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CHAPTER 3

The Stevenson Effect

When Helen Myers, delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1952, landed back home in Los Angeles after watching the nomination of Adlai Stevenson, she found that events had not gone unnoticed in California. “As soon as I got back,” she recalled, “there was a stack of phone calls on my desk—people calling in wanting to know if they could work for Adlai Stevenson.” This sudden enthusiasm for national Democratic politics in Los Angeles came at just the right time for activists like Myers. “The Stevenson people came into politics just at the time we were trying to create a new structure in the county,” she remembered. “I collected all the names, found out what assembly district they lived in, and sent them out to the campaign manager in that district.”¹ Stewart Udall, influential Democratic congressman from Arizona who later became JFK's secretary of the interior, claimed in a 1958 article that “Stevenson acted as a fulcrum for the upsurge of his party in several of the states. It was hardly accidental that many of the Stevenson strongholds of 1956—California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, to name a few—were the states where Stevenson's 1952 campaign set in motion new forces and personalities. In many instances it was this fresh corps of amateurs and egghead recruits who provided the extra drive that revitalized weak party organizations.”² The Stevenson presidential bid energized left-of-center activism in California, and provided a new lease on life for the Democratic Party, and in particular the more radical elements within the liberal coalition. But why Stevenson, and why 1952? Californians had voted happily for FDR or Truman without at the same time seeming particularly interested in Democratic Party politics more generally. The Stevenson campaign helped to unify a range of grassroots movements just coming together in California behind a search for meaning for the left in affluent 1950s America. The campaign provided the organizational impetus for the formation of a new Democratic Party infrastructure in the mid-1950s, and also provided the kind of ideological soul-searching needed to propel the party to power later in the decade.

Americanism Versus Foreignism

The parallel story to this rejuvenation of political debate among Democrats is the remorseless rise of the Republican right in 1952, marshaling its forces and planning another clearly delineated left versus right battle that had worked so effectively for them in 1950. Republicans held most of the political advantages: they were well-financed; their political message was simple and easy to articulate; their campaign team was in place early; incumbent senator William Knowland was a major political player on the national stage whom no Democrat wanted to take on and who could act as a central figure around whom the other campaigns could revolve. Knowland, a darling of the right because of his hard-line stance on opposing communism in the Far East and his staunchly anti-Fair Deal voting record, also served as an antidote to the moderate Republicans who were largely blamed for the 1948 defeat: Earl Warren had been the vice presidential candidate and was increasingly seen as useful only for his own election. “Has [Warren] forgotten,” wrote one angry Southern Californian to Knowland in November 1951, “that his name was not magic in 1948…. He has too many socialistic ideas to please any real American.” Another correspondent to Knowland and Richard Nixon begged them not to nominate “another ‘Me-tooer' for president. Dulles, Eisenhower, Stassen, Truman, Warren and Willkie, birds of a feather. ‘FOREIGNISTS’ all. The 1952 campaign will be a clear issue of Americanism vs. Foreignism.”³

Knowland was perfectly placed to represent the forces of the California right in a campaign of this kind. He was a vocal champion of conservative causes, foreign and domestic, in the U.S. Senate, and the family name had considerable political clout in Oakland and the East Bay. His grandfather, Joseph Knowland, had arrived in California in the 1850s and had made a huge fortune in lumber, mining, shipping, and banking in the Bay Area, and Bill's father, J. R. Knowland, had combined an equally successful business career as owner-editor of the Oakland Tribune with his role as a prominent advocate of conservative and Republican Party political causes. Before buying the Tribune in 1915 he had been a Republican member of the California State Assembly and then a U.S. congressman, but his failure to win a Senate seat in 1914 because of the break with the Bull Moose forces in the party prompted him to wield his considerable political influence from his offices in the Tribune Tower for the rest of his life. One of the beneficiaries of J. R.'s editorial patronage was a young Alameda district attorney named Earl Warren, and it was ironic that by 1952 Bill Knowland's campaign backers were so aroused against Warren given the fact that Warren had shown his gratitude for the Knowland family's careful nurturing of his legal and political career by appointing Bill to the Senate in 1945 after progressive warhorse Hiram Johnson's death. In the Senate Knowland became renowned for the grim intensity of his conservative convictions. He supported abortive legislation in 1946 to force the federal government to balance its budget, and was a relentless advocate of low taxation and an end to New Deal programs. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Taft-Hartley Act and a staunch critic of organized labor and of government mediation between management and unions, having acted as a fearsome opponent of union power during the Oakland General Strike of 1946. A reluctant convert to the Truman administration's foreign policy, like many former isolationists and antispending critics of American Cold War foreign policy, Knowland saw Asia rather than Europe as the primary arena of U.S. foreign policy interests and became a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists after their defeat by Mao's Communist forces on the mainland in 1949, a cause that soon earned him the title “the Senator from Formosa.”⁴

Knowland's Senate campaign gave the Republican right in California a clearly defined route into political action in 1952. Murray Chotiner, fresh from his successful effort to elect Nixon two years earlier, was chosen as Knowland's campaign manager, and immediately set out to create a mass coalition for Knowland that would, he felt, have a knock-on effect on other Republican candidates, including presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Chotiner's strategy involved making an association between the Republicans and American values, attracting registered Democrats on the basis that Democratic candidates were out of step with the national ethos. “We must appeal to Democrats to vote for Bill Knowland,” Chotiner's campaign manual argued. “Therefore, do not make a blanket attack on Democrats. Refer to the opposition as a supporter of the Truman spend-spend-tax-tax program. As pointed out on our campaign strategy sheet, do not mention the opposition unless you are asked about him.” Knowland was painted as “sincere, hard working” and as “an outstanding authority on international affairs.” His opponent, Democratic representative Clinton McKinnon of San Diego, had “a 96% record of voting along with the Truman, Fair Deal, spend-spend program during 1951.”⁵ The campaign gained valuable endorsements from conservative Democrats, and made carefully worded references to both parties in speeches and broadcasts as Knowland successfully associated his own candidacy with the Cold War fight against totalitarianism and foreign political values.⁶

The Democrats, reeling from the disaster of 1950, simply did not have the resources to challenge the Knowland juggernaut, backed as it was by the state's media and a national tide that was heading the Republicans' way. Knowland won both party primaries in a landslide, capturing nearly a million votes in the Democratic primary alone to McKinnon's 633,556. He garnered ten times as many votes as McKinnon in the Republican primary, and swept every county in the state except for McKinnon's home city of San Diego, which he carried in his own primary but not in that of the Democrats. Thus Knowland had effectively clinched victory on June 3, five months before the November general election, facing only a selection of minor candidates headed by Progressive Party candidate Reuben Borough. Borough had received 5,258 votes in his own primary; Knowland, by contrast, had in two primaries gained the votes of 2,308,051 Californians in a state in which Democrats in theory had a registration advantage.⁷ The natural political advantage the Republicans enjoyed in California combined with the electoral climate of 1952 to produce an almost impossible situation for Democratic candidates searching for a message after their 1950 drubbing.

