California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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Los Angeles Democratic Party warhorse and fixer Carmen Warschaw recalled Nixon's campaign against Jerry Voorhis in similar terms: “People used to get phone calls that Jerry Voorhis is a communist. ‘We can't give you our name because, you know, you can't say that, but believe me, Voorhis is a communist.' And they used to have young people come in when Jerry Voorhis was speaking and they would boo so that you couldn't hear. Hold signs.”39 Robert Condon had barely arrived in Washington when the allegations that he had been denied security clearance for atomic bomb tests during the war because of his associations with a prominent local communist surfaced in the state media, and even his own party had to abandon him in 1954, prompting one local supporter to despair that national Democrats “did more harm to the Democratic Party in California than all the Republican newspapers with their rapacious party line.”40 The iron grip of antitotalitarian imagery on political discourse in postwar California drastically restricted the capacity for serious debate over the future development of the public sphere without some sort of radical overhaul of the political balance of power in the state.
Why No Democratic Political Order in California?
Democratic Party figures or national activists who arrived in California from the East coast in the late 1940s or early 1950s would usually comment upon the relative youth of the political world found there. One of Adlai Stevenson's campaign chiefs argued that the lack of an organized precinct structure to the Democratic Party like that common in Illinois or New York was due to the fact that precinct work “takes place in large cities and…it takes many years to develop these cohesive groups. There is no large city in California that is even fifty years old and the greatest growth has taken place in the last twenty-five years, so that eastern politicians, professional or otherwise, are inclined to be frustrated and baffled by this lack of organization.”41 One visiting Democrat, musing on the seeming political ineffectiveness of the state's labor movement, noted that “the labor movement here is so much younger, it's still having growing pains and is in an earlier stage of development.”42 If the state's Republicans were becoming ever more organized and coordinated in this period, the Democrats and their natural allies in liberal interest groups and labor represented a plethora of competing clusters, factions, and organizations. In the words of one activist, “California Democrats are over-organized. For a party which has been so conspicuously unsuccessful at the polls this is a curious condition; but the fact is that the political landscape teems with unnecessary committees, councils, coordinating groups, and groups to coordinate the coordinators.”43 The fact that California had missed out on the organizational discipline brought about elsewhere in the country during the New Deal would make life extremely difficult for those on the left in the years after the war, but it would also allow for the development of a new movement of liberals in the 1950s predicated on ideological and organizational premises developed after the war. It is this contradiction that is the subject of the pages that follow.
The Democratic Party was in California a political party in name only. It was in practice a collection of local fiefdoms, county committees, activist groups that often included communists and fellow-travelers, some labor affiliates, all presided over by a state central committee that was split into two to satisfy the longstanding rivalry between the northern and southern California leadership. There were even rival fund-raising outfits in the 1950s to satisfy the power hunger of various warring factions. In some areas a strong personality would establish control over a local area and become the conduit for political patronage, such as Bill Malone in San Francisco, but in most areas individuals launched themselves into political campaigns for office without much in the way of centralized control. “From choice or necessity,” reported political scientist Currin Shields in 1954, “most Democratic nominees campaigned as individuals, rather than as Party men; they raised their own funds and recruited their workers on a personal basis, with little organizational help. Some professed leaders of the Party with fair consistency supported Republican candidates, and generally tried to work both sides of the political street.”44 A Democrat in Berkeley informed Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) chairman James Loeb that there was “no cohesion within the party; there is, in fact, no party in the real sense. What the party consists of is a loose business alliance between various clots of opportunists who congeal about local ‘strongmen.' And the liberals in the Party prefer to align themselves with these clots rather than seek through collective action to build a liberal force in the state.”45 Democratic State committeeman Roger Kent, a central figure in party politics in the 1950s, recalled his run for congress in 1950 in the First District, which ran from Marin all the way up the coast to the Oregon border: “there was absolutely no Democratic organization whatsoever in the first district—there were two or three counties that didn't have any county committees at all. There were a couple of committees—Humboldt and Sonoma—that were controlled by actual communists, and I don't use that word lightly.”46 While the Republican Party could benefit from a long history of dominance of the political system in California and the use since the 1930s of an organization, the Republican Assembly, designed to secure preprimary endorsements of favored candidates, the Democrats had no disciplining force and little organizational zeal in the late 1940s. The fact that the GOP had dominated legislative politics for so long had also allowed Republican legislators to build links with labor organizations as well as with business interests, and had constructed a coalition of the state's different socioeconomic factions within a single party.
The power of the left in California radical politics in the 1930s and 1940s had invigorated some of the CIO and AFL unions in their fight for better conditions, and had created an array of enthused activists in a host of civil rights and political organizations such as the civil Rights congress in Los Angeles.47 But in an increasingly hostile political climate such radicalism could become a political liability. Not only would it open liberal and leftist political actors to the accusation of communist sympathy at a time when such accusations were politically devastating, but it also forced them into a preoccupation with the question of the legacy of the popular front that had implications for their future.
The labor movement, in particular, was in the late 1940s reeling from the twin pressures of bitter internal divisions over the legacy of the popular front and its peculiar relationship with the two main political parties in California. The November 1947 meeting of the state CIO demonstrated the damaging schism appearing within organized labor over the putative third party challenge to President Truman over the question of communism and the nation's relationship with the Soviet Union. Some unions, led by CIO state secretary Bjorne Halling of the ILWU, remained popular front advocates, and in many cases were overtly communist-led. Others rallied to the resolution of the United Steel Workers, led by anticommunist John Despol, that stated that the “so-called Independent Progressive Party is neither independent nor progressive. Instead, it is more accurately described as a ‘Trojan Horse' party under the control of the fellow-travelers of the reactionary American agents who, consciously or unconsciously, work for the establishment of a world police state which would deny the individual dignity of man.” Though the open challenge to Halling's leadership was defeated at the Santa Cruz meeting, the San Francisco News noted that a “growing influence of a rightist faction was apparent at the four-day session.”48 By mid-1948, CIO national chair Philip Murray had initiated a purge of communist-dominated unions from the organization, symbolized in California by Murray's removal of Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) as northern director of the California CIO.49
The difficult political position of labor in California was underscored by an examination of the role of the much larger California Federation of Labor (CFL) in the postwar years.50 In the crucial election year of 1950, in which James Roosevelt was running for governor on an unashamedly left-of-center platform and Helen Douglas was struggling to help maintain the liberal forces' tenuous hold on the U.S. Senate, a key battleground in the fight to do something about Taft-Hartley, the Federation's League for Political Education held its first formal preprimary endorsing convention. As political parties were forbidden from endorsing primary candidates, and since the Democrats had not yet managed to establish their own equivalent to the Republican Assembly, the role of organized labor in giving guidance to its membership on whom to support could be significant in determining the future direction of state politics. This fact was not lost on the national director of the AFL'S political