7
Perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the effort to end gerrymandering in the United States is that opinion on the issue has become, like most other controversial topics in contemporary American political debate, intensely polarized along partisan lines. The simple fact is that since 2000, Republicans have done a much better job of using redistricting to boost their electoral fortunes than Democrats have, and quite dramatically so. As a result, active support for reform has come almost exclusively from politicians, interest groups, and rank-and-file voters who affiliate with Democrats and progressive causes while being met with virtually monolithic opposition from those on the right.
What should have been framed as a matter of democratic best practices, as a good government reform that protects the interests of all citizens, has instead become one more partisan political football, tossed around on the editorial pages of newspapers, cable news talk shows, and the discourse on social media. Republicans, many of whom still remember the experience of being under the jackboot of the Democratic gerrymanders of the 1970s and 1980s, are not about to surrender the power to do the same to their opponents, particularly so soon after finally being in a position to exercise it. After all, the Democrats did little to nothing to combat the harms of gerrymandering when they were the ones who were benefiting from it. Why should they be bailed out now that the jackboot is on the other foot?
Exhibit A in this narrative has, of course, been REDMAP. But the redistricting cycle following the 2000 census was similarly tilted in favor of Republican success stories. There are a couple of explanations for this trend, the first of which has been geographic. In the same way as the concentration of African American and Latino voters in certain neighborhoods made them an easy target for the racial gerrymanders of the 1970s, so too has the tendency of Democratic voters to cluster in urban areas, where their candidates run up huge majorities, made the task of cracking and packing them into neatly gerrymandered districts considerably more straightforward. Republicans, meanwhile, tend to be more dispersed across geographic space, with significant electoral strength in both suburban and rural areas, where they win by consistently smaller margins.
The second explanation has been political. Beginning in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” swept the GOP into power on Capitol Hill, Republicans have performed dramatically better in state legislative elections than they ever had before. With this growing influence over the working of state government has come the ability to control the redrawing of districts for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives, after decades spent largely on the outside looking in.
Take 1984 as an example. Despite Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection in the presidential race that year, Republicans emerged with full control of only nine of the nation’s statehouses, compared with twenty-seven for the Democrats. By 1994, that gap had narrowed to a twenty-to-seventeen edge for the Democrats. And in 2004, things finally flipped. Republicans now controlled twenty-one state legislatures; their opponents only seventeen. The continuing decline of Democratic hegemony in the South was a major driving force behind this development, but so too was the emerging Republican strength in swing states like Florida, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
The party’s appeal to working-class blue-collar voters in the Rust Belt, rural populations left behind by the effects of globalization, evangelical Christians, and middle-class suburban whites created a formidable coalition that consistently outpolled the Democrats’ increasingly urban, educated, and minority constituency. They were not about to let the opportunity go to waste. The road map for the GOP’s REDMAP-inspired gerrymandering successes of the 2010s had already been laid by a previous generation of Democratic line drawers. And for arguably the first example of the quintessentially modern gerrymander, we need look no further than the state of California.
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No one was better acquainted with how the Democrats had behaved when they had been allowed to control redistricting than Thomas Hofeller. Hofeller was born in San Diego in 1943 and operated for more than four decades as the GOP’s gerrymandering guru. He traveled around the country assisting Republican state legislators, first in their efforts to resist Democratic designs on gerrymandering and then later in the GOP’s attempts to craft their own. “Tom was the father of Republican map-drawing, and also its grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather,” opined the Republican election law attorney Ben Ginsberg, a contemporary of Hofeller’s during his time at the Republican National Committee. “He understood both the art and science of [redistricting] like no one else.”
After graduating from Claremont McKenna College in California in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, Hofeller served his country for four years during the Vietnam War aboard a navy destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf. But after this brief foray into military service, he would spend the remainder of his life in politics, becoming perhaps the most influential Republican operative of the last fifty years. Notably, however, this influence was exercised almost exclusively behind the scenes, in the shadowy corners of the American political system where political influence is parceled out using spreadsheets of census data and sophisticated computerized mapping tools. Though well known among his contemporaries in the narrow and highly insular cabal of redistricting professionals, when Hofeller passed away in 2018, few Americans even knew his name.
Thomas Hofeller with his daughter, Stephanie, sometime in the 1970s.
On his return to California from Vietnam, Hofeller enrolled at the Claremont Graduate School, now Claremont Graduate University. It was here that his lifelong passion for the art and science of political line drawing was ignited. He earned a master’s degree in government in 1975 and wrote his 147-page thesis on the history of redistricting in California, tracing the Golden State’s conflicts over gerrymandering from statehood, through the malapportionment era of the early twentieth century, to the events that he himself was watching play out in Sacramento during the 1970s. What Hofeller discovered in that history would reinforce what became the central mantra of his entire political career. Democrats, if left to their own devices, would use every tool in the box to manipulate the electoral landscape in their favor. And so Republicans, if they hoped to compete on a level playing field, must be prepared to be equally dirty, underhanded, and devious as they were. “I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today,” Hofeller said in 1991, never one to mince words about the true nature of his chosen profession. And in a state that had recently surpassed New York as the most populous in the nation, not to mention its fifth fastest growing, there were a lot of votes out there ready to be stolen.
California’s redistricting in the mid-twentieth century had been characterized by dueling gerrymanders put in place by Democrats and Republicans. Neither had been particularly successful. The GOP controlled the state government after the 1950 census and had used that control, in Hofeller’s words, to “wield the gerrymander’s knife to maintain or increase their seats in the face of a three to two Democratic registration [advantage].” But infighting between the state’s three most powerful Republican politicians—Vice President Richard Nixon, Governor Goodwin Knight, and the U.S. senator William Knowland—ended up derailing their efforts to stretch that control into a second decade.
Things came to a head in the 1958 election. Knowland announced that instead of running for reelection to the Senate, he was challenging Knight in the Republican primary for governor, part of a plan to use the office as a springboard to seek the Republican presidential nomination against Nixon in 1960. Depending on whose version of events you believe, Knight then either volunteered, was coerced by Knowland, or agreed in a backroom deal under pressure from outside forces to step aside and instead run for Knowland’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat, an office he had no particular desire to pursue. This would in turn clear the way for Knowland to be the Republican nominee to replace Knight as governor.
