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CHAPTER 1

Politics and Party in California at Mid-Century

The social and economic changes of the Depression and World War II had affected California at least as manifestly as anywhere else in the Union. Whether we think of the mass of displaced Okies in the 1930s or the millions who descended on the Golden State to seek employment in war industries in the 1940s, there was no question that California was undergoing rapid and significant social changes that required collective solutions. The state population had swollen in the 1940s alone from a little under seven million to 10,586,223. The African American population had rocketed from 124,000 in 1940 to over 462,000 ten years later.¹ Between 1941 and 1944 California's manufacturing employment rose an extraordinary 201 percent, compared to the national average of 51 percent. The state government had become responsible for coordinating one of the nation's largest war economies, a network of plants and factories that had sprung up almost overnight and required new roads, water supplies, and public power.² Undergirding this picture of change was a history of political progressivism and radicalism that had found expression with the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair in 1934 and the pension campaigns of Francis Townsend and George McLain through the 1930s, together with the rise of a powerful communist movement in the state that was among the largest in the nation. The party had by the outbreak of war infiltrated the left wing of the Democratic Party and most of the CIO unions on the West coast, and was involved in any number of civil rights and civil liberties organizations that formed the lynchpin of mass political engagement in these years.³ California was the home of the progressive wing of the Republican Party, symbolized by senator Hiram Johnson and congressman Richard Welch of San Francisco, and also home of stalwart supporters of the New Deal such as Democratic congressmen Jerry Voorhis of LA and George Outland of Santa Barbara. Though the state's citizens had only elected a Democrat to the governorship once since 1888—Culbert Olson in 1938—they were comfortable with Republicans like Earl Warren who, having defeated Olson's chaotic administration after just one term, would oversee the largest expansion in state government capacities in California's history up to that time. A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the postwar settlement would involve a progressive pact between government, social movements, and private enterprise that would invigorate the liberal spirit of the New Deal age.⁴

In fact, California politics at the midpoint of the twentieth century was a world unusually unsuited to the demands of a modern industrialized state. The reforms of Hiram Johnson's administration in the 1910s that had been designed to break the power of organized factions and lobbyists over the state's political system had by the 1930s had the opposite effect, and had calcified political activity into an organized chaos of individual candidacies, one-party dominance over the legislature and local government, and a lack of serious mainstream public debate about the ideological direction of the state and the country.⁵ Yet it is important to lay out the dynamics of late 1940s California politics to show what was missing from public discourse and political organizing in these years, and how that lack of a serious engagement with programmatic ideas in postwar party politics would shape the formation of a new age of political activism in later years.

Political Culture in California at Mid-Century

Recent studies of political movements associated with the left in California have inevitably focused on local studies of neighborhoods, local civil rights efforts, and nonparty campaigns for civil and economic rights centered in specific communities, whether they be the bohemian enclave of Edendale in Los Angeles or African American sections of West Oakland.⁶ Yet these localized examples of political pressure usually met with successful statewide opposition, as in the case of the repeal of a welfare rights proposition by powerful antiwelfare interests in 1949.⁷ The Republican Party's control of the legislature and most local governments, due in part to a tradition of Republicanism in the state and in part to the effects of California's peculiar cross-filing law, severely restricted the political options open to Californians between the 1920s and 1950s, and helped to reinforce a strong rightward turn in the state's politics in these years.

The practice of cross-filing in California virtually eliminated the party political impact of the New Deal in the state. Brought in as part of Johnson's reform package to rid the state of political corruption, the law allowed candidates for state and federal office to enter the primary of parties other than their own. Often during the 1930s and 1940s Republicans won Democratic primaries and vice versa, thus eliminating meaningful competition at the general election. It had been hoped that this free-for-all between candidates of different parties for the nomination would assert the primacy of the individual candidate and his or her suitability for the post, and eliminate the supposedly corrupt picking of candidates by political bosses behind closed doors. Indeed, party organizations were forbidden by law from endorsing any candidate for office, which meant in practice at least half a dozen candidates from each party would enter each primary. The last man standing with a large enough war chest and the loudest message tended to emerge victorious. The need for money and airtime inevitably increased the reliance of politicians on lobbyists and business elites rather than the reverse, and the superior discipline and organization of the Republican Party ensured that they would win the majority of contests regardless of the national political picture. Despite having a three to two advantage in political registration by the late 1930s, the Democrats had half as many seats in the State Senate and far fewer seats in the Assembly throughout the New Deal era and well into the 1950s.⁸ Even when the state elected a left-wing Democratic governor in 1938, the GOP-controlled legislature ensured his administration left little by way of a positive legacy, and rendered many of the local campaigns for welfare and civil rights bereft of the political power needed to pass the kind of social legislation—a Fair Employment Practices law, for instance—being pioneered elsewhere.⁹

In cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit, Democrats had built a new political order based on a coalition of organized labor, urban liberal activists, and Democratic Party regulars. In Los Angeles, by contrast, an antistatist Republican in 1950 could win both Republican and Democratic primaries in congressional districts like the Fifteenth, extending west though Hollywood and including coteries of liberals in the movie industry and far-left activist networks near Silver Lake reservoir. The main Democratic candidate complained bitterly that Republican congressman Gordon McDonough was conservative in a district in which Democrats were the majority of registered voters, yet he had triumphed nonetheless. “Presenting that picture to the voters was difficult and expensive,” he wrote. “The population of the Fifteenth is almost as much as the city of St. Louis. There is no party organization, and no time to form one during a campaign. Precinct work is unknown.” A single mailshot to registered Democrats in the district cost $1,600, a large amount of money for a party with little centralized organization. Some candidates did establish robust campaigns, with fund-raising drives, local party workers, and enthusiastic supporters, such as Esther Murray in the neighboring Sixteenth District that same year, but even then she only managed to win her primary in her West Los Angeles-Beverly Hills district, not the general election.¹⁰

Democrats not already ensconced in congressional or Assembly seats faced another major hurdle in their quest for election: the Republican legislature controlled the redistricting process that redrew the district boundaries every ten years. In 1951, slightly rattled by Esther Murray's vigorous campaign to unseat arch-conservative Donald Jackson in West Los Angeles, and required by the census to give new congressional seats to the rapidly growing Los Angeles region, the GOP-controlled reapportionment committee decided to create a new seat that gathered together all the scraps of the city of Los Angeles that had large majorities of Democratic registrants, leaving the rest of the city with safe Republican districts. The new seat, the Twenty-Sixth District, took in the heavily African American Sixty-Second and Sixty-Sixth Assembly Districts that made up the existing Fourteenth congressional District and tied them by a thin strip of land to the Sixty-First Assembly District in Jackson's old Sixteenth District, a seat taking in the heavily liberal and Jewish portions of Fairfax and Beverly Hills as well as Venice and culver city. “It is the most heavily gerrymandered district in the history of California,” decried a 1954 flyer for the new Twenty-Sixth candidate, James Roosevelt. “It is not a geographical unit; it has widely varied interests; and it is large enough to make TWO congressional districts instead of the one we now have. The districting is so outrageous that even Governor Warren, back in 1951, asked his Republican-dominated reapportionment committee how they could justify what they had done. He was told: ‘Those are the leftovers. When we had the other districts laid out the way we wanted them, those pieces were left. Nobody wanted them. So we threw them together and made a district.'”¹¹ Later in the twentieth century, when California became an electorally competitive state, the Democrats were able to adopt this practice themselves, just as the two parties did in every state in the country. Until the 1960s, however, the Republicans in California had a monopoly on reapportionment prerogatives. This, together with the fact that allocation of State Senate seats by county dramatically skewed allocation in favor of rural areas (Los Angeles had one Senate seat until the 1960s, as did a few tiny counties in the Sierra mountains), left urban, liberal voters and politicians with little influence over policymaking.

The clear disjuncture between the diverse and rapidly changing social make-up of California and the limited range of political choices open to voters was reinforced by the role of the media in state politics. Most of the state's newspapers were run by Republican-supporting owners and editors, including Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times and Joseph Knowland of the Oakland Tribune, whose son was a California senator and who was also a major contributor to the campaigns of Governor Warren. Of the major dailies only one, the Sacramento Bee, had any sympathy for Democratic candidates. In the late 1950s all but 9 of some 120 state newspapers supported Republican candidates for senator.¹² More important, the editorial policy of almost all the California press was to impose an unashamedly anti-Democrat, antistatist spin on all copy, news stories as well as editorials. “We will not be able to carry on in defeat like the Republicans,” warned Democratic candidate Patrick McDonough after the party's horrendous 1946 electoral drubbing. “We do not have the newspapers, radio, nor do we have the money to battle adversity.”¹³ Jimmy Roosevelt informed the Greater LA Press Club during his 1950 gubernatorial campaign that in his view “news stories and headlines reflect the economic, social, and political views of the publisher far more than they do an actual and truthful situation, event or issue.”¹⁴

A cursory glance at any California newspaper from the mid-twentieth century reveals not just a lack of real engagement with the diversity of political opinion in the world, but a reluctance even to mention political opponents of preferred candidates. Often candidates for office who failed to win the endorsement of the major dailies had to buy advertising space to gain any coverage at all. Senatorial candidate Helen Douglas resorted to this tactic in 1950, placing an advertisement in several newspapers in which she argued that she had uncovered during the course of her canvassing “growing resentment that there is no news of my campaign being carried in the Los Angeles newspapers…. My campaign has bought this space in order that I might bring light to the blackout and let my supporters know how the campaign is progressing.”¹⁵ Senate candidate Sam Yorty did the same in 1954 to rebut claims by Democratic supporters of his Republican opponent that he had a past as a far-left radical, claims reported prominently in the LA Times.¹⁶ When Adlai Stevenson swung though San Diego during his 1952 campaign for the presidency, a local campaign supporter reported that his keynote speech “was given little coverage in the local newspaper, either before or after it was delivered.” The only Democratic newspaper had been bought out by the Republican paper “and the coverage that was given came out in a thoroughly garbled report, with the quotations, as usual, torn out of context, and the effectiveness rendered nil.”¹⁷ Republicans, on the other hand, gained high-profile coverage in outlets like the Times, often finding their political stances discussed approvingly in items that were supposedly news stories, not editorials. In one such story, a right-wing Republican assemblyman was praised for fighting “the increased unemployment insurance benefits…because he wanted the fund protected better from mooching and chiseling.” His Democratic opponent was briefly dismissed as “an amateur” who dared to oppose an incumbent whose work had been “outstanding on the side of reasonableness in government and to protect the interest of the people from dreamers and those whose plans would load the taxpayers with unreasonable burdens.”¹⁸

