California

IT SEEMED something of a joke on California two years ago when George Murphy turned Republican politician and put on a performance that scuttled White-House-wise Pierre Salinger right off the political set and sent an amiable Hollywood hoofer to the U.S. Senate.

But nobody in California is joking this year about the star performance Ronald Reagan is giving as Republican candidate for governor, least of all the startled Democrats. The role has captured the man. Months of persuading audiences “It is time for an ordinary citizen to bring the fresh air of common sense to government” have transmuted Ronald Reagan. Gone is “Ronnie, baby,” the Hollywood “personality,” the television host of Death Valley Days, the genial dispenser of urbanity on the General Electric Theater. The new creation is an adroit, quickthinking, deft, and personable political candidate.

The significant transformation is not in the man but in the message. Goldwaler conservatism has been mellowed by Reagan until it sounds like comfortable American folklore. Reagan’s aim is consensus. He is not drawing lines and daring voters to step across; there are no “either with me or against me” imperatives. “Just hear me out,” he begs. Then, with his most winsome actor’s gesture of appeal he tempers the hard core of conservatism with his own personal assertion of goodwill, his earnest assurance that we can indeed, all of us, just by working together, somehow solve the problems of this old world. His reassertion of old-fashioned American optimism has managed to sweep the skeptical moderates of the Republican Party in California overwhelmingly into his camp.

Reagan exudes the appealing fantasy that the great dilemmas of American society can be resolved around the conference table of an afternoon if a fresh and willing novice is leading the “best minds” — drawn, of course, from business. “The best minds are not in government,” Reagan recently stated. “If any were, business would hire them away.” Government, he suggests, is just not all that difficult. The resolute mind and the ready heart can find the way. Interweaving sweeping attacks on welfare dependency, extravagance in the poverty program, vice on the campuses, indolence among the unemployed, unemployment insurance as a “prepaid vacation plan,” and government intrusion into private freedoms, Reagan evokes a tantalizing reincarnation of the old, authentic American derringdo, translated to the political scene. The Good Guys always win. It may very well be that he conjures up precisely the world of make-believe that most Americans yearn for, to escape the unlovely urban-life realities of the 1960s, with their smog, high taxes, brotherly hate, and gap between rich and poor.

Escapism, not extremism

This is not to say that extremism has somehow evaporated from California or that the John Birch Society, which Reagan refuses to criticize, is diminished as a threat. He has only swept it under a rug. The money for his venture comes from the same sources that funded the Goldwater movement. Blatant extremists lead most GOP organizations in California, if not the official state party, and Reagan’s nomination renews rightwing hopes from Arizona to Vermont. What is more ominous, Reagan has more skillful campaign management than any other Republican, including Goldwater, has enjoyed within memory.

In addition, Reagan is bulwarked by a state organization which has steered a careful middle course for four years and concentrated on precinct work. Its state chairman, a Los Angeles obstetrican, Dr. Gaylord B. Parkinson, enforced an “Eleventh Commandment” through the primary: “Republicans shall speak no evil of other Republicans.” It was most helpful to Reagan. It aerosoled away his previous reactionary positions. Almost the only California Republican not now osterized into the new mushy model of reaction is standoffish Senator Kuchel.

The senator, sole liberal carry-over in office from the Earl Warren Republican days, drew Dr. Parkinson’s rebuke for indicating he was not interested in campaigning this fall for the GOP ticket. “Who the hell is Parkinson?” Kuchel exploded, in the only robust blow any California Republican has delivered since niceness got to be the new, calculated formula for victory.

The alarming element in the Reagan phenomenon is the possibility that the artificiality of his new role as star in the Republican show matches the mood of the American public. In California at least, the response Reagan engenders suggests that a surfeit of insurmountable domestic problems coupled with the baffling Vietnam war has so confused the American conscience that it is ready for retreat. The actual threat may not be extremism but escapism.

