Earl Warren and the struggle for justice /

Moke (Wilmington College) argues that Earl Warren was one of the central political figures of his time. Warren, who had been attorney general and governor of California, was chief justice from 1953 to 1969; he participated in the civil rights revolution that benefited African Americans, the cases that were meant to enforce the rights of criminally accused persons, and the court-ordered reapportionments of legislatures based on the one-person, one-vote principle. Moke's thesis is easily proven; Warren is considered so influential in these developments that the period is commonly called the Warren Era. Moke mines previously plundered archives and contributes some new material from the 1930s. His book is less comprehensive than Bernard Schwartz's Super Chief (1983). Nevertheless, Moke makes a contribution, showing how the attorney general who supported the Japanese exclusion of 1942 developed into the author of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and how the prosecutor who carelessly disregarded the rights of accused persons in the 1930s grew into the defender of the Miranda warning. But in 1964, Moke notes, Warren failed to "speak truth to power" as the chairman of the Warren Commission. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and undergraduate students. --Paul Lermack, Bradley University