Floating above this apparent vipers' nest of poisonous antiliberal invective and political chicanery in the 1940s and early 1950s was the benign, avuncular figure of Governor Earl Warren. His years on the U.S. Supreme court, not least his landmark ruling in Brown, have added to an impression of judicial fairness, strength of character, and political moderation that had already been assiduously developed during his years as California attorney general and as governor. The editors of his memoirs, published posthumously, wrote in a prologue that “he believed in dealing directly, openly, and in a nonpartisan way with any problem,” and that he “steadfastly refused to be obligated to any special interest.”¹⁹ State legislative analyst A. Alan Post, a key figure in a rapidly growing state regulatory and legislative apparatus in the postwar years, recalled that government officials referred to him as “the Earl of Warren” because “he had a kind of regal bearing, and he was stiff but a real glad-hander…. He had close affiliations with labor and took care of them and was an affable and well-meaning, thoughtful, cautious sort of person.”²⁰ Born in Los Angeles, Warren moved to northern California as a boy, attending law school at Berkeley and soon getting a job in the Alameda county district attorney's office in Oakland. An astute, careful operator, Warren came of age politically at a time when the progressive Republican challenge to the corporate interests of the Southern Pacific Railroad had reached its high point, and the fact that his father had worked for Southern Pacific for little pay convinced the young Warren that his own political inclinations were on the side of Hiram Johnson and the progressive forces. As he later wrote, the “things I learned about monopolistic power, political dominance, corruption in government, and their effect on the people of a community were valuable lessons that would tend to shape my career throughout life.”²¹ He became Alameda district attorney in 1925, and gained a reputation as a principled law enforcer and an opponent of partisan affiliation: he refused campaign contributions for his campaign for district attorney in 1926, and believed fervently in California's cross-filing rule, allowing him to court support on the basis of his achievements and manifesto promises rather than party favors. He won election as California's attorney general in 1938, and ended four difficult years of popular front and Democratic rule in 1942 with his elevation to the governorship.²²

Under his administration a massive industrial war economy came into existence, regulated by a vastly enlarged governmental apparatus.²³ His tenure saw the creation of a Postwar Reconstruction and Reemployment commission, a program of public works, and vast investment in state-funded higher education, which helped fund a 156 percent increase in enrollment between 1944 and 1950.²⁴ Warren's presence as Republican figurehead, supported by a significant group of labor-backed Republican progressive legislators, surely suggested that the political system could cope with the demands of a rapidly diversifying and growing population.

In many respects, however, Warren's occupation of the governor's mansion in Sacramento marked the peak of progressive ascendancy in the state's Republican Party. For one thing, the limited ideological reach of political discourse among state Republicans meant their solutions to social problems could never keep pace with demand. Warren himself was dependent on the support of important conservative interests like Joe Knowland's Oakland Tribune, and responsible for placing future darling of the American right Bill Knowland in the Senate in 1945. For another, pro-business, bitterly anti-government interests in the party were after 1945 making a serious challenge to the broker state being delicately established under Warren, determined to sweep aside any political consensus in a bid to establish private sector control over the economy. Warren's short-lived attempt to establish some kind of state health insurance system was a major casualty of the growing political clout of antistatist Republican legislators and their powerful financial backers in the California Medical Association (CMA) and chamber of commerce. Days after Warren's announcement of his social security-based insurance scheme in January 1945, the CMA met in Los Angeles and, in Warren's words, “all but declared the plan to be the work of the Devil.” In a propaganda campaign that formed part of a wider 1940s national campaign against government-administered health care, the CMA “stormed the legislature with their invective,” and Warren's bill “was not even accorded a decent burial.”²⁵ The New Republic verdict that when Warren “discovered the hornet's nest that he had uncovered, he began to run for cover and had it conveniently killed in committee” is perhaps unfair, but its broader accusation that the vigorous actions of conservative interests in rolling back social welfare entitlements in the years after the war demonstrated the limits of progressive political activity in Sacramento in these years is hard to refute.²⁶ As the forces of capital began to gear up for a full-on assault on the post-New Deal regulatory state, an attack that would culminate in an attempt to reintroduce open shop labor contracts in the late 1950s, it was not at all clear that progressive Republicanism had the political strength or ideological conviction to stem the antistatist tide.

