California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ not ring true given the care she had taken not to be caught up in the increasingly febrile rhetorical game that was paralyzing political debate in Washington. But her attempt to argue, in response to Nixon's infamous pink sheet claiming she had voted with the extreme leftist Representative Vito Marcantonio 354 times, that Nixon had in fact voted with Marcantonio against overseas aid and economic assistance to Korea was sheer madness.⁵⁶ Clearly it was a reaction to the deeply unpleasant tactics employed against her by Chotiner and his sinister band of campaign coordinators: the pink sheet associating her directly with communism; the whispered phone calls reminiscent of those employed against Jerry Voorhis in 1946; the use of researcher Edna Lonigan to dredge up supposed links between Douglas and communist front organizations.⁵⁷ Her bid to challenge the GOP on foreign policy was not unusual in the fall of 1950, as many Democrats in races across the country were being worn down by the constant jibes of socialism and wanted to establish their own antitotalitarian credentials against a party only just coming to terms with its isolationist past.⁵⁸

      Her positive political message was, nonetheless, very real, and the bitter campaign against her was part of a broader national strategy, funded by organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and American Medical Association, to cast the demon of federal regulation out of the private business economy once and for all. In the lexicon of the increasingly dominant antiregulatory right the issue of the 1950 elections was, in Nixon's words, “the type of slavery in which an all-powerful state seeks complete domination and control over the lives and liberties of the people. The Soviet Union is an example of the slave state in its ultimate development; Great Britain is half-way down the same road; powerful political interests are striving to impose the British socialist system upon the people of the United States. The Republican Party must meet this issue squarely if it is to survive.”⁵⁹ Douglas strenuously denied the assumed link between social democracy and communism or totalitarianism, decrying the Republican attempt to “associate every Democratic proposal in your minds with something alien, terrible, and hateful.” In so doing, she was encouraged to articulate ever more defiantly what exactly it was that she stood for. In some respects she, like many Americans adjusting to life after FDR's death, remained unsure where to go from the New and Fair Deals: in her speech defending Democrats against the charge of communism she stressed that she epitomized “the struggle to win legislative recognition of America's needs through the enactment of the Democratic platform…. I am an advocate of the reforms begun by FDR and carried forward by Harry S Truman.”⁶⁰ Yet her articulation of a statist political vision was more clearly delineated than ever as she headed for electoral disaster in 1950. “I believe that government should be ever alert to the needs of the people, should seek to better their health, to extend their opportunities for education, should concern itself with the problems of old age and insecurity, should act to maintain a steadily advancing economy without valleys of depression or mountains of inflation,” she stated in a radio broadcast during her campaign. “I believe that government should be ready and able and willing to assist in replacing slums with decent homes for families with incomes too low to afford such homes without help. I believe that government should protect us from want in periods of unemployment.”⁶¹

      Her doomed campaign represented the beginning of a closer affiliation in California between an increasingly dominant liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a range of grass-roots reform movements pressing for political recognition. Phil Burton, then a law student at USC and a rising star in the Young Democrats of California, and Willie Brown, a young African American law student in San Francisco, became politically active in her campaign, and would later lead the way in reshaping the landscape of California politics. Brown later recalled how student politics came alive over her candidacy, paving the way for the landmark Adlai Stevenson movement in 1952: “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it was a little more left than that. It was really the left wing of the Democratic party that was trying to organize on campus.” Young Democrats were stung by the internal opposition to her campaign within the party, prompting many to sign up for active political duty. Bill Malone and most of the San Francisco Central Committee “were just too conservative,” Brown recalled, “and were holding on to everything. They showed zero interest in the problems of old people, zero interest in the problems of racial minorities and clearly were indifferent to students.”⁶² The 1950 campaigns coincided with the picking up of the pace of fair employment and Young Democrat movements that would play important roles in the political world of California in the 1950s.

      It was hard for Douglas's wide-eyed, idealistic supporters like Phil Burton to see much in the way of a silver lining in the final results in November. Roosevelt lost to Warren by a landslide of over a million votes. Democratic strategists tried to put some gloss on the catastrophic defeat by arguing that his campaign had been “extremely vigorous, well-organized, although not too well-financed,” and claimed the consistency and power of Roosevelt's hard-hitting attacks on the Republicans had helped Democrats hold all but one House seat. The post mortem also blamed the press for the scale of the defeat, claiming the “big factor” was the “vicious personal attacks upon Roosevelt by the press (about 100 percent).” Douglas fared better, losing by 600,000, itself a terrible result given her only win in a county of any size was in Contra Costa, but it looked good when put next to Roosevelt's catastrophic defeat. To the Democratic high command, “the false charge of Communism was the major contributing factor to her defeat.” The Democratic state chairman's report noted that Douglas's hard work in her congressional district in South Central Los Angeles over the previous six years had helped her Democratic successor Sam Yorty win by a respectable margin with “solid support from all segments in the district, labor, minority groups, and so forth.”⁶³ The Democratic tide among African Americans was particularly evident given the fact that the Los Angeles Sentinel had backed Nixon in the closing stages of the campaign, citing his anticommunism, but had not been able to sway many in the African American districts of southern California.⁶⁴ There was little doubt, however, that the Republican machine had crushed the hopeful band of Democratic insurgents, helped along by elements in the Democratic Party hierarchy who feared the consequences of a political revolution for their own sinecures. It was hard for Roosevelt and Douglas to appear credible when figures in their own party were arguing that their vision for America would “turn the country over to the Communists or reduce it to bankruptcy.”⁶⁵

      Yet opponents of Helen Douglas were right to fear what she represented, and what her campaign suggested was happening to California politics. The bitter attacks on her suggested that the cozy harmony between moderate and far right elements in the ruling Republican coalition was coming unstuck. The right had embarked upon an all-out drive to crush the New Deal order that risked putting the old internal division on the left over the popular front to bed in favor of a united front against the antistatist onslaught. Douglas and Roosevelt's rethinking of a left-of-center vision, however tentative, would begin to tie together grassroots racial, gender, and sexual political movements to a Democratic renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the defeated Democratic duo's most unpleasant opponents among the general public hoped that 1950 signified the end of the politics of welfare and civil rights in California. one claimed to speak for the whole state in suggesting “that Mrs. Douglas gather up the market basket with its chuck roast and other groceries she loved to use in her act together with other Fair Deal clap-trap and get out. Gullible people who fell for her act are no longer in these parts.”⁶⁶ Douglas took the advice and moved to New York after her defeat, but events were soon to show that her friendly correspondent was wrong to think the debate had been won.

      CHAPTER 3

      The Stevenson Effect

      When Helen Myers, delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1952, landed back home in Los Angeles after watching the nomination of Adlai Stevenson, she found that events had not gone unnoticed in California. “As soon as I got back,” she recalled, “there was a stack of phone calls on my desk—people calling in wanting to know if they could work for Adlai Stevenson.” This sudden enthusiasm for СКАЧАТЬ