The “Big Switch,” as it was termed by the Sacramento press corps, did not work out well for either man. Voters disliked the perception that the state’s elected offices were being shuffled up and dealt like a deck of cards in a Vegas casino. In the end, both Knowland and Knight went down in flames in the wake of the switcheroo. Knowland lost his bid for governor to the Democratic attorney general Pat Brown, Knight lost the Senate seat that the Republican Party had held since 1900, and Democrats swept to large majorities in both the assembly and the state senate. This set the stage for them to enact their own gerrymander after the 1960 census. It was time, as Hofeller describes in a rare departure from the formulaic academic prose that characterizes most of his thesis, for the “same [map] that the Republicans had performed surgery upon in 1951 [to go] on the Democratic operating table.”
But just as the Republican gerrymander had been thwarted by the Knight-Knowland conflict in 1958, so too would this new Democratic gerrymander end up being dismantled before a decade could pass. This time, however, it was because of factors entirely outside their control. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ignited the reapportionment revolution, and with it pulled the Golden State right back into the political thicket. In 1967, all California’s legislative districts would need to be redrawn again to comply with the constitutional mandate of “one person, one vote.” And by now Ronald Reagan had defeated the incumbent Democratic governor in the 1966 election, meaning that divided government would once again be the order of the day.
What followed was a compromise plan that largely unwound the most egregious effects of the Democratic gerrymander—one that had been predicated in no small part on the creative use of the now-illegal practice of malapportionment—and returned as many incumbents of both stripes to office as possible. This particular flavor of gerrymandering, perpetuated in service of bipartisan incumbent protection, rather than overt partisan manipulation, will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 10.
And by the time that Thomas Hofeller, budding scholar of the art and science of gerrymandering, enrolled at the Claremont Graduate School in the early 1970s, redistricting was once more on the state’s political agenda. The GOP’s hopes of controlling the process under the stewardship of Governor Reagan had been dashed in the 1970 election, when their razor-thin majorities in the assembly and senate were upended and replaced with equally hairline margins for the Democrats. Hofeller, busy at work on his thesis and in the early stages of developing one of the very first computerized mapping systems, known as REDIS, that could be used to quickly and easily redraw districts, served as a consultant to the assembly Republicans. Their goal was to negotiate a compromise plan similar to that which had passed in 1967.
“He started out in the days when we were doing redistricting with pencils and paper and very large erasers,” recalled John Ryder, another RNC colleague and friend. But Hofeller, though new to the process in which he had now become embroiled, was about to revolutionize it. One of his graduate school professors, Alan Heslop, had been the founding director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont, cementing the informal ties between that institution and the state Republican Party, for whom Hofeller worked as a consultant. The institute supplied the technical and academic expertise to pair with the computing power of the GOP’s technology firm, Compass Systems. But the bipartisan talks on redistricting in the legislature eventually broke down, leading to an attempted Democratic gerrymander that was swiftly vetoed by Governor Reagan, throwing the process to the courts.
Hofeller used his newly created mapping software to draw his own set of districts, which the Republicans hoped to persuade the state supreme court to adopt. Hofeller’s map was an early preview of what was to come. He was able to use the power of computers to produce districts that to all outward appearances seemed to be compact, regularized, and pleasing to the eye yet that still contained a sufficiently pro-Republican bias to all but guarantee them a majority in the state legislature.
The seven justices on the supreme court, however, were not biting. Five of the seven had been appointed by the previous Democratic governor, Pat Brown. So it was not surprising that Hofeller’s map, a wolf of a Republican gerrymander after all, albeit one in sheep’s clothing, was rejected. But the court went on to hand the Democrats an almost total victory in the dispute. The legislature’s proposed U.S. House plan was adopted almost without modification. And, after allowing the existing 1967 map to be used for the 1972 state legislative elections, the court also adopted a final plan for those chambers that bore a striking resemblance to the attempted Democratic gerrymander of 1971.
The outcome seared a lesson into the mind of the young Thomas Hofeller, who had now taken the first steps toward carving out a career in the GOP’s redistricting machine. The courts could not be trusted to protect the integrity and fairness of the redistricting process, at least as far as the Republican Party was concerned. When judges redrew the lines, he reasoned, it was virtually the same thing as having Democrats redraw the lines. Republicans would have to fight tooth and nail to protect their interests and show the enemy no mercy, and to the victor would go the spoils. Redistricting was a zero-sum game: if you’re not winning, then you’re losing.
Hofeller eventually graduated from Claremont in 1980 with a PhD in government, later moving to Washington, D.C., to work as both the redistricting coordinator and the information technology director for the Republican National Committee. There would be scarcely a Republican gerrymander over the next forty years that did not have his fingerprints on it. But first, he had one more political score to settle in his home state.
When California began the process of redrawing its state legislative and congressional districts after the 1980 census, Hofeller was ready for battle. The twin Democratic gerrymanders of the 1960s and 1970s—one imposed by the state legislature and the other by the supreme court—had eclipsed the now-distant memory of the lone Republican success story of the 1950s, convincing him that the stakes could not be higher when it came to this latest decennial line-drawing exercise. “The GOP forgot the vital connection between success in state legislative elections and its future ability to regain and keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives,” he later wrote in an RNC strategy memo, one of the thousands of documents that were discovered among the files that were turned over to Common Cause by his daughter, Stephanie, after his death. “It has all but forgotten the historical electoral disadvantage to GOP candidates caused by past Democratic gerrymanders resulting from their lock on the redistricting process.” Hofeller would spend his entire career attempting to prevent those lessons from being forgotten a second time.
For now, though, he and his allies in the California legislature found themselves fighting another holding action. The Watergate scandal, which ended the presidency of the state’s most famous Republican politician, had been devastating to the California GOP. Combined with the effects of the gerrymander that the Democrats had managed to ram through with the help of their allies on the state supreme court, it appeared to consign the California Republican Party to electoral oblivion. By 1976, two years after Nixon’s resignation and the ascent to the presidency of his vice president, Gerald Ford, the prospect of the GOP ever regaining hold on the levers of power in the Golden State were looking dim indeed.