A lack of political muscle or ideological clarity were not weaknesses of the forces of the private enterprise lobby in California. Figures such as Lemuel Boulware of the public relations wing of General Electric had become increasingly aware in the immediate postwar years of the potential of ideologically driven PR campaigns against the regulatory state, and of the need to fund politicians who would drive their free market, antilabor agenda in the halls of power. In a 1945 memo Boulware set out the terms of his forthright campaign to rein in union power and establish senior management as the sole arbiters of company policy: “Management is in a sales campaign to determine who will run business and the country,—and to determine if business and the country will be run right” (emphasis original).²⁷ A test case of this battle in California came when the city of Los Angeles attempted to establish a public housing program after the passage of the Housing Act of 1949. congresswoman Helen Douglas had in 1947 bitterly attacked congress for not passing legislation to ease the chronic housing crisis in America after the war: “When certain parts of my congressional district in Los Angeles…are full of slums that would put Port Said to shame, that, in my view, is a political matter. When rents are raised beyond the ability of the average working man and woman to pay.…And when newly-married veterans of World War Two are forced to start their families under the handicap of a hopeless debt because they have to pay $13,000 for a huddle of Number Three white pine with naked wiring running through the knot-holes, that, in my humble opinion, is a political matter too.”²⁸ The scale of the housing shortage in the late 1940s had prompted congress to take action, and Republican mayor of Los Angeles Fletcher Bowron was keen to take advantage of the federal funding for his city. Private real estate interests quickly moved to call in favors from city councilmen, and the council blocked the proposals. The Reporter noted that the “Los Angeles uprising is part of a test case instituted by national and local real-estate groups to determine whether the nation shall have federally subsidized slum-clearance and low-rent housing programs in the future.”²⁹ In 1952 Bowron visited President Harry Truman to discuss the difficulties inherent in any attempt by government to compete with private enterprise or to regulate its affairs. As a White House official described it, Bowron had “broken with the local GOP leadership and the powerful LA Times on the public housing issue and the ‘interests' have ganged up on him and forbidden him radio time. He says the Republicans have given the Democrats a ready-made issue they can win on in the city.”³⁰ As in the case of later campaigns against racial discrimination in housing and employment, the issues were there to create a political groundswell against the status quo, but the organizational infrastructure had yet to be established, a significant weakness given the influence of private business interests in the corridors of power on the West coast.

Professional public relations gurus had long bridged the divide between private enterprise and Republican party politics. Murray Chotiner, Richard Nixon's right-hand man in his campaigns for office, had in the 1930s been a leading figure behind the formation of the Republican Assembly, an extra-party organization established to give the nod to favored Republican primary candidates, a useful way of getting the “right” candidates elected to office in a state where official party endorsement was banned. By 1946 those opposed to enlargement of the regulatory state and in favor of the rollback of the New Deal and elimination of wartime controls had gained control of the Republican Party National committee, and thus the party's midterm platform, and were quietly using their power in California circles to gain leverage over the party apparatus there. Southern Californian business interests carefully vetted a young Richard Nixon, including asking him to two interviews with right-wing California congressmen Carl Hinshaw and John Phillips, before giving him their full backing in the GOP primary for the Twelfth District, a key race to unseat prominent New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis.³¹

The Republican right also zeroed in on pro-New Deal congressmen like George Outland of Santa Barbara, key player in the fight to get the Full Employment Act through congress in 1946, and Ned Healy of the Thirteenth District in Los Angeles. They financed pro-business Donald Jackson in the Sixteenth District of left-wing popular frontist Ellis Patterson, and fashioned the antistatist lexicon that would form the common campaign strategy of the vast majority of Republican candidates in 1946. According to a Nixon campaign leaflet, “basically, the issue to be settled in this election is conflict between political philosophies. The present congressman from this district [Voorhis] has consistently supported the socialization of free American institutions.”³² A campaign letter to professional groups in the Twelfth District, an area centered on wealthy South Pasadena and similar communities east of LA, argued that voters' “liberty and freedom are being threatened by Federal encroachment and centralized bureaucracy. our state and nation need men like Richard Nixon to protect private business and free enterprise.”³³ The common thread of campaigns of candidates like Nixon was that Republicanism represented all sections of society equally under the umbrella of private citizenship, as opposed to “those who espouse the regimentation of our people, collectivism or communism in some form [who would act] according to the wishes of minority pressure groups of which the Political Action committee is an example.”³⁴ The U.S. chamber of commerce cleverly stitched together antiregulatory rhetoric with elements from the global situation of the day to provide an anti-New Deal synthesis in its public relations literature. “In the agony and chaos of recent years,” stated one such booklet in 1946, “we detect two recurrent themes. The first is the worship of the State. The second, and correlative theme, is the denial of the rights of the individual. As the State takes over, the individual must give way. The absolute State reached its malign perfection under Fascism, Nazism, and communism.”³⁵

