Christ and the CIO: Blue-Collar Evangelicalism’s

Crisis of Conscience and Political Turn in Early

Cold-War California

Darren Dochuk
Purdue University

Abstract
This article explores tensions within the Democratic Party’s uneasy alliance of grassroots
labor and blue-collar evangelicalism that collapsed in heated confrontation during
California’s postwar political realignment. The context in which this played out is Ham
and Eggs, one of California’s largest old-age welfare movements during the 1930s
which, in the midst of economic reconstruction, found new (but short-lived) relevance
in the late 1940s. From spring 1945 until summer 1946 Ham and Eggs rallied workers
behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of
forcing new legislation on behalf of pensions for the elderly. In the process, it stirred a
political storm that thrust it into a significance exceeding its original intent. At issue
was the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this
juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism’s labor-friendly initiatives and
progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be
extended. Caught between a labor-Left movement within the Democratic Party that
looked to extend New Deal liberalism and a galvanized Christian Right, which looked
to roll it back, blue-collar evangelicals affiliated with Ham and Eggs confronted a new
political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith
commitments. With reluctance they chose the latter over the former. The decision
marked the beginning of blue-collar evangelicalism’s shift to the Right and ultimately
the formation of a broader evangelical political alliance that would prove instrumental
in the rise of California’s conservative Republican movement.

Hunched over his desk in the dim one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment he
shared with his family, Jonathan Perkins penned a letter he believed would
trigger political revolution. Dated April 25, 1945, Perkins’ late-night missive
to famous red-baiter Gerald L.K. Smith hardly concealed selfish intentions
when conveying this grandiose dream; in part, he wrote to rejuvenate a flagging
career. Endearingly branded “Ichabod Crane” by loyal supporters for his tall,
wiry frame and pointy features, Perkins had once ridden such inimitability to
success, first in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as pastor of the city’s largest Assemblies of
God church and then in California as one of Los Angeles’ most controversial
religious leaders. By spring of 1945, however, Perkins’s distinctions had lost
their charm. Banned from his denomination for radicalism, he now corre-
sponded with Smith as an awkward, disenfranchised cleric reduced to irregular
shifts on the assembly line at Goodyear and unfulfilling stints in the pulpit of a
small storefront church.

International Labor and Working-Class History

No. 74, Fall 2008, pp. 76– 100
# 2008 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
Christ and the CIO 77

Personally broken and professionally spent, Perkins nevertheless wrote his con-
fidant with a sincerity of purpose that exceeded his angst-ridden sense of self. The
timing was right and the opportunity obvious, he proclaimed in this vein, to rally
fellow blue-collar evangelicals behind a vision of religious revival, economic
reform, and political change. Beyond its obvious spiritual payoff, such an awaken-
ing, he suggested, would fix societal rifts created by postwar paralysis and new Cold
War anxieties. Imagine the results, he intoned, if America were to return to the
principles of social democracy preached so effectively by William Jennings
Bryan just a few years earlier. The earnestness that poured from his pen was
matched by the confidence with which Perkins transcribed his thoughts. In his
view, no one was better suited than he to help lead the charge, a point easily
made with reference to his résumé. Surely his recent hardships meant he was
called to usher working folk toward a more fulfilling existence promised by the
populist dictates of his faith.1
Smith answered Perkins’ call in the affirmative and soon came west to help
lead this crusade, but he was not the only one convinced by the Pentecostal’s cre-
dentials. Within months a veritable army of blue-collar evangelicals took to
California’s streets to lobby for the reforms advocated by their lanky leader. The
organization through which these activists worked for change was Ham
and Eggs, a movement founded in the 1930s but restarted during California’s
postwar economic reconversion crisis. For a fourteen-month stretch, from spring
1945 until summer 1946, Ham and Eggs used an effective grassroots lobby to
rally workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian
Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of welfare benefits. In
the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance far exceeding
its original intent.
The political tempest Ham and Eggs helped spin revolved around the “labor
question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture
about the extent to which New Deal liberalism’s labor-friendly initiatives and pro-
gressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be
extended. As historians have effectively demonstrated, no decisive answer to this
question would be offered in the short-term, leaving at least some room during the
Cold War era for political tussles over its subtler meanings. Yet, already by the
mid-1940s there seemed little chance that the labor question would effect any per-
manent reordering in American society, at least of the kind hoped for by the New
Deal’s most ardent supporters. While federal election results in 1946 and 1948
would see conservative Democrats and like-minded Republicans turn the tide
against New Deal Democrats in Congress, organized labor itself would shy away
from reformist goals to protect its position of power within a liberal establishment
that now saw mass consumption, not social democracy, as its chief aim. The irony of
this shift is obvious, for in the mid-1940s we are indeed witness to the moment at
which “Labor” “came to be both fundamentally more important yet fundamentally
less threatening” to American political life.2
Why the “labor question” was eclipsed at this time and to what end remains
a fundamental query for historians of postwar America, one that has elicited an
78 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

