In a speech to the Commonwealth Club during his 1950 gubernatorial campaign in California, Democratic candidate James Roosevelt argued that the Republican Party had
chosen to make the welfare state the issue of the coming elections. In doing so I fear it has chosen to fight again the campaigns of the 1930s instead of the 1950s. The real issue before us is not whether in fact we shall have the welfare state. The American people have already decided that. They want more than freedom in the abstract. They have already decided that a society as fabulously wealthy and productive as our own can and must make provision for all of its members … The achievement of a genuine welfare society, whose government chosen by the people acts in the interest of all of them, may be delayed and hindered. But it cannot be averted.Footnote 1
This “welfare society” included a shared commitment to civil rights, non-discrimination, and universal access to health care, issues that would come to frame political debate in California in the 1950s. Yet Roosevelt's failed battle to unseat popular incumbent governor Earl Warren demonstrated the difficulties facing left-of-center politicians like Roosevelt, caught between their desire to continue the struggle for social rights in the wake of the New Deal and their need to mediate between Popular Front and anticommunist factions. The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights.Footnote 2 In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I chart the ways in which the damage inflicted on the left in California by debates over the Cold War forced Democratic Party activists and intellectuals to look for a domestic policy agenda that would revitalize them politically in the 1950s and early 1960s as the febrile atmosphere of McCarthyite America gave way to a realization that California politics had room for a social-democratic ideology in the marketplace of ideas. The continued existence of a Popular Front-inspired anti-Cold War strain in liberal politics on the West Coast that prioritized domestic social policy and opposed the projection of US policy abroad gave California a political trajectory that makes us take seriously a democratic left in an American context.
Historians have begun to recognize the ways in which Cold War themes of democracy and antitotalitarianism opened up debates over civil rights and racial equality in the postwar years.Footnote 3 And there has been some analysis of the development of an international dialogue of social reform that took shape in the context of greater Western political collaboration in a Cold War context.Footnote 4 Yet the story of mainstream liberalism's recovery from the collapse of the Popular Front in the late 1940s and its embrace of social-democratic policy positions as a way of marginalizing its foreign-policy headaches requires further examination. Embedded in the California left's turmoil over the Cold War, both in the 1940s and the 1960s, was its openness to ideas of social inclusion and economic rights that formed the centerpiece of many politicians’ appeals for political legitimacy in these years. Politicians ranging from Jimmy Roosevelt in 1950 to anti-Vietnam War campaigner Bob Scheer in 1966 could not capture and maintain power through opposition to the Cold War, but they could use opposition to the certainties of US foreign policy to ignite a debate over domestic social policy, in part because they argued that the race with the USSR for military hegemony was undermining the financial viability of a social welfare policy, and in part because their very opposition to Cold War certainties was an opposition to the antistatist nostrums of an anti-Sovietism that all too easily slid into antisocialism. The search for legitimacy of California liberals and leftists in a post-Popular Front world of the 1950s and 1960s sheds light on the extent to which a Popular Front strain in left politics on the West Coast gave activists a cultural heritage that bridged the political battles of the 1940s and those of the 1960s and 1970s.
THE DILEMMAS OF CALIFORNIA POLITICS AT MID-CENTURY
California is an important case study of the relationship between opposition to the developing Cold War and the fortunes of the democratic left in the United States. For one thing, the Popular Front was a significant force in the state Democratic Party, especially in Los Angeles.Footnote 5 For another, the state party was particularly affected by schisms over its future strategy and relationship with the growing strain of anticommunism in national politics. The Democratic Party was in any case in California a political party in name only. It was in practice a collection of local fiefdoms, county committees, and activist groups that often included communists and fellow-travelers, and some labor affiliates, all presided over by a state central committee that was split into two to satisfy the long-standing rivalry between the northern and southern California leadership. There were even rival fund-raising outfits in the 1950s to satisfy the power hunger of various warring factions. Democratic State Committeeman Roger Kent, a central figure in party politics in the 1950s, recalled his run for Congress in 1950 in the First district, which ran from Marin all the way up the coast to the Oregon border:
there was absolutely no Democratic organization whatsoever in the first district – there were two or three counties that didn't have any county committees at all. There were a couple of committees – Humboldt and Sonoma – that were controlled by actual Communists, and I don't use that word lightly.Footnote 6
While the Republican Party could benefit from a long history of dominance of the political system in California and the use since the 1930s of an organization, Republican Assembly, designed to secure preprimary endorsements of favored candidates, the Democrats had no disciplining force and little organizational zeal in the late 1940s. The fact that the GOP had dominated legislative politics for so long had also allowed Republican legislators to build links with labor organizations as well as with business interests, and had constructed a coalition of the state's different socioeconomic factions within a single party.