The seemingly impregnable Republican fortress contained, nonetheless, some almost imperceptible weaknesses that would not impact upon election results in 1952 but which would become significant during the 1950s. For one thing, the GOP's bipartisan strategy was no longer based upon Earl Warren's brand of centrist Republicanism, but upon a staunch antitotalitarian message that suggested a strong swing to the right. This seemed appropriate in the political world of 1952, with the war in Korea and Joseph McCarthy's charges about communists in government on all the front pages. But in the long term the strategy pushed the Republican Party increasingly into the hands of the far right in California, and away from the broader political base, which in the 1940s had included organized labor, that had guaranteed its position of power in state politics. The Republican strategy in 1952 created in a sense a political gap into which a new opposition movement, energized by the influx of personnel and the circulation of new ideas, could move.

In California the rise of a brand of far-right politics was symbolized by the activities of State senator Jack Tenney of Los Angeles and congressman Thomas Werdel of Bakersfield, who represented a growing force in state Republican politics. They also worried state Republican leaders, with good reason since their respective stars shone briefly before plunging into oblivion: Tenney thanks to a primary challenge in 1954 as McCarthyism was on the wane; Werdel in the general election in 1952. Their political strategies revealed the contradiction inherent in right-wing politics in California in the 1950s: the brand of bitterly anticommunist, anti-left rhetoric they espoused was becoming more mainstream in the state party just as it was becoming less appealing to society at large. Tenney's indiscriminate hounding of those suspected of communist leanings from his position on the state un-American activities committee was helping to mobilize thousands of Angelenos to defeat him. Werdel was even more extreme: affiliated to extremist organizations such as Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, which had an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, he was one of the not insignificant band of Taftites who went beyond Taft. Werdel remained isolationist because he felt foreign policy spending helped push the United States down the road to big government.⁸ In some senses, Werdel was a maverick, unrepresentative of the forces that controlled state politics. In part he represented part of a broader Republican strategy of playing to a right-wing faithful in advance of the first election the GOP seemed clearly on course to win since the 1920s, married to a concurrent strategy of mobilizing the private business community in a coalition to roll back the New Deal. One antiregulatory group sent Bill Know-land a campaign pamphlet entitled “So, the Fair Deal Lost,” described as “part of a series of pamphlets and graphic charts, designed to educate the rank and file on the benefits of the Free Enterprise System. This series is sold to the boss man for distribution to his employees…. While this one particular brochure has a strong political slant, the reception from both the employer and employee, on this particular piece, is most enthusiastic.”⁹ The Republican Party, in California as elsewhere, was becoming more obviously a vehicle for the establishment of an antigovernment ideology that saw the unfettered private accumulation of capital as the sole economic goal for the postwar age.

Despite William Knowland's massive victory in the Senate race, the election results for the state as a whole sent a shot across the bows of the Republican political leviathan. The party had redistricted the state, benefiting not only from favorable district boundaries but also from the increase in the number of seats in Congress from 23 to 30 to reflect California's rapid and significant population increase since 1941. Yet although the Republicans finally managed to oust Democrat Franck Havenner from his San Francisco seat after several close races and plenty of mud slinging over alleged communist ties, they lost two races they should have won: in the Third District, based on Sacramento and its rural hinterland, and in the Sixth, in Contra Costa. The Democrats also disposed of Thomas Werdel in the new Fourteenth District, and came very close to regaining the Santa Barbara/Ventura Thirteenth District they had lost in 1946. The GOP ended up with a 19-11 majority in the House delegation, a crucial margin given their wafer-thin victory over the Democrats in total number of House seats, but hardly reflective of a landslide in a state in which almost every elected office was held by a Republican. Only eight Republican House candidates had both party nominations, and six Democrats also won the Republican primary. Crucially, a proposition to put the party affiliation next to each person's name on the primary ballot so that voters could not be deceived into thinking conservative Republicans were actually Democrats passed the popular vote in November. The 1952 election would be the last in which party labels could be immaterial.¹⁰

Stirrings on the Left: Intellectual and Political Currents

The gradual weakening of the Republican Party's grip on political power and, just as importantly, the decline of its dominance over political debate, became both more obvious and more significant when compared to the intellectual and practical upheavals occurring on the other side of the political divide. Whoever was to become the Democratic Party standard-bearer in the 1952 presidential election would benefit from three interrelated trends in California politics that would have repercussions beyond the election itself. First, there existed a growing realization within the California labor movement and civil rights organizations that the right turn in the state GOP meant they needed to build up the kind of left-labor coalition that they had failed to establish in the 1930s. Second, left-of-center political activists were finding new energy in an intellectual debate emerging on the left in various industrial democracies over the future of social democracy in an age of prosperity. Third, the obvious excesses of the domestic Cold War enabled a backlash against right-wing demagoguery to crystallize to a far greater degree than in the previous few years. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 served as a focal point for the coming together of these phenomena, but his campaign was just the beginning of a massive reshaping of the relationship between Democratic politics and California society that would gather pace later in the decade.

The rhetorical strategy of state Republicans finally encouraged the development of an explicitly social democratic antithesis in a labor movement previously hamstrung by the peculiar dynamics of California party politics. Although the State Federation of Labor remained, as we have seen, unable fully to divorce itself from an endorsement strategy that rewarded the GOP as much as Democrats, the executive committee of the CLLPE had become concerned enough about the prospects for an emerging left-right divide to draw up a statement to be presented to the pre-general election convention in Santa Barbara at the end of August. Though careful to deny that the League was changing its practice of supporting politicians of any party that supported labor's economic and political aims, the committee made it clear that it had been forced to take sides, at least in terms of basic party political philosophy. The statement drew attention to the continued GOP support for Taft-Hartley; to the party's increasingly shrill antilabor rhetoric in which it referred to labor leaders as “bosses” and “dictators”; and, in pointed reference to the California situation, to “the punishment of candidates within their own party who have supported the program of social and economic reform…and by the further punishment of those who refuse to enter into their schemes to destroy labor.” The statement of intent alleged that the Republican Party was acting increasingly as a vehicle for private enterprise “to manipulate the institutions of government to defeat every effort to spread the benefits of our political and economic system fairly among those who create the nation's wealth.” The Democratic Party, by contrast, had “adopted a platform that recognizes the rights of labor and the common people throughout the world.”¹¹

The statement, which endorsed the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket for president and declared a formal break with bipartisan politics, was unanimously accepted at the convention. The party's post-primary endorsements were a stark contrast to the muddle and fudge of the preprimary convention, throwing support to Democrats for Congress and State Assembly with very few nods of support for a handful of pro-labor Republicans. William J. McSorley Jr., Assistant Director of the National League for Political Education, worked the delegates into a frenzy with his bitter attack on antistatist politics. “This year of 1952 is indeed the most crucial year in the history of the American labor movement,” he claimed. “We can become active politically; we can work politically to destroy reaction; to retire the peddlers of reaction from the halls of the United States Congress and the State legislatures…. It was our failure to take part in the election in 1946 that has put us in the position we are in today.”¹² For those in the ranks of labor already committed to Democratic politics, such as Hope Schechter in East Los Angeles, the links being forged between labor activism and party political mobilization changed her political world. She had found the opportunistic marriages between labor and some state Republicans depressing, and was pleased to be able to go into her Latino communities as a proud Democrat, making calls on voters in the early evening before attending a labor or political committee meeting.¹³

