Editor's Introduction
The 1930s witnessed the renaissance of the California labor movement. The membership of the California State Federation of Labor increased from slightly more than 100,000 in 1931 to 291,000 in 1938. The booming economic conditions created by World War II and sustained with but few interruptions through the 1940s provided the setting for an even more dramatic growth in trade union membership. In 1950, when the state took its first census of union members, there were 1,354,000 unionized employees, who made up 42 percent of California's wage and salary workers (excluding farmworkers). The greatly enhanced strength of the California labor movement enabled it to make gains at the workplace and also gave it more potential political power than at any time since the Progressive Era.
Although the jurisdictional disputes between the CIO and the AFL were as bitter in California as anywhere, the rival organizations sometimes forged alliances that made them a potent force in California local and state politics. The CIO had never been averse to political action. The California AFL was much more reluctant to enter the political fray directly by participating in electoral politics. But the gains that unions made in the late 1930s and early 1940s resulted in a legislative offensive against labor at the local, state, and national levels, which impelled the California AFL to switch its focus from legislative lobbying to actively engaging in electoral politics.
The resort to electoral activity was not solely a defensive move. It also reflected the fact that labor emerged during the war years with a newfound sense of its moral and political legitimacy. Many union leaders and rank-and-file union members were determined to forge a postwar
social-democratic order fundamentally different from that of the 1930s, more akin to the political agenda of the labor movement in Western Europe.
Nowhere were the militancy and power of the California labor movement more apparent during the 1940s than in Oakland. In December 1946, a strike by retail clerks mushroomed into a general strike sanctioned by the Alameda County Central Labor Council and the Building Trades Council of the AFL. More than one hundred thousand workers took part. The strike was followed in the spring of 1947 by important municipal elections in which four labor candidates were elected on a progressive political platform.
Marilynn Johnson examines the factors that led to the Oakland general strike of 1946 and labor's subsequent political offensive. She shows how the defense boom helped to both cause and magnify a variety of urban social problems, which caused great discontent. The revolt was led by a coalition of labor, minorities, and workers from outside the trade union movement. The insurgents demanded such reforms as mayoral and district elections, public housing, rent control, and more money for schools. Johnson concludes that the labor movement's political challenge in Oakland (and other East Bay cities) foreshadowed progressive political revolts that would occur in later decades.
On the eve of the 1947 municipal elections, an extraordinary event took place in Oakland, California. Starting from their respective flatland neighborhoods, hundreds of the city's working-class residents set out for the downtown district on foot, by automobile, and atop parade floats. They convened in a mass torchlight procession down Broadway, brandishing brooms and mops to dramatize the need for "municipal housecleaning." The most impressive float, constructed by the United Negro Labor Committee, showed American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) pallbearers lowering a casket labelled "The Machine" into the ground. Alongside the burial scene was a placard depicting two gloved fists—one black, one white—smashing the Oakland Tribune tower, headquarters of the city's conservative political machine. The fists were labelled "Oakland Voters," and the banner beneath read "Take the Power Out of the Tower."[1]
The election parade dramatized an urban political revolt that had been gaining momentum in Oakland and other California cities since the middle
of World War II. While the defense boom accompanying the war created a spate of social problems and dislocations in these cities, such events also allowed political outsiders to challenge the status quo. Labor, black, and other progressive forces coalesced during the war and would become a major force in the municipal politics of the postwar era. In northern California, the city of Oakland became the site of the Bay Area's most dramatic and sustained political challenge. Cemented by a general strike in 1946, a labor-led coalition waged a mass electoral revolt against the businessoriented machine of Oakland Tribune publisher Joseph R. Knowland in 1947. Events there present a political dynamic different from the one that might be suggested by conventional wisdom.
Standard urban history accounts say little or nothing about wartime urban politics. In The New Urban America , one of the few works that address this issue, historian Carl Abbott argues that the war boom in southern and western cities laid the foundation for municipal political upheavals of the postwar era. Abbott describes these postwar political challenges as "G.I. revolts," led by returning veterans eager to build on wartime demographic and economic gains. This younger generation came to power by supporting a variety of middle-class reform measures aimed at promoting economic growth and municipal efficiency.[2]
In Oakland, however, it was not middle-class reformers who were the driving force in these struggles, but labor, minorities, and working-class people. Nor did these reformers seek to promote business-oriented municipal reform measures such as city manager government and nonpartisan elections (conservative forces had already instituted such practices in the prewar era). Instead, the labor insurgents called for an end to these practices, demanding an elected mayor, district elections, publicly owned mass transportation, public works projects, public housing, and increased funding for education and other social programs—in short, a broad-based liberal agenda. Middle-class business reformers, then, were not the only ones to take advantage of war-born opportunities; under the right conditions, labor and progressive forces also mounted effective political challenges to business-dominated city governments.
Furthermore, the Oakland experience suggests that municipal revolts in western cities were not strictly postwar affairs but had direct roots in wartime political arrangements. The wartime city, in fact, provided a crucible for progressives seeking to fulfill the social ideals of the 1930s. In this regard, the CIO was critical. Nearly all of the postwar issues and personalities can be traced back to the work of the newly formed CIO Political Action Committee (PAC) in 1944. Though initially a creation of the CIO's national
executive board, the local PAC soon took on a life of its own and became the core of an insurgent political movement that united a wide array of community interests, including more liberal elements of the AFL. While this laborled coalition did not survive the reactionary backlash of the 1950s, it foreshadowed progressive trends that would characterize the city in later decades.
