California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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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.
CHAPTER 3
The Stevenson Effect
When Helen Myers, delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1952, landed back home in Los Angeles after watching the nomination of Adlai Stevenson, she found that events had not gone unnoticed in California. “As soon as I got back,” she recalled, “there was a stack of phone calls on my desk—people calling in wanting to know if they could work for Adlai Stevenson.” This sudden enthusiasm for national Democratic politics in Los Angeles came at just the right time for activists like Myers. “The Stevenson people came into politics just at the time we were trying to create a new structure in the county,” she remembered. “I collected all the names, found out what assembly district they lived in, and sent them out to the campaign manager in that district.”1 Stewart Udall, influential Democratic congressman from Arizona who later became JFK's secretary of the interior, claimed in a 1958 article that “Stevenson acted as a fulcrum for the upsurge of his party in several of the states. It was hardly accidental that many of the Stevenson strongholds of 1956—California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, to name a few—were the states where Stevenson's 1952 campaign set in motion new forces and personalities. In many instances it was this fresh corps of amateurs and egghead recruits who provided the extra drive that revitalized weak party organizations.”2 The Stevenson presidential bid energized left-of-center activism in California, and provided a new lease on life for the Democratic Party, and in particular the more radical elements within the liberal coalition. But why Stevenson, and why 1952? Californians had voted happily for FDR or Truman without at the same time seeming particularly interested in Democratic Party politics more generally. The Stevenson campaign helped to unify a range of grassroots movements just coming together in California behind a search for meaning for the left in affluent 1950s America. The campaign provided the organizational impetus for the formation of a new Democratic Party infrastructure in the mid-1950s, and also provided the kind of ideological soul-searching needed to propel the party to power later in the decade.
Americanism Versus Foreignism
The parallel story to this rejuvenation of political debate among Democrats is the remorseless rise of the Republican right in 1952, marshaling its forces and planning another clearly delineated left versus right battle that had worked so effectively for them in 1950. Republicans held most of the political advantages: they were well-financed; their political message was simple and easy to articulate; their campaign team was in place early; incumbent senator William Knowland was a major political player on the national stage whom no Democrat wanted to take on and who could act as a central figure around whom the other campaigns could revolve. Knowland, a darling of the right because of his hard-line stance on opposing communism in the Far East and his staunchly anti-Fair Deal voting record, also served as an antidote to the moderate Republicans who were largely blamed for the 1948 defeat: Earl Warren had been the vice presidential candidate and was increasingly seen as useful only for his own election. “Has [Warren] forgotten,” wrote one angry Southern Californian to Knowland in November 1951, “that his name was not magic in 1948…. He has too many socialistic ideas to please any real American.” Another correspondent to Knowland and Richard Nixon begged them not to nominate “another ‘Me-tooer' for president. Dulles, Eisenhower, Stassen, Truman, Warren and Willkie, birds of a feather. ‘FOREIGNISTS’ all. The 1952 campaign will be a clear issue of Americanism vs. Foreignism.”3
Knowland was perfectly placed to represent the forces of the California right in a campaign of this kind. He was a vocal