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INTRODUCTION

Placing California in Post-World War II American Politics

In April 1959, cricket levering, legislative chairwoman of democratic clubs in the suburb of Claremont and the surrounding neighborhoods of the Forty-Ninth assembly district in the northeastern corner of Los Angeles County, wrote a memo to fellow club organizers. Giddy from the landslide victories of gubernatorial candidate Pat Brown and other democratic legislative candidates in the 1958 elections, levering wanted to maintain the momentum that had helped bring about those victories through tireless precinct walking, leaflet distribution, rally organizing, and voter registration drives. Those who met in living rooms and poolside backyards in the Forty-ninth district democratic clubs discussed issues like the legitimacy of capital punishment, wider access to health care, the Cuban revolution, and the civil rights movement, often taking stances far to the left of many of their fellow citizens in Southern California.

Across the state, Democratic clubs like those in the Claremont area used meetings to provide a social focus for their rapidly growing communities, to take stands on major issues of the day, and to lobby their elected representatives to reflect their political concerns in legislative debates. “let us not lose sight of the importance of this task,” levering wrote. “We have helped to elect a Governor who is putting the weight of his office behind a legislative program that is unprecedented in California. We who are the working democrats now have an obligation and responsibility to keep ourselves informed on the issues, and to support that program.”¹

This intersection of grassroots organizing, left-of-center ideology, and organizational politics in the reshaping of California's political terrain between World War II and the end of the 1970s is the subject of this book. In this period, California was not only the fastest growing state in the union and one of the world's largest economies in these decades, but was also the site of significant political change in the 1950s and 1960s that illustrates a broader national process of ideological affiliation based on notions of economic and civil equality in an age of growing prosperity. Liberal activists in California built a new political base in the 1950s that used grass-roots engagement to mobilize a cross-class coalition of voters behind a legislative program that would transform the political landscape of the state and the nation. This new generation of liberal politicians interpreted the human rights of Americans broadly to include the right to a subsistence income regardless of economic status, together with the right to racial and sexual equality.

Debates in California about the expansion of the welfare state and economic growth gave these new democrats the political language with which to interpret broader questions of civil and sexual rights, in many cases before the explosion of rights discourses on the national stage in the 1970s. The increasing political power of liberal politicians on the West coast provoked sustained and increasingly bitter hostility from their conservative counterparts. Indeed, in many ways, the rhetorical power of the right in California must be seen through the lens of liberal successes in reframing the terms of state-level political debate in the postwar era. Though California began the postwar period as a political outlier with its own peculiar culture and traditions, it ended the 1970s as a harbinger of trends in interest group strategies, media-driven performative politics, and debates over economic power and individual rights that would come to define American politics writ large.

In this book I try neither to particularize nor to overly generalize the California experience, but rather to place the nation's most populous state and one of the world's largest economies into a wider context of significant political upheaval over questions of economic citizenship, public infrastructure, civil rights, and individual freedoms that transformed the relationship between government and society in the postwar decades. Left-leaning intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s viewed the United States as the archetype of advanced capitalist democracy, in which rapid technological advances and economic dynamism could provide wealth and security for all if harnessed to a social safety net designed to smooth the rough edges of the market.² Fast becoming the premiere economic engine for the United States in the years after World War II, California early on demonstrated problems of racial and social inequality that came to characterize advanced capitalism in the U.S. Context. The Golden state was also an important example of the emergence of a cross-class coalition of liberal Americans who transcended the New Deal politics of the 1930s, as the nation's economy became ever more dominated by the service sector, and as the middle class became employees bound tightly to the increasingly sophisticated corporate welfare system of insurance, retirement pensions, and other benefits.³ The growth of Democratic-inclined professional voters sympathetic to civil rights and social justice affected other states in these years, but California was the largest and most politically significant: repeated congressional reapportionment gave it the legislative seats through which to cultivate many of the most important liberals to lead the Democratic Party in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, including Phil Burton, Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi.⁴

