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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
Building the Democratic Party in the 1940s
The California Democratic Party needed a message and a program in order to unite all left-of-center interests in the state behind its banner and thus establish a genuine political choice for the public and set up the terms of debate in the postwar years. The difficulties it faced in achieving this task also point up reasons why it would become one of the most radical in reshaping its political perspective during the 1950s and 1960s: liberal political ideology was being thrashed out within the Democratic party hierarchy and in activist organizations against a backdrop of a strong popular front tradition in leftist politics, a powerful antistatist opposition against which to define itself, and a lack of established channels of Democratic patronage of the type that dampened political ambition and radicalism elsewhere. The Democratic political project of the postwar decades that is the subject of this book would unfold anew out of the political circumstances of the very late 1940s and 1950s.
Engaging the Popular Front
When James Roosevelt took over the leadership of the state party in late 1946, he found a party in turmoil, reeling from bitter attacks from business interests and the Republican political establishment, and convulsed by political divisions over the role of communists in the coalition of the left in California. The party's troubles were hardly unique, and in fact California voting patterns in the mid-1940s reflected national trends: the Democrats did relatively well in 1944, carrying the state for the presidential ticket and winning nine of the twenty-three congressional districts and the Senate seat, albeit by narrow margins. In 1946, as elsewhere, the party did appallingly badly, losing five congressional seats, the Senate race, and also failing to win their own primary in the gubernatorial race.1 But there was more to the party's problems than just national ennui directed at the unpopular Truman administration. For every account of a political house party, public meeting, or Young Democrat group was a story that told a very different tale: a Democratic party in Alameda county, which contained over 200,000 registered Democrats in the late 1940s, that could not get a quorum at its meetings; county committees that never met; bitter infighting among members of the state central committee over some members' links to communists and supporters of the Progressive citizens of America and other fellow-traveler groups.2 Fresh from his comprehensive drubbing at the hands of a conservative Republican in the Seventh congressional District in Oakland in 1946, Democratic candidate and prominent Alameda businessman Patrick McDonough put the blame for the party's electoral disaster squarely on the dissident left-wing elements in the party who had been using it as a popular front vehicle since the 1930s. “The election did not come out as perhaps we all wished,” he wrote a business associate, “but as for myself, I do not regret the outcome. The political situation here in California for us Democrats is very much confused. This defeat permits all of us to take a stand and begin inviting those whose views and actions do not harmonize with the best interests of the Democratic Party and our form of government to disassociate themselves from our party, and perhaps the best thing would be to form a party of their own. With this group we are always in danger of losing with their help.”3 Despite the fact that fellow traveler organizations such as the Hollywood branch of the Independent citizens' committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP) had participated in voter registration drives, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and had authored an FEPC ballot initiative, as well as endorsing favored liberal candidates publicly to their membership, they had not been able to prevent the Republican tide. Nor had they been able to convince enough registered Democrats that their gubernatorial candidate, soon to be Wallaceite Robert Kenny, was a preferable candidate to Earl Warren, nor that Representative Ellis Patterson, a known fellow traveler, should win the party's Senate nomi-nation.4 After the 1946 political massacre, it was not hard to see why liberal but establishment figures like McDonough saw the popular front hue of the California Democratic party as fatal to the party's political fortunes.
Roosevelt saw things differently. He had been involved in the ICCASP, had seen the power of leftist factions in Los Angeles politics in the late 1930s and during the war when he had worked his way up through the party hierarchy, and had also seen the impact of the dead hand of conservative bosses on the party's fortunes. He saw the year 1947 as a chance to attempt to unite the party's warring factions through a reorganization of the delegate selection system to the national convention to make it more representative of the membership, and the drawing up of a state manifesto that could serve to give energy and direction to the faithful in advance of the 1948 elections. Writing the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, J. Howard McGrath, in October 1947 about the proposed changes to the delegate selection system, he argued that his aim had been “to secure for President Truman the broadest and most representative backing of the liberals and progressives who joined the Democratic Party from 1932 through 1945. These people joined the Democratic Party because they knew it was not dominated by financial interests or by special interests such as oil, as the Republican Party has always been…. A majority of us…made a successful beginning to eliminate the influence of this small minority of conservative element and have devoted the intervening months in bringing our party as close as possible to the people.” He was careful to underline his opposition to those flocking to the third party candidacy of Henry Wallace that was developing steam in late 1947: “Regardless of how difficult the road may be we shall continue our efforts to make the Democratic Party in California a true home for all liberals and progressives who believe in the basic principles of the New Deal.”5
This delicate balancing act between placating potential Wallace supporters and the party's established leadership explained Roosevelt's decision to create a policy committee to draw up a manifesto for the party's meeting in Los Angeles at the end of July 1947. The message was clear: California did not need a third party as long as the Democratic Party reaffirmed its commitment to extending and expanding the New Deal. The statement of policy was unashamedly left-of-center, but there were repeated references to the need to achieve economic and social equality through “the American form of democracy,” a clear jibe at popular front elements who looked to the Soviet Union in an overly romantic fashion. In an attempt to keep such elements within the broad church of the Democratic Party, however, there was reference to the need to reserve the use of armed force only against a “proven aggressor” and the principles of atomic power sharing, an idea already abandoned in Washington, were restated. The overall message was a wakeup call for those worried that the Democrats were losing their radical edge: “We frankly state that, in our increasingly complex economic and social system, we believe that it will become more and more necessary for us to plan as a people. We contend that it is only through intelligent and far-sighted planning on the part of our state and national governments that we can cope with the problems facing us, that we can bring a greater share of prosperity to more people, indeed that in the long term we can survive as a people.” There were commitments to a large public housing program “for that section of our population which private enterprise cannot reach,” to racial equality in employment, to a state agency “to assist in the providing of work in the event that such individuals are unable to obtain jobs in the private enterprise system,” to “a fair and adequate health program in cooperation with the forward-looking members of the medical profession in California.” The list of Democratic goals also included a commitment to a minimum income for the elderly of $65 a month, to a rapid transit system in major cities, and concluded with the robust statement that the party would “go forward in its traditional liberal and progressive spirit.”6 Liberals like Roosevelt knew that the party did not have the upper hand in California politics, but argued that an enthusiastic statement of principles would send Democrats into the crucial 1948 elections with enthusiasm and present a united front against the Republicans.
