California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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life issues encouraged many suburban communities to embrace Democratic (and maverick liberal Republican) candidates for office, thus complicating the commonly held notion that the California suburbs were little more than a fulcrum for right-wing politics by the 1970s. Bitter contests over fair housing and property taxes certainly contributed to a right turn in much of California's Republican Party, and helped to undermine the governorships of liberal Democrat Pat Brown in the 1960s and his son Jerry in the late 1970s. But California ended the 1970s as the spiritual home of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party as much as that of John Birch sympathizers, complicating our understanding of how ideological trends and grassroots activism intersected in these decades.
Indeed, a study of California politics helps to shed light on how we define “liberalism” in the postwar period, with important ramifications for our understanding of American politics more generally. If the California experience proved anything, it was that the notion of state-sponsored economic citizenship encouraged in post-New Deal America led inevitably to identity politics, as more and more heretofore marginalized social groups began to clamor for inclusion in the political process. In opening up this process to a greater number of interests, liberal politicians oversaw a dramatic widening of the parameters of their worldview that helped make California the archetype of socially engaged left politics, which prized individual and civil rights as a necessary corollary of economic liberalism. The development of an expanded welfare state, for instance, required policymakers to engage with questions of social inclusion that furnished them with a language of rights that expanded their understanding of what constituted normative behavior. The complex interactions of race and economic rights discourses in California allowed a social democratic ideology to develop that built upon a strong popular front heritage on the West Coast, and pulled together interests ranging from Latino farm workers to wealthy suburban homemakers into a shared political project. This process of adapting the New Deal to a diverse population caused antagonistic and self-defeating disputes, which served to embed factional animosities in the Democratic Party and alienate many liberal Republicans, problems that have continued to afflict liberal politics in the United States in the recent past. By the 1970s, this factionalism, and an inability to unify interest groups behind a larger message, prevented legislative Democrats from addressing the thorny question of tax relief. Moreover, issues such as the right of farm laborers to bargain for better working conditions tested the capacity of Democratic Party politics to challenge the entrenched inequality of market capitalism. At times liberals lacked the linguistic confidence of their conservative rivals to tie their ideological precepts to homegrown American values. Yet by the late twentieth century a politics of big government, social welfare, public funding for education and health, and strict protections of civil and human rights was a powerful influence on public life both in California and in a national Democratic Party. This book goes some way toward explaining the processes through which such a politics came of age between World War II and recent times.
It is instructive to note that studies that have explicitly linked grassroots activism to wider themes of political party history have tended to be histories of the right, viewing conservative activism, most notably in Orange County, California, as exemplifying an inexorable shift in the zeitgeist of American politics rightward in the 1960s and 1970s. Historians of the right have been much more confident in nationalizing their story than historians of political struggles that encompass a much wider range of forces.7 Yet even if we restrict our angle of vision to the politics of suburban communities that have done so much to enhance our understanding of the tax revolts, school district controversies, and zoning laws that shaped American political trends by the 1970s, it is by no means clear that these histories are purely narratives of conservatism. Orange county may have been “at the leading edge of economic and social changes that have propelled a deep-rooted and ever more powerful conservative political culture in significant areas of the Sunbelt and West,” but other California counties, including Santa Barbara, Marin, and San Mateo, manifested concern over taxes and schools alongside a strong attachment to environmentalism, individual rights, and high public spending.8 Suburbs and wealthy neighborhoods of cities like Los Angeles were also home to a vibrant popular front during the 1940s that endured and prospered in the repackaged Democratic club movement of the 1950s. And many of the Democratic bastions of the early twenty-first century can be found in high-income communities around the cities of the Golden State. The California experience of the decades following 1945 forces us to resist easy generalizations about suburban selfishness, racism, and Cold War anticommunism, and to place the politics of postwar market capitalism—with all its attendant class, racial, and ideological contradictions—back into a study of party politics at a time of massive shifts in party affiliation and strategy at a crucial time in the state-building process in the United States and elsewhere.
The development of a revitalized antistatist private business community on the West coast does not support the narrative of the breakdown of the New Deal order. For one thing, the chronological trajectory of the growth of militant business and GOP anti-unionism in California differed from that of Sunbelt and Southern states, regions that have received much recent scholarly attention.9 The Republican Party was the established party of government in California at the height of the New Deal, and had come to a basic understanding with labor unions about maintaining good labor-management relations. California was heavily unionized, and when the Republican leadership decided to push anti-union legislation in 1958, they helped legitimize Democratic liberalism as the natural party for union members and bolstered labor organizing at precisely the time insurgent Republicans and business elites in sunbelt states were beginning to mount an assault on the citadels of power. As a New Deal order was collapsing in Arizona and elsewhere, it was only just coming together in California, forcing us to particularize the experience of different states of the United States when fitting the American case into the broader history of the rise of free market ideology and modern corporate capitalism in the later twentieth century.
A study of California politics after World War II also encourages us to rethink the widely held thesis that civil rights liberalism became divorced from economic rights in this period, as advocates of racial equality became increasingly involved in school desegregation and legal rights and less committed to workplace equality and economic justice.10 Such an argument sees struggles for mass unionism and fairer working conditions during the New Deal and World War II as the crucial window of opportunity in which to link economic security to racial equality, a window that closed when the Cold War and a national turn away from New Deal class politics in the 1950s made courtroom battles to eliminate Jim crow laws more feasible as a civil rights strategy than a direct assault on the economic structures of the nation. Given that California does not fit into the chronology of a New Deal order betrayed by the political upheavals of the postwar period, this thesis does not stand up to scrutiny. Liberals committed to civil rights legislation in the 1950s, and who enacted the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) and fair housing legislation in the 1959-1963 period, encountered bitter opposition from business and civic leaders convinced that civil equality interfered with private sector prerogatives. conservatives also noticed that the coalition of civil rights activists, labor unions, and Democratic club members that ended decades of Republican dominance in state politics were able to expand enormously the scope and generosity of the state's welfare system in ways that would dramatically alter the economic status of hundreds of thousands of Californians of all races. Furthermore, civil rights was not a biracial issue, given the vital significance of Latino, often immigrant, agricultural labor to the state economy: questions of how the economy worked, and how the state could intervene in private economic relationships to head off major labor disputes, lay at the heart of the Democratic project in California in the postwar decades, leading to the integration of farm labor into the National Labor Relations Act in California in 1975. The Golden State was not an outlier in this regard, but a stark reminder of the fact that questions of economic and social equality remained thoroughly entwined throughout the Cold War.
This book also challenges the notion that identity politics unpicked a grand New Deal coalition in the 1960s and 1970s and set the United States on a more conservative path. To historian Donald T. Critchlow, liberalism had by the 1970s become “little more than a boiling cauldron of identity politics that pandered to the jealousies of ethnic and minority groups. Liberal candidates were elected to local and state office, but by the late 1960s liberalism as an intellectual force was placed on the defensive