Book Notes

(from the California HISTORIAN)

Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the
Art of Power Politics

By Bill Boyarsky

University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008
264 Pages, hardcover, ISBN 978 0 520 21967-0

Reviewed by Webb Johnson
Past President and Member of the Board
Contra Costa County Historical Society

Author, Bill Boyarsky is well-known to California historians as one of the best-ever political reporters. In his thirty years with the Los Angeles Times he was a featured columnist who, as a member of reporting teams, won three Pulitzer Prizes for political reporting. He is also the author of two well received biographies of Ronald Reagan. His career as a stellar political reporter coincided roughly with that of Jesse Unruh, who dominated California politics from the early 1960s until his death from cancer in 1987. It would be difficult to imagine anyone more qualified, or more adept, at chronicling the life of Jesse Unruh and his role in the political processes that shaped our state during that period and beyond.

Boyarsky’s biography of the flamboyant, hard living, yet effective and influential populist “boss” of California politics examines not only the life of Jesse Unruh, but is a close up look at the development of California following World War II, a momentous time of social transition in California and throughout America.

The book begins at the end, with a chapter describing the final months of Unruh’s life when he refused to be operated on for prostate cancer, fearing that such a procedure would render him sexually impotent. He left generous sums of his sizeable estate to two women, one of whom he married in his final days, and to his five grown children. He had divorced their mother, Virginia in 1975, eleven years earlier.

Unruh was born in 1930 in Newton, Kansas. He grew up in sharecropper poverty in rural Texas, but his impoverished depression-era generation would be known as Okies no matter where they were from. Their troubles, how they persevered, their seething populism and resentment of the arrogance and insensitivity of the rich colors and defines the early years of Unruh’s life and stayed with him and influenced his staunch political leanings throughout his career.

The family migrated to California in 1949 where Jesse completed his schooling at the University of Southern California and served in the Navy before beginning his political life as a get-out-the-vote volunteer for democratic candidates. He became an assemblyman in 1954 at the age 24. Later he became assembly speaker and then state treasurer.

Through it all he lived life to the fullest, if not to excess, with hard boozing, playing cards in Sacramento hotel rooms with lobbyists and openly womanizing. He once famously said of the lobbyists who financed his unrestrained behavior, “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, (have a good time) with their women, take their money, and then vote against them, you’ve got no business being up here.”

Unruh demonstrated a fierce passion for economic and social justice. He was the author of California’s landmark 1959 civil rights law, which prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or gender in employment and public accommodations. He alleviated grim conditions that existed in California’s mental hospitals and engineered reforms that created a full-time legislature staffed by professionals in water, insurance, education, taxation, mental health and transportation.

Given human nature, not all of Unruh’s dreams for California came to fruition through the institutions he helped build, but his overall contributions are significant and lasting. His story, set against the tumultuous period of growth and reform that took place during his political life make for a fascinating historical read. Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics is a major addition to the distinguished biographies of California politicians published over the last dozen years by the University of California Press.