One man, one vote. If Earl Warren had to choose one memorial, it would undoubtedly be the decisions of his Supreme Court affirming that principle. There were others—school desegregation and the broadening of criminal suspects' rights, for instance—that also changed political and judicial history.
Yet Warren was not an ideologue or a radical. Rather he was a pragmatist who came to the bench with no preconceived vision or grand design, no strongly held or elaborately developed theory of society or even the law itself. He did right as he learned to see the right; the key word was learned.
Warren's long public career spanned nearly half of the 20th century. He served as a county district attorney, state attorney general and three times as Governor of California, but he will be remembered for his turbulent tenure as Chief Justice of the United States. As power came to him, he used it to advance the high dream of American democracy, which he took literally: that all men must be equal before the law. When Warren died last week of heart disease at 83, the evidence was already in: during his 16 historic years as head of the Supreme Court (1953-69), he had joined the small company of men who wrought fundamental changes in U.S. society. He had more impact on his time—and on the future—than many Presidents.
So deep were these changes that both Warren and the "activist" court that bore his name inevitably became national issues. The far-reaching decisions on racial discrimination and individual rights, beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka school desegregation ruling of 1954, were applauded by civil libertarians—and just as vigorously denounced by a variety of critics. Segregationists and John Birchers put up billboards demanding IMPEACH WARREN; religious traditionalists protested the court's 1962-63 bans on classroom prayers and urged the court to "put God back in the schools." Law-and-Order Candidate Richard Nixon invariably drew cheers in 1968 when he accused the court of rulings that freed "patently guilty criminals on the basis of legal technicalities."
Union Member. Warren's trademark on the bench was to interrupt a counsel's learned argument citing precedent and book with the simple, almost naive question: "Yes, but is it fair?" He believed that social justice was more important than legalisms: "You sit up there, and you see the whole gamut of human nature. Even if the case being argued involves only a little fellow and $50, it involves justice. That's what is important."
Warren always remembered what it was like to be in the little fellow's place. His father, an immigrant from Norway (the original family name was Varran), was a railroad worker in Los Angeles when Earl was born. The elder Warren joined the American Railway Union and was blacklisted in 1894 when he went on strike. He moved the family to Bakersfield, where he got a job and began working his way up the economic ladder to the comfortable perch of prosperous landlord. But young Earl had a keen understanding of the workingman's problems. As a teenage clarinet player, he joined the musicians' union and also worked as a freight-yard helper and truck driver.