Rise and Triumph of the California Right, 1945-66

Kurt Schuparra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780765602770
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315292755
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this, the first book to deal exclusively with conservative politics in California, author Kurt Schuparra pinpoints the myriad factors that led to the formation and rise of the conservative movement in California after World War II, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966. While Schuparra is concerned with prominent figures such as Ronald Reagan, California senator William Knowland, Richard Nixon, and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, his larger interest is in the principal players in the movement behind these individuals, the causes they espoused, and the movement's role in pivotal electoral contests. Schuparra also provides an assessment of how the struggle between liberals and conservatives - and those caught in the middle - in the Golden State both reflected and influenced the national debate over major governmental policies and social issues, particularly on racial matters.

One

“It’s Not the Party—but the Man”

California became a state in 1850 on the heels of the great gold rush that filled the Sierra Nevada Mountains and foothills with prospectors determined to find the Mother Lode. Numerous others migrated to the state at mid-century and after in pursuit of the American Dream in the salubrious environs of the Golden State. Though California was blessed with a hospitable climate and an abundance of natural resources, federal aid would prove indispensable in making the state a thriving entity by providing many jobs and various subsidies for hydroelectric power and other water projects, timber harvesting, transportation, and ranching. State government facilitated this growth as well, but in a different fashion. After the Civil War, party politics in California came to be dominated by the “machine” politics of the railroad interests. Replete with the corruption and laissez-faire policies associated with the Gilded Age, California government would remain under the control of these powerful railroad companies (particularly the Southern Pacific) until reformers led by Republican governor Hiram Johnson broke their grip during the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century.¹

In addition to greatly diminishing the influence of the railroads’ political operatives in state government, the “nonpartisan” Johnson and his fellow reformers made changes of major importance in California’s electoral process between 1911 and 1917. These changes included the authorization of the initiative and referendum, the recall and women’s suffrage. Cross-filing in primary elections, in which candidates could run on all party ballots and win office with a majority of the overall vote, arguably proved to be the most significant of Johnson’s reforms. Until its abolition in 1959, cross-filing played a significant role in keeping Republican governors in Sacramento but at the same time helped continue the state’s nonpartisan political trend through the de-emphasis of party affiliation. The nonpartisanship of the cross filing era tended to be of the moderate yet progressive and pragmatic style that typified Johnson’s governance.²

Progressive politics persisted in California in the 1920s despite the conservative inclinations of the state’s Republican governors,³ but the impoverished misery brought about by the Great Depression the following decade led to a serious challenge to this moderate political pattern. The most significant effort the far left would ever mount for a high state office, Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor in 1934, alarmed Republicans and Democrats alike. A onetime socialist, Sinclair stunned many Democrats in California and across the nation by winning the party’s gubernatorial primary. Running on an “End Poverty in California” (EPIC) platform, Sinclair faced vicious Republican attacks and lacked strong support even from his own party due to his “radicalism.” In addition to the backing generated by their invective, California Republicans garnered support by acquiescing to numerous New Deal public aid measures, thus stealing much of Sinclair’s potential thunder and ensuring his defeat by Frank Merriam. Run by the “full-service” management team of Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, the Merriam campaign utilized innovative mass-media techniques and served as the prototype for later campaigns in California and the rest of the nation. That campaign also cemented a small but powerful right-wing coalition that supported conservative candidates into the 1950s.⁴ Though Democrat Culbert Olson won the governorship in 1938, California politics maintained a bumpy but moderate course as the nation entered World War II and the California economy began its long-term boom with lucrative defense contracts.⁵

Seeking to recapture the governor’s office for the GOP, the moderately conservative Republican Earl Warren challenged Olson’s reelection bid in 1942.⁶ While serving as the state attorney general during the Olson years, Warren had openly feuded with the governor on numerous issues, including wartime civil defense policy. Deciding finally to run for governor himself, Warren declared, “I just don’t intend to run a nonpartisan campaign. I intend to conduct a nonpartisan administration.” Still, Warren attacked Olson’s “radicalism” mainly due to the governor’s pardon of Thomas Mooney, a militant labor figure who served twenty-two years in prison after being convicted of murder on questionable evidence. Depicting Mooney as an “assassin,” Warren maintained that the governor pardoned Mooney and other “communist radicals” to win union votes but that such transparent actions were “an insult to the intelligence of organized labor.” Olson countered this assault by depicting Warren as a “reactionary” who represented the “aristocracy of wealth,” but to no avail.⁷ Warren won the election handily and then pledged, as he had during the campaign, to work diligently with the Roosevelt administration in the nation’s war effort. California’s role in that effort not only entrenched defense industries in the state’s economy; it also provided the pragmatic Warren with an extraordinarily broad base of support.

