Excerpted from "Right Out of California:
The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism"
Tricky Dick
 In early 1946, in Orange County, an area that would become a
hotbed of right-wing activism, a group of businessmen launched a
search for a charismatic candidate who would represent their
interests in Congress. The manager of a local Bank of America
branch suggested Richard Nixon, a lawyer and Navy veteran.
Hoover and his son Herbert Jr. traveled to Pasadena to meet this
promising young man and urge him to run for the House of
Representatives. Nixon would always remember the meeting fondly
and revere the former president for his role in jump-starting
his career.
Nixon won his first campaign by ousting Congressman Jerry
Voorhis, the idealistic Social Gospeler and former Socialist
who, as a supporter of striking lettuce workers, had been
menaced by angry vigilantes in front of an El Centro hotel in
1934. Nixon painted Voorhis as a stooge of labor unions and the
Soviet Union. He repeatedly denounced him for his supposed
alliance with the Political Action Committee of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its “communist principles.”
It did not matter to Nixon that Voorhis had written a tough
Communist registration law in 1940, or that the CIO Political
Action Committee had actually refused to endorse Voorhis. “Mr.
Nixon had to win. Nothing else would do at all,” Voorhis wrote
later.
Nixon admitted privately that he misrepresented his opponent’s
beliefs, but he made no apologies for doing so. “Of course, I
knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” he told one of
Voorhis’s aides. But political candidates, he said, needed to
play rough sometimes. “The important thing is to win,” he
explained. “You’re just being naïve.” Nixon enjoyed support
from the same California business interests that helped defeat
Upton Sinclair in 1934. Oil companies, movie studios, and
agribusiness conglomerates were among his biggest backers.
Grower Robert Di Giorgio contributed to Nixon’s earliest
campaigns, while Philip Bancroft and a friend formed “Farmers
for Nixon” to help funnel agribusiness money to him.
The Los Angeles Times, a longtime enemy of California liberals
and radicals, championed Nixon’s career from the beginning. The
Times’s political editor, Kyle Palmer, believed that he saw the
potential for national greatness in the Orange County native.
Nixon understood that portraying Democrats as dupes and traitors
could help put the Republicans back in power.
Once in office, Congressman Nixon served on the House
Un-American Activities Committee, where he played a major role
in the exposure of an actual Communist spy. Alger Hiss, the
one-time nemesis of the growers at the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, was investigated by the committee and ultimately
convicted of perjury for denying that he had been part of an
underground Communist group in the 1930s. Journalist Whittaker
Chambers swore that Hiss had been a spy as well as a secret Red.
Much later, documents from the former Soviet Union confirmed
that Hiss had indeed passed information to the Communists while
working in various government agencies, including the State
Department.
The conviction of Hiss, a New Dealer known for his public
support of farmworkers in the 1930s and international
institutions in the 1940s, gave conservatives ammunition for
their charge that the New Deal was, at its core, a Communist
project.
Opponents of Hiss from his days at the AAA were thrilled by news
of his conviction. “Time has caught up with our enemies,”
chortled one cotton grower to another. Herbert Hoover felt
vindicated. “At last the stream of treason that existed in our
Government has been exposed in a fashion that all may believe,”
he wrote Nixon. After the Hiss case, conservatives recognized
Nixon as “AMERICA’S GREATEST ENEMY OF COMMUNISM,” according to a
flyer advertising one of his speeches.
Nixon continued to battle against real and imagined Communists
and their alleged liberal enablers when he ran for a U.S. Senate
seat in 1950. In a television commercial for his race against
Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, he promised voters that he
would “represent you and your interests in Washington and not
the half-baked theories of left-wing intellectuals at pinko
cocktail parties.” He labeled Douglas the “pink lady”; she
called him “Tricky Dick.”
Douglas had no idea how tricky Nixon could be. Years later, in
1962, the California attorney general seized General Van Deman’s
secret files in San Diego, saying they had been used “by
unauthorized persons for political purposes.” Democrats charged
that the unauthorized persons worked for Nixon, and their
purposes had been to smear Voorhis in 1946 and Douglas in 1950.
These charges were never proven, but left-liberal California
Democrats continued to view him as a reckless and sinister
Red-baiter.
