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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 25, 19 June 1950, pp. 1 & 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Labor, particularly the politically powerful AFL, intervened in the California primaries on June 6 and succeeded in propping up a factionally torn and almost defunct Democratic Party organization. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Fair Deal congresswoman, and James Roosevelt, state chairman of the Democratic Party, seeking endorsement as candidates for senator and governor respectively, thus won decisive victories on the Democratic ticket.
For the first time in eight years the Democrats wrested electoral control of their own party from the Warren-Knowland Republican machine. And for the first time in decades the Democrats have been lifted to the position of even challenging Republican supremacy in state politics.
Surprisingly enough, both Douglas and Roosevelt openly bucked the Democratic bosses of California – the Malone, Lucky, Pauley forces – to attain their victory. Douglas was endorsed my Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, but she was bitterly opposed by all metropolitan and major daily newspapers in the state. The one Democratic paper, the Los Angeles Daily News, is owned by Democratic candidate for the Senate, Manchester Boddy, who inherited Senator Downey’s machine, and who was Douglas’s rival in the Democratic primary.
On the other hand, every trade-union, paper and journal in California actively campaigned for Douglas because of her record in Congress and her platform. She called for public housing, the 150 acre water limitation in the Central Valley, civil rights and civil liberties, and she opposed the Taft-Hartley Law.
Lack of support from her own party organization, which favored “Man of Distinction” Boddy, caused her campaign to bog down during the last month, but nevertheless Douglas captured the Democratic nomination over both Boddy and Republican Nixon by almost 300,000 votes. So strong was her labor support that in the five metropolitan countries – Los Angeles. San Francisco, Alameda, San Diego and Contra Costa – she poled up almost a 200,000 plurality. Then when every major agricultural county came out for her as well, her nomination on the Democratic ticket became over--whelming.
James Roosevelt, in challenging Warren’s third-term bid for governor, faced even sterner opposition in the California Democratic Party. Supporting Fair Deal politics but refusing the aid of national Fair Deal politicians, Roosevelt’s backing of Eisenhower in 1948 plagued him throughout the campaign.
His alleged deal with Truman not to run for the presidency in 1952 probably accounts for the absence of a real Democratic opponent in the California race. But at best the bosses only gave him cold comfort, the Malone forces in San Francisco reportedly sabotaging the election entirely. Roosevelt’s campaign also reached financial collapse in the pre-election weeks.
So Roosevelt too turned to labor.
He plastered Warren’s inept administration with a “do nothing” label, because it failed to meet rising unemployment, because it refused to back low-cost public housing, because it straddled on the 160-acre water limitation, and because it just mouthed words over FEPC. Roosevelt appealed to the unemployed by pointing to the State Employment Service as a police board rather than a jobfinding agency. He tried to corral the thousands of California pension votes by calling for $100 per month old-age pension. He attempted to win veteran support by a vague and at times demagogic veterans’ program.
In all he succeeded by winning the California trade-union movement, which found itself in the difficult spot of having endorsed Warren for governor in 1946 and then having repudiated him two years later as a vice-presidential candidate.
The state leaders of the labor movement thus met Roosevelt half way, and they endorsed him officially, although Lundeberg of the Sailors Union of the Pacific, the Kearny forces in the CIO Longshoremen’s Union and other local union organizations continued to play ball with Warren. Roosevelt's Democratic victory, therefore, was not as marked as Douglas’s, his majority being somewhat over 200,000. San Francisco County alone of the union concentration areas failed to give him a majority and only two major agricultural counties went to Warren on the Democratic ticket.
California primaries carry more political weight than those in most states, for in California “cross” or “double” filing by candidates is permitted. Many politicians, usually incumbents, have thus been able to become nominees for two or more parties, and the need for a general.election has to that extent been minimized. Candidates listed as incumbents on several party ballots without showing their party platform responsibilities have therefore held a distinct advantage over challengers.