He had proved adroit at winning broad backing during his years as district attorney of Alameda County, a position he held from 1925 to 1938, before becoming attorney general. Amassing strong support by taking on organized crime, Warren also won over many blue collar workers in the county’s numerous labor union locals through his reputation for being firm but fair.⁸ Moreover, he and his associate Ed Shattuck founded the California Republican Assembly (CRA) in 1934, after the party had lost many members and electoral contests to the Democrats. (The depression and the New Deal created a seismic shift in voter registration in California, giving roughly a 3-to-2 advantage to the Democrats, which the party held through the period of interest in this study.) The CRA became a powerful entity that helped organize effective Republican campaigns and shaped a new progressive image for the party despite the resistance of laissez-faire conservatives. Though the organization clearly provided a much needed boost to the party’s electoral prospects, it also developed into Warren’s political machine. Warren and the CRA formed a symbiotic relationship and charted a middle-of-the-road political course for the state GOP and California government.

That course was apparent in Warren’s first term, especially in his effort to prepare the state for the potentially turbulent transition from the wartime economy to peacetime production. Addressing a nationwide radio audience in 1944 on the obligations owed to returning veterans, Warren maintained that families should be “assured the chance to make a decent income” and find adequate and “decent” housing. He also stressed the need for good schools, altruistic community organizations, and for “health services in the economic range for all.”⁹ To facilitate the latter, Warren aimed to establish a comprehensive health insurance system, financed equally by contributions from employers and employees, like Social Security. Probably the most controversial legislative proposal he ever made as governor, Warren’s plan incurred the wrath of the powerful California Medical Association and the Republican right, as he repeatedly—and ultimately unsuccessfully—attempted to institute “socialized medicine” in California.

Shortly after the war’s end Warren expressed his concerns about “Republican Party policy” to Herbert Brownell Jr., chairman of the Republican National Committee. In addition to a public health care initiative, Warren contended that the party should “have a definite program on Social Security …, [on] the conservation of our natural resources, and an anti-monopoly program.” “Unfortunately,” he lamented, “we are being held up to the public as the party that opposes legislation in all these fields.” Believing that the GOP had taken its oppositional role to an ill-advised extreme, Warren declared, “[w]e must have an affirmative program which we offer to the public for the solution of our basic problems.”¹⁰ He clearly recognized what Republican conservatives did not: having endured the depression and the war with the considerable aid of government programs, the public by and large did not want another postwar “return to normalcy” with laissez-faire policies reminiscent of the 1920s; nor would voters long embrace a party seemingly intent on making the politics of negativity its most distinguishing characteristic.

In anticipation of Warren’s reelection bid, disgruntled conservative naysayers in the legislature and in the state’s Republican Party hierarchy in late 1945 coalesced behind Earl Lee Kelly for governor. A prominent San Francisco investment banker who had served as the state director of public works under governors James Rolph and Frank Merriam, Kelly attacked Warren for having policies “closely akin to those of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] Political Action Committee and all the radical riff raff elements in California….” He insinuated that the governor was a “fellow traveler” abetting the communist effort to create a “regimented society” through the constrictive grip of a “master state.” Warren’s complicity in this iniquitous scheme could be seen in the “shameful spectacle” of his attempts to “out-deal the New Dealers in Washington….” “We need men who will fight for the right,” he declared, and “give the conservative people of this state the leadership they are demanding … [which] we have a sacred obligation to provide….”¹¹ The religiosity of his commitment to the right reflected the crusading impulse that later sparked the conservative movement in California.

Kelly’s fervid attempt to link Warren with the CIO-PAC and communist activities resembled the Republican assaults on Franklin Roosevelt in the 1944 presidential campaign. During that campaign the Republican presidential candidate, New York governor Thomas Dewey, charged that Roosevelt had pardoned the convicted “draft dodger” and “perjurer” Earl Browder, the leading communist in America, “in time to organize the campaign for his [Roosevelt’s] fourth term.” He claimed that Browder and the CIO-PAC chief Sidney Hillman had “taken over” the “great Democratic Party,” paving the way for a full-fledged New Deal “corporate state.”¹² Ironically, Warren had turned down Dewey’s offer to be his running mate and subsequently refused to deliver the “canned” version of this Dewey diatribe against Roosevelt in his own speeches around the country in support of Dewey and other Republican candidates.¹³ Similar to the negligible impact of Kelly’s attack on Warren’s “radicalism,” Dewey’s barbs barely dented Roosevelt’s war-tested armor as FDR marched to his final commanding electoral victory.

