SOBRAN

Earl Warren: A Public LifeBy G. Edward White Oxford, 429 pp., $25 Earl Warren’s father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, retired with a pension, and nine years later was murdered by an unknown assailant. The hardships of the railroad work—the constant possibility of capricious layoffs, severe injuries without compensation, competition from cheap imported labor—made, it seems, a far deeper impression on the young Warren than the murder.

Strange that we haven’t had a full biography of Warren until now. This one concentrates on his formative years in California, where he was an old-fashioned progressive-nativist, the sort who would both fight for the rights of labor and herd Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Men of his background could believe firmly in the equality of all white people. Eventually he championed racial integration and the rights of accused criminals. Only his attitudes toward big business remained fairly constant.

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Joseph Sobran

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Earl Warren: A Public LifeBy G. Edward White Oxford, 429 pp., $25 Earl Warren’s father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, retired with a pension, and nine years later was murdered by an unknown assailant. The hardships of the railroad work—the constant possibility of capricious layoffs, severe injuries without compensation, competition from cheap imported labor—made, it seems, a far deeper impression on the young Warren than the murder.

Strange that we haven’t had a full biography of Warren until now. This one concentrates on his formative years in California, where he was an old-fashioned progressive-nativist, the sort who would both fight for the rights of labor and herd Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Men of his background could believe firmly in the equality of all white people. Eventually he championed racial integration and the rights of accused criminals. Only his attitudes toward big business remained fairly constant.