California's political endorsement system made it extremely difficult for parties to act as coherent organizations. Candidates were permitted to cross-file in rival party primaries as well as their own, and campaigning revolved around individual candidates rather than party labels. The machine politics common in eastern states like Rhode Island that allowed local bosses and labor unions to control the primary process and create tightly organized electoral fighting machines did not exist in the Golden State.Footnote 7 Instead, in a state where all serious patronage and power lay in the Republican Party, individuals clung to Democratic Party politics due to a mixture of factional loyalty and the fact that its lack of organization allowed them the freedom to mould their local environment to suit them. It was for this reason that the Popular Front thrived in the California Democratic Party in the 1940s: it was extremely easy to infiltrate local party organs and use them as a platform for particular ideological worldviews, including pro-Soviet positions. “There is absolutely no effective liberal organization out here that doesn't follow the [Communist] party line,” wrote Frank Furstenberg of the San Francisco branch of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation to James Loeb of the Union for Democratic Action in February 1946,
and there are plenty of independent liberals and leftists who perforce must work in the Commie sponsored organizations in order to do anything at all. For example, the Council for Civic Unity, Fair Practices Committee (local), Lawyers’ Guild, Labor School, National PAC (local – [Harry] Bridges controlled), the liberal Democratic Club and Voters’ League.Footnote 8
Popular Front affiliates worked hard to put sympathetic candidates into both the Senate and gubernatorial primaries in 1946, creating much bad blood in the process but also demonstrating the continued salience of Popular Front issues in both domestic and foreign policy in California politics. “Progressive organizations took a tremendous setback in the recent California primaries,” wrote a Beverly Hills activist after a debacle in which leftist Robert Kenny had been defeated in his own primary by Republican governor Earl Warren. “The errors that caused the setback were errors into which sincere progressives were maneuvered by small Communist minorities within progressive organizations.” The fellow travelers’ Senate candidate, Representative Ellis Patterson of Los Angeles, also lost after a passionate campaign in which his staunch opposition to US involvement in the war during the period of the Nazi–Soviet pact had made him very popular in communist circles. “The Communist handful got their comeuppance,” wrote activist Art Arthur, “but the real wounds were those suffered by the Progressive cause in California.”Footnote 9
Although the Democratic Party was heading for serious defeat across the board in the 1946 elections, a bad year for the party nationwide, it was impossible to ignore the impact communist and fellow traveler networks had on internal party politics. Congresswoman Helen Douglas of Los Angeles, for instance, seemed to UDA director James Loeb in July 1946 to
be playing both sides of the liberal street. This may be good politics, depending on one's congressional district. I should talk to Helen once more, but I am not certain that she would do anything to alienate some of the extremists who have been giving her good support.
Loeb mentioned the Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, who had “contributed heavily to her campaign both in money and voters,” and the West Coast director of the MSWA admitted that much of the labor leadership in southern California was involved in the Popular Front.Footnote 10 Party chairman James Roosevelt, himself locked in a power struggle in 1947–48 with conservative rivals Ed Pauley and George Luckey for control over party policy and over whom to endorse in the 1948 presidential election, needed to keep Popular Fronters onside because they formed an important counterweight to the right-wing faction. Having failed to amend the party's mechanism to elect delegates to the 1948 convention by congressional district, which would have enhanced the power of leftists at the Convention, he wrote to Democratic National Committee chair J. Howard McGrath in October 1947 that he wished “to secure for President Truman the broadest and most representative backing of the liberals and progressives who joined the Democratic Party from 1932 through 1945.” He wished to “eliminate the influence of this small minority of conservative element” from party leadership, and to “make the Democratic Party in California a true home for all liberals and progressives who believe in the basic principles of the New Deal.” He noted that he had been careful to disassociate the party leadership from Henry Wallace and talk of a third party, but it was clear that the influence of Popular Front groups in progressive politics in California was so significant that it would take more than the temporary split over Wallace's presidential run 1948 to engender a final split within liberalism over the Cold War that would come to define liberal politics elsewhere in the United States.Footnote 11 A large number of California Democrats argued in the mid-1940s that only the incorporation of all left-leaning politicians in the Democratic Party would head off the third-party threat, in contrast to the battles elsewhere to purge fellow travelers from the liberal mainstream.Footnote 12
In southern California, supporters of Henry Wallace did not divorce themselves from the Democratic Party, preferring instead to encourage Democratic candidates to file as Progressives as well, perfectly possible under California law. Henry Wallace made specific reference to LA congresspersons Helen Douglas and Chet Holifield in speeches during the 1948 campaign because southern California was one of the IPP's strongest regions. Helen Douglas had opposed the Truman Doctrine in Congress and was a staunch friend of organized labor. “I guess our friends will vote for Douglas and Holifield,” Wallace admitted to supporters in New York after both had refused to file as Progressives at a time of bitter national division over the Communist question, “but I suspect for fear of offending them, they won't ring any doorbells.”Footnote 13 Wallace's right-hand man C. B. Baldwin went further, claiming to have been behind Douglas's successful nomination for Congress in 1944 and to have managed successfully to convince her to file as a Progressive until anti-IPP leaders vetoed the idea.