The emerging Cold War interacted with the increased self-confidence of anti-New Deal interests to place anticommunism at the center of the campaign to establish a pro-business, antiregulatory consensus in American politics. At the national level this was manifested by the use of antitotalitarian arguments in the fight to repeal the Office of Price Administration, or to combat President Truman's federal health insurance proposals.³⁶ In California the state legislature had established its own “Little Dies” committee under the leadership of Los Angeles state senator Jack Tenney in order to uncover evidence of political subversion and so-called un-Americanism in state government and the professions.³⁷ As the drive to oust the remaining liberal Democrats from political office gained pace in the late 1940s, anti-communism became the main weapon in destroying the political careers of Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, congressman Franck Havenner of San Francisco in 1952, and Robert Condon of the East Bay in 1954. As early as 1946 Douglas was finding anticommunism a problem in her reelection campaign in Los Angeles, writing prominent New Dealer Harold Ickes that her campaign “gets dirtier and dirtier…. They've put out an enormous flyer, asking me how I happened to go to Moscow, what Stalin said to me, what I told Stalin, etc.”³⁸ Los Angeles Democratic Party warhorse and fixer Carmen Warschaw recalled Nixon's campaign against Jerry Voorhis in similar terms: “People used to get phone calls that Jerry Voorhis is a communist. ‘We can't give you our name because, you know, you can't say that, but believe me, Voorhis is a communist.' And they used to have young people come in when Jerry Voorhis was speaking and they would boo so that you couldn't hear. Hold signs.”³⁹ Robert Condon had barely arrived in Washington when the allegations that he had been denied security clearance for atomic bomb tests during the war because of his associations with a prominent local communist surfaced in the state media, and even his own party had to abandon him in 1954, prompting one local supporter to despair that national Democrats “did more harm to the Democratic Party in California than all the Republican newspapers with their rapacious party line.”⁴⁰ The iron grip of antitotalitarian imagery on political discourse in postwar California drastically restricted the capacity for serious debate over the future development of the public sphere without some sort of radical overhaul of the political balance of power in the state.

Why No Democratic Political Order in California?

Democratic Party figures or national activists who arrived in California from the East coast in the late 1940s or early 1950s would usually comment upon the relative youth of the political world found there. One of Adlai Stevenson's campaign chiefs argued that the lack of an organized precinct structure to the Democratic Party like that common in Illinois or New York was due to the fact that precinct work “takes place in large cities and…it takes many years to develop these cohesive groups. There is no large city in California that is even fifty years old and the greatest growth has taken place in the last twenty-five years, so that eastern politicians, professional or otherwise, are inclined to be frustrated and baffled by this lack of organization.”⁴¹ One visiting Democrat, musing on the seeming political ineffectiveness of the state's labor movement, noted that “the labor movement here is so much younger, it's still having growing pains and is in an earlier stage of development.”⁴² If the state's Republicans were becoming ever more organized and coordinated in this period, the Democrats and their natural allies in liberal interest groups and labor represented a plethora of competing clusters, factions, and organizations. In the words of one activist, “California Democrats are over-organized. For a party which has been so conspicuously unsuccessful at the polls this is a curious condition; but the fact is that the political landscape teems with unnecessary committees, councils, coordinating groups, and groups to coordinate the coordinators.”⁴³ The fact that California had missed out on the organizational discipline brought about elsewhere in the country during the New Deal would make life extremely difficult for those on the left in the years after the war, but it would also allow for the development of a new movement of liberals in the 1950s predicated on ideological and organizational premises developed after the war. It is this contradiction that is the subject of the pages that follow.

The Democratic Party was in California a political party in name only. It was in practice a collection of local fiefdoms, county committees, activist groups that often included communists and fellow-travelers, some labor affiliates, all presided over by a state central committee that was split into two to satisfy the longstanding rivalry between the northern and southern California leadership. There were even rival fund-raising outfits in the 1950s to satisfy the power hunger of various warring factions. In some areas a strong personality would establish control over a local area and become the conduit for political patronage, such as Bill Malone in San Francisco, but in most areas individuals launched themselves into political campaigns for office without much in the way of centralized control. “From choice or necessity,” reported political scientist Currin Shields in 1954, “most Democratic nominees campaigned as individuals, rather than as Party men; they raised their own funds and recruited their workers on a personal basis, with little organizational help. Some professed leaders of the Party with fair consistency supported Republican candidates, and generally tried to work both sides of the political street.”⁴⁴ A Democrat in Berkeley informed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) chairman James Loeb that there was “no cohesion within the party; there is, in fact, no party in the real sense. What the party consists of is a loose business alliance between various clots of opportunists who congeal about local ‘strongmen.' And the liberals in the Party prefer to align themselves with these clots rather than seek through collective action to build a liberal force in the state.”⁴⁵ Democratic State committeeman Roger Kent, a central figure in party politics in the 1950s, recalled his run for congress in 1950 in the First District, which ran from Marin all the way up the coast to the Oregon border: “there was absolutely no Democratic organization whatsoever in the first district—there were two or three counties that didn't have any county committees at all. There were a couple of committees—Humboldt and Sonoma—that were controlled by actual communists, and I don't use that word lightly.”⁴⁶ While the Republican Party could benefit from a long history of dominance of the political system in California and the use since the 1930s of an organization, the Republican Assembly, designed to secure preprimary endorsements of favored candidates, the Democrats had no disciplining force and little organizational zeal in the late 1940s. The fact that the GOP had dominated legislative politics for so long had also allowed Republican legislators to build links with labor organizations as well as with business interests, and had constructed a coalition of the state's different socioeconomic factions within a single party.