In that election, despite Ford’s narrow victory in California over Jimmy Carter in the presidential race, Republicans were obliterated in the elections for the state legislature. Democrats won fifty-seven of the eighty seats in the state assembly, and twenty-eight of the forty in the state senate, good for a more than two-thirds majority in each chamber. But as had occurred with the Republicans in the late 1950s, political infighting threw a wrench into the emerging Democratic hegemony, spinning the orderly revolution of the political world in Sacramento off its axis. This shock to the system came from one of the unlikeliest of sources: a cigar-smoking, vodka-drinking Mormon by the name of Howard Jarvis.
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“They said he was just an old coot,” begins the political scientist T. Anthony Quinn’s account of the events that led up to the 1980s California redistricting battle. “A perennial candidate for office not to be taken seriously. So it wasn’t until well into the spring of 1978 that the political establishment awakened to the phenomenon of Howard Jarvis.” But in less than a year, this seventy-five-year-old real-life Howard Beale—whose 1979 autobiography was quite appropriately titled I’m Mad as Hell—orchestrated the greatest tax revolt in American history.
Jarvis was born in 1903 in Magna, Utah, a tiny frontier agricultural hamlet that was in the process of becoming a copper-mining boomtown. He was the son of a Democratic state supreme court judge, often joining him on the campaign trail during his youth. His own politics, however, would end up diverging wildly from those of his father. He has been described in the media as a “right-wing political gadfly,” “a burly and profane spud of a man,” or alternatively, by those more in tune with his libertarian small-government philosophy, the “new hero to the U.S. taxpayer.” Jarvis ran for office as a Republican on at least four separate occasions, but lost every time. This did not prevent him, however, from becoming perhaps the most consequential political figure in 1970s California.
In an early preview of his later pugnaciousness, Jarvis was a boxer during his younger years. He was also the first graduate of his tiny Utah high school to finish college and initially planned to follow his father into the law. Instead, he would end up charting his own path in life. And what a path it was. Shortly after graduating from Utah State University, Jarvis purchased a local newspaper, The Magna Times. Its success allowed him to acquire a chain of eleven Utah papers while still in his twenties. After unsuccessfully seeking a seat in the state legislature, he became involved in national politics, serving as press secretary for the western division of President Herbert Hoover’s disastrous 1932 reelection campaign against Franklin Roosevelt. He also attended the 1934 Republican National Committee meeting in Chicago, where he made the acquaintance of an obscure young California district attorney by the name of Earl Warren. It was Warren who persuaded him to sell his newspaper holdings in Utah and move to the West Coast. And after settling in Los Angeles, Jarvis pursued a variety of business interests, with varying degrees of success.
In one of the more bizarre chapters, he became involved in a patent dispute with the manufacturers of the first American garbage disposal, which he claimed to have previously invented. “I should have held on to that garbage disposal,” he later told The New York Times. “I didn’t realize how big it was going to become.” Other business ventures included the acquisition of a chemical company, the development of a device to silence office machines, the invention of a process to demagnetize the hulls of U.S. warships during World War II, making them less susceptible to German mines and U-boats, and the creation of a business that manufactured household appliances and aircraft subassemblies. Eventually, though, having retired from his manufacturing company at the age of fifty-nine, he settled into a career in real estate, ultimately being elected president of the Apartment House Association of Los Angeles. And it was there that he embarked on the mission that would consume the remainder of his life: the fight against California’s skyrocketing property taxes.
Howard Jarvis during the 1978 campaign for Proposition 13.
After allegedly passing up an opportunity to purchase a mile of the Las Vegas strip for the bargain price of $5,000—that particular lucrative business venture having apparently met the same fate as his earlier garbage disposal prototype—Jarvis watched as his own home at 515 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in West Hollywood ballooned in tax-assessed value. The house he had purchased for $8,000 in 1941 was by 1976, at least according to the tax authorities, worth in excess of $80,000. Jarvis, mad as hell at the perceived injustice, undertook a series of unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of Los Angeles, running on the single-issue platform of tax reform.
The same rapid population growth that had thrown gasoline on the redistricting debates of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had also produced a surge in real estate and land prices that threatened to price many middle-class and lower-income Californians out of their homes. The public was primed to listen with open ears to an antitax, small-government message, and Howard Jarvis was about to give them a voice with which to express their dissatisfaction and anger. If he wasn’t able to do so as a politician, then he would have to find some other avenue to achieve his goals.
California is one of a handful of states that allows for citizen initiatives. Policy proposals may be placed on the ballot by petition for a direct popular vote of the people, bypassing their elected representatives in the state government entirely. Decades later, this same maneuver would be used to create the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which removed from the hands of politicians the responsibility for drawing district boundaries that had so divided the state’s previous generations of political parties. Now, though, Jarvis and his antigovernment allies were preparing to use the same procedure to try to ease their crippling tax burden.
Their proposal, which became known as Proposition 13, called for property taxes to be cut by two-thirds; capped any future increases at a maximum of 2 percent per year, unless the property was sold; and, perhaps most radically of all, required a supermajority vote in the legislature for any subsequent increase in state taxes. It was a shoot-the-moon grab bag of libertarian dream reforms pulled straight from the playbook of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson, a campaign in which he had lost the state of California by almost twenty points. But in these drastic times, Jarvis gambled that the voters were now ready for drastic measures.
Proposition 13 set the proverbial cat among the pigeons of the California Democratic Party. The state assembly Speaker, Leo McCarthy, decried the proposal as a “disaster,” while San Francisco’s mayor, George Moscone, alleged that “no matter how you slice it, our police, our libraries, our fire department and schools would be crippled.” The state party chairman Bert Coffey was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in February as saying that passage of Proposition 13 would mean “turning the state over to the current-day anarchists.” “If I were a Communist and I wanted to destroy America,” wrote Pat Brown in a misguidedly hyperbolic letter to the state GOP, “I would support the Jarvis Amendment.”
All of this was music to the ears of the Republicans. They rallied in support of the reform, making it the cornerstone of their 1978 campaign. After all, who ever looked bad when telling voters that they should pay less in taxes? “Jarvis had unleashed a political earthquake that rumbled across California and the nation,” Quinn argues in his retrospective. “Before the year was out, Jarvis and his Proposition 13 had reduced the orderly political landscape of California to rubble. They also rescued from near oblivion one of California’s two major political parties.”