Focusing mainly on the national level, labor historians have generally criticized wartime CIO political activity for fostering a rigid and ultimately detrimental relationship between labor, the federal government, and the Democratic Party.[3] When viewed at the grassroots level, however, the experience was far more open and fluid. By examining local politics in Oakland, we can begin to see how labor activists understood the war experience and why they chose to place their faith in the electoral system. Once in office, however, labor representatives found progress difficult. With the onset of the Cold War and domestic anti-Communism, Knowland forces were able to block labor initiatives and drove several progressive councilmembers from office. Indeed, just as the war had helped enhance labor's power in the mid-1940s, later national and international events contributed to labor's political demise. The Oakland experience thus speaks to both the potential and the limitations of electoral politics as a means of advancing workers' interests.
Located across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland had long been a thriving industrial center with a large blue-collar population. As a transcontinental railroad terminus and an active deep-water port, Oakland had become a key transportation and distribution center on the West Coast by the early twentieth century. As such, it attracted hundreds of manufacturing industries including automobile assembly, shipbuilding, canning and food processing, and electrical, chemical, and paint production. Despite the economic setbacks of the depression years, Oakland continued to grow through the 1930s, its population totalling 302,163 by 1940.
The city's industrial development attracted a diverse working-class population, many of whom settled in the flatland neighborhoods of East and West Oakland. In 1940, 14.1 percent of Oakland's population was foreign-born, while immigrants and their children accounted for approximately one-third of the population. The African-American community, though smaller than its counterparts in eastern cities, accounted for 2.8 percent. Centered in West Oakland, adjacent to the railroad yards that had long provided employment for many of its residents, Oakland's prewar black community was the largest in the Bay Area.[4]
Despite the city's blue-collar character, labor played only a minor role
in Oakland politics prior to the war. Since the Progressive era, progrowth business elites had dominated municipal government through the implementation of two major charter reforms. Sparked by a serious Socialist Party challenge in the 1911 municipal elections, local business elites worked to eliminate the ward system and replaced it with a nonpartisan commission form of government later that year. Even under the new system, however, competing business factions continued to fight among themselves. One of these factions, led by prominent Republican and Oakland Tribune publisher Joseph R. Knowland, began campaigning for a second round of charter reform in 1928. The subsequent establishment of a councilmanager government in 1931 helped defeat Knowland's opponents and put his business machine in control of the city for the next fifteen years.[5]
The onset of the depression and the New Deal, however, enhanced labor's power by providing new organizing opportunities. The clearest sign of labor's revitalization was the eighty-three-day maritime strike of 1934, which culminated in a four-day general strike in both Oakland and San Francisco. Involving some 100,000 Bay Area workers, including members of over seventy Oakland locals, the dispute ended on an ambiguous note after AFL leaders agreed to government arbitration, over strong rank-and-file opposition. The "big strike," however, did galvanize support for labor and ushered in an era of union militancy in the Bay Area.[6]
The newly founded CIO was responsible for much of the renewed activism. In the late thirties, CIO activists in Oakland organized workers in a wide variety of manufacturing and service industries including auto plants, canneries, waterfront operations, newspapers, hospitals, and domestic service agencies. While the CIO sought to "organize the unorganized," local CIO dissidents also worked within existing AFL unions to form rival labor organizations. Such efforts outraged many local AFL leaders, who responded by purging CIO unions from the county's Central Labor Council, staging counter-raids on CIO unions, and supporting the use of city police against CIO pickets. Growing labor militance during these years also encouraged the Knowland machine to recruit Building Trades Council President James Quinn and several other AFL conservatives, offering them political patronage in exchange for labor's support of machine candidates and policies. Increasingly, AFL councilmembers backed the Knowland government in its efforts to suppress CIO organizing in the city.[7]
In-fighting between the AFL and the CIO ultimately hindered effecive political action by labor during these years. While some liberal AFL members worked with the CIO through Labor's Non-Partisan League, a
pro-New Deal political action group, the national and local AFL leadership remained staunchly opposed to any cooperation between the two groups. In Oakland, conservative AFL leaders formed a rival political organization that backed Knowland machine candidates against local CIO and Communist insurgents. In 1937-38, the two union federations would not even march in the same Labor Day parade, much less join forces politically.[8]
World War II, however, brought about cataclysmic changes in Oakland's economy, population, and physical development—changes that enhanced labor's role in the community. As one of the West Coast's major transportation and industrial centers, the metropolitan Oakland area received millions of dollars in federal defense contracts, including large outlays for shipbuilding, motor vehicle assembly, food processing, and military supply. To staff these operations, employers recruited local women, youth, and elderly workers and tapped distant labor markets in the South and Midwest as well. Consequently, Oakland's population grew from 302,163 in 1940 to 345,345 by mid-1944—a 14.3 percent increase in less than four years. Not surprisingly, the population boom severely strained housing, transportation, education, and other city services. To help alleviate these crowded conditions, the federal government provided funding for temporary war housing, expanded school facilities, and other community programs.[9]
The influx of civilian and military workers also altered Oakland's racial and class composition. Recruiting heavily in the southwest, defense employers drew many working-class families from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Black families figured prominently among the southwesterners, and Oakland's black population mushroomed from 8,462 in 1940 to 21,770 in 1944 and to 47,562 by 1950. Making up less than 3 percent of the city's population before the war, black Oaklanders constituted 6.3 percent of the total by 1944 and 12.4 percent by 1950.[10] Assuming they remained in the city, black and working-class war migrants provided a potential new source of support for Oakland's embattled labor movement.
