Hunched over his desk in the dim one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment he shared with his family, Jonathan Perkins penned a letter he believed would trigger political revolution. Dated April 25, 1945, Perkins’ late-night missive to famous red-baiter Gerald L.K. Smith hardly concealed selfish intentions when conveying this grandiose dream; in part, he wrote to rejuvenate a flagging career. Endearingly branded “Ichabod Crane” by loyal supporters for his tall, wiry frame and pointy features, Perkins had once ridden such inimitability to success, first in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as pastor of the city's largest Assemblies of God church and then in California as one of Los Angeles’ most controversial religious leaders. By spring of 1945, however, Perkins's distinctions had lost their charm. Banned from his denomination for radicalism, he now corresponded with Smith as an awkward, disenfranchised cleric reduced to irregular shifts on the assembly line at Goodyear and unfulfilling stints in the pulpit of a small storefront church.

Personally broken and professionally spent, Perkins nevertheless wrote his confidant with a sincerity of purpose that exceeded his angst-ridden sense of self. The timing was right and the opportunity obvious, he proclaimed in this vein, to rally fellow blue-collar evangelicals behind a vision of religious revival, economic reform, and political change. Beyond its obvious spiritual payoff, such an awakening, he suggested, would fix societal rifts created by postwar paralysis and new Cold War anxieties. Imagine the results, he intoned, if America were to return to the principles of social democracy preached so effectively by William Jennings Bryan just a few years earlier. The earnestness that poured from his pen was matched by the confidence with which Perkins transcribed his thoughts. In his view, no one was better suited than he to help lead the charge, a point easily made with reference to his résumé. Surely his recent hardships meant he was called to usher working folk toward a more fulfilling existence promised by the populist dictates of his faith.Footnote ¹

Smith answered Perkins’ call in the affirmative and soon came west to help lead this crusade, but he was not the only one convinced by the Pentecostal's credentials. Within months a veritable army of blue-collar evangelicals took to California's streets to lobby for the reforms advocated by their lanky leader. The organization through which these activists worked for change was Ham and Eggs, a movement founded in the 1930s but restarted during California's postwar economic reconversion crisis. For a fourteen-month stretch, from spring 1945 until summer 1946, Ham and Eggs used an effective grassroots lobby to rally workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of welfare benefits. In the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance far exceeding its original intent.

The political tempest Ham and Eggs helped spin revolved around the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism's labor-friendly initiatives and progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be extended. As historians have effectively demonstrated, no decisive answer to this question would be offered in the short-term, leaving at least some room during the Cold War era for political tussles over its subtler meanings. Yet, already by the mid-1940s there seemed little chance that the labor question would effect any permanent reordering in American society, at least of the kind hoped for by the New Deal's most ardent supporters. While federal election results in 1946 and 1948 would see conservative Democrats and like-minded Republicans turn the tide against New Deal Democrats in Congress, organized labor itself would shy away from reformist goals to protect its position of power within a liberal establishment that now saw mass consumption, not social democracy, as its chief aim. The irony of this shift is obvious, for in the mid-1940s we are indeed witness to the moment at which “Labor” “came to be both fundamentally more important yet fundamentally less threatening” to American political life.Footnote ²

Why the “labor question” was eclipsed at this time and to what end remains a fundamental query for historians of postwar America, one that has elicited an extensive but not yet complete array of scholarly emphases. While some, for instance, have stressed race as the crucible through which New Deal liberalism stumbled at this time, others concerned with state formation and urban development, domestic and foreign policy, have drawn alternative conclusions.Footnote ³ While lending texture to these accounts, Ham and Eggs’ story adds another important element in this equation: religion. It does so by revealing a crisis point at which an important constituency of the New Deal order—the thousands of blue-collar evangelical Democrats who worked in the West's defense industries and worshiped in the regions burgeoning Baptist, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist churches—addressed the “labor question” on their own terms. Forced by volatile circumstances beyond their own control, conditions raised by rapid demographic, economic, and cultural change created by wartime mobilization and illustrated most clearly in partisan discord within the Democratic Party, these Christian workers confronted a new political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith commitments.

In the end they chose the latter over the former, but as the Ham and Eggs affair reveals, they did so with reluctance and only after diluting the economic imperatives of their theology. Rooted in the populist evangelicalism they had long heard preached in their churches and seen revealed in scripture was William Jennings Bryan's doctrine of “Jefferson and Jesus,” a social gospel from below that encouraged protest against the centralizing forces of the modern state and defense of a society buttressed by personal ties to local institutions, deep devotion to Christian morality, and equal access to a truly free-market economy. Simplistic and at times incoherent in its delivery, radically egalitarian in class terms but also prone to fierce racism, populist evangelicalism nevertheless held enough consistency within its ideological framework to see its political goals addressed clearly by a pre- and interwar Democratic Party that stood both for their craft and for their creed. In the tumult that surrounded and ultimately destroyed the Ham and Eggs movement, blue-collar evangelicals witnessed the swift dissolution of this vision.Footnote ⁴

To be sure the experience jarred blue-collar evangelicals, but it was equally disruptive for California's political alignment. Although not the only harbinger of change, Ham and Eggs was an especially violent one that proved extant political alliances could not last. For those on the labor Left, who shared the Democratic Party with blue-collar evangelicals, Ham and Eggs smacked of fascism and illustrated the damage done to industrial unionism and social democracy when plain folk religion called the shots. For an emerging conservative coalition united behind Christian anticommunism, Ham and Eggs offered further proof that organized labor and the New Deal state had become political leviathans that threatened the Christian American values they now sought to protect. Caught in the middle, Ham and Eggs thus became a symbolic pivot for both the Right and Left. When blue-collar evangelicals who supported this movement finally leaned right in response to their predicament they found conservative allies eager to embrace them. For the following decades they would return the affection by becoming the ground troops for a conservative Republican movement that swept east from California across the rest of the nation.

This, then, was the big picture at play the moment Perkins wrote to Smith, yet at no point was it ever obvious to the citizens who responded in mass to the preacher's call. Emotion as much as logic, parochialism as much as broad vision, guided their actions. This makes Ham and Eggs’ history difficult but even more important to tell, for in its details, drawn from letters, literature, and “spy reports” crafted by activists on both the Right and Left, we are witness to a short and turbulent but consequential turning point in California's—and ultimately the nation's—political destiny.