It was not just labor's clarion call to political action that mobilized grassroots party workers in 1952. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president also set the scene for the development of a left-right political spectrum in California in the 1950s. “There was no Democratic Party,” recalled Roger Kent about the political situation in 1952, until “the Stevenson campaign of ‘52 brought in this large number of idealistic people who were just crazy about Stevenson…. Then they had to go out and create [the party] themselves, which they did, and started the Stevenson clubs and everything else.”¹⁴ There was no doubt that the “surge” for Stevenson's nomination was national in scope and born in part of a large amount of favorable coverage in the national print media, including Time and the Atlantic Monthly. To prominent ADA supporter Arthur Schlesinger, the Stevenson movement “indicates the extent to which the Stevenson candidacy is filling a political vacuum. The vacuum exists for professional politicians and liberals alike; and Stevenson combines geographical desirability, political strength and moral courage in a package which appeals equally to northern city bosses and to members of Americans for Democratic Action.”¹⁵ Stevenson had impressed the machine politicians and liberal intellectuals alike with his massive win in the 1948 governor's race in Illinois against a corrupt, reactionary incumbent Republican, and his record in the governor's mansion had been at least in the tradition of the New Deal, if not exactly radical. His campaign's eighteen-page report detailing his accomplishments in Springfield pointed to his support for increased public assistance grants, together with the fact that his “four-year public aid program has made available $128 million more for old age pensions, blind pensions, and aid to dependent children than was spent in the previous four years, but it is also a program of getting rid of the ‘cheaters' and of conserving public funds for those legitimately in need.”¹⁶ He had gained national attention for his controversial and widely admired veto of a hysterical loyalty oath bill passed in the Illinois State Legislature, memorably stating that in attempting to protect the nation against communist subversion Americans “must not burn down the house to kill the rats.”¹⁷ He cast himself as a morally upright crusader for standards in public life and as an arbiter of fairness in his oversight of public affairs. He supported a fair employment practices law for Illinois. He possessed a gift for rhetorical flamboyance that served him well in his political career. At a time when McCarthyism and the horrors of the day filled political headlines, he seemed the perfect antidote for American liberals: calmly rational, articulate in his defense of democracy and freedom in American life.

Yet it is difficult to understand at first his massive appeal to the liberal movement in California. As his roll call of achievements, claiming a purge of “chiselers” from the relief rolls among them, demonstrated, Stevenson was hardly a typical standard bearer of the leftist tradition in American politics. He gathered round him during the campaign a distinguished group of political and intellectual advisers, among them economist John K. Galbraith, law professor Willard Wirtz, Harper's editor Jack Fischer, and David E. Bell, who would subsequently serve, as would Wirtz, in the Kennedy administration and philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation. Yet he remained distrustful of the political left, worrying, as Galbraith recalled, “lest he had been taken over by radicals. We felt that he was insufficiently committed to the constituency and the policies that had brought the magnificent string of Democratic victories all the way from 1932 to 1948…. Stevenson's fear…was that he would be thought automatic in his political responses, a predictable voice for the liberal clichés of the New Deal and Fair Deal years.” Galbraith also noted Stevenson's social background and his affluent Chicago friends and neighbors. “They were not enamored of the Roosevelt or especially the Truman oratory, and they didn't wish to see their friend seduced…. Stevenson never fully escaped their hand.”¹⁸

More seriously, his campaign's desire to hold the Democratic Party together nationwide, leading to his choosing Alabama senator John Sparkman as his running mate, suggested that the thorny question of race would loom large in 1950s Democratic politics. Stevenson would find that this fact would cause problems in California, where a civil rights movement was rapidly gathering steam in the early 1950s. New York representative Adam Clayton Powell was forthright in his attack on both main parties for retreating from their 1948 civil rights planks, noting that the Republicans had mentioned FEPC by name in their 1948 platform but had not in 1952, while the Democrats had also toned down their support for the civil rights of all. “I think the best description of it is the one that Clifton Utley, of NBC, gave me,” said Powell in an interview in the summer of 1952. “'Well,' he said, ‘this is a little bit to the left of the Republicans and a little bit to the right of the 1948 Democrats.'…. In this changing world, unless we keep pace, ethically with our material progress, all is lost. 1952 demands stronger planks than 1948.”¹⁹ Prominent Los Angeles African American newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass publicly abandoned mainstream party politics to embrace the by now moribund Progressive Party as their vice presidential candidate over the question of civil rights and her opposition to the shrill, politically debilitating rhetoric of the Cold War that dominated political debate. It was, she claimed, “my government that supports the segregation by violence practiced by a Malan in South Africa, sends guns to maintain a bloody French rule in Indo-China, gives money to help the Dutch repress Indonesia, props up Churchill's rule in the Middle East and over the colored people of Africa and Malaya…. I have fought and will continue to fight unceasingly for the rights and privileges of all people who are oppressed and who are denied their just share of the world's goods their labor produces.”²⁰ To Bass, like many African Americans a Republican until the New Deal shook the political certainties of the progressive era in California from their moorings, mainstream party politics had a long way to go on the civil rights question globally if Eisenhower and Stevenson represented the best choice available to people of color.²¹

Stevenson may not have been the perfect standard-bearer for a revitalized left in places like California, but he benefited there from the state's intensely media-driven, celebrity politics that thrived on candidates, like Stevenson, who were able effortlessly to court the support of the national liberal press and to establish a media personality for themselves. As Thurman Arnold observed, California had grown so rapidly and was so vast that candidates who wanted the statewide vote had to rely on “personal campaigning, radio, and advertising,” all of which the Stevenson movement used with skill and ease.²² The boosting of Stevenson in publications such as the New Republic as the great hope for those disgusted by the erosion of civil liberties and the Republican Party's anti-New Deal cries of socialism and communism was attractive to the demoralized and poorly organized political left in California. In February the New Republic described his record as Governor of Illinois as “outstanding in reorganizing state government, increasing aid to schools, overhauling roads and road financing, improving welfare services, attacking gambling and corruption, working deftly to get the most from a Republican legislature.”²³ This media portrayal of Stevenson as a crusader for fairness and civil liberties chimed with the political zeitgeist for a political left reeling from the defeats of the previous few years.