When the dust settled, Proposition 13 had passed by a landslide. Sixty-three percent of the state’s voters endorsed the reforms. For Jarvis, it was a vindication of his life’s work. The man who had failed on so many occasions to become a politician himself had now done more in a single year to blunt the expansion of the bloated state government, not to mention the power of the Democratic majority he so despised, than the entire California Republican Party had managed in decades. Jarvis became a media sensation, lapping up the attention that was lavished on him by the popular press. “This is a victory for freedom and liberty in the United States,” he told reporters. “This is a new revolution against the politicians and insensitive bureaucrats whose philosophy is spend, spend, spend;…tax, tax, tax.” Jarvis’s supporters were no less jubilant. “You’re damn right we feel like revolutionaries,” gushed Dick Molinoy, a cigar-chewing swimming pool installer. “I’m here because this is American history being made. How do I feel about Howard Jarvis? He should be president. If he could cook, I’d marry him.”
In the general election later that fall, eleven Democratic incumbents lost their seats. And while the lingering effects of the 1971 gerrymander were enough for them to keep their majorities, the party now found itself reeling. Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy, who had been expected to spearhead the redistricting process after the 1980 census, was ousted from his position after a titanic power struggle against his own lieutenant, Majority Leader Howard Berman. The Republicans, seeking to destabilize things even further, backed the dark horse candidate, the flamboyant San Francisco assemblyman Willie Brown, allowing him to assume the speakership over Berman. Brown had been one of the few Democrats who had supported the redistricting compromise pushed by Hofeller and his allies in 1971, and the Republicans believed they would be better positioned to outmaneuver him during negotiations.
Then, in 1980, another bombshell dropped. Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by a landslide in the presidential election, becoming the second California Republican to occupy the Oval Office in less than a decade. Nine additional Democratic incumbents lost their seats, further cutting into their rapidly diminishing majorities. Crucially, however, the Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, the son of the former governor Pat Brown, was able to hold on to his position in the 1978 election. The Democrats had been battered and bruised by the fallout from Proposition 13, but they clung tooth and nail to their control of the state government. And with redistricting now fast approaching, they were spoiling for a fight. As Quinn puts it, “Nothing radicalizes politicians like losing.”
“Political analysts often argue about when the modern-day conservative movement in America began,” wrote the Cato Institute’s Stephen Moore in 1998. “Some say that it began with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. Others say it began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. I believe that the conservative, anti-big-government tide in America began 20 years ago with the passage of taxpayer advocate Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 in California.” For Jarvis, though, while the battle over Proposition 13 had been won, the war was only beginning. Fearful that the Democrats in Sacramento would attempt to thwart the people’s mandate, he formed the nonprofit Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which continues to lobby for tax reform to this day. In 1980, he made a cameo appearance in the movie Airplane! as the taxi passenger who is driven to the airport by Robert Hays’s protagonist, Ted Striker, only to spend the entire film sitting in the parking lot with the meter running.
Jarvis died in 1986, at the age of eighty-two, due to complications from blood disease. Even while incapacitated by his final illness, he never stopped fighting for lower taxes. And as for the home at 515 North Crescent Heights Boulevard, the one whose skyrocketing property tax assessment had begun this whole crusade? After Jarvis’s widow, Estelle, sold the house in 2008 for $822,000, more than one hundred times the original 1941 purchase price, it was turned into the Nechung Dharmapala Center, a nonsectarian Buddhist meditation institute. The irony would surely not have been lost on the man whose entire life’s work was grounded in the acquisition, and retention, of material wealth. “Well, I’ll give him another twenty minutes,” Jarvis deadpans in the final line of Airplane!, delivered while still waiting in the taxi after the closing credits have rolled, “but that’s it!”
Howard Jarvis holding a copy of his 1979 autobiography.
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If Thomas Hofeller and his Republican allies thought that they might be able to engineer another compromise redistricting with the Democratic majority in Sacramento, then they surely hadn’t reckoned with Phil Burton. Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 had sent the Democrats reeling. It had unseated numerous incumbent members of the state legislature, thrown the assembly caucus into a protracted and divisive leadership battle that brought down the Speaker, and mired Governor Jerry Brown in the political fallout of an almost 60 percent reduction in tax revenues. Things were looking bleak indeed. But into this power vacuum stepped Congressman Burton. The “hard-boiled San Francisco Democrat,” populist advocate, and progressive reformer had in 1976 come within a single vote of being elected House majority leader, losing 148–147 to the Texas congressman Jim Wright. Now he made it his mission to save the California Democratic Party from itself.
Burton was born in Cincinnati in 1926, the son of Thomas Burton (originally Berger), a German American traveling salesman, and Mildred Burton, an Irish Catholic. He was later described by a Democratic colleague as “the most naturally gifted elected official or politician I have ever known or run across.” The family moved frequently during his childhood, spending time in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. After originally enrolling at one Washington High School in Milwaukee, Burton eventually graduated from another, George Washington High in San Francisco, where his father had moved to pursue a medical degree. He worked initially as an attorney, establishing a law practice in San Francisco alongside his African American partner, Joseph Williams, and serving as a lawyer for the air force during the Korean War. But politics was always his first love.
In 1956, Burton sought election to the California state assembly. When his primary opponent, the incumbent Democrat William “Cliff” Berry, passed away a month before Election Day—too late for the ballots to be reprinted—he could have been forgiven for thinking that he had the election in the bag. The voters had other ideas. When the returns were in, Burton had lost to Berry, now interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, by a more than two-to-one margin. Devastated, he resolved never to allow the meat grinder of party-machine politics to get the better of him again.
By the time he ran for the assembly a second time two years later, Burton was prepared. Relentlessly canvassing his new district’s neglected African American and Chinese American communities, he managed to defeat the thirty-two-year Republican Sacramento veteran, Tommy Maloney, by the narrow margin of 659 votes. When a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives opened up in 1964 with the departure of the Democratic incumbent John F. Shelley—who resigned after being elected mayor of San Francisco—Burton threw his hat into the ring. Throughout his entire political career, he never lost an election to a live human being.