In some respects the strategy seemed to work. Patrick McDonough claimed to be delighted by the July convention, arguing that “the opposition to our President was practically eliminated, particularly the Kenny forces.” The statement of policy had been overwhelmingly endorsed by a vote of 179 to 19, and the anti-Truman forces had been brought to heel by a platform that had been impossible to oppose. “I think from now on the true Democratic Party in California knows where it stands and will work harmoniously to-gether.”7 Such optimism was to be short-lived, and McDonough himself had predicted the reasons before the convention when he objected to the idea of a policy statement. In a strongly worded letter to Roosevelt's policy chairman George Outland, a recently defeated representative from Santa Barbara, he argued that nothing could unite the party except the purging of the far left and the establishment of better campaign organization in the run-up to Truman's reelection effort. “There is only one thing of importance to Democrats today,” he wrote. “That is the election of President Truman in 1948. With him will go the failure of the Democratic Party for 50 years.”8 McDonough had already asked Roosevelt to concentrate on organizing the party along the lines the Republicans had done with the Republican Assembly, using a proxy group to endorse candidates, purge extremists from the ranks, and energize the party's base. “Such an organization would help us in getting votes, acquiring practical workers, and would bring political brains into our party that are now not able to find a place in the Democratic organization,” he wrote in February. “This Democratic Assembly would be in a position to endorse candidates to the end that most of our imbroglio would be eliminated.”9
Outland and Roosevelt took a different view, arguing that a strong ideological statement of policy would help convince Californians to back the party, and that a debate within party ranks over policy would revitalize a demoralized organization. Outland asserted that voters had “every right to ask that the Democratic leadership in this state develop a clear-cut statement of its stand on the problems that face the state and nation. Unless such a position is taken how can any intelligent person be in a position to align himself in the ranks of any political party?”10 Underlying Outland's argument was the tacit assertion that it was better to use policy statements to try to maintain harmony in the ranks than to use organizational structures to carry out a putsch of problematic factions.
As it would turn out in the following decade both Outland and McDonough were right: left-of-center politics would emerge out of the shadows due to a new combination of tighter organization and greater ideological unity. A rethinking of the party's political role and its organizational structure in the particular context of the late 1940s and early 1950s would provide the party in California with a unique springboard to political power with a new, postwar political agenda. This was not immediately clear in 1948. Henry Wallace announced his presidential candidacy in the pages of the New Republic in January, and the divisions within the Democratic Party over what to do about the deep unpopularity of President Truman in the party and the country affected the California party with particular force because of its internal divisions concerning foreign policy and the popular front.11 One Berkeley Democrat informed Roosevelt that she was “deeply concerned about the breach in our party ranks over Foreign Policy which appears to be widening each day…. Never have we so needed to be united to combat anti-American activities which are threatening to disrupt our party and our real democracy.”12 Patrick McDonough, having initially welcomed the Wallace candidacy because to McDonough his supporters had been “like lye in our drinking water and their leaving has left the water purified,” was by March despairing that the Roosevelt leadership were refusing to make a total break from the party's popular front past and support Truman.13 In March the leadership withdrew the affidavit commitment of the membership to support Truman for renomination at the national convention, acting on the assumption, common in party circles nationwide in the spring, that there would be a popular challenger to the president, the name Eisenhower often cropping up in debate. McDonough, however, saw State chairman Roosevelt's actions as a futile attempt to keep the Wallace wing of the party loyal, whereas he and some others such as State Vice-chairman John McEnery “felt that we were dealing with a political rattlesnake and instead of helping him rattle his buttons, we should de-fang him if possible or at least fail in the attempt before he slithered off and did additional harm to the Democratic Party.” McDonough formally broke with Roosevelt over the Truman loyalty issue in mid-1948, noting sadly that since early 1947 “no serious attempt has been made to organize the Democratic Party in California, but you have at all times displayed a genius to promote bickering and disunity.”14
McDonough became the eyes and ears of the Truman campaign back in Washington, corresponding with members of the Democratic National committee and with Truman's campaign chairman J. Howard McGrath. In part people like McDonough were simply party loyalists, and in part they felt that the Truman administration was as much committed to the legacy of the New Deal as anyone else and should not be unceremoniously dumped. McDonough had as little time for Republicans as he did Wallace supporters, claiming that “the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is as wide as between the Republican and communist parties, except that both the Republican and Democratic Party are interested in the United States only and are not seeking to be affiliated with Russia.” For chief Wallace supporter in California Bob Kenny he had brutal words about the nature of the Wallace movement: “Your associates are rodents of the sewer variety. They were great CIOers when the CIO served their interests. Few of them are for labor. That phase of their activity is a cloak to cover their sinister objectives. None of them joined a union until 1936. I joined a union when I was 16. They believe in the same type of unions that can be found in Russia.”15 Publicly, at least, the vast majority of California Democrats echoed his sentiments. “The only cheering for the third party,” Roosevelt declared in a speech to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner of the Democrats of Tacoma, Washington, “comes from the Kremlin. The complete hypocrisy of the third party is proved by its insistence on running candidates in Illinois, Minnesota, and California against men whose records prove beyond any doubt their long-term adherence to liberal and progressive principles.”16
In the event, the 1948 elections defied all expectations from right and left and produced a convincing victory for President Truman. Though California demonstrated the hybrid character of its leftist politics in providing the second highest tally for Wallace, around a million votes, Truman carried the state by a narrow margin over Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. Party loyalists put this down to Truman's barnstorming appearances as much as to efforts by the local party, McDonough commenting that when “it is considered that we have approximately one million majority of Democrats and the net result is that we came out with a 17,000 vote lead something is putrid with the Democratic leadership.”17 But a Democratic victory against concerted Republican and Progressive Party opposition in California was a remarkable achievement. Though many in the fractious and divided California party did not realize it, their convulsions over the Wallace candidacy, and their drive to build political campaigns without the benefit of a long-established power base in the state, were setting the scene for a reworking of the party's political faith and alliances in the years that followed. An examination of the attempt to build up grassroots liberal organizations in the early Cold War, together with an analysis of the political impact of the campaigns of Jimmy Roosevelt and Helen Douglas for governor and senator in 1950, demonstrates the importance of the travails of the late 1940s in building a political revolution in the 1950s.
