California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
the “year of 1950 is all-important for American labor. The labor movements of the whole world are watching us, and we are going into the bitterest campaign in the history of this country.” Keenan fiercely attacked Richard Nixon for distorting a debate about the future of the New Deal into one about communism, noting the devastating impact anticommunism had already had on primary elections in Florida and North Carolina, as well as on labor's chances of toppling the author of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. “We in Washington,” he told the California delegates, “hope to get enough information to you so that you can acquaint the people with the laws that the American Federation of Labor is concerned with…laws such as social security, minimum wage, aid to education, housing, and, most of all, health insurance.”51 The battles for Fair Deal measures such as federal health insurance and against Taft-Hartley had further welded together the political fortunes of labor and the Democratic Party, and in some respects the San Francisco meeting of the AFL'S California membership reflected this development: Helen Douglas and James Roosevelt both gained labor's blessing, and both addressed the assembled throng. “My fight has been your fight,” proclaimed Douglas in an impassioned speech, “and I will continue to work for the economic bill of rights that President Roosevelt outlined for us: a decent home for every family; a job at a decent wage; the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act [loud applause]; the extension of the social security program; the extension of our educational opportunities for young people; the realization of our civil liberties for all the people.”52
In the topsy-turvy world of California politics, however, the growing realization that organized labor would have to work with the Democratic Party to offset the impact of the revitalization of the private business community gave way to the realities of political patronage on the West coast. At the same time as Roosevelt and Douglas were giving their fighting speeches in defense of liberal principles and the legacy of the New Deal, the convention was voting to endorse all incumbent assemblymen and state senators—of either party— seen to be “friendly” to organized labor. More controversially, a vocal minority on the convention floor objected to the endorsement of Pat Brown for the office of attorney general. Brown, a prominent San Francisco Democrat and the city's district attorney, seemingly had the best chance of a Democratic victory in that difficult year: his Republican opponent, Fred Howser, had served a term in office beset by scandal, to the extent that Governor Warren was openly encouraging primary challengers. Howser had, however, made decisions deemed by many in the California Federation of Labor as favorable, and in a state in which established Republican patronage, however unreliable, was seen as far more valuable to union members than a commitment to an untested opponent, it was no surprise when the floor voted by 79,961 to 40,296 to override the leadership's recommendation and endorse Howser.53 It would not be the last time such a controversy would distract the assembled gathering from the realization that gathering crumbs from the Republican Party's table was not helping place labor's concerns at the center of the political agenda in California. In 1950, in any case, the convention's achievements could be summed up by the fact that while labor's champions Douglas and Roosevelt were suffering ignominious defeats, Howser had lost the Republican primary to Ed Shattuck, who in turn became the only statewide victim of a Democratic victory that year when he lost to rising star, and future champion of organized labor, Pat Brown.54
Hope Mendoza Schechter, a leading figure in the garment workers' union and Democratic activist in a predominantly Latino part of southeastern Los Angeles, recalled with frustration the political ambivalence of the AFL in her neighborhood and statewide: “CIO—you could almost bank on Democratic endorsements—but not AFL. That was touch and go and a lot of politicking and a lot of work, in order to swing meaningful endorsements for Democrats.” She was determined to build up a liberal Democratic movement in her overwhelmingly working class district, but found her union leadership unwilling to ruffle the feathers of Republican contacts in Sacramento, including Fred Howser: “In the nineteenth congressional district, I maintained a totally Democratic headquarters…. I remember going to a central Labor council meeting…and [ILGWU Director of Public Relations and Education Sigmund Arywitz had] bounced me off…because I had worked for Pat Brown. The irony is that Pat Brown later appointed him commissioner of Labor.” Schechter argued that labor's reluctance to be more daring in its efforts to shape state politics frustrated ambitious and hard-working activists like her. The leadership “were being opportunistic. They knew [a Republican] was going to win anyway, and so they might just as well—there was no sense in fighting it…. I just took the position that they could have gone for no endorsement and that way, leave those of us who want to retain a few ideals, a little flexibility. This other way…your hands were tied.”55 The AFL endorsement process often did refuse to endorse Republicans if they were antilabor or had overwhelmingly conservative records, but in many cases the conventions in the early 1950s were plagued by disputes between delegates over whether or not to endorse both Republican and Democratic candidates in a district where both were friendly to labor, or whether to withhold endorsement in cases where insufficient information about candidates had been made available.56 California Labor League for Political Education (CLLPE) secretary c. J. Haggerty even confessed in his speech to the 1952 convention to being “almost nauseated” by the choice of endorsements for the State Legislature. comments from the floor were more categorical: “I have looked through these endorsements,” said one delegate, “and I think in very few instances are we going to be at battle with the chamber of commerce or the Merchants and Manufacturers. In many instances I think we are going to be in the same corner with them…. It seems to me that we have reached not the basic fundamentals of ‘rewarding our friends and defeating our enemies,' but a placating of the powers-that-be in the spirit of ‘we will be nice to you if you will be nice to us.'” The delegate noted that Earl Warren, praised in the league political newsletter, had signed the reapportionment bill, and that re-apportionment along GOP-approved lines “is going to do us more harm than any acts that the Legislature passed during the 1951 session.”57 It was certainly true that absence of a natural alliance between organized labor and a New Deal-dominated political establishment made the prospects of an amicable settlement of industrial relations questions particularly unlikely in California as the 1950s wore on.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of agricultural labor, a thorny political question that perfectly demonstrated the enormous gulf separating the wealthy and well-connected from the poor and politically powerless. Huge landholdings inherited from Spanish and Mexican grants or from awards to railroads made California by the late nineteenth century ahead of its time in the development of massive agribusiness operations as the principal producers of farmed goods. British observer James Bryce in his American Commonwealth in the 1880s commented that “the land system in California presents features both peculiar and dangerous, a contrast between great properties, often appearing to conflict with the general weal, and the sometimes hard pressed small farmer, together with a mass of unsettled labor, thrown without work into the towns at certain times of the year.”58 Landowners could depend upon a ready supply of immigrant labor from Asia and Mexico as well as periodic waves of domestic unemployed pushed westward by economic crisis or drought. High capitalization costs for enormous holdings concentrating on single crops necessitated a flexible, mobile labor force that could be rapidly increased at harvest times and then reduced out of season.59 The economic realities of California agriculture created a system in which a small number of wealthy landowners controlled the economic well-being of hundreds of thousands of rural poor who held little political sway and who in many cases were not even American citizens, thereby condemning them to the status of indentured wage slaves at the mercy of the needs of their employers and their allies in government.
The politics of farm labor conspired with the economic factors to leave rural workers outside the protective umbrella of progressive governance well into the post-World War II era. A riot at the Durst Brothers Hop Ranch in Wheatland in 1913 brought the plight of rural laborers into the public eye and prompted the recently established California commission of Immigration and Housing to inspect labor camps “with the object in view of rendering the immigrant that protection to which he is entitled,” and the legislature gave the commission funds and a remit to attempt to force an improvement in camp conditions.60 An improvement in living arrangements and sanitation in the camps was seen as the solution to the farm labor problem; happier, healthier workers