Burton had a passion for conservation. In Congress, he was influential in the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which at eighty-two thousand acres—more than twice the size of the city of San Francisco itself—is one of the largest urban parks in the world. He also advocated tirelessly for the National Park Service, believing that America’s natural resources should be preserved and protected in perpetuity, available for the enjoyment of all, regardless of their socioeconomic status. An opponent of the aggressive use of the U.S. military in the fight against communism, he was one of only three members of the House to vote against funding the Vietnam War in 1965. And in the early 1980s, he spearheaded legislation to promote scientific research into the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.
Congressman Phillip Burton during a tour of Alcatraz Island, 1974.
Now Burton had set his sights on the California GOP. He was described by the press as “an invisible hand shaping the California congressional races this year that has not been quite invisible enough.” The Golden State was about to witness its fourth consecutive decade of knock-down-drag-out gerrymandering. “What you find out in many of these races,” said the RNC regional coordinator Harvey Hukari, “is that you’re not fighting the incumbent so much as you’re fighting Phil Burton.”
The opening gambit in this game of redistricting chess was made by Hofeller. He and his former Claremont professor Alan Heslop, now serving as the director of the Rose Institute, were keenly aware that setting the agenda, and winning the public relations war, were key elements to seizing the initiative. With little movement from the Democrats throughout most of 1981, Hofeller set about using his REDIS mapping software to draw a proposed set of compromise districts that might serve as a starting point to avoid a protracted fight between the parties.
In June, the institute unveiled its map, marketed as a “model” plan for the state, featuring “compact, attractive districts that garnered much press attention, and more than a few laudatory editorials.” The media ate it up. Described as a “practical benchmark” for the legislature’s negotiations by the San Francisco Examiner, and the “honest computer plan” by the Chronicle, Hofeller’s map would have preserved smaller Democratic majorities in the state legislature while allocating them twenty-four U.S. House seats compared with twenty-one for the Republicans. But it was a nonstarter. Speaker Willie Brown, upset at the changes made to his own district under the plan, lambasted it as a Republican plot, insisting that “the Rose Institute is totally skewed towards Republicans.” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Phil Burton began preparing his countermove.
“The most important thing you do, before anything else,” Burton later said of his redistricting strategy, “is you get yourself in a position to draw the lines for your own district. Then you draw them for all your friends before anyone else’s.” For Burton to successfully maneuver himself through the minefield of California redistricting and craft an effective gerrymander, however, he would also need to keep his enemies happy. What he produced was a magnum opus. Howard Berman and two of his allies were placated with custom-drawn congressional districts. This also carried the added bonus of getting them out of the assembly, consolidating the Burton ally Willie Brown’s power over the Democratic caucus. “You’re in your mother’s arms,” Burton reassured them, his go-to catchphrase for when the creation of a safe, reliable district was a done deal.
The state’s growing Latino population, long excluded from fair representation in Sacramento, was given additional minority-influence districts in the state legislature. Their representatives also signed off on Burton’s plan, having previously threatened to join the Republicans in a lawsuit if their demands were not met. Realizing that the appearance of Republican participation would help bolster him against accusations of partisanship, Burton allowed the Republican representative Clair Burgener to draw the four San Diego–area districts, knowing full well that he would be forced to protect the three existing Republican incumbents, allowing the Democrats to snag the fourth seat.
In the Central Valley, where another new seat needed to be created, he appeased another powerful adversary, Tony Coelho, by completely bifurcating the city of Stockton. Half of it was assigned to a new Democratic seat in Fresno, connected by a long finger that skirted around the edge of Coelho’s district, and the other half to a sprawling rural seat that snaked all the way to the Oregon border. Perhaps the most egregious affront to the state’s geography came in the Bay Area, where Burton was determined to create another safe Democratic seat for his own brother, John, to run in. In what he later described to the media as “my contribution to modern art,” Burton drew a district that attached the heavily Democratic city of Vallejo in the East Bay to two disconnected parts of Marin County and the city of San Francisco, creating what Quinn describes as “the only district in California history to cross the San Francisco Bay twice without the use of a bridge.” “I just hope he swims well,” quipped William Campbell, the Republican leader in the senate. Thomas Hofeller was somewhat less sanguine in his own reaction to the plan. “This is gerrymandering at its most acute level,” he told The New York Times. “They probably should award Phillip Burton the ‘Gerrymander of the Year Award.’ ”
Phil Burton’s bay-hopping 1981 “contribution to modern art.”
But the line-drawing shenanigans in the Bay Area were merely the appetizer for what Burton had in store for Los Angeles. Sensing the opportunity to pick off no fewer than three vulnerable Republican incumbents, he took a hacksaw to the City of Angels. First on the chopping block was the district represented by Bob Dornan, a conservative firebrand who once personally swam the channel between Chappaquiddick and Edgartown in Massachusetts just to prove that Ted Kennedy had lied in his account of the famous accident that killed his female companion, Mary Jo Kopechne. His district was cleaved in two, with the northern areas around Malibu and Santa Monica joined with parts of west-central L.A. to form a district designed to elect an African American Democrat, and the southern Manhattan and Redondo Beach sections shoehorned into an absurdly shaped Republican supermajority district that packed together every GOP neighborhood in and around the city of Long Beach.
Another Republican House member, Bobbi Fiedler, had her home drawn out of the moderately Democratic district she had captured in 1980 and into the neighboring, far more conservative district represented by Barry Goldwater Jr. Since Goldwater was retiring, Fiedler now had an easy task of running for reelection in her new district, allowing the Democrats to recapture her old seat, now denuded of its only Republican neighborhoods, as well as its incumbent.
The final indignity was reserved for Burton’s archenemy John Rousselot, the Republican whom he suspected of funneling money to his opponent in his previous reelection campaign. Earlier in the year, Burton had cornered Rousselot during a cruise on the Potomac in Washington, D.C., that had been organized for the California delegation and berated him. “I had no choice but to listen or jump,” Rousselot recalled of the incident. “He said, ‘You’ve been bad for California. You’re in trouble.’ ” It was no empty threat. Rousselot’s L.A.-area district was destroyed, with parts of it drawn into a packed GOP seat that also paired two other Republican incumbents together, and the rest parceled out among several surrounding Latino-influence districts. Rousselot was forced to choose to either run against two other incumbent GOP congressmen in the San Gabriel valley seat or seek election in one of the heavily Democratic seats that surrounded it. “Everyone north of the Tehachapi is in their mother’s arms,” Burton told Bill Thomas, his GOP counterpart. “Los Angeles is dog meat. And San Diego takes care of itself.”