Building a Liberal Movement in California, 1945-1950
The fact that the political world of the California left was preoccupied in the 1940s with divisions over communist influence within its ranks meant that activists, intellectuals, political operators, and elected officials were forced to define what exactly being on the left entailed. We have already seen how politicians like Roosevelt and Henry Wallace frequently used terms like “liberal” and “progressive” interchangeably. Yet in the battles for supremacy among the heirs to the New Deal, their political tussles were implicitly pushing them all toward a new definition of liberalism for a postwar age. This was by no means a clearly defined or straightforward process. Some fellow traveler groups, such as the Democratic Club of Burbank, saw their raison d'être as nothing more than to promote the Soviet foreign policy line, as in their March 1946 resolution at the meeting of the Los Angeles branch of the National Citizens' PAC that the United States should “desist from needling, baiting, and antagonizing Russia, a country that has always been a sincere friend to the United States.”18 Others saw the particular demands of the booming postwar California economy and the state's insatiable demand for water, power, and urban growth to fuel that expansion as a green light for a rethinking of what it meant to be a “liberal.” A member of the Berkeley Democratic club claimed to be “working with the Farmer-Labor-consumer Association on central Valley Project matters…. We are making a drive for the establishment of an Authority which will function along TVA lines.”19 Others, like Jimmy Roosevelt and George Outland, tried to steer an uncertain course between maintaining the broad church of a party that included the far left and the anti-New Deal right and setting out a political stall that saw the Four Freedoms and FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights as clarion calls for a reengagement with the promise of the New Deal. All, however, faced a new political climate after the war without the inherited baggage of at least a decade in the political driving seat, in contrast to Democrats and labor leaders on the East coast or chicago.20
National leaders of the American liberal movement had during the war established organizations that had the potential to establish a foothold on the West coast. The Union for Democratic Action (UDA), for example, had been created in 1941 as an organ of left-of-center political action to help act as an aide to New Deal politicians during the war. AFL political director Nelson Cruickshank was one of many who felt that such an organization had even more significance after the war, particularly given the increasingly obvious splits between the UDA and its fellow traveler offshoot, the Progressive citizens of America, since 1944. “In the belief that there is today more than ever a need for some agency with which those having a liberal point of view on social and economic problems can work unitedly and which at the same time will not fall for the fake liberalism of the ‘united front' organizations and become a tool of the communist Party, a number of us are doing what we can to strengthen the Union for Democratic Action,” Cruickshank wrote his California counterpart c. J. Haggerty in July 1946.21 Many in California welcomed developments back in Washington, particularly in the wake of the local party's bruising internal fight over the 1946 primary nominations, which had exposed the growing chasm within the party over the issue of communism. “Progressive organizations took a tremendous setback in the recent California primaries,” wrote a Beverly Hills party member in June. “The most glaring example was the all-out drive to get over Ellis E. Patterson [for senator]. Patterson, a good man in many ways, nevertheless had a bad record of anti-Roosevelt and anti-preparedness activity in the period when Stalin and Hitler were honeymooning…. The communist handful got their comeuppance—but the real wounds were those suffered by the Progressive cause in California.” UDA chairman James Loeb responded positively, noting that he had sent a senior UDA member out to California to help organize the liberal movement there, and that he was “confident that the UDA idea will be well-received,” predicting that “it won't take too long before it is the top organization of its kind hereabouts.”22
Nathalie Panek arrived in San Francisco in July to spend the whole summer meeting local Democrats, labor leaders, and activist groups to see whether the UDA umbrella could unite the center-left in the face of daunting postwar political challenges. “California is different,” she mused to a San Francisco newspaperman as she prepared to travel west. “However, in the national office we reason that regardless of how things seem in your sunny state we think there must be some good live liberals who are not slavish followers of the policy of the Soviet Union. I think nothing would be so helpful to us in the national office as to have lively chapters in San Francisco and Los Angeles which could talk back to the CP on the home front and give a little courage to the California delegation who would prefer not to follow Uncle Joe at every turn.”23
It was soon clear, as was the case with left-wing parties across the industrialized world in the 1940s, that noncommunist leftists had to travel a precarious path between the popular front and capitalism. UC Santa Barbara professor Harry Girvetz, a key intellectual figure in the building up of the UDA and its successor, Americans for Democratic Action, on the West coast, noted in September 1946 that the UDA was coming under attack from left-wing sources for being “too engrossed in battling the CP to the detriment of its positive program. This is a real danger which an organization which excludes communists always courts.”24 Still, the January 1947 meeting in Washington that established Americans for Democratic Action as a new national organization of liberals represented at least an effort to come to terms with the collapse of the popular front and a determination among New Dealers to redefine their political agenda. The launch of the new organization, attended by some of the liberal movement's leading lights and up-and-coming stars, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Chester Bowles, Philip Murray, and Hubert Humphrey, provided a new focus for followers of the New Deal in an uncertain political climate.25 Its statement of principles underscored the perceived need to re-brand New Deal politics for the postwar period: “We hold that private enterprise must be controlled only to the extent necessary for fulfilling two basic requirements: the realization of our full productive potentialities, with provision for adequate leisure; the withdrawal from private individuals of economic power so great that it enables them to dominate government and thereby to subvert democracy.”26 This commitment to a form of Keynesian economic management and to standard New and Fair Deal policies such as social security, federal health insurance, the minimum wage, and public housing was coupled with a new and robust commitment to civil rights and to anticommunism.