California had by the 1970s become a trailblazer for national debates over taxation, sexual and gender rights, racial discrimination, and the welfare state, and also reflected international political trends as countries grappled first with establishing a new social democratic order in an era of prosperity and then struggled to maintain it as a global economic crisis unfolded by the end of the seventies. As a new generation of liberal activists fought to invigorate the moribund system of party politics in California in the 1950s, and as they made common cause with organized labor in an effort to halt forces trying to roll back labor rights on the West coast, they were forced to engage with questions of ideology and political affiliation that placed them in a broader social democratic political shift anchored not in Depression-era crisis but in the 1950s culture of affluence.⁵ Though a great deal of state-building occurred in California during the New Deal and World War II, under mainly Republican administrations, legislators' commitment in this period to an overarching reform program that included welfare and civil rights as well as infrastructure projects remained tentative and unfulfilled. It took a dramatic shift in the nature of the state's electoral politics in the 1950s to spur a massive transformation in the terms of political debate. This shift established a left-right dichotomy in California party politics that later came to define the American political spectrum in a wider sense.

California's postwar social democratic politics—which envisaged government maintenance of economic and social rights through a more ambitious social welfare safety net, strong labor unions, and antidiscrimination legislation, in addition to major public infrastructure projects—needed people— voters—to believe in it for it to take root. California's status as a media-rich state—home to the nation's movie industry and a significant share of the booming television industry—gave the new generation of state Democrats (as well as Republicans) an ideal opportunity to take advantage of a new style of campaigning, one that involved carefully staged and scripted performances relayed to thousands of voters, which broadened the appeal of liberal politics beyond the cadre of true believers in Democratic clubs and in the legislature. The fact that the dominant Republican Party in the 1950s enjoyed electoral hegemony without a clear, unifying message underpinning it offered liberal activists an opportunity to use mass rallies, TV spots, and press campaigns to sell a policy agenda to the electorate. By the early 1960s election campaigns based on clearly defined ideological fissures between left and right were the norm in California, setting the scene for a more adversarial, media-driven politics that would come to characterize American politics more generally in later decades. The fact that Democrats needed to legitimize themselves anew in the 1950s and 1960s, and could not simply present themselves as standard bearers of the New Deal, forced Californian liberals to engage with big debates over social democracy and economic rights in campaigns in ways that linked west coast politics to wider international discussions on the left even if the carefully crafted electoral appeals often eschewed the emotive language of class.

Another crucial aspect of the construction of a new liberal politics in California was the need to legitimize social forces outside the political mainstream. Unlike their new right counterparts, who drew upon volunteers and sources of patronage very much part of dominant social forces even if they liked to portray themselves as insurgents, California liberals depended upon coalitions of the marginalized as well as sympathetic bankrollers in order to establish themselves as viable contenders for legislative power. An analysis of the language liberals used to establish their ideas in political debate in the 1950s and 1960s helps us to contextualize how and why interest groups gained traction within mainstream political discourse. The reasons why there was such a major change in political definitions of what constituted normative behavior in questions of sexuality and lifestyle choice in the 1960s remain only partly understood. This study argues that the goal of California liberal politicians to sell their program through a commitment to social equality provided the language through which marginalized groups, including gay rights and civil rights organizations, could tie their agendas to the broader agenda of postwar liberalism. There is a voluminous literature on the development of various rights movements in this period, but this work exposes the gendered, racialized, and economic discourses cultivated by those in legislative power that in part drove the success and failure of these movements to alter the political landscape. To put it another way, only by addressing the questions of economic and social rights together, linked by the rise of liberal electoral politics in California, can we understand how mainstream politicians came to widen their understanding of who would be included under their protective umbrella in these years.⁶