The use of California's media-driven, style-obsessed political world to create a groundswell of popular support for Stevenson was carefully orchestrated. The strategy of promoting a spectacle of massive crowds and enthusiastic volunteers provided much needed excitement for a demoralized liberal movement. Stevenson's publicity director carefully groomed the mushrooming Volunteer for Stevenson groups, ordering them to “augment in every possible way work being done by regular party organizations to create crowds along motorcade route and at speaking places. Use sound trucks, newspaper ads, radio and TV spots to the absolute limit of your budget. Handbills announcing [the] Governor's schedule should be printed and distributed on strategic street corners. Banners should be strung at every intersection along route. Placards and signs should be placed in store windows and telephone poles and lamp posts along the route of the motorcade.”²⁴ An officer of the “Hollywood for Stevenson-Sparkman Committee” told members they must attend “all political rallies and speeches in person. Remember that most major political meetings are televised and nationwide. Be in the audience. Recruit as many more people as you can…. Wear your button and display your Stevenson stickers.”²⁵ Stevenson's public appearances were carefully choreographed for television as well as live audiences, including a press meeting in San Francisco at which Stevenson was flanked by several actors, including Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. As the flash bulbs lit up the room local Stevenson club president Allen Rivkin was on hand “to see that the press doesn't murder our actors by throwing framed questions at them.”²⁶ If a radio broadcast was particularly well-received, it was rebroadcast with a new introduction underlining just how popular it had been.²⁷ The content mattered less than the spin that was placed on it, encouraging grassroots support for the Stevenson movement on the basis that he was a dynamic political force who inspired personal devotion in members of the public.

The fact that the Republican turn to the right in California was pushing the Stevenson movement leftward was made explicit when Stevenson's strategists explored issues pertaining to the Golden State. California's economic development and rapid population growth, making it a prime symbol of modernity in the eyes of many observers, created challenges that required the guiding hand of government. This argument dominated reports to the Stevenson campaign compiled with the help of local Democratic politicians and activists across the state in the fall of 1952. Rapid economic development had exposed the inadequacies of housing and public facilities; had shown up in sharp relief the reality of racial segregation in California's cities; had placed increasing strain on the state's social welfare resources as many of the previous waves of migrants grew old. In Oakland the key issue was a crisis in housing: “Oakland, like Los Angeles, has had a long running fight over public housing…. Housing conditions for minorities—Negroes, Mexicans, Asiatics—are very bad,” reported Stevenson's Bay Area sources, including San Francisco State Chair George Bradley and Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Gordon of the Berkeley chapter of ADA. They noted the NAACP's recent court challenge to segregated housing in San Francisco, and the need for Stevenson's campaign to embrace civil rights. In Los Angeles local congressmen Cecil King and Clyde Doyle reported that “Los Angeles has more persons over 65 than any other county in the country—378,000 or more than 12% of the voting population.” A “liberal view on old age and disability allotments” would be a “helpful” way of framing Stevenson's campaign in LA. The increasingly unacceptable term “socialism” had to be tackled head-on in a city in which the genuine left and hard right coexisted in large numbers. Socialism was, the report stated, a “large issue in Southern California. Think it should be pointed out that the Government put out large sums to subsidize airlines, ships, railroads, farm prices, plants for such outfits as U.S. Steel. Stockholders think those expenditures are fine, but they object to Democratic programs for the little people—such as [Home Owners Loan Corporation] which has saved millions of homes. A good example of a ‘socialistic' experiment is the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. It was founded in 1900, the year of Stevenson's birth in Los Angeles, and is the greatest municipally owned power enterprise in the world. Is this socialistic?” In Richmond, a city in which the party's candidate for Congress was successful in 1952, rapid growth had set the agenda: “Population rose from 24,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1950, about equal to the wartime peak…. Economic distress after the war was the most serious in California because of the closure of the shipyards…. Major issues are reactivation of the shipyards, need for industrial water, Taft-Hartley, FEPC, Social Security, other progressive measures.”²⁸ The particular demands of a modern, industrialized world placed pressure on resources, planning policy, and social cohesion in a way that made a new articulation of the place of the state in 1950s California necessary, at least in the view of those surveyed by Stevenson campaign managers.

The debate within California over the future of liberalism took on added significance at the time of Stevenson's first run for the White House because it coincided with a wider intellectual debate on the left internationally about these very same themes.²⁹ In January 1952 a New Republic article tried to capture the flavor and tone of this emerging ideological agenda when the author, J. R. Feyrel, noted the way opponents, as well as supporters, of the New Deal state argued even more bitterly about welfare in the 1950s than twenty years earlier. “The main issue of today,” he wrote, “is surely the struggle for or against the Welfare State, or perhaps one can already say over the shape, development and control of the Welfare State. We live today in a collectivist society, in the broad sense of the word, and the pace of collectivism is likely to increase, for better or worse…. And if such a society is to function efficiently, it seems already clear that it must be governed by Welfare State concepts, in one form or another.” The momentum of change had been picking up pace since the industrialization of the late nineteenth century, Feyrel argued, with the legitimization of labor unions and the end of the open shop forming one major milestone, and the reduction of economic inequality by means of social legislation and redistributive taxation signifying another. “In such measures as the TVA,” he wrote, “one can see at least the wedge of the mixed economy, in the recent legislation in, say, California on the various trade-union and other ‘private' insurance schemes at least the first sign of the Welfare State.” The 1950s would, he argued, throw up new problems and challenges that would conceivably herald a major step toward social democracy configured for a prosperous world. A crucial question, and one that frames much of the present study, was “the cultural one. After the leveling, after the British National Health Service or the American owner-occupied home, what next?'”³⁰

It is not difficult to point to a wealth of recent historiography on the American political economy of the postwar era that throws plenty of cold water on the implied optimism of Feyrel's assessment. As it turned out, the accord between labor and management over access to a private welfare state did not prove durable when the economic weather turned inclement, nor did it lead to an automatic federal expansion of entitlements for the laboring man and woman and their dependents. The term “welfare state” was in any case hardly appropriate for the patchwork of work-based welfare schemes, private pension agreements, and healthcare plans that reached only some of the workforce and very few of the laboring and out of work or retired poor.³¹ Still, several interesting trends could be discerned when thinking about Feyrel's analysis and its implications for California. certainly the state did witness the capture of the Democratic Party by partisans committed to constructing the sort of economic and social policies that would contribute toward greater social equality later in the century. And evidently the campaign of 1952 did point toward a clearer articulation of a social democratic message for the 1950s: economic growth and social diversity together required the regulatory hand of government to encourage a collectivist conception of social citizenship. The dynamic shifts in California society in the postwar era made the Golden State a stark case study of left-of-center political development in this period.

The fact that California fascinated left-wing visitors from overseas desperate to find a new message for their own discredited parties in the 1950s strongly supports this argument. When British Labor politician and theorist Anthony Crosland landed on the West Coast, remarking in his diary on the “spectacular harbour, hills, much older houses, European, or rather cosmopolitan, atmosphere” of San Francisco, Dwight Eisenhower had defeated Adlai Stevenson and was already settled into the White House.³² His mission, however, was of great relevance to the Democratic left in California throughout the 1950s. His own party had enjoyed six years in power after World War II, during which time they had established a National Health Service, nationalized major industries, expanded the welfare state on universalist principles, and changed the economic and social landscape of postwar Britain. In 1951, they had been unceremoniously ejected from power by the British electorate, despite gaining the highest number of votes cast for any party in British electoral history up to that point. Labor and Socialist parties in Australia, New Zealand, and continental Europe had also lost power at the end of the 1940s or were struggling to find a role in an international political system dominated by the United States and its powerful brand of anticommunist politics.³³ Crosland was conducting research in the United States for his book The Future of Socialism, intended as a road map for a left that he felt needed a fresh message if it was to adapt to the political demands of an age of consumption and technological change. In essence, he was trying to find answers to the question Feyrel had posed in early 1952: what next?³⁴