Initially it seemed as though the ADA would provide an important rallying point for the demoralized left in California. Many major figures in state politics, including labor leader John Despol and Representative Chet Holifield, became members, and a concerted effort was made to set up local chapters across the state to sign up members, hold meetings, and maintain interest in New Deal-type issues. In Los Angeles four chapters sprang up in early 1947, and in July Jeri Despol, wife of CIO leader John, wrote Panek that they had established an office on West Seventh Street downtown. “We have a small foyer and one small room and a telephone,” she reported, “but we are gradually getting organized.” Despol was optimistic about the new organization's prospects: “we must have a chapter organized in each Congressional district, with at least 50 new members in each one by the 15th of September.”27 The Los Angeles chapters were soon forced to amalgamate into one, but the local ADA played host to prominent British Labor Party politician Jennie Lee in late fall 1947, and to Hubert Humphrey, then the pioneering liberal mayor of Minneapolis and ADA leading light, in October, attended by over 700 people and raising $224 for the LA chapter.28 Local socialites such as Melvyn and Helen Douglas and Democratic political fixer Paul Ziffren held cocktail parties and pool parties at their homes and invited ADA members to attend and help swell the group's financial coffers, as well as providing a taste of political activism for actors and screenwriters such as Ronald Reagan and Myrna Loy.29
Harry Girvetz, head of a thriving chapter in Santa Barbara centered on the university, reported to Washington regularly on local events, informing national director James Loeb in late 1947 that Jennie Lee's visit had been “an overwhelming success. It has definitely established us as a powerful force in the community. More than 600 people turned out to hear her at the famous Lobrero Theatre, despite a football game. Had it not been for the latter we'd have had to turn them away…. The Santa Barbara chapter is thriving and more vigorous than ever. We're trying at this time to organize another chapter in our sister city of Ventura.” The Santa Barbara chapter soon became a model of ADA organization, raising funds regularly through the invitation of guest speakers and the holding of events such as rummage sales and drinks parties and thereby paying its way without the need for heavy subsidies from Washington.30 Santa Barbara's experience suggested that even if the official Democratic Party and the state's labor unions remained in disarray in this period, activist organizations such as ADA chapters had the potential to provide new energy and life to left-of-center politics in California in the postwar years.
Faced with the challenge of a Republican Party and pro-business establishment that dominated California politics, the other side of the political spectrum needed more than speaker meetings and garage sales to make a serious impact on the political landscape. Though James Q. Wilson's contemporary analysis of grassroots “amateur” politics applied to Democratic clubs in a slightly later period, it could just as well have described the problems faced by ADA affiliates and even local chapters of the ACLU in the late 1940s: “The amateur club movement is, with few exceptions, a middle class phenomenon. In the long run this, more than its factionalism, will probably prove to be its single greatest weakness.”31 ADA chapters were effectively talking shops for those already committed to New Deal politics, and rarely were they able to coordinate their activities with local welfare rights protests in cities like Oakland, or grapple with the reasons why figures like California Eagle publisher and prominent African American Charlotta Bass ran for vice president on the Progressive ticket in 1952.32 In any case, few ADA groups were as successful as the Santa Barbara chapter. An ADA national board member complained in 1950 that the organization had “probably put as much into the state as we have in any other state outside of New York and with embarrassing results.”33 The San Francisco chapter collapsed in 1951 after it became apparent that its leader was using the group as a powerbase for a personal rivalry with local Democratic Party chieftain Bill Malone, going so far as to endorse a Republican for city supervisor without consulting the local membership and appointing a notorious red-baiting ex-communist to the committee.34 Girvetz reported in 1951 that he was struggling to help reestablish the Los Angeles chapter after finding it “in a state of complete collapse…. The executive committee had many vacancies, met rarely, and meetings were badly attended…. ADA had become synonymous with failure in the area and a kind of laughing stock.” Furthermore, the chapter's principal financial patron, Gifford Phillips, editor of Frontier, was widely distrusted by the national leadership and local anticommunists as a fellow traveler. Los Angeles chapter member Abraham Held referred to the Phillips group, including chapter president Kenneth Brown, as having “played footsie with the Communist fellow-travelers on the County Central Committee.”35 In a state experiencing a massive wave of in-migration and in which few settled in one home for long, ADA chapters could serve as a useful social club or a jumping off point into local politics. They could not, however, function as a political party surrogate that could reach beyond the middle class and high society salons of Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara and provide concrete legislative solutions to California's major political problems.
A forum like ADA was nevertheless a useful conduit for the sharing of ideas and the development of a new sense of purpose for those worried about the resurgence of anti-New Deal Republicanism after the war. Evidence for the tentative emergence of a broad political agenda for postwar liberalism in California came from Harry Girvetz in his scholarship as a professor of philosophy and sociology. Although hardly as well known in later years as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Talcott Parsons, his role as leader of the more successful branches of Americans for Democratic Action in the state and his involvement in Democratic politics made him a good example of an intellectual who also used his ideas in the political arena. He would later advise the Pat Brown administration on welfare policy, and so provides the sort of link between intellectual developments and practical politics that is of concern here. Girvetz articulated a political vision that was expansive enough to adapt to changing social attitudes over the next half century, and this vision would increasingly mould the character of the Democratic Party as it struggled to come to terms with a new political landscape in the postwar years.
Girvetz published his major work on political philosophy: From Wealth to Welfare: The Evolution of Liberalism in 1950, the same year in which British professor of social policy Richard Titmuss published his groundbreaking study of the dynamics of social policy in wartime Britain, Problems of Social Policy. Both Girvetz and Titmuss would feature as intellectual policy experts cited in deliberations of policy formulators in California after the election of a Democratic administration in 1958, and so a consideration of the intellectual revolution on the left in the early 1950s at a time when the political fortunes of Democratic liberals and Fair Dealers were looking rather desperate is necessary for understanding later developments.36 Girvetz's study was divided into two parts. The first outlined the principal tenets of “classical liberalism” as an Enlightenment mode of thought that reordered the world around a new, proto-capitalist understanding of human nature. The second he termed “contemporary liberalism,” which dismissed the classical liberal notion of human nature as egoistic and individualistic, preferring to emphasize the creative and social instinct in human nature that saw productive endeavor as a collective enterprise. Girvetz traced this intellectual current back into the late nineteenth century, but saw as its high priest in the United States the philosopher John Dewey. Dewey saw human activity as altruistic rather than inherently selfish, and claimed that clashes that occurred within societies over work and the sharing out of the spoils of production “do not lie in an original aversion of human nature to serviceable action, but in the historic conditions which have differentiated the work of the laborer for wage from that of the artist, adventurer, sportsman, soldier, administrator, and speculator.”37 Girvetz wanted to construct a serviceable definition of modern liberalism for a postwar world that was not just concerned with Depression era issues but could be used as a mobilizing ideology for Americans opposed to the growing influence of free-market individualism in American politics. In this effort he was not alone, as the work of Crosland in Great Britain and Francois Mitterrand and Charles Hernu in France in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates.38 An understanding of these intellectual currents does provide us with the framework within which to understand the growing political confidence of the Democratic Party in the 1950s, and the sowing of policy seedlings that would presage a reconfiguration of the relationship between mainstream politics and society.
