California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism

7. Democratic Politics and the Brown Administration

chaPTer 7 democratic Politics and the brown administration at the end of the 1959 session of the california legislature, the state aFl-cio leadership looked back on the achievements of the preceding year. “undoubtedly ,” wrote c. J. Haggerty in his foreword to labor’s guide to events in sacramento , “1959 will go down in state history as the year in which california undertooktheprotectionandextensionofequalrightsofitscitizens.”Pointing to the extension of unemployment insurance, disability insurance, workmen’s compensation, and the landmark civil rights laws in the form of the passage of a state FePc, the prohibition of discrimination in the provision of goods and services, and in public housing, Haggerty argued that the legislature had “produced the most impressive array of legislation in my experience as [aFlcio ] legislative representative which was as satisfying as its disappointments were disturbing and basic.”1 The years between 1959 and 1963 were to see a radical transformation of the political landscape in california, with landmark legislation in fields ranging from civil rights to higher education to natural resources and to the rights of welfare recipients. The Brown administration and its allies in the legislature enacted an impressive legislative program that dramatically expanded the reach of the state and sharpened the divisions between statist democrats and business leaders and most republicans over key questions of economic and social citizenship that were to define political debate for the rest of the century and beyond. a number of historians and political biographers have detailed these legislative accomplishments and the debates that surrounded them.2 others have analyzed the limits of legislative and political change at the national level, mindful of the fact that much of the nation’s welfare, labor, and regulatory infrastructure had altered little since the new deal.3 My purpose here is to argue that the political changes of these chapter 7 156 years in california were important in shaping politicians’ understanding of social relationships and what constituted the normative in society in ways that had long-term significance even if the actual policy changes proved less durable. Policy innovations in the realms of civil rights and economic rights forced politicians to re-evaluate the boundaries of social inclusion and entitlement in ways that opened up debates over gender, sexuality, and race and the relationship of these categories to government regulation. This chapter and the next will use case studies of policymaking during the Brown years to show how policy debates before 1964 raised new questions of social citizenship and the place of the individual in wider society that set the stage for the rights revolution of the later 1960s and 1970s and tied the democratic Party irrevocably to the social movements that spawned that revolution. fePc: race and economic citizenship The twenty years after World War ii saw a dramatic change in willingness of state governments to regulate the relationship between the individual and the marketplace: almost half of all states in these years passed legislation forbidding employers from discriminating on the basis of race when handing out employment contracts. These state laws, pioneered by new York in 1945 and finally passed after spirited debate in the california legislature in the spring of 1959, explicitly associated the rights of individuals to freedom from discrimination with governmental regulation of the economy. as James rorty explained in his analysis of the experience of new York’s state commission against discrimination (scad) in 1958, “scad’s experience has demonstrated nothing so clearly as that the problem of discrimination is an indivisible aspect of the total national economy and culture. discrimination in housing is inseparably linked, not only with discrimination in employment and education—south and north—but also with the low income status and relative immobility of the nonwhite minorities; it is also linked with trade union policy and control, with local, state and national politics, and, of course, with our international responsibilities as leader of the free world.”4 in california proponents of the FePc bill framed their arguments for the new law in terms of the rights of all to economic citizenship. “We in california are faced with a tremendous problem,” stated african american assemblyman Byron rumford in February. “There are 5,000,000 in our minority groups. This will protect their rights. it represents the full flowering of the democratic [sic] process.” rumford elaborated on his deliberate use of the democratic Politics and the brown administration 157 capital d in his press release by...