Even if the Stevenson campaign itself was unsuccessful, and the ideological direction of the candidate uncertain, the personalities and men of ideas around him in California and nationally contributed toward a vibrant debate over the future of left-of-center politics in the United States. The impact of thinkers such as Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Leon Keyserling at a national level over the possibilities for economic equality of opportunity in prosperous times has been well documented by historians.39 The debate was in full flow during the 1952 campaign, prompting an interesting take on the international dimension to leftist political thought in a New Republic editorial in August. The possibilities of the nation's vast economic output for the promotion of social cohesion and abundance for all were viewed as central to Stevenson's message to the country. “This theme,” the editors argued, promoted “an intelligent and helpful treatment of the Republican epithet: Socialism.” Whereas in Europe, they suggested, socialism had arisen out of economies of scarcity, “compelling low income groups to seek higher standards principally through a more equal distribution of limited national incomes,” American economic growth could serve as the engine of greater social equality without policies of mass redistribution of income. “It is the restrictionist concept of the Republicans which brings socialism about; the expansionist approach which makes it irrelevant.”40 This analysis begged more questions than it answered: how far down the socioeconomic scale did the capacity to access the economy of abundance reach? How far were social questions of equal citizenship in racial and class terms bound up with economic redistribution? And as Crosland wondered during his visit to California, how long would the tentative truce between management and unions over the relationship between productivity and wage and benefit settlements last?
It was in this intellectual and political context that the growth of the Stevenson movement and the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in California took shape. The rise of the club movement depended in part on a political mood, a growing recognition that the zeitgeist was changing and that the old politics of business as usual was no longer enough to cope with a rapidly changing social fabric. In part, the Stevenson movement reflected the usual organizational and personality rivalries that characterized party politics in California. The head of the club organization in California, Leo Doyle, reported in August that there was “some indication that the usual quarrelling Democratic factions see this Stevenson move as an opportunity to render service to the Stevenson cause and hence gain the proverbial urge for power.”41 One San Francisco Democratic worker, Ben Heineman, was of the opinion that the whole Stevenson club movement there had sprung originally from a party faction opposed to a rival group who had come out for the presidential campaign of Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.42 This was a pessimistic, if not totally inaccurate, picture: the club system, however cynical its origins (and Heineman's perspective related only to San Francisco), provided a conduit into Democratic activism for thousands who had thought that the collapse of the Roosevelt and Douglas campaigns two years earlier had killed off their hopes for a new dawn for the California left. Towering figures of the party of the future: the Burton brothers, Willie Brown, Jess Unruh, Alan Cranston, all cut their teeth in the Stevenson battle. And as Willie Brown recalled, in these years before they gained power and became constrained by the compromise and chicanery of office, they were hungry for a social democratic politics around which to organize.43
It is important to remember that the 1952 campaign represented a political fresh start; it was not the culmination of a struggle for power among liberals, but a planting of the seed that would take another six years fully to flower. Stevenson's spirited campaign ended in failure. He received a healthy 2,197,548 votes in California, but could not come close to Eisenhower's broad appeal in a state still enamored with those who could cross narrow party lines. Eisenhower's state total was 2,897,310. The Stevenson campaign had enthused many scarred from the bruising experiences of the 1950 campaigns and the rise of a red-baiting politics that threatened to engulf all outside a narrow right-wing consensus in state politics. But much remained to be done if a six-month burst of enthusiasm for a presidential campaign was to turn into something more durable and significant.
There was no doubting the extent of the enthusiasm, nonetheless. Stevenson himself received thousands of letters during and after the campaign from Californians: there are twelve thick folders full of them among his private papers. “Your integrity, your honesty, the firmness of your intellectual grasp, the literary distinction of your speeches, and, most of all, your insistence on talking sense and on standing for the same principles everywhere and in all kinds of company, involved me emotionally as well as mentally in your fight and resulted in my associating myself, for the first time in my life, with the Democratic organization in my precinct,” wrote a Berkeley professor to Stevenson after his defeat in November.44 “I'm in mourning for the brains of the American people,” wrote a Los Angeles woman. “Because if they're not dead, where are they? It grieves me far beyond the point of tears that one of the finest, most sincere men I've ever known—and I think all of us feel we know you—should be defeated, not by logic or reason, but by a fairy tale…. I should have done more. I'm ashamed I didn't. I should have gone down to the Stevenson Headquarters and helped. Surely there were things I could have done. Next time, in ‘56, I will do more.”45 A precinct captain in Danville wrote in a similar vein: “The tremendous popular vote you polled with your truthful and inspiring campaign bespeaks the popularity you attained in the last three weeks of three very short months. As captain of the Danville area precinct I want you to know that all the active workers are ready to campaign for you again—anytime. We feel that against any other candidate than General Eisenhower…the eloquent campaign you fought would have ended in victory—and will be triumphant once the General's glitter is gone.”46 If this last prediction turned out to be wide of the mark, it was nonetheless true that the contours of California politics would be far more sympathetic to his run for president four years later, and the power of left-of-center networks of activists much more entrenched and obvious.
Political Undercurrents: Race and Sexuality
The Stevenson campaign, the intellectual debate over the future of moderate left politics, and the gradual shift of organized labor fully into the Democratic camp were important reasons why the political center of gravity was shifting slowly leftward in California in the early 1950s. In order to understand the social context in which this was occurring, and to understand the peculiar dynamics in California that made the Golden State part of a political avant garde in terms of a redefinition of the relationship between economic and social citizenship, we need to examine the growing movements for civil rights on the West Coast that did not in themselves directly address definitions of social democracy but that would later shape left politics in the Democratic Party in any case. The campaign for a fair employment practices law in California, and the nascent homophile movement in Los Angeles and San Francisco, both took shape at the same time as the rise of the Democratic Party to political power, and although these phenomena were not always overtly connected, all would intersect several years later to help crystallize the ways in which social democratic ideas would operate when they gained currency in the halls of power in Sacramento.
California's booming economy and rapid population growth were set within the context of endemic and entrenched systems of racial discrimination. Over twelve million people lived in the state in 1953, and another million were expected to arrive by 1955. “Such gains, of course, must be translated into more homes, more stores, more factories, more schools, more hospitals, more prisons, and more facilities of every kind,” wrote a contemporary observer in September 1953.47 Across California, access to homes and employment was not immune from racially motivated pressures. A group of Berkeley law students in the mid-1950s conducted a study of attitudes of local real estate agents, using dummy prospective buyers of different ethnic backgrounds to assess how each would be treated and which available housing they would be shown. “The interviews reveal,” noted their report, “for purposes ranging from personal prejudice to feelings of self and group-appointed guardianship of the community, local realtors are actively engaged in perpetuating the separation of the Berkeley area into segregated racial districts.”48 Willie Brown recalled that in San Francisco in the 1950s “I knew that you couldn't get housing. I knew that you couldn't get jobs….