California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ membership and appointing a notorious red-baiting ex-communist to the committee.³⁴ Girvetz reported in 1951 that he was struggling to help reestablish the Los Angeles chapter after finding it “in a state of complete collapse…. The executive committee had many vacancies, met rarely, and meetings were badly attended…. ADA had become synonymous with failure in the area and a kind of laughing stock.” Furthermore, the chapter's principal financial patron, Gifford Phillips, editor of Frontier, was widely distrusted by the national leadership and local anticommunists as a fellow traveler. Los Angeles chapter member Abraham Held referred to the Phillips group, including chapter president Kenneth Brown, as having “played footsie with the Communist fellow-travelers on the County Central Committee.”³⁵ In a state experiencing a massive wave of in-migration and in which few settled in one home for long, ADA chapters could serve as a useful social club or a jumping off point into local politics. They could not, however, function as a political party surrogate that could reach beyond the middle class and high society salons of Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara and provide concrete legislative solutions to California's major political problems.

      A forum like ADA was nevertheless a useful conduit for the sharing of ideas and the development of a new sense of purpose for those worried about the resurgence of anti-New Deal Republicanism after the war. Evidence for the tentative emergence of a broad political agenda for postwar liberalism in California came from Harry Girvetz in his scholarship as a professor of philosophy and sociology. Although hardly as well known in later years as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Talcott Parsons, his role as leader of the more successful branches of Americans for Democratic Action in the state and his involvement in Democratic politics made him a good example of an intellectual who also used his ideas in the political arena. He would later advise the Pat Brown administration on welfare policy, and so provides the sort of link between intellectual developments and practical politics that is of concern here. Girvetz articulated a political vision that was expansive enough to adapt to changing social attitudes over the next half century, and this vision would increasingly mould the character of the Democratic Party as it struggled to come to terms with a new political landscape in the postwar years.

      Girvetz published his major work on political philosophy: From Wealth to Welfare: The Evolution of Liberalism in 1950, the same year in which British professor of social policy Richard Titmuss published his groundbreaking study of the dynamics of social policy in wartime Britain, Problems of Social Policy. Both Girvetz and Titmuss would feature as intellectual policy experts cited in deliberations of policy formulators in California after the election of a Democratic administration in 1958, and so a consideration of the intellectual revolution on the left in the early 1950s at a time when the political fortunes of Democratic liberals and Fair Dealers were looking rather desperate is necessary for understanding later developments.³⁶ Girvetz's study was divided into two parts. The first outlined the principal tenets of “classical liberalism” as an Enlightenment mode of thought that reordered the world around a new, proto-capitalist understanding of human nature. The second he termed “contemporary liberalism,” which dismissed the classical liberal notion of human nature as egoistic and individualistic, preferring to emphasize the creative and social instinct in human nature that saw productive endeavor as a collective enterprise. Girvetz traced this intellectual current back into the late nineteenth century, but saw as its high priest in the United States the philosopher John Dewey. Dewey saw human activity as altruistic rather than inherently selfish, and claimed that clashes that occurred within societies over work and the sharing out of the spoils of production “do not lie in an original aversion of human nature to serviceable action, but in the historic conditions which have differentiated the work of the laborer for wage from that of the artist, adventurer, sportsman, soldier, administrator, and speculator.”³⁷ Girvetz wanted to construct a serviceable definition of modern liberalism for a postwar world that was not just concerned with Depression era issues but could be used as a mobilizing ideology for Americans opposed to the growing influence of free-market individualism in American politics. In this effort he was not alone, as the work of Crosland in Great Britain and Francois Mitterrand and Charles Hernu in France in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates.³⁸ An understanding of these intellectual currents does provide us with the framework within which to understand the growing political confidence of the Democratic Party in the 1950s, and the sowing of policy seedlings that would presage a reconfiguration of the relationship between mainstream politics and society.

      As an ADA organizer, Girvetz was interested in building up left-of-center political activity on the West Coast. As leader of a relatively successful ADA chapter in a state where that organization was having enormous difficulty establishing a foothold in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was called upon to provide speech material for national politicians such as Hubert Humphrey. One such draft expanded upon the philosophical foundations laid out in his scholarly work and applied it to the United States in the 1950s: “Cognizant of the real achievements of the profit system, present-day liberalism does not seek its abolition, only its regulation and control, that is to say, its modification to meet the requirements of a changing world…. Accordingly, liberals have evolved a program of government action which, by a striking consensus of both critics and adherents, has come to be known as the Welfare State.”³⁹ Girvetz defined welfare not simply as the transfer of economic resources or the establishment of personal insurance systems, but as a philosophically self-contained but practically elastic doctrine that could change in emphasis and target over time and in response to changing need. “The approach,” he claimed, “is experimental, the solution tentative, the test pragmatic.”⁴⁰ This welfare state would, he argued, include a response to families in economic need, but also to racial discrimination, and, by implication of the pragmatic test, to other areas of discrimination that might emerge into public discourse in the future.

      The campaigns of Democrats for statewide and national office in 1950 suggested that social democratic political ideas were taking roots in California, but that the party had not yet found the political muscle or the favorably social context to make them dominant. Jimmie Roosevelt's fight to defeat the popular Warren and Helen Douglas's drive to sweep aside conservative Democratic Party interests and win her party's Senate race represented clear attempts to push the political center of gravity leftward. Both campaigns sowed the seeds for the development of a vibrant social democratic strain in California politics later in the decade. And both demonstrated vividly the very real political and structural obstacles built into the political economy of California and the nation that still had to be overcome if the class, racial, and ideological kaleidoscope of Californian society was to be fully represented in the state's mainstream political discourse. The Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan was not just a victim of hyperbole when he argued that Roosevelt's campaign was “the most significant in the history of California politics since 1910,” and that “we are back in 1910, but on a higher level, in that our individual freedom and security are challenged by a group more monstrous and corrupted than in former years.”⁴¹ The 1950 campaigns, like the battles of the early twentieth century, represented a titanic clash between the forces of capital and those of the New Deal that set up the terms of political debate for the rest of the century.

      Few were surprised when James Roosevelt announced his candidacy on 15 November 1949: he had been the titular head of the party through trying times in the mid-1940s and had managed to steer his rag-tag army through a devastating internal storm over whom to support in the 1948 presidential election. More interesting was the fact that Roosevelt's campaign, unlike most Democratic fights elsewhere in the country that year, did not run screaming from an engagement with social democratic issues but made its central strategy against Warren one of openly embracing such issues.⁴² His opening gambit deliberately linked together statist economic management and individual rights in a way that would become common in California liberal politics later in the decade. In an open rebuke to Warren's stately nonpartisanship Roosevelt pledged to show voters “on which side of the fence I stand,” arguing that all citizens had the “right to find a job at a fair wage and under desirable working conditions. We must achieve here in California the goal of full employment…. Jobs must be free from discrimination because of race, creed, or color. Collective bargaining in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect СКАЧАТЬ