California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ Committee for Fair Employment had no choice but to assume that the Republican Party was the cradle of power in California and that all lobbying had to concentrate on persuading its leadership to support the legislation. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that the Republican establishment was not going to act. Dellums's attempts to take the matter to Washington got a polite brush-off, a representative of the Republican National Committee stating that the feeling there was that it was a “local matter.” His attempts to arrange a meeting with Governor Warren in early 1953 failed. His letter in March to California GOP National Committeeman McIntyre Faries smacked of desperation: “As one who wants to see the Republican Party retain its control in 1954, I thought it advisable to seek your help. The last Fair Employment Practices Bill before the California legislature was killed in the committee on a strictly partisan vote…. We are very conscious of the fact that this is a Republican state and that this bill can only be put through by the Republicans, and they shall receive full credit for what is done.”⁵⁷ Unfortunately for the fair employment movement, the issue was a matter of party politics: both Republican senators refused to intervene, and the Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy of the State Assembly, in which the FEPC bill was bottled up, was dominated by conservative Republicans, all but two of whom were from wealthy, white districts of Los Angeles. The chairman of the committee, Albert I. Stewart, represented Pasadena, not an area in which FEPC ranked high on his constituents' wish list.⁵⁸ All FEPC bills were in fact introduced by Democrats and representatives of organized labor and the NAACP: the principal effort in 1953 was AB 900, introduced by the Assembly's two African American members, Byron Rumford of Berkeley and Augustus Hawkins of Los Angeles. Dellums attempted to get the state and national Republican leadership on board in order to broaden the bill's appeal, claiming that Rumford and Hawkins had sponsored AB 900 “not because they are Democrats but because they are Negroes.”⁵⁹ The very existence of an antidiscrimination movement in California, with its demand for governmental oversight over employment and economic relationships, unwittingly contributed toward a political polarization that meant party and political ideology would become more interconnected.

      The fair employment campaign coincided with a growing effort on the part of business interests and their Republican allies to resist efforts to regulate the private economy in any way. Fair employment as a concept was bound up with bigger themes of economic relationships between employer and employee, between homeowner and prospective buyer, between private individuals and the state. It was simply impossible in the 1950s to disentangle economic and civil rights issues, let alone attempt to argue that party politics did not matter. The State Chamber of Commerce, Associated Farmers, and the Merchants Manufacturing Association of Southern California all spearheaded efforts to kill FEPC, and funded Republican assemblymen who killed it in committee. The California Real Estate Association, which would become an enormously powerful antiregulatory lobby group once Democrats gained power in Sacramento and attempted to prevent discrimination in house sales, understood early on the interrelationship between economic rights and civil rights. In a direct attack on the fair employment movement, an article in the Association's magazine in September 1953 observed that “tricky phrases with favorable meanings and emotional appeals are being used today to imply a distinction between property rights and human rights…. Expressed more accurately, the issue is not one of property rights versus human rights, but of the human rights of one person in the community versus the human rights of another.” If government could interfere in private economic relationships on the side of one individual's rights to a job or a home against another's rights to decide how to disburse the fruits of his company's profits or how to sell his private home, what other new human rights would follow? “Now what about the so-called human rights that are represented as superior to property rights? What about the ‘right' to a job, the ‘right' to a standard of living, the ‘right' to a minimum wage or a maximum work week, the ‘right' to a ‘fair' price, the ‘right' to bargain collectively, the ‘right' to security against the adversities and hazards of life, such as old age and disability?…. These ‘human rights' are indeed different from property rights, for they rest on a denial of the basic concept of property rights. They are not freedoms or immunities assured to all persons alike. They are special privileges conferred upon some persons at the expense of others.”⁶⁰ Whether the proponents of fair employment liked it or not, their efforts for state regulation of employment law would, if successful, have economic consequences that an increasingly self-confident private business community, supported by a powerful public relations machine, was not prepared to tolerate, seeing civil rights predicated upon race as an opening wedge to broader economic redistribution of wealth outside the control of private enterprise.

      Historians have recently become sensitive to the ways in which economic development became more contested terrain in the postwar years, as business public relations firms and representatives of organized labor and the New and Fair Deals vied for political supremacy using contrasting notions of freedom and individualism as tools in their rhetorical and political strategies.⁶¹ It was becoming increasingly clear to civil rights advocates in California during the 1950s that their fight for housing and employment rights was becoming bound up in this wider struggle. It was not just the fact that Republican legislators repeatedly voted against the bill, though its repeated failure, most frustratingly in 1955 when it passed the Assembly but failed in the State Senate, was due almost entirely to Republican right-wingers from Southern California. One Santa Barbara Republican claimed citizens could not “be partially tolerant any more than they can be partially pregnant,” a reference to the claims by FEPC proponents that the bill would not force anyone to give jobs or housing to particular people, demonstrating the inextricable link between the debate over economic freedom and that over civil rights.⁶²

      There was also the fact that the Cold War put at the center of political debate contested notions of freedom and democracy that created a more antagonistic relationship between left and right around the twin themes of free enterprise and race. The CIO in its October 1951 newsletter noted that “our national security demands all-out production of defense materials and the use of all the available manpower. But discriminatory employment practices are preventing the full utilization of our manpower resources, impeding our productive capacity, and providing ammunition for the Communists' propaganda campaign about the failures of democracy…. Negro chemists are still working as laborers and Negro stenographers serving as maids.….We cannot aspire to world leadership in world affairs so long as we make mockery of our high-sounding talk about justice and democracy by practices of discrimination which destroy the dignity and deny the rights of millions of our fellow citizens.”⁶³ By contrast, a new right-wing organization based in Southern California in the same year stated in its articles of incorporation that its aim, in addition to the outlawing of communism in the United States, was to “prepare and propose constitutional amendments and legislative enactments for the restoration of democratic liberties and property rights” and to “formulate, develop, and promote public interest and education in basic democratic principles, civil rights, and property rights.” Those associated with this organization, known as America Plus (P for Property, L for Liberty, U for Unity, S for Strength), included state senator Jack Tenney and notorious far-right figure Aldrich Blake, who had led the fight against the recall of Los Angeles city councilman Meade McClanahan for his overt support for Fascist Gerald L. K. Smith during the war. Blake had authored My Kind! My Country! in 1950, a propaganda novel set in a dystopian future in which a new state of “Negroland” had been established in the United States. Its principal target was an economic and civil rights movement “officered by stooges of the Soviet Union…skillfully recruited from the ranks of those worst off in the social scale…from those among the rich and the intellectual who revel in striking a pose and in seeming to be out of the ordinary; from the emotionally upset and frustrated, including many members of the so-called minority groups,” all of whose “compassion for the unfortunate has inspired them to believe falsely that the remedy lies in unlimited handouts and controls by the State.”⁶⁴ Just as the Fair Employment movement was gaining strength in the 1950s, so was a popular right movement in southern California that welded together issues of private property rights, the Cold War, and racial prejudice in a manner that would have a major impact on both political debate and party political activity by the end of the decade.⁶⁵ As we shall СКАЧАТЬ