For most migrants, however, organized labor offered a hostile welcome at best. Since the shipbuilding industry absorbed the bulk of new workers, most newcomers found themselves within the jurisdiction of the Boilermakers Union and other conservative AFL trades. Outnumbered by wartime newcomers and alarmed at their potential power, the Boilermakers' leadership created special nonvoting auxiliaries to accommodate migrants, blacks, and other new workers. Conceived as a temporary wartime expedient, the second-class auxiliaries effectively squelched newcomers'
participation in union activities and alienated them from the labor movement generally.[11]
By contrast, CIO unions and their more liberal AFL allies made serious attempts to address the needs of war migrants. Unable to organize most newcomers in the shipyards, CIO activists turned their attention to community problems. Such issues proved critical during the war as housing shortages, overcrowded transportation, inadequate social services, and increased racial tensions threatened productivity in Oakland and other important defense areas.
The unusual political arrangements of wartime cities also encouraged labor activists to adopt a community orientation. Specifically, the rhetoric and ritual of wartime unity offered labor, black, and other progressive forces an opportunity to participate on citywide committees and debate public policy issues. Following the example of federal agencies like the War Labor Board, local officials invited a wide range of community representatives to serve on ad hoc committees dealing with issues such as defense employment, housing, mass transit, public health, childcare, rationing, etc. Committee members included not only the conservative AFL building trades officials and black ministers traditionally appointed to represent the city's working class, but also left-leaning CIO and AFL members and black officials of the railroad brotherhoods. Organized labor embraced this opportunity to work with other community groups and praised Mayor John Slavich for "bringing labor spokesmen into committees and activity to further Oakland's war effort."[12]
Perhaps the most trenchant example of this urban corporatism was the Postwar Planning Committee convened by Mayor Slavich in 1943 to promote successful reconversion. Ostensibly representing all city residents, the committee was heavily business-dominated. Out of fifty members, thirty represented business and finance interests while only four spoke for organized labor. As an ad hoc group, the committee sidestepped formal planning bodies and developed projects that would make Oakland "the leading center of the New Industrial West." In an effort to provide longdeferred municipal improvements and to ease the transition to a peacetime economy, the committee developed an elaborate program of public works and civic projects. Their plans called for the repair or construction of roads, highways, sewers, schools, parks, pools, hospitals, and civic centers, many of which had languished since the depression. With fear of a postwar recession looming, such projects would create jobs for displaced veterans and defense workers—a key labor demand. For business interests, adequate facilities and services were prerequisites to industrial growth. "Immediate
and postwar civic improvements will have a far-reaching effect on Oakland's industrial development," said the committee. "Eastern concerns are more likely to locate their plants in Oakland knowing that the city of Oakland is willing to provide the facilities required by industry."[13] But the business-labor unity symbolized by the Postwar Planning Committee proved illusory, and the execution of postwar plans would become a source of bitter and protracted conflict.
Even during the war, labor remained at best a junior partner in this experiment in urban corporatism. As Carl Abbott has pointed out, defense contractors and federal bureaucrats—who generally favored policies acceptable to the city's business elite—dominated ad hoc committees and decision-making. The important point, however, was not labor's lack of influence but the experience with and exposure to urban policy issues fostered by such participation.