The reality which wishing will not dispel is that the forces and communal problems with which political leadership must deal are accelerating in gravity, explosiveness, and cost. California only exemplifies pressures the rest of the nation knows. This state does not have the burden of old cities, but it carries its special burden of fast growth heavily freighted with the poor and the dependent, young and old. It has its special costs in king-size public works and its special shame in the spoliation of natural beauty by spreading “slurbs.” It has its rich but dangerously uncertain economy, dependent on defense and aerospace jobs. It has its special time bomb in Watts, scene of the worst racial riot the nation has experienced.

Reagan against the Great Society

This reality finds the California Democrats sorely in need of some means to infuse a new sense of mission, a new confidence in direction, a new zest into the assault government makes on such problems. It has implications as serious for the national Administration as for the bewildered Democrats of California. Even before President Eisenhower and Ray C. Bliss and the Republican National Committee gave Reagan a hero’s welcome, he had contrived his central attack around the phrase “Creative Society.” It is his tag for free enterprise. With it, Reagan makes clear he is tilting not with a mere state structure but with President Johnson’s “Great Society.” The state Democratic organization is quaking.

In a state particularly susceptible to the fabricated “image,” Democratic Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown must now pose his tired twoterm Mr. Bumble public figure against a glamorous new political find who is a professional in the “image” business. It is a frightening prospect for a man who has never looked a hero, even to himself. But one must not underrate the Brown political acumen. He does best when he comes from behind. And the scare thrown into his team by the June primary may convert his unimaginative assault upon Reagan into a new thrust. Rethinking has been ordered. Fear may be Governor Brown’s best ally.

The burning issues

If indeed the burden of today’s problems weighs overheavy on the general public — and pollsters, politicians, and dissent votes all seem to indicate as much — the Brown administration is in a sorry predicament. It must campaign on what is happening; its appeal is mired in the stuff of life. And two cruel issues dominate political thinking in California: Watts and Proposition 14.

Watts’s tragic riots are a year past. Proposition 14 — a California constitutional amendment devised by real estate interests to ensure each person’s right to sell or rent his own property “as he in his own discretion chooses” irrespective of discrimination — was on the ballot two years ago. Despite overwhelming voter approval it has recently been ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.

These are, then, one might assume, old issues, over with. By no means. They are the liveliest in California today, each an extension of America’s inability to settle with its conscience about race. Watts, the ghetto striking back, burning, killing, defiant and vengeful, has laid the edge of fear against every Californian. And Proposition 14 gave each voter a chance to slam his own door upon demands for equality if such demands seemed importunate. To four and a half million Californians, 65 percent of those voting in 1964, they did.

Every political campaign this year must be run in the context of these two concerns, and the candidates for governor divide on them, with Reagan on the popular side. Governor Brown bluntly opposed Proposition 14 from the start. Reagan draws a special bead on fair housing laws as a threat to basic freedoms. He is playing upon the public attitude that makes Congress hesitant this year to embrace new civil rights proposals aimed at ending discrimination in housing. On the race issue, Reagan walks a careful fine, aware that Watts is no subject for demagoguery. Prodded about the likelihood that his campaign might gain from white backlash, he affects a skillful dodge: he blasts “white supremacy.”

Black scorch

Watts cannot be erased. A visit to this dreary poverty-scape in south Los Angeles today is like entry into a war zone. Nerves are that much on edge. On the surface, life looks normal enough in the endless blocks of tawdry housing. This is no teeming tenement district. It does not at first glance look dangerous, with its wide streets, its knots of loiterers, and its air of just going no place. But black scorch is like a scar on countless buildings. Weed-filled empty lots were last summer’s supermarkets put to the torch. Many structures stand idle because banks will not lend money for their reconstruction and insurance companies will not underwrite their future safety. Most nights have small ugly “incidents,” and every person in the area — resident, welfare worker, bus driver, employment official, minister, policeman — is tense with the constant apprehension that each incident may fan a new riot. Some 318 schoolteachers have rebelled against going back there next month.