extensive but not yet complete array of scholarly emphases. While some, for
instance, have stressed race as the crucible through which New Deal liberalism
stumbled at this time, others concerned with state formation and urban develop-
ment, domestic and foreign policy, have drawn alternative conclusions.3 While
lending texture to these accounts, Ham and Eggs’ story adds another important
element in this equation: religion. It does so by revealing a crisis point at which
an important constituency of the New Deal order––the thousands of blue-collar
evangelical Democrats who worked in the West’s defense industries and wor-
shiped in the regions burgeoning Baptist, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist
churches––addressed the “labor question” on their own terms. Forced by vola-
tile circumstances beyond their own control, conditions raised by rapid demo-
graphic, economic, and cultural change created by wartime mobilization and
illustrated most clearly in partisan discord within the Democratic Party, these
Christian workers confronted a new political reality that compelled them to
choose between their class and faith commitments.
In the end they chose the latter over the former, but as the Ham and Eggs
affair reveals, they did so with reluctance and only after diluting the economic
imperatives of their theology. Rooted in the populist evangelicalism they had
long heard preached in their churches and seen revealed in scripture was
William Jennings Bryan’s doctrine of “Jefferson and Jesus,” a social gospel
from below that encouraged protest against the centralizing forces of the
modern state and defense of a society buttressed by personal ties to local
institutions, deep devotion to Christian morality, and equal access to a truly
free-market economy. Simplistic and at times incoherent in its delivery, radically
egalitarian in class terms but also prone to fierce racism, populist evangelicalism
nevertheless held enough consistency within its ideological framework to see its
political goals addressed clearly by a pre- and interwar Democratic Party that
stood both for their craft and for their creed. In the tumult that surrounded
and ultimately destroyed the Ham and Eggs movement, blue-collar evangelicals
witnessed the swift dissolution of this vision.4
To be sure the experience jarred blue-collar evangelicals, but it was equally
disruptive for California’s political alignment. Although not the only harbinger
of change, Ham and Eggs was an especially violent one that proved extant pol-
itical alliances could not last. For those on the labor Left, who shared the
Democratic Party with blue-collar evangelicals, Ham and Eggs smacked of
fascism and illustrated the damage done to industrial unionism and social
democracy when plain folk religion called the shots. For an emerging conserva-
tive coalition united behind Christian anticommunism, Ham and Eggs offered
further proof that organized labor and the New Deal state had become political
leviathans that threatened the Christian American values they now sought to
protect. Caught in the middle, Ham and Eggs thus became a symbolic pivot
for both the Right and Left. When blue-collar evangelicals who supported
this movement finally leaned right in response to their predicament they
found conservative allies eager to embrace them. For the following
decades they would return the affection by becoming the ground troops for a
Christ and the CIO 79

conservative Republican movement that swept east from California across the
rest of the nation.
This, then, was the big picture at play the moment Perkins wrote to Smith,
yet at no point was it ever obvious to the citizens who responded in mass to the
preacher’s call. Emotion as much as logic, parochialism as much as broad vision,
guided their actions. This makes Ham and Eggs’ history difficult but even more
important to tell, for in its details, drawn from letters, literature, and “spy
reports” crafted by activists on both the Right and Left, we are witness to a
short and turbulent but consequential turning point in California’s––and ulti-
mately the nation’s––political destiny.

Ham and Eggs Redux

The story behind Perkins’s letter begins a decade earlier. Ham and Eggs––or the
Retirement Life Payments Association, as it was formally known––was the most
sensational of eighty different old-age welfare schemes cultivated in California
during the 1930s. Led by the brother tandem of Willis and Lawrence Allen and
engineered by one-time End Poverty in California (EPIC) official Sherman
Bainbridge, Ham and Eggs was formed in 1937 with hopes of curing economic
depression by making the government fund pensioners with a weekly allowance.
It was Bainbridge who gave the movement its popular name when, in a casual
reference to the difficulties of securing food for the elderly in times of economic
hardship, he told an audience, “We must have our ham and eggs!” Within
months of this declaration, Ham and Eggs claimed a statewide membership of
362,000 and supporting constituency of 1,000,000, numbers that commanded
the attention of the state’s most powerful politicians.5
Although senior citizens comprised a significant bloc of support, the move-
ment’s success stemmed from its ability to generate a broader appeal among
other sectors of society. Structured around a simple economic plan that would
create a state bank to manage the exchange of thirty one-dollar warrants issued
each week to every unemployed Californian over the age of fifty, the legalization
of this scrip as tender for the payment of all state taxes, and a three percent gross
income tax on all persons and corporations, Ham and Eggers argued that their
plan held the key to problems facing all Americans regardless of age, gender, or
class. As the organization’s printed newspaper Ham and Eggs for Californians
liked to illustrate through depictive cartoons, with Californians over fifty comforta-
bly retired from the labor force and spending their thirty dollars per week, young
people, laborers, and struggling blue-collar families would all benefit equally.6 This
simple formula raised red flags for upper-middle-class voters but held deep truths
for the rank and file, especially those populating Los Angeles’s blue-collar suburbs
who prided themselves on self sufficiency and communal voluntarism but
welcomed government largesse and checks on corporate capitalism in times of
need. In their minds, Ham and Eggs seemed common sense. Radical in its condem-
nation of economic inequalities yet conservative enough in its refusal to undermine
80 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