As much as California Democrats relied on energizing people formerly outside mainstream politics and reaching voters through a new style of campaigning, they also drew on a more traditional constituency—labor. By the 1940s, the Republican Party of progressive governors Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren was the established machine of power and patronage in California. Its sudden and unprecedented break with labor in the late 1950s served to strengthen the position of unions in California politics and provided liberals with significant electoral and organizational muscle that allowed California to take the lead in responding to the significant expansion in federal funding opportunities in the Kennedy and LBJ years. This development had an additional effect in encouraging Californians—of wide-ranging political beliefs—to raise their expectations of what government could do for them. In the process, a politics predicated on quality of life issues encouraged many suburban communities to embrace Democratic (and maverick liberal Republican) candidates for office, thus complicating the commonly held notion that the California suburbs were little more than a fulcrum for right-wing politics by the 1970s. Bitter contests over fair housing and property taxes certainly contributed to a right turn in much of California's Republican Party, and helped to undermine the governorships of liberal Democrat Pat Brown in the 1960s and his son Jerry in the late 1970s. But California ended the 1970s as the spiritual home of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party as much as that of John Birch sympathizers, complicating our understanding of how ideological trends and grassroots activism intersected in these decades.

Indeed, a study of California politics helps to shed light on how we define “liberalism” in the postwar period, with important ramifications for our understanding of American politics more generally. If the California experience proved anything, it was that the notion of state-sponsored economic citizenship encouraged in post-New Deal America led inevitably to identity politics, as more and more heretofore marginalized social groups began to clamor for inclusion in the political process. In opening up this process to a greater number of interests, liberal politicians oversaw a dramatic widening of the parameters of their worldview that helped make California the archetype of socially engaged left politics, which prized individual and civil rights as a necessary corollary of economic liberalism. The development of an expanded welfare state, for instance, required policymakers to engage with questions of social inclusion that furnished them with a language of rights that expanded their understanding of what constituted normative behavior. The complex interactions of race and economic rights discourses in California allowed a social democratic ideology to develop that built upon a strong popular front heritage on the West Coast, and pulled together interests ranging from Latino farm workers to wealthy suburban homemakers into a shared political project. This process of adapting the New Deal to a diverse population caused antagonistic and self-defeating disputes, which served to embed factional animosities in the Democratic Party and alienate many liberal Republicans, problems that have continued to afflict liberal politics in the United States in the recent past. By the 1970s, this factionalism, and an inability to unify interest groups behind a larger message, prevented legislative Democrats from addressing the thorny question of tax relief. Moreover, issues such as the right of farm laborers to bargain for better working conditions tested the capacity of Democratic Party politics to challenge the entrenched inequality of market capitalism. At times liberals lacked the linguistic confidence of their conservative rivals to tie their ideological precepts to homegrown American values. Yet by the late twentieth century a politics of big government, social welfare, public funding for education and health, and strict protections of civil and human rights was a powerful influence on public life both in California and in a national Democratic Party. This book goes some way toward explaining the processes through which such a politics came of age between World War II and recent times.

It is instructive to note that studies that have explicitly linked grassroots activism to wider themes of political party history have tended to be histories of the right, viewing conservative activism, most notably in Orange County, California, as exemplifying an inexorable shift in the zeitgeist of American politics rightward in the 1960s and 1970s. Historians of the right have been much more confident in nationalizing their story than historians of political struggles that encompass a much wider range of forces.⁷ Yet even if we restrict our angle of vision to the politics of suburban communities that have done so much to enhance our understanding of the tax revolts, school district controversies, and zoning laws that shaped American political trends by the 1970s, it is by no means clear that these histories are purely narratives of conservatism. Orange county may have been “at the leading edge of economic and social changes that have propelled a deep-rooted and ever more powerful conservative political culture in significant areas of the Sunbelt and West,” but other California counties, including Santa Barbara, Marin, and San Mateo, manifested concern over taxes and schools alongside a strong attachment to environmentalism, individual rights, and high public spending.⁸ Suburbs and wealthy neighborhoods of cities like Los Angeles were also home to a vibrant popular front during the 1940s that endured and prospered in the repackaged Democratic club movement of the 1950s. And many of the Democratic bastions of the early twenty-first century can be found in high-income communities around the cities of the Golden State. The California experience of the decades following 1945 forces us to resist easy generalizations about suburban selfishness, racism, and Cold War anticommunism, and to place the politics of postwar market capitalism—with all its attendant class, racial, and ideological contradictions—back into a study of party politics at a time of massive shifts in party affiliation and strategy at a crucial time in the state-building process in the United States and elsewhere.