In Watts-like ghettos elsewhere in the state the same alert is on. Recent hearings by advisory committees to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission noted more, not less, hostility between Negroes and police in other core cities. In San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, Bakersfield, and San Jose, and even in the agricultural centers of the Central Valley, where Mexican-Americans are learning to stir out of their passivity, there is perpetual wariness lest mounting despair and idleness light new fires. To greater or less degree this vast unease haunts every Californian. Among the keenest young Democratic officeholders it is assumed that a riot of serious proportions anywhere this summer will be the party’s undoing. Voting against the Brown administration would be the public’s way to strike back.

It is not easy to discover improvements in Watts, though a commendable effort and considerable millions have been spent in the last year and a spirit of concern has been mobilized among previously indifferent parts of the Los Angeles community. Those working in the area consider that there is actually greater dissatisfaction and more potential for explosion today than last year. Expectations of quick help were raised by headline promises of $24 million in federal poverty funds, by private agency commitments, labor union pledges to assist, bond issue proposals for a hospital in the region and for school improvements. Most of the schools are on half-time schedules. But school and hospital bonds were defeated in June by a taxburdened Los Angeles electorate.

Labor unions are still groping for contacts in the region. And although poverty money has established projects for youngsters, a skills center for job training opened only last April. It will be another year and maybe more before physical evidence of help is appreciable in Watts and two or three years before schooling pays off for the undereducated. No one is sure there is that much time.

New leadership from business

The most striking assistance so far, remarkable because it reflects a new type of leadership in Los Angeles business, has come from the Chamber of Commerce. Led by H. C. (“Chad”) McClellan, paint company magnate who was Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower Administration, a Chamber committee met and accepted responsibility to consider basic remedies before the riot fires were cool. They focused on jobs. To the credit of the 100 largest Los Angeles firms, which plunged into prompt “affirmative recruitment” with personnel men at the tables on the sidewalk of Watts for all to see, this Chamberled activity directly brought about employment of 5000 Negroes from the “curfew area,” but 25 percent of Watts men still do not have jobs.

An aggressive drive continues among restaurants, motels, auto-repair shops, and other industries to force employment and advancement. The Chamber’s hurried committee has matured into an endowmentsupported separate Management Council, activist and well-staffed, a prod to governmental efforts. It has established good teamwork with the “service center” which government has set up in Watts.

Nothing so clearly fixes the dimension of Watts abandonment as realization that before the riots there was no employment office in the area and getting to the nearest required one and a half hours travel via three separate bus lines. A McCone Commission’s staff member, investigating causes of the riot, tagged along with one Watts resident who was seeking welfare. They traveled fifty-four miles by bus just to find the proper headquarters. It took five hours. Most of the new arrivals lack the tenacity, the ingenuity, and the bus fare that could lead to work, and if they found it they could not get there and back within a day, so inadequate is Los Angeles public transportation. Governor Brown recently obtained a large emergency federal transportation grant to cope with the abysmal system by supplying some direct service from Watts to major employment sectors. It has not started rolling yet.

The new governmental service center does have visual impact. Another has been established in the impoverished Mexican-American sector of east Los Angeles. The purpose is to assemble all government agencies, federal, state, and county, which directly affect these residents into one recognizable, easy-to-find headquarters, to make possible coordinated assistance. The state now has employment office, welfare headquarters, public health clinic, veterans’ office, public housing headquarters, and other agencies assembled at a common address and has persuaded some federal agencies to join. It is a concept Governor Brown thinks must be adapted to every core city.

“If we could only stop them at the border, we’d get someplace,” remarked a discouraged young Negro employment office worker in Watts, appalled at the unending influx of new families. Los Angeles had 25,000 Negroes before World War II. It has 600,000 now, and minorities figure large in California’s annual population increase of 600,000. Los Angeles is everybody’s utopia. It is inhabited by wave after wave of new arrivals, drawn by the region’s warmth, travel-poster allure, easy living, and by its employment opportunities in the defense and aerospace industries. Los Angeles’ population has grown to 7 million people, all seekers of a better life — for themselves, not for their neighbors.