In this case, the Democratic Party knows that the Progressive Party in California is destined to be the majority party in that state. They talked Helen out of filing on our ticket although she agrees with 90% of everything we stand for … I hope, and I think, that the IPP will be supporting Helen Douglas but if there is a split, it won't be our split, it will be the split that is caused by the people that will influence Helen Douglas.Footnote 14
Baldwin was wrong about the Progressive Party replacing the Democratic Party, but more prescient than he realized about the echoes of Popular Front politics coming to take root in Democratic politics as they became far better organized during the 1950s.
The enduring bridge linking the Popular Front to the mainstream Democratic Party was the widely shared opposition to Cold War foreign policy in California, something which baffled the ADA leadership on the East Coast but which explains a lot about the particular tenor of liberal politics on the edge of the Pacific. It was hardly surprising that the Los Angeles branch of the National Citizens’ PAC, an avowed fellow-traveler outfit, would adopt a resolution of a member of the Burbank Democratic club in March 1946 that the US government should “desist from needling, baiting, and antagonizing Russia, a country that has always been a sincere friend to the United States.”Footnote 15 What is perhaps more surprising is the range of politically active people who held anti-Cold War liberal views, together with the fact that such views persisted well into the 1950s. When the anticommunist Union for Democratic Action, soon to become the ADA, sent a representative to California in late 1946 to organize chapters there, she was forced to concede in exasperation that “California is different. However, in the national office we reason that regardless of how things seem in your sunny state we think there must be some good live liberals who are not slavish followers of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.” UC Santa Barbara professor and UDA activist Harry Girvetz, himself no fellow traveler, felt bound to point out the sensitivity to the communist issue in California liberal circles:
One criticism I have heard of the UDA from a famous progressive who has often traveled with the extreme left but who also exercises independent judgement … is that the UDA is too engrossed in battling the CP to the detriment of its positive program. This is a real danger which an organization which excludes Communists always courts.Footnote 16
As late as 1954 national ADA envoy Nathalie Panek, surveying the struggling ADA chapter in Los Angeles, denounced its chairman as
fuzzier than a pillow on the CP. In all justice I should say, though, that fuzziness among decent liberals out here seems almost endemic. I have met only a few people – principally labor – who are really solid on this issue … To round out the picture I should tell you that in the two months I have been out here I have had more stupid pre-ADA types of arguments about whether or not we can work with Communists than I have had in the last five years. And I don't think one of the arguers was a knowing fellow traveler.Footnote 17
Senior Democrats organizing campaigns and running for office in this period, of whom Jimmy Roosevelt and Helen Douglas were good examples, knew that their rag-tag and disparate army did not have much political clout: all they could do, they argued, was tap into the strength of feeling leftists could draw on, a commitment to a cause that trumped the expediency of the broad church GOP. This notion of ideological strength of purpose would become important when explaining the rise of the Democratic Party in the 1950s. Roosevelt created a policy committee to draw up a manifesto for the party's meeting in Los Angeles at the end of July 1947. The manifesto helps us to understand how activists at the time defined what they felt a post-New Deal world should look like. The message was clear: California did not need a third party as long as the Democratic Party reaffirmed its commitment to extending and expanding the New Deal. The statement of policy was unashamedly left of center, but there were repeated references to the need to achieve economic and social equality through “the American form of democracy,” a clear jibe at Popular Front elements who looked to the Soviet Union in an overly romantic fashion. In an attempt to keep such elements within the broad church of the Democratic Party, however, there was reference to the need to reserve the use of armed force only against a “proven aggressor,” and the principles of sharing atomic power, an idea already abandoned in Washington, were restated. The overall message was a wake-up call for those worried that the Democrats were losing their radical edge:
We frankly state that, in our increasingly complex economic and social system, we believe that it will become more and more necessary for us to plan as a people. We contend that it is only through intelligent and far-sighted planning on the part of our state and national governments that we can cope with the problems facing us, that we can bring a greater share of prosperity to more people, indeed that in the long term we can survive as a people.
There were commitments to a large public-housing program “for that section of our population which private enterprise cannot reach,” to racial equality in employment, to a state agency “to assist in the providing of work in the event that such individuals are unable to obtain jobs in the private enterprise system,” to “a fair and adequate health program in cooperation with the forward-looking members of the medical profession in California.” The list of Democratic goals also included a commitment to a minimum income for the elderly of sixty-five dollars a month and a commitment to a rapid transit system in major cities, and concluded with the robust statement that the party would “go forward in its traditional liberal and progressive spirit.”Footnote 18 Liberals like Roosevelt knew that the party did not have the upper hand in California politics, but argued that an enthusiastic statement of principles would send Democrats into the crucial 1948 elections with enthusiasm and present a united front against the Republicans.