Ham and Eggs Redux

The story behind Perkins's letter begins a decade earlier. Ham and Eggs—or the Retirement Life Payments Association, as it was formally known—was the most sensational of eighty different old-age welfare schemes cultivated in California during the 1930s. Led by the brother tandem of Willis and Lawrence Allen and engineered by one-time End Poverty in California (EPIC) official Sherman Bainbridge, Ham and Eggs was formed in 1937 with hopes of curing economic depression by making the government fund pensioners with a weekly allowance. It was Bainbridge who gave the movement its popular name when, in a casual reference to the difficulties of securing food for the elderly in times of economic hardship, he told an audience, “We must have our ham and eggs!” Within months of this declaration, Ham and Eggs claimed a statewide membership of 362,000 and supporting constituency of 1,000,000, numbers that commanded the attention of the state's most powerful politicians.Footnote ⁵

Although senior citizens comprised a significant bloc of support, the movement's success stemmed from its ability to generate a broader appeal among other sectors of society. Structured around a simple economic plan that would create a state bank to manage the exchange of thirty one-dollar warrants issued each week to every unemployed Californian over the age of fifty, the legalization of this scrip as tender for the payment of all state taxes, and a three percent gross income tax on all persons and corporations, Ham and Eggers argued that their plan held the key to problems facing all Americans regardless of age, gender, or class. As the organization's printed newspaper Ham and Eggs for Californians liked to illustrate through depictive cartoons, with Californians over fifty comfortably retired from the labor force and spending their thirty dollars per week, young people, laborers, and struggling blue-collar families would all benefit equally.Footnote ⁶ This simple formula raised red flags for upper-middle-class voters but held deep truths for the rank and file, especially those populating Los Angeles's blue-collar suburbs who prided themselves on self sufficiency and communal voluntarism but welcomed government largesse and checks on corporate capitalism in times of need. In their minds, Ham and Eggs seemed common sense. Radical in its condemnation of economic inequalities yet conservative enough in its refusal to undermine local institutions of authority—church, home, and guild—Ham and Eggs offered short-term government relief to ensure long-term personal well-being.Footnote ⁷

Despite (or because of) its strong support from California's lower echelons, Ham and Eggs failed to achieve the legislative success it coveted, but it came close. In the fall 1938 election Ham and Eggs failed by the slightest of margins (defeated by a vote of 1,143,670 yes to 1,398,999 no) to have its initiative passed into legislation. While the respectable showing made Ham and Eggers determined to force a special election in 1939, it also crystallized opposition. Out from the political shadows emerged several interest groups ready to expose Ham and Eggs as a disastrous concoction of ideas. Among these naysayers was a usual suspect, big business, which argued that Ham and Eggs’ plan would further destabilize the economy by replacing a struggling but proven currency with a worthless form of monetary exchange that would surely collapse. What caught the Allen brothers off guard, however, was criticism from other unexpected sources, like liberal religious leaders, for example, which deemed their plan immoral.Footnote ⁸

All of these criticisms contributed to Ham and Eggs’ defeat, but the censure that had the most damning effect was one that linked the movement with the labor Left. Although dismissed by many as vacuous in substance, the Ham and Eggs agenda nevertheless struck fear among California's civic elite as a collectivist scheme.Footnote ⁹ Martin Dies, chairman of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities, validated fears when, on a visit to Los Angeles in the fall of 1939, he claimed to possess evidence that, if voted in, Ham and Eggs would be seized by the Communist Party and used to “wreck the state government as an opening wedge in its campaign to overthrow the government of the United States.”Footnote ¹⁰ Dies’ evidence might have included the official endorsement Ham and Eggs received from William Schneiderman, Executive Secretary of the Communist Party of California, who believed that all

But most Californians did not need Dies or Schneiderman to tell them of Ham and Eggs’ courting of the labor Left. Although hesitant to be linked with card-carrying Communists, Ham and Eggs leaders made broad overtures to industrial labor and found their dealings with this constituency rewarding. Of this alliance, less sympathetic liberal pundits like Winston and Marian Moore sardonically joked, “The C.I.O. sent them love and kisses and, not to be outdone, the A.F. of L. came through with many happy returns.”Footnote ¹²

In the end, Ham and Eggs proved unable to deflect the criticisms heaped upon it in the weeks leading up to the November 1939 election. Following an intense campaign not seen in California since the EPIC campaign of 1934, a record eighty two percent of registered voters turned out, with 1,933,557 of them voting no and 993,204 yes to the Ham and Eggs plan. Infuriated by what they perceived as a betrayal of their movement by Governor Culbert Olson, whose earlier support for Ham and Eggs waned noticeably as the election approached, Ham and Eggs leaders vowed revenge. Then, with war looming and California's electorate focused abroad, Ham and Eggs decided that retreat was the best tactic for their organization, at least for the time being.Footnote ¹³

The Allens’ decision to resurrect Ham and Eggs in 1945 stemmed from a combination of political opportunism and genuine desire to finish the fight they had started years earlier. In basic terms, the Allens hoped to secure the required number of signatures on a petition that would force state officials again to place their initiative on the 1946 election ballot. Their endgame was a yes vote that would lead to a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing pensions for the elderly. But it was also more than that. In order to achieve their goal, the Allens sought to maximize a climate of protest created by postwar economic recession. Along the way they hoped their work in the trenches would garner them personal power within the Democratic Party. Two adjustments were considered essential for victory on these counts, both of which banked success on one of California's fastest growing constituencies: blue-collar evangelicals.

Ham and Eggs, the Allens decided in the first place, needed religion. In its 1930s incarnation Ham and Eggs had drawn loosely from popular religious influences that helped fuel other California grassroots movements like the Townsend Plan. But compared to Francis Townsend, a respected Protestant gentleman whose organization directly recruited Protestant ministers and appealed to California's evangelical voter, the backslidden-Methodist Allen brothers seemed less focused on garnering support in the local pew.Footnote ¹⁴ In Ham and Eggs’ postwar form this changed, dramatically. From the outset of their 1945 campaign, the Allens knew that success the second time around would depend on a more conscious and rigorous courting of working-class evangelicals whose numbers in California had swelled during the war years as a result of in-migration from the southern Bible Belt.Footnote ¹⁵ Institutionally, this meant tapping into the pews of the hundreds of Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Church of Christ, and independent fundamentalist churches that clustered around Los Angeles’ defense industries. As illustrated by expansion just within the Assemblies of God, these clusters were indeed thick with potential. Between 1941 and 1946, the Assemblies of God's total number of churches in Southern California alone increased by fifty percent (from 107 to 151) with the vast majority of these built along the industrial corridor that stretched south from Los Angeles to Orange County.Footnote ¹⁶ The Allens’ path to these pews came through preachers, and here too they had immeasurable opportunity. Reporting in 1946 to his superiors at denominational headquarters in Springfield, F.C. Woodworth, Superintendent of the Southern California District Council of the Assemblies of God, described the overabundance of pastors that made uniformity in his ranks so difficult: “We have about 175 churches and about 650 preachers on our roll; consequently, you can see somewhat of the task we have here.”Footnote ¹⁷ Besides leaving other regions of the country understaffed, this excess meant hundreds of Pentecostal pastors had to look elsewhere for employment, either in other denominations, independent churches of their own making, or outside the ministry as laborers in the industrial workforce. Woodworth's struggles were the Allens’ boon, for in this network of uprooted and unemployed clerics was the personnel needed for an effective grassroots political campaign.