The development of a revitalized antistatist private business community on the West coast does not support the narrative of the breakdown of the New Deal order. For one thing, the chronological trajectory of the growth of militant business and GOP anti-unionism in California differed from that of Sunbelt and Southern states, regions that have received much recent scholarly attention.⁹ The Republican Party was the established party of government in California at the height of the New Deal, and had come to a basic understanding with labor unions about maintaining good labor-management relations. California was heavily unionized, and when the Republican leadership decided to push anti-union legislation in 1958, they helped legitimize Democratic liberalism as the natural party for union members and bolstered labor organizing at precisely the time insurgent Republicans and business elites in sunbelt states were beginning to mount an assault on the citadels of power. As a New Deal order was collapsing in Arizona and elsewhere, it was only just coming together in California, forcing us to particularize the experience of different states of the United States when fitting the American case into the broader history of the rise of free market ideology and modern corporate capitalism in the later twentieth century.

A study of California politics after World War II also encourages us to rethink the widely held thesis that civil rights liberalism became divorced from economic rights in this period, as advocates of racial equality became increasingly involved in school desegregation and legal rights and less committed to workplace equality and economic justice.¹⁰ Such an argument sees struggles for mass unionism and fairer working conditions during the New Deal and World War II as the crucial window of opportunity in which to link economic security to racial equality, a window that closed when the Cold War and a national turn away from New Deal class politics in the 1950s made courtroom battles to eliminate Jim crow laws more feasible as a civil rights strategy than a direct assault on the economic structures of the nation. Given that California does not fit into the chronology of a New Deal order betrayed by the political upheavals of the postwar period, this thesis does not stand up to scrutiny. Liberals committed to civil rights legislation in the 1950s, and who enacted the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) and fair housing legislation in the 1959-1963 period, encountered bitter opposition from business and civic leaders convinced that civil equality interfered with private sector prerogatives. conservatives also noticed that the coalition of civil rights activists, labor unions, and Democratic club members that ended decades of Republican dominance in state politics were able to expand enormously the scope and generosity of the state's welfare system in ways that would dramatically alter the economic status of hundreds of thousands of Californians of all races. Furthermore, civil rights was not a biracial issue, given the vital significance of Latino, often immigrant, agricultural labor to the state economy: questions of how the economy worked, and how the state could intervene in private economic relationships to head off major labor disputes, lay at the heart of the Democratic project in California in the postwar decades, leading to the integration of farm labor into the National Labor Relations Act in California in 1975. The Golden State was not an outlier in this regard, but a stark reminder of the fact that questions of economic and social equality remained thoroughly entwined throughout the Cold War.

This book also challenges the notion that identity politics unpicked a grand New Deal coalition in the 1960s and 1970s and set the United States on a more conservative path. To historian Donald T. Critchlow, liberalism had by the 1970s become “little more than a boiling cauldron of identity politics that pandered to the jealousies of ethnic and minority groups. Liberal candidates were elected to local and state office, but by the late 1960s liberalism as an intellectual force was placed on the defensive and appeared to have run out of fresh ideas, living on by wrapping itself in the legacy of the New Deal of the 1930s.”¹¹ Until the political revolution in 1958 in California, the only way for interest groups like labor unions to buy into the political compact of the New Deal was by appealing unilaterally to a disorganized and amorphous political leadership in Sacramento. After the late 1950s liberal legislators were able to stitch together a variety of interest groups into a more unified, powerful coalition that often traded on the same ideological premises to advance an agenda that brought together questions of poverty, welfare, gay rights, and labor rights into one package. The 1960s did not cause the New Deal coalition to unravel, at least not at the state level: that decade instead witnessed the extension of a New Deal politics of social democracy to groups who had never seen its fruits in earlier decades, a fact that has relevance to the history of American liberalism.