California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

Donald Jackson in West Los Angeles, and required by the census to give new congressional seats to the rapidly growing Los Angeles region, the GOP-controlled reapportionment committee decided to create a new seat that gathered together all the scraps of the city of Los Angeles that had large majorities of Democratic registrants, leaving the rest of the city with safe Republican districts. The new seat, the Twenty-Sixth District, took in the heavily African American Sixty-Second and Sixty-Sixth Assembly Districts that made up the existing Fourteenth congressional District and tied them by a thin strip of land to the Sixty-First Assembly District in Jackson's old Sixteenth District, a seat taking in the heavily liberal and Jewish portions of Fairfax and Beverly Hills as well as Venice and culver city. “It is the most heavily gerrymandered district in the history of California,” decried a 1954 flyer for the new Twenty-Sixth candidate, James Roosevelt. “It is not a geographical unit; it has widely varied interests; and it is large enough to make TWO congressional districts instead of the one we now have. The districting is so outrageous that even Governor Warren, back in 1951, asked his Republican-dominated reapportionment committee how they could justify what they had done. He was told: ‘Those are the leftovers. When we had the other districts laid out the way we wanted them, those pieces were left. Nobody wanted them. So we threw them together and made a district.'”¹¹ Later in the twentieth century, when California became an electorally competitive state, the Democrats were able to adopt this practice themselves, just as the two parties did in every state in the country. Until the 1960s, however, the Republicans in California had a monopoly on reapportionment prerogatives. This, together with the fact that allocation of State Senate seats by county dramatically skewed allocation in favor of rural areas (Los Angeles had one Senate seat until the 1960s, as did a few tiny counties in the Sierra mountains), left urban, liberal voters and politicians with little influence over policymaking.

      The clear disjuncture between the diverse and rapidly changing social make-up of California and the limited range of political choices open to voters was reinforced by the role of the media in state politics. Most of the state's newspapers were run by Republican-supporting owners and editors, including Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times and Joseph Knowland of the Oakland Tribune, whose son was a California senator and who was also a major contributor to the campaigns of Governor Warren. Of the major dailies only one, the Sacramento Bee, had any sympathy for Democratic candidates. In the late 1950s all but 9 of some 120 state newspapers supported Republican candidates for senator.¹² More important, the editorial policy of almost all the California press was to impose an unashamedly anti-Democrat, antistatist spin on all copy, news stories as well as editorials. “We will not be able to carry on in defeat like the Republicans,” warned Democratic candidate Patrick McDonough after the party's horrendous 1946 electoral drubbing. “We do not have the newspapers, radio, nor do we have the money to battle adversity.”¹³ Jimmy Roosevelt informed the Greater LA Press Club during his 1950 gubernatorial campaign that in his view “news stories and headlines reflect the economic, social, and political views of the publisher far more than they do an actual and truthful situation, event or issue.”¹⁴

      A cursory glance at any California newspaper from the mid-twentieth century reveals not just a lack of real engagement with the diversity of political opinion in the world, but a reluctance even to mention political opponents of preferred candidates. Often candidates for office who failed to win the endorsement of the major dailies had to buy advertising space to gain any coverage at all. Senatorial candidate Helen Douglas resorted to this tactic in 1950, placing an advertisement in several newspapers in which she argued that she had uncovered during the course of her canvassing “growing resentment that there is no news of my campaign being carried in the Los Angeles newspapers…. My campaign has bought this space in order that I might bring light to the blackout and let my supporters know how the campaign is progressing.”¹⁵ Senate candidate Sam Yorty did the same in 1954 to rebut claims by Democratic supporters of his Republican opponent that he had a past as a far-left radical, claims reported prominently in the LA Times.¹⁶ When Adlai Stevenson swung though San Diego during his 1952 campaign for the presidency, a local campaign supporter reported that his keynote speech “was given little coverage in the local newspaper, either before or after it was delivered.” The only Democratic newspaper had been bought out by the Republican paper “and the coverage that was given came out in a thoroughly garbled report, with the quotations, as usual, torn out of context, and the effectiveness rendered nil.”¹⁷ Republicans, on the other hand, gained high-profile coverage in outlets like the Times, often finding their political stances discussed approvingly in items that were supposedly news stories, not editorials. In one such story, a right-wing Republican assemblyman was praised for fighting “the increased unemployment insurance benefits…because he wanted the fund protected better from mooching and chiseling.” His Democratic opponent was briefly dismissed as “an amateur” who dared to oppose an incumbent whose work had been “outstanding on the side of reasonableness in government and to protect the interest of the people from dreamers and those whose plans would load the taxpayers with unreasonable burdens.”¹⁸

      Floating above this apparent vipers' nest of poisonous antiliberal invective and political chicanery in the 1940s and early 1950s was the benign, avuncular figure of Governor Earl Warren. His years on the U.S. Supreme court, not least his landmark ruling in Brown, have added to an impression of judicial fairness, strength of character, and political moderation that had already been assiduously developed during his years as California attorney general and as governor. The editors of his memoirs, published posthumously, wrote in a prologue that “he believed in dealing directly, openly, and in a nonpartisan way with any problem,” and that he “steadfastly refused to be obligated to any special interest.”¹⁹ State legislative analyst A. Alan Post, a key figure in a rapidly growing state regulatory and legislative apparatus in the postwar years, recalled that government officials referred to him as “the Earl of Warren” because “he had a kind of regal bearing, and he was stiff but a real glad-hander…. He had close affiliations with labor and took care of them and was an affable and well-meaning, thoughtful, cautious sort of person.”²⁰ Born in Los Angeles, Warren moved to northern California as a boy, attending law school at Berkeley and soon getting a job in the Alameda county district attorney's office in Oakland. An astute, careful operator, Warren came of age politically at a time when the progressive Republican challenge to the corporate interests of the Southern Pacific Railroad had reached its high point, and the fact that his father had worked for Southern Pacific for little pay convinced the young Warren that his own political inclinations were on the side of Hiram Johnson and the progressive forces. As he later wrote, the “things I learned about monopolistic power, political dominance, corruption in government, and their effect on the people of a community were valuable lessons that would tend to shape my career throughout life.”²¹ He became Alameda district attorney in 1925, and gained a reputation as a principled law enforcer and an opponent of partisan affiliation: he refused campaign contributions for his campaign for district attorney in 1926, and believed fervently in California's cross-filing rule, allowing him to court support on the basis of his achievements and manifesto promises rather than party favors. He won election as California's attorney general in 1938, and ended four difficult years of popular front and Democratic rule in 1942 with his elevation to the governorship.²²

      Under his administration a massive industrial war economy came into existence, regulated by a vastly enlarged governmental apparatus.²³ His tenure saw the creation of a Postwar Reconstruction and Reemployment commission, a program of public works, and vast investment in state-funded higher education, which helped fund a 156 percent increase in enrollment between 1944 and 1950.²⁴ Warren's presence as Republican figurehead, supported by a significant group of labor-backed Republican progressive legislators, surely suggested that the political system could cope with the demands of a rapidly diversifying and growing population.

      In many respects, however, Warren's occupation of the governor's mansion in Sacramento marked the peak of progressive ascendancy in the state's Republican Party. For one thing, the limited ideological reach of political discourse among state Republicans meant their solutions to social problems could never keep pace with demand. Warren himself was dependent on the support of important conservative interests like Joe Knowland's Oakland Tribune, and responsible for placing