California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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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