local institutions of authority––church, home, and guild––Ham and Eggs offered

short-term government relief to ensure long-term personal well-being.7
Despite (or because of) its strong support from California’s lower echelons,
Ham and Eggs failed to achieve the legislative success it coveted, but it came
close. In the fall 1938 election Ham and Eggs failed by the slightest of
margins (defeated by a vote of 1,143,670 yes to 1,398,999 no) to have its initiat-
ive passed into legislation. While the respectable showing made Ham and
Eggers determined to force a special election in 1939, it also crystallized opposi-
tion. Out from the political shadows emerged several interest groups ready to
expose Ham and Eggs as a disastrous concoction of ideas. Among these nay-
sayers was a usual suspect, big business, which argued that Ham and Eggs’
plan would further destabilize the economy by replacing a struggling but proven
currency with a worthless form of monetary exchange that would surely collapse.
What caught the Allen brothers off guard, however, was criticism from other unex-
pected sources, like liberal religious leaders, for example, which deemed their plan
immoral.8
All of these criticisms contributed to Ham and Eggs’ defeat, but the censure
that had the most damning effect was one that linked the movement with the
labor Left. Although dismissed by many as vacuous in substance, the Ham
and Eggs agenda nevertheless struck fear among California’s civic elite as a col-
lectivist scheme.9 Martin Dies, chairman of the Special House Committee on
Un-American Activities, validated fears when, on a visit to Los Angeles in
the fall of 1939, he claimed to possess evidence that, if voted in, Ham and
Eggs would be seized by the Communist Party and used to “wreck the state gov-
ernment as an opening wedge in its campaign to overthrow the government of
the United States.”10 Dies’ evidence might have included the official endorse-
ment Ham and Eggs received from William Schneiderman, Executive
Secretary of the Communist Party of California, who believed that all

progressive-minded people . . . should support the passage of the $30-every-Thursday

initiative measure, as a means to defeat the reactionary “economy” block and
re-inforce[sic] the people’s mandate for social security and recovery measures, the
fight for which must be pressed by the New Deal in a bold and aggressive manner
against the interests of monopoly capital.11

But most Californians did not need Dies or Schneiderman to tell them of Ham
and Eggs’ courting of the labor Left. Although hesitant to be linked with card-
carrying Communists, Ham and Eggs leaders made broad overtures to industrial
labor and found their dealings with this constituency rewarding. Of this alliance,
less sympathetic liberal pundits like Winston and Marian Moore sardonically
joked, “The C.I.O. sent them love and kisses and, not to be outdone, the A.F.
of L. came through with many happy returns.”12
In the end, Ham and Eggs proved unable to deflect the criticisms heaped
upon it in the weeks leading up to the November 1939 election. Following an
intense campaign not seen in California since the EPIC campaign of 1934,
Christ and the CIO 81

a record eighty two percent of registered voters turned out, with 1,933,557 of
them voting no and 993,204 yes to the Ham and Eggs plan. Infuriated by what
they perceived as a betrayal of their movement by Governor Culbert Olson,
whose earlier support for Ham and Eggs waned noticeably as the election
approached, Ham and Eggs leaders vowed revenge. Then, with war looming
and California’s electorate focused abroad, Ham and Eggs decided that retreat
was the best tactic for their organization, at least for the time being.13
The Allens’ decision to resurrect Ham and Eggs in 1945 stemmed from a
combination of political opportunism and genuine desire to finish the fight
they had started years earlier. In basic terms, the Allens hoped to secure the
required number of signatures on a petition that would force state officials
again to place their initiative on the 1946 election ballot. Their endgame was
a yes vote that would lead to a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing
pensions for the elderly. But it was also more than that. In order to achieve
their goal, the Allens sought to maximize a climate of protest created by
postwar economic recession. Along the way they hoped their work in the
trenches would garner them personal power within the Democratic Party.
Two adjustments were considered essential for victory on these counts, both
of which banked success on one of California’s fastest growing constituencies:
blue-collar evangelicals.
Ham and Eggs, the Allens decided in the first place, needed religion. In its
1930s incarnation Ham and Eggs had drawn loosely from popular religious
influences that helped fuel other California grassroots movements like the
Townsend Plan. But compared to Francis Townsend, a respected Protestant gen-
tleman whose organization directly recruited Protestant ministers and appealed
to California’s evangelical voter, the backslidden-Methodist Allen brothers
seemed less focused on garnering support in the local pew.14 In Ham and
Eggs’ postwar form this changed, dramatically. From the outset of their 1945
campaign, the Allens knew that success the second time around would
depend on a more conscious and rigorous courting of working-class evangelicals
whose numbers in California had swelled during the war years as a result of
in-migration from the southern Bible Belt.15 Institutionally, this meant
tapping into the pews of the hundreds of Pentecostal, Southern Baptist,
Church of Christ, and independent fundamentalist churches that clustered
around Los Angeles’ defense industries. As illustrated by expansion just
within the Assemblies of God, these clusters were indeed thick with potential.
Between 1941 and 1946, the Assemblies of God’s total number of churches in
Southern California alone increased by fifty percent (from 107 to 151) with
the vast majority of these built along the industrial corridor that stretched
south from Los Angeles to Orange County.16 The Allens’ path to these pews
came through preachers, and here too they had immeasurable opportunity.
Reporting in 1946 to his superiors at denominational headquarters in
Springfield, F.C. Woodworth, Superintendent of the Southern California
District Council of the Assemblies of God, described the overabundance of
pastors that made uniformity in his ranks so difficult: “We have about 175
82 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

