overcome the question of legitimacy which has plagued farm union organizations here.”44
In July Brown named five men to the new ALRB, at salaries of $42,500 annually. Four were attorneys. They included Joseph Grodin, a close friend of Justice Mathew Tobriner. Bird and Grodin were not acquainted at this point, but within a decade their professional fates would become inextricably entwined. Brown appointed Roger Mahony, a Catholic bishop from Fresno, chair of the newly formed board. Bird proclaimed all of the men “fair minded people who are willing to work up to 20 hours a day to make the law an effective one. It’s going to take that kind of hard work and dedication.” Within eighteen months, Bird would have reason to see Mahony in a different light. Brown also named Walter Kintz, an attorney from the National Labor Relations Board in Washington DC, as temporary executive director of the ALRB. Bird immediately went to work with Kintz to craft regulations implementing the new law.
The final language of SB813 stated: “In enacting this legislation, the people of the State of California seek to ensure peace in the agriculture fields by guaranteeing justice for all agriculture workers and stability in labor relations.”45 The hoped-for peace never materialized. The law took effect on August 28, 1975, and immediately hit major speed bumps. Both Teamsters and UFWA representatives swarmed into the fields to sign up workers. The ALRB was deluged with demands for elections. By the end of the first month, the board had hired ninety-one employees to handle the workload—“a great deal more than anticipated,” Kintz said.
In addition to arranging elections, the ALRB also had to handle an onslaught of complaints of unfair labor practices. Within five months of its creation, the ALRB had overseen 400 elections; the UFWA prevailed in 195, Teamsters in 120. No union won a majority in the rest. After seven months, ALRB had run through its entire budget for the year.
The legislature eventually agreed to provide more money, but any goodwill the participants had developed during the negotiation process quickly vanished. Brown said the problems suggested “the limits of government.” By 1976 his attention had shifted elsewhere, and he declared his intention to run for president of the United States. He won a few primaries, but his campaign soon fizzled out and he turned his attention back to California, though not to farmworker issues.46
Bird’s attention shifted to other matters as well. Her months of intense focus on farmworker legislation had kept her largely aloof from subordinates, and some employees soon began to chafe under what they viewed as her controlling management style. Brown had appointed department heads, yet they usually had to go through Bird to get to the governor, even though they aimed to further his agenda. Luther “Tim” Wallace, an economist at UC Berkeley, headed the state Food and Agriculture Department.
Wallace eagerly took on the task of implementing one of Brown’s pet projects: placing consumers and regular citizens on the boards of professional organizations, including the California bar association and grower groups designed to market farm products. The governor believed that professionals often positioned themselves as “superior” to ordinary citizens, and Brown wanted to bring them down a notch. In an interview, Wallace told one reporter that Brown sought “qualified, concerned citizens” to “help shape the policies” of agriculture marketing boards.47
Bird also believed strongly in citizen membership on professional boards and may not have appreciated Wallace’s taking on the role of spokesman for the issue. Wallace may have headed the Agriculture Department, but she headed the overall agency, and thus she was Wallace’s boss. She soon tightened control over messaging, and Wallace ultimately resigned.48
The resignation fueled debate over what some inside government began dubbing Bird’s “turf consciousness” and unwillingness to delegate. Not everyone agreed, however. Don Vial headed the Industrial Relations Department. He helped Bird in her campaign to end grower use of the short-handled hoe and stood next to her as she publicly announced its elimination. Vial became a valuable ally and maintained a friendship with Bird for years after both had left the Agriculture and Services Agency.49 But disagreement with others persisted.
Bird also experienced problems with heads of other departments not under her control. Brown had appointed Preble Stolz, Bird’s former law professor at Berkeley, as head of the Office of Planning and Research, and he assigned Stolz and Bird to work together on projects involving land policy. They tussled over a variety of issues. At one point, Bird sent Stolz a plastic stop sign—hinting none too subtly that he needed to back off. She said it was a joke, but “I didn’t think it was very funny,” Stolz said later. At the time such tiffs seemed minor, but some would come back to haunt her.50
Bird’s difficulties with colleagues did not affect her relationship with Jerry Brown, though she still often expressed frustration at his reluctance to make decisions. By late 1975, she was widely considered his most influential cabinet member. When President Gerald Ford visited Sacramento in September 1975, Bird sat in on meetings. Some Brown acolytes attributed her status to her willingness to tell the governor when, as one observer put it, “something was a load of crap.” Brown obviously respected Bird’s counsel. In March 1976 he asked her to participate when he interviewed Adriana Gianturco for the job of California’s transportation director.