As an ADA organizer, Girvetz was interested in building up left-of-center political activity on the West Coast. As leader of a relatively successful ADA chapter in a state where that organization was having enormous difficulty establishing a foothold in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was called upon to provide speech material for national politicians such as Hubert Humphrey. One such draft expanded upon the philosophical foundations laid out in his scholarly work and applied it to the United States in the 1950s: “Cognizant of the real achievements of the profit system, present-day liberalism does not seek its abolition, only its regulation and control, that is to say, its modification to meet the requirements of a changing world…. Accordingly, liberals have evolved a program of government action which, by a striking consensus of both critics and adherents, has come to be known as the Welfare State.”39 Girvetz defined welfare not simply as the transfer of economic resources or the establishment of personal insurance systems, but as a philosophically self-contained but practically elastic doctrine that could change in emphasis and target over time and in response to changing need. “The approach,” he claimed, “is experimental, the solution tentative, the test pragmatic.”40 This welfare state would, he argued, include a response to families in economic need, but also to racial discrimination, and, by implication of the pragmatic test, to other areas of discrimination that might emerge into public discourse in the future.
The campaigns of Democrats for statewide and national office in 1950 suggested that social democratic political ideas were taking roots in California, but that the party had not yet found the political muscle or the favorably social context to make them dominant. Jimmie Roosevelt's fight to defeat the popular Warren and Helen Douglas's drive to sweep aside conservative Democratic Party interests and win her party's Senate race represented clear attempts to push the political center of gravity leftward. Both campaigns sowed the seeds for the development of a vibrant social democratic strain in California politics later in the decade. And both demonstrated vividly the very real political and structural obstacles built into the political economy of California and the nation that still had to be overcome if the class, racial, and ideological kaleidoscope of Californian society was to be fully represented in the state's mainstream political discourse. The Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan was not just a victim of hyperbole when he argued that Roosevelt's campaign was “the most significant in the history of California politics since 1910,” and that “we are back in 1910, but on a higher level, in that our individual freedom and security are challenged by a group more monstrous and corrupted than in former years.”41 The 1950 campaigns, like the battles of the early twentieth century, represented a titanic clash between the forces of capital and those of the New Deal that set up the terms of political debate for the rest of the century.
Few were surprised when James Roosevelt announced his candidacy on 15 November 1949: he had been the titular head of the party through trying times in the mid-1940s and had managed to steer his rag-tag army through a devastating internal storm over whom to support in the 1948 presidential election. More interesting was the fact that Roosevelt's campaign, unlike most Democratic fights elsewhere in the country that year, did not run screaming from an engagement with social democratic issues but made its central strategy against Warren one of openly embracing such issues.42 His opening gambit deliberately linked together statist economic management and individual rights in a way that would become common in California liberal politics later in the decade. In an open rebuke to Warren's stately nonpartisanship Roosevelt pledged to show voters “on which side of the fence I stand,” arguing that all citizens had the “right to find a job at a fair wage and under desirable working conditions. We must achieve here in California the goal of full employment…. Jobs must be free from discrimination because of race, creed, or color. Collective bargaining in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect between labor and management must have the active support of state officials” (emphasis original) He argued that the key issues of public power, economic development, and individual civil rights were interconnected, linked by the central nexus of the state. His statement was not a restatement of the underlying principles of the New Deal, as California had missed out on the political upheavals of the 1930s. It was more a new statement of purpose for the forces of the left in postwar California: “Party responsibility must be restored in California…. Non-partisanship…has come more and more to mean non-activity, non-responsibility, and non-leadership…. The rapid and continuing growth of our State means that our pressing problems can wait no longer for solution. Only leadership not tied down by the ever clinging ties of reactionary and special privilege forces can get the job done.”43
The clear left turn in California Democratic politics signaled by Roosevelt's announcement was reinforced when he gave a series of campaign speeches to different audiences on the subject of the welfare state. In terms similar to those employed by Girvetz in his extension of the ideas of John Dewey, or Richard Titmuss or Tony Crosland in their reinterpretation of socialism in Britain in the 1950s, Roosevelt attempted to associate individual rights with collective action. Those who shared these values believed that the individual possessed intrinsic value that meant no individual could be neglected: the state “should foster those economic and social conditions in which the individual can be really free. Its aim, in a word, is justice—not justice in a narrow, legalistic sense, but real, substantive justice.” Roosevelt used the example of a dynamic, growing state like California to argue for a vibrant public sector through which to manage the state's economic growth: “Perhaps the problems of a small and simple pastoral society or a frontier community can be dealt with through the individual exercise of uprightness and charity. But amid the incredible complexity of our highly industrialized state this cannot be sufficient.” At points his increasingly righteous tone became reminiscent of his father in his 1936 election campaign, as he proclaimed himself “weary of the pious cant of those reactionaries who have arrogated to themselves the custody of all the traditional virtues (except charity perhaps) and who somehow confuse freedom with the practices of the more predatory industrialists.” But the underlying philosophical current at work was more reminiscent of FDR's 1944 Economic Bill of Rights message that set the tone for California liberals far more than the less specific relief, recovery, and reform message of the 1930s.44 In a telling attempt to pull his listeners' attention away from past battles and onto the present he argued that the “real issue before us is not whether in fact we shall have the welfare state. The American people have already decided that. They want more than freedom in the abstract. They have already decided that a society as fabulously wealthy and productive as our own can and must make provision for all of its members…. The achievement of a genuine welfare society, whose government chosen by the people acts in the interest of all of them, may be delayed and hindered. But it cannot be averted.” This “welfare society” included a shared commitment to civil rights, nondiscrimination, and universal access to health care, issues that framed political debate in California for the 1950s.45