Outrage from the Republicans and the media swiftly poured forth as soon as Burton’s plan was unveiled to the legislature. “It resembles nothing so much as a jigsaw puzzle designed by an inmate of a mental institution,” declared The Sacramento Union. “Districts dip and swirl around, picking up a few votes here, and a few more there.” “We believe that what the Democrats are up to is a major form of ballot box stuffing,” opined the senate Republican leader William Campbell. His counterpart in the assembly, Robert Naylor, put it even more bluntly: “Reapportionment is the closest we come in this country to lining people up against the wall with a firing squad.” It was a gerrymandering master class that drew from every page of Burton’s encyclopedic knowledge of California politics. No stone in the political landscape was left unturned, no petty squabble or half-forgotten grudge too small, no minor partisan advantage that might be eked from the map too insignificant to escape his notice.
Every traditional districting principle that you could think of, from the preference for compact, regularly shaped districts, to the desire to avoid dividing cities, counties, communities, and neighborhoods, to even the quaint notion that the disparate parts of an individual district be in some way connected or even related to one other, was jettisoned if it provided the Democrats with even the slightest edge in the battle for control. Gone were the colorful cartoon creations of Ohio in the 1840s and Massachusetts in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the neatly regularized conglomerations of counties that were easily satirized in the pages of the popular press. Burton’s districts were so convoluted, so outrageously misshapen and contorted into bizarre splotches, dribbles, and brushstrokes on the canvas of the state that even visualizing them on a map presents a considerable challenge. What Burton had created was arguably the first quintessentially modern gerrymander in American history, replete with all of the same underhanded manipulation of the electoral playing field, ruthless targeting of opposing incumbents, and outright disdain for the norms of democratic accountability that characterized the Republicans’ later REDMAP project.
Burton himself was singularly unapologetic. He was on a crusade. “I trust visceral reactions, and I trust workers’ reactions,” he told California magazine in November 1981, in a story appropriately titled “Boss.” “I like people whose balls roar when they see justice…. I’m determined to make the universe a better place. Not the world, the universe.” For Burton, securing justice for the marginalized communities of California meant that the Democrats had to win, at any cost.
In 1982, the first election to be held under his newly gerrymandered congressional boundaries, he and his colleagues were firmly in their mother’s arms. They turned what had been a narrow twenty-two-to-twenty-one-seat edge into a twenty-eight-to-seventeen romp, picking off numerous Republican incumbents, forcing others into retirement, and establishing a stranglehold that they have yet to relinquish to this day. The Republican Party would never again control a majority of the House seats in the state of California. And barring a brief period from 1995 to 1997 when they held the assembly, they were perpetually shut out of control of the state legislature as well. Though moderate Republicans have achieved some successes in governor’s races, Burton’s gerrymander effectively consigned the party to permanent minority status.
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Things were no less fiery in the negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders in the legislature, although Burton, persona non grata in Sacramento following his evisceration of the GOP’s Congress members, wisely took a backseat to Speaker Willie Brown and President Pro Tempore David Roberti. “The congressional redistricting was dropped on a Legislature already torn apart by its own line-drawing,” writes Quinn. “Soothing promises of an ‘easy’ redistricting had given way to a nasty battle one reporter called ‘a cat fight that (shows) the Legislature at its very worst.’ ”
First on deck was the senate plan. The initial goal of Roberti, who spearheaded the process along with the Appropriations Committee chairman, Daniel Boatwright, was a simple one: to protect the seats of all twenty-three Democratic incumbents. That part of the plan, at least, went off without a hitch. When the initial version of the map was unveiled to the Democratic caucus that summer, most liked what they saw. But the Democrats were unable to resist the temptation to stick it to some of their least favorite members on the opposite side of the aisle, and it was from there that the fireworks began.
Elections to the California Senate, like those for the U.S. Senate, are staggered, with only a portion of the seats going up for reelection during each two-year cycle. Its forty members are elected to four-year terms, meaning that those incumbents who represented even-numbered districts were scheduled to face the voters in 1982, while those in odd-numbered seats would not have to do so until 1984. This presented the Democrats with a unique opportunity. By manipulating the numbering of senate districts, switching odd districts to even and even districts to odd, they could ensure that their own incumbents would remain safely in office until 1984, while vulnerable Republicans could be forced to run for reelection in 1982, putting their seats in jeopardy. The threat of a numbering switcheroo could also be used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations, something to hang over the heads of the GOP caucus members to force them to accede to other changes that benefited the majority.
One of the most prominent renumbering victims was John Doolittle, the Sacramento Republican who had ousted the popular Democratic incumbent Albert Rodda in the previous election. And to add insult to injury, his district was also redrawn to bring in additional Democratic areas in the city’s urban core while removing some of the more conservative suburbs. “Not only would Doolittle find it nearly impossible to survive,” Quinn writes, “but he would not even be allowed to serve out his term before facing the voters again.”
Another victim, Dan O’Keefe, was paired in a district with a fellow Republican incumbent that was also renumbered. It was an outrageous and unprecedented subversion of the norms and conventions of the redistricting process by the Democrats, one that only added further fuel to the partisan fire that Burton had already ignited. Never before in California history had a party used the renumbering of senate districts as a strategy for crafting a gerrymander. And quite predictably, it did not go down well within the ranks of the GOP senators. What had begun as a good-faith effort to preserve the existing incumbents on both sides had devolved into yet another round of partisan chicanery, and things would only go from bad to worse as the year progressed.
Bill Richardson, the leader of the Republican faction in the senate that had proved most intransigent to the Democratic majority, was singled out for special treatment. His neatly compact San Gabriel valley district was enlarged into a mostly uninhabited desert monstrosity that spanned an area larger than the entirety of New England. Merely canvassing this sprawling wasteland, which included both Death Valley and Mount Whitney, would keep him occupied for most of the next two years. “Amused Democrats claimed their nemesis would be happy in the desert,” Quinn reports. “He was after all an active gun-owner and would surely enjoy shooting rabbits.” All Republican efforts to resist the gerrymander proved futile. The Democrats were simply not prepared to compromise. On September 3, the senate redistricting bill passed by a 26–11 majority, with three Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for it under the threat of a numbering switch.