In order to fashion links with these clerics and turn their parishioners into activists, the Allens’ needed a religious doctrine for Ham and Eggs that would sanctify the movement's economic agenda. The Allens were confident that such fusion could take place if they adhered to a formula laid out earlier. The ultimate precedent, of course, was late nineteenth-century Populism, whose championing of localized labor, popular democracy, and evangelical religion had galvanized Bryan's career.Footnote ¹⁸ But more recent examples could also be drawn from Depression-era organizations like Huey Long's “Share Our Wealth,” which had sought to “pull down the rich and … raise the spiritual state of the nation” at the same time.Footnote ¹⁹ In its initial state, Ham and Eggs had drawn from the same pool of religiously inflected imperatives, but in a less consistent and distinguishable manner. Now that was about to change.

Perkins was the man who convinced the Allens that religion could guarantee Ham and Eggs’ success. His illustrious and unconventional career no doubt helped warm the Allens to this possibility. Having worked in the region's factories, ministered in some of California's largest and smallest evangelical churches, and barnstormed for some of the West Coast's most popular political movements (including the notorious, anti-Semitic kind), Perkins was not only well versed in grassroots political discourse but also well connected to the region's most politicized preachers. At the same time he carried personal baggage that often overburdened the constructive potential of his professional aspirations. Insecure about his social location and status within the evangelical subculture, prone to conspiratorial thinking and bouts of exaggeration in the name of self-promotion, he nevertheless suffered most from a spiritual earnestness that manifested itself in fierce and often detrimental anti-institutional behavior. Perkins was enigmatic, to say the least, but not so different from other Pentecostal preachers of the day who saw themselves as prophets working against society's grain. Yet even with these troubling idiosyncrasies, it did not take long for Perkins to earn the Allens’ trust by brandishing his extensive religious and political ties. Shortly after agreeing to join Ham and Eggs Perkins assembled the “California Pastors’ Committee,” comprised mainly of local Pentecostal and Baptist ministers but also of more prominent clerics like Trinity Methodist's Reverend Bob Shuler. Estimated at one thousand but likely numbering around four hundred, this band of preachers immediately set about encouraging those in their pews to rally behind Ham and Eggs.Footnote ²⁰

Through Perkins’ connections, the Allens also succeeded at making the second adjustment to the postwar Ham and Eggs organization by turning it into an anticommunist organization. The reasoning behind the shift was threefold. Stung in the 1930s by charges that their movement was a communist front, the Allens entered the postwar era determined to prove detractors wrong. Ham and Eggs was not communist, they would insist, but rather an authentically American initiative carried out by patriotic citizens to reclaim democratic principles upon which their nation was founded. The second motive grew out of the first. Cognizant of the anticommunist sentiments that animated their new constituency, the Allens wanted to assure their evangelical followers that lobbying for economic reform was not the same as advocating collectivism. Finally, always looking for sensational marketing strategies, the Allens recognized that anticommunism was good business in postwar California. Although increasingly evident nationwide, in 1945 no other region could match the intensity with which California encouraged or battled communist influences. By joining California's front-line assault on the Red Menace the Allens hoped Ham and Eggs would generate the publicity necessary to make its more substantive claims stick in the citizenry's conscience.

When searching for a charismatic leader to dramatize their new anti-communist concern, the Allens looked to Gerald L.K. Smith. With Perkins as mediator, the Allens entered into an agreement with Smith whereby in exchange for touring California on behalf of the movement he would be allowed to use Ham and Eggs’ platform to propagate his strident Christian anticommunism.Footnote ²¹ Just as the Allens predicted it would be, Smith's impact was immediate. During the summer of 1945 the Allens marketed Smith as a new spokesman of Ham and Eggs and by doing so created a buzz in the local media that no amount of money or business savvy could otherwise have engendered. By mid-November 1945 Smith was responsible for doubling the number of subscriptions to the Ham and Eggs newsletter and forcing the organization to look for bigger auditoriums than ever imagined necessary.Footnote ²² Throughout the campaign the Allens would remain “tickled pink” with Smith's ability to generate publicity, even of the most frequent, negative kind.Footnote ²³ Rank-and-file evangelicals who supported the movement, however, were soon to learn the heavy price that came with this devil's bargain.

Blue Collar Evangelicalism Awakened

What the Allens thought possible in the late 1940s, then, was a political front that would advocate change in the same way populist evangelicalism had done since the 1880s. In a sense, by appealing simultaneously to economic interests and religious values, the Allens believed Ham and Eggs could carve out a third way between the industrial unionism and progressive liberalism that animated the Left on one hand, and the antistatism and strident Christian anticommunism that energized the Right on the other.

To be sure, the plan was novel, for already in the West wartime volatility had created an either/or political scenario in which class concern and religious creed no longer seemed compatible. Political leadership on both ends of the spectrum accentuated the divide, leaving Ham and Eggs’ blue-collar evangelicals feeling embattled on all fronts. While in their factories they encountered advocates of the CIO's Political Action Committee (PAC) that banked hope for societal reform on powerful unions and an active, secular state, from the pulpits of the region's influential middle-class evangelical churches they heard sermons celebrating free market capitalism and Christian patriotism with little heed to economic injustice. Yet if the Allens were a bit naïve in their goal, they were not completely misguided, for even amid these pressures, most rank-and-file evangelicals still believed they could advance an agenda of political change at the top through the implementation of a social gospel from below. Jefferson and Jesus, they remained convinced in other words, was not a simplistic political notion reserved for a romanticized past.

