California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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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