GOP-affiliated media were already manning the barricades. The Sacramento Union, a conservative paper, published photos of the three defectors under the headline “Roll of Dishonor.” The San Jose Mercury railed against “the audacity of the decision by Democratic Senators to strip more than a million Californians of representation in the State Senate for two years.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner called the gerrymander a “brand of quack surgery that warrants criminal prosecution.”
Meanwhile, in the senate itself, the Republicans who had broken ranks to support the plan, including Bob Beverly, a pragmatic and popular centrist who was well liked even among his Democratic opponents, found themselves pariahs. Gerald Felando, one of the L.A.-area representatives whose previously comfortable district had been collapsed into oblivion, “took the picture of Beverly off the wall in Minority Leader Hallett’s office where it hung with other GOP Minority Leaders and stomped on it, breaking the glass. He then left the office, muttering about finding Beverly in a local bar and punching him in the face.”
Over in the assembly, the prospects of a bipartisan compromise on the new districts initially looked brighter. “Speaker Brown had no desire to punish anyone in redistricting,” members were told, “he assured his colleagues that everyone would have a district in which to run.” But the demographic realities made it virtually impossible for him to keep that promise. The preceding decade had seen the population in the areas around Los Angeles grow at a slower rate than the rest of the state, meaning that to remain in compliance with “one person, one vote,” two assembly districts in the region would need to be eliminated and reconstituted elsewhere. And with none of the incumbent representatives on either side planning to retire, someone would be left out in the cold. As negotiations progressed, it became increasingly clear that those sacrificial lambs would not be led to the slaughter from the Democratic side of the aisle.
This time, though, the Republicans were not caught setting foot on the battlefield unprepared. Pulling the strings behind the scenes, once again, was Hofeller and the Rose Institute. They used their extensive database and mapping software to draw up the Republican plan that would be deployed for negotiating purposes. To avoid tipping their hand, the full plan was not unveiled to the public or the Democrats, as had been done in 1971, but instead released piecemeal as “sizzle packages.” These were intended, in the words of Assemblyman Ross Johnson, to “sell the sizzle, not the steak.”
Their strategy was to appeal to vulnerable Democrats by floating sizzle packages that promised to shore up their districts, as a carrot to be dangled in return for preserving those of GOP incumbents in Los Angeles. The Rose Institute softened the ground further by hosting propaganda sessions to “educate” the Sacramento press corps about the process. Many of those journalists then dutifully reprinted the sizzle packages that were strategically leaked to them by the GOP caucus.
But L.A. remained a sticking point, particularly when word leaked that Burton was drawing tailor-made districts for the area assemblymen Howard Berman and Mel Levine to run for Congress. Why save their districts, the GOP wondered, when neither of them was going to be around to run in them? The Republicans smelled a rat. Formal negotiations ground to a halt, and based on information gleaned informally during hushed late night conversations at Sacramento bars, it appeared that a plan was afoot to wreak havoc with the GOP incumbents in Southern California.
“It was hard to say just when the Speaker’s resolve to effect a bipartisan reapportionment went out the window,” Quinn muses, but when rumors started swirling in the press about an alleged plot, denied by all parties, to unseat Brown and replace him with Howard Berman—a highly implausible notion considering that Berman was planning to run for Congress—any veneer of bipartisanship that still remained was stripped away. Many believed that Berman had planted the rumor himself, hoping to undermine Brown’s leadership in retaliation for being denied the speakership the previous year. Whatever the genesis, everyone had now retreated to their various camps. Any incentives there might have been for Brown and Richard Alatorre, the chairman of the Elections and Reapportionment Committee, to compromise had evaporated.
Which isn’t to say that there were not occasional moments of levity among the bickering. Quinn recounts one incident in which two Republican assemblymen, Gilbert Marguth and Bill Baker, “borrowed a coat from a large member of the Assembly staff and entered Alatorre’s office with both of them wearing it, symbolizing the fact that they were both in the same district.” The district of the senior Democratic assembly member Tom Bane, whose shape resembled “a well-known obscene gesture,” was nicknamed the “Bane finger” by his amused colleagues. Other jokes were not so well received. “Some Republican Assemblymen were passing around the line that Alatorre, of Hispanic descent, was drawing district boundaries with spray paint. Alatorre did not find that funny at all.”
Some revelations provoked a much angrier reaction. When Cathie Wright, another GOP incumbent, was “escorted into Alatorre’s office to see her new seat, she found her formerly compact district had been stretched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County to Lancaster north of Los Angeles.” “A woman of short fuse anyway, [she] took the map and threw it on the floor, telling Alatorre that he could put the district ‘where the sun doesn’t shine.’ ” “A Republican staff member remarked that the Air Force could fire a missile from Vandenberg and it would run out of fuel before it left Cathie Wright’s district; and the closest thing to a community of interest in the far-flung district was the fact that it united all of the state’s condor refugees.” When Brown entered Alatorre’s office one day, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, he asked, “Richard, what’s your justification for a seat that looks like that?” “It’s very simple,” Alatorre responded, “the bird people said we should unite the condors.”
As the end of the legislative session approached, tensions between the two sides reached a breaking point. Assembly Republicans announced that they would block all bills that required a two-thirds majority to pass. Under Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13, this included any legislation that increased the government’s revenues. Senate Democrats then announced a counter-boycott of all such bills originating in the assembly. Most distressingly of all, at least in the minds of the politicians, the logjammed legislation included a bill giving legislators a 10 percent pay raise in their next session. The world’s tiniest violin orchestra most surely struck up a somber symphony in lament for their loss. “Since they injected unorthodox and outrageous games in the process,” whined one senate Democrat, apparently conceding that playground rules were now in full effect, “we felt we had no choice. Obviously there is no place for that kind of tactic, but at the same time we can’t reward them by ignoring it.”
