California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ over the putative third party challenge to President Truman over the question of communism and the nation's relationship with the Soviet Union. Some unions, led by CIO state secretary Bjorne Halling of the ILWU, remained popular front advocates, and in many cases were overtly communist-led. Others rallied to the resolution of the United Steel Workers, led by anticommunist John Despol, that stated that the “so-called Independent Progressive Party is neither independent nor progressive. Instead, it is more accurately described as a ‘Trojan Horse' party under the control of the fellow-travelers of the reactionary American agents who, consciously or unconsciously, work for the establishment of a world police state which would deny the individual dignity of man.” Though the open challenge to Halling's leadership was defeated at the Santa Cruz meeting, the San Francisco News noted that a “growing influence of a rightist faction was apparent at the four-day session.”⁴⁸ By mid-1948, CIO national chair Philip Murray had initiated a purge of communist-dominated unions from the organization, symbolized in California by Murray's removal of Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) as northern director of the California CIO.⁴⁹

      The difficult political position of labor in California was underscored by an examination of the role of the much larger California Federation of Labor (CFL) in the postwar years.⁵⁰ In the crucial election year of 1950, in which James Roosevelt was running for governor on an unashamedly left-of-center platform and Helen Douglas was struggling to help maintain the liberal forces' tenuous hold on the U.S. Senate, a key battleground in the fight to do something about Taft-Hartley, the Federation's League for Political Education held its first formal preprimary endorsing convention. As political parties were forbidden from endorsing primary candidates, and since the Democrats had not yet managed to establish their own equivalent to the Republican Assembly, the role of organized labor in giving guidance to its membership on whom to support could be significant in determining the future direction of state politics. This fact was not lost on the national director of the AFL'S political action wing, Joe Keenan, who told the assembled convention in San Francisco in April that the “year of 1950 is all-important for American labor. The labor movements of the whole world are watching us, and we are going into the bitterest campaign in the history of this country.” Keenan fiercely attacked Richard Nixon for distorting a debate about the future of the New Deal into one about communism, noting the devastating impact anticommunism had already had on primary elections in Florida and North Carolina, as well as on labor's chances of toppling the author of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. “We in Washington,” he told the California delegates, “hope to get enough information to you so that you can acquaint the people with the laws that the American Federation of Labor is concerned with…laws such as social security, minimum wage, aid to education, housing, and, most of all, health insurance.”⁵¹ The battles for Fair Deal measures such as federal health insurance and against Taft-Hartley had further welded together the political fortunes of labor and the Democratic Party, and in some respects the San Francisco meeting of the AFL'S California membership reflected this development: Helen Douglas and James Roosevelt both gained labor's blessing, and both addressed the assembled throng. “My fight has been your fight,” proclaimed Douglas in an impassioned speech, “and I will continue to work for the economic bill of rights that President Roosevelt outlined for us: a decent home for every family; a job at a decent wage; the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act [loud applause]; the extension of the social security program; the extension of our educational opportunities for young people; the realization of our civil liberties for all the people.”⁵²

      In the topsy-turvy world of California politics, however, the growing realization that organized labor would have to work with the Democratic Party to offset the impact of the revitalization of the private business community gave way to the realities of political patronage on the West coast. At the same time as Roosevelt and Douglas were giving their fighting speeches in defense of liberal principles and the legacy of the New Deal, the convention was voting to endorse all incumbent assemblymen and state senators—of either party— seen to be “friendly” to organized labor. More controversially, a vocal minority on the convention floor objected to the endorsement of Pat Brown for the office of attorney general. Brown, a prominent San Francisco Democrat and the city's district attorney, seemingly had the best chance of a Democratic victory in that difficult year: his Republican opponent, Fred Howser, had served a term in office beset by scandal, to the extent that Governor Warren was openly encouraging primary challengers. Howser had, however, made decisions deemed by many in the California Federation of Labor as favorable, and in a state in which established Republican patronage, however unreliable, was seen as far more valuable to union members than a commitment to an untested opponent, it was no surprise when the floor voted by 79,961 to 40,296 to override the leadership's recommendation and endorse Howser.⁵³ It would not be the last time such a controversy would distract the assembled gathering from the realization that gathering crumbs from the Republican Party's table was not helping place labor's concerns at the center of the political agenda in California. In 1950, in any case, the convention's achievements could be summed up by the fact that while labor's champions Douglas and Roosevelt were suffering ignominious defeats, Howser had lost the Republican primary to Ed Shattuck, who in turn became the only statewide victim of a Democratic victory that year when he lost to rising star, and future champion of organized labor, Pat Brown.⁵⁴

      Hope Mendoza Schechter, a leading figure in the garment workers' union and Democratic activist in a predominantly Latino part of southeastern Los Angeles, recalled with frustration the political ambivalence of the AFL in her neighborhood and statewide: “CIO—you could almost bank on Democratic endorsements—but not AFL. That was touch and go and a lot of politicking and a lot of work, in order to swing meaningful endorsements for Democrats.” She was determined to build up a liberal Democratic movement in her overwhelmingly working class district, but found her union leadership unwilling to ruffle the feathers of Republican contacts in Sacramento, including Fred Howser: “In the nineteenth congressional district, I maintained a totally Democratic headquarters…. I remember going to a central Labor council meeting…and [ILGWU Director of Public Relations and Education Sigmund Arywitz had] bounced me off…because I had worked for Pat Brown. The irony is that Pat Brown later appointed him commissioner of Labor.” Schechter argued that labor's reluctance to be more daring in its efforts to shape state politics frustrated ambitious and hard-working activists like her. The leadership “were being opportunistic. They knew [a Republican] was going to win anyway, and so they might just as well—there was no sense in fighting it…. I just took the position that they could have gone for no endorsement and that way, leave those of us who want to retain a few ideals, a little flexibility. This other way…your hands were tied.”⁵⁵ The AFL endorsement process often did refuse to endorse Republicans if they were antilabor or had overwhelmingly conservative records, but in many cases the conventions in the early 1950s were plagued by disputes between delegates over whether or not to endorse both Republican and Democratic candidates in a district where both were friendly to labor, or whether to withhold endorsement in cases where insufficient information about candidates had been made available.⁵⁶ California Labor League for Political Education (CLLPE) secretary c. J. Haggerty even confessed in his speech to the 1952 convention to being “almost nauseated” by the choice of endorsements for the State Legislature. comments from the floor were more categorical: “I have looked through these endorsements,” said one delegate, “and I think in very few instances are we going to be at battle with the chamber of commerce or the Merchants and Manufacturers. In many instances I think we are going to be in the same corner with them…. It seems to me that we have reached not the basic fundamentals of ‘rewarding our friends and defeating our enemies,' but a placating of the powers-that-be in the spirit of ‘we will be nice to you if you will be nice to us.'” The delegate noted that Earl Warren, praised in the league political newsletter, had signed the reapportionment bill, and that re-apportionment along GOP-approved lines “is going to do us more harm than any acts that the Legislature passed during the 1951 session.”⁵⁷ It was certainly true that absence of a natural alliance between organized labor and a New Deal-dominated political establishment made the prospects of an amicable settlement of industrial relations questions particularly unlikely in California as the 1950s wore on.

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