California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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as superior to property rights? What about the ‘right' to a job, the ‘right' to a standard of living, the ‘right' to a minimum wage or a maximum work week, the ‘right' to a ‘fair' price, the ‘right' to bargain collectively, the ‘right' to security against the adversities and hazards of life, such as old age and disability?…. These ‘human rights' are indeed different from property rights, for they rest on a denial of the basic concept of property rights. They are not freedoms or immunities assured to all persons alike. They are special privileges conferred upon some persons at the expense of others.”60 Whether the proponents of fair employment liked it or not, their efforts for state regulation of employment law would, if successful, have economic consequences that an increasingly self-confident private business community, supported by a powerful public relations machine, was not prepared to tolerate, seeing civil rights predicated upon race as an opening wedge to broader economic redistribution of wealth outside the control of private enterprise.
Historians have recently become sensitive to the ways in which economic development became more contested terrain in the postwar years, as business public relations firms and representatives of organized labor and the New and Fair Deals vied for political supremacy using contrasting notions of freedom and individualism as tools in their rhetorical and political strategies.61 It was becoming increasingly clear to civil rights advocates in California during the 1950s that their fight for housing and employment rights was becoming bound up in this wider struggle. It was not just the fact that Republican legislators repeatedly voted against the bill, though its repeated failure, most frustratingly in 1955 when it passed the Assembly but failed in the State Senate, was due almost entirely to Republican right-wingers from Southern California. One Santa Barbara Republican claimed citizens could not “be partially tolerant any more than they can be partially pregnant,” a reference to the claims by FEPC proponents that the bill would not force anyone to give jobs or housing to particular people, demonstrating the inextricable link between the debate over economic freedom and that over civil rights.62
There was also the fact that the Cold War put at the center of political debate contested notions of freedom and democracy that created a more antagonistic relationship between left and right around the twin themes of free enterprise and race. The CIO in its October 1951 newsletter noted that “our national security demands all-out production of defense materials and the use of all the available manpower. But discriminatory employment practices are preventing the full utilization of our manpower resources, impeding our productive capacity, and providing ammunition for the Communists' propaganda campaign about the failures of democracy…. Negro chemists are still working as laborers and Negro stenographers serving as maids.….We cannot aspire to world leadership in world affairs so long as we make mockery of our high-sounding talk about justice and democracy by practices of discrimination which destroy the dignity and deny the rights of millions of our fellow citizens.”63 By contrast, a new right-wing organization based in Southern California in the same year stated in its articles of incorporation that its aim, in addition to the outlawing of communism in the United States, was to “prepare and propose constitutional amendments and legislative enactments for the restoration of democratic liberties and property rights” and to “formulate, develop, and promote public interest and education in basic democratic principles, civil rights, and property rights.” Those associated with this organization, known as America Plus (P for Property, L for Liberty, U for Unity, S for Strength), included state senator Jack Tenney and notorious far-right figure Aldrich Blake, who had led the fight against the recall of Los Angeles city councilman Meade McClanahan for his overt support for Fascist Gerald L. K. Smith during the war. Blake had authored My Kind! My Country! in 1950, a propaganda novel set in a dystopian future in which a new state of “Negroland” had been established in the United States. Its principal target was an economic and civil rights movement “officered by stooges of the Soviet Union…skillfully recruited from the ranks of those worst off in the social scale…from those among the rich and the intellectual who revel in striking a pose and in seeming to be out of the ordinary; from the emotionally upset and frustrated, including many members of the so-called minority groups,” all of whose “compassion for the unfortunate has inspired them to believe falsely that the remedy lies in unlimited handouts and controls by the State.”64 Just as the Fair Employment movement was gaining strength in the 1950s, so was a popular right movement in southern California that welded together issues of private property rights, the Cold War, and racial prejudice in a manner that would have a major impact on both political debate and party political activity by the end of the decade.65 As we shall see, Democratic party politics in the 1950s turned on the question of economic citizenship in a state in which the established channels of political patronage were being closed off, allowing the party to harness forces for economic and social change that were demanding greater representation.
When Harry Hay, Bob Hull, and Chuck Rowland first met in Los Angeles in 1950 to discuss the potential formation of a new organization to promote understanding of homosexuality, something other than their sexuality united them. All three had been members of the Communist Party.66 By the early 1950s Marxism to these former party members was a God that had failed, and a combination of McCarthyism and a growing realization that individual sexual freedom was incompatible with communist doctrine helped men like Hay shake off any vestiges of fellow traveler status from Mattachine. Anyone who “espouses political philosophies which abrogate basic rights of the individual as set forth in the Constitution of the United States will hardly find the principles of social and moral responsibility as set forth in the aims and principles of the Society to his purpose,” the committee assured Mattachine's current and potential membership in 1954.67 Much of the new organization's early publicity material avoided discussion of ideology or political partisanship lest it become tainted by association with communism at an inopportune time. “Politically, the Mattachine Society is strictly nonpartisan,” one statement read. “It espouses no ‘isms' except Americanism, for it realizes that such a program is possible only in a free nation such as the United States.”
In addition to the fear of political persecution homophile activists harbored at a time of McCarthyite purges of suspected gay men from public service in the early 1950s, they also faced more mundane problems of political identification that stemmed from their lack of a coherent ideological world-view into which their sexuality could fit.68 British-born author Christopher Isherwood, who during the war had settled in Los Angeles and become a key figure in the city's gay demi-monde in these years, later recalled that by the time of his emigration to the United States he had “lost my political faith—I couldn't repeat the left-wing slogans which I had been repeating throughout the last few years. It wasn't that I had lost all belief in what the slogans stood for, but I was no longer wholehearted. My leftism was confused by an increasingly aggressive awareness of myself as a homosexual and by a newly made discovery that I was a pacifist. Both these individualistic minority- attitudes kept bringing me into conflict with the leftist majority-ideology.”69 When a Los Angeles journalist in December 1953 wondered openly about the political intent of the new fledgling group in his newspaper column, the reply was forthright: “There is no political aim of the Mattachine Foundation Inc. other than to fight for the rights of man. IT IS DEFINITELY AND ABSOLUTELY NON-PARTISAN…. They are concerned with the problems of the homosexual and only that!”70 These “problems” for the Mattachine Society of the 1950s concerned the rights of individuals to conduct their private affairs as they wished without unwarranted legal impediment and the education of wider society to accommodate sexual difference. Chuck Rowland went as far as to say that “it was society which created our culture by excluding us,” suggesting that the extent of political engagement on the part of early Mattachine members was to gain unrestricted entry to existing social structures, not to change those structures as any socialist would advocate. As the slogan of the 1954 convention put it: “evolution, not revolution.”71
As the gay rights movement grew and evolved it was clear that the membership's analysis of social exclusion was predicated upon something more than just individualism, and that they faced internal pressure to take an interest in mainstream politics. To Rowland, political activism, a belonging to a concrete organization of people determined to advance the cause of social acceptance of gay men and women, provided “a pride in participating in the cultural growth and social