California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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.” This “welfare society” included a shared commitment to civil rights, nondiscrimination, and universal access to health care, issues that framed political debate in California for the 1950s.45
Given the unfavorable national political climate and the overwhelming advantage incumbent Governor Warren enjoyed, Roosevelt's campaign seemed an unlikely prospect from the start. Warren barely mentioned Roosevelt in his own reelection campaign, and Roosevelt's increasingly desperate attempts in his speeches and broadcasts to cast Warren as a far right-wing Republican in sheep's clothing and to create as much political space between the two candidates as possible in part represented an attempt simply to get noticed and create some relevancy and purpose for his faltering campaign.46 The strongly left-of-center tenor of Roosevelt's campaign also represented a calculated strategy based on the findings of polls taken before and during the 1950 race. In the summer of 1949 Jimmy hired a polling firm to establish whether a run for office would be feasible, and the results bear close investigation. The question that mattered—would Roosevelt win—did not look promising: 52 percent of those polled said that if an election were held tomorrow they would vote for Warren, as opposed to 23 percent who preferred Roosevelt. But the election was still eighteen months away. Roosevelt was swayed by the polling data dealing with the depth of feeling of those surveyed: 96 percent of Roosevelt supporters supported his politics and candidacy strongly, compared to 72 percent of Warren supporters; 24 percent of Warren supporters were classed as “weak” in their commitment to Warren. In addition, 15 percent of those asked how they would vote if an election were held tomorrow were undecided. The polling suggested that Roosevelt had to campaign on themes that differentiated himself from Warren: “Those voting for a candidate other than Warren or who are undecided have for the most part a well-formulated negative attitude toward Warren,” the poll revealed. “On the other hand, those voting for a candidate other than Roosevelt or who are undecided display merely a lack of knowledge about Roosevelt.” A full third of those polled thought that Warren was a Democrat, or a candidate of both parties, helped by the cross-filing system in California elections and overwhelming media coverage of his governorship; 43 percent of registered Democrats planned to vote for Warren in the Democratic primary, as opposed to just 5 percent of Republicans who thought they would cast their Republican primary ballot for Roosevelt.47 The only hope for Roosevelt's campaign was to convince voters that Warren was an enemy of the Democratic Party and Roosevelt an heir to his father's legacy in a state where registered Democrats still outnumbered Republicans by a near two to one margin.
This fact was reinforced in the wake of the primary elections in July 1950. Warren was the overwhelming winner of his own primary and had gained an alarming number of votes in the Democratic primary, but a deeper probing of voting attitudes among the 2,241 adults surveyed across the state revealed a potentially significant weakness in people's commitment to the Republicans. For one thing, the overwhelming registration bias to the Democrats—53 percent Democratic to 26 percent Republican, and 21 percent unaffiliated— at least suggested a serious disjuncture between the political complexion of California and election results. More significantly, 48 percent of respondents said that the Democrats were doing the most good for the country compared to 30 percent who answered Republican, but many did not know Warren was a Republican. “The survey shows that the majority of the voters are registered or will register as Democrats because they believe that party has done more for them. The majority of those who consider themselves Independent voters are either ‘weak' Warren votes or ‘Don't know' Senatorial votes at this time, despite the fact that in the main they lean toward Democratic party thinking. A strong united front of the Democratic candidates would be a psychological factor towards crystallizing their Democratic voting behavior.” Though the poll warned that ideology was a difficult concept that could send mixed messages in the rough and tumble of a campaign, and terms such as “Fair Dealer,” “Reactionary,” “Liberal,” and “Radical” had multiple meanings and were “newspaper terms and not part of the average person's vocabulary,” there was a clear message that some sort of left-wing platform was the only way of creating a serious challenge to bipartisan Warren. “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. Roosevelt should be identified as a Progressive Democrat…. The lower middle and lower economic groups, pro-Roosevelt, did not vote in their true number as did the pro-Warren economic groups, particularly the upper income group. The need for planning and organizing the ‘get out the vote' committee is obvious. It should be one vast correlated organization under the Democratic Party, with all the various pro-Roosevelt units working together.”48
The polling companies could not factor in the bitterly factionalized nature of the California Democrats that made such a coordinated campaign impossible, nor could they rationalize the highly personalized nature of California politics that made party-line voting difficult to organize. Even the Roosevelt and Douglas campaigns, both running for statewide office and both sharing the same political principles as well as the same party label, were wary of working together. Indeed, Earl Warren was genuinely angry when Helen Douglas came out and asked her supporters to vote for Roosevelt as well, as Warren had never openly backed Richard Nixon, Douglas's opponent, and such open party loyalty was often seen as unsavory in California.49 The Roosevelt campaign did, however, expose the fact that there existed in California, underneath the ongoing imbroglio about communism and the popular front, a strong undercurrent of left-of-center politics that had the potential to explode into life under different political circumstances.
Helen Gahagan Douglas's Senate campaign further demonstrated both the limits of leftist influence in California and the potential for its growth. Douglas represented one of the great California Democratic Party success stories of the 1940s, as well as one of its greatest defeats. Born to a socially prominent Scotch-Irish family in Brooklyn in 1900, a young Helen Gahagan dropped out of Barnard College to pursue a career in theater. She was a Broadway star at twenty-two, a leading lady on the New York stage throughout the 1920s and, in George Abbott's words, “a strange classic beauty.” She toured Europe as an opera singer before returning to the United States and her theater work, appearing in the David Belasco production Tonight or Never in 1930 with leading man Melvyn Douglas, who soon matched his stage romance with Helen with a real-life love affair and marriage. The couple relocated to Los Angeles, where his film career blossomed as her work life stagnated, though she made a comeback in the big budget science-fiction film She in 1935. She found a new interest alongside her husband in local Democratic Party politics, campaigning for Sheridan Downey in his successful 1938 Senate race and soon becoming the leading Democratic female activist in the state as a Democratic National Committeewoman during the Culbert Olson governorship. She entered Congress in 1944 from the predominantly African American and inner-city Fourteenth Congressional District in Los Angeles, and rapidly became a vocal champion of the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party. She managed to ride out the stormy and debilitating battles within the state party during 1947 and 1948 by tending to her duties in Washington and by steering clear of the Wallace party overtures, but her political convictions remained on the left, and her strong personality ensured that she paid little attention to the social niceties of freshman life in the House of Representatives. She preferred delivering dramatic speeches on the floor of the House to courting lobbyists and her congressional colleagues, at one point striding purposefully onto the floor of the chamber with a basket of groceries to demonstrate the difficulties faced by ordinary families in the wake of the end of price controls in 1946. Her growing frustration at the rightward drift of Senator Downey in the 1940s on questions of corporate power, particularly in terms of big farm interests, prompted her to declare her candidacy for his seat in the fall of 1949.50
Acting as the launch pad for Richard Nixon's inexorable rise into national politics and as a prime example of a titanic clash between huge personalities in a crucial postwar political battle over the future direction of American politics, the Nixon-Douglas race has received wide attention.51 Most accounts of this battle royal take a well-known path. Douglas was a well-meaning, principled liberal who had famously taken that basket of groceries into Congress in 1947 to demonstrate the impact of inflation on the average American's