During the war, labor moved from a relatively narrow focus on workplace organizing to a broad-based community orientation. Communist Party members, who were well represented in many West Coast CIO locals, had a long history of community organizing in the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s. In the full-employment context of wartime Oakland, such experience proved invaluable as the need for increased productivity to win the war provided a perfect rationale for linking community and workplace issues. In an effort to expand such activities, the Alameda County CIO Council urged every full-time union official to sit on at least one civic group or committee. The Council also endorsed a new course on community services offered by the Oakland-based California Labor School and urged union members to enroll. This growing concern and sophistication in dealing with community issues would not disappear at war's end.[14]
Labor not only gained experience in urban policymaking during the war but also developed an impressive organizational network. With the creation of the national CIO Political Action Committee in 1943, local PACs began forming in major industrial centers to support the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt and other pro-labor candidates. The passage of the anti-labor Smith-Connally Act in 1943 also served to galvanize labor forces nationwide in an effort to repeal the legislation. In California, a "right-to-work" initiative known as Proposition Twelve spurred especially enthusiastic PAC activity in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas in 1944 and helped bring the long-feuding AFL and CIO together in a united front. In Oakland, AFL and CIO members joined forces with the establishment of United Labor's Legislative Committee in 1944.[15]
The PACs conducted mass voter registration drives that summer and
fall, enrolling a record number of voters statewide, including over 300,000 ballot applications from migrant defense workers. In Oakland, sound trucks patrolled working-class neighborhoods and war housing areas all day, every day, urging residents to register. The PAC appointed registrars in both the shipyards and war housing projects, while the Democratic Club led by black union leader C. L. Dellums concentrated on reaching new black voters in West Oakland. Defense migrants were popular targets for these campaigns, since working-class and Southern voters presumably voted Democratic. The PACs thus did extensive work in migrant neighborhoods, helping newcomers file for residency and explaining voting rights (including freedom from poll taxes and literacy tests). As a result of such efforts, Alameda County showed the greatest gains in voter registration in the Bay Area, rising from 225,000 voters before the primary election to 362,000 by late October.[16]
Labor groups made an equally impressive effort on election day. First, United Labor's Legislative Committee organized a mass distribution of slate cards in all major shipyards. Union members and their families then rallied voters via telephone and doorbell ringing, minded children while voters went to the polls, offered information on voting rights, and served as pollwatchers. When the returns were tallied, Oakland voters came in heavily for the triumphant Roosevelt and local pro-labor Democrats while defeating Proposition Twelve.[17]
Although it is hard to estimate the precise influence of PAC activity, the PAC's role as a nucleus of a progressive revolt in local politics is quite clear. As local shipyard worker and NAACP leader Joseph James observed in 1945, a progressive coalition had formed in the Bay Area "spearheaded by CIO-PAC in the 1944 elections. . .. The contacts made during the course of that political battle have remained intact to a surprising degree." In Alameda County, the origins of postwar progressivism were especially evident as local organizers of the 1944 campaign—Ruby Heide, J. C. Reynolds, C. L. Dellums, Earl Hall, and William Hollander—emerged as important figures in the grassroots revolt that first took shape in the 1945 Oakland elections.[18]
Once again, it was the CIO that spearheaded plans for an organized labor presence in the 1945 elections. In a meeting called by the CIO Council in December 1944, the PAC established four subcommittees to analyze the issues and candidates in the spring municipal elections in Oakland and other East Bay cities. The PAC hoped to identify progressive, pro-labor candidates who could defeat incumbents backed by local business machines. The present leadership was "obstructionist," said the PAC, and the region's
future was being "stifled by selfish interests and machine politics." While the war had not yet ended, the era of wartime unity was clearly over.[19]
Labor's confrontational stance grew out of both changing economic conditions and disillusionment over the business community's failure to pursue postwar planning measures. By the winter of 1944-45, the slowdown of the war economy and the spectre of another depression gave labor reason for growing concern. Shipyard employment in the East Bay had begun contracting slowly in the fall of 1943. Job layoffs increased considerably over the next year, and by early 1945 unemployment claims were five times higher than in the previous year. At the same time, local urban leaders had shown little enthusiasm for inaugurating the postwar public works projects designed to cushion the shock of reconversion. City officials, labor contended, had taken no concrete action on the recommendations of the Postwar Planning Committee nor had they sought funding for any new projects. The issue, as one columnist put it, was whether the city "will go forward or backward. . .. It is prosperity versus the prewar status quo, which means a return to unemployment."[20]
The split between labor and business was not as sudden as it seemed; the rhetoric of wartime unity had merely obscured the longstanding animosity between the two groups. This is not to say that wartime rhetoric was entirely false, but rather that labor and business understood the meaning of the war experience differently. For much of the old-time business community, the war boom brought an unprecedented expansion of business, population, and economic growth accompanied by a temporary, but necessary, dose of federal intervention. Although excited about the economic potential of an expanded population, conservatives expressed concern that migrants had become dependent on government social programs. Business hoped to encourage continued economic growth in the postwar era, but under the control of the private sector.[21]
For labor, the collectivist experiments of the war years had a very different meaning. The mass mobilization of resources, personnel, and government services seemed to prove that business and government were capable of creating a humane capitalism that provided jobs, a decent standard of living, and fair treatment for all Americans. Wartime social programs such as health insurance, public housing, and childcare were not just temporary expedients, but models for the postwar future. Labor's vision, then, was not one of radical anti-capitalism, but of more moderate social-democratic reform based on the war experience.[22]
Organized labor also had a far more positive view of the areas's newcomers. Far from being disoriented and dependent, labor leaders argued,
newcomers appreciated wartime social programs and merely wanted fair treatment from local housing authorities and other agencies. City leaders had "expressed hostility toward the problems of wartime inhabitants from outside areas," said one labor supporter. "The indifference . . . is rooted in the defeatist theory that such people are here only temporarily." To help overcome the nativist and racist sentiments that plagued the city, the PAC called for the creation of a civic unity committee that would bring different racial, occupational, and religious groups together to resolve community conflicts.[23]
The failure of elected officials to respond to such initiatives prompted the PAC to launch its own campaign in the spring of 1945. For the first time since the Progressive era, a unified opposition slate challenged local business rule, fielding candidates for city council, the school board, and other city offices. Calling themselves the United for Oakland Committee (UOC), the progressives campaigned for expanded industry and job opportunities, public works, slum clearance, public housing, a civic unity committee, increased pay for civil service employees, and expanded facilities and services for education, health care, childcare, recreation, and mass transit. In an effort to address the structural inequities of the council-manager system, UOC candidates also demanded district elections, an elected mayor, and other charter reform measures.[24]
The UOC's sweeping agenda attracted a broad-based alliance representing a diverse cross-section of the urban community. First, the coalition represented a solidly united AFL-CIO front unknown in prewar politics. Despite conservatives' efforts to split the labor vote by running machine-backed AFL candidates, the UOC remained united in support of its own candidates.[25] The labor coalition also forged links with forward-looking businesspeople who advocated aggressive postwar growth and opposed existing machines. UOC business supporters included former Postwar Planning Committee members Frank Belgrano, president of the Central Bank of Oakland and regional chairman of the Committee for Economic Development; liberal Republican Earl Hall, chairman of the Uptown Property Owners Association (rival of Knowland's Downtown Association); and Patrick McDonough, owner of defense-oriented McDonough Steel and chairman of the Alameda County Democratic Committee.
