California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
seats, but hardly reflective of a landslide in a state in which almost every elected office was held by a Republican. Only eight Republican House candidates had both party nominations, and six Democrats also won the Republican primary. Crucially, a proposition to put the party affiliation next to each person's name on the primary ballot so that voters could not be deceived into thinking conservative Republicans were actually Democrats passed the popular vote in November. The 1952 election would be the last in which party labels could be immaterial.10
Stirrings on the Left: Intellectual and Political Currents
The gradual weakening of the Republican Party's grip on political power and, just as importantly, the decline of its dominance over political debate, became both more obvious and more significant when compared to the intellectual and practical upheavals occurring on the other side of the political divide. Whoever was to become the Democratic Party standard-bearer in the 1952 presidential election would benefit from three interrelated trends in California politics that would have repercussions beyond the election itself. First, there existed a growing realization within the California labor movement and civil rights organizations that the right turn in the state GOP meant they needed to build up the kind of left-labor coalition that they had failed to establish in the 1930s. Second, left-of-center political activists were finding new energy in an intellectual debate emerging on the left in various industrial democracies over the future of social democracy in an age of prosperity. Third, the obvious excesses of the domestic Cold War enabled a backlash against right-wing demagoguery to crystallize to a far greater degree than in the previous few years. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 served as a focal point for the coming together of these phenomena, but his campaign was just the beginning of a massive reshaping of the relationship between Democratic politics and California society that would gather pace later in the decade.
The rhetorical strategy of state Republicans finally encouraged the development of an explicitly social democratic antithesis in a labor movement previously hamstrung by the peculiar dynamics of California party politics. Although the State Federation of Labor remained, as we have seen, unable fully to divorce itself from an endorsement strategy that rewarded the GOP as much as Democrats, the executive committee of the CLLPE had become concerned enough about the prospects for an emerging left-right divide to draw up a statement to be presented to the pre-general election convention in Santa Barbara at the end of August. Though careful to deny that the League was changing its practice of supporting politicians of any party that supported labor's economic and political aims, the committee made it clear that it had been forced to take sides, at least in terms of basic party political philosophy. The statement drew attention to the continued GOP support for Taft-Hartley; to the party's increasingly shrill antilabor rhetoric in which it referred to labor leaders as “bosses” and “dictators”; and, in pointed reference to the California situation, to “the punishment of candidates within their own party who have supported the program of social and economic reform…and by the further punishment of those who refuse to enter into their schemes to destroy labor.” The statement of intent alleged that the Republican Party was acting increasingly as a vehicle for private enterprise “to manipulate the institutions of government to defeat every effort to spread the benefits of our political and economic system fairly among those who create the nation's wealth.” The Democratic Party, by contrast, had “adopted a platform that recognizes the rights of labor and the common people throughout the world.”11
The statement, which endorsed the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket for president and declared a formal break with bipartisan politics, was unanimously accepted at the convention. The party's post-primary endorsements were a stark contrast to the muddle and fudge of the preprimary convention, throwing support to Democrats for Congress and State Assembly with very few nods of support for a handful of pro-labor Republicans. William J. McSorley Jr., Assistant Director of the National League for Political Education, worked the delegates into a frenzy with his bitter attack on antistatist politics. “This year of 1952 is indeed the most crucial year in the history of the American labor movement,” he claimed. “We can become active politically; we can work politically to destroy reaction; to retire the peddlers of reaction from the halls of the United States Congress and the State legislatures…. It was our failure to take part in the election in 1946 that has put us in the position we are in today.”12 For those in the ranks of labor already committed to Democratic politics, such as Hope Schechter in East Los Angeles, the links being forged between labor activism and party political mobilization changed her political world. She had found the opportunistic marriages between labor and some state Republicans depressing, and was pleased to be able to go into her Latino communities as a proud Democrat, making calls on voters in the early evening before attending a labor or political committee meeting.13
It was not just labor's clarion call to political action that mobilized grassroots party workers in 1952. The campaign of Adlai Stevenson for president also set the scene for the development of a left-right political spectrum in California in the 1950s. “There was no Democratic Party,” recalled Roger Kent about the political situation in 1952, until “the Stevenson campaign of ‘52 brought in this large number of idealistic people who were just crazy about Stevenson…. Then they had to go out and create [the party] themselves, which they did, and started the Stevenson clubs and everything else.”14 There was no doubt that the “surge” for Stevenson's nomination was national in scope and born in part of a large amount of favorable coverage in the national print media, including Time and the Atlantic Monthly. To prominent ADA supporter Arthur Schlesinger, the Stevenson movement “indicates the extent to which the Stevenson candidacy is filling a political vacuum. The vacuum exists for professional politicians and liberals alike; and Stevenson combines geographical desirability, political strength and moral courage in a package which appeals equally to northern city bosses and to members of Americans for Democratic Action.”15 Stevenson had impressed the machine politicians and liberal intellectuals alike with his massive win in the 1948 governor's race in Illinois against a corrupt, reactionary incumbent Republican, and his record in the governor's mansion had been at least in the tradition of the New Deal, if not exactly radical. His campaign's eighteen-page report detailing his accomplishments in Springfield pointed to his support for increased public assistance grants, together with the fact that his “four-year public aid program has made available $128 million more for old age pensions, blind pensions, and aid to dependent children than was spent in the previous four years, but it is also a program of getting rid of the ‘cheaters' and of conserving public funds for those legitimately in need.”16 He had gained national attention for his controversial and widely admired veto of a hysterical loyalty oath bill passed in the Illinois State Legislature, memorably stating that in attempting to protect the nation against communist subversion Americans “must not burn down the house to kill the rats.”17 He cast himself as a morally upright crusader for standards in public life and as an arbiter of fairness in his oversight of public affairs. He supported a fair employment practices law for Illinois. He possessed a gift for rhetorical flamboyance that served him well in his political career. At a time when McCarthyism and the horrors of the day filled political headlines, he seemed the perfect antidote for American liberals: calmly rational, articulate in his defense of democracy and freedom in American life.
Yet it is difficult to understand at first his massive appeal to the liberal movement in California. As his roll call of achievements, claiming a purge of “chiselers” from the relief rolls among them, demonstrated, Stevenson was hardly a typical standard bearer of the leftist tradition in American politics. He gathered round him during the campaign a distinguished group of political and intellectual advisers, among them economist John K. Galbraith, law professor Willard Wirtz, Harper's editor Jack Fischer, and David E. Bell, who would subsequently serve, as would Wirtz, in the Kennedy administration and philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation. Yet he remained distrustful of the political left, worrying, as Galbraith recalled, “lest he had been taken over by radicals. We felt that he was insufficiently committed to the constituency and the policies that had brought the magnificent string of Democratic victories all the way from 1932 to 1948…. Stevenson's fear…was that he would be thought automatic in his political responses, a predictable voice for the liberal clichés of the New Deal and Fair Deal years.” Galbraith also noted Stevenson's social background and his affluent