The power of the left in California radical politics in the 1930s and 1940s had invigorated some of the CIO and AFL unions in their fight for better conditions, and had created an array of enthused activists in a host of civil rights and political organizations such as the civil Rights congress in Los Angeles.⁴⁷ But in an increasingly hostile political climate such radicalism could become a political liability. Not only would it open liberal and leftist political actors to the accusation of communist sympathy at a time when such accusations were politically devastating, but it also forced them into a preoccupation with the question of the legacy of the popular front that had implications for their future.

The labor movement, in particular, was in the late 1940s reeling from the twin pressures of bitter internal divisions over the legacy of the popular front and its peculiar relationship with the two main political parties in California. The November 1947 meeting of the state CIO demonstrated the damaging schism appearing within organized labor over the putative third party challenge to President Truman over the question of communism and the nation's relationship with the Soviet Union. Some unions, led by CIO state secretary Bjorne Halling of the ILWU, remained popular front advocates, and in many cases were overtly communist-led. Others rallied to the resolution of the United Steel Workers, led by anticommunist John Despol, that stated that the “so-called Independent Progressive Party is neither independent nor progressive. Instead, it is more accurately described as a ‘Trojan Horse' party under the control of the fellow-travelers of the reactionary American agents who, consciously or unconsciously, work for the establishment of a world police state which would deny the individual dignity of man.” Though the open challenge to Halling's leadership was defeated at the Santa Cruz meeting, the San Francisco News noted that a “growing influence of a rightist faction was apparent at the four-day session.”⁴⁸ By mid-1948, CIO national chair Philip Murray had initiated a purge of communist-dominated unions from the organization, symbolized in California by Murray's removal of Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) as northern director of the California CIO.⁴⁹

The difficult political position of labor in California was underscored by an examination of the role of the much larger California Federation of Labor (CFL) in the postwar years.⁵⁰ In the crucial election year of 1950, in which James Roosevelt was running for governor on an unashamedly left-of-center platform and Helen Douglas was struggling to help maintain the liberal forces' tenuous hold on the U.S. Senate, a key battleground in the fight to do something about Taft-Hartley, the Federation's League for Political Education held its first formal preprimary endorsing convention. As political parties were forbidden from endorsing primary candidates, and since the Democrats had not yet managed to establish their own equivalent to the Republican Assembly, the role of organized labor in giving guidance to its membership on whom to support could be significant in determining the future direction of state politics. This fact was not lost on the national director of the AFL'S political action wing, Joe Keenan, who told the assembled convention in San Francisco in April that the “year of 1950 is all-important for American labor. The labor movements of the whole world are watching us, and we are going into the bitterest campaign in the history of this country.” Keenan fiercely attacked Richard Nixon for distorting a debate about the future of the New Deal into one about communism, noting the devastating impact anticommunism had already had on primary elections in Florida and North Carolina, as well as on labor's chances of toppling the author of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. “We in Washington,” he told the California delegates, “hope to get enough information to you so that you can acquaint the people with the laws that the American Federation of Labor is concerned with…laws such as social security, minimum wage, aid to education, housing, and, most of all, health insurance.”⁵¹ The battles for Fair Deal measures such as federal health insurance and against Taft-Hartley had further welded together the political fortunes of labor and the Democratic Party, and in some respects the San Francisco meeting of the AFL'S California membership reflected this development: Helen Douglas and James Roosevelt both gained labor's blessing, and both addressed the assembled throng. “My fight has been your fight,” proclaimed Douglas in an impassioned speech, “and I will continue to work for the economic bill of rights that President Roosevelt outlined for us: a decent home for every family; a job at a decent wage; the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act [loud applause]; the extension of the social security program; the extension of our educational opportunities for young people; the realization of our civil liberties for all the people.”⁵²

