California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
the flavor and tone of this emerging ideological agenda when the author, J. R. Feyrel, noted the way opponents, as well as supporters, of the New Deal state argued even more bitterly about welfare in the 1950s than twenty years earlier. “The main issue of today,” he wrote, “is surely the struggle for or against the Welfare State, or perhaps one can already say over the shape, development and control of the Welfare State. We live today in a collectivist society, in the broad sense of the word, and the pace of collectivism is likely to increase, for better or worse…. And if such a society is to function efficiently, it seems already clear that it must be governed by Welfare State concepts, in one form or another.” The momentum of change had been picking up pace since the industrialization of the late nineteenth century, Feyrel argued, with the legitimization of labor unions and the end of the open shop forming one major milestone, and the reduction of economic inequality by means of social legislation and redistributive taxation signifying another. “In such measures as the TVA,” he wrote, “one can see at least the wedge of the mixed economy, in the recent legislation in, say, California on the various trade-union and other ‘private' insurance schemes at least the first sign of the Welfare State.” The 1950s would, he argued, throw up new problems and challenges that would conceivably herald a major step toward social democracy configured for a prosperous world. A crucial question, and one that frames much of the present study, was “the cultural one. After the leveling, after the British National Health Service or the American owner-occupied home, what next?'”30
It is not difficult to point to a wealth of recent historiography on the American political economy of the postwar era that throws plenty of cold water on the implied optimism of Feyrel's assessment. As it turned out, the accord between labor and management over access to a private welfare state did not prove durable when the economic weather turned inclement, nor did it lead to an automatic federal expansion of entitlements for the laboring man and woman and their dependents. The term “welfare state” was in any case hardly appropriate for the patchwork of work-based welfare schemes, private pension agreements, and healthcare plans that reached only some of the workforce and very few of the laboring and out of work or retired poor.31 Still, several interesting trends could be discerned when thinking about Feyrel's analysis and its implications for California. certainly the state did witness the capture of the Democratic Party by partisans committed to constructing the sort of economic and social policies that would contribute toward greater social equality later in the century. And evidently the campaign of 1952 did point toward a clearer articulation of a social democratic message for the 1950s: economic growth and social diversity together required the regulatory hand of government to encourage a collectivist conception of social citizenship. The dynamic shifts in California society in the postwar era made the Golden State a stark case study of left-of-center political development in this period.
The fact that California fascinated left-wing visitors from overseas desperate to find a new message for their own discredited parties in the 1950s strongly supports this argument. When British Labor politician and theorist Anthony Crosland landed on the West Coast, remarking in his diary on the “spectacular harbour, hills, much older houses, European, or rather cosmopolitan, atmosphere” of San Francisco, Dwight Eisenhower had defeated Adlai Stevenson and was already settled into the White House.32 His mission, however, was of great relevance to the Democratic left in California throughout the 1950s. His own party had enjoyed six years in power after World War II, during which time they had established a National Health Service, nationalized major industries, expanded the welfare state on universalist principles, and changed the economic and social landscape of postwar Britain. In 1951, they had been unceremoniously ejected from power by the British electorate, despite gaining the highest number of votes cast for any party in British electoral history up to that point. Labor and Socialist parties in Australia, New Zealand, and continental Europe had also lost power at the end of the 1940s or were struggling to find a role in an international political system dominated by the United States and its powerful brand of anticommunist politics.33 Crosland was conducting research in the United States for his book The Future of Socialism, intended as a road map for a left that he felt needed a fresh message if it was to adapt to the political demands of an age of consumption and technological change. In essence, he was trying to find answers to the question Feyrel had posed in early 1952: what next?34
Crosland's travels around California and some other parts of the United States led him to agree with Feyrel that the economic development of the nation since the regulatory and statist reforms of the New Deal did show the extent to which the politics of the broker state between government, management, and labor had changed the ideological landscape. He studied a California bakers' union and noted its “very detailed statewide trade union agreement, giving the trade union considerable power over firms' decisions in labor policy, including in discretion of restrictive or inflexible practices.” American trade unions, he felt, were “probably more militant than in the UK” with “more emphasis on strikes, less on arbitration…. Indeed, they've become a powerful entrenched empire, equal in strength to big business, farmers, etc.”35 He found little enthusiasm for a dramatic change in the party system, but did note widespread criticism among Democrats of the Republicans' regressive tax policies and its abandonment of public works and large-scale public spending as an instrument of economic growth. He even found a corporate executive, Ernest T. Weir of National Steel, who was “convinced government has [a] clear responsibility for keeping economy in balance: admits this is a big change in business thinking from 1930s.”36 Crosland did observe the need for greater state control over the economic development of places like California: he reflected sadly on the lax zoning laws in many cities that led to “hideous urban sprawl, appalling traffic problems created, no open spaces.” Suburbs of California cities were “sprawling, ugly, very industrial— quite different from suburbs of smaller, less industrialized towns.” Los Angeles was “hideous except for lovely Italian surrounding hills.”37 Crosland's trip left him in no doubt that the United States had witnessed dramatic political changes since the 1930s as well as vast economic growth that gave him ammunition for arguing that social citizenship and a dynamic private economy were potentially compatible. He also saw the limits of Americans' acceptance of a statist solution of economic problems, noting that unions still had legislative battles ahead to resist right-to-work laws and maintain high-wage settlements. The next problem remained how to reconcile economic growth with social equality.
When left-wing colleagues and friends back in London read drafts of The Future of Socialism, they were somewhat taken aback by the influence his American trip had evidently cast over the thesis of the book. One friend wrote that “I feel that perhaps you are rather carried away by America,” and Richard Crossman, Labour Party heavyweight, disagreed with Crosland's arguments about American politics and society in a spirited correspondence. “If I understand you aright,” he wrote, “you believe that Socialism is now about equality, not about public ownership, and that we should accept much of the American attitude to social equality and equality of opportunity and add to these concepts of radical democracy a specifically Socialist content, the move towards equalization in the distribution of property, purchasing power and responsibility in industry.” Indeed, Crosland did see the implicit connection between equality of opportunity in economic terms and social equality in terms of equal access for all to a common citizenship, an idea being worked out in America through pressure from civil rights activists for racial equality, though it had broader implications than that. Crossman was, however, unconvinced. “Social equality à l'Americaine not only assumes inequality in property distribution etc but glories in it. It is only in a society where there are millionaires as well as newspaper boys, and vastly more of the latter than the former, that everyone has an equal opportunity to rise from one status to the other. It is no good, therefore, suggesting…that American ideology comes much closer to the egalitarian ideas of the British Left than to those of the British Right…. As for equality as you define it, they would regard it as completely fatal to their free enterprise system.”38 It was difficult to deny the fact that the ongoing struggle for supremacy between management and labor for control over the industrial relations process in the United States rendered Crosland's notion of social equality through progressive taxation and a large public sector rather too radical for the American political scene. But it was also true that Crossman's failure to distinguish between all the different shades of political