California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ right time for activists like Myers. “The Stevenson people came into politics just at the time we were trying to create a new structure in the county,” she remembered. “I collected all the names, found out what assembly district they lived in, and sent them out to the campaign manager in that district.”¹ Stewart Udall, influential Democratic congressman from Arizona who later became JFK's secretary of the interior, claimed in a 1958 article that “Stevenson acted as a fulcrum for the upsurge of his party in several of the states. It was hardly accidental that many of the Stevenson strongholds of 1956—California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, to name a few—were the states where Stevenson's 1952 campaign set in motion new forces and personalities. In many instances it was this fresh corps of amateurs and egghead recruits who provided the extra drive that revitalized weak party organizations.”² The Stevenson presidential bid energized left-of-center activism in California, and provided a new lease on life for the Democratic Party, and in particular the more radical elements within the liberal coalition. But why Stevenson, and why 1952? Californians had voted happily for FDR or Truman without at the same time seeming particularly interested in Democratic Party politics more generally. The Stevenson campaign helped to unify a range of grassroots movements just coming together in California behind a search for meaning for the left in affluent 1950s America. The campaign provided the organizational impetus for the formation of a new Democratic Party infrastructure in the mid-1950s, and also provided the kind of ideological soul-searching needed to propel the party to power later in the decade.

      Americanism Versus Foreignism

      The parallel story to this rejuvenation of political debate among Democrats is the remorseless rise of the Republican right in 1952, marshaling its forces and planning another clearly delineated left versus right battle that had worked so effectively for them in 1950. Republicans held most of the political advantages: they were well-financed; their political message was simple and easy to articulate; their campaign team was in place early; incumbent senator William Knowland was a major political player on the national stage whom no Democrat wanted to take on and who could act as a central figure around whom the other campaigns could revolve. Knowland, a darling of the right because of his hard-line stance on opposing communism in the Far East and his staunchly anti-Fair Deal voting record, also served as an antidote to the moderate Republicans who were largely blamed for the 1948 defeat: Earl Warren had been the vice presidential candidate and was increasingly seen as useful only for his own election. “Has [Warren] forgotten,” wrote one angry Southern Californian to Knowland in November 1951, “that his name was not magic in 1948…. He has too many socialistic ideas to please any real American.” Another correspondent to Knowland and Richard Nixon begged them not to nominate “another ‘Me-tooer' for president. Dulles, Eisenhower, Stassen, Truman, Warren and Willkie, birds of a feather. ‘FOREIGNISTS’ all. The 1952 campaign will be a clear issue of Americanism vs. Foreignism.”³

      Knowland was perfectly placed to represent the forces of the California right in a campaign of this kind. He was a vocal champion of conservative causes, foreign and domestic, in the U.S. Senate, and the family name had considerable political clout in Oakland and the East Bay. His grandfather, Joseph Knowland, had arrived in California in the 1850s and had made a huge fortune in lumber, mining, shipping, and banking in the Bay Area, and Bill's father, J. R. Knowland, had combined an equally successful business career as owner-editor of the Oakland Tribune with his role as a prominent advocate of conservative and Republican Party political causes. Before buying the Tribune in 1915 he had been a Republican member of the California State Assembly and then a U.S. congressman, but his failure to win a Senate seat in 1914 because of the break with the Bull Moose forces in the party prompted him to wield his considerable political influence from his offices in the Tribune Tower for the rest of his life. One of the beneficiaries of J. R.'s editorial patronage was a young Alameda district attorney named Earl Warren, and it was ironic that by 1952 Bill Knowland's campaign backers were so aroused against Warren given the fact that Warren had shown his gratitude for the Knowland family's careful nurturing of his legal and political career by appointing Bill to the Senate in 1945 after progressive warhorse Hiram Johnson's death. In the Senate Knowland became renowned for the grim intensity of his conservative convictions. He supported abortive legislation in 1946 to force the federal government to balance its budget, and was a relentless advocate of low taxation and an end to New Deal programs. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Taft-Hartley Act and a staunch critic of organized labor and of government mediation between management and unions, having acted as a fearsome opponent of union power during the Oakland General Strike of 1946. A reluctant convert to the Truman administration's foreign policy, like many former isolationists and antispending critics of American Cold War foreign policy, Knowland saw Asia rather than Europe as the primary arena of U.S. foreign policy interests and became a passionate supporter of the Chinese Nationalists after their defeat by Mao's Communist forces on the mainland in 1949, a cause that soon earned him the title “the Senator from Formosa.”⁴

      Knowland's Senate campaign gave the Republican right in California a clearly defined route into political action in 1952. Murray Chotiner, fresh from his successful effort to elect Nixon two years earlier, was chosen as Knowland's campaign manager, and immediately set out to create a mass coalition for Knowland that would, he felt, have a knock-on effect on other Republican candidates, including presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. Chotiner's strategy involved making an association between the Republicans and American values, attracting registered Democrats on the basis that Democratic candidates were out of step with the national ethos. “We must appeal to Democrats to vote for Bill Knowland,” Chotiner's campaign manual argued. “Therefore, do not make a blanket attack on Democrats. Refer to the opposition as a supporter of the Truman spend-spend-tax-tax program. As pointed out on our campaign strategy sheet, do not mention the opposition unless you are asked about him.” Knowland was painted as “sincere, hard working” and as “an outstanding authority on international affairs.” His opponent, Democratic representative Clinton McKinnon of San Diego, had “a 96% record of voting along with the Truman, Fair Deal, spend-spend program during 1951.”⁵ The campaign gained valuable endorsements from conservative Democrats, and made carefully worded references to both parties in speeches and broadcasts as Knowland successfully associated his own candidacy with the Cold War fight against totalitarianism and foreign political values.⁶

      The Democrats, reeling from the disaster of 1950, simply did not have the resources to challenge the Knowland juggernaut, backed as it was by the state's media and a national tide that was heading the Republicans' way. Knowland won both party primaries in a landslide, capturing nearly a million votes in the Democratic primary alone to McKinnon's 633,556. He garnered ten times as many votes as McKinnon in the Republican primary, and swept every county in the state except for McKinnon's home city of San Diego, which he carried in his own primary but not in that of the Democrats. Thus Knowland had effectively clinched victory on June 3, five months before the November general election, facing only a selection of minor candidates headed by Progressive Party candidate Reuben Borough. Borough had received 5,258 votes in his own primary; Knowland, by contrast, had in two primaries gained the votes of 2,308,051 Californians in a state in which Democrats in theory had a registration advantage.⁷ The natural political advantage the Republicans enjoyed in California combined with the electoral climate of 1952 to produce an almost impossible situation for Democratic candidates searching for a message after their 1950 drubbing.

      The seemingly impregnable Republican fortress contained, nonetheless, some almost imperceptible weaknesses that would not impact upon election results in 1952 but which would become significant during the 1950s. For one thing, the GOP's bipartisan strategy was no longer based upon Earl Warren's brand of centrist Republicanism, but upon a staunch antitotalitarian message that suggested a strong swing to the right. This seemed appropriate in the political world of 1952, with the war in Korea and Joseph McCarthy's charges about communists in government on all the front pages. But in the long term the strategy pushed the Republican Party increasingly into the hands of the far right in California, and away from the broader political base, which in the 1940s had included organized labor, that had guaranteed its position of power in state politics. The Republican strategy in 1952 created in a sense a political gap into СКАЧАТЬ