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chaPTer 2 building the democratic Party in the 1940s The california democratic Party needed a message and a program in order to unite all left-of-center interests in the state behind its banner and thus establish a genuine political choice for the public and set up the terms of debate in the postwar years. The difficulties it faced in achieving this task also point up reasons why it would become one of the most radical in reshaping its political perspective during the 1950s and 1960s: liberal political ideology was being thrashed out within the democratic party hierarchy and in activist organizations against a backdrop of a strong popular front tradition in leftist politics, a powerful antistatist opposition against which to define itself, and a lack of established channels of democratic patronage of the type that dampened political ambition and radicalism elsewhere. The democratic political project of the postwar decades that is the subject of this book would unfold anew out of the political circumstances of the very late 1940s and 1950s. engaging the Popular front When James roosevelt took over the leadership of the state party in late 1946, he found a party in turmoil, reeling from bitter attacks from business interests and the republican political establishment, and convulsed by political divisions over the role of communists in the coalition of the left in california. The party’s troubles were hardly unique, and in fact california voting patterns in the mid-1940s reflected national trends: the democrats did relatively well in 1944, carrying the state for the presidential ticket and winning nine of the twenty-three congressional districts and the senate seat, albeit by narrow margins. in 1946, as elsewhere, the party did appallingly badly, losing five chapter 2 32 congressional seats, the senate race, and also failing to win their own primary in the gubernatorial race.1 But there was more to the party’s problems than just national ennui directed at the unpopular truman administration. For every account of a political house party, public meeting, or Young democrat group was a story that told a very different tale: a democratic party in alameda county, which contained over 200,000 registered democrats in the late 1940s, that could not get a quorum at its meetings; county committees that never met; bitter infighting among members of the state central committee over some members’ links to communists and supporters of the Progressive citizens of america and other fellow-traveler groups.2 Fresh from his comprehensive drubbing at the hands of a conservative republican in the seventh congressional district in oakland in 1946, democratic candidate and prominent alameda businessman Patrick Mcdonough put the blame for the party’s electoral disaster squarely on the dissident left-wing elements in the party who had been using it as a popular front vehicle since the 1930s. “The election did not come out as perhaps we all wished,” he wrote a business associate, “but as for myself, i do not regret the outcome. The political situation here in california for us democrats is very much confused. This defeat permits all of us to take a stand and begin inviting those whose views and actions do not harmonize with the best interests of the democratic Party and our form of government to disassociate themselves from our party, and perhaps the best thing would be to form a party of their own. With this group we are always in danger of losing with their help.”3 despite the fact that fellow traveler organizations such as the Hollywood branch of the independent citizens’ committee of the arts, sciences, and Professions (iccasP) had participated in voter registration drives, get-out-the-vote campaigns, and had authored an FePc ballot initiative, as well as endorsing favored liberal candidates publicly to their membership, they had not been able to prevent the republican tide. nor had they been able to convince enough registered democrats that their gubernatorial candidate, soon to be Wallaceite robert Kenny, was a preferable candidate to earl Warren, nor that representative ellis Patterson, a known fellow traveler, should win the party’s senate nomination .4 after the 1946 political massacre, it was not hard to see why liberal but establishment figures like Mcdonough saw the popular front hue of the california democratic party as fatal to the party’s political fortunes. roosevelt saw things differently. He had been involved in the iccasP, had seen the power of leftist factions in los angeles politics in the late 1930s and during...

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