The Wallace campaign and the deep concern of many with the increasingly anti-Soviet tone of American foreign policy in 1948 still crippled the California party even as Truman was eking out a narrow victory in the Golden State that year. Bitter factionalism meant that few would even agree to support Truman, preferring to manage local campaigns and avoid engaging with the question of loyalty to the national program. Alameda Democrat Patrick McDonough, a local businessman bitterly opposed to the Popular Front and the anti-Truman movement in California, wrote to former Democratic fixer Jim Farley after the election that a
remarkable job was done in electing President Truman but this job was wholly done by President Truman … Very few of the so-called leaders were doing anything for Truman … Conditions in California were unbelievable. Some of the southern California Congressmen would not permit Truman literature in their offices.Footnote 19
Sensing a Truman defeat, many in the party, including Roosevelt, had backed away from the national campaign, mindful of their state-level strategy of trying to keep a broad church, including the left, onside in the run-up to the crucial Senate and gubernatorial races in 1950. Roosevelt fulminated at the “complete hypocrisy of the third party … by its insistence on running candidates in Illinois, Minnesota and California against men whose records prove beyond any doubt their long-term adherence to liberal and progressive principles,” but he also realized that Popular Front adherents were more likely to back his putative gubernatorial campaign in 1950 than were those on the right of the party.Footnote 20 As party chairman he refused to confront the left head-on, instead preferring to view its distinctive commitment to ideological affiliation as something that could power his and his allies’ future political advancement.
The unsuccessful 1950 campaigns of Jimmy Roosevelt for governor and Helen Douglas for senator marked the beginning of a new phase in Democratic Party politics in California, one in which the left would become fully integrated into mainstream politics. Roosevelt's campaign sought to channel the burning resentment at injustice that had carried the Popular Front through the war and create serious political space between himself and Governor Earl Warren. Interviewed on radio station KECA in June 1950, Democratic political analyst Richard Rogan argued that the races that fall were set to be ideologically polarized.
I should say that jobs, education, housing, social security, civil rights, water, power, transportation and basics like that should be the main issues. Jimmy Roosevelt and Helen Douglas won their primary campaigns by taking positive positions on these issues. I hope the Republicans don't continue to dodge them.Footnote 21
Roosevelt's team made a conscious decision to enthuse their left-wing base by taking policy stances that went beyond the New and Fair Deals in an attempt to create a new progressive alliance out of the wreckage of the Popular Front. State direction of employment policy, public works to take up any slack in the private employment market, strong support for collective bargaining, anti-discrimination legislation, and high pensions were supplemented by a public commitment to issues that would form part of the extension of liberalism in the 1960s, such as the widening of the rights of welfare recipients and the development of greater public entitlements for the elderly, as well as state health insurance.Footnote 22 Roosevelt avoided foreign policy, in part because a gubernatorial race necessitated an emphasis on domestic issues but also because his experience of the previous five years had taught him that it was simply impossible to keep campaigns focussed when foreign affairs – seemingly the third rail of California Democratic politics – loomed large. Patrick McDonough argued in March that Roosevelt had “not been able to make any impression except on those persons who saw fit to follow Wallace in the last election.”Footnote 23 Yet Roosevelt's attempt to mobilize the left behind a statewide campaign would leave a significant legacy even if his own campaign would end in humiliating failure.
The reason for Roosevelt's insistence on a strongly left-of-center campaign lay in his organization's analysis of polling data. A succession of polls conducted during late 1949 and 1950 all gave Earl Warren a strong lead, but also identified a tendency for supporters of Roosevelt to be strongly attached to him and to liberalism, whereas many Warren voters either did not realize he was a Republican or had a relatively unformed impression of him, citing his name recognition and experience rather than his beliefs or program. Some 94 percent of Roosevelt supporters in mid-1949 had either a “strong” or “fairly strong” attachment to him, compared to only 72 percent of Warren supporters. In addition, pollsters found that a majority of San Francisco Democrats who voted for Warren in the primary in 1950 did so because of a strong negative feeling towards President Truman and a feeling that Roosevelt had betrayed the California party by failing to stand firm against Truman's renomination in 1948. In a state in which Democratic victories were few and far between and often based on individuals rather than on machine endorsements, it was easy for politically active Californians to put idealism over practical politics. “There should be a clear understanding in the voter's mind that James Roosevelt has developed and stands on his own platform – a platform that has meaning for the problems of the State of California,” advised his polling company. “Roosevelt should be identified as a Progressive Democrat.”Footnote 24 The campaigns of both Roosevelt and Douglas took this line, and though they failed to make a breakthrough, these campaigns proved formative experiences for many who would help lead Democrats to a hegemonic position in state politics during the 1950s, including Phil Burton, Willy Brown, and Pat Brown. They also provided examples of the strong relationship in California between political campaigns and ideological positions that would grow in importance as the Democratic club movement took off over the following decade.