Given the unfavorable national political climate and the overwhelming advantage incumbent Governor Warren enjoyed, Roosevelt's campaign seemed an unlikely prospect from the start. Warren barely mentioned Roosevelt in his own reelection campaign, and Roosevelt's increasingly desperate attempts in his speeches and broadcasts to cast Warren as a far right-wing Republican in sheep's clothing and to create as much political space between the two candidates as possible in part represented an attempt simply to get noticed and create some relevancy and purpose for his faltering campaign.46 The strongly left-of-center tenor of Roosevelt's campaign also represented a calculated strategy based on the findings of polls taken before and during the 1950 race. In the summer of 1949 Jimmy hired a polling firm to establish whether a run for office would be feasible, and the results bear close investigation. The question that mattered—would Roosevelt win—did not look promising: 52 percent of those polled said that if an election were held tomorrow they would vote for Warren, as opposed to 23 percent who preferred Roosevelt. But the election was still eighteen months away. Roosevelt was swayed by the polling data dealing with the depth of feeling of those surveyed: 96 percent of Roosevelt supporters supported his politics and candidacy strongly, compared to 72 percent of Warren supporters; 24 percent of Warren supporters were classed as “weak” in their commitment to Warren. In addition, 15 percent of those asked how they would vote if an election were held tomorrow were undecided. The polling suggested that Roosevelt had to campaign on themes that differentiated himself from Warren: “Those voting for a candidate other than Warren or who are undecided have for the most part a well-formulated negative attitude toward Warren,” the poll revealed. “On the other hand, those voting for a candidate other than Roosevelt or who are undecided display merely a lack of knowledge about Roosevelt.” A full third of those polled thought that Warren was a Democrat, or a candidate of both parties, helped by the cross-filing system in California elections and overwhelming media coverage of his governorship; 43 percent of registered Democrats planned to vote for Warren in the Democratic primary, as opposed to just 5 percent of Republicans who thought they would cast their Republican primary ballot for Roosevelt.47 The only hope for Roosevelt's campaign was to convince voters that Warren was an enemy of the Democratic Party and Roosevelt an heir to his father's legacy in a state where registered Democrats still outnumbered Republicans by a near two to one margin.
This fact was reinforced in the wake of the primary elections in July 1950. Warren was the overwhelming winner of his own primary and had gained an alarming number of votes in the Democratic primary, but a deeper probing of voting attitudes among the 2,241 adults surveyed across the state revealed a potentially significant weakness in people's commitment to the Republicans. For one thing, the overwhelming registration bias to the Democrats—53 percent Democratic to 26 percent Republican, and 21 percent unaffiliated— at least suggested a serious disjuncture between the political complexion of California and election results. More significantly, 48 percent of respondents said that the Democrats were doing the most good for the country compared to 30 percent who answered Republican, but many did not know Warren was a Republican. “The survey shows that the majority of the voters are registered or will register as Democrats because they believe that party has done more for them. The majority of those who consider themselves Independent voters are either ‘weak' Warren votes or ‘Don't know' Senatorial votes at this time, despite the fact that in the main they lean toward Democratic party thinking. A strong united front of the Democratic candidates would be a psychological factor towards crystallizing their Democratic voting behavior.” Though the poll warned that ideology was a difficult concept that could send mixed messages in the rough and tumble of a campaign, and terms such as “Fair Dealer,” “Reactionary,” “Liberal,” and “Radical” had multiple meanings and were “newspaper terms and not part of the average person's vocabulary,” there was a clear message that some sort of left-wing platform was the only way of creating a serious challenge to bipartisan Warren. “There should be a clear understanding in the voter's mind that James Roosevelt has developed and stands on his own platform—a platform that has meaning for the problems of the State of California. Roosevelt should be identified as a Progressive Democrat…. The lower middle and lower economic groups, pro-Roosevelt, did not vote in their true number as did the pro-Warren economic groups, particularly the upper income group. The need for planning and organizing the ‘get out the vote' committee is obvious. It should be one vast correlated organization under the Democratic Party, with all the various pro-Roosevelt units working together.”48
The polling companies could not factor in the bitterly factionalized nature of the California Democrats that made such a coordinated campaign impossible, nor could they rationalize the highly personalized nature of California politics that made party-line voting difficult to organize. Even the Roosevelt and Douglas campaigns, both running for statewide office and both sharing the same political principles as well as the same party label, were wary of working together. Indeed, Earl Warren was genuinely angry when Helen Douglas came out and asked her supporters to vote for Roosevelt as well, as Warren had never openly backed Richard Nixon, Douglas's opponent, and such open party loyalty was often seen as unsavory in California.49 The Roosevelt campaign did, however, expose the fact that there existed in California, underneath the ongoing imbroglio about communism and the popular front, a strong undercurrent of left-of-center politics that had the potential to explode into life under different political circumstances.