As Nixon rose from senator to vice president, he fulfilled the
dreams of Hoover and other business conservatives who had chosen
him back in 1946. When Vice President Nixon won reelection in
1956, Hoover congratulated him and expressed his sense of
personal satisfaction. “Ever since our interview in Pasadena
years ago when I added my urging that you should run for
Congress,” he wrote Nixon in a private letter, “I have grown
stronger and stronger in my belief in your immense value to the
American people. And they have now shown their full acceptance
of that view.”
Hoover also grew stronger in his belief that the Democratic
Party tolerated and even nurtured treasonous ideas. In 1960, as
GOP presidential nominee Nixon prepared for a debate against
John F. Kennedy, Hoover wrote Nixon that Kennedy’s goals were
“evil.” To left-liberals, Kennedy’s policies of tax cuts,
increased spending on defense, and indifference (at the time) to
civil rights seemed to put him at the center or even slightly to
the right on the political spectrum. But to Hoover, Kennedy’s
agenda was nothing more than “socialism disguised as a ‘welfare
state.’ ”
Nixon’s top aides, who followed him to the White House, learned
their craft in California’s culture of frenzied Red-baiting.
Murray Chotiner, a protégé of Clem Whitaker and known for his
mantra of “attack, attack, attack, and never defend,” served as
Nixon’s consultant or manager for most of his campaigns from
1946 through 1972. His fellow UCLA graduates John Ehrlichman and
Bob Haldeman—the latter the grandson of a founder of the
anti-Red group Better America Federation—worked on Nixon’s
unsuccessful 1960 run for the presidency and later became his
chief advisers when he won the White House eight years later.
Along with his virulent anticommunism, Nixon’s attention to the
politics of image marked him as a California product. With its
weak party system, fondness for Hollywood glitz, and rootless,
diverse residents, the state helped nurture a style of
campaigning that emphasized appearance over substance. “What
they’ve got isn’t a party,” a Democratic official told Theodore
White in 1956. “It’s a star system, it’s a studio lot. They
don’t run candidates—they produce them, like movie heroes.”
Nixon was one of the first politicians to “embrace the new tools
of political artistry” and “foster our current image-obsessed
political culture,” as historian David Greenberg has said. Nixon
and his public relations staff created an image of the candidate
as a “populist everyman” and helped to unite the wealthy with
the disaffected middle classes in a broad, successful coalition.
Reagan’s America
Ronald Reagan, who would preside over the transformation of
America’s political economy in the 1980s, owed his start to the
same California business conservatives who supported Nixon.
Reagan’s earliest backers included drugstore magnate Justin
Dart, oil men Henry Salvatori and A.C. Rubel, steel tycoons
Earle Jorgensen and Leland Kaiser, banker Charles Cook, car
dealer Holmes Tuttle, and entertainment mogul Walt Disney. Some
of these men had close ties to California agribusiness: Kaiser
and Rubel’s firms had extensive investments in agricultural
land, as did Reagan’s lawyer, William French Smith. Strongly
opposed to the New Deal from its earliest days, these Western
millionaires saw potential in Reagan, a former actor and
corporate spokesperson who shared their loathing of Communism
and their suspicion of the liberals who failed to see its
dangers.
The labor struggles in California in the 1940s had shaped
Reagan’s hard-line anticommunist views. During his term as
president of a relatively conservative union, the Screen Actors
Guild, Reagan grew convinced that Communists were plotting to
take over Hollywood. The Reds’ goal, he wrote later, was “to
gain economic control of the motion picture industry in order to
finance their activities and subvert the screen for their
propaganda.” Publicly, he testified as a friendly witness before
the House Un-American Activities Committee; privately, he worked
as an informant for the FBI.
In 1964, Reagan attracted a national political following when he
delivered a televised speech for Republican presidential nominee
Barry Goldwater on the virtues of free-market capitalism and the
dangers of liberalism. “So we have come to a time for choosing,”
he said. “Either we accept the responsibility for our own
destiny, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that
an intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our
lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
Like Nixon, Reagan drew on the political vocabulary Hoover and
Campaigns Inc. used in the 1934 elections. He castigated the
elite on the other side of a cultural, not economic, divide—an
elite of eggheads, not fat cats. When Reagan ran for governor of
California in 1966, he directed his fire at the intellectual
elite at the state’s public university system. Candidate Reagan
blamed a “leadership gap in Sacramento” that “permitted the
degradation of the once great University of California.” He
built on decades of populist attacks on the taxpayer-supported
university as a cesspool of political radicalism and moral
degeneracy, teeming with Reds, pinks, and queers. At Reagan’s
first UC regents meeting, the majority voted to fire Clark Kerr
on the spot.