OPPOSING THE COLD WAR AND FINDING A ROLE: THE DEMOCRATIC CLUBS IN THE 1950s
The early 1950s witnessed an outpouring of organizational zeal among Democratic activists, mobilized initially by the experience of 1950 and by the campaign of Adlai Stevenson for President in 1952 to breathe new life into the moribund party political system on the West Coast. In 1953, in the wake of Stevenson's defeat, a large group of Democrats met to discuss “how to end the Republican stranglehold in California.” The Asilomar meeting produced universal agreement on two things: the need to put the power of a new organization behind endorsed Democratic candidates so that the party could gain power in Sacramento and abolish cross-filing, and the need to swing public opinion behind Democratic candidates through the development of a program of political action. Individual clubs would be formed and chartered across the state, which would solicit members in the neighborhoods and fight for endorsed Democratic candidates in each election cycle. These endorsements would be furnished at annual California Democratic Council (CDC) conventions attended by delegates from every club, and endorsed candidates would gain the CDC's official seal of approval through their embrace of approved CDC stances on key issues of the day. The final report of the Asilomar conference contained resolutions from all the various workshops on different aspects of public policy, including labor resolutions opposing Taft-Hartley and right-to-work initiatives and supporting FEPC.Footnote 25 The Asilomar workshop acted as a testing ground for policy formation that would provide a political purpose for a Democratic Party struggling to establish itself in a difficult political climate.
ADA activist Paul Seabury identified the peculiar dynamic in California in the 1950s of a Democratic organization that gained vitality from its own failure to dominate state politics:
Continuous defeat in state and local politics in the past made difficult the growth of responsible state-wide organization; but it had made it possible for the newly emergent Democratic organization in the state to be far more responsive to forces of “modernity” within the party … By and large it is something new in American politics, a broad movement of well-educated liberals whose political cohesiveness derives not from ethnic, or narrowly-based economic interest, but from a deep “concern” with political issues transcending the “self-interest” of the movement itself. The “great issues” of American politics and international affairs for them have been overriding.Footnote 26
The key difference from the 1940s was that these cells of ex-communists, New Dealers, and regular party members had since 1953 become organized into functioning units who would provide the manpower for election battles and who would shape party policy in a less haphazard way. The president of the Kensington Democratic club wrote to CDC chairman Alan Cranston in February 1957 that his members “believe that in the past few years sectionalism and other intra-party rivalries and disputes have been overridden by the greatest wave of unity and solidarity that the Democratic Party has ever experienced.”Footnote 27 Many of these club members were bound together by a passion for issues ranging from the welfare state to the Cold War, a sensibility that had carried the Popular Front through the 1940s but which now fed into a massive upsurge in grassroots party activity. CDC issues conferences each spring allowed club activists to debate issues as well as to endorse candidates for office, giving meaning to political involvement.
Foreign policy loomed large in these debates, as clubs and Young Democrat groups struggled to adjust to the harsh realities of the Cold War. A meeting of the California Federation of Young Democrats in Monterey in September 1957 paid much attention to big foreign questions of concern to California leftists, including the role of communist China, anti-imperialist struggles in Algeria, and the fear of nuclear holocaust. “In recent years,” stated a conference resolution,
this country has put relatively too much emphasis on pacts, treaties, and international diplomacy, and too little on measures to promote the growth of stable, effective, and democratic societies abroad – societies which will remain in the free world not because they have been coerced but because they are politically healthy and mature.
The policy of supporting the government of Taiwan as the legal government of all of China did “not conform to reality.”Footnote 28 The question of Red China proved to be hugely divisive amongst liberals, often serving as a convenient point of contention between rival candidates in party primaries seeking to keep alive the flames of the battles of the Popular Front, but even those seeking to distance themselves from the taint of communism often sought to demonstrate that anticommunism did not mean support for the foreign policy of the State Department. “One element of American foreign policy which I … feel is most objectionable is America's support, all over the world, of dictators and potentates, and our lack of support of those striving for Democracy,” argued CDC chairman Alan Cranston in 1957. “It would be utterly inconsistent with our Democratic efforts to achieve a more principled foreign policy for us to do anything implying support for one of the most ruthless and cruel dictatorships of all – Red China.”Footnote 29 Just as liberal politics in California had married questions of social justice and foreign policy in the late 1940s, so now the clubs and conventions of the 1950s acted as outlets for activists sympathetic to the spirit of Popular Front politics, a politics now predicated upon questions of relevance to the age: anticolonialism, China, and Cuba.
