California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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oratory, and they didn't wish to see their friend seduced…. Stevenson never fully escaped their hand.”18
More seriously, his campaign's desire to hold the Democratic Party together nationwide, leading to his choosing Alabama senator John Sparkman as his running mate, suggested that the thorny question of race would loom large in 1950s Democratic politics. Stevenson would find that this fact would cause problems in California, where a civil rights movement was rapidly gathering steam in the early 1950s. New York representative Adam Clayton Powell was forthright in his attack on both main parties for retreating from their 1948 civil rights planks, noting that the Republicans had mentioned FEPC by name in their 1948 platform but had not in 1952, while the Democrats had also toned down their support for the civil rights of all. “I think the best description of it is the one that Clifton Utley, of NBC, gave me,” said Powell in an interview in the summer of 1952. “'Well,' he said, ‘this is a little bit to the left of the Republicans and a little bit to the right of the 1948 Democrats.'…. In this changing world, unless we keep pace, ethically with our material progress, all is lost. 1952 demands stronger planks than 1948.”19 Prominent Los Angeles African American newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass publicly abandoned mainstream party politics to embrace the by now moribund Progressive Party as their vice presidential candidate over the question of civil rights and her opposition to the shrill, politically debilitating rhetoric of the Cold War that dominated political debate. It was, she claimed, “my government that supports the segregation by violence practiced by a Malan in South Africa, sends guns to maintain a bloody French rule in Indo-China, gives money to help the Dutch repress Indonesia, props up Churchill's rule in the Middle East and over the colored people of Africa and Malaya…. I have fought and will continue to fight unceasingly for the rights and privileges of all people who are oppressed and who are denied their just share of the world's goods their labor produces.”20 To Bass, like many African Americans a Republican until the New Deal shook the political certainties of the progressive era in California from their moorings, mainstream party politics had a long way to go on the civil rights question globally if Eisenhower and Stevenson represented the best choice available to people of color.21
Stevenson may not have been the perfect standard-bearer for a revitalized left in places like California, but he benefited there from the state's intensely media-driven, celebrity politics that thrived on candidates, like Stevenson, who were able effortlessly to court the support of the national liberal press and to establish a media personality for themselves. As Thurman Arnold observed, California had grown so rapidly and was so vast that candidates who wanted the statewide vote had to rely on “personal campaigning, radio, and advertising,” all of which the Stevenson movement used with skill and ease.22 The boosting of Stevenson in publications such as the New Republic as the great hope for those disgusted by the erosion of civil liberties and the Republican Party's anti-New Deal cries of socialism and communism was attractive to the demoralized and poorly organized political left in California. In February the New Republic described his record as Governor of Illinois as “outstanding in reorganizing state government, increasing aid to schools, overhauling roads and road financing, improving welfare services, attacking gambling and corruption, working deftly to get the most from a Republican legislature.”23 This media portrayal of Stevenson as a crusader for fairness and civil liberties chimed with the political zeitgeist for a political left reeling from the defeats of the previous few years.
The use of California's media-driven, style-obsessed political world to create a groundswell of popular support for Stevenson was carefully orchestrated. The strategy of promoting a spectacle of massive crowds and enthusiastic volunteers provided much needed excitement for a demoralized liberal movement. Stevenson's publicity director carefully groomed the mushrooming Volunteer for Stevenson groups, ordering them to “augment in every possible way work being done by regular party organizations to create crowds along motorcade route and at speaking places. Use sound trucks, newspaper ads, radio and TV spots to the absolute limit of your budget. Handbills announcing [the] Governor's schedule should be printed and distributed on strategic street corners. Banners should be strung at every intersection along route. Placards and signs should be placed in store windows and telephone poles and lamp posts along the route of the motorcade.”24 An officer of the “Hollywood for Stevenson-Sparkman Committee” told members they must attend “all political rallies and speeches in person. Remember that most major political meetings are televised and nationwide. Be in the audience. Recruit as many more people as you can…. Wear your button and display your Stevenson stickers.”25 Stevenson's public appearances were carefully choreographed for television as well as live audiences, including a press meeting in San Francisco at which Stevenson was flanked by several actors, including Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. As the flash bulbs lit up the room local Stevenson club president Allen Rivkin was on hand “to see that the press doesn't murder our actors by throwing framed questions at them.”26 If a radio broadcast was particularly well-received, it was rebroadcast with a new introduction underlining just how popular it had been.27 The content mattered less than the spin that was placed on it, encouraging grassroots support for the Stevenson movement on the basis that he was a dynamic political force who inspired personal devotion in members of the public.
The fact that the Republican turn to the right in California was pushing the Stevenson movement leftward was made explicit when Stevenson's strategists explored issues pertaining to the Golden State. California's economic development and rapid population growth, making it a prime symbol of modernity in the eyes of many observers, created challenges that required the guiding hand of government. This argument dominated reports to the Stevenson campaign compiled with the help of local Democratic politicians and activists across the state in the fall of 1952. Rapid economic development had exposed the inadequacies of housing and public facilities; had shown up in sharp relief the reality of racial segregation in California's cities; had placed increasing strain on the state's social welfare resources as many of the previous waves of migrants grew old. In Oakland the key issue was a crisis in housing: “Oakland, like Los Angeles, has had a long running fight over public housing…. Housing conditions for minorities—Negroes, Mexicans, Asiatics—are very bad,” reported Stevenson's Bay Area sources, including San Francisco State Chair George Bradley and Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Gordon of the Berkeley chapter of ADA. They noted the NAACP's recent court challenge to segregated housing in San Francisco, and the need for Stevenson's campaign to embrace civil rights. In Los Angeles local congressmen Cecil King and Clyde Doyle reported that “Los Angeles has more persons over 65 than any other county in the country—378,000 or more than 12% of the voting population.” A “liberal view on old age and disability allotments” would be a “helpful” way of framing Stevenson's campaign in LA. The increasingly unacceptable term “socialism” had to be tackled head-on in a city in which the genuine left and hard right coexisted in large numbers. Socialism was, the report stated, a “large issue in Southern California. Think it should be pointed out that the Government put out large sums to subsidize airlines, ships, railroads, farm prices, plants for such outfits as U.S. Steel. Stockholders think those expenditures are fine, but they object to Democratic programs for the little people—such as [Home Owners Loan Corporation] which has saved millions of homes. A good example of a ‘socialistic' experiment is the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. It was founded in 1900, the year of Stevenson's birth in Los Angeles, and is the greatest municipally owned power enterprise in the world. Is this socialistic?” In Richmond, a city in which the party's candidate for Congress was successful in 1952, rapid growth had set the agenda: “Population rose from 24,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1950, about equal to the wartime peak…. Economic distress after the war was the most serious in California because of the closure of the shipyards…. Major issues are reactivation of the shipyards, need for industrial water, Taft-Hartley, FEPC, Social Security, other progressive measures.”28 The particular demands of a modern, industrialized world placed pressure on resources, planning policy, and social cohesion in a way that made a new articulation of the place of the state in 1950s California necessary, at least in the view of those surveyed by Stevenson campaign managers.
The debate within California over the future of liberalism took on added significance at the time of Stevenson's first run for the White House because it coincided with a wider intellectual debate on the left internationally about these very same