While both the Knowland machine and the UOC ostensibly supported industrial expansion, the labor group maintained that local machines jealously guarded their dominant position and created bottlenecks to discourage new businesses from locating in the city. Because of such attitudes, labor alleged, aircraft manufacturers like Lockheed chose to locate in
southern California instead of Oakland. Other businesspeople, however, had "a sincere desire to take Oakland out of the rut it's been in," said PAC official Paul Heide. "These are the people we want to work with." Historian Carl Abbott has described these forward-looking businesspeople as the instigators of postwar "G.I. revolts." In Oakland, however, it was labor, not business, that played the dominant role in this new urban coalition.[26]
Most significant, labor forces worked hard to develop strong ties with the black community. Black labor leaders such as C. L. Dellums, business agent for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Matt Crawford, former assistant director of the CIO Minorities Committee, provided key links between the labor movement and the larger black community. Dellums, in particular, represented a broad network of black interests in Oakland and helped deliver the support of the railroad brotherhoods, the local NAACP, and the Democratic Seventeenth District Citizens' League. The labor coalition's support for fair housing and employment practices, civic unity committees, and other civil rights measures made such inter-racial alliances possible.[27]
Finally, the labor coalition also drew support from middle-class white liberals, particularly those in progressive religious circles. Reflecting the social gospel tendencies of liberal Protestantism, members of the interracial war housing ministries and the local Council of Churches united with the UOC in support of fair labor practices and civil rights. As NAACP leader Joseph James explained, "There is a large group of prominent white persons who are outspokenly liberal on the question of racial equality." These people joined with "an overwhelming preponderance of working people, combined with the strength of the CIO," to form a truly broad-based progressive coalition in Bay Area cities.[28]
The UOC, however, was far less successful in actually turning out the vote on election day. With a dismally low turnout in the spring municipal elections, voters swept all of the incumbents back into office. Part of the problem was poor outreach; without the lure of Roosevelt and other high-profile national candidates, only 26 percent of the city's registered voters cast their ballots. In all likelihood, however, labor's message was as much a problem as its weak campaigning. By appropriating the pro-growth rhetoric of their opponents, liberal candidates were at times indistinguishable from machine incumbents. Future labor candidates would discover that a more frankly left-wing platform had more grassroots appeal than a watered-down reform agenda.[29]
Some last-minute concessions by Knowland forces may also have contributed to labor's defeat. Just prior to the elections, the city finally agreed
to raise the wages of police and fire personnel, one of the UOC's campaign demands. At the same time, incumbent Mayor John Slavich announced the formation of a civic unity committee—another labor campaign plank—despite prior dismissals of the idea. Labor's defeat in 1945, then, was more than just a painful learning experience. The UOC had successfully pressured the Knowland machine into action on several key community issues and continued to win concessions afterward. In May of 1945, the city council finally presented a bond measure to provide modest funding for roads, sewers, libraries, swimming pools, parks, and a new hall of justice. The measure passed decisively with Knowland and UOC support. In a separate election in September, the city council offered a second bond measure to fund new school facilities. Heartened by these small victories, the UOC vowed to continue the fight by extending outreach and education efforts until the next election.[30]
In the meantime, the termination of hostilities between the U.S. and Japan virtually shut down Oakland's war industries. Local manufacturing operations had been contracting steadily since their peak in June 1943, when they employed nearly 1.2 million people statewide. By December of 1946, this figure had fallen to 730,000. The biggest losses occurred in the shipbuilding industry, which declined from 307,000 workers statewide in June 1943 to 25,000 by November 1946. As California's number one shipbuilding center, the East Bay felt these dislocations particularly hard, and the U.S. Employment Service reported increased unemployment claims for the area through 1946. Women, blacks, and other wartime newcomers faced the most severe layoffs, as employers sought to accommodate returning veterans whenever possible.[31]
Even those workers who kept their jobs after the war saw their living standards deteriorate. Despite record corporate profits in expanding consumer industries and services, the take-home pay of many workers declined as a result of reduced hours and the loss of overtime and bonus pay. With the termination of wartime price controls in the summer of 1946, consumer prices skyrocketed nationwide while real wages fell. Furthermore, the existence of a growing pool of unemployed benefitted local employers, who adopted an increasingly hostile stance toward organized labor. In Congress, Republican lawmakers attempted to roll back New Deal labor gains through open shop legislation and other anti-labor measures embodied in the Taft-Hartley Act. At the state level, California lawmakers initiated a similar anti-labor offensive. In reaction to these trends, labor discontent erupted in a nationwide strike wave in 1945-46.[32]
Oakland was one of six American cities that experienced a general
strike in this tumultuous period. The conflict began in October 1946 when some four hundred members—mainly women—of the AFL Department and Specialty Store Employees Union walked off their jobs at Kahn's and Hastings downtown department stores. Demanding employer recognition of the union as a legitimate bargaining agent, striking workers picketed the stores throughout the month of November with the support of the Teamsters and other AFL trades. On December 1, Kahn's brought in nonunion drivers to deliver twelve truckloads of merchandise to the store under the protection of two hundred and fifty Oakland police.