A case study of one of these new clubs in Los Angeles demonstrates that Democratic Party politics in the 1950s was in part shaped by the coming together of an anti-Cold War ethos and a commitment to social justice on the part of a significant number of activists. The West Beverly Club in the Fairfax area of west LA, one of the most active and successful in the state, had its own political action chairman who organized get-out-the-vote campaigns, brought in political speakers to address the club, and made it the mission of the organization to “help elect the type of candidates that believe in the same things we do.”Footnote 30 Many of the West Beverly club members were ex-communists, as this heavily Jewish part of Westside LA had been strongly involved in Popular Front politics in the 1940s, including promoting the election to Congress of Ellis Patterson in 1944. Issues that united these activist volunteers included bitter opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee, support for organized labor, support for universal health insurance and an expanded welfare state, and civil rights. At the same time California liberals increasingly saw the Cold War as a distraction from the ongoing battle for social justice at home and abroad. In February 1959 the West Beverly club meeting heard three supporters of Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement discuss his recent ascent to power in Cuba. The following year a memorandum circulated in the local congressional district party offices entitled “Cuba as an issue in the campaigns,” and contained several pages of material sympathetic to the Castro rebels.Footnote 31 Officials in the local Westside Democratic Party Council collated pages of material on the question of Cuba for use during the 1960 campaign.
The fact that clubs provided a bridge from the Popular Front of the 1940s to the radicalism of the 1960s takes on further significance when we remember that almost all the founder members of the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization formed in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, were also former members of the Communist Party.Footnote 32 Key figures in this group had supported the Wallace campaign of 1948, even flirting with the idea of a gay group called “Bachelors for Wallace.”Footnote 33 Mattachine was not overtly linked to mainstream party politics, though many of its successor groups would be, but its individual cells acted very much like CDC clubs, providing social space as well as opportunities for political engagement for Californians searching for meaning after the collapse of the Popular Front and the disintegration of the CPUSA. Like CDC, Mattachine attempted to detach itself from any association with communism at a time of heightened sensitivity to radicalism after the McCarthy witch hunts, preferring to promote itself as a home for intelligent citizens to use debate and political activism to alter the landscape of California politics.
This is NOT an organization attempting to create a “homosexual society” but rather an organization seeking the integration of the homosexual as a responsible and acceptable citizen in the community. The Society will not tolerate use of itself or its name for any subversive political activity or reprehensible conduct,
claimed the Mattachine Review in early 1955. The issues at the heart of the campaign were those that would form the basis for the rights movements of the 1960s: “to achieve permanent advances in integration, education, understanding, civil rights, elimination of unfair practices and discrimination, and abolishment of false ideas about human sexuality.”Footnote 34 By 1959, the organization was holding annual conventions, just like CDC, at which contemporary events and issues could be debated: at the 1959 event, the majority floor leader of the Colorado House of Representatives participated in a panel discussion on “civil liberties and the homophile.”Footnote 35 This emphasis in California on linking together social networking and political activism allowed political clubs to flourish inside and outside the California Democratic Council in the 1950s, providing a platform for left politics that kept its radical sensibility from the Popular Front period even as the issues changed over the following thirty years.
It was becoming evident that the late 1950s were witnessing a definite shift away from the earlier certainties of Cold War liberalism in the Democratic Party nationwide, and that the battle lines of the 1960s over both domestic and foreign policy were already being drawn by 1958. Most Los Angeles Democratic clubs and district councils had established legislative committees of their own by the late 1950s so that they could send well-briefed representatives to the CDC Convention, and several of them, buoyed by the impressive primary results for Democratic candidates, put together a legislative issues conference to be held at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Auditorium that August. Ed Lybeck, Jimmy Roosevelt's right-hand man in his west LA congressional district, warned his boss that “some notorious extremists” were serving on the legislative panels and that
it is being bruited about that the chief subjects of discussion are to be recognition of Red China and denunciation of the Administration for sending troops to the Middle East. Guys like Bernie Selber, who is CDC Director nowadays, and Paul Posner, who got 'em the hall, are having catfits, for fear that the publicity will damage the Democratic ticket.Footnote 36
The LA issues conference was not as controversial as Lybeck feared, stressing unemployment, benefit levels, the need for public works, right-to-work, and the indicative but hardly revolutionary statement that “diplomacy, that is bargaining, treaties, conferences and economic understanding must take precedence over the military emphasis.”Footnote 37 There was little doubt, however, that a combination of the vestiges of the old left in LA and the increasing influence of the young in southern California politics who had not come of age politically in the 1940s was pushing the club movement towards an anti-Cold War stance.Footnote 38 What clubs and Young Democrats thought about foreign policy was hardly headline news in the late 1950s, but the potential such views had to cause schisms in the Democratic order being developed in California was manifest.
CALIFORNIA WELFARE IDEOLOGY AND THE COLD WAR IN THE ERA OF CAMELOT
By the time of President Kennedy's assassination, the uneasy truce between different factions of liberal politics in California over the ongoing struggle to reconcile the ambitious policy agenda of many state Democratic activists with the realities of a rapidly warming Cold War was breaking down. The battle between former CDC chairman Alan Cranston and the late President Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger for the Democratic Senate nomination in 1964 highlighted these tensions. Salinger was temperamentally as removed from the spirit of California Democratic politics as it was possible to be, at least in its post-1950 club manifestation. He had acquired political experience in the Kennedy White House in an atmosphere of Cold War crisis: the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis to him were testimony to the continued seriousness of the Soviet threat and of the certainties of the foreign-policy outlook that had crystallized in the late 1940s. Though there were some in the California party who shared these concerns, the soul of the California Democratic Party was occupied elsewhere: the bitter battle against a ballot initiative to sanction racial discrimination in housing, the legacy of the party's Popular Front past, and the growing criticism of Cold War foreign policy and of reflexive anticommunism in the clubs and Young Democrats lent the party a very different sensibility to many elsewhere in the country.