Helen Gahagan Douglas's Senate campaign further demonstrated both the limits of leftist influence in California and the potential for its growth. Douglas represented one of the great California Democratic Party success stories of the 1940s, as well as one of its greatest defeats. Born to a socially prominent Scotch-Irish family in Brooklyn in 1900, a young Helen Gahagan dropped out of Barnard College to pursue a career in theater. She was a Broadway star at twenty-two, a leading lady on the New York stage throughout the 1920s and, in George Abbott's words, “a strange classic beauty.” She toured Europe as an opera singer before returning to the United States and her theater work, appearing in the David Belasco production Tonight or Never in 1930 with leading man Melvyn Douglas, who soon matched his stage romance with Helen with a real-life love affair and marriage. The couple relocated to Los Angeles, where his film career blossomed as her work life stagnated, though she made a comeback in the big budget science-fiction film She in 1935. She found a new interest alongside her husband in local Democratic Party politics, campaigning for Sheridan Downey in his successful 1938 Senate race and soon becoming the leading Democratic female activist in the state as a Democratic National Committeewoman during the Culbert Olson governorship. She entered Congress in 1944 from the predominantly African American and inner-city Fourteenth Congressional District in Los Angeles, and rapidly became a vocal champion of the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party. She managed to ride out the stormy and debilitating battles within the state party during 1947 and 1948 by tending to her duties in Washington and by steering clear of the Wallace party overtures, but her political convictions remained on the left, and her strong personality ensured that she paid little attention to the social niceties of freshman life in the House of Representatives. She preferred delivering dramatic speeches on the floor of the House to courting lobbyists and her congressional colleagues, at one point striding purposefully onto the floor of the chamber with a basket of groceries to demonstrate the difficulties faced by ordinary families in the wake of the end of price controls in 1946. Her growing frustration at the rightward drift of Senator Downey in the 1940s on questions of corporate power, particularly in terms of big farm interests, prompted her to declare her candidacy for his seat in the fall of 1949.50
Acting as the launch pad for Richard Nixon's inexorable rise into national politics and as a prime example of a titanic clash between huge personalities in a crucial postwar political battle over the future direction of American politics, the Nixon-Douglas race has received wide attention.51 Most accounts of this battle royal take a well-known path. Douglas was a well-meaning, principled liberal who had famously taken that basket of groceries into Congress in 1947 to demonstrate the impact of inflation on the average American's shopping bill. She had decided to take on conservative interests backing incumbent senator Sheridan Downey and run for the Senate, but soon found she was running a hopelessly underfunded, poorly timed campaign against the slick, well-funded champion of anticommunism and antistatism in Congress at a time when Cold War antitotalitarianism was the main issue in America. Nixon's campaign followed closely the strategy of the Republican National Committee in 1950, one of associating the Democrats with socialism and, by implication, communism. Referring to the forthcoming elections as “the most important in our nation's history,” Nixon in a recorded speech to an audience in Modesto in March 1950 argued that President Truman had gone “right down the line for his socialistic program which he first presented to the special session of the 80th Congress in the summer of 1948 and which he made the basis of his campaign for reelection.” In another speech he assailed “the president's program for socializing the nation's industry and agriculture and schools and medicine.” Nixon's campaign was able to tie this in with a foreign policy that had seemingly failed to halt the expansion of communism in Asia, and with a candidate, Douglas, who was committed to expending the nation's wealth on leftist schemes rather than on combating Soviet expansionism.52 Faced with a vast Chinese Red Army sweeping down the Korean peninsula, and a relentless Republican onslaught against statist planners in Washington and their supposed communist friends in government like Alger Hiss, Helen Douglas had little chance against the man credited with exposing Hiss and standing against the Fair Deal.
It is certainly true that Douglas's campaign faced numerous debilitating handicaps that have lent an air of resigned inevitability to historical treatments of the events of that tumultuous year. Some of the problems she faced have been sketched out in the preceding pages. Just to get the nomination she had needed to take on powerful elements within her own fractious party, people who had first of all remained steadfastly loyal to Senator Downey before shifting their allegiance to anyone but Douglas after Downey announced his retirement in the spring. The eventual challenger to Douglas, Manchester Boddy, a Los Angeles newspaperman, conducted his own bitterly anticommunist, anti-Fair Deal campaign against her, which left Douglas's campaign broke and exhausted before the main Republican onslaught had even gathered pace. Conducting a major statewide campaign in a huge, media-dominated state like California was a vastly expensive task, and Douglas had even hired a helicopter, “the flying egg-beater,” to take her from city to city quickly and efficiently and to gain media coverage in a media market resolutely hostile to her campaign.53 Nixon, by contrast, had the unequivocal support of almost all the major newspapers, and almost limitless cash from an array of financial backers, prompting the New Republic to comment on the 1,400 Nixon billboards that stretched as far as Tijuana in Mexico to attract the attention of the tourists and day-trippers, and the planes flying overhead spelling out pro-Nixon messages in the sky at $50 an hour.54
Even so, Nixon's campaign later admitted to being afraid of the potential for left-of-center politics to attract support, which is why they attacked Douglas so mercilessly. Murray Chotiner, Nixon's campaign organizer and right-hand man throughout his political career, emphasized his concern about the potential strength of the opposition in a campaign manual he wrote in the mid-1950s for prospective Republican candidates. He pointed out the need for a candidate to have a strong political message, echoing the advice Jimmy Roosevelt's pollsters had given him. For Nixon in 1950 this had been “A strong America” and was based on the idea that “as long as our boys were fighting communism overseas, the least we could do was to see to it that the communists did not get a foothold here.” The flip side of this point, Chotiner continued, was the “very fundamental point that we must keep in mind, and that is never attack the strength of the opposition. I remember, as an illustration, that there were some issues that came up where frankly we were a little weak, and the other side was a little stronger than we were…. You are not going to be able to tear down the strength. You can attack the weakness of the opposition and just keep hammering and hammering those weak points until your opponent can no longer exist in the election drive.” Chotiner's argument that Republicans could not “outbid the administration…because the Republican Party did not stand for the same thing that Mrs. Douglas was espousing” explained the need to make communism the central theme: “Nobody could ever hope to outpromise a New Dealer.” He also noted that his team in 1950 had not bothered organizing a labor committee as they could “not compete against the opposition with top-name individuals. Never show your weakness at any time.” This confession demonstrated clearly that the bipartisan politics practiced by men like Earl Warren was on the way out by 1950, with antistatist business interests determined to attack the remaining citadels of the New Deal order lest any further advances in the corporate alliance between business, labor, and the state be sanctioned. Douglas's mistake, Chotiner argued, was to attack Nixon's strength and, by implication, to neglect her own: that of potentially benefiting from the more clearly demarcated lines of debate on the subject of the Fair Deal and political rights for the disadvantaged. “She made the fatal mistake of attacking our strength instead of sticking to attacking our weakness.”55