In the topsy-turvy world of California politics, however, the growing realization that organized labor would have to work with the Democratic Party to offset the impact of the revitalization of the private business community gave way to the realities of political patronage on the West coast. At the same time as Roosevelt and Douglas were giving their fighting speeches in defense of liberal principles and the legacy of the New Deal, the convention was voting to endorse all incumbent assemblymen and state senators—of either party— seen to be “friendly” to organized labor. More controversially, a vocal minority on the convention floor objected to the endorsement of Pat Brown for the office of attorney general. Brown, a prominent San Francisco Democrat and the city's district attorney, seemingly had the best chance of a Democratic victory in that difficult year: his Republican opponent, Fred Howser, had served a term in office beset by scandal, to the extent that Governor Warren was openly encouraging primary challengers. Howser had, however, made decisions deemed by many in the California Federation of Labor as favorable, and in a state in which established Republican patronage, however unreliable, was seen as far more valuable to union members than a commitment to an untested opponent, it was no surprise when the floor voted by 79,961 to 40,296 to override the leadership's recommendation and endorse Howser.⁵³ It would not be the last time such a controversy would distract the assembled gathering from the realization that gathering crumbs from the Republican Party's table was not helping place labor's concerns at the center of the political agenda in California. In 1950, in any case, the convention's achievements could be summed up by the fact that while labor's champions Douglas and Roosevelt were suffering ignominious defeats, Howser had lost the Republican primary to Ed Shattuck, who in turn became the only statewide victim of a Democratic victory that year when he lost to rising star, and future champion of organized labor, Pat Brown.⁵⁴

Hope Mendoza Schechter, a leading figure in the garment workers' union and Democratic activist in a predominantly Latino part of southeastern Los Angeles, recalled with frustration the political ambivalence of the AFL in her neighborhood and statewide: “CIO—you could almost bank on Democratic endorsements—but not AFL. That was touch and go and a lot of politicking and a lot of work, in order to swing meaningful endorsements for Democrats.” She was determined to build up a liberal Democratic movement in her overwhelmingly working class district, but found her union leadership unwilling to ruffle the feathers of Republican contacts in Sacramento, including Fred Howser: “In the nineteenth congressional district, I maintained a totally Democratic headquarters…. I remember going to a central Labor council meeting…and [ILGWU Director of Public Relations and Education Sigmund Arywitz had] bounced me off…because I had worked for Pat Brown. The irony is that Pat Brown later appointed him commissioner of Labor.” Schechter argued that labor's reluctance to be more daring in its efforts to shape state politics frustrated ambitious and hard-working activists like her. The leadership “were being opportunistic. They knew [a Republican] was going to win anyway, and so they might just as well—there was no sense in fighting it…. I just took the position that they could have gone for no endorsement and that way, leave those of us who want to retain a few ideals, a little flexibility. This other way…your hands were tied.”⁵⁵ The AFL endorsement process often did refuse to endorse Republicans if they were antilabor or had overwhelmingly conservative records, but in many cases the conventions in the early 1950s were plagued by disputes between delegates over whether or not to endorse both Republican and Democratic candidates in a district where both were friendly to labor, or whether to withhold endorsement in cases where insufficient information about candidates had been made available.⁵⁶ California Labor League for Political Education (CLLPE) secretary c. J. Haggerty even confessed in his speech to the 1952 convention to being “almost nauseated” by the choice of endorsements for the State Legislature. comments from the floor were more categorical: “I have looked through these endorsements,” said one delegate, “and I think in very few instances are we going to be at battle with the chamber of commerce or the Merchants and Manufacturers. In many instances I think we are going to be in the same corner with them…. It seems to me that we have reached not the basic fundamentals of ‘rewarding our friends and defeating our enemies,' but a placating of the powers-that-be in the spirit of ‘we will be nice to you if you will be nice to us.'” The delegate noted that Earl Warren, praised in the league political newsletter, had signed the reapportionment bill, and that re-apportionment along GOP-approved lines “is going to do us more harm than any acts that the Legislature passed during the 1951 session.”⁵⁷ It was certainly true that absence of a natural alliance between organized labor and a New Deal-dominated political establishment made the prospects of an amicable settlement of industrial relations questions particularly unlikely in California as the 1950s wore on.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of agricultural labor, a thorny political question that perfectly demonstrated the enormous gulf separating the wealthy and well-connected from the poor and politically powerless. Huge landholdings inherited from Spanish and Mexican grants or from awards to railroads made California by the late nineteenth century ahead of its time in the development of massive agribusiness operations as the principal producers of farmed goods. British observer James Bryce in his American Commonwealth in the 1880s commented that “the land system in California presents features both peculiar and dangerous, a contrast between great properties, often appearing to conflict with the general weal, and the sometimes hard pressed small farmer, together with a mass of unsettled labor, thrown without work into the towns at certain times of the year.”⁵⁸ Landowners could depend upon a ready supply of immigrant labor from Asia and Mexico as well as periodic waves of domestic unemployed pushed westward by economic crisis or drought. High capitalization costs for enormous holdings concentrating on single crops necessitated a flexible, mobile labor force that could be rapidly increased at harvest times and then reduced out of season.⁵⁹ The economic realities of California agriculture created a system in which a small number of wealthy landowners controlled the economic well-being of hundreds of thousands of rural poor who held little political sway and who in many cases were not even American citizens, thereby condemning them to the status of indentured wage slaves at the mercy of the needs of their employers and their allies in government.