Salinger's campaign strategy, however, served to inject a divisive note into the campaign specifically designed to expose political splits within the party that need not have been critical in an otherwise strongly Democratic year. The California Young Democratic convention in Fresno in May offered Salinger an opportunity to make the most of his Kennedy Cold War liberal credentials, as the delegates had called for the recognition of Red China and its admission to the UN, the resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the dissolution of anti-Soviet military alliances such as NATO. Salinger publicly repudiated “the forces of the extreme left which forced an astonishing group of policy statements through the State Young Democrats last weekend,” and called on Cranston “to repudiate these stands and to join with me in an effort to stop this dangerous infiltration in our Party,” comparing the left of the Democratic Party to the Republican right in its obsession with ideological purity over political realism. He argued that Cranston was
working closely with these zealots who would attempt to remake the goals of the Democratic Party into their own brand of extreme political philosophy … I ask him how he can be so confident of his own virtue that he can ally himself with this sort of extremism without seeing that followed to its logical extent it would mean a policy of surrender all around the world.Footnote 39
Foreign policy had served since World War II as a fault line to create a political division amongst liberals for tactical reasons; it also now reflected a dividing line between the Cold War liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s and the post-Castro liberalism that dominated club politics in California. “We said it was a struggle between the citizen participant and the pro, between broad-based decision-making and machine control, between image politics and issue politics, between the club movement and the fat cats,” stated an editorial in the Liberal Democrat in its June issue. “This dichotomy has sharpened as Salinger has moved to the right, and Cranston has developed an increasingly liberal posture on the issues and on matters of organization.”Footnote 40 Its editor, Marshall Windmiller, was also a member of Californians for Liberal Representation, a group founded two years earlier by Gifford Phillips, the Los Angeles publisher who had been bankroller of fellow-traveller political organs in the city in the 1940s. CLP was a direct link, therefore, between the 1940s and 1960s, as the group threw itself into the 1964 primary campaign, initially backing Jimmy Roosevelt for the seat in a virtual re-run of 1950 before settling on Cranston once Roosevelt withdrew from the race. The organization claimed to want to keep “politics wherever possible, focussed on issues positions,” these to include opposition to the nuclear deterrent, unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, revision to the Panama Canal treaty, and “economic planning in the areas of automation, reconversion, reduction of the work week,” as well as tax reform and public service projects.Footnote 41 Opposition to Cold War liberalism and strong support for the basic premise of the Great Society at home gave a 1960s mantle to political actors still committed to the anti-anticommunist struggles of the World War II period.
Cranston decided to use Salinger's foreign-policy tactics to reaffirm his own progressive agenda, which he felt would play well with his CDC club base. “We must start by admitting to ourselves that it is a dangerous folly to regard foreign aid largely as a deterrent to Communism,” he told a rally at a high school in late May. “We must instead regard foreign aid as an investment in the economic stability of poorer nations – a stability that will eventually produce new markets for the export of both American products and American concepts of freedom.”Footnote 42 He expounded a social-democratic vision of state involvement in the domestic economy. He supported a reduction in defense and space-exploration spending in favor of “federal public works projects in areas of greatest need: Housing, transportation, natural resources, and urban development.” He proposed the extension of the minimum wage to agricultural workers, a nod towards an issue rapidly gaining political momentum in California in the 1960s. He made reference in a speech to black Baptist leaders in LA to the need to frame the civil rights debate at the center of state and national politics in 1964 in economic terms:
We must, by eliminating poverty and providing full employment convert legal rights and opportunities into actuality. What good is a fair housing law to an unemployed Negro? What good is a fair employment practice law to an unskilled worker whose job was taken away by a machine?Footnote 43
Cranston's campaign built upon the groundwork laid by CDC activists in reorienting the political foundations of liberalism to embrace economic management, civil rights through social citizenship for all, and the downplaying of Cold War foreign-policy concerns – a process that had been gathering pace long before the oft-cited Vietnam crisis in the party in 1968. Cranston narrowly lost the primary, but the difficulties Salinger faced in eking out his victory suggested that the strongly left activist wing of the California party was a force to be reckoned with, and many activists refused to vote for Salinger in the general election, which he lost in an otherwise strongly Democratic year.Footnote 44
Antiwar activist Bob Scheer's campaign against incumbent congressman Jeffery Cohelan in Berkeley in 1966 demonstrated the extent to which the fault lines of the 1940s still pertained in the 1960s. Scheer supported the repeal of antiunion shop provisions of Taft-Hartley, a public works program, a two-dollar minimum wage, a thirty-hour week, a guaranteed income of $3,600 “as a right, not as welfare,” access to day care centers for families, increased social security payments to seniors, the end to racial discrimination in housing, and various other measures that represented a standard left-of-center Democratic wish list.Footnote 45 His views on the Vietnam War were rapidly permeating into Democratic Party discourse as the war began to drag on with no end in sight: “The United States spends more in 1 HOUR in Vietnam than it spends in a WHOLE YEAR for the ‘War on Poverty’ in Oakland and Watts.”Footnote 46
