California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ underlining just how popular it had been.²⁷ The content mattered less than the spin that was placed on it, encouraging grassroots support for the Stevenson movement on the basis that he was a dynamic political force who inspired personal devotion in members of the public.

      The fact that the Republican turn to the right in California was pushing the Stevenson movement leftward was made explicit when Stevenson's strategists explored issues pertaining to the Golden State. California's economic development and rapid population growth, making it a prime symbol of modernity in the eyes of many observers, created challenges that required the guiding hand of government. This argument dominated reports to the Stevenson campaign compiled with the help of local Democratic politicians and activists across the state in the fall of 1952. Rapid economic development had exposed the inadequacies of housing and public facilities; had shown up in sharp relief the reality of racial segregation in California's cities; had placed increasing strain on the state's social welfare resources as many of the previous waves of migrants grew old. In Oakland the key issue was a crisis in housing: “Oakland, like Los Angeles, has had a long running fight over public housing…. Housing conditions for minorities—Negroes, Mexicans, Asiatics—are very bad,” reported Stevenson's Bay Area sources, including San Francisco State Chair George Bradley and Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Gordon of the Berkeley chapter of ADA. They noted the NAACP's recent court challenge to segregated housing in San Francisco, and the need for Stevenson's campaign to embrace civil rights. In Los Angeles local congressmen Cecil King and Clyde Doyle reported that “Los Angeles has more persons over 65 than any other county in the country—378,000 or more than 12% of the voting population.” A “liberal view on old age and disability allotments” would be a “helpful” way of framing Stevenson's campaign in LA. The increasingly unacceptable term “socialism” had to be tackled head-on in a city in which the genuine left and hard right coexisted in large numbers. Socialism was, the report stated, a “large issue in Southern California. Think it should be pointed out that the Government put out large sums to subsidize airlines, ships, railroads, farm prices, plants for such outfits as U.S. Steel. Stockholders think those expenditures are fine, but they object to Democratic programs for the little people—such as [Home Owners Loan Corporation] which has saved millions of homes. A good example of a ‘socialistic' experiment is the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light. It was founded in 1900, the year of Stevenson's birth in Los Angeles, and is the greatest municipally owned power enterprise in the world. Is this socialistic?” In Richmond, a city in which the party's candidate for Congress was successful in 1952, rapid growth had set the agenda: “Population rose from 24,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1950, about equal to the wartime peak…. Economic distress after the war was the most serious in California because of the closure of the shipyards…. Major issues are reactivation of the shipyards, need for industrial water, Taft-Hartley, FEPC, Social Security, other progressive measures.”²⁸ The particular demands of a modern, industrialized world placed pressure on resources, planning policy, and social cohesion in a way that made a new articulation of the place of the state in 1950s California necessary, at least in the view of those surveyed by Stevenson campaign managers.

      The debate within California over the future of liberalism took on added significance at the time of Stevenson's first run for the White House because it coincided with a wider intellectual debate on the left internationally about these very same themes.²⁹ In January 1952 a New Republic article tried to capture the flavor and tone of this emerging ideological agenda when the author, J. R. Feyrel, noted the way opponents, as well as supporters, of the New Deal state argued even more bitterly about welfare in the 1950s than twenty years earlier. “The main issue of today,” he wrote, “is surely the struggle for or against the Welfare State, or perhaps one can already say over the shape, development and control of the Welfare State. We live today in a collectivist society, in the broad sense of the word, and the pace of collectivism is likely to increase, for better or worse…. And if such a society is to function efficiently, it seems already clear that it must be governed by Welfare State concepts, in one form or another.” The momentum of change had been picking up pace since the industrialization of the late nineteenth century, Feyrel argued, with the legitimization of labor unions and the end of the open shop forming one major milestone, and the reduction of economic inequality by means of social legislation and redistributive taxation signifying another. “In such measures as the TVA,” he wrote, “one can see at least the wedge of the mixed economy, in the recent legislation in, say, California on the various trade-union and other ‘private' insurance schemes at least the first sign of the Welfare State.” The 1950s would, he argued, throw up new problems and challenges that would conceivably herald a major step toward social democracy configured for a prosperous world. A crucial question, and one that frames much of the present study, was “the cultural one. After the leveling, after the British National Health Service or the American owner-occupied home, what next?'”³⁰

      It is not difficult to point to a wealth of recent historiography on the American political economy of the postwar era that throws plenty of cold water on the implied optimism of Feyrel's assessment. As it turned out, the accord between labor and management over access to a private welfare state did not prove durable when the economic weather turned inclement, nor did it lead to an automatic federal expansion of entitlements for the laboring man and woman and their dependents. The term “welfare state” was in any case hardly appropriate for the patchwork of work-based welfare schemes, private pension agreements, and healthcare plans that reached only some of the workforce and very few of the laboring and out of work or retired poor.³¹ Still, several interesting trends could be discerned when thinking about Feyrel's analysis and its implications for California. certainly the state did witness the capture of the Democratic Party by partisans committed to constructing the sort of economic and social policies that would contribute toward greater social equality later in the century. And evidently the campaign of 1952 did point toward a clearer articulation of a social democratic message for the 1950s: economic growth and social diversity together required the regulatory hand of government to encourage a collectivist conception of social citizenship. The dynamic shifts in California society in the postwar era made the Golden State a stark case study of left-of-center political development in this period.

      The fact that California fascinated left-wing visitors from overseas desperate to find a new message for their own discredited parties in the 1950s strongly supports this argument. When British Labor politician and theorist Anthony Crosland landed on the West Coast, remarking in his diary on the “spectacular harbour, hills, much older houses, European, or rather cosmopolitan, atmosphere” of San Francisco, Dwight Eisenhower had defeated Adlai Stevenson and was already settled into the White House.³² His mission, however, was of great relevance to the Democratic left in California throughout the 1950s. His own party had enjoyed six years in power after World War II, during which time they had established a National Health Service, nationalized major industries, expanded the welfare state on universalist principles, and changed the economic and social landscape of postwar Britain. In 1951, they had been unceremoniously ejected from power by the British electorate, despite gaining the highest number of votes cast for any party in British electoral history up to that point. Labor and Socialist parties in Australia, New Zealand, and continental Europe had also lost power at the end of the 1940s or were struggling to find a role in an international political system dominated by the United States and its powerful brand of anticommunist politics.³³ Crosland was conducting research in the United States for his book The Future of Socialism, intended as a road map for a left that he felt needed a fresh message if it was to adapt to the political demands of an age of consumption and technological change. In essence, he was trying to find answers to the question Feyrel had posed in early 1952: what next?³⁴

      Crosland's travels around California and some other parts of the United States led him to agree with Feyrel that the economic development of the nation since the regulatory and statist reforms of the New Deal did show the extent to which the politics of the broker state between government, management, and labor had changed the ideological landscape. He studied a California bakers' union and noted its “very detailed statewide trade union agreement, giving the trade union considerable power over firms' decisions in labor policy, including in discretion of restrictive or inflexible practices.” СКАЧАТЬ