The politics of farm labor conspired with the economic factors to leave rural workers outside the protective umbrella of progressive governance well into the post-World War II era. A riot at the Durst Brothers Hop Ranch in Wheatland in 1913 brought the plight of rural laborers into the public eye and prompted the recently established California commission of Immigration and Housing to inspect labor camps “with the object in view of rendering the immigrant that protection to which he is entitled,” and the legislature gave the commission funds and a remit to attempt to force an improvement in camp conditions.⁶⁰ An improvement in living arrangements and sanitation in the camps was seen as the solution to the farm labor problem; happier, healthier workers would be less prone to riot or strike, and social peace would be restored. The larger question of the economic status of lowly paid, seasonal workers was never addressed, and there was no direct organizational link between government and the agricultural workforce to match the development of labor unions for industrial workers. Indeed, despite efforts in the 1930s to unionize and politicize farm labor, it quickly became clear that differences of ethnicity, citizenship, and patterns of work in the fields rendered agriculture a far cry from urban industry in its place in the economic structure.⁶¹ Progressive politics in California saw questions of labor relations and economic inequality as individual technical problems to be addressed on a case by case basis. Without a coherent ideological worldview to unite elected politicians and the economically disenfranchised it was difficult to see how the overall position of farm workers could be improved.

In the 1940s the question of the economic and political position of farm workers gained new salience with the passage of the bracero law in 1942 and the decision of the AFL-affiliated National Farm Workers' Union to organize in California in early 1947. The wartime pressure for maximum agricultural production led to leaders of agribusiness to press congress into allowing the legal importation of Mexican farm labor into the United States, initially on an emergency basis but extended indefinitely in 1951. The bracero program was also supported by a ready supply of illegal immigrant labor that made it virtually impossible for labor organizers to exert upward pressure on wages, as farm owners increasingly turned away from a reliance on domestic labor in order to ensure complete employment flexibility and to keep wages low. Out of some half million people involved in harvesting crops in California in the 1940s, only about 140,000 were local day wage laborers, meaning that imported labor constituted much of the rest. “Vast differences in culture and ethos separated [braceros, domestics, and illegals] despite their common class status as rural proletarians,” wrote Ernesto Galarza, farm labor organizer in the NFLU in the late 1940s. “Significant savings in the wage outlay for harvesting became possible by discarding domestics and lowering wage scales to more economical ratios with fertilizer, machinery, fuel, and other non-human inputs.”⁶² Rivalries between domestics and non-U.S. citizens for jobs undermined efforts to create solidarity over issues of pay and conditions, and the flexibility of the bracero system allowed owners and managers to circumvent unionization efforts by firing striking workers and bringing in extra imported labor.

The first serious effort by the NFLU to make headway in California was the strike at the DiGiorgio ranch in 1947, but the protracted and bitter dispute over union recognition at the largest estate in the central Valley revealed serious political roadblocks to the union's goal of transforming working conditions in the farming heartland of the state. The problem was not just one of supply and demand—the fact that the availability of cheap and willing labor outweighed the number of workers willing to strike—it was also one of political power. Not only did Robert DiGiorgio benefit from the support of local officials in Kern county, including the sheriff, the Board of Supervisors, and the justice of the peace, but he also drew upon larger reserves of political patronage at the state level, and knew that the weight of legislative and legal machinery could be brought to bear.⁶³ Membership of the state board of agriculture, for instance, was restricted to leading figures in the Farm Bureau, the Associated Farmers, grower-shipper associations, and business leaders, all hostile to union organizing.⁶⁴ Farm owners had almost exclusive access to state and federal officials who implemented and managed the bracero agreements with Mexico, allowing them to write wage agreements and dictate the terms of the program to their advantage. And when in the wake of the unsuccessful DiGiorgio strike the NFLU and AFL organized a boycott to pressurize owners into recognizing the union, DiGiorgio's lawyers filed suit against the boycotters, invoking the ban on secondary boycotts in the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act despite the fact that agricultural labor was excluded from federal collective bargaining legislation. Agricultural labor was thus deprived of the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act but victim of its antistrike provisions, testimony to the major imbalance in New Deal-era industrial relations law between employers and employees.⁶⁵

The very limited success of the farm worker organizing movement in the late 1940s demonstrated the vital need for a shift in the wider political climate in California at Mid-Century. Without the integration of farm labor into the protective embrace of collective bargaining, minimum wage, and prospective fair employment legislation, the scope for a substantive shift in living conditions on the land in the Golden State remained severely limited, regardless of grassroots organizing activity. Existing power structures in the era of Earl Warren had no incentive to challenge the dominance of grower elites in the central and Imperial Valleys, and the California Federation of Labor, keen to keep its place at the legislative table in Sacramento and to head off any attempts to roll back its political influence, was by the early 1950s wary of getting too involved in new organizing drives.⁶⁶ What was lacking was a language of social inclusion in political discourse at the state level that could embrace farm workers in its legislative and ideological agenda. It would take a new generational of political activists who, on the face of it, had nothing in common with those toiling in the fields to change the landscape of California politics in ways that could open the door at least to a consideration of farm labor as part of a broader question of social citizenship in the 1950s.