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2 From Popular Front to Liberalism Redefining the Political in California in the Post–World War II Era jonathan bell In January 1952 a New Republic article argued that “one can see at least the wedge of the mixed economy, in the recent legislation in, say, California on the various trade-union and other ‘private’ insurance schemes at least the first sign of the Welfare State.” The 1950s would, the author argued, throw up new problems and challenges that would conceivably herald a major step toward social democracy configured for a prosperous world: “In the vast American scene, the approach toward the Welfare State will probably not come through any dramatic political shift, but in a variety of ways: by the growth of trade union and other social-insurance schemes, by an increasing practice of including such schemes in employer-employee contracts, by greater federal planning, by the capture of this or that local political machine by progressive forces, by greater economic equality for the Negro community, or by the general spread of the Welfare State outlook as is already happening .” A crucial question, and one that frames my work, was “the cultural one. ‘After the leveling, after the British National Health Service or the American owner-occupied home, what next?’”1 California missed out on the far-reaching political realignment of the New Deal era. In the late 1940s the state Democratic Party was a factionalized, chaotic mess, a curious amalgam of Popular Front communists and fellow travelers, old-style political bosses, special interests, and a handful of New Deal liberals. Ten years later the Party had captured power at all levels and, under Governor Pat Brown and a Democratic legislature, went on to enact one of the biggest state government programs of public power, college expansion , welfare state building, and civil rights law in state history. At the same time, California became the largest state in the union and one of the fastest growing economies in the United States, a standout example of the consumer boom and developing muscle of American corporate power that took shape in the postwar years. This paper aims to situate the consumer boom and suburbanization of California in the twenty years after World War II in the context of the changing dynamics of liberal politics on the West Coast. The rise of the Democratic Party to power in California took place at a time in which a range of interest groups demanding greater racial, sexual, and economic equality began to gain political traction and found that the existing avenues of party political action were inadequate for their needs. These interests, including homophile organizations and civil rights groups pushing for fair housing and fair employment laws, framed their demands around an idea of social citizenship that demanded access to economic resources and to equal rights in society. At the same time, a Democratic Party that had to find an ideological raison d’être in a consumer age was forced to adapt its message and electoral appeal to reconcile the legacy of the New Deal with the idea of civil rights for the socially marginalized that was rapidly becoming an important strain of social democratic politics across the industrialized world. I argue here that the California Democratic Party in the 1950s acted as a meeting ground for a range of cross-class interests searching for political meaning in a suburbanized, consumerist political marketplace. The fact that the Democrats were so impotent in the early 1950s gave a new generation of political entrepreneurs on the liberal left an opportunity to recast liberal politics in a way that used the economic citizenship of the New Deal as a bridge to the social citizenship that characterized the politics of the 1960s. Although there is an increasingly rich historiography on the subject of the revitalization of corporate capitalism in the postwar decades and the concomitant rise of a powerful Republican Party, the concept of left-of-center interests as political entrepreneurs in this period remains only partially understood .2 An international dialogue on the left expanded the parameters of how intellectuals and politicians understood and conceptualized social inclusion, equality of opportunity, and individual rights, with significant implications for how we chart the development of a rights discourse in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Historians have ably framed this debate on the left through recourse to intellectual history, demonstrating how vibrant arguments in left-wing journals, liberal and left organizations, and university departments reshaped...

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