Crosland's travels around California and some other parts of the United States led him to agree with Feyrel that the economic development of the nation since the regulatory and statist reforms of the New Deal did show the extent to which the politics of the broker state between government, management, and labor had changed the ideological landscape. He studied a California bakers' union and noted its “very detailed statewide trade union agreement, giving the trade union considerable power over firms' decisions in labor policy, including in discretion of restrictive or inflexible practices.” American trade unions, he felt, were “probably more militant than in the UK” with “more emphasis on strikes, less on arbitration…. Indeed, they've become a powerful entrenched empire, equal in strength to big business, farmers, etc.”³⁵ He found little enthusiasm for a dramatic change in the party system, but did note widespread criticism among Democrats of the Republicans' regressive tax policies and its abandonment of public works and large-scale public spending as an instrument of economic growth. He even found a corporate executive, Ernest T. Weir of National Steel, who was “convinced government has [a] clear responsibility for keeping economy in balance: admits this is a big change in business thinking from 1930s.”³⁶ Crosland did observe the need for greater state control over the economic development of places like California: he reflected sadly on the lax zoning laws in many cities that led to “hideous urban sprawl, appalling traffic problems created, no open spaces.” Suburbs of California cities were “sprawling, ugly, very industrial— quite different from suburbs of smaller, less industrialized towns.” Los Angeles was “hideous except for lovely Italian surrounding hills.”³⁷ Crosland's trip left him in no doubt that the United States had witnessed dramatic political changes since the 1930s as well as vast economic growth that gave him ammunition for arguing that social citizenship and a dynamic private economy were potentially compatible. He also saw the limits of Americans' acceptance of a statist solution of economic problems, noting that unions still had legislative battles ahead to resist right-to-work laws and maintain high-wage settlements. The next problem remained how to reconcile economic growth with social equality.

When left-wing colleagues and friends back in London read drafts of The Future of Socialism, they were somewhat taken aback by the influence his American trip had evidently cast over the thesis of the book. One friend wrote that “I feel that perhaps you are rather carried away by America,” and Richard Crossman, Labour Party heavyweight, disagreed with Crosland's arguments about American politics and society in a spirited correspondence. “If I understand you aright,” he wrote, “you believe that Socialism is now about equality, not about public ownership, and that we should accept much of the American attitude to social equality and equality of opportunity and add to these concepts of radical democracy a specifically Socialist content, the move towards equalization in the distribution of property, purchasing power and responsibility in industry.” Indeed, Crosland did see the implicit connection between equality of opportunity in economic terms and social equality in terms of equal access for all to a common citizenship, an idea being worked out in America through pressure from civil rights activists for racial equality, though it had broader implications than that. Crossman was, however, unconvinced. “Social equality à l'Americaine not only assumes inequality in property distribution etc but glories in it. It is only in a society where there are millionaires as well as newspaper boys, and vastly more of the latter than the former, that everyone has an equal opportunity to rise from one status to the other. It is no good, therefore, suggesting…that American ideology comes much closer to the egalitarian ideas of the British Left than to those of the British Right…. As for equality as you define it, they would regard it as completely fatal to their free enterprise system.”³⁸ It was difficult to deny the fact that the ongoing struggle for supremacy between management and labor for control over the industrial relations process in the United States rendered Crosland's notion of social equality through progressive taxation and a large public sector rather too radical for the American political scene. But it was also true that Crossman's failure to distinguish between all the different shades of political opinion led him to miss the perceptible changes in American political life, evident especially in California, that were taking place in the wake of Stevenson's campaign.

Even if the Stevenson campaign itself was unsuccessful, and the ideological direction of the candidate uncertain, the personalities and men of ideas around him in California and nationally contributed toward a vibrant debate over the future of left-of-center politics in the United States. The impact of thinkers such as Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Leon Keyserling at a national level over the possibilities for economic equality of opportunity in prosperous times has been well documented by historians.³⁹ The debate was in full flow during the 1952 campaign, prompting an interesting take on the international dimension to leftist political thought in a New Republic editorial in August. The possibilities of the nation's vast economic output for the promotion of social cohesion and abundance for all were viewed as central to Stevenson's message to the country. “This theme,” the editors argued, promoted “an intelligent and helpful treatment of the Republican epithet: Socialism.” Whereas in Europe, they suggested, socialism had arisen out of economies of scarcity, “compelling low income groups to seek higher standards principally through a more equal distribution of limited national incomes,” American economic growth could serve as the engine of greater social equality without policies of mass redistribution of income. “It is the restrictionist concept of the Republicans which brings socialism about; the expansionist approach which makes it irrelevant.”⁴⁰ This analysis begged more questions than it answered: how far down the socioeconomic scale did the capacity to access the economy of abundance reach? How far were social questions of equal citizenship in racial and class terms bound up with economic redistribution? And as Crosland wondered during his visit to California, how long would the tentative truce between management and unions over the relationship between productivity and wage and benefit settlements last?

It was in this intellectual and political context that the growth of the Stevenson movement and the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in California took shape. The rise of the club movement depended in part on a political mood, a growing recognition that the zeitgeist was changing and that the old politics of business as usual was no longer enough to cope with a rapidly changing social fabric. In part, the Stevenson movement reflected the usual organizational and personality rivalries that characterized party politics in California. The head of the club organization in California, Leo Doyle, reported in August that there was “some indication that the usual quarrelling Democratic factions see this Stevenson move as an opportunity to render service to the Stevenson cause and hence gain the proverbial urge for power.”⁴¹ One San Francisco Democratic worker, Ben Heineman, was of the opinion that the whole Stevenson club movement there had sprung originally from a party faction opposed to a rival group who had come out for the presidential campaign of Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.⁴² This was a pessimistic, if not totally inaccurate, picture: the club system, however cynical its origins (and Heineman's perspective related only to San Francisco), provided a conduit into Democratic activism for thousands who had thought that the collapse of the Roosevelt and Douglas campaigns two years earlier had killed off their hopes for a new dawn for the California left. Towering figures of the party of the future: the Burton brothers, Willie Brown, Jess Unruh, Alan Cranston, all cut their teeth in the Stevenson battle. And as Willie Brown recalled, in these years before they gained power and became constrained by the compromise and chicanery of office, they were hungry for a social democratic politics around which to organize.⁴³

It is important to remember that the 1952 campaign represented a political fresh start; it was not the culmination of a struggle for power among liberals, but a planting of the seed that would take another six years fully to flower. Stevenson's spirited campaign ended in failure. He received a healthy 2,197,548 votes in California, but could not come close to Eisenhower's broad appeal in a state still enamored with those who could cross narrow party lines. Eisenhower's state total was 2,897,310. The Stevenson campaign had enthused many scarred from the bruising experiences of the 1950 campaigns and the rise of a red-baiting politics that threatened to engulf all outside a narrow right-wing consensus in state politics. But much remained to be done if a six-month burst of enthusiasm for a presidential campaign was to turn into something more durable and significant.