churches and about 650 preachers on our roll; consequently, you can see some-
what of the task we have here.”17 Besides leaving other regions of the country
understaffed, this excess meant hundreds of Pentecostal pastors had to look
elsewhere for employment, either in other denominations, independent churches
of their own making, or outside the ministry as laborers in the industrial
workforce. Woodworth’s struggles were the Allens’ boon, for in this network of
uprooted and unemployed clerics was the personnel needed for an effective grass-
roots political campaign.
In order to fashion links with these clerics and turn their parishioners into
activists, the Allens’ needed a religious doctrine for Ham and Eggs that would
sanctify the movement’s economic agenda. The Allens were confident that
such fusion could take place if they adhered to a formula laid out earlier. The
ultimate precedent, of course, was late nineteenth-century Populism, whose
championing of localized labor, popular democracy, and evangelical religion
had galvanized Bryan’s career.18 But more recent examples could also be
drawn from Depression-era organizations like Huey Long’s “Share Our
Wealth,” which had sought to “pull down the rich and . . . raise the spiritual
state of the nation” at the same time.19 In its initial state, Ham and Eggs had
drawn from the same pool of religiously inflected imperatives, but in a less con-
sistent and distinguishable manner. Now that was about to change.
Perkins was the man who convinced the Allens that religion could guaran-
tee Ham and Eggs’ success. His illustrious and unconventional career no doubt
helped warm the Allens to this possibility. Having worked in the region’s fac-
tories, ministered in some of California’s largest and smallest evangelical
churches, and barnstormed for some of the West Coast’s most popular political
movements (including the notorious, anti-Semitic kind), Perkins was not only
well versed in grassroots political discourse but also well connected to the
region’s most politicized preachers. At the same time he carried personal
baggage that often overburdened the constructive potential of his professional
aspirations. Insecure about his social location and status within the evangelical
subculture, prone to conspiratorial thinking and bouts of exaggeration in the
name of self-promotion, he nevertheless suffered most from a spiritual earnest-
ness that manifested itself in fierce and often detrimental anti-institutional beha-
vior. Perkins was enigmatic, to say the least, but not so different from other
Pentecostal preachers of the day who saw themselves as prophets working
against society’s grain. Yet even with these troubling idiosyncrasies, it did not
take long for Perkins to earn the Allens’ trust by brandishing his extensive reli-
gious and political ties. Shortly after agreeing to join Ham and Eggs Perkins
assembled the “California Pastors’ Committee,” comprised mainly of local
Pentecostal and Baptist ministers but also of more prominent clerics like
Trinity Methodist’s Reverend Bob Shuler. Estimated at one thousand but
likely numbering around four hundred, this band of preachers immediately
set about encouraging those in their pews to rally behind Ham and Eggs.20
Through Perkins’ connections, the Allens also succeeded at making the
second adjustment to the postwar Ham and Eggs organization by turning it
Christ and the CIO 83

into an anticommunist organization. The reasoning behind the shift was three-
fold. Stung in the 1930s by charges that their movement was a communist
front, the Allens entered the postwar era determined to prove detractors
wrong. Ham and Eggs was not communist, they would insist, but rather an auth-
entically American initiative carried out by patriotic citizens to reclaim demo-
cratic principles upon which their nation was founded. The second motive
grew out of the first. Cognizant of the anticommunist sentiments that animated
their new constituency, the Allens wanted to assure their evangelical followers
that lobbying for economic reform was not the same as advocating collectivism.
Finally, always looking for sensational marketing strategies, the Allens recog-
nized that anticommunism was good business in postwar California. Although
increasingly evident nationwide, in 1945 no other region could match the inten-
sity with which California encouraged or battled communist influences. By
joining California’s front-line assault on the Red Menace the Allens hoped
Ham and Eggs would generate the publicity necessary to make its more substan-
tive claims stick in the citizenry’s conscience.
When searching for a charismatic leader to dramatize their new
anti-communist concern, the Allens looked to Gerald L.K. Smith. With Perkins
as mediator, the Allens entered into an agreement with Smith whereby in
exchange for touring California on behalf of the movement he would be
allowed to use Ham and Eggs’ platform to propagate his strident Christian antic-
ommunism.21 Just as the Allens predicted it would be, Smith’s impact was immedi-
ate. During the summer of 1945 the Allens marketed Smith as a new spokesman of
Ham and Eggs and by doing so created a buzz in the local media that no amount of
money or business savvy could otherwise have engendered. By mid-November
1945 Smith was responsible for doubling the number of subscriptions to the
Ham and Eggs newsletter and forcing the organization to look for bigger auditor-
iums than ever imagined necessary.22 Throughout the campaign the Allens would
remain “tickled pink” with Smith’s ability to generate publicity, even of the most
frequent, negative kind.23 Rank-and-file evangelicals who supported the move-
ment, however, were soon to learn the heavy price that came with this devil’s
bargain.

Blue Collar Evangelicalism Awakened

What the Allens thought possible in the late 1940s, then, was a political front
that would advocate change in the same way populist evangelicalism had
done since the 1880s. In a sense, by appealing simultaneously to economic inter-
ests and religious values, the Allens believed Ham and Eggs could carve out a
third way between the industrial unionism and progressive liberalism that ani-
mated the Left on one hand, and the antistatism and strident Christian antic-
ommunism that energized the Right on the other.
To be sure, the plan was novel, for already in the West wartime volatility
had created an either/or political scenario in which class concern and religious
creed no longer seemed compatible. Political leadership on both ends of the
84 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