From May 1945 through June 1946, Ham and Eggs set out to prove this point by pursuing its objectives on two fronts. Providing the grassroots momentum would be regularly scheduled local rallies during which evangelical and nonevangelical laborers could be educated in a gospel of reform. Creating headlines for the movement, meanwhile, would be Smith's crusades, gatherings the Allens hoped would help galvanize broader support among middle-class Californians, especially those whose anticommunist priorities might bring them into fellowship with their blue-collar allies. Although the second tactic would soon take precedence, it was the first that offered substantive hope for change. In community halls throughout the state neighbors gathered to sing, speak, and listen to a message of empowerment based on workers’ rights and religious commitment. It was fleeting and not to be repeated again in a postwar era that would see material interests eclipsed in the evangelical mind, but in this moment laborers called forth in unison the virtues of Christ and the CIO.

From the outset Perkins took charge of Ham and Eggs’ ground-level attack by using his pulpit and pamphlets to turn the movement into a full-fledged evangelistic crusade. He revealed these intentions at a downtown Los Angeles meeting in fall 1945. With the “rattle and clatter from passing streetcars outside on Hill Street” offering a metaphor for the numbing distractions of modernity, Perkins reminded his audience of the unencumbered life he and many of his listeners had experienced back in Oklahoma before urging the restitution of this lifestyle. The list of catchy invectives that followed helped Perkins emphasize his point: “Ham ‘n’ Eggs’ plan [is] outlined in the Bible. If the ministers can't see this, or won't … get some new ministers!” “Everything belongs to God and not to the big trusts. We have the Bible on our side!” “We must wake up the preachers and the politicians!”Footnote ²⁴ More coherent in its biblical defense of Ham and Eggs was the booklet Perkins authored and began selling at this time. Advertised at meetings, Perkins’ The Preacher and the State contained the obligatory stab at modernist, mainline preachers who, in his mind, had abandoned Christ's call to defend the rights of the poor and joined the “unions of the rich” (like the Merchants and Manufacturers Associations) to protect the rights of property. Perkins’ chastisement, however, was not reserved for modernists. Though sympathetic toward their fears of promoting social justice at the expense of individual salvation, Perkins reminded his allies that it was equally remiss to ignore “plain scripture on economic matters.” It was all the more negligent, he emphasized, for Pentecostals and Baptists to shirk this duty for they had the advantage of “working among the poor or common people as a rule.” What evangelicals in every kind of pew had to do, Perkins proclaimed, was stretch their political awareness beyond the narrow confines of charity and begin acting boldly for change in affairs of the state.Footnote ²⁵

With pride Perkins watched as this message increasingly dictated the terms of Ham and Eggs mobilization. Throughout the fall of 1945 and well into spring of 1946 Ham and Eggs meetings continued to emphasize its evangelical qualities but always in a manner that embraced its working-class imperatives. Programming strategies reflected this. While one meeting in March, for example, saw a platform of preachers listening intently to Leslie G. Taylor, Executive Secretary of the CIO's shipyard union in San Pedro, elucidate Ham and Eggs’ “economic education” of the common worker, on another platform another day Taylor and his compatriots were treated to a sermon by a Methodist preacher and a selection of gospel favorites sung by Rev. James Warren Lowman, friend of Perkins and regular soloist at Ham and Eggs meetings. Lowman's moving rendition of “The Stranger of Galilee” was preceded by an equally heartrending testimony by Laguerre Drouet, a former Water and Power employee of twenty years, American Federation of Labor member and First- and Second-World-War veteran, who had converted to Ham and Eggs after reading Perkins’ The Preacher and the State, a book that had revealed to him “God's Law” and that “Labor deserves a break.”Footnote ²⁶

While Ham and Eggs’ first line of attack ran smoothly under Perkins’ command, the organization's second plan to market Smith's anticommunism proved far less easy to control. At the beginning its prospects seemed good. On May 27, 1945, the Allens first introduced Smith to an audience of five hundred “chronic Ham-and-Eggers,” then four nights later before an invitation-only crowd of two thousand gathered in Los Angeles’ Embassy Auditorium heralded him again as Ham and Eggs’ great hope. Smith was joined on stage at this larger rally by a greeters panel that included local radio commentator G. Allison Phelps, Claude A. Watson, a “perennial candidate for the Prohibition Party,” Mrs. Adele Cox, head of the California Chapter of “We, the Mothers Mobilize for America, Inc.,” and both Woodworth and Shuler, who opened the meeting with prayer.Footnote ²⁷ To Smith's glee, upon his request for audience members to indicate if they were ministers of the gospel, over three hundred hands were raised.Footnote ²⁸ Perkins liked to brag that he could organize a “parade of Fundamentalist preachers” behind the Ham and Eggs movement, and early returns suggested some merit to his claims.Footnote ²⁹

Designed to make a splash, Smith's appearance in Southern California caused a tidal wave of fervor among the region's evangelical citizens. For the next six months the Smith-led rallies, designed to support Perkins’ local gatherings, became the movement's focal point. As illustrated by one gathering at Los Angeles’ Polytechnic High School Auditorium on November 3, 1945, public spectacle always followed. On this night three thousand Angelenos arrived ready for a routine of revivalist preaching, old-time hymn singing, and political barnstorming. Willis Allen opened proceedings by leading the audience in the “Pledge of Allegiance” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and then pronounced Ham and Eggs a success with 495,000 members and its commitment to redistribution of wealth “among the people regardless of color, class or creed.” After setting the tone Allen extended a welcome to Smith who, “as representative of 3,000,000 thinking people … and 21 patriotic groups,” had graciously accepted the invitation to lobby for Ham and Eggs. To the thrill of those standing, applauding Allen's welcome, Smith ascended to the podium and leaped into a diatribe against “the mangy Reds!” Then, as if turning off a light switch, Smith announced that it was time for prayer.

Following prayer Smith resumed his sermon by navigating the same anthology of maxims that had fuelled his politics since the 1930s. After lamenting the hardships that had befallen average Americans because of New Deal liberalism, Smith turned somber as he invited his audience to think about what their fight against an overbearing state meant for their communities, country, and their own status as free individuals. Lest they forget the grand purpose of their struggles, Smith then invoked the spirit of his champion, Huey Long. With the uncanny homiletic flair that had made him Long's unofficial chaplain, Smith began to recite the eulogy he had composed ten years earlier to honor the slain Louisiana statesman. “Greater love hath no man…. His spirit shall never rest as long as hungry bodies cry for food, as long as lean human frames stand naked, as long as homeless wretches haunt this land of plenty.” Fifteen minutes later Smith brought the valedictory to a close with typical hyperbolic panache: “He was the Stradivarius, whose notes rose in competition with jealous drums, envious tomtoms. His was the unfinished symphony.” Sensing the poignancy of the moment he had coaxed along, Smith concluded the meeting with a Longfellow poem and prayer instead of with the scheduled rousing hymn.Footnote ³⁰ The meeting adjourned, and Ham and Eggers quietly shuffled out of the dank auditorium into the crisp California night.