His campaign also demonstrated the way in which in California the issue of the war and disappointment with the achievements of 1960s liberalism acted as catalysts for the reemergence of a radical leftism that was not new but had lain dormant during the upheavals of the 1950s and was now finding a new outlet. Critics of the Scheer campaign quickly noticed this trend:
The majority of names on the letterhead announcing the Scheer campaign were well-known old left figures: three unions which officially endorsed the campaign were Mine, Mill and Smelter, the Longshoremen, and the United Electrical Workers, unions expelled as communist dominated by the CIO and still part of the emotional and intellectual heritage of the old communist left.Footnote 47
Scheer readily accepted the involvement of communists in his campaign, cognizant of their organizational usefulness, and gathered an impressive coalition of antiwar students, radical unions, communists, and Democratic clubs disillusioned with Cohelan and disenchanted after the dismissal of Casady as CDC chair.Footnote 48
What was new about the Scheer campaign was the extent to which it represented the coming together of Democratic Party politics and old and new left organs in an open alliance in the mid-1960s. Club politics had exhibited these trends earlier – a brief look at the West Beverly Club is illuminating – but in a post-Joe McCarthy world the extent to which a Popular Front legacy resonated in the rejuvenated Democratic Party was never openly addressed until the antiwar movement forced the issue in 1965 and 1966. Some new leftists grew disillusioned with the Scheer campaign as it grew more successful during spring 1966, thus aligning radical protest with the pursuit of power through orthodox electoral means, but early on even they saw merit in a campaign that
would serve as a vehicle for community organizing while providing a framework within which to educate the organizers. Moreover, by focusing its opposition on a liberal congressman, the campaign would broaden the protest against the war to a critique of liberalism itself, and in so doing, link foreign policy to domestic concerns.
They noted the remarkably broad coalition that had lined up behind Scheer even as they decried the implications of a rainbow left that embraced the ballot box and the Democratic Party as vehicles for advancing social change.
For their part, the adherents of the old left wanted to build an electoral machine rather than a community organization … They agreed with the liberals that important gains could be made by moving Cohelan to the left, and they realized that the campaign coalition could best be maintained by giving first priority to the election.Footnote 49
Many VDC and SDS members feared the consequences of infiltrating the Democratic Party, and in this respect the spirit of the 1960s New Left represented a change from the strong relationship between Popular Front and party politics in earlier years: “To run an ‘effective’ political campaign in America today means that one must be willing to set up very highly structured organizations similar to those of the Democratic and Republican parties,” wrote SDS activists Carolyn Craven, Buddy Stein, and Dave Wellman. “This includes such mundane and undemocratic structures as precinct organizations with their captains and ‘workers.’”Footnote 50 Yet the Scheer campaign channeled the radical sensibility of democratic politics in the Bay Area and would shape the dynamics of the electoral process there for the rest of the twentieth century. “The primary purpose of the campaign is to speak out for peace in Vietnam,” stated a Scheer-for-Congress form letter. “But this is not the sole purpose of the campaign. We intend to speak about everything from the War on Poverty, to hot lunches in ghetto schools, to the problems of taxes in a war economy.”Footnote 51 These themes would continue to resonate in Berkeley politics long after the Scheer campaign, helping to elect a radical city council in 1967 and a radical congressman in Ron Dellums in 1970. They sprang from a long tradition of insurgency politics in California, and had far deeper roots than the explosion of new left and student protest in the early 1960s.
Yet the continued vitality of anticommunism both as a defining feature of US foreign policy and as a rhetorical trope in liberal discourse contributed to the decline of the club volunteer movement in California, and stoked the fires of internecine warfare in the state and national Democratic Party. Still, the tendency in California liberal politics to connect a struggle to define the legacy of the New Deal to one over foreign policy provides a framework for understanding the growth of Democratic activism throughout the post-World War II era, culminating in the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972. The Vietnam War did not wreck California liberalism in the way the early Cold War had done, and many antiwar Democrats, including Phil Burton and Ron Dellums, rose to positions of power and influence on the national stage in later years on the tide of welfare liberalism and opposition to Cold War anticommunism. In many respects, liberalism became more powerful during the 1970s, as Governor Reagan failed to implement much of his agenda and then ceded office to Democrat Jerry Brown, whose own fiscal conservatism was held in check by a liberal state legislature, and whose own party career had been launched as part of the Eugene McCarthy peace campaign of 1968.Footnote 52 The New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.