spectrum accentuated the divide, leaving Ham and Eggs’ blue-collar evangeli-
cals feeling embattled on all fronts. While in their factories they encountered
advocates of the CIO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) that banked hope
for societal reform on powerful unions and an active, secular state, from the
pulpits of the region’s influential middle-class evangelical churches they heard
sermons celebrating free market capitalism and Christian patriotism with little
heed to economic injustice. Yet if the Allens were a bit naı̈ve in their goal,
they were not completely misguided, for even amid these pressures, most
rank-and-file evangelicals still believed they could advance an agenda of politi-
cal change at the top through the implementation of a social gospel from below.
Jefferson and Jesus, they remained convinced in other words, was not a simplis-
tic political notion reserved for a romanticized past.
From May 1945 through June 1946, Ham and Eggs set out to prove this point
by pursuing its objectives on two fronts. Providing the grassroots momentum would
be regularly scheduled local rallies during which evangelical and nonevangelical
laborers could be educated in a gospel of reform. Creating headlines for the move-
ment, meanwhile, would be Smith’s crusades, gatherings the Allens hoped would
help galvanize broader support among middle-class Californians, especially
those whose anticommunist priorities might bring them into fellowship with their
blue-collar allies. Although the second tactic would soon take precedence, it was
the first that offered substantive hope for change. In community halls throughout
the state neighbors gathered to sing, speak, and listen to a message of empower-
ment based on workers’ rights and religious commitment. It was fleeting and not
to be repeated again in a postwar era that would see material interests eclipsed
in the evangelical mind, but in this moment laborers called forth in unison the
virtues of Christ and the CIO.
From the outset Perkins took charge of Ham and Eggs’ ground-level attack
by using his pulpit and pamphlets to turn the movement into a full-fledged evan-
gelistic crusade. He revealed these intentions at a downtown Los Angeles
meeting in fall 1945. With the “rattle and clatter from passing streetcars
outside on Hill Street” offering a metaphor for the numbing distractions of mod-
ernity, Perkins reminded his audience of the unencumbered life he and many of
his listeners had experienced back in Oklahoma before urging the restitution of
this lifestyle. The list of catchy invectives that followed helped Perkins empha-
size his point: “Ham ‘n’ Eggs’ plan [is] outlined in the Bible. If the ministers can’t
see this, or won’t . . . get some new ministers!” “Everything belongs to God and
not to the big trusts. We have the Bible on our side!” “We must wake up the
preachers and the politicians!”24 More coherent in its biblical defense of Ham
and Eggs was the booklet Perkins authored and began selling at this time.
Advertised at meetings, Perkins’ The Preacher and the State contained the obli-
gatory stab at modernist, mainline preachers who, in his mind, had abandoned
Christ’s call to defend the rights of the poor and joined the “unions of the rich”
(like the Merchants and Manufacturers Associations) to protect the rights of
property. Perkins’ chastisement, however, was not reserved for modernists.
Though sympathetic toward their fears of promoting social justice at the
Christ and the CIO 85

expense of individual salvation, Perkins reminded his allies that it was equally
remiss to ignore “plain scripture on economic matters.” It was all the more
negligent, he emphasized, for Pentecostals and Baptists to shirk this duty for
they had the advantage of “working among the poor or common people as a
rule.” What evangelicals in every kind of pew had to do, Perkins proclaimed,
was stretch their political awareness beyond the narrow confines of charity
and begin acting boldly for change in affairs of the state.25
With pride Perkins watched as this message increasingly dictated the terms
of Ham and Eggs mobilization. Throughout the fall of 1945 and well into spring
of 1946 Ham and Eggs meetings continued to emphasize its evangelical
qualities but always in a manner that embraced its working-class
imperatives. Programming strategies reflected this. While one meeting in
March, for example, saw a platform of preachers listening intently to Leslie
G. Taylor, Executive Secretary of the CIO’s shipyard union in San Pedro, eluci-
date Ham and Eggs’ “economic education” of the common worker, on another
platform another day Taylor and his compatriots were treated to a sermon by a
Methodist preacher and a selection of gospel favorites sung by Rev. James
Warren Lowman, friend of Perkins and regular soloist at Ham and Eggs meet-
ings. Lowman’s moving rendition of “The Stranger of Galilee” was preceded by
an equally heartrending testimony by Laguerre Drouet, a former Water and
Power employee of twenty years, American Federation of Labor member and
First- and Second-World-War veteran, who had converted to Ham and Eggs
after reading Perkins’ The Preacher and the State, a book that had revealed to
him “God’s Law” and that “Labor deserves a break.”26
While Ham and Eggs’ first line of attack ran smoothly under Perkins’
command, the organization’s second plan to market Smith’s anticommunism
proved far less easy to control. At the beginning its prospects seemed good. On
May 27, 1945, the Allens first introduced Smith to an audience of five hundred
“chronic Ham-and-Eggers,” then four nights later before an invitation-only
crowd of two thousand gathered in Los Angeles’ Embassy Auditorium heralded
him again as Ham and Eggs’ great hope. Smith was joined on stage at this larger
rally by a greeters panel that included local radio commentator G. Allison
Phelps, Claude A. Watson, a “perennial candidate for the Prohibition Party,”
Mrs. Adele Cox, head of the California Chapter of “We, the Mothers Mobilize
for America, Inc.,” and both Woodworth and Shuler, who opened the meeting
with prayer.27 To Smith’s glee, upon his request for audience members to indicate
if they were ministers of the gospel, over three hundred hands were raised.28
Perkins liked to brag that he could organize a “parade of Fundamentalist preach-
ers” behind the Ham and Eggs movement, and early returns suggested some merit
to his claims.29
Designed to make a splash, Smith’s appearance in Southern California
caused a tidal wave of fervor among the region’s evangelical citizens. For the
next six months the Smith-led rallies, designed to support Perkins’ local gather-
ings, became the movement’s focal point. As illustrated by one gathering at Los
Angeles’ Polytechnic High School Auditorium on November 3, 1945, public
86 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

