Debates in California about the expansion of the welfare state and economic growth gave these new democrats the political language with which to interpret broader questions of civil and sexual rights, in many cases before the explosion of rights discourses on the national stage in the 1970s. The increasing political power of liberal politicians on the West coast provoked sustained and increasingly bitter hostility from their conservative counterparts. Indeed, in many ways, the rhetorical power of the right in California must be seen through the lens of liberal successes in reframing the terms of state-level political debate in the postwar era. Though California began the postwar period as a political outlier with its own peculiar culture and traditions, it ended the 1970s as a harbinger of trends in interest group strategies, media-driven performative politics, and debates over economic power and individual rights that would come to define American politics writ large.
In this book I try neither to particularize nor to overly generalize the California experience, but rather to place the nation's most populous state and one of the world's largest economies into a wider context of significant political upheaval over questions of economic citizenship, public infrastructure, civil rights, and individual freedoms that transformed the relationship between government and society in the postwar decades. Left-leaning intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s viewed the United States as the archetype of advanced capitalist democracy, in which rapid technological advances and economic dynamism could provide wealth and security for all if harnessed to a social safety net designed to smooth the rough edges of the market.2 Fast becoming the premiere economic engine for the United States in the years after World War II, California early on demonstrated problems of racial and social inequality that came to characterize advanced capitalism in the U.S. Context. The Golden state was also an important example of the emergence of a cross-class coalition of liberal Americans who transcended the New Deal politics of the 1930s, as the nation's economy became ever more dominated by the service sector, and as the middle class became employees bound tightly to the increasingly sophisticated corporate welfare system of insurance, retirement pensions, and other benefits.3 The growth of Democratic-inclined professional voters sympathetic to civil rights and social justice affected other states in these years, but California was the largest and most politically significant: repeated congressional reapportionment gave it the legislative seats through which to cultivate many of the most important liberals to lead the Democratic Party in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, including Phil Burton, Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi.4
California had by the 1970s become a trailblazer for national debates over taxation, sexual and gender rights, racial discrimination, and the welfare state, and also reflected international political trends as countries grappled first with establishing a new social democratic order in an era of prosperity and then struggled to maintain it as a global economic crisis unfolded by the end of the seventies. As a new generation of liberal activists fought to invigorate the moribund system of party politics in California in the 1950s, and as they made common cause with organized labor in an effort to halt forces trying to roll back labor rights on the West coast, they were forced to engage with questions of ideology and political affiliation that placed them in a broader social democratic political shift anchored not in Depression-era crisis but in the 1950s culture of affluence.5 Though a great deal of state-building occurred in California during the New Deal and World War II, under mainly Republican administrations, legislators' commitment in this period to an overarching reform program that included welfare and civil rights as well as infrastructure projects remained tentative and unfulfilled. It took a dramatic shift in the nature of the state's electoral politics in the 1950s to spur a massive transformation in the terms of political debate. This shift established a left-right dichotomy in California party politics that later came to define the American political spectrum in a wider sense.
California's postwar social democratic politics—which envisaged government maintenance of economic and social rights through a more ambitious social welfare safety net, strong labor unions, and antidiscrimination legislation, in addition to major public infrastructure projects—needed people— voters—to believe in it for it to take root. California's status as a media-rich state—home to the nation's movie industry and a significant share of the booming television industry—gave the new generation of state Democrats (as well as Republicans) an ideal opportunity to take advantage of a new style of campaigning, one that involved carefully staged and scripted performances relayed to thousands of voters, which broadened the appeal of liberal politics beyond the cadre of true believers in Democratic clubs and in the legislature. The fact that the dominant Republican Party in the 1950s enjoyed electoral hegemony without a clear, unifying message underpinning it offered liberal activists an opportunity to use mass rallies, TV spots, and press campaigns to sell a policy agenda to the electorate. By the early 1960s election campaigns based on clearly defined ideological fissures between left and right were the norm in California, setting the scene for a more adversarial, media-driven politics that would come to characterize American politics more generally in later decades. The fact that Democrats needed to legitimize themselves anew in the 1950s and 1960s, and could not simply present themselves as standard bearers of the New Deal, forced Californian liberals to engage with big debates over social democracy and economic rights in campaigns in ways that linked west coast politics to wider international discussions on the left even if the carefully crafted electoral appeals often eschewed the emotive language of class.
Another crucial aspect of the construction of a new liberal politics in California was the need to legitimize social forces outside the political mainstream. Unlike their new right counterparts, who drew upon volunteers and sources of patronage very much part of dominant social forces even if they liked to portray themselves as insurgents, California liberals depended upon coalitions of the marginalized as well as sympathetic bankrollers in order to establish themselves as viable contenders for legislative power. An analysis of the language liberals used to establish their ideas in political debate in the 1950s and 1960s helps us to contextualize how and why interest groups gained traction within mainstream political discourse. The reasons why there was such a major change in political definitions of what constituted normative behavior in questions of sexuality and lifestyle choice in the 1960s remain only partly understood. This study argues that the goal of California liberal politicians to sell their program through a commitment to social equality provided the language through which marginalized groups, including gay rights and civil rights organizations, could tie their agendas to the broader agenda of postwar liberalism. There is a voluminous literature on the development of various rights movements in this period, but this work exposes the gendered, racialized, and economic discourses cultivated by those in legislative power that in part drove the success and failure of these movements to alter the political landscape. To put it another way, only by addressing the questions of economic and social rights together, linked by the rise of liberal electoral politics in California, can we understand how mainstream politicians came to widen their understanding of who would be included under their protective umbrella in these years.6
As much as California Democrats relied on energizing people formerly outside mainstream politics and reaching voters through a new style of campaigning, they also drew on a more traditional constituency—labor. By the 1940s, the Republican Party of progressive governors Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren was the established machine of power and patronage in California. Its sudden and unprecedented break with labor in the late 1950s served to strengthen the position of unions in California politics and provided liberals with significant electoral and organizational muscle that allowed California to take the lead in responding to the significant expansion in federal funding opportunities in the Kennedy and LBJ years. This development had an additional effect in encouraging Californians—of wide-ranging political beliefs—to raise their expectations of what government could do for them. In the process, a politics predicated