9.5: Political Transformation

The war’s population boom placed severe strains on California’s urban infrastructure and heightened competition for existing resources. Race relations deteriorated as many white residents, attempting to retain control over housing, jobs, and public services, directed their hostility toward ethnic minorities. At the same time, a growing number of Californians—both established residents and newcomers—felt that racial discrimination was incompatible with the prodemocracy thrust of the war. Ethnic groups, they maintained, deserved all of the rights and privileges of citizenship, particularly in light of their wartime service. Moreover, political leaders and governmental institutions had an obligation to ensure that all residents benefited from the war’s economic boom and democratic promise. If the state’s infrastructure and civic fabric were unraveling, it was the fault of shortsighted, ineffective leadership, not California’s newest residents.

Change from the Grassroots

A more liberal political vision took root in the early years of the war with the formation of multiethnic coalitions like the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination, and the Los Angeles–based Council for the Protection of Minority Rights. These coalitions of minority activists, white liberals, and CIO union leadership focused primarily on discrimination in the defense industry and housing. Other coalitions soon followed. Throughout the state, CIO unions, whose membership now included large numbers of African American and Mexican American activists, joined with white liberals to register voters and back pro-labor, liberal candidates for office. In the San Francisco East Bay, for example, the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) and Democratic Club joined forces to register thousands of new voters, including black migrants. On Election Day in 1944, the East Bay electorate weighed in for Roosevelt and the liberal congressional candidate, George Miller, and helped defeat a right-to-work ballot measure. The PAC then went on to select its own slate of candidates—pro-labor supporters of fair housing and employment legislation— for the municipal elections of 1945. Though its candidates were unsuccessful in 1945, the PAC created a growing interracial alliance that enjoyed greater electoral success in the postwar period.

The efforts of these CIO-led voters leagues were complemented by the activities of civic unity councils, which were multiethnic organizations devoted to ending discrimination through increased public education and political pressure. For example, in 1944, Mexican Americans, white liberals, and African Americans established the Los Angeles Council for Civic Unity, which attracted membership from a number of labor unions, the NAACP, LULAC, the Church Federation of Los Angeles, and the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress. The Los Angeles Council, like the San Francisco Civic Unity Council established the same year in the San Francisco Bay area, promoted racial tolerance, equality, and cooperation through public forums, children’s summer camps, and social events.

These and other liberal coalitions won small, local victories during the war but, more importantly, their efforts helped create the foundation for the civil rights and liberal political advances of the postwar years. Working in concert with various ethnic organizations, larger, more influential coalitions—growing out of this earlier institutional framework—would eventually mobilize large numbers of minority voters, and secure fair employment and housing legislation and the election of African American and Mexican American candidates to local and state office.

Change at the Top

In 1942, state attorney general Earl Warren succeeded Culbert Olson as governor of California. Although a lifelong Republican, Warren secured broadbased, bipartisan support by downplaying his party affiliation and crafting a progressive, even liberal, political image. His pragmatic, nonideological leadership style, mastery of media-based campaign strategy, and exploitation of California’s cross-filing system easily won him reelection in 1946 and 1950. Following in the progressive political tradition, Warren believed that government had an obligation to ensure the public good by directing the forces of social and economic change. Entering office during a period of unprecedented growth and upheaval, he had ample opportunity to devise policies that would help the state meet its new challenges.

Warren’s first project was to use the tax revenue generated by the booming economy to create a “rainy day fund” in anticipation of defense industry demobilization and mass unemployment at the end of the war. The fund, easing the transition to a peacetime economy, put Californians to work rebuilding existing infrastructure and constructing new schools, hospitals, and other state-run facilities. His massive highway construction program, initiated in 1947, and financed by a gasoline tax that was bitterly opposed by the oil and trucking lobbies, also eased postwar unemployment and created the foundation for future economic and suburban expansion.

Warren’s efforts to upgrade the state’s infrastructure extended beyond highway and school construction to the development of water resources. He believed that the new Central Valley Project would not be sufficient to meet future demand. Instead, a comprehensive state-funded system was needed to move water from northern California to the more arid agricultural and urban areas in the south. Although Warren did obtain legislative approval to develop the plan, its implementation was blocked until 1959. For more than a decade, northern Californians, conservationists, and organized labor persuasively argued that a state-funded plan would primarily benefit large corporate farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Indeed, the state, unlike the federal government, imposed no eligibility restrictions on access to subsidized water. If the project were federally funded, farmers cultivating more than 160 acres of land would lose their subsidy and pay higher rates for irrigating their excess acreage. No such limits applied to state-funded projects, and growers would benefit at the taxpayer’s expense.

Concerned for the health and welfare of the state’s growing population, Warren upgraded the Public Health Service, financed the construction of new mental health facilities, and increased welfare benefits, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, Aid to the Blind, and compensation for disabled workers. In 1945, Warren also proposed a comprehensive health coverage system for all California residents, to be financed by employee and employer contributions. Inspired by an uncle’s preventable medical tragedy, Warren’s proposal was defeated by the California Medical Association, which characterized the plan as socialized medicine. The powerful agricultural lobby similarly defeated Warren’s proposal to include farm workers under the state’s unemployment and worker compensation systems. These confrontations with corporate and special-interest groups prompted Warren’s vigorous backing of lobby control legislation in 1949 and 1950.

Warren’s relationship with organized labor and the state’s ethnic groups was more ambiguous. Although he increased worker benefits and opposed anti-picketing and right-to-work laws, Warren sided with his fellow Republicans in opposing a CIO-backed initiative to redraw state senate districts so that ethnic and working-class voters would be more fairly represented. As state attorney general and candidate for governor, Warren had helped fuel anti- Japanese hysteria and officially sanctioned relocation and internment. Only at the end of his life did he express regret for his actions. As governor, however, Warren defended the right of internees to return to California and took strong action against perpetrators of anti-Japanese hate crimes.

Throughout his administration, he also lobbied unsuccessfully for state fair employment legislation and the creation of a state Fair Employment Practice Commission. Such legislation would finally pass into law in 1959, during Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown’s first term in office. On another race-related issue, Warren was less of an advocate. Despite constant pressure from civil rights groups beginning at the end of World War II, Warren refused to integrate the California National Guard until 1949.

Warren, at times inconsistent and always enigmatic, was a transitional political figure. Despite being a lifelong Republican, he often faced challenges with a decidedly liberal outlook—one that was shaped by the expansive optimism and pro-democracy sentiment that grew out of World War II. At many crucial junctures, he failed to take moral or courageous action. At others, he led with remarkable insight and compassion. Over time, however, he would distinguish himself as a leading figure in the civil rights movement and a champion of the poor and disfranchised. In 1953, Warren left office to serve as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he wrote the majority opinion for the Brown desegregation case of 1954. This, and other decisions made by the “Warren Court,” cemented his reputation as one of the most “liberal” justices in American history.