order to win convictions in bootleg cases, Warren personally took charge of prosecuting the agent. Warren's efforts gained him national attention; a 1931 nationwide poll of law enforcement officials found that Warren was "the most intelligent and politically independent district attorney in the United States". The Great Depression hit the San Francisco Bay area hard in the 1930s, leading to high levels of unemployment and a destabilization of the political order. Warren took a hard stance against labor in the buildup to the San Francisco General Strike. In Whitney v. California (1927) Warren prosecuted a woman under the California Criminal Syndicalism Act for attending a communist meeting in Oakland. In 1936, Warren faced one of the most controversial cases of his career after George W. Alberts, the chief engineer of a freighter, was found dead. Warren believed that Alberts was murdered in a conspiracy orchestrated by radical left-wing union members, and he won the conviction of union officials George Wallace, Earl King, Ernest Ramsay, and Frank Conner. Many union members argued that the defendants had been framed by Warren's office, and they organized protests of the trial. State party leader While continuing to serve as the district attorney of Alameda County, Warren emerged as leader of the state Republican Party. He served as the county chairman for Herbert Hoover's 1932 campaign and, after Franklin D. Roosevelt won that election, he attacked Roosevelt's New Deal policies. In 1934, Warren became chairman of the state Republican Party and he took a leading public role in opposing the gubernatorial candidacy of Democrat Upton Sinclair. Warren earned national notoriety in 1936 for leading a successful campaign to elect a slate of unpledged delegates to the 1936 Republican National Convention; he was motivated largely by his opposition to the influence of Governor Frank Merriam and publisher William Randolph Hearst. In the 1936 presidential election, Warren campaigned on behalf of the unsuccessful Republican nominee, Alf Landon. Family and social life After World War I, Warren lived with his sister and her husband in Oakland. In 1921, he met Nina Elisabeth Meyers (née Palmquist), a widowed, 28-year-old store manager with a three-year-old son. Nina had been born in Sweden to a Baptist minister and his wife, and her family had migrated to the United States when she was an infant. On October 4, 1925, shortly after Warren was appointed district attorney, Warren and Nina married. Their first