There was no doubting the extent of the enthusiasm, nonetheless. Stevenson himself received thousands of letters during and after the campaign from Californians: there are twelve thick folders full of them among his private papers. “Your integrity, your honesty, the firmness of your intellectual grasp, the literary distinction of your speeches, and, most of all, your insistence on talking sense and on standing for the same principles everywhere and in all kinds of company, involved me emotionally as well as mentally in your fight and resulted in my associating myself, for the first time in my life, with the Democratic organization in my precinct,” wrote a Berkeley professor to Stevenson after his defeat in November.⁴⁴ “I'm in mourning for the brains of the American people,” wrote a Los Angeles woman. “Because if they're not dead, where are they? It grieves me far beyond the point of tears that one of the finest, most sincere men I've ever known—and I think all of us feel we know you—should be defeated, not by logic or reason, but by a fairy tale…. I should have done more. I'm ashamed I didn't. I should have gone down to the Stevenson Headquarters and helped. Surely there were things I could have done. Next time, in ‘56, I will do more.”⁴⁵ A precinct captain in Danville wrote in a similar vein: “The tremendous popular vote you polled with your truthful and inspiring campaign bespeaks the popularity you attained in the last three weeks of three very short months. As captain of the Danville area precinct I want you to know that all the active workers are ready to campaign for you again—anytime. We feel that against any other candidate than General Eisenhower…the eloquent campaign you fought would have ended in victory—and will be triumphant once the General's glitter is gone.”⁴⁶ If this last prediction turned out to be wide of the mark, it was nonetheless true that the contours of California politics would be far more sympathetic to his run for president four years later, and the power of left-of-center networks of activists much more entrenched and obvious.

Political Undercurrents: Race and Sexuality

The Stevenson campaign, the intellectual debate over the future of moderate left politics, and the gradual shift of organized labor fully into the Democratic camp were important reasons why the political center of gravity was shifting slowly leftward in California in the early 1950s. In order to understand the social context in which this was occurring, and to understand the peculiar dynamics in California that made the Golden State part of a political avant garde in terms of a redefinition of the relationship between economic and social citizenship, we need to examine the growing movements for civil rights on the West Coast that did not in themselves directly address definitions of social democracy but that would later shape left politics in the Democratic Party in any case. The campaign for a fair employment practices law in California, and the nascent homophile movement in Los Angeles and San Francisco, both took shape at the same time as the rise of the Democratic Party to political power, and although these phenomena were not always overtly connected, all would intersect several years later to help crystallize the ways in which social democratic ideas would operate when they gained currency in the halls of power in Sacramento.

California's booming economy and rapid population growth were set within the context of endemic and entrenched systems of racial discrimination. Over twelve million people lived in the state in 1953, and another million were expected to arrive by 1955. “Such gains, of course, must be translated into more homes, more stores, more factories, more schools, more hospitals, more prisons, and more facilities of every kind,” wrote a contemporary observer in September 1953.⁴⁷ Across California, access to homes and employment was not immune from racially motivated pressures. A group of Berkeley law students in the mid-1950s conducted a study of attitudes of local real estate agents, using dummy prospective buyers of different ethnic backgrounds to assess how each would be treated and which available housing they would be shown. “The interviews reveal,” noted their report, “for purposes ranging from personal prejudice to feelings of self and group-appointed guardianship of the community, local realtors are actively engaged in perpetuating the separation of the Berkeley area into segregated racial districts.”⁴⁸ Willie Brown recalled that in San Francisco in the 1950s “I knew that you couldn't get housing. I knew that you couldn't get jobs…. The Sunset [district] was considered off-limits. As a matter of fact, there were only two or three communities in which the welcome mat was there. The real estate people would only show in certain areas of San Francisco. You still had to buy through a dummy buyer.”⁴⁹ The report compiled for Adlai Stevenson's campaign team in 1952 on San Francisco stated that all “past public housing is segregated. The city has one of the worst private housing shortages for minority families.” A new public housing development in Diamond Heights was planned that would be open to all, but it would not solve the racial divisions in the city's employment and housing situation. The local NAACP had had to go to court to overturn a housing authority ruling that a new housing project could not rent to African Americans because ethnic uniformity was the “neighborhood pattern.”⁵⁰ The Yellow Cab Company in the city openly refused to hire African Americans. “Employment and housing are still the main problems which confront Negroes in the Bay Area,” wrote the president of the Urban League in 1957.⁵¹ “There are in California about 500,000 Negroes, 800,000 Mexican Americans, 85,000 Japanese Americans, 60,000 Chinese Americans, 400,000 Jews, over 2 million Catholics and a million foreign born,” stated a report of the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices in 1955. “There are some employment restrictions against all of these groups in California. The records of the California State Employment Service in Los Angeles three years ago showed that 67.5% of all job orders were discriminatory.”⁵² Economic development and tacit racism appeared entwined in California life in the 1950s.

As elsewhere in the country, a movement to enact a state fair employment practices law had been gaining momentum after the nation's experience of a national law during World War II and the passage of a landmark state law in New York in 1945. By 1949 seven states had enacted antidiscrimination laws, two of them—Oregon and Washington—on the West Coast.⁵³ The NAACP had set up its West Coast Regional Office in San Francisco toward the end of the war, and Assemblyman Gus Hawkins had begun to push fair employment in Sacramento during the 1940s. The lobbying campaign was led by East Bay NAACP leaders C. L. Dellums and Tarea Hall Pittman, first through the NAACP itself, and later in the 1950s through the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices. Dellums was also International Vice President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and member of the Alameda County Central Labor Council, as well as the Alameda County Democratic Council. He thus crossed the boundaries between party activism, organized labor, and civil rights movement, and was a central figure in the formation of a statewide organization to lobby for major changes in the relationship between California politics and wider society.⁵⁴ The struggle mounted by Dellums and others for legislation to mitigate against discrimination in employment during the 1950s pointed up the growing influence of groups pushing for social change over the political process, but it also demonstrated the fact that the Republican power structure was ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the postwar era, and that a major shift in the balance of power in party politics was imminent. underlying this political shift was an implicit recognition that the enemies of fair employment were part of a broader attack on state regulation of the economy that by its very nature was both antigovernment and racist. Whether Dellums and his allies liked it or not, their struggle was not merely one of civil rights; it was a basic fight for economic rights as well, meaning that the fair employment movement was participating in the same ideological reading of social democracy as politicians and intellectuals on the California left.

