California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

For another, pro-business, bitterly anti-government interests in the party were after 1945 making a serious challenge to the broker state being delicately established under Warren, determined to sweep aside any political consensus in a bid to establish private sector control over the economy. Warren's short-lived attempt to establish some kind of state health insurance system was a major casualty of the growing political clout of antistatist Republican legislators and their powerful financial backers in the California Medical Association (CMA) and chamber of commerce. Days after Warren's announcement of his social security-based insurance scheme in January 1945, the CMA met in Los Angeles and, in Warren's words, “all but declared the plan to be the work of the Devil.” In a propaganda campaign that formed part of a wider 1940s national campaign against government-administered health care, the CMA “stormed the legislature with their invective,” and Warren's bill “was not even accorded a decent burial.”²⁵ The New Republic verdict that when Warren “discovered the hornet's nest that he had uncovered, he began to run for cover and had it conveniently killed in committee” is perhaps unfair, but its broader accusation that the vigorous actions of conservative interests in rolling back social welfare entitlements in the years after the war demonstrated the limits of progressive political activity in Sacramento in these years is hard to refute.²⁶ As the forces of capital began to gear up for a full-on assault on the post-New Deal regulatory state, an attack that would culminate in an attempt to reintroduce open shop labor contracts in the late 1950s, it was not at all clear that progressive Republicanism had the political strength or ideological conviction to stem the antistatist tide.

      A lack of political muscle or ideological clarity were not weaknesses of the forces of the private enterprise lobby in California. Figures such as Lemuel Boulware of the public relations wing of General Electric had become increasingly aware in the immediate postwar years of the potential of ideologically driven PR campaigns against the regulatory state, and of the need to fund politicians who would drive their free market, antilabor agenda in the halls of power. In a 1945 memo Boulware set out the terms of his forthright campaign to rein in union power and establish senior management as the sole arbiters of company policy: “Management is in a sales campaign to determine who will run business and the country,—and to determine if business and the country will be run right” (emphasis original).²⁷ A test case of this battle in California came when the city of Los Angeles attempted to establish a public housing program after the passage of the Housing Act of 1949. congresswoman Helen Douglas had in 1947 bitterly attacked congress for not passing legislation to ease the chronic housing crisis in America after the war: “When certain parts of my congressional district in Los Angeles…are full of slums that would put Port Said to shame, that, in my view, is a political matter. When rents are raised beyond the ability of the average working man and woman to pay.…And when newly-married veterans of World War Two are forced to start their families under the handicap of a hopeless debt because they have to pay $13,000 for a huddle of Number Three white pine with naked wiring running through the knot-holes, that, in my humble opinion, is a political matter too.”²⁸ The scale of the housing shortage in the late 1940s had prompted congress to take action, and Republican mayor of Los Angeles Fletcher Bowron was keen to take advantage of the federal funding for his city. Private real estate interests quickly moved to call in favors from city councilmen, and the council blocked the proposals. The Reporter noted that the “Los Angeles uprising is part of a test case instituted by national and local real-estate groups to determine whether the nation shall have federally subsidized slum-clearance and low-rent housing programs in the future.”²⁹ In 1952 Bowron visited President Harry Truman to discuss the difficulties inherent in any attempt by government to compete with private enterprise or to regulate its affairs. As a White House official described it, Bowron had “broken with the local GOP leadership and the powerful LA Times on the public housing issue and the ‘interests' have ganged up on him and forbidden him radio time. He says the Republicans have given the Democrats a ready-made issue they can win on in the city.”³⁰ As in the case of later campaigns against racial discrimination in housing and employment, the issues were there to create a political groundswell against the status quo, but the organizational infrastructure had yet to be established, a significant weakness given the influence of private business interests in the corridors of power on the West coast.

      Professional public relations gurus had long bridged the divide between private enterprise and Republican party politics. Murray Chotiner, Richard Nixon's right-hand man in his campaigns for office, had in the 1930s been a leading figure behind the formation of the Republican Assembly, an extra-party organization established to give the nod to favored Republican primary candidates, a useful way of getting the “right” candidates elected to office in a state where official party endorsement was banned. By 1946 those opposed to enlargement of the regulatory state and in favor of the rollback of the New Deal and elimination of wartime controls had gained control of the Republican Party National committee, and thus the party's midterm platform, and were quietly using their power in California circles to gain leverage over the party apparatus there. Southern Californian business interests carefully vetted a young Richard Nixon, including asking him to two interviews with right-wing California congressmen Carl Hinshaw and John Phillips, before giving him their full backing in the GOP primary for the Twelfth District, a key race to unseat prominent New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis.³¹

      The Republican right also zeroed in on pro-New Deal congressmen like George Outland of Santa Barbara, key player in the fight to get the Full Employment Act through congress in 1946, and Ned Healy of the Thirteenth District in Los Angeles. They financed pro-business Donald Jackson in the Sixteenth District of left-wing popular frontist Ellis Patterson, and fashioned the antistatist lexicon that would form the common campaign strategy of the vast majority of Republican candidates in 1946. According to a Nixon campaign leaflet, “basically, the issue to be settled in this election is conflict between political philosophies. The present congressman from this district [Voorhis] has consistently supported the socialization of free American institutions.”³² A campaign letter to professional groups in the Twelfth District, an area centered on wealthy South Pasadena and similar communities east of LA, argued that voters' “liberty and freedom are being threatened by Federal encroachment and centralized bureaucracy. our state and nation need men like Richard Nixon to protect private business and free enterprise.”³³ The common thread of campaigns of candidates like Nixon was that Republicanism represented all sections of society equally under the umbrella of private citizenship, as opposed to “those who espouse the regimentation of our people, collectivism or communism in some form [who would act] according to the wishes of minority pressure groups of which the Political Action committee is an example.”³⁴ The U.S. chamber of commerce cleverly stitched together antiregulatory rhetoric with elements from the global situation of the day to provide an anti-New Deal synthesis in its public relations literature. “In the agony and chaos of recent years,” stated one such booklet in 1946, “we detect two recurrent themes. The first is the worship of the State. The second, and correlative theme, is the denial of the rights of the individual. As the State takes over, the individual must give way. The absolute State reached its malign perfection under Fascism, Nazism, and communism.”³⁵

      The emerging Cold War interacted with the increased self-confidence of anti-New Deal interests to place anticommunism at the center of the campaign to establish a pro-business, antiregulatory consensus in American politics. At the national level this was manifested by the use of antitotalitarian arguments in the fight to repeal the Office of Price Administration, or to combat President Truman's federal health insurance proposals.³⁶ In California the state legislature had established its own “Little Dies” committee under the leadership of Los Angeles state senator Jack Tenney in order to uncover evidence of political subversion and so-called un-Americanism in state government and the professions.³⁷ As the drive to oust the remaining liberal Democrats from political office gained pace in the late 1940s, anti-communism became the main weapon in destroying the political careers of Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, congressman Franck Havenner of San Francisco in 1952, and Robert Condon of the East Bay in 1954. As early as 1946 Douglas was finding anticommunism a problem in her reelection campaign in Los Angeles, writing prominent New Dealer Harold Ickes that her campaign “gets dirtier and dirtier…. They've put out an enormous flyer, asking me how I happened to go to