Mobilizing for Democracy

When Smith arrived on the West Coast he touched off a political storm that exceeded the Allens’ expectations. Stirring energy behind the storm were two phalanxes of political activists that sought different futures for their community, neither of which cared much for Ham and Eggs but both of which saw the movement as a potential wedge in the larger political battle now being waged. On the Left stood a coalition of labor leaders and liberal progressive Democrats, on the Right a contingent of middle-class evangelical and conservative Republicans. When distilled, the core issue separating them seemed straightforward: Would postwar American liberal democracy follow a course started in the 1930s by extending labor and government power in hopes of codifying racial toleration, economic equality, social justice, and international cooperation? Or, would it revert back to an older essence by at once limiting state power over citizens, local communities, voluntary agencies, and the market, and increasing it abroad for proliferation and defense of these principles? In partisan terms, the matter boiled down more simply: would the Democratic Party advance the New Deal, or the Republican Party roll it back? Active in a region where the political stakes seemed higher than anywhere else, Ham and Eggs quickly came to bear a heavy burden for its vulnerability.

California's progressive-labor alliance exerted pressure on Ham and Eggs from the left.Footnote ³¹ Comprised of New Deal liberals, CIO campaigners, ecumenically minded Protestant and Jewish clerics, and Hollywood celebrities, this coalition was startled into action after probing the area's blue-collar churches (of which they knew little about) and learning that behind the façade of Smith's extremism and Ham and Eggs’ unorthodoxy was an entire religious subculture whose sensibilities appeared very different from its own.Footnote ³² Even though it would continue to presume racism as part of this subculture's essence (and thereby miss some of its ideological complexities) this coalition now recognized that it could no longer dismiss Ham and Eggs as simply the fringe. With gathering momentum sparked by this discovery, the left-leaning alliance created its own countermovement under the title of Mobilization for Democracy (MFD). Led by California Attorney General Robert Kenny, journalist Carey McWilliams, and screen-sensation Orson Wells, MFD set out to educate Californians about the increasing threat of bigotry in their communities, a sordid trait they were convinced Ham and Eggs’ legion of “hillbilly preachers” wanted to transport west from Dixie.

Supplying MFD's ground troops were those in the labor Left and the CIO's PAC whose experiences within California's vibrant Popular Front in the 1930s made them especially determined in the 1940s to defuse social prejudices that threatened the region's labor force. At the center of this campaign were men like Philip Connelly, the communist firebrand who acted as secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles Industrial Union Council (CIO), president of the State CIO Industrial Union Council, and a major player in Los Angeles’ civic politics throughout the 1940s.Footnote ³³ For Connelly, Harry Bridges, and California's other CIO organizers, race and religion had come to animate their politics as much as class. This transition had come as a result of two experiences, one negative the other positive; both shaped their opinions of Ham and Eggs. In the first place, recent organizational campaigns throughout the South had exposed them to ministers who constantly thwarted local drives to unionize workers and extend civil rights.Footnote ³⁴ Now, in Ham and Eggs, it seemed they faced the threat of southern racism and religious bigotry again, only this time in their own backyard. An equally powerful impulse for fighting Ham and Eggs came from a more optimistic belief that the West was a racial frontier, welcoming to a cosmopolitan, ecumenical pluralism that held the key for postwar society. In this vision the fortunes of a truly democratic order rode on the “California experiment.”Footnote ³⁵

With this all-or-nothing mentality, MFD members spent the fall of 1945 marshalling forces for an assault on Ham and Eggs. The first strategy MFD employed was preventative in nature. Buoyed by the actions of school boards in San Francisco and San Diego where requests from Ham and Eggs for access to public auditoriums had been denied, MFD sought an injunction from Los Angeles officials prohibiting the use of school auditoriums like Polytechnic High's. It introduced the motion at a school board meeting on October 14. With 500 representatives of 250 civic organizations present and McWilliams, Eddie Cantor, and Socialist Workers Party leader Myra Tanner Weiss delivering speeches on its behalf, MFD called for cancellation of the Ham and Eggs meeting planned two nights later. MFD activists knew they were on shaky ground when raising the issue of free speech, since in this instance they themselves seemed eager to constrain it, but nevertheless proceeded to argue that Smith threatened social order by encouraging a “form of violence anathema to free speech.”Footnote ³⁶ The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw things differently, however, and defended Smith on the grounds that MFD's petition itself was the “savage blow at free speech.” The defense was convincing, for shortly after hearing it school board members voted to allow Ham and Eggs use of Polytechnic's auditorium, stating in the process that they were not a censoring body.Footnote ³⁷

Irate over this decision, MFD decided to carry the fight into the political arena by adopting a seldom-used weapon: the recall. Its target was Meade McClanahan, a city councilman who frequented Ham and Eggs rallies. The scene of the struggle was McClanahan's 13^th District, a primarily white working-class community of bungalows and apartments (including the one Perkins inhabited) that also included pockets of affluent liberals and radical artists. MFD mustered these activists and all available resources into a no-holds-barred publicity campaign that sullied McClanahan's name in any way possible. A common sight for this district's residents were posters with McClanahan's name inscribed below photographs of Hitler and word descriptions that exposed the “peanut politician” as a “Negro-hater,” “Jew-hater,” “labor-hater” and the dupe of businessmen and “backward people.”Footnote ³⁸ McClanahan's defenders met the barrage with extreme tactics of their own. While McClanahan and Perkins canvassed local churches to drum up support, the California Republican Assembly (CRA) and a “Committee of 500” concerned citizens (comprised mostly of pastors and women) fought the recall street by street.Footnote ³⁹ Despite these efforts, MFD delivered McClanahan a humiliating defeat that left him bankrupt, out of work, and personally despondent.Footnote ⁴⁰

Progressive activists scored a victory with McClanahan's recall, but the most devastating tactic employed against Ham and Eggs proved to be the simplest: public protest. Following defeat in the courts, MFD redoubled efforts to prevent Smith's access to Los Angeles's public auditoriums by recruiting picketers from its coordinating agencies. With efficiency worthy of its name, MFD carried out its first strike on October 16 when 15,000 banner-waving protestors circled Polytechnic's auditorium to disrupt the meeting inside. On November 3 protestors appeared again, only this time a primed police force was ready for the onslaught. In the wake of the mid-October rally, Ham and Eggers had lambasted city officials for allowing such demonstrations. In response, Mayor Fletcher Bowron made good on a promise to control the picketers outside Polytechnic High. While inside Smith waxed eloquent on Huey Long's legacy, police outside proceeded swiftly and arrested seventy-nine of the most belligerent demonstrators. In frustration, MFD disbanded, then marched to the Olympic Auditorium where they held a spirited mass meeting of their own.Footnote ⁴¹

