California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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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