Bird “had a real track record of accomplishment,” Gianturco said much later. “She was somebody whose judgment about things the governor trusted.” Gianturco, like Bird, was a self-acknowledged “take-charge individual.” Also like Bird, she soon discovered that not everyone in state government appreciated this trait in female bosses.51
By spring 1976, Bird had begun receiving wider attention. In April a reporter for California Journal, a monthly magazine focused on state government and politics, contacted her. Would she be willing to sit down for an interview? Bird agreed. At exactly the appointed moment, she crossed the lobby of the Agriculture Department to greet the reporter. “Do you want coffee?” she asked. This was quickly followed by the information that she herself chose not to drink tea, coffee, or alcoholic beverages. To this point Bird had been willing, even eager, to meet with reporters for stories focused on her efforts as part of a larger group doing important work.
She was taken aback to discover, however, that this particular article would feature her alone. She had thought, she told the interviewer, that the story would include all of the cabinet secretaries. “Oh, no, I don’t want a story [just] on me. I’m not worth a story,” she insisted. Then the woman known for being blunt proceeded to lecture the reporter: “People in politics should be written about for their accomplishments, not personalities.” She said that she had spent the weeks following the ALRA’s passage working ten- and twelve-hour days developing relationships with department heads, though she left out details of conflicts and disagreements. She hoped to use her position to advocate for an end to “useless boards,” she said, and to streamline government. And she had an idea for how to finance elections through income taxes.52
The California Journal was the first publication to experience what many others would soon learn: Rose Bird was a frustrating interview subject. She was willing to talk about herself, but only in an extremely limited way and in general terms. However, her choice of revelations could be interesting. She said, for example, that she did her own shopping: “You should keep up with the price of butter.” Left unasked or answered was why a relatively anonymous bureaucrat—at least to many readers of the California Journal—would believe she should not do her own shopping.
She also revealed that two months earlier, in February 1976, at the age of thirty-nine, she had undergone a modified radical mastectomy on her right breast. She had spent little time recuperating, returning to work less than two weeks after the operation. She decided to forgo chemotherapy or radiation and to attack her cancer via a strictly vegetarian diet and large doses of vitamin C. Her willingness to reveal this information seems particularly surprising given her extreme reticence in personal matters. Additionally, in the 1970s, only a few individuals—actor and activist Shirley Temple Black and First Lady Betty Ford, for example—talked publicly about breast cancer.53
Since Bird originally had planned to be a journalist, her refusal to at least appear friendly and accessible to interviewers seems surprising, particularly because her early heroes had been reporters who relentlessly pursued their subjects and specialized in speaking truth to power. Such reporters probed for weaknesses but could be at least somewhat defanged with flattery, the appearance of accessibility, and a casual, approachable demeanor.
Brown knew how the system worked and reveled in it. He “eats journalists for breakfast,” declared one aide. “He knows the game. And in a funny way he’s more here when he’s on national TV than when he’s in the room.” These were not qualities Bird possessed. She refused to play the game or to humanize herself via anecdotes or friendly banter. Instead, she often came across as humorless, defensive, or preachy, intimating that any personal questions represented an inappropriate breach of her privacy. In response, writers felt no obligation to present her in a flattering light, though most stories did reflect her complexity as a smart, dedicated woman who struggled to do the right thing but also was intense, suspicious, and exceedingly controlling.54
The California Journal, for example, revealed that Bird insisted that everyone on her staff call her “Rose,” that she loved to bring baked goods from home to share with her employees, and that she occasionally socialized with her aides on weekends, attending movies and roller-skating through her Sacramento neighborhood. But she was also “deliberately analytical and likes to be in control. She lacks Brown’s ability to tolerate dissent.” Ironically, Brown was in fact not much better at handling dissent, but he was a much savvier interview subject. The writer also noted that Bird kept a tight rein on staff and was ill at ease with new people. She quoted an acquaintance of Bird’s who said she was “not comfortable with unknown quantities.” Bird agreed that “it’s useful in my position to have people you know and trust.” Few were women, however. Of nine department heads hired by Bird, only one appointment went to a woman.55
Nonetheless, feminists across the country viewed Bird as an example of a successful woman who lived and worked according to her own terms. They promoted her as a candidate for even higher office. For example, when Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in November 1976, Bird was frequently cited as a potential cabinet choice. Ms. magazine suggested her for U.S. agriculture secretary. Other Ms. suggestions included Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroeder as defense secretary; Julia Montgomery Walsh, a member of the board of directors for a brokerage firm, as labor secretary; and Columbia University law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the U.S. Supreme Court. Carter did not take any of Ms.’s suggestions, though he did appoint three women to his cabinet: Juanita Morris Kreps as commerce secretary, Patricia Roberts Harris as secretary of health and human services, and California judge Shirley Hufstedler as secretary of education.56
Shortly after Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, feminists cheered the news that Rose Bird might be headed for a new and even more prestigious job. Donald Wright, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, had announced his retirement; rumor had it that Brown intended to name Bird as Wright’s replacement. She had just turned forty and had never been a judge, though neither had three other prominent California jurists: the late U.S. Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren and two former California Supreme Court chief justices—Roger Traynor and Phil Gibson.