Los Angeles versus the state

Los Angeles’ 2,900,000 voters have decided California elections for a long time, carrying the state for Nixon over Kennedy and for Murphy over Pierre Salinger, though the Democratic majority and President Johnson’s acumen overcame the Gold water fever. Reckoning with the population preponderance, San-Francisco-born Governor Brown found it necessary to establish his “vacation” residence in Los Angeles for the past six years. It wasn’t enough. Los Angeles and Orange counties alone carried Brown to the brink of disaster in June. In every other part of the state he topped Mayor Yorty of Los Angeles two to one.

The wellsprings of liberal thinking which have shaped California for half a century have centered in the north since the Hiram Johnson era and had effective reinforcement from northern Californians in the administrations of Governor Earl Warren and Governor Brown. Today there is general assumption that reapportionment, removing the last northern impediment to political dominance by Los Angeles and her southern sister counties, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, and Imperial, has ushered in a new historic period which will be characterized by extreme conservatism.

Another reality which encumbers Governor Brown is the rebellion of the young; 20 percent of California’s civilian voting population is between twenty-one and twenty-nine years of age. This group has known no symbol of state authority except Governor Brown and no party in power except the Democrats. Reagan, at fifty-five, is only five years younger than Brown, but he is new, he has buoyancy and thrust, where the governor personifies middle-aged substantiality.

Governor Brown lacks “style,” and there is impatience among the electorate as well as among his friends with the unrehearsed malapropisms which have become his principal political trademark. His two major accomplishments have been, first, securing statewide consent to the water plan which manages the salvation of southern California by piping to it an ample portion of surplus water from northern California; and second, achieving a “master plan” for California’s Topsy-grown schools of higher education which established harmony instead of competition among the nine campuses of the state university, the eighteen four-year state colleges, and the two dozen junior colleges.

Money problems

Fiscal burdens are California’s most serious present concern. They differ from those in most other states only in magnitude and in reach. This year’s budget exceeds $4.5 billion. California has a tradition of moving out to meet state needs. Its $2 billion water plan, now halfway built, is just one indication. Its expansive system of education has no parallel. Last June California had 4,500,000 in school. That number alone is more than the population of Connecticut or Wisconsin, or indeed of thirty-seven other states. There will be 200,000 more youngsters at the principal’s door next month. Every year the state needs 6000 more classrooms, 6000 more teachers.

The state also needs an expanding economy able to provide 200,000 new jobs each year if its overhigh 5 percent unemployment is not to mount. To such concerns as these Governor Brown has been alert, persuasive, effective. Taxes are high in California, but so are earnings. Now the time for new taxes is unavoidably around again.

If this is conveyed to the public, the difference between less government or more government can be put in very personal terms to great masses of Californians, for services and welfare aids will drop if taxes are not increased. Biggest hurt, however, will be in schools. Local property-tax payers are demanding the shift of some further school costs to the state to case the local tax burden, in some cases risen 300 percent in ten years. There must be in California next year a state fiscal overhaul of a scope that comes along only once in a decade.

It is in the context of this urgency that Reagan and the right-wing program must be measured. He is a man totally without political experience, and in over fifty years California has not chosen such a novice as governor. Its governors have been men schooled in its problems, through preliminary state service. Even William F. Knowland coming home from the U.S. Senate and Richard Nixon from the presidential lists have been rejected by Californians, and a considerable reason for Governor Brown’s victory over these two in his previous campaigns was their apparent inability to understand the state and its problems.

In the final count it wall be business interests as much as the average voter who will make the November decision. Reagan’s rosy generalities about saving freedom will not weigh if men are worried about whether the enormous investments in plant and payroll in this state can risk committing government at this financial turning point to a neophyte who is under the tutelage of men averse to government.

Many industrialists who captain California’s chief industries know that the world trend is not running with the reactionary philosophy. To a large portion of businessmen, world over, government must have an expanding role if society is to keep stable in the face of its great problems. Realists, pitted against the professional image-makers, will decide the California election.