Police involvement in the action triggered a sharp outcry against city officials, and on December 2 the Central Labor Council declared a "labor holiday." The next day, 142 unions with over 100,000 workers took to the streets, successfully shutting down streetcar and bus lines, factories, shipyards, stores, restaurants, hotels, and three local newspapers. After two and a half days, as the strike threatened to spread to adjoining Contra Costa County, leaders of the AFL Teamsters' and Machinists' internationals ordered their members back to work. With the loss of these critical unions, local leaders reluctantly accepted an agreement with the city manager to end the general strike in exchange for the city's pledge to observe workers' civil rights in the future. The general strike thus ended inconclusively while the store workers' strike continued as a separate dispute. Within weeks, however, the city again deployed police to protect scab workers at the downtown stores.[33]
Angry and betrayed, labor forces rebounded into the electoral arena in 1947. Outraged by the brazen pro-employer sentiments of the mayor and city council, the labor coalition of 1945 reorganized as the Oakland Voters League (OVL) and revitalized their efforts to build a unified urban movement. In the May elections, the OVL ran a slate of five candidates for city council on a platform reminiscent of the 1945 UOC campaign. As they had two years earlier, the OVL dubbed the Knowland machine "obstructionist" and demanded that postwar public works projects begin immediately. "Two years ago, $15,754,000 was voted for parks and playgrounds, swimming pools and recreational facilities, health services, street improvements, and other needed civic projects," the OVL asserted. "Where are they?"[34]
The 1947 platform also added some new planks, giving the OVL a more radical edge. Specifically, the OVL called for city council neutrality in all labor disputes; repeal of anti-picketing and anti-handbill ordinances often used against labor; investigation of police brutality against black residents; the restoration of rent control; repeal of the sales tax; and more equitable tax assessment procedures to eliminate unfair advantages for downtown
property owners. The OVL also gave top priority to building public housing, establishing a city fair employment commission, and constructing new school facilities. Disputing Chamber of Commerce data on industrial growth, the OVL noted that the majority of new industries had located in suburban areas outside the city. In contrast to 1945, though, Oakland progressives talked less about attracting new business; their main thrust was employment, community services, and social justice.[35]
As in 1945, the OVL represented a broad spectrum of community interests—from Communists and left-wing CIO members to local veterans and church members. Labor remained the centerpiece of the coalition, and in the wake of the failed 1946 strike and the pending Taft-Hartley legislation, union forces closed ranks as never before. The AFL, the CIO, and the railroad brotherhoods all endorsed the OVL, and in early April they held a mass support rally of over 10,000 union members at the Oakland Auditorium. Labor support from West Oakland's black community was also strong; black unionists formed the United Negro Labor Committee, which played a particularly active and visible role campaigning for the OVL. Because of labor's outspoken concern with providing housing for returning G.I.s, the OVL won support from veterans groups as well. By supporting housing and other pressing community concerns, labor built a broad-based urban coalition in support of the OVL.[36]
To combat the low turnout which hampered the UOC in the 1945 elections, the OVL established a grassroots community network organized around neighborhood precincts. OVL precinct workers canvassed Oakland neighborhoods in the weeks prior to the election, distributing thousands of copies of the Oakland Voters Herald , an OVL newsheet designed to counter the meagre and often biased coverage of the organization by the Oakland Tribune . In West Oakland, the United Negro Labor Committee sponsored a street dance and other activities to help turn out the vote. The campaign culminated in the dramatic torchlight procession described earlier.[37]
On election day, the OVL's organizing efforts paid off. With a record turnout of 97,520 voters—65 percent of the city's registered voters—OVL candidates Vernon Lantz, Raymond Pease, Joseph Smith, and Scott Weakley defeated the Knowland-backed incumbents despite a bitter redbaiting campaign by the Tribune . The other OVL candidate, former Richmond shipyard worker Ben Goldfarb, lost by a margin of less than a thousand votes. Although no precinct voting records have survived, local newspapers agreed that the OVL's strongest support came from the working-class districts of East and West Oakland. The latter, inhabited predomi-
nantly by blacks and white migrants, contributed the strongest support with residents voting three-to-one in favor of the OVL. The landslide vote prompted the Labor Herald to chide that the "Old Guard's Waterloo was in West Oakland."[38]
The triumph of the four OVL candidates was an unprecedented event in Oakland that demonstrated the power of an interracial labor coalition. But Goldfarb's loss was a damaging blow. The new city council still stood five to four in favor of the Knowland forces. On nearly every progressive measure, the OVL councilmembers would find themselves narrowly outvoted and their initiatives stalled. Machine forces, however, did not always act as a coherent unit. When selecting a mayor a few months later, feuding Knowland councilmembers could not agree on a single candidate. As a re-suit, OVL councilmembers elected their own favorite, Joseph Smith, in 1947.[39] As the mayoral contest indicated, OVL forces could win a council vote by trading favors with one of their opponents. This strategy would play a key part in what would become the defining issue of the postwar city—public housing.