To the dismay of city officials the pattern of confrontation that surfaced at Ham and Eggs meetings in October escalated in the coming months, galvanizing in the process, an alliance of right-wing opponents. Although not necessarily in agreement with the Ham and Eggs agenda, nor supportive of Smith's reactionary tone, conservative allies gathered from local Republican groups, middle-class evangelical churches, and business associations rallied around these two political players out of contempt for a common adversary. Writing to Bowron about his own involvement with Ham and Eggs, one individual expressed what many of his allies believed when he suggested that though reprehensible as an individual, Smith represented a much larger, legitimate struggle against evil forces that threatened the country: communism, secularism, and moral degeneracy. Such a cause was worth fighting regardless of who stood next to you in the trenches. But there was more to this unity than a shared enemy.Footnote ⁴² All who backed the struggle against MFD harbored a similar assessment of current politics that grew out of disillusionment with or outright contempt for New Deal liberalism. When they witnessed or read about MFD's assault on Ham and Eggs they recoiled, convinced more than ever that New Deal liberalism, first promised as a temporary fix, was becoming the established order. And as they continued to observe MFD's actions they grew increasingly weary that communist radicals in government, mainline Protestantism, organized labor, and Hollywood were setting the terms of this new establishment.

As tensions mounted with MFD, Ham and Eggers thus found themselves inundated with support from conservatives of all kinds. None of these advocates carried more weight among Ham and Eggers than those who (like they) had been heavily invested in California's New Deal Democratic coalition during the 1930s. By the early 1940s news of communist advances abroad helped confirm fears at home that this coalition was a communist front. Sensing, in fact encouraging these fears, were a number of dissenting Democrats who proceeded to wrest control of the legislative assembly and inaugurate a government sanctioned anticommunist purge.Footnote ⁴³ Sam Yorty and Jack Tenney, two state congressmen from Los Angeles, provided the leadership for this crusade. Once considered the left of the Left, both Democrats caused a storm in the early 1940s by forcing former colleagues to testify before California's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. Especially dramatic, Tenney's journey to the Right came to an end in September 1944 when he declared his switch to the GOP because his former party had been “taken over lock, stock and barrel by Sidney Hillman, the C.I.O. Political Action Committee and the Communist Party.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Tenney was especially supportive of Ham and Eggers and, out of a sense of solidarity and with hopes of recruiting them to his cause, appeared at their meetings to offer his testimony of political conversion. It is impossible to know what they thought at the time, but it is likely Tenney's listeners realized anew that their local struggle was part of a seismic shift in the nation's political alignment.Footnote ⁴⁵

Wherever the advice and support secular conservatives offered Ham and Eggs’ blue-collar evangelicals fell short, words of encouragement from middle-class evangelical brethren filled the void. In this context Bob Shuler's investment in Ham and Eggs became especially crucial. A southern Methodist and Democrat by birth, Shuler was, at the point of collision between Ham and Eggs and MFD, California's most powerful emissary for populist evangelicalism. Although solidly middle-class in standing and pastor of an affluent congregation, Shuler ascribed to a political vision that corresponded with that of his blue-collar friends. Like them he had supported the New Deal but now feared that it was working against the interests of Jefferson and Jesus. Once MFD began its protests, Shuler thus found a ready, tangible target on which to pin his fears and criticisms.

He did so in public fashion. In a case that turned into fodder for the press, Shuler, on the night of Smith's October appearance at Polytechnic High, had become the victim of a beating that left him bleeding and raging mad. Following the ruckus, Shuler drafted a letter to Mayor Bowron describing in great detail MFD's aggressive tactics. Shuler wrote of his attempt to enter the auditorium:

Shuler went on to compare his experience to a lynching in his home state: “I know a mob. I stood by the side of the Sheriff of Lamar County, Texas, until a mob that burned two Negroes trampled us down and went over us. This mob [MFD] was just as malicious and mischievous … as was that mob.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In cleverly turning the southern problem on its head Shuler voiced an opinion that was gaining traction with conservatives. Dixie's rising in California, according to this assessment, stemmed not from the activities of plain folk preachers, but belligerent union leaders and communist agitators determined to apply their southern strategy in the West.

If Shuler had reserved his comments for private correspondence with Bowron, conservative opposition might not have gelled so quickly, but by referencing the Ham and Eggs controversy in his pulpit and print ministries, he virtually guaranteed that it would assume new significance. Throughout the campaign Shuler used editorial pages in his church paper, The Methodist Challenge, to voice his frustrations with MFD. His editorial of October 1945, titled “That Mass Meeting,” was typical for the way it sought distance from Ham and Eggers while at the same time championing their cause in the face of MFD picketing. “I do not belong to any movement with which Gerald Smith is associated,” Shuler began before adding, “But between the crowd that gathered at the Olympic Auditorium, with their cries of ‘Kill Smith, Kill Smith, Kill Smith,’ and the orderly audience that sat in the Shrine Auditorium and heard Smith on the same night, there can be no choice for any good, sound Christian American.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Because his paper was one of the most widely read periodicals on the West Coast, both by politically-conscious evangelicals and religiously-curious political conservatives, Shuler's words in this instance went far in galvanizing right-wing opposition.

Accosted by the Left and bombarded by the Right, Ham and Eggers thus found their middle ground difficult to maintain. By early 1946, after having confronted volatility on both sides, these citizens could not help but feel embattled. Constantly facing the MFD's picket lines they grew convinced that “political agitators” on the Left were muscling them out of their God-given rights of political expression. One woman articulated this when, writing to Smith, she penned: “I know I am sounding very radical, but golly, it's been proven, over and over and over again, that by being fair, and mild and meek, one loses against the rabble rousers. They use strong tactics, yet so subtle, that the ordinary man becomes confused in his mind.”Footnote ⁴⁹

If disgust adequately characterized the response of rank-and-file Ham and Eggers to MFD, disillusionment captured their feelings about Tenney, Shuler and the anticommunist Right. Although in agreement with middle-class conservatives about the dangers of communism and secularism, big government and union bureaucracies, these citizens were far less willing than their counterparts to celebrate laissez-faire capitalism. As they entered 1946, they faced a conundrum that escalated in complexity as the election approached. Would they follow left-leaning labor leaders who sympathized with their economic situation but demonstrated contempt for their religion, or would they align with those who put class concerns aside for the sake of a united Christian conservative front? Would they choose Christ or the CIO?