spectacle always followed. On this night three thousand Angelenos arrived

ready for a routine of revivalist preaching, old-time hymn singing, and political
barnstorming. Willis Allen opened proceedings by leading the audience in the
“Pledge of Allegiance” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and then pro-
nounced Ham and Eggs a success with 495,000 members and its commitment to
redistribution of wealth “among the people regardless of color, class or creed.”
After setting the tone Allen extended a welcome to Smith who, “as representa-
tive of 3,000,000 thinking people . . . and 21 patriotic groups,” had graciously
accepted the invitation to lobby for Ham and Eggs. To the thrill of those stand-
ing, applauding Allen’s welcome, Smith ascended to the podium and leaped into
a diatribe against “the mangy Reds!” Then, as if turning off a light switch, Smith
announced that it was time for prayer.
Following prayer Smith resumed his sermon by navigating the same
anthology of maxims that had fuelled his politics since the 1930s. After lament-
ing the hardships that had befallen average Americans because of New Deal
liberalism, Smith turned somber as he invited his audience to think about
what their fight against an overbearing state meant for their communities,
country, and their own status as free individuals. Lest they forget the grand
purpose of their struggles, Smith then invoked the spirit of his champion,
Huey Long. With the uncanny homiletic flair that had made him Long’s unoffi-
cial chaplain, Smith began to recite the eulogy he had composed ten years
earlier to honor the slain Louisiana statesman. “Greater love hath no man. . ..
His spirit shall never rest as long as hungry bodies cry for food, as long as
lean human frames stand naked, as long as homeless wretches haunt this land
of plenty.” Fifteen minutes later Smith brought the valedictory to a close with
typical hyperbolic panache: “He was the Stradivarius, whose notes rose in
competition with jealous drums, envious tomtoms. His was the unfinished symph-
ony.” Sensing the poignancy of the moment he had coaxed along, Smith con-
cluded the meeting with a Longfellow poem and prayer instead of with the
scheduled rousing hymn.30 The meeting adjourned, and Ham and Eggers
quietly shuffled out of the dank auditorium into the crisp California night.

Mobilizing for Democracy

When Smith arrived on the West Coast he touched off a political storm that
exceeded the Allens’ expectations. Stirring energy behind the storm were two
phalanxes of political activists that sought different futures for their community,
neither of which cared much for Ham and Eggs but both of which saw the move-
ment as a potential wedge in the larger political battle now being waged. On the
Left stood a coalition of labor leaders and liberal progressive Democrats, on the
Right a contingent of middle-class evangelical and conservative Republicans.
When distilled, the core issue separating them seemed straightforward: Would
postwar American liberal democracy follow a course started in the 1930s by
extending labor and government power in hopes of codifying racial toleration,
economic equality, social justice, and international cooperation? Or, would
Christ and the CIO 87

it revert back to an older essence by at once limiting state power over citizens,
local communities, voluntary agencies, and the market, and increasing it abroad
for proliferation and defense of these principles? In partisan terms, the matter
boiled down more simply: would the Democratic Party advance the New
Deal, or the Republican Party roll it back? Active in a region where the political
stakes seemed higher than anywhere else, Ham and Eggs quickly came to bear a
heavy burden for its vulnerability.
California’s progressive-labor alliance exerted pressure on Ham and Eggs
from the left.31 Comprised of New Deal liberals, CIO campaigners, ecumenically
minded Protestant and Jewish clerics, and Hollywood celebrities, this coalition
was startled into action after probing the area’s blue-collar churches (of which
they knew little about) and learning that behind the façade of Smith’s extremism
and Ham and Eggs’ unorthodoxy was an entire religious subculture whose sensi-
bilities appeared very different from its own.32 Even though it would continue to
presume racism as part of this subculture’s essence (and thereby miss some of its
ideological complexities) this coalition now recognized that it could no longer
dismiss Ham and Eggs as simply the fringe. With gathering momentum sparked
by this discovery, the left-leaning alliance created its own countermovement
under the title of Mobilization for Democracy (MFD). Led by California
Attorney General Robert Kenny, journalist Carey McWilliams, and screen-
sensation Orson Wells, MFD set out to educate Californians about the increasing
threat of bigotry in their communities, a sordid trait they were convinced Ham
and Eggs’ legion of “hillbilly preachers” wanted to transport west from Dixie.
Supplying MFD’s ground troops were those in the labor Left and the CIO’s
PAC whose experiences within California’s vibrant Popular Front in the 1930s
made them especially determined in the 1940s to defuse social prejudices that
threatened the region’s labor force. At the center of this campaign were men
like Philip Connelly, the communist firebrand who acted as secretary-treasurer
of the Los Angeles Industrial Union Council (CIO), president of the State CIO
Industrial Union Council, and a major player in Los Angeles’ civic politics
throughout the 1940s.33 For Connelly, Harry Bridges, and California’s other
CIO organizers, race and religion had come to animate their politics as much
as class. This transition had come as a result of two experiences, one negative
the other positive; both shaped their opinions of Ham and Eggs. In the first
place, recent organizational campaigns throughout the South had exposed
them to ministers who constantly thwarted local drives to unionize workers
and extend civil rights.34 Now, in Ham and Eggs, it seemed they faced the
threat of southern racism and religious bigotry again, only this time in their
own backyard. An equally powerful impulse for fighting Ham and Eggs came
from a more optimistic belief that the West was a racial frontier, welcoming
to a cosmopolitan, ecumenical pluralism that held the key for postwar society.
In this vision the fortunes of a truly democratic order rode on the “California
experiment.”35
With this all-or-nothing mentality, MFD members spent the fall of 1945
marshalling forces for an assault on Ham and Eggs. The first strategy MFD
88 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