Of all the troublesome legacies of World War II in Oakland, the housing problem topped the list. During the war, a severe housing shortage had prompted federal and local authorities to cooperate in building some 2,700 units of temporary war housing to accommodate incoming defense migrants. Under federal law, such housing was to be removed within two years of the war's end. The anticipated exodus of war workers, however, never occurred. Instead, the wartime phenomenon of chain migration continued, and thousands of veterans returned to the area, swelling the city's population to 384,575 in 1950. As an emergency measure, the city retained the temporary projects and added an additional five hundred temporary units for homeless veterans. In 1946, the Oakland Housing Authority estimated that at least 23,000 new units would be needed to accommodate families currently residing in temporary housing or sharing quarters with others.[40]
Minority and low-income families encountered the tightest housing conditions. While many middle-income white residents secured homes under G.I. loan programs in the suburbs, low-income families competed for a limited amount of older, central city dwellings. The housing options of black and Asian families of all income levels were also limited to certain urban areas because of racial covenants and biased lending practices. With the postwar institution of veterans' preferences and income ceilings, public war housing became the last refuge for what many city leaders saw as the area's least desirable residents—war migrants, minorities, and the
poor. Increasingly, then, city officials targeted war housing for removal and redevelopment.[41]
As with other postwar planning issues, business and labor representatives found some common ground on the housing issue. Both agreed that temporary housing was overcrowded, badly deteriorated, and beyond salvage. They sharply disagreed, however, over the fate of the land and its inhabitants. Business leaders argued that housing lands were prime areas for industrial development and that the private market could accommodate displaced housing residents. Labor and other progressive community groups insisted that redeveloped land be used for new public housing to rehouse the displaced tenants. Their opponents, they claimed, were simply trying to force these unwanted refugees out of the city.
The housing fight came to a head in 1949-50 when new national housing legislation mandated the removal of war housing and provided federal funding for the construction of new projects. Labor representatives on the city council responded by drafting a request for three thousand units of federal public housing. With OVL forces occuping four of nine council seats, they needed only one defector to pass the measure. By trading their support for the mayoral candidacy of one of the Knowland-backed council-members in 1949, OVL forces gained the additional vote needed to pass the public housing resolution.[42]
In the meantime, the anti-housing Knowland forces found support for their cause from the newly formed Committee for Home Protection (CHP). Composed of the Oakland Real Estate Board, the Apartment House Owners Association, and other local development interests, the CHP had formed in 1948 to spearhead a drive for an anti-public housing referendum in Oakland. Attacking public housing as "socialistic," the CHP appealed to voters' patriotism, fiscal conservatism, and belief in free enterprise. In the midst of an economic upswing and growing anti-Communism, such rhetoric had strong appeal, particularly among the white middle class. The initiative won, defeating public housing in principle but without force of law. CHP forces were thus outraged when the city council later voted five to four in favor of three thousand new housing units on August 20, 1949.[43]
Infuriated, CHP leaders waged a fierce campaign designed to thwart pro-housing forces. Filing affidavits for the recall of three of the five pro-housing councilmembers (the other two had not yet served six months and were thus ineligible for recall), the CHP launched an elaborate media campaign associating the labor coalition with "socialized housing" and "CIO communism." While the use of redbaiting tactics had been
largely unsuccessful in past elections, a rising tide of anti-Communism made the public more suspicious and susceptible to such appeals. In a special election held in February 1950, two members were reelected, but a third, Scott Weakley, was ousted. Losing his job as a radio announcer as a result of alleged employer blacklisting, Weakley committed suicide shortly thereafter. In a low turnout election the following year, OVL councilmembers Joseph Smith and Raymond Pease also lost to CHP-backed candidates running on an anti-housing, anti-Communist platform. The remaining OVL representative died in office.[44]
By 1951, then, the liberal challenge in Oakland had run its course—defeated over the housing issue that had come to symbolize the future of the city. Conservative forces regained firm control of the city government and rescinded the federal housing contracts signed by their predecessors. Between 1945 and 1965, the city constructed a total of only five hundred public housing units. During these same years, the city leveled one temporary housing project after another, displacing thousands of migrants, veterans, and low-income residents. While most white tenants managed to find housing in nearby suburbs, minority residents found themselves limited to deteriorating, overcrowded urban neighborhoods.[45]
What had happened between 1947 and 1951 to so shift the course of Oakland politics? Most critical, the pervasive climate of Cold War anti-Communism worked to the advantage of conservatives who used redbaiting to discredit liberal forces. But the internal divisions that wracked the labor coalition were even more damaging. Under the impact of Taft-Hartley loyalty oaths and the bitterness of the 1948 presidential election, CIO forces were torn by raids, ousters, and in-fighting. With the most progressive labor forces in disarray, the behind-the-scenes leadership of the labor coalition fell to the AFL contingent led by Central Labor Council Chairman J. C. Reynolds.