Christ or the CIO

Blue-collar evangelicals faced this juncture as Ham and Eggs entered its last phase of mobilization in the spring of 1946. Their prospects did not look good, especially as far as the Allens were concerned. Try as they might to fend off MFD's counteraction, the Allens began to see its corrosive effects. Ham and Eggs remained in part a movement for pensioners, and trying to convince these supporters that their political cause was greater than the physical confrontation awaiting them at each meeting grew more difficult as lines of picketers and policemen steadily lengthened. These mounting concerns certainly depleted Ham and Eggs, but internal divisions became insurmountable as well. As spring wore on Ham and Eggs seemed less likely to secure the number of signatures required to place its initiative on the fall ballot. The Allens knew that lost momentum stemmed from their movement's squeezing out by the labor Left and anticommunist Right. Survival now seemed predicated on their commitment to one or the other side.

Though battered by political circumstances beyond their control, many Ham and Eggers remained more convinced than the Allens that they could maintain the middle ground. Their confidence might have been unfounded, but it grew naturally from an authentic desire to protect their interests as workers and Christian converts. Perkins was one who operated under this premise. Although supportive of Smith, Perkins grew weary of his influence when, as a result, Ham and Eggs became less of a grassroots movement concerned with the plight of rank-and-file laborers. In spring of 1946 Perkins voiced displeasure with his mentor by stepping up correspondence. “I fear that some of your recent statements concerning strikes are unfortunate, and that they sound Anti-Labor,” Perkins soft-peddled to Smith in one of many letters written at this time. But “in your heart I know you to be a friend of Labor. I intend to oppose Communism as strongly as ever, but I also intend—God willing—to defend the right of Labor….”Footnote ⁵⁰ Perkins was less reticent in public venues where he declared in Smith's absence, “I don't want Communism, but I don't want the rich standing with their feet on the necks of the poor anymore, either. We are being foolish to defend the rich against Communism. We have been fighting to protect the rich and not ourselves.”Footnote ⁵¹

Unfortunately for Perkins, the Allens grew deaf to his proclamations. As spring turned toward summer, the Allens decided that the Smith alliance was too risky for maintaining healthy relations with the AFL and CIO. In a letter to Smith, Willis Allen laid it out in blunt terms: “As you know, many leaders of both A.F. of L. and C.I.O. are strongly opposed to you. It is essential that we have their friendship and support if we are to win and we have found it necessary to assure both these organizations that we are not expecting to have you out here for our campaign.” Cognizant of his plans to return to Los Angeles for additional meetings that summer, Allen finished with one last plea that Smith “not come to California now because it would not help your cause any and certainly would in all probability prevent us from gaining our position on the ballot.”Footnote ⁵²

The Allens followed this maneuver with another bold move when they agreed to back one of MFD's own in the upcoming Democratic primary: Robert Kenny. On paper the move seemed to make sense for all involved. While Kenny pledged a constitutional amendment that would “provide an adequate system of pensions and work opportunity,” thereby gaining the support of the purported 492,000 Ham and Egg members, the Allens were guaranteed important government posts; it would be Lawrence who would become state Attorney General should victory come for Kenny in the June primaries and for the Democratic Party in the November election.Footnote ⁵³

For rank-and-file Ham and Eggers, however, the Allens’ private and public declarations for the labor Left made no sense at all. As word spread that the Allens and Kenny had struck a deal, Ham and Egg members became confrontational, demanding that their leaders explain the motives behind their backroom deal. Tensions flared at a meeting in mid-May when Lawrence Allen tried to justify the new course of action that would optimize the Ham and Eggs political position for the fall election. Already agitated by rumors that Kenny had paid off the Allens, the overflow crowd of supporters became even angrier when it was revealed that Perkins had resigned in protest of these latest developments. Although passionate about Ham and Eggs, Perkins explained, he was certainly not willing to “be swallowed up by Kenney[sic], the Pal of the Commies.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Evidently neither was Ham and Eggs’ blue-collar evangelical majority.

With Perkins gone and their movement aligned with those who once opposed them, these Christian workers made their own decision by abandoning the cause. Appropriately laced with the apocalyptic imagery of Revelations, the last two sermons they heard on behalf of Ham and Eggs were delivered to half-full auditoriums in late May and early June. One was titled “Goodbye Capitalism,” the other “Goodbye Communism,” but they might as well have been titled “Goodbye Ham and Eggs,” for the movement's fate was sealed shortly thereafter in the Democratic primary on June 4.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thanks to a peculiarity of California's political system, which allowed candidates to cross-file, the Republican incumbent Earl Warren outpolled Kenny in his own party and in the process became the only governor in state history to win the office in the primary.Footnote ⁵⁶ With Kenny and the Democratic Party ticket dead before even getting to campaign for the election in November, Ham and Eggs once again found itself on the outside looking in. This time, however, it was for good.

So ended the uneasy alliance between grassroots labor and plain-folk religion that had propelled Ham and Eggs into the spotlight for a short while. In the end, Ham and Eggs was forced to confront a new political reality that compelled it to choose between rather than for Christ and the CIO. Meaning to bridge these interests, Ham and Eggs effectively did the opposite by helping accentuate evolving divergences between them. Larger political forces in this way overrode this organization's best and worst intentions. By inviting Smith to join their crusade, the Allens hoped to unite their movement but in fact immediately embroiled it in fierce ideological warfare between two sides with radically different plans for postwar America. In hopes of salvaging their organization and political careers, the Allens decided that turning to the Left was their only option.

For the blue-collar evangelicals the decision was not so easy. They had set off with grand expectations that Ham and Eggs would carry on the fight heroes like William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long had started by realizing a society of common folk organized in vibrant, local communities centered around home, church, and work, and grounded in principles of popular democracy and Christian morality. Ham and Eggs’ tussles with an aggressive Left finally convinced these evangelicals that their vision for tomorrow was not the same one shared by those vying for control of their unions and their political party—those who, in their mind, wanted hardworking plain folk to renounce their rights as white, Bible-believing Christian Americans for the singular cause of labor hegemony and a permanent welfare state. This realization was a troubling one for religious working folk because it meant they now had to revisit long-held assumptions about their place in American politics.

