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СКАЧАТЬ in the UK” with “more emphasis on strikes, less on arbitration…. Indeed, they've become a powerful entrenched empire, equal in strength to big business, farmers, etc.”³⁵ He found little enthusiasm for a dramatic change in the party system, but did note widespread criticism among Democrats of the Republicans' regressive tax policies and its abandonment of public works and large-scale public spending as an instrument of economic growth. He even found a corporate executive, Ernest T. Weir of National Steel, who was “convinced government has [a] clear responsibility for keeping economy in balance: admits this is a big change in business thinking from 1930s.”³⁶ Crosland did observe the need for greater state control over the economic development of places like California: he reflected sadly on the lax zoning laws in many cities that led to “hideous urban sprawl, appalling traffic problems created, no open spaces.” Suburbs of California cities were “sprawling, ugly, very industrial— quite different from suburbs of smaller, less industrialized towns.” Los Angeles was “hideous except for lovely Italian surrounding hills.”³⁷ Crosland's trip left him in no doubt that the United States had witnessed dramatic political changes since the 1930s as well as vast economic growth that gave him ammunition for arguing that social citizenship and a dynamic private economy were potentially compatible. He also saw the limits of Americans' acceptance of a statist solution of economic problems, noting that unions still had legislative battles ahead to resist right-to-work laws and maintain high-wage settlements. The next problem remained how to reconcile economic growth with social equality.

      When left-wing colleagues and friends back in London read drafts of The Future of Socialism, they were somewhat taken aback by the influence his American trip had evidently cast over the thesis of the book. One friend wrote that “I feel that perhaps you are rather carried away by America,” and Richard Crossman, Labour Party heavyweight, disagreed with Crosland's arguments about American politics and society in a spirited correspondence. “If I understand you aright,” he wrote, “you believe that Socialism is now about equality, not about public ownership, and that we should accept much of the American attitude to social equality and equality of opportunity and add to these concepts of radical democracy a specifically Socialist content, the move towards equalization in the distribution of property, purchasing power and responsibility in industry.” Indeed, Crosland did see the implicit connection between equality of opportunity in economic terms and social equality in terms of equal access for all to a common citizenship, an idea being worked out in America through pressure from civil rights activists for racial equality, though it had broader implications than that. Crossman was, however, unconvinced. “Social equality à l'Americaine not only assumes inequality in property distribution etc but glories in it. It is only in a society where there are millionaires as well as newspaper boys, and vastly more of the latter than the former, that everyone has an equal opportunity to rise from one status to the other. It is no good, therefore, suggesting…that American ideology comes much closer to the egalitarian ideas of the British Left than to those of the British Right…. As for equality as you define it, they would regard it as completely fatal to their free enterprise system.”³⁸ It was difficult to deny the fact that the ongoing struggle for supremacy between management and labor for control over the industrial relations process in the United States rendered Crosland's notion of social equality through progressive taxation and a large public sector rather too radical for the American political scene. But it was also true that Crossman's failure to distinguish between all the different shades of political opinion led him to miss the perceptible changes in American political life, evident especially in California, that were taking place in the wake of Stevenson's campaign.

      Even if the Stevenson campaign itself was unsuccessful, and the ideological direction of the candidate uncertain, the personalities and men of ideas around him in California and nationally contributed toward a vibrant debate over the future of left-of-center politics in the United States. The impact of thinkers such as Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Leon Keyserling at a national level over the possibilities for economic equality of opportunity in prosperous times has been well documented by historians.³⁹ The debate was in full flow during the 1952 campaign, prompting an interesting take on the international dimension to leftist political thought in a New Republic editorial in August. The possibilities of the nation's vast economic output for the promotion of social cohesion and abundance for all were viewed as central to Stevenson's message to the country. “This theme,” the editors argued, promoted “an intelligent and helpful treatment of the Republican epithet: Socialism.” Whereas in Europe, they suggested, socialism had arisen out of economies of scarcity, “compelling low income groups to seek higher standards principally through a more equal distribution of limited national incomes,” American economic growth could serve as the engine of greater social equality without policies of mass redistribution of income. “It is the restrictionist concept of the Republicans which brings socialism about; the expansionist approach which makes it irrelevant.”⁴⁰ This analysis begged more questions than it answered: how far down the socioeconomic scale did the capacity to access the economy of abundance reach? How far were social questions of equal citizenship in racial and class terms bound up with economic redistribution? And as Crosland wondered during his visit to California, how long would the tentative truce between management and unions over the relationship between productivity and wage and benefit settlements last?

      It was in this intellectual and political context that the growth of the Stevenson movement and the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in California took shape. The rise of the club movement depended in part on a political mood, a growing recognition that the zeitgeist was changing and that the old politics of business as usual was no longer enough to cope with a rapidly changing social fabric. In part, the Stevenson movement reflected the usual organizational and personality rivalries that characterized party politics in California. The head of the club organization in California, Leo Doyle, reported in August that there was “some indication that the usual quarrelling Democratic factions see this Stevenson move as an opportunity to render service to the Stevenson cause and hence gain the proverbial urge for power.”⁴¹ One San Francisco Democratic worker, Ben Heineman, was of the opinion that the whole Stevenson club movement there had sprung originally from a party faction opposed to a rival group who had come out for the presidential campaign of Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.⁴² This was a pessimistic, if not totally inaccurate, picture: the club system, however cynical its origins (and Heineman's perspective related only to San Francisco), provided a conduit into Democratic activism for thousands who had thought that the collapse of the Roosevelt and Douglas campaigns two years earlier had killed off their hopes for a new dawn for the California left. Towering figures of the party of the future: the Burton brothers, Willie Brown, Jess Unruh, Alan Cranston, all cut their teeth in the Stevenson battle. And as Willie Brown recalled, in these years before they gained power and became constrained by the compromise and chicanery of office, they were hungry for a social democratic politics around which to organize.⁴³

      It is important to remember that the 1952 campaign represented a political fresh start; it was not the culmination of a struggle for power among liberals, but a planting of the seed that would take another six years fully to flower. Stevenson's spirited campaign ended in failure. He received a healthy 2,197,548 votes in California, but could not come close to Eisenhower's broad appeal in a state still enamored with those who could cross narrow party lines. Eisenhower's state total was 2,897,310. The Stevenson campaign had enthused many scarred from the bruising experiences of the 1950 campaigns and the rise of a red-baiting politics that threatened to engulf all outside a narrow right-wing consensus in state politics. But much remained to be done if a six-month burst of enthusiasm for a presidential campaign was to turn into something more durable and significant.

      There was no doubting the extent of the enthusiasm, nonetheless. Stevenson himself received thousands of letters during and after the campaign from Californians: there are twelve thick folders full of them among his private papers. “Your integrity, your honesty, the firmness of your intellectual grasp, the literary distinction of your speeches, and, most of all, your insistence on talking sense and on standing for the same principles everywhere and in all kinds of company, involved me emotionally as well as mentally in your fight and resulted in my associating myself, for the first time in my life, with the СКАЧАТЬ