In March 1953 hundreds of Californians, among them Dellums, Pittman, Los Angeles city councilman Edward Roybal, Berkeley assemblyman Byron Rumford, and John Despol of the California CIO, gathered in Sacramento to lobby the legislature to pass fair employment legislation. Angry at the repeated failure of the Republican legislature to act on the proposed legislation, the gathering hoped that a show of solidarity and strength would force the elected representatives to change their perspective: “This session of the legislature has not distinguished itself by any concern for civil liberties,” argued a sympathetic piece in the Los Angeles Daily News. “Rather, it has gone to the other extreme in an effort to destroy labor unions and check up on the loyalty of public employees, most of whom are conceded to be loyal. The FEPC mobilization may have had the effect, however, of convincing the lawmakers that a large segment of the population is not supine or indifferent to what goes on in the capital. It may stay the hands of the more reactionary solons and lay the groundwork for future legislation of a better kind.”⁵⁵ Certainly the newly formed lobbying group the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices was keen to relay an optimistic message to its sponsors. Tarea Hall Pittman claimed that the Sacramento mobilization was “very successful. We feel that we have impressed upon members of the Legislature the importance of taking official notice of employment discrimination in California and the need for corrective action.”⁵⁶

The Committee for Fair Employment had no choice but to assume that the Republican Party was the cradle of power in California and that all lobbying had to concentrate on persuading its leadership to support the legislation. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that the Republican establishment was not going to act. Dellums's attempts to take the matter to Washington got a polite brush-off, a representative of the Republican National Committee stating that the feeling there was that it was a “local matter.” His attempts to arrange a meeting with Governor Warren in early 1953 failed. His letter in March to California GOP National Committeeman McIntyre Faries smacked of desperation: “As one who wants to see the Republican Party retain its control in 1954, I thought it advisable to seek your help. The last Fair Employment Practices Bill before the California legislature was killed in the committee on a strictly partisan vote…. We are very conscious of the fact that this is a Republican state and that this bill can only be put through by the Republicans, and they shall receive full credit for what is done.”⁵⁷ Unfortunately for the fair employment movement, the issue was a matter of party politics: both Republican senators refused to intervene, and the Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy of the State Assembly, in which the FEPC bill was bottled up, was dominated by conservative Republicans, all but two of whom were from wealthy, white districts of Los Angeles. The chairman of the committee, Albert I. Stewart, represented Pasadena, not an area in which FEPC ranked high on his constituents' wish list.⁵⁸ All FEPC bills were in fact introduced by Democrats and representatives of organized labor and the NAACP: the principal effort in 1953 was AB 900, introduced by the Assembly's two African American members, Byron Rumford of Berkeley and Augustus Hawkins of Los Angeles. Dellums attempted to get the state and national Republican leadership on board in order to broaden the bill's appeal, claiming that Rumford and Hawkins had sponsored AB 900 “not because they are Democrats but because they are Negroes.”⁵⁹ The very existence of an antidiscrimination movement in California, with its demand for governmental oversight over employment and economic relationships, unwittingly contributed toward a political polarization that meant party and political ideology would become more interconnected.

The fair employment campaign coincided with a growing effort on the part of business interests and their Republican allies to resist efforts to regulate the private economy in any way. Fair employment as a concept was bound up with bigger themes of economic relationships between employer and employee, between homeowner and prospective buyer, between private individuals and the state. It was simply impossible in the 1950s to disentangle economic and civil rights issues, let alone attempt to argue that party politics did not matter. The State Chamber of Commerce, Associated Farmers, and the Merchants Manufacturing Association of Southern California all spearheaded efforts to kill FEPC, and funded Republican assemblymen who killed it in committee. The California Real Estate Association, which would become an enormously powerful antiregulatory lobby group once Democrats gained power in Sacramento and attempted to prevent discrimination in house sales, understood early on the interrelationship between economic rights and civil rights. In a direct attack on the fair employment movement, an article in the Association's magazine in September 1953 observed that “tricky phrases with favorable meanings and emotional appeals are being used today to imply a distinction between property rights and human rights…. Expressed more accurately, the issue is not one of property rights versus human rights, but of the human rights of one person in the community versus the human rights of another.” If government could interfere in private economic relationships on the side of one individual's rights to a job or a home against another's rights to decide how to disburse the fruits of his company's profits or how to sell his private home, what other new human rights would follow? “Now what about the so-called human rights that are represented as superior to property rights? What about the ‘right' to a job, the ‘right' to a standard of living, the ‘right' to a minimum wage or a maximum work week, the ‘right' to a ‘fair' price, the ‘right' to bargain collectively, the ‘right' to security against the adversities and hazards of life, such as old age and disability?…. These ‘human rights' are indeed different from property rights, for they rest on a denial of the basic concept of property rights. They are not freedoms or immunities assured to all persons alike. They are special privileges conferred upon some persons at the expense of others.”⁶⁰ Whether the proponents of fair employment liked it or not, their efforts for state regulation of employment law would, if successful, have economic consequences that an increasingly self-confident private business community, supported by a powerful public relations machine, was not prepared to tolerate, seeing civil rights predicated upon race as an opening wedge to broader economic redistribution of wealth outside the control of private enterprise.

Historians have recently become sensitive to the ways in which economic development became more contested terrain in the postwar years, as business public relations firms and representatives of organized labor and the New and Fair Deals vied for political supremacy using contrasting notions of freedom and individualism as tools in their rhetorical and political strategies.⁶¹ It was becoming increasingly clear to civil rights advocates in California during the 1950s that their fight for housing and employment rights was becoming bound up in this wider struggle. It was not just the fact that Republican legislators repeatedly voted against the bill, though its repeated failure, most frustratingly in 1955 when it passed the Assembly but failed in the State Senate, was due almost entirely to Republican right-wingers from Southern California. One Santa Barbara Republican claimed citizens could not “be partially tolerant any more than they can be partially pregnant,” a reference to the claims by FEPC proponents that the bill would not force anyone to give jobs or housing to particular people, demonstrating the inextricable link between the debate over economic freedom and that over civil rights.⁶²

There was also the fact that the Cold War put at the center of political debate contested notions of freedom and democracy that created a more antagonistic relationship between left and right around the twin themes of free enterprise and race. The CIO in its October 1951 newsletter noted that “our national security demands all-out production of defense materials and the use of all the available manpower. But discriminatory employment practices are preventing the full utilization of our manpower resources, impeding our productive capacity, and providing ammunition for the Communists' propaganda campaign about the failures of democracy…. Negro chemists are still working as laborers and Negro stenographers serving as maids.….We cannot aspire to world leadership in world affairs so long as we make mockery of our high-sounding talk about justice and democracy by practices of discrimination which destroy the dignity and deny the rights of millions of our fellow citizens.”⁶³ By contrast, a new right-wing organization based in Southern California in the same year stated in its articles of incorporation that its aim, in addition to the outlawing of communism in the United States, was to “prepare and propose constitutional amendments and legislative enactments for the restoration of democratic liberties and property rights” and to “formulate, develop, and promote public interest and education in basic democratic principles, civil rights, and property rights.” Those associated with this organization, known as America Plus (P for Property, L for Liberty, U for Unity, S for Strength), included state senator Jack Tenney and notorious far-right figure Aldrich Blake, who had led the fight against the recall of Los Angeles city councilman Meade McClanahan for his overt support for Fascist Gerald L. K. Smith during the war. Blake had authored My Kind! My Country! in 1950, a propaganda novel set in a dystopian future in which a new state of “Negroland” had been established in the United States. Its principal target was an economic and civil rights movement “officered by stooges of the Soviet Union…skillfully recruited from the ranks of those worst off in the social scale…from those among the rich and the intellectual who revel in striking a pose and in seeming to be out of the ordinary; from the emotionally upset and frustrated, including many members of the so-called minority groups,” all of whose “compassion for the unfortunate has inspired them to believe falsely that the remedy lies in unlimited handouts and controls by the State.”⁶⁴ Just as the Fair Employment movement was gaining strength in the 1950s, so was a popular right movement in southern California that welded together issues of private property rights, the Cold War, and racial prejudice in a manner that would have a major impact on both political debate and party political activity by the end of the decade.⁶⁵ As we shall see, Democratic party politics in the 1950s turned on the question of economic citizenship in a state in which the established channels of political patronage were being closed off, allowing the party to harness forces for economic and social change that were demanding greater representation.

