California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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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