Though Warren in 1946 had hardly attained the stature of the venerable (and now deceased) Roosevelt, the governor’s opponents soon realized he would be about as hard to beat. Kelly apparently did not have problems raising funds for his campaign, but he had trouble finding much support within the party or from the state’s prominent newspapers. In early 1946, officials at the Los Angeles Times, along with key Republican leaders, pressured Kelly to withdraw from the race. Even some prominent conservatives believed that winning the election with Warren was more important than persisting in the attempt to make a statement about “fundamental principles” with a sure loser such as the ultraconservative Kelly.¹⁴ As a result, Kelly dropped out of the race and the party’s factions came together behind the governor.

With the challenge from the Republican Old Guard behind him, Warren touted his tempered progressivism and especially his stewardship during the war when he formally announced his reelection bid in March 1946. He emphasized that he had assumed office “during the darkest days of the war” and noted “[t]here was no assurance that we ourselves would not be bombed and pressed for the defense of our homes.” A portent of the “front line” mentality that later contributed to the proliferation of Southland anticommunist groups, Warren contended that “California’s aircraft, ship-building and chemical industries, [and] its vital military installations … placed it in the most perilous position of all the States….” Though Californians never had to “meet actual disaster” on the home front, he noted that they and the state were thoroughly prepared to do so.¹⁵ In short, Warren reminded voters that he had guided the state through the treacherous waters of the “darkest days” and it had emerged not only unscathed but, due to his leadership and the emerging metropolitan-military complex, stronger economically than ever.

California Democrats therefore did not have an easy task in finding a candidate to challenge the formidable incumbent and to fit the rightward drift of postwar politics. Due to FDR’s coattails, Democratic candidates had fared well in the 1944 election in California and elsewhere, but the palpable progressive spirit that had long pervaded the party and generated wide support withered in good part after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Having reconciled their differences with capitalism by the war’s end, most reform-minded liberals nevertheless believed that government could once again tackle challenges on the domestic front with an emphasis on creating a full-employment economy and on the maintenance of New Deal social welfare and insurance programs.¹⁶

The strongest backer of the “Roosevelt legacy” in California, organized labor joined with Democratic Party officials in persuading State Attorney General Robert Kenny to run for governor against the “unbeatable” Warren. A true New Deal liberal, the witty Kenny had been a Los Angeles judge well known for his devotion to the preservation of civil liberties—even for communist “radicals”—before being elected to the State Senate in 1938 and as attorney general in 1942. Drawing upon a friendship that started in the late 1920s, Warren had sought and received Kenny’s endorsement for his attorney general candidacy in 1938, even though Kenny was serving as the treasurer for Culbert Olsen’s gubernatorial campaign at the time. In turn, Warren did nothing to help Wallace Ware, Kenny’s Republican opponent in the 1942 attorney general’s race, and a number of Warren’s deputies backed Kenny. Contrary to the feuding that had typified the relationship between Warren and Olson, Attorney General Kenny and Governor Warren worked well together, though Kenny opposed Warren’s active role in maintaining wartime internment camps for Japanese Americans. Conservative Republican assemblyman Thomas Werdel, among others, believed that Kenny played an important role in turning Warren away from “traditional Republicanism.”¹⁷

That Warren had indeed co-opted the general idea and practice of government activism into Republican politics in California did much to diminish Kenny’s gubernatorial aspirations and the Democratic Party overall. Kenny had been the only Democrat to win statewide office in 1942, and as the party’s “sole survivor” he came under intense pressure to run and ultimately felt obligated to do so. Though it was “hopeless,” one party official recalled, “we had to have a candidate and we couldn’t get anyone else as good.”¹⁸ To the limited extent that the California Democratic Party existed outside of its nearly three million registered voters, it was torn by intense factionalism. The party’s pro-business conservatives, such as oilman Ed Pauley, battled against ultraliberal like Kenny and Congressman Ellis Patterson. This internal strife prevented the Democrats from forming a strong party organization, despite FDR’s success in carrying the state four times.¹⁹ His wit and political savvy notwithstanding, Kenny faced the formidable challenge of trying to beat a popular incumbent without a united party, a solid campaign organization, or a compelling message.

Moving further to the left in the campaign’s final months, Kenny made the rather untenable claim that Warren represented the “reactionary forces” opposed to “every ideal that Franklin D. Roosevelt ever stood for.”²⁰ While this proclamation rallied members of the pro-Kenny CIO, the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) endorsed Warren ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “It’s Not the Party—but the Man”
• Chapter 2: “Freedom versus Tyranny”
• Chapter 3: “A Little Piece of America”
• Chapter 4: “The ‘Old Nixon’ Is the Real Nixon”
• Chapter 5: “How the West Was Won”
• Chapter 6: “A Great White Light”
• Chapter 7: Triumph of the Right
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index