California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ after his defeat in November.⁴⁴ “I'm in mourning for the brains of the American people,” wrote a Los Angeles woman. “Because if they're not dead, where are they? It grieves me far beyond the point of tears that one of the finest, most sincere men I've ever known—and I think all of us feel we know you—should be defeated, not by logic or reason, but by a fairy tale…. I should have done more. I'm ashamed I didn't. I should have gone down to the Stevenson Headquarters and helped. Surely there were things I could have done. Next time, in ‘56, I will do more.”⁴⁵ A precinct captain in Danville wrote in a similar vein: “The tremendous popular vote you polled with your truthful and inspiring campaign bespeaks the popularity you attained in the last three weeks of three very short months. As captain of the Danville area precinct I want you to know that all the active workers are ready to campaign for you again—anytime. We feel that against any other candidate than General Eisenhower…the eloquent campaign you fought would have ended in victory—and will be triumphant once the General's glitter is gone.”⁴⁶ If this last prediction turned out to be wide of the mark, it was nonetheless true that the contours of California politics would be far more sympathetic to his run for president four years later, and the power of left-of-center networks of activists much more entrenched and obvious.

      Political Undercurrents: Race and Sexuality

      The Stevenson campaign, the intellectual debate over the future of moderate left politics, and the gradual shift of organized labor fully into the Democratic camp were important reasons why the political center of gravity was shifting slowly leftward in California in the early 1950s. In order to understand the social context in which this was occurring, and to understand the peculiar dynamics in California that made the Golden State part of a political avant garde in terms of a redefinition of the relationship between economic and social citizenship, we need to examine the growing movements for civil rights on the West Coast that did not in themselves directly address definitions of social democracy but that would later shape left politics in the Democratic Party in any case. The campaign for a fair employment practices law in California, and the nascent homophile movement in Los Angeles and San Francisco, both took shape at the same time as the rise of the Democratic Party to political power, and although these phenomena were not always overtly connected, all would intersect several years later to help crystallize the ways in which social democratic ideas would operate when they gained currency in the halls of power in Sacramento.

      California's booming economy and rapid population growth were set within the context of endemic and entrenched systems of racial discrimination. Over twelve million people lived in the state in 1953, and another million were expected to arrive by 1955. “Such gains, of course, must be translated into more homes, more stores, more factories, more schools, more hospitals, more prisons, and more facilities of every kind,” wrote a contemporary observer in September 1953.⁴⁷ Across California, access to homes and employment was not immune from racially motivated pressures. A group of Berkeley law students in the mid-1950s conducted a study of attitudes of local real estate agents, using dummy prospective buyers of different ethnic backgrounds to assess how each would be treated and which available housing they would be shown. “The interviews reveal,” noted their report, “for purposes ranging from personal prejudice to feelings of self and group-appointed guardianship of the community, local realtors are actively engaged in perpetuating the separation of the Berkeley area into segregated racial districts.”⁴⁸ Willie Brown recalled that in San Francisco in the 1950s “I knew that you couldn't get housing. I knew that you couldn't get jobs…. The Sunset [district] was considered off-limits. As a matter of fact, there were only two or three communities in which the welcome mat was there. The real estate people would only show in certain areas of San Francisco. You still had to buy through a dummy buyer.”⁴⁹ The report compiled for Adlai Stevenson's campaign team in 1952 on San Francisco stated that all “past public housing is segregated. The city has one of the worst private housing shortages for minority families.” A new public housing development in Diamond Heights was planned that would be open to all, but it would not solve the racial divisions in the city's employment and housing situation. The local NAACP had had to go to court to overturn a housing authority ruling that a new housing project could not rent to African Americans because ethnic uniformity was the “neighborhood pattern.”⁵⁰ The Yellow Cab Company in the city openly refused to hire African Americans. “Employment and housing are still the main problems which confront Negroes in the Bay Area,” wrote the president of the Urban League in 1957.⁵¹ “There are in California about 500,000 Negroes, 800,000 Mexican Americans, 85,000 Japanese Americans, 60,000 Chinese Americans, 400,000 Jews, over 2 million Catholics and a million foreign born,” stated a report of the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices in 1955. “There are some employment restrictions against all of these groups in California. The records of the California State Employment Service in Los Angeles three years ago showed that 67.5% of all job orders were discriminatory.”⁵² Economic development and tacit racism appeared entwined in California life in the 1950s.

      As elsewhere in the country, a movement to enact a state fair employment practices law had been gaining momentum after the nation's experience of a national law during World War II and the passage of a landmark state law in New York in 1945. By 1949 seven states had enacted antidiscrimination laws, two of them—Oregon and Washington—on the West Coast.⁵³ The NAACP had set up its West Coast Regional Office in San Francisco toward the end of the war, and Assemblyman Gus Hawkins had begun to push fair employment in Sacramento during the 1940s. The lobbying campaign was led by East Bay NAACP leaders C. L. Dellums and Tarea Hall Pittman, first through the NAACP itself, and later in the 1950s through the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices. Dellums was also International Vice President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and member of the Alameda County Central Labor Council, as well as the Alameda County Democratic Council. He thus crossed the boundaries between party activism, organized labor, and civil rights movement, and was a central figure in the formation of a statewide organization to lobby for major changes in the relationship between California politics and wider society.⁵⁴ The struggle mounted by Dellums and others for legislation to mitigate against discrimination in employment during the 1950s pointed up the growing influence of groups pushing for social change over the political process, but it also demonstrated the fact that the Republican power structure was ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the postwar era, and that a major shift in the balance of power in party politics was imminent. underlying this political shift was an implicit recognition that the enemies of fair employment were part of a broader attack on state regulation of the economy that by its very nature was both antigovernment and racist. Whether Dellums and his allies liked it or not, their struggle was not merely one of civil rights; it was a basic fight for economic rights as well, meaning that the fair employment movement was participating in the same ideological reading of social democracy as politicians and intellectuals on the California left.

      In March 1953 hundreds of Californians, among them Dellums, Pittman, Los Angeles city councilman Edward Roybal, Berkeley assemblyman Byron Rumford, and John Despol of the California CIO, gathered in Sacramento to lobby the legislature to pass fair employment legislation. Angry at the repeated failure of the Republican legislature to act on the proposed legislation, the gathering hoped that a show of solidarity and strength would force the elected representatives to change their perspective: “This session of the legislature has not distinguished itself by any concern for civil liberties,” argued a sympathetic piece in the Los Angeles Daily News. “Rather, it has gone to the other extreme in an effort to destroy labor unions and check up on the loyalty of public employees, most of whom are conceded to be loyal. The FEPC mobilization may have had the effect, however, of convincing the lawmakers that a large segment of the population is not supine or indifferent to what goes on in the capital. It may stay the hands of the more reactionary solons and lay the groundwork for future legislation of a better kind.”⁵⁵ Certainly the newly formed lobbying group the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices was keen to relay an optimistic message to its sponsors. Tarea Hall Pittman claimed that the Sacramento mobilization was “very successful. We feel that we have impressed upon members of the Legislature the importance of taking official notice of employment discrimination in California and the СКАЧАТЬ