Brown’s friends and aides urged him to forestall controversy by naming Bird an associate justice and elevating Justice Stanley Mosk to chief justice. Mosk had been appointed to the court by Pat Brown and had long yearned for the top job. Nonetheless, on February 12, 1977, Brown announced Bird as his choice for chief justice, a job that paid $66,839 annually. Her years in his cabinet “writing legislation, seeing it through the Legislature and carrying out its intent” gave her a “real world kind of experience that will be valuable in making the judgments a Supreme Court Justice must make,” Brown told reporters. Asked why he had settled on someone with no judicial experience and a reputation as “difficult” for a job that was high profile and demanded collegiality, the governor reminded interviewers of his intention “to shake things up. I look at appointments as a way to get some new blood into the system,” he said. Putting a woman atop one of the nation’s most prominent courts most definitely qualified on that score.57
Appointments Secretary Carlotta Mellon believed “there were a couple of reasons” Brown chose to appoint Bird to the top court job. “One, I think he had an extremely high regard for [her] personally, for her scholarship, for her judicial temperament, for her knowledge, and for her mind. . . . I also think it was partly, ‘if I am going to do it, why don’t I do it all the way?’ . . . I think he was surprised as many of us were with the reaction.”58
Bird said she was stunned but “deeply honored” by the nomination. “The California Supreme Court is considered the most outstanding supreme court in the United States.” She added that she saw the court as “collegial rather than hierarchical.” She would just be one of seven justices—equal to her colleagues but not above them, she added. Bird would not be the first woman in the country to sit as chief justice of a state supreme court, however. Lorna Lockwood served two stints heading the Arizona Supreme Court, beginning in 1965. Susie Sharp of North Carolina became an associate justice of that state’s high court in 1962 and chief justice in 1974.59
Brown also announced the appointment of the California high court’s first African American justice, Wiley Manuel, to replace retiring justice Raymond Sullivan. Manuel had been a longtime legal advisor to Republican attorney general Evelle Younger and was said to be “stunned” by the appointment. Brown had named Manuel to the state appeals court just a year earlier. Before either could become justices, however, they would have to win approval from the Commission on Judicial Appointments. California utilized a system wherein nominees appeared before the commission, composed of the state’s chief justice, the attorney general, and the presiding appeals court judge.60
Bird’s nomination drew national attention. Newsweek lauded her ability to cut “to the core of an issue” and noted that, as chief judicial officer of California, she would be in charge of 264 courts and 1,160 judges.61 The New York Times noted her reputation as “an outstanding appellate lawyer who has demonstrated a flair for writing legislation.” In a telephone interview with the Times, Bird said, “My role model was my mother, who had to work hard all her life while raising a family.” Two reporters asked Bird whether she considered herself a feminist, a natural question considering the pathbreaking nature of her appointment. Bird told the New York Times that she did “not consider herself a feminist, although she hopes her success will encourage other women.”62
She tried to finesse the issue with the San Francisco Chronicle. “I don’t know quite what you mean by a feminist,” she said. “My great hope is that if I am able to serve, I would do a good job and in that sense, help in the implementation of getting others to look at what have been traditional male roles—professional roles.” For a woman who prided herself on being direct, Bird’s phrasing seems uncharacteristically cautious, and it reflected a sophisticated understanding of how freighted the term “feminism” was in 1977, a decade after the emergence of women’s rights as a mass movement dedicated to eradicating gender discrimination.63
The women’s movement had achieved many gains in the late 1960s and 1970s, including employment protections, the right to credit, equal treatment in high school and college sports, rape shield laws, and abortion rights. But their achievements had fueled a backlash from individuals and groups who believed that changes were occurring too fast or that changes on some issues—like abortion—should not be occurring at all. For conservative critics, Bird’s nomination served as a reminder, recognized or not, of feminism’s relentless push for women’s equality. Bird wanted to be viewed as an individual, not as a representative of the larger “group called women.” But in accepting the nomination as California’s chief justice, she was stepping into uncharted territory.64
The California Supreme Court had long been viewed as an “activist” body, as Newsweek phrased it, willing to take on “cases in areas of changing social conditions.” Some of them involved gender. Two months before Bird’s appointment, for example, justices determined that an unmarried “woman who had been living with a man for six years could pursue financial claims against her former lover as if they had had a [marriage] contract.” Few people were willing to acknowledge it, but at least at the beginning, much of the reaction to Rose Bird had to do with how people felt about a woman willing to speak truth to power no matter what the consequences. Whether Bird called herself a “feminist” was entirely irrelevant.65