employed was preventative in nature. Buoyed by the actions of school boards in

San Francisco and San Diego where requests from Ham and Eggs for access to
public auditoriums had been denied, MFD sought an injunction from Los
Angeles officials prohibiting the use of school auditoriums like Polytechnic
High’s. It introduced the motion at a school board meeting on October 14.
With 500 representatives of 250 civic organizations present and McWilliams,
Eddie Cantor, and Socialist Workers Party leader Myra Tanner Weiss delivering
speeches on its behalf, MFD called for cancellation of the Ham and Eggs
meeting planned two nights later. MFD activists knew they were on shaky
ground when raising the issue of free speech, since in this instance they them-
selves seemed eager to constrain it, but nevertheless proceeded to argue that
Smith threatened social order by encouraging a “form of violence anathema
to free speech.”36 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw things dif-
ferently, however, and defended Smith on the grounds that MFD’s petition itself
was the “savage blow at free speech.” The defense was convincing, for shortly
after hearing it school board members voted to allow Ham and Eggs use of
Polytechnic’s auditorium, stating in the process that they were not a censoring
body.37
Irate over this decision, MFD decided to carry the fight into the political
arena by adopting a seldom-used weapon: the recall. Its target was Meade
McClanahan, a city councilman who frequented Ham and Eggs rallies. The
scene of the struggle was McClanahan’s 13th District, a primarily white working-
class community of bungalows and apartments (including the one Perkins inha-
bited) that also included pockets of affluent liberals and radical artists. MFD
mustered these activists and all available resources into a no-holds-barred pub-
licity campaign that sullied McClanahan’s name in any way possible. A common
sight for this district’s residents were posters with McClanahan’s name inscribed
below photographs of Hitler and word descriptions that exposed the “peanut
politician” as a “Negro-hater,” “Jew-hater,” “labor-hater” and the dupe of busi-
nessmen and “backward people.”38 McClanahan’s defenders met the barrage
with extreme tactics of their own. While McClanahan and Perkins canvassed
local churches to drum up support, the California Republican Assembly
(CRA) and a “Committee of 500” concerned citizens (comprised mostly of
pastors and women) fought the recall street by street.39 Despite these efforts,
MFD delivered McClanahan a humiliating defeat that left him bankrupt, out
of work, and personally despondent.40
Progressive activists scored a victory with McClanahan’s recall, but the
most devastating tactic employed against Ham and Eggs proved to be the sim-
plest: public protest. Following defeat in the courts, MFD redoubled efforts to
prevent Smith’s access to Los Angeles’s public auditoriums by recruiting pick-
eters from its coordinating agencies. With efficiency worthy of its name, MFD
carried out its first strike on October 16 when 15,000 banner-waving protestors
circled Polytechnic’s auditorium to disrupt the meeting inside. On November 3
protestors appeared again, only this time a primed police force was ready for the
onslaught. In the wake of the mid-October rally, Ham and Eggers had
Christ and the CIO 89

lambasted city officials for allowing such demonstrations. In response, Mayor

Fletcher Bowron made good on a promise to control the picketers outside
Polytechnic High. While inside Smith waxed eloquent on Huey Long’s legacy,
police outside proceeded swiftly and arrested seventy-nine of the most belliger-
ent demonstrators. In frustration, MFD disbanded, then marched to the
Olympic Auditorium where they held a spirited mass meeting of their own.41
To the dismay of city officials the pattern of confrontation that surfaced at
Ham and Eggs meetings in October escalated in the coming months, galvanizing
in the process, an alliance of right-wing opponents. Although not necessarily in
agreement with the Ham and Eggs agenda, nor supportive of Smith’s reaction-
ary tone, conservative allies gathered from local Republican groups, middle-
class evangelical churches, and business associations rallied around these two
political players out of contempt for a common adversary. Writing to Bowron
about his own involvement with Ham and Eggs, one individual expressed
what many of his allies believed when he suggested that though reprehensible
as an individual, Smith represented a much larger, legitimate struggle against
evil forces that threatened the country: communism, secularism, and moral
degeneracy. Such a cause was worth fighting regardless of who stood next to
you in the trenches. But there was more to this unity than a shared enemy.42
All who backed the struggle against MFD harbored a similar assessment of
current politics that grew out of disillusionment with or outright contempt for
New Deal liberalism. When they witnessed or read about MFD’s assault on
Ham and Eggs they recoiled, convinced more than ever that New Deal liberal-
ism, first promised as a temporary fix, was becoming the established order. And
as they continued to observe MFD’s actions they grew increasingly weary that
communist radicals in government, mainline Protestantism, organized labor,
and Hollywood were setting the terms of this new establishment.
As tensions mounted with MFD, Ham and Eggers thus found themselves
inundated with support from conservatives of all kinds. None of these advocates
carried more weight among Ham and Eggers than those who (like they) had
been heavily invested in California’s New Deal Democratic coalition during
the 1930s. By the early 1940s news of communist advances abroad helped
confirm fears at home that this coalition was a communist front. Sensing, in
fact encouraging these fears, were a number of dissenting Democrats who pro-
ceeded to wrest control of the legislative assembly and inaugurate a government
sanctioned anticommunist purge.43 Sam Yorty and Jack Tenney, two state con-
gressmen from Los Angeles, provided the leadership for this crusade. Once con-
sidered the left of the Left, both Democrats caused a storm in the early 1940s by
forcing former colleagues to testify before California’s Joint Fact-Finding
Committee on Un-American Activities. Especially dramatic, Tenney’s journey
to the Right came to an end in September 1944 when he declared his switch
to the GOP because his former party had been “taken over lock, stock and
barrel by Sidney Hillman, the C.I.O. Political Action Committee and the
Communist Party.”44 Tenney was especially supportive of Ham and Eggers
and, out of a sense of solidarity and with hopes of recruiting them to his
90 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

cause, appeared at their meetings to offer his testimony of political conversion.