Certainly, Douglas's desperate attempt to retaliate against the Nixon team's allegations that she and the administration had inadequately opposed Soviet expansionism was ill-judged. It was unconvincing enough to argue that had it “not been for this aggressive, far-sighted policy…proposed by a Democratic administration, which I supported and helped write into law, America would today be standing alone and isolated in a sea of communism or chaos.” She had opposed the Truman Doctrine and other early containment measures, and in any case her grim portrayal of the Soviets as terrifying megalomaniacs just did not ring true given the care she had taken not to be caught up in the increasingly febrile rhetorical game that was paralyzing political debate in Washington. But her attempt to argue, in response to Nixon's infamous pink sheet claiming she had voted with the extreme leftist Representative Vito Marcantonio 354 times, that Nixon had in fact voted with Marcantonio against overseas aid and economic assistance to Korea was sheer madness.56 Clearly it was a reaction to the deeply unpleasant tactics employed against her by Chotiner and his sinister band of campaign coordinators: the pink sheet associating her directly with communism; the whispered phone calls reminiscent of those employed against Jerry Voorhis in 1946; the use of researcher Edna Lonigan to dredge up supposed links between Douglas and communist front organizations.57 Her bid to challenge the GOP on foreign policy was not unusual in the fall of 1950, as many Democrats in races across the country were being worn down by the constant jibes of socialism and wanted to establish their own antitotalitarian credentials against a party only just coming to terms with its isolationist past.58
Her positive political message was, nonetheless, very real, and the bitter campaign against her was part of a broader national strategy, funded by organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and American Medical Association, to cast the demon of federal regulation out of the private business economy once and for all. In the lexicon of the increasingly dominant antiregulatory right the issue of the 1950 elections was, in Nixon's words, “the type of slavery in which an all-powerful state seeks complete domination and control over the lives and liberties of the people. The Soviet Union is an example of the slave state in its ultimate development; Great Britain is half-way down the same road; powerful political interests are striving to impose the British socialist system upon the people of the United States. The Republican Party must meet this issue squarely if it is to survive.”59 Douglas strenuously denied the assumed link between social democracy and communism or totalitarianism, decrying the Republican attempt to “associate every Democratic proposal in your minds with something alien, terrible, and hateful.” In so doing, she was encouraged to articulate ever more defiantly what exactly it was that she stood for. In some respects she, like many Americans adjusting to life after FDR's death, remained unsure where to go from the New and Fair Deals: in her speech defending Democrats against the charge of communism she stressed that she epitomized “the struggle to win legislative recognition of America's needs through the enactment of the Democratic platform…. I am an advocate of the reforms begun by FDR and carried forward by Harry S Truman.”60 Yet her articulation of a statist political vision was more clearly delineated than ever as she headed for electoral disaster in 1950. “I believe that government should be ever alert to the needs of the people, should seek to better their health, to extend their opportunities for education, should concern itself with the problems of old age and insecurity, should act to maintain a steadily advancing economy without valleys of depression or mountains of inflation,” she stated in a radio broadcast during her campaign. “I believe that government should be ready and able and willing to assist in replacing slums with decent homes for families with incomes too low to afford such homes without help. I believe that government should protect us from want in periods of unemployment.”61
Her doomed campaign represented the beginning of a closer affiliation in California between an increasingly dominant liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a range of grass-roots reform movements pressing for political recognition. Phil Burton, then a law student at USC and a rising star in the Young Democrats of California, and Willie Brown, a young African American law student in San Francisco, became politically active in her campaign, and would later lead the way in reshaping the landscape of California politics. Brown later recalled how student politics came alive over her candidacy, paving the way for the landmark Adlai Stevenson movement in 1952: “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it was a little more left than that. It was really the left wing of the Democratic party that was trying to organize on campus.” Young Democrats were stung by the internal opposition to her campaign within the party, prompting many to sign up for active political duty. Bill Malone and most of the San Francisco Central Committee “were just too conservative,” Brown recalled, “and were holding on to everything. They showed zero interest in the problems of old people, zero interest in the problems of racial minorities and clearly were indifferent to students.”62 The 1950 campaigns coincided with the picking up of the pace of fair employment and Young Democrat movements that would play important roles in the political world of California in the 1950s.
It was hard for Douglas's wide-eyed, idealistic supporters like Phil Burton to see much in the way of a silver lining in the final results in November. Roosevelt lost to Warren by a landslide of over a million votes. Democratic strategists tried to put some gloss on the catastrophic defeat by arguing that his campaign had been “extremely vigorous, well-organized, although not too well-financed,” and claimed the consistency and power of Roosevelt's hard-hitting attacks on the Republicans had helped Democrats hold all but one House seat. The post mortem also blamed the press for the scale of the defeat, claiming the “big factor” was the “vicious personal attacks upon Roosevelt by the press (about 100 percent).” Douglas fared better, losing by 600,000, itself a terrible result given her only win in a county of any size was in Contra Costa, but it looked good when put next to Roosevelt's catastrophic defeat. To the Democratic high command, “the false charge of Communism was the major contributing factor to her defeat.” The Democratic state chairman's report noted that Douglas's hard work in her congressional district in South Central Los Angeles over the previous six years had helped her Democratic successor Sam Yorty win by a respectable margin with “solid support from all segments in the district, labor, minority groups, and so forth.”63 The Democratic tide among African Americans was particularly evident given the fact that the Los Angeles Sentinel had backed Nixon in the closing stages of the campaign, citing his anticommunism, but had not been able to sway many in the African American districts of southern California.64 There was little doubt, however, that the Republican machine had crushed the hopeful band of Democratic insurgents, helped along by elements in the Democratic Party hierarchy who feared the consequences of a political revolution for their own sinecures. It was hard for Roosevelt and Douglas to appear credible when figures in their own party were arguing that their vision for America would “turn the country over to the Communists or reduce it to bankruptcy.”65
Yet opponents of Helen Douglas were right to fear what she represented, and what her campaign suggested was happening to California politics. The bitter attacks on her suggested that the cozy harmony between moderate and far right elements in the ruling Republican coalition was coming unstuck. The right had embarked upon an all-out drive to crush the New Deal order that risked putting the old internal division on the left over the popular front to bed in favor of a united front against the antistatist onslaught. Douglas and Roosevelt's rethinking of a left-of-center vision, however tentative, would begin to tie together grassroots racial, gender, and sexual political movements to a Democratic renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the defeated Democratic duo's most unpleasant opponents among the general public hoped that 1950 signified the end of the politics of welfare and civil rights in California. one claimed to speak for the whole state in suggesting “that Mrs. Douglas gather up the market basket with its chuck roast and other groceries she loved to use in her act together with other Fair Deal clap-trap and get out. Gullible people who fell for her act are no longer in these parts.”66 Douglas took the advice and moved to New York after her defeat, but events were soon to show that her friendly correspondent was wrong to think the debate had been won.