“The most interesting moment in the Assembly debate came when one Republican compared the Democratic remapping to the Holocaust,” Quinn relates, “and said what the Democrats were doing to Jerry Felando matched what the Nazis had done to the Jews.” A Democratic colleague retorted, “He can always go back to dentistry: it’s not quite the same as it was in Germany.” In an apparent attempt to one-up his cohort’s unfortunate invocation of Godwin’s law, the Republican Bob Naylor “bitterly compared Speaker Brown to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the only difference being that the Ayatollah lined his enemies up against the wall, not his friends.” With both sides rending their garments in faux outrage, and toys being thrown from strollers in all directions, there was little left for anyone to do but vote. By September, with the deadline fast approaching, Brown decided to go ahead and pass Alatorre’s plan, Republican outrage be damned. The assembly redistricting bill was enacted on a party-line vote, 44–35, on the final day of the legislative session.
When it was over, Alatorre took a well-deserved victory lap on the assembly floor. Literally. “He rose,” reported the San Francisco Examiner, “performed an exaggerated strut to the podium, spread his arms in a gesture of success, and sauntered back to his seat without saying a word. One of his colleagues later remarked that it was the most eloquent speech he had witnessed in weeks.” In the 1982 elections, the Democrats increased their seat total in the assembly to forty-eight. The blue tide had well and truly rolled.
The postscript to the Great Golden State Gerrymander of 1981 was a rosy one for the Democrats. But even then, it was not without its stumbling blocks. Republican dissatisfaction eventually coalesced into a campaign to force a popular referendum on the redistricting plans during the 1982 primary election. After the requisite number of signatures had been collected—including that of President Ronald Reagan, who remarked, as he signed the petitions in the White House Rose Garden, that “the situation in California seems to have gotten out of hand”—the fate of the Democratic gerrymander was now in the hands of the voters. And they did not like what they saw one bit. In the election that June, the people of California roundly rejected the Democratic plans. But just when it appeared that the work of Burton, Brown, Alatorre, Roberti, and Boatwright would be undone, their allies on the state supreme court stepped up once again to save the day.
With the November general election fast approaching, the court faced the tricky question of what districts would be used to elect members of the U.S. House, state senate, and state legislature. On the House plan, they were unanimous. Since the Burton gerrymander was the only one that accounted for the increase in seats from forty-three to forty-five, the justices ruled that it must be used. But the Republicans were hopeful that they might still be able to convince a majority of the seven justices, six of whom were Democratic appointees, that the old districts for the state legislature should be temporarily left in place. Those hopes too were swiftly dashed. The court ruled 4–3 that the Democrats’ gerrymandered districts must also be used for those elections. “A bare majority of this court have become entangled in the ‘political thicket,’ ” wrote the dissenters, “by ignoring their obligation of neutrality on a partisan issue, a neutrality that can be observed only by a maintenance of the status quo in legislative districting until the people speak at the upcoming election.”
And speak they did. While the gerrymander was sufficient to preserve the large Democratic majorities in the legislature—despite their winning less than 50 percent of the popular vote—they lost both their U.S. Senate seat and the governorship. But there was still time, during the lame-duck session between the election and the arrival of the Republican governor-elect, George Deukmejian, in early 1983, for the Democrats to thwart the will of the voters one last time. The outgoing governor, Jerry Brown—whose own political career appeared to be over after his Senate defeat to the Republican Pete Wilson—called an extraordinary session of the legislature in January 1983 to pass new plans. While the harshest edges of the previous year’s gerrymander were somewhat softened, what emerged from that session was a set of maps that were still heavily tilted in the Democrats’ favor. Brown signed the bills into law mere hours before leaving office.
But what to nickname this latest affront to representative democracy? There was no need for the Sacramento press corps to procure the services of a Hollywood screenwriter: the script wrote itself. Just as another Governor Gerry had inspired eponymous infamy with his reluctant redistricting scheme almost two centuries earlier, Governor Brown now had his own unfortunate legacy: the Jerrymander.
The 1980s, now two decades removed from the reapportionment revolution, were the first time the quintessentially modern gerrymander fully spread its wings and took flight. Gone were the relatively simple pencil-and-paper creations of bygone eras, replaced with complex and abstract multisided polygons, exquisitely tailored and manipulated down to the individual city block level. The 1980s were also the first decade in which both sides came to the fight armed with sophisticated computerized mapping systems and reams of electoral data. The Republicans had Hofeller’s REDIS software and the power of Claremont’s computers, while the Democrats had spent much of 1981 developing their own parallel technology, deploying it to full effect in the creation of their gerrymander. The redistricting wars had seen the creation of their very own weapons of mass destruction. And once those weapons were within their arsenal, neither side could afford to unilaterally disarm.
Hofeller himself, exhausted from a second consecutive decade of fighting in vain to prevent the Democrats from committing wanton acts of brutality against the political landscape of his home state, left for Washington to take up a position in the Census Bureau under President Ronald Reagan. But his departure from the redistricting battlefield was merely a temporary one. As chapter 11 discusses, he would return in 1991 to help ensure that Republicans would not find themselves on the losing end of the fight yet again. And while Jerry Brown eventually resurrected his political career—serving as the chairman of the California Democratic Party, mayor of Oakland, and the state’s attorney general before once again returning to the governor’s mansion in 2011—the 1982 election proved to be Phil Burton’s last rodeo.
Having given up the juiciest precincts in his own district to craft the absurd bay-hopping monstrosity for his brother, Burton found himself in a closely contested reelection battle against the Republican Milton Marks. Though he won the race with 59 percent of the vote, that was still seven points worse than Jimmy Carter had performed in the district during his landslide defeat to Reagan in 1980. Already in poor health, Burton passed away at his San Francisco home on April 10, 1983, from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He was fifty-six. “One observer surmised that Burton’s body had finally exploded from the intense pressure of his personality.” “More than a hundred members of Congress flew to California for his funeral,” Quinn wryly observes, “although some may have come just to make sure that the crafty Burton was actually in his grave.” When the Democrats somehow hung on to their twenty-eight-to-seventeen House majority in the 1984 election, despite Reagan’s eighteen-point landslide in the presidential race, the DNC chairman, Charles Manatt, was asked how they had managed it. “God and Phil Burton,” he replied.