California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ politics that had the potential to explode into life under different political circumstances.

      Helen Gahagan Douglas's Senate campaign further demonstrated both the limits of leftist influence in California and the potential for its growth. Douglas represented one of the great California Democratic Party success stories of the 1940s, as well as one of its greatest defeats. Born to a socially prominent Scotch-Irish family in Brooklyn in 1900, a young Helen Gahagan dropped out of Barnard College to pursue a career in theater. She was a Broadway star at twenty-two, a leading lady on the New York stage throughout the 1920s and, in George Abbott's words, “a strange classic beauty.” She toured Europe as an opera singer before returning to the United States and her theater work, appearing in the David Belasco production Tonight or Never in 1930 with leading man Melvyn Douglas, who soon matched his stage romance with Helen with a real-life love affair and marriage. The couple relocated to Los Angeles, where his film career blossomed as her work life stagnated, though she made a comeback in the big budget science-fiction film She in 1935. She found a new interest alongside her husband in local Democratic Party politics, campaigning for Sheridan Downey in his successful 1938 Senate race and soon becoming the leading Democratic female activist in the state as a Democratic National Committeewoman during the Culbert Olson governorship. She entered Congress in 1944 from the predominantly African American and inner-city Fourteenth Congressional District in Los Angeles, and rapidly became a vocal champion of the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party. She managed to ride out the stormy and debilitating battles within the state party during 1947 and 1948 by tending to her duties in Washington and by steering clear of the Wallace party overtures, but her political convictions remained on the left, and her strong personality ensured that she paid little attention to the social niceties of freshman life in the House of Representatives. She preferred delivering dramatic speeches on the floor of the House to courting lobbyists and her congressional colleagues, at one point striding purposefully onto the floor of the chamber with a basket of groceries to demonstrate the difficulties faced by ordinary families in the wake of the end of price controls in 1946. Her growing frustration at the rightward drift of Senator Downey in the 1940s on questions of corporate power, particularly in terms of big farm interests, prompted her to declare her candidacy for his seat in the fall of 1949.⁵⁰

      Acting as the launch pad for Richard Nixon's inexorable rise into national politics and as a prime example of a titanic clash between huge personalities in a crucial postwar political battle over the future direction of American politics, the Nixon-Douglas race has received wide attention.⁵¹ Most accounts of this battle royal take a well-known path. Douglas was a well-meaning, principled liberal who had famously taken that basket of groceries into Congress in 1947 to demonstrate the impact of inflation on the average American's shopping bill. She had decided to take on conservative interests backing incumbent senator Sheridan Downey and run for the Senate, but soon found she was running a hopelessly underfunded, poorly timed campaign against the slick, well-funded champion of anticommunism and antistatism in Congress at a time when Cold War antitotalitarianism was the main issue in America. Nixon's campaign followed closely the strategy of the Republican National Committee in 1950, one of associating the Democrats with socialism and, by implication, communism. Referring to the forthcoming elections as “the most important in our nation's history,” Nixon in a recorded speech to an audience in Modesto in March 1950 argued that President Truman had gone “right down the line for his socialistic program which he first presented to the special session of the 80th Congress in the summer of 1948 and which he made the basis of his campaign for reelection.” In another speech he assailed “the president's program for socializing the nation's industry and agriculture and schools and medicine.” Nixon's campaign was able to tie this in with a foreign policy that had seemingly failed to halt the expansion of communism in Asia, and with a candidate, Douglas, who was committed to expending the nation's wealth on leftist schemes rather than on combating Soviet expansionism.⁵² Faced with a vast Chinese Red Army sweeping down the Korean peninsula, and a relentless Republican onslaught against statist planners in Washington and their supposed communist friends in government like Alger Hiss, Helen Douglas had little chance against the man credited with exposing Hiss and standing against the Fair Deal.

      It is certainly true that Douglas's campaign faced numerous debilitating handicaps that have lent an air of resigned inevitability to historical treatments of the events of that tumultuous year. Some of the problems she faced have been sketched out in the preceding pages. Just to get the nomination she had needed to take on powerful elements within her own fractious party, people who had first of all remained steadfastly loyal to Senator Downey before shifting their allegiance to anyone but Douglas after Downey announced his retirement in the spring. The eventual challenger to Douglas, Manchester Boddy, a Los Angeles newspaperman, conducted his own bitterly anticommunist, anti-Fair Deal campaign against her, which left Douglas's campaign broke and exhausted before the main Republican onslaught had even gathered pace. Conducting a major statewide campaign in a huge, media-dominated state like California was a vastly expensive task, and Douglas had even hired a helicopter, “the flying egg-beater,” to take her from city to city quickly and efficiently and to gain media coverage in a media market resolutely hostile to her campaign.⁵³ Nixon, by contrast, had the unequivocal support of almost all the major newspapers, and almost limitless cash from an array of financial backers, prompting the New Republic to comment on the 1,400 Nixon billboards that stretched as far as Tijuana in Mexico to attract the attention of the tourists and day-trippers, and the planes flying overhead spelling out pro-Nixon messages in the sky at $50 an hour.⁵⁴

      Even so, Nixon's campaign later admitted to being afraid of the potential for left-of-center politics to attract support, which is why they attacked Douglas so mercilessly. Murray Chotiner, Nixon's campaign organizer and right-hand man throughout his political career, emphasized his concern about the potential strength of the opposition in a campaign manual he wrote in the mid-1950s for prospective Republican candidates. He pointed out the need for a candidate to have a strong political message, echoing the advice Jimmy Roosevelt's pollsters had given him. For Nixon in 1950 this had been “A strong America” and was based on the idea that “as long as our boys were fighting communism overseas, the least we could do was to see to it that the communists did not get a foothold here.” The flip side of this point, Chotiner continued, was the “very fundamental point that we must keep in mind, and that is never attack the strength of the opposition. I remember, as an illustration, that there were some issues that came up where frankly we were a little weak, and the other side was a little stronger than we were…. You are not going to be able to tear down the strength. You can attack the weakness of the opposition and just keep hammering and hammering those weak points until your opponent can no longer exist in the election drive.” Chotiner's argument that Republicans could not “outbid the administration…because the Republican Party did not stand for the same thing that Mrs. Douglas was espousing” explained the need to make communism the central theme: “Nobody could ever hope to outpromise a New Dealer.” He also noted that his team in 1950 had not bothered organizing a labor committee as they could “not compete against the opposition with top-name individuals. Never show your weakness at any time.” This confession demonstrated clearly that the bipartisan politics practiced by men like Earl Warren was on the way out by 1950, with antistatist business interests determined to attack the remaining citadels of the New Deal order lest any further advances in the corporate alliance between business, labor, and the state be sanctioned. Douglas's mistake, Chotiner argued, was to attack Nixon's strength and, by implication, to neglect her own: that of potentially benefiting from the more clearly demarcated lines of debate on the subject of the Fair Deal and political rights for the disadvantaged. “She made the fatal mistake of attacking our strength instead of sticking to attacking our weakness.”⁵⁵

      Certainly, Douglas's desperate attempt to retaliate against the Nixon team's allegations that she and the administration had inadequately opposed Soviet expansionism was ill-judged. It was unconvincing enough to argue that had it “not been for this aggressive, far-sighted policy…proposed by a Democratic administration, which I supported and helped write into law, America would today be standing alone and isolated in a sea of communism or chaos.” She had opposed the Truman Doctrine and other early containment measures, and in any СКАЧАТЬ