California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ by the influx of personnel and the circulation of new ideas, could move.

      In California the rise of a brand of far-right politics was symbolized by the activities of State senator Jack Tenney of Los Angeles and congressman Thomas Werdel of Bakersfield, who represented a growing force in state Republican politics. They also worried state Republican leaders, with good reason since their respective stars shone briefly before plunging into oblivion: Tenney thanks to a primary challenge in 1954 as McCarthyism was on the wane; Werdel in the general election in 1952. Their political strategies revealed the contradiction inherent in right-wing politics in California in the 1950s: the brand of bitterly anticommunist, anti-left rhetoric they espoused was becoming more mainstream in the state party just as it was becoming less appealing to society at large. Tenney's indiscriminate hounding of those suspected of communist leanings from his position on the state un-American activities committee was helping to mobilize thousands of Angelenos to defeat him. Werdel was even more extreme: affiliated to extremist organizations such as Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, which had an office on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, he was one of the not insignificant band of Taftites who went beyond Taft. Werdel remained isolationist because he felt foreign policy spending helped push the United States down the road to big government.⁸ In some senses, Werdel was a maverick, unrepresentative of the forces that controlled state politics. In part he represented part of a broader Republican strategy of playing to a right-wing faithful in advance of the first election the GOP seemed clearly on course to win since the 1920s, married to a concurrent strategy of mobilizing the private business community in a coalition to roll back the New Deal. One antiregulatory group sent Bill Know-land a campaign pamphlet entitled “So, the Fair Deal Lost,” described as “part of a series of pamphlets and graphic charts, designed to educate the rank and file on the benefits of the Free Enterprise System. This series is sold to the boss man for distribution to his employees…. While this one particular brochure has a strong political slant, the reception from both the employer and employee, on this particular piece, is most enthusiastic.”⁹ The Republican Party, in California as elsewhere, was becoming more obviously a vehicle for the establishment of an antigovernment ideology that saw the unfettered private accumulation of capital as the sole economic goal for the postwar age.

      Despite William Knowland's massive victory in the Senate race, the election results for the state as a whole sent a shot across the bows of the Republican political leviathan. The party had redistricted the state, benefiting not only from favorable district boundaries but also from the increase in the number of seats in Congress from 23 to 30 to reflect California's rapid and significant population increase since 1941. Yet although the Republicans finally managed to oust Democrat Franck Havenner from his San Francisco seat after several close races and plenty of mud slinging over alleged communist ties, they lost two races they should have won: in the Third District, based on Sacramento and its rural hinterland, and in the Sixth, in Contra Costa. The Democrats also disposed of Thomas Werdel in the new Fourteenth District, and came very close to regaining the Santa Barbara/Ventura Thirteenth District they had lost in 1946. The GOP ended up with a 19-11 majority in the House delegation, a crucial margin given their wafer-thin victory over the Democrats in total number of House seats, but hardly reflective of a landslide in a state in which almost every elected office was held by a Republican. Only eight Republican House candidates had both party nominations, and six Democrats also won the Republican primary. Crucially, a proposition to put the party affiliation next to each person's name on the primary ballot so that voters could not be deceived into thinking conservative Republicans were actually Democrats passed the popular vote in November. The 1952 election would be the last in which party labels could be immaterial.¹⁰

      Stirrings on the Left: Intellectual and Political Currents

      The gradual weakening of the Republican Party's grip on political power and, just as importantly, the decline of its dominance over political debate, became both more obvious and more significant when compared to the intellectual and practical upheavals occurring on the other side of the political divide. Whoever was to become the Democratic Party standard-bearer in the 1952 presidential election would benefit from three interrelated trends in California politics that would have repercussions beyond the election itself. First, there existed a growing realization within the California labor movement and civil rights organizations that the right turn in the state GOP meant they needed to build up the kind of left-labor coalition that they had failed to establish in the 1930s. Second, left-of-center political activists were finding new energy in an intellectual debate emerging on the left in various industrial democracies over the future of social democracy in an age of prosperity. Third, the obvious excesses of the domestic Cold War enabled a backlash against right-wing demagoguery to crystallize to a far greater degree than in the previous few years. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 served as a focal point for the coming together of these phenomena, but his campaign was just the beginning of a massive reshaping of the relationship between Democratic politics and California society that would gather pace later in the decade.

      The rhetorical strategy of state Republicans finally encouraged the development of an explicitly social democratic antithesis in a labor movement previously hamstrung by the peculiar dynamics of California party politics. Although the State Federation of Labor remained, as we have seen, unable fully to divorce itself from an endorsement strategy that rewarded the GOP as much as Democrats, the executive committee of the CLLPE had become concerned enough about the prospects for an emerging left-right divide to draw up a statement to be presented to the pre-general election convention in Santa Barbara at the end of August. Though careful to deny that the League was changing its practice of supporting politicians of any party that supported labor's economic and political aims, the committee made it clear that it had been forced to take sides, at least in terms of basic party political philosophy. The statement drew attention to the continued GOP support for Taft-Hartley; to the party's increasingly shrill antilabor rhetoric in which it referred to labor leaders as “bosses” and “dictators”; and, in pointed reference to the California situation, to “the punishment of candidates within their own party who have supported the program of social and economic reform…and by the further punishment of those who refuse to enter into their schemes to destroy labor.” The statement of intent alleged that the Republican Party was acting increasingly as a vehicle for private enterprise “to manipulate the institutions of government to defeat every effort to spread the benefits of our political and economic system fairly among those who create the nation's wealth.” The Democratic Party, by contrast, had “adopted a platform that recognizes the rights of labor and the common people throughout the world.”¹¹

      The statement, which endorsed the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket for president and declared a formal break with bipartisan politics, was unanimously accepted at the convention. The party's post-primary endorsements were a stark contrast to the muddle and fudge of the preprimary convention, throwing support to Democrats for Congress and State Assembly with very few nods of support for a handful of pro-labor Republicans. William J. McSorley Jr., Assistant Director of the National League for Political Education, worked the delegates into a frenzy with his bitter attack on antistatist politics. “This year of 1952 is indeed the most crucial year in the history of the American labor movement,” he claimed. “We can become active politically; we can work politically to destroy reaction; to retire the peddlers of reaction from the halls of the United States Congress and the State legislatures…. It was our failure to take part in the election in 1946 that has put us in the position we are in today.”¹² For those in the ranks of labor already committed to Democratic politics, such as Hope Schechter in East Los Angeles, the links being forged between labor activism and party political mobilization changed her political world. She had found the opportunistic marriages between labor and some state Republicans depressing, and was pleased to be able to go into her Latino communities as a proud Democrat, making calls on voters in the early evening before attending a labor or political committee meeting.¹³

      It was not just labor's clarion call to political action that mobilized grassroots party workers in 1952. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president also set the scene for the development of a left-right political spectrum in California in the 1950s. “There was no СКАЧАТЬ