Jefferson and Jesus Turn Right

Just where they repositioned themselves in postwar politics would, of course, play out in various ways. Like other Americans trying to make sense of the complex domestic and global order the Second World War created, these citizens struggled to find their bearing. The string of work stoppages, anticommunist campaigns, and geopolitical crises immediately surrounding Ham and Eggs only accentuated the tentativeness of their situation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Blue-collar evangelicals spent the rest of the 1940s wrestling with all of these tensions, and though they usually did so while gathered as community in church, in the end, answers were sought (just as evangelicals preferred it) on a deeply personal level. For this reason generalizations are dangerous when trying to measure their post-Ham and Eggs response. By the 1950s, however, it was clear that they were most comfortable following two parallel political paths, both of which pointed to the Right. Historians usually emphasize the racial backlash of the 1960s or culture wars over gender and the family in the early 1970s as the point at which hard-hat and church-going voters headed in these two directions. But for California's blue-collar evangelicals, who wore both labels, the imperative came earlier in response to the labor question, not civil rights or abortion.Footnote ⁵⁸

Those, in the first place, who remained resentful of progressive liberal Democrats and empowered by racist solutions enlisted in the reactionary Right, which thanks to Smith's continued presence, operated with surprising authority in postwar California. After participating in statewide campaigns against fair employment and open housing and leading a charge against California Democratic Party leader James (“Jimmy”) Roosevelt, Smith decided that relocation was in order. In the early 1950s he and key staff members packed their belongings and moved to Los Angeles. Upon arrival they made their move known by carrying out a fifteen-week crusade that drew packed auditoriums across the region. The same left-wing spies who had monitored Smith's activities with Ham and Eggs attended as witnesses and what they saw troubled them. “Lest this be complacently dismissed as merely ‘another rabble-rousing affair’” one agent ruefully reported, “this time his audience was not rabble; it was an aggregation of cross-section Americans with all its many implications.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Now subtler in platform manner and conspicuously sure of himself, Smith followed up on these meetings by establishing a third-party ticket for the 1952 federal election. With General Douglas MacArthur as his write-in presidential candidate and State Senator Tenney as running mate, Smith's Christian Nationalist Party succeeded at stirring up a surfeit of notoriety if with only limited electoral success.Footnote ⁶⁰ Smith's ability at one point to rival the state Republican Party in campaign funding sent a clear message, however, that his prospects in California remained bright.Footnote ⁶¹

And remain bright they did. Over the course of the next fifteen years Smith nursed connections with local benefactors whose virulently racist conservatism meshed with his and whose open pocketbooks facilitated networking with like-minded segregationists across the South. These networks were put to use in the early 1960s when Smith's political apparatus—staffed by some of the same women's groups and blue-collar evangelical preachers that supported Ham and Eggs—helped generate a surprisingly high level of support for George Wallace during his 1968 California campaign.Footnote ⁶²

Smith's presence in Southern California would be constant throughout the Cold War years but his influence increasingly negligible within the evangelical subculture. In the main, blue-collar evangelicals worked their way along a second political path toward the respectable Right. By the early 1950s, in fact, most had heartily denounced Smith. Whereas earlier many had seen Smith's racist vitriol as an excess necessary to endure for their greater interests, by the 1950s, with expanded economic and political horizons now in clear view, they broke ties with their former ally. Although race would remain embedded in their political consciousness it would no longer be foregrounded. As Perkins’ postwar metamorphosis illustrates, a genuine softening of prejudices helped nudge them in this direction. In the two decades after Ham and Eggs, Perkins purged the extremism that stained his convictions by seeking redemption in family and community, and ministry to California's largest (and most Republican) Pentecostal congregations. At his death in 1974 he was serving at Mayor Thomas Bradley's request on Los Angeles's Committee on the Aging which, among other things, monitored pensions for the elderly.Footnote ⁶³

For its part, California's increasingly formidable conservative coalition welcomed Perkins and his blue-collar evangelical friends into the GOP. To be sure, not all veterans of the 1940s’ labor wars responded quickly or decisively to these Republican overtures; some needed further coaxing and even then many remained registered Democrats while identifying as independents at the polls. But as Shuler's monthly proclamations in The Methodist Challenge consistently made clear, the “working men” who occupied California's Pentecostal, Baptist, and fundamentalist churches were clearly the Republican Party's for the taking.Footnote ⁶⁴ Throughout the 1950s they hinted at this by supporting Republican-friendly causes that impacted their own work place. During this decade's heated battles over right-to-work (RTW) legislation, for example, blue-collar evangelicals often backed GOP arguments that to allow closed shops (or oppose RTW legislation) was to allow union racketeering and bureaucracy to override the rank-and-file's best interests. Still grounded in principles of autonomy that shaped their worldview, these workers felt their actions did not spell disloyalty to their unions but rather dedication to the greater good for which they stood, namely the protection of workers’ economic and political freedoms. The need for such vigilance, they believed, was a lesson learned during the 1940s.Footnote ⁶⁵

By the early 1960s those blue-collar evangelicals who remained reticent in their endorsement of the GOP shed their last inhibitions. The state's heated culture wars, along with renewed concern about communist expansion, weakening national defense, civil rights legislation, and liberal Democratic leadership—all of which they continued to see playing out dramatically in the workplace as much as in their neighborhoods and national culture—pushed the hesitant across the Republican threshold. In 1964 they helped ensure Barry Goldwater's nomination as the GOP's presidential candidate, then two years later voted for a gubernatorial candidate they thought held even more promise: Ronald Reagan.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reagan's pull with Californians was extensive, but his genius shone through in the way he wooed unions and churches, two worlds bridged by blue-collar evangelicals. An uncanny ability to invoke Jefferson and Jesus (though in noticeably watered-down form) by blending antistatism with calls for strong military, law and order, and Christian morality helped seal his relationship with this constituency.

Yet the dealmaker was his testimony. When Reagan reached out to California's evangelicals he not only wore his spiritual commitments on the sleeve but also spoke passionately about conversion from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Undoubtedly both salvation stories touched a nerve, but blue-collar evangelicals seemed especially drawn in when the Republican referred to the labor wars of the 1940s as his crucible and awakening. Like their new champion, they had been transformed by this profound experience; now, twenty years later, they embraced the opportunity to channel frustrations behind a candidate and a party that seemed to understand them. To be sure the appreciation cut both ways, with Reagan frequently heaping praise on his new allies, and it was not hard to see why. When Reagan made his bid for governor, California was home to a more affluent and active evangelicalism than seen anywhere else; Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and other blue-collar evangelicals once relegated to the margins dictated the terms of this subculture.Footnote ⁶⁷ Recognizing this, Reagan eagerly gathered them into the fold then turned them loose as combatants for a conservative “popular front” that soon would extend its reach across the rest of the nation.Footnote ⁶⁸