Most of the other labor-supported candidates also were victorious, the outstanding one being John Shelley, former head of the State Federation of Labor, who won the Democratic and Republican nominations for congressman in the Fifth District (San Francisco). An effort was made by the AFL in the Seventh District (Alameda County) to defeat reactionary Congressman Allen and resulted in preventing a cross-filed victory for Allen by nominating Cook on the Democratic ticket.
The necessity of the trade-union movement to select and endorse its own candidates on an independent labor ticket became most obvious in the case of Attorney General Fred Howser.
Howser, whose record since he entered office in 1946 revealed tie-ins with statewide tideland oil companies, liquor interests, gambling interests and other racketeers, was defeated on both the Democratic and Republican tickets. But not before he received a state trade-union endorsement! So disreputable was this action on the part of the State Federation of Labor that local labor councils in some instances were compelled to Steer away from Howser to support Pat Brown, the Democratic candidate, who was nominated.
Since 1936 California has been viewed as a Democratic state because in each of the four national elections the state supported a Democratic presidential candidate. Moreover, California registration totals show more Democrats than Republicans. For example, the figures stand now at approximately three million Democrats to two million Republicans.
Yet for the past fifty years Republican governors have ruled the State House backed by Republican Legislatures. The only exception was during the years 1938–42, when the lone Democratic governor, Olson, won, but was confronted by a hostile Assembly and Senate and was ousted four years later. The fact that leading state offices come up for election in the off-years when national presidential elections do not occur has been of immeasurable aid to dominant Republicans.
This year, however, factionalism has begun to seep into the Republican Party. After the primaries Warren was openly criticized by the Republican San Francisco Chronicle for not campaigning properly to defeat his opponent. Lieutenant Governor Knight, rightwing Republican mogul, now threatens to sit out the November election. Labor organizations which previously threw all or most of their weight to the Republicans have shifted away. Consequently the strong popular returns for Republican candidates in the June 6 primary may not be as indicative as they appear.
The November election will significantly put Douglas, who stands opposed to the work of the Committee on Un-American Activities, against one of the witch-hunting authors of the Mundt-Nixon bill and a member of that committee. Nixon, who won the Republican nomination for Senator hands down, amassed an approximate fifty thousand greater combined vote than Douglas. But the likelihood of a Douglas victory in November is great, particularly if labor continues to intervene and actively undertakes a push-bell door to door campaign as it did in 1948.
Roosevelt, too, although five hundred thousand votes behind the combined popular total for Warren, stands a fair chance of entering the governor’s mansion. If Roosevelt in addition to maintaining and increasing his labor support makes his peace with Truman and active Democratic support comes to California, the Warren-Knowland forces will have a neck and neck race on hand.
More important than all these maneuvers on top is the fact that city and agricultural workers are beginning to show signs of political unrest and are seeking some vague solution to unemployment, excessive taxes, lower living standards and general insecurity.
Labor’s bolstering of a dying Democratic Party – in view of this last circumstance – carries with it heavy political meaning. Without trade union support in this last primary, the Democratic Party would have gone down to an ignominious defeat worse than in 1946. Republican crossfiling would have ripped it to splinters.
If, on top of that, the labor movement had proclaimed its own independent political organization, the Democratic Party in California would have died completely, its right wing passing silently over to the Republicans and its liberals willy-nilly having to support labor’s choice.
No other state trade-union movement had the opportunity of creating a clean-cut two party system dividing capital and labor in this same way. By one bold sweeping political stroke labor could have recreated the situation on a statewide scale that existed in England just prior to May 1945. It still will have this chance in the next few years.
As it is the Democratic Party can only get along as a thin coalition of Fait Dealers, conservatives and reactionaries which only electoral strength is given to it by the mass of mobilized labor. The tragedy in California politics is that everybody but the trade-union leaders knows that the Democratic Party lives only by labor’s sufferance.
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