When Harry Hay, Bob Hull, and Chuck Rowland first met in Los Angeles in 1950 to discuss the potential formation of a new organization to promote understanding of homosexuality, something other than their sexuality united them. All three had been members of the Communist Party.⁶⁶ By the early 1950s Marxism to these former party members was a God that had failed, and a combination of McCarthyism and a growing realization that individual sexual freedom was incompatible with communist doctrine helped men like Hay shake off any vestiges of fellow traveler status from Mattachine. Anyone who “espouses political philosophies which abrogate basic rights of the individual as set forth in the Constitution of the United States will hardly find the principles of social and moral responsibility as set forth in the aims and principles of the Society to his purpose,” the committee assured Mattachine's current and potential membership in 1954.⁶⁷ Much of the new organization's early publicity material avoided discussion of ideology or political partisanship lest it become tainted by association with communism at an inopportune time. “Politically, the Mattachine Society is strictly nonpartisan,” one statement read. “It espouses no ‘isms' except Americanism, for it realizes that such a program is possible only in a free nation such as the United States.”

In addition to the fear of political persecution homophile activists harbored at a time of McCarthyite purges of suspected gay men from public service in the early 1950s, they also faced more mundane problems of political identification that stemmed from their lack of a coherent ideological world-view into which their sexuality could fit.⁶⁸ British-born author Christopher Isherwood, who during the war had settled in Los Angeles and become a key figure in the city's gay demi-monde in these years, later recalled that by the time of his emigration to the United States he had “lost my political faith—I couldn't repeat the left-wing slogans which I had been repeating throughout the last few years. It wasn't that I had lost all belief in what the slogans stood for, but I was no longer wholehearted. My leftism was confused by an increasingly aggressive awareness of myself as a homosexual and by a newly made discovery that I was a pacifist. Both these individualistic minority- attitudes kept bringing me into conflict with the leftist majority-ideology.”⁶⁹ When a Los Angeles journalist in December 1953 wondered openly about the political intent of the new fledgling group in his newspaper column, the reply was forthright: “There is no political aim of the Mattachine Foundation Inc. other than to fight for the rights of man. IT IS DEFINITELY AND ABSOLUTELY NON-PARTISAN…. They are concerned with the problems of the homosexual and only that!”⁷⁰ These “problems” for the Mattachine Society of the 1950s concerned the rights of individuals to conduct their private affairs as they wished without unwarranted legal impediment and the education of wider society to accommodate sexual difference. Chuck Rowland went as far as to say that “it was society which created our culture by excluding us,” suggesting that the extent of political engagement on the part of early Mattachine members was to gain unrestricted entry to existing social structures, not to change those structures as any socialist would advocate. As the slogan of the 1954 convention put it: “evolution, not revolution.”⁷¹

As the gay rights movement grew and evolved it was clear that the membership's analysis of social exclusion was predicated upon something more than just individualism, and that they faced internal pressure to take an interest in mainstream politics. To Rowland, political activism, a belonging to a concrete organization of people determined to advance the cause of social acceptance of gay men and women, provided “a pride in participating in the cultural growth and social achievements of my people, the homosexual minority.” In this he claimed kinship with those advocating civil rights for different racial groups, trying to open avenues of employment and housing to all without discrimination. The Society's magazine, Mattachine Review, was launched in 1954 to promote “permanent advances in integration, education, understanding, civil rights, elimination of unfair practices and discrimination, and abolishment of false ideas about human sexuality.”⁷² Even in its very early days the founders of the organization recognized that theirs was a lobbying group with political goals, however muted and tentative they may be: “Once it has been conclusively demonstrated that variants can be unified in their own behalf, and when the time is agreed to be right for such a move,” they asserted, “it is considered imperative for the Society to move into the realm of political action to erase from the law books discriminatory legislation presently directed against the sexual variant minority.”⁷³ At the Society's 1954 convention in San Francisco the chair of the newly established legislative committee noted that no legislation of use to gay Californians had been passed in the Republican legislature, and that 1954 was an election year: “The chief factor here is the exercise of every American's basic franchise—that of voting…. THIS NEED FOR US TO ASSUME THIS RESPONSIBILITY OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP CANNOT BE OVERSTRESSED, FOR UNLESS WE VOTE, WE AS INDIVIDUALS AND AS AN ORGANIZATION HAVE NO REAL RIGHT TO CRITICIZE OFFICIALS AND THE LAWS THEY ENACT.”⁷⁴

The involvement of Mattachine in electoral politics began with the organization's creation, when the committee sent various candidates for office in Los Angeles a questionnaire soliciting their opinions on the question of making material on homosexuality available in schools. The accompanying letter attempted to demonstrate the potential electoral power of gay Angelenos, suggesting that if even only “a conservative percentage of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's testimony before the 1951 California State Legislature's Interim Committee is conceded, there are at least 150,000 such persons in the Los Angeles area alone.”⁷⁵ LA Mirror journalist Paul Coates saw as early as December 1953 that gay rights activism had the capacity to shape the way in which political parties conceptualized social change in the postwar age. Pointing to the forthcoming midterm elections in California, Coates observed the Mattachine questionnaire gambit, describing it as a “broadside from a strange new pressure group. An organization that claims to represent the homosexual voters of Los Angeles is vigorously shopping for campaign promises.” Mattachine, he noted, “pointedly hints it has the potential support of 150,000 to 200,000 homosexuals in this area.”⁷⁶ It would be some time before homophile politics gained general recognition in mainstream political debate in California, and throughout the 1950s a system of legalized repression of gay bars and political meetings relating to homophile activism kept sexuality out of the political lexicon of all elected politicians. Yet Coates was right to perceive the potential for gay rights to gain electoral traction at the same time as it struck a chord with a political class developing a new program for gaining and maintaining power in the 1950s and 1960s.

The language of rights deployed by both the racial and sexual equality movements contained similar cadences and perspectives to the intellectual debate that underpinned the Stevenson campaign in California. The development of civil rights organizations set up as lobby groups to press for political rights and representation in the halls of power mirrored the establishment of clubs and societies based around the advancement of the Democratic Party in California, a state in which the terms of political debate had been set in particularly narrow terms and in which existing channels of legislative action had proved to be inadequate when questions of civil rights came into play. The years between 1952 and 1958 would see the rapid rise not only of the Democratic Party in California politics, but also a concomitant rise of the influence of grassroots political organizations that would play a role in dramatically reshaping the ideological agenda of Democratic liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.