Reynolds' leadership was damaging to the coalition in several ways. Most obviously, Reynolds' 1951 federal indictment on bribery and conspiracy charges critically harmed the credibility of the labor coalition. The Tribune's age-old cries of "labor bossism" now seemed disturbingly close to reality. In the political arena, Reynolds scorned any attempt to enlist the support of the local black community. From their perspective, black leaders had little cause to back labor candidates. Those elected in 1947 had not delivered on their campaign promises to pass a fair employment practices act and to deal with police brutality against minority citizens. Certainly, the conservative council majority had derailed their efforts to do so, but progressives had also defected on other issues such as the city sales tax increase.
In the conservative climate of postwar Oakland, labor representation was not the progressive panacea that many had hoped it would be. As the CIO Labor Herald explained, the defeat "was a tragic lesson in the cost of disunity and political opportunism."[46] Indeed, the internal effects of anti-Communism on the OVL proved more damaging than the external ones, as a feuding labor movement lost the ability to mobilize the community-wide coalition it had struggled so hard to build.
The devastating effects of postwar conservatism were by no means unique to Oakland. Particularly on the housing issue, progressive urban coalitions in many cities unraveled under redbaiting attacks by local conservatives. Under the coordination of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, local anti-housing groups formed around the country to fight public housing and its supporters. On the West Coast, where the fate of thousands of war housing tenants hung in the balance, anti-housing groups in Portland and Los Angeles launched successful referendum campaigns against public housing construction in the early fifties. On the heels of these victories, conservatives then used anti-housing appeals and redbaiting tactics to oust incumbent mayors Fletcher Bowron in Los Angeles and Dorothy Lee in Portland. As in Oakland, these cities then dismantled temporary war housing projects, displacing thousands of poor and minority residents into deteriorating, overcrowded neighborhoods.[47]
We should not, however, allow the bitter experiences of the 1950s to blind us to the accomplishments of progressives in the 1940s. In many ways, the activities of labor coalitions in the 1940s were a dress rehearsal for the urban liberalism of the 1960s and '70s. In Oakland and other Bay Area cities, labor demands such as civil rights legislation, district elections, rent control, and other urban social programs were eventually implemented. Public housing, with all its accompanying problems, would also reappear as a major urban program in the sixties and seventies. While many of these issues date back to the New Deal or before, it was World War II that was the springboard for an effective political mobilization on the municipal level.
The political arrangements of wartime cities offered labor representatives a new voice in municipal affairs and encouraged them to expand their political horizons from the workplace to the city at large. The formation of CIO-PACs gave this impulse an organizational coherence, while defense migrants provided an expanded working-class constituency. After the war, recessionary pressures served to galvanize labor and other progressive forces, helping them defeat business-backed incumbents. Labor unity, a willingness to build bridges to other community groups, and a commit-
ment to grassroots organizing were the key ingredients in the success of these urban movements.
Labor's role in forging a progressive coalition was not limited to Oakland; labor forces in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond also spearheaded the organization of progressive community movements in the 1940s. As in Oakland, the Allied Berkeley Citizens, the Richmond Better Government Committee, and the San Francisco Voters League all grew out of wartime CIO activities, with many of their leaders drawn from the same unions. The Los Angeles Voters League, founded in 1948, was a direct descendant of the United AFL Committee for Political Action organized in 1943 as an AFL counterpart to the CIO-PAC. Like the OVL, the Los Angeles and San Francisco Voters Leagues worked to bring labor together with other progressive groups in the community to pursue a broad-based, multiple-issue program. Explicitly rejecting the role of political lobbying groups, the Voters Leagues organized from the precinct level up, stressing grassroots political participation and leadership development among rank-and-file union members and community activists.[48]
While further research is needed on labor politics in California cities, the early experience of the Oakland Voters League reveals an innovative and exciting experiment in grassroots democracy and urban coalition-building—an experience that contrasts favorably with labor's increasing rigidity and conservatism on the national level. The experience of the OVL in the 1940s also suggests a kind of organizational bridge between the class-based movements of the 1930s and the cultural or community-based social movements that have emerged since the 1960s (i.e., civil rights, women's liberation, community organizing, etc.). While the conservatism of the 1950s posed a historical chasm between these two types of movements, it is clear that the new social activism did not emerge full-blown in the sixties; the urban movements of the 1940s provided important precedents.[49] Unfortunately for the newer movements, the demise of the OVL and other labor-led coalitions in the 1950s caused later activists to distance themselves from their predecessors. In the process, they have had to relearn the difficult lessons of organizing, coalition-building, and ideological development that are essential to effective social action.