One of my favorite California books is Miriam Pawel’s The Browns of California, a sweeping history of four generations over nearly 170 years. The book starts with the odyssey of August Schuckman, a German immigrant who found prosperity as an innkeeper in late 19th-century Colusa County. His flinty daughter Ida fled to the urbane environs of San Francisco around the turn of the 20th century, marrying Edmund Joseph Brown and ensconcing herself in the booming city’s social scene.
From there, the story advances to names you’ve likely heard of: The Browns’ son Edmund Gerald (who earned the nickname “Pat” for his committed performance as Patrick Henry in a school play), and their grandson Edmund Gerald Jr.—a philosophical brooder better known as Jerry.
Driving policies that defined California over six decades, Pat and Jerry together served a total of 24 years as governors of the Golden State. Jerry’s four terms established him as California’s youngest, oldest, and longest-serving governor, a Triple Crown unlikely to be matched.
As richly detailed by Pawel, the Browns’ story both parallels and influences the arc of California since the Civil War. San Francisco and Los Angeles are witnessed in their infancies by progenitors of the dynasty that would shape them both. Pawel maps the seismic social shifts that today trigger appreciation, resentment, and/or uneasy ambivalence in California—the labor movement, the California Water Project, Proposition 13, the University of California, and other byproducts of the decades when the Browns led or governed. Pawel’s earlier books—a biography of Cesar Chavez and her history of United Farm Workers—zoom in further on eras of tumult and change. Today, we hear those eras' echoes in the modern movements for social and economic justice for immigrants and and other marginalized Californians.
It was a thrill to speak to Miriam Pawel for this episode of What is California?, and to delve deeper with her into the Browns, Chavez, and their complicated legacies. I was also surprised to hear Pawel describe the function of her regular columns with The New York Times, which she said strive to interpret the past, present, and future of California for the largely East Coast audience to which she once belonged as a New York native.
You can find links and more information about Pawel’s work in the episode notes below.
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Episode Notes
Miriam Pawel is the author of The Browns of California, The Union of Their Dreams, and The Crusades of Cesar Chavez.
Part of what I think is important about my work is that I try to translate California for people who do not live here--particularly people on the East Coast. I always say that I understand what they think of California because I was one of them. [I] really began to write about California because I found it such a fascinating place and, in many ways, a misunderstood one.
Notes and references from this episode:
@miriampawel, Twitter
The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, by Miriam Pawel
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, by Miriam Pawel
The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, by Miriam Pawel
Miriam Pawel - NY Times Opinion archive
The First Lady, by Stu VanAirsdale, Sactown magazine
“California Wakes Up From its Dream,” by Miriam Pawel, NY Times
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