California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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foreign and domestic, in the U.S. Senate, and the family name had considerable political clout in Oakland and the East Bay. His grandfather, Joseph Knowland, had arrived in California in the 1850s and had made a huge fortune in lumber, mining, shipping, and banking in the Bay Area, and Bill's father, J. R. Knowland, had combined an equally successful business career as owner-editor of the Oakland Tribune with his role as a prominent advocate of conservative and Republican Party political causes. Before buying the Tribune in 1915 he had been a Republican member of the California State Assembly and then a U.S. congressman, but his failure to win a Senate seat in 1914 because of the break with the Bull Moose forces in the party prompted him to wield his considerable political influence from his offices in the Tribune Tower for the rest of his life. One of the beneficiaries of J. R.'s editorial patronage was a young Alameda district attorney named Earl Warren, and it was ironic that by 1952 Bill Knowland's campaign backers were so aroused against Warren given the fact that Warren had shown his gratitude for the Knowland family's careful nurturing of his legal and political career by appointing Bill to the Senate in 1945 after progressive warhorse Hiram Johnson's death. In the Senate Knowland became renowned for the grim intensity of his conservative convictions. He supported abortive legislation in 1946 to force the federal government to balance its budget, and was a relentless advocate of low taxation and an end to New Deal programs. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Taft-Hartley Act and a staunch critic of organized labor and of government mediation between management and unions, having acted as a fearsome opponent of union power during the Oakland General Strike of 1946. A reluctant convert to the Truman administration's foreign policy, like many former isolationists and antispending critics of American Cold War foreign policy, Knowland saw Asia rather than Europe as the primary arena of U.S. foreign policy interests and became a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists after their defeat by Mao's Communist forces on the mainland in 1949, a cause that soon earned him the title “the Senator from Formosa.”4
Knowland's Senate campaign gave the Republican right in California a clearly defined route into political action in 1952. Murray Chotiner, fresh from his successful effort to elect Nixon two years earlier, was chosen as Knowland's campaign manager, and immediately set out to create a mass coalition for Knowland that would, he felt, have a knock-on effect on other Republican candidates, including presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Chotiner's strategy involved making an association between the Republicans and American values, attracting registered Democrats on the basis that Democratic candidates were out of step with the national ethos. “We must appeal to Democrats to vote for Bill Knowland,” Chotiner's campaign manual argued. “Therefore, do not make a blanket attack on Democrats. Refer to the opposition as a supporter of the Truman spend-spend-tax-tax program. As pointed out on our campaign strategy sheet, do not mention the opposition unless you are asked about him.” Knowland was painted as “sincere, hard working” and as “an outstanding authority on international affairs.” His opponent, Democratic representative Clinton McKinnon of San Diego, had “a 96% record of voting along with the Truman, Fair Deal, spend-spend program during 1951.”5 The campaign gained valuable endorsements from conservative Democrats, and made carefully worded references to both parties in speeches and broadcasts as Knowland successfully associated his own candidacy with the Cold War fight against totalitarianism and foreign political values.6
The Democrats, reeling from the disaster of 1950, simply did not have the resources to challenge the Knowland juggernaut, backed as it was by the state's media and a national tide that was heading the Republicans' way. Knowland won both party primaries in a landslide, capturing nearly a million votes in the Democratic primary alone to McKinnon's 633,556. He garnered ten times as many votes as McKinnon in the Republican primary, and swept every county in the state except for McKinnon's home city of San Diego, which he carried in his own primary but not in that of the Democrats. Thus Knowland had effectively clinched victory on June 3, five months before the November general election, facing only a selection of minor candidates headed by Progressive Party candidate Reuben Borough. Borough had received 5,258 votes in his own primary; Knowland, by contrast, had in two primaries gained the votes of 2,308,051 Californians in a state in which Democrats in theory had a registration advantage.7 The natural political advantage the Republicans enjoyed in California combined with the electoral climate of 1952 to produce an almost impossible situation for Democratic candidates searching for a message after their 1950 drubbing.
The seemingly impregnable Republican fortress contained, nonetheless, some almost imperceptible weaknesses that would not impact upon election results in 1952 but which would become significant during the 1950s. For one thing, the GOP's bipartisan strategy was no longer based upon Earl Warren's brand of centrist Republicanism, but upon a staunch antitotalitarian message that suggested a strong swing to the right. This seemed appropriate in the political world of 1952, with the war in Korea and Joseph McCarthy's charges about communists in government on all the front pages. But in the long term the strategy pushed the Republican Party increasingly into the hands of the far right in California, and away from the broader political base, which in the 1940s had included organized labor, that had guaranteed its position of power in state politics. The Republican strategy in 1952 created in a sense a political gap into which a new opposition movement, energized by the influx of personnel and the circulation of new ideas, could move.
In California the rise of a brand of far-right politics was symbolized by the activities of State senator Jack Tenney of Los Angeles and congressman Thomas Werdel of Bakersfield, who represented a growing force in state Republican politics. They also worried state Republican leaders, with good reason since their respective stars shone briefly before plunging into oblivion: Tenney thanks to a primary challenge in 1954 as McCarthyism was on the wane; Werdel in the general election in 1952. Their political strategies revealed the contradiction inherent in right-wing politics in California in the 1950s: the brand of bitterly anticommunist, anti-left rhetoric they espoused was becoming more mainstream in the state party just as it was becoming less appealing to society at large. Tenney's indiscriminate hounding of those suspected of communist leanings from his position on the state un-American activities committee was helping to mobilize thousands of Angelenos to defeat him. Werdel was even more extreme: affiliated to extremist organizations such as Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, which had an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, he was one of the not insignificant band of Taftites who went beyond Taft. Werdel remained isolationist because he felt foreign policy spending helped push the United States down the road to big government.8 In some senses, Werdel was a maverick, unrepresentative of the forces that controlled state politics. In part he represented part of a broader Republican strategy of playing to a right-wing faithful in advance of the first election the GOP seemed clearly on course to win since the 1920s, married to a concurrent strategy of mobilizing the private business community in a coalition to roll back the New Deal. One antiregulatory group sent Bill Know-land a campaign pamphlet entitled “So, the Fair Deal Lost,” described as “part of a series of pamphlets and graphic charts, designed to educate the rank and file on the benefits of the Free Enterprise System. This series is sold to the boss man for distribution to his employees…. While this one particular brochure has a strong political slant, the reception from both the employer and employee, on this particular piece, is most enthusiastic.”9 The Republican Party, in California as elsewhere, was becoming more obviously a vehicle for the establishment of an antigovernment ideology that saw the unfettered private accumulation of capital as the sole economic goal for the postwar age.
Despite William Knowland's massive victory in the Senate race, the election results for the state as a whole sent a shot across the bows of the Republican political leviathan. The party had redistricted the state, benefiting not only from favorable district boundaries but also from the increase in the number of seats in Congress from 23 to 30 to reflect California's rapid and significant population increase since 1941. Yet although the Republicans finally managed to oust Democrat Franck Havenner from his San Francisco seat after several close races and plenty of mud slinging over alleged communist ties, they lost two races they should have won: in the Third District, based on Sacramento and its rural hinterland, and in the Sixth, in Contra Costa. The Democrats also disposed of Thomas Werdel in the new Fourteenth District, and came very close to regaining the Santa Barbara/Ventura Thirteenth District they had lost in 1946. The GOP ended up with a 19-11 majority in the House delegation, a crucial margin