The Pink Lady and Tricky Dick

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"There's not much to say about the 1950 campaign except that a man ran for Senate who wanted to get there and didn't care how."

Helen Gahagan Douglas
A Full Life (1982)

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Do you think the just–concluded midterm election campaign was vicious, mean–spirited, polarizing?

Well, it was. And it was expensive, too.

But, from what I have read and heard, you shoulda seen the California Senate race 60 years ago. That was a costly one, too. The amount isn't eye popping by today's standards, but in 1950 it was a fortune.

Tomorrow will mark 60 years since Republican Rep. Richard Nixon defeated Democratic Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Sheridan Downey.

Some people say Nixon won because he smeared Douglas that fall, accusing her of being, at the very least, sympathetic to communist causes. The repeated accusations gained credibility when Douglas was slow to respond, in spite of the fact that former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose son was running for governor, urged her to respond more decisively.

If Douglas had been quicker to retaliate, some say, Nixon would have lost that Senate race, and he would have been a man without an office, having abandoned his House seat. He would have been a has–been in California politics, never would have been chosen to run on Eisenhower's ticket two years later and, in the long run, the nation would have been spared his presidency and the Watergate scandal.

I have written here before about the "what–ifs" of history. They're certainly fun to think about. They make great topics for speculation, and I think we're all curious about the road not taken.

But I am doubtful about whether it is true that Douglas could have beaten Nixon. Even in a fantastical alternate reality. And thus it is wrong to give her too much credit/blame for what happened in the next quarter of a century.

It all probably would've happened, anyway.

Nixon and Douglas both entered the race in 1949; at the time, no other politicians were willing to take on Downey. But polls indicated that, when people were asked to choose between Downey and Douglas, Downey came up short, and the incumbent withdrew in March 1950, claiming that his health was not good.

Nixon and Douglas won their primaries, setting up one of the nastiest campaigns in American political history.

Actually, the campaign got nasty in the primaries, which, it should be noted, were handled considerably differently then — in some places — than they are today. The campaign Nixon waged was merely a continuation of the one against Douglas in the primary.

In 1950, the practice of cross–filing — in which a candidate ran not only in his/her own party's primary but the opposing party's primary as well — was permitted. California abolished the practice in 1959, but both Nixon and Douglas ran in each other's party primary, and both finished third.

The runnerup in each primary was a newspaper publisher named Manchester Boddy, a Democrat with no political experience who entered the race after Downey withdrew (and with Downey's blessing) and cross–filed in the Republican primary.

You have to imagine the atmosphere in which the campaign was conducted. It was early in the Cold War. The Russians had only recently successfully detonated a nuclear weapon. Joseph McCarthy was at the height of his anti–communist rhetorical powers.

Boddy never really provided much explanation for his candidacy, as far as I can tell. He had been approached by Democrats in the past to run for office, but he had declined, protesting that he had no interest in elected office. And his reasons for deciding to enter the 1950 race remain unknown.

But, once in the race, he apparently decided he wanted to win.

Unfortunately for Boddy, though, he appears to have had little charisma or flair for public speaking. The only other way to make his campaign competitive appeared to be the use of the smear.

Such McCarthyesque tactics already had been fairly successful that year, resulting in the primary defeats of two Southern senators, so Boddy tried to link Douglas to a congressman named Vito Marcantonio, a notorious New York radical who was said to be a supporter of communist causes. Boddy circulated the accusations in pamphlets printed with red ink.

Picking up that theme, Douglas was labeled "decidedly pink" and "pink shading to deep red" by Boddy's newspaper and others that were affiliated with it. She was called "the pink lady," and Boddy alleged, in his newspaper column, that Douglas belonged to "a small minority of red hots" who were determined to "establish a beachhead on which to launch a Communist attack on the United States."

About two weeks before the primary, Downey re–emerged and made a speech in which he said he did not believe Douglas was qualified to serve in the Senate.

Boddy wasn't successful in winning the nomination, but he did succeed in dividing the party and severely weakening Douglas, whose reluctance to retaliate to the smear campaign encouraged the Republicans to expand on the theme in the fall.

Nixon had been building his anti–communist credentials in his two terms in the House, and he wasted little time linking Douglas to communists.

I guess one of the "highlights" of the Nixon campaign — if one can call it that — was the "Pink Sheet," a flyer printed on pink paper that suggested that sending Douglas to Washington to serve in the Senate would be no different than voting for Marcantonio.

Douglas, the Pink Sheet alleged, had voted with Marcantonio on national security issues. Is that what Californians wanted? the sheet asked.

Eleanor Roosevelt recognized what the Pink Sheet meant and advised Douglas to respond without delay, but Douglas did not. Not long after the debut of the Pink Sheet, an alleged whispering campaign was launched, in which it was said that Douglas' husband, actor Melvyn Douglas, was a communist. His Jewish heritage also was mentioned.

The Pink Sheet appeared to be paying off for Nixon about six weeks before the election when 64 prominent Democrats endorsed him, ostensibly because Douglas' voting record so closely resembled Marcantonio's.

Nixon said Douglas was "pink right down to her underwear."

On Election Day, Nov. 7, 1950, it wasn't even close. Nixon received 59% of the vote, which seems like a pretty impressive achievement for a Republican in a state where voter registration was 58% Democrat and only 37% Republican — except for the fact that most of the statewide officeholders, including the state's popular governor, Earl Warren, were Republicans who had won Democratic support in the past.

But Douglas, too, was deceived by the numbers, and she apparently believed that most Democrats would vote for their party's nominees.

It's hard for me to understand why she might feel complacent. The 1950 midterms — conducted at a time when Gallup reported that the Democratic president had an approval rating of 41% in late October and 33% in early December — would have been difficult for Douglas, anyway, and she must have known it. The Korean War, suspicion of the administration's foreign policy in general and inflation made the electoral environment a hostile one.

Democrats lost ground in both chambers of Congress that November — not as much as they did in this year's midterms but enough to set the stage for Republicans to seize control two years later.

Democrats complained, in the aftermath of the election, that Nixon was another McCarthy and Douglas had been crucified, and there was certainly some truth in that.

Douglas "had been crucified, all right," wrote historian William Manchester, "but the worst spikes had been driven into her by fellow Democrats." Boddy's smear campaign, he said, guaranteed she would lose before the Republicans ever nominated Nixon.

It was suggested that sexism played a role in the vote, and perhaps that was true as well. There was certainly a greater reluctance to elect women to statewide office in 1950 than there is today — when California is represented by not one but two women in the U.S. Senate.

But I also think it was a time when the Cold War/Red Scare was at its most effective as a political wedge in the United States. Boddy and his newspaper made another contribution to American politics in the form of nicknames hung on Douglas and Nixon. In his newspaper column, Boddy dubbed Douglas "the Pink Lady," and someone at the paper called Nixon "Tricky Dick" during that campaign.

Douglas is an interesting figure in American political history. There is a kind of bipolarity in her treatment of that election. She insisted, in her posthumously published memoirs, "Nixon had his victory, but I had mine ... He hadn't touched me. I didn't carry Richard Nixon with me," but she seems to have carried a grudge for the rest of her life.

She campaigned for John F. Kennedy when he narrowly defeated Nixon for the presidency 10 years later, and she campaigned for George McGovern even though he was on his way to a landslide defeat when Nixon sought re–election as president in 1972.