Given his hostility to unions and support from agribusiness, it
was not surprising that Governor Reagan strongly resisted a new
organization effort in the California fields. After labor and
civil rights groups finally succeeded in killing the bracero
program in 1965, fruit and vegetable pickers tried to organize
collectively for the first time since the Great Depression. The
goals remained the same—higher wages and union recognition. But
the new, non-Communist organizers aligned their cause with the
national, nonviolent movement for racial justice and civil
rights for minorities. As a result, the United Farm Workers
(UFW) was not just a union; it was La Causa. And its leader,
Cesar Chavez, knew how to appeal to urban consumers for support.
Chavez helped organize pickers at the largest grape vineyards in
the Central Valley and encouraged them to strike for higher
wages. When the growers refused to negotiate, he launched a
nationwide boycott of the two biggest producers, Di Giorgio
Fruit Corporation and Schenley Industries. The grape boycott
linked middle-class consumers to the workers and helped Chavez
build a broad coalition of backers.
Reagan opposed Chavez and farmworkers’ unions from the first day
of his campaign for governor. During the speech announcing his
candidacy, he held a catsup bottle and predicted that 28 million
fewer would be manufactured if the state and federal governments
were allowed to “finish their experiments in reform among
farmworkers and completely cancel out the Bracero program.” Once
elected, he helped farm operators break the strikes by
authorizing the use of temporary guest workers, chain gangs, and
welfare recipients to pick the crops. He filled the top
agricultural posts in his administration with growers. The
governor also worked with President Nixon to lobby for a federal
bill proposed by California senator George Murphy that would
have made agricultural strikes and boycotts illegal.
As the boycott gained national and international support, both
Reagan and Nixon ostentatiously ate grapes on television. The
conspicuous consumption of the fruit became a public badge of
honor for conservatives. Growers paid $4 million to Whitaker and
Baxter for a nationwide advertising campaign that encouraged
Americans to exercise their “consumer rights” and “Eat
California Grapes, the Forbidden Fruit.” After leaving office in
1974, Reagan would continue to combine populist, visceral
appeals to racial and gender conservatism with a libertarian
reverence for an unfettered market.
Reagan’s vision of a free market still included government
support for agribusiness, however. Like most prominent
California Republicans and Democrats, Reagan endorsed government
programs that benefited the growers, including state and federal
irrigation projects and guest worker programs.
Despite Reagan’s opposition, Chavez and the United Farm Workers
did win some contracts and a few legal, legislative, and moral
victories. In 1975, Governor Jerry Brown signed the Agricultural
Labor Relations Act, which gave state protection to farmworkers’
unions. Chavez became a civil rights icon. The California
legislature proclaimed his birthday a state holiday in 1995. And
in 1999, city officials in Sacramento renamed Plaza Park, where
union organizers in the 1930s had waved the Red flag and
denounced capitalism. The new name is Cesar Chavez Plaza.
But the UFW’s victories were short-lived, and more symbolic than
substantial. The union failed to win the allegiance of many
workers, and its organizing efforts were complicated by the
increased flow of undocumented workers to the California fields
in the 1980s. By 2014, only a few thousand members remained in
the UFW, down from more than fifty thousand in 1970.
Reagan’s campaign against the UFW was central to his appeal to
California voters. His opposition to the grape boycott helped
him rally his followers against the mostly Mexican-born workers
and the “intellectual elite” who presumed to shame them into
giving up the consumption of a favorite food.
The Reagan coalition of Western business elites and social
conservatives backed him for his unsuccessful run for the
presidency in 1976 and his ultimate victory in 1980. As
president, Reagan could now finish the counterrevolution that
California conservatives had worked for since 1933.
Excerpted from “Right Out of California: The 1930s and the
Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism” by Kathryn S.
Olmsted. Published by The New Press. Copyright 2015 by Kathryn
S. Olmsted. All rights reserved.
Kathryn S. Olmsted is chair of the history department at the
University of California, Davis. |