It is impossible to know what they thought at the time, but it is likely Tenney’s
listeners realized anew that their local struggle was part of a seismic shift in the
nation’s political alignment.45
Wherever the advice and support secular conservatives offered Ham and
Eggs’ blue-collar evangelicals fell short, words of encouragement from middle-
class evangelical brethren filled the void. In this context Bob Shuler’s investment
in Ham and Eggs became especially crucial. A southern Methodist and Democrat
by birth, Shuler was, at the point of collision between Ham and Eggs and MFD,
California’s most powerful emissary for populist evangelicalism. Although solidly
middle-class in standing and pastor of an affluent congregation, Shuler ascribed to
a political vision that corresponded with that of his blue-collar friends. Like them
he had supported the New Deal but now feared that it was working against the
interests of Jefferson and Jesus. Once MFD began its protests, Shuler thus
found a ready, tangible target on which to pin his fears and criticisms.
He did so in public fashion. In a case that turned into fodder for the press,
Shuler, on the night of Smith’s October appearance at Polytechnic High, had
become the victim of a beating that left him bleeding and raging mad.
Following the ruckus, Shuler drafted a letter to Mayor Bowron describing in
great detail MFD’s aggressive tactics. Shuler wrote of his attempt to enter the
auditorium:

I was kicked, struck over the head with a stick and twice pushed to my knees. I was
cursed, called a son of a bitch. . .. I saw an old lady, trying to enter the building,
soundly beaten by two young women. Finally the old lady turned and left,
crying as she went. . .. There was no picket line in front of that High School build-
ing. It was a mob. It was a mob in action.46

Shuler went on to compare his experience to a lynching in his home state:

“I know a mob. I stood by the side of the Sheriff of Lamar County, Texas,
until a mob that burned two Negroes trampled us down and went over us.
This mob [MFD] was just as malicious and mischievous . . . as was that
mob.”47 In cleverly turning the southern problem on its head Shuler voiced an
opinion that was gaining traction with conservatives. Dixie’s rising in
California, according to this assessment, stemmed not from the activities of
plain folk preachers, but belligerent union leaders and communist agitators
determined to apply their southern strategy in the West.
If Shuler had reserved his comments for private correspondence with
Bowron, conservative opposition might not have gelled so quickly, but by refer-
encing the Ham and Eggs controversy in his pulpit and print ministries, he
virtually guaranteed that it would assume new significance. Throughout the
campaign Shuler used editorial pages in his church paper, The Methodist
Challenge, to voice his frustrations with MFD. His editorial of October 1945,
titled “That Mass Meeting,” was typical for the way it sought distance from
Ham and Eggers while at the same time championing their cause in the face
Christ and the CIO 91

of MFD picketing. “I do not belong to any movement with which Gerald Smith
is associated,” Shuler began before adding, “But between the crowd that gath-
ered at the Olympic Auditorium, with their cries of ‘Kill Smith, Kill Smith, Kill
Smith,’ and the orderly audience that sat in the Shrine Auditorium and heard
Smith on the same night, there can be no choice for any good, sound
Christian American.”48
Because his paper was one of the most widely read periodicals on the West
Coast, both by politically-conscious evangelicals and religiously-curious political
conservatives, Shuler’s words in this instance went far in galvanizing right-wing
opposition.
Accosted by the Left and bombarded by the Right, Ham and Eggers thus
found their middle ground difficult to maintain. By early 1946, after having con-
fronted volatility on both sides, these citizens could not help but feel embattled.
Constantly facing the MFD’s picket lines they grew convinced that “political agi-
tators” on the Left were muscling them out of their God-given rights of political
expression. One woman articulated this when, writing to Smith, she penned:
“I know I am sounding very radical, but golly, it’s been proven, over and over
and over again, that by being fair, and mild and meek, one loses against the
rabble rousers. They use strong tactics, yet so subtle, that the ordinary man
becomes confused in his mind.”49
If disgust adequately characterized the response of rank-and-file Ham and
Eggers to MFD, disillusionment captured their feelings about Tenney, Shuler
and the anticommunist Right. Although in agreement with middle-class conser-
vatives about the dangers of communism and secularism, big government and
union bureaucracies, these citizens were far less willing than their counterparts
to celebrate laissez-faire capitalism. As they entered 1946, they faced a conun-
drum that escalated in complexity as the election approached. Would they
follow left-leaning labor leaders who sympathized with their economic situation
but demonstrated contempt for their religion, or would they align with those
who put class concerns aside for the sake of a united Christian conservative
front? Would they choose Christ or the CIO?

Christ or the CIO

Blue-collar evangelicals faced this juncture as Ham and Eggs entered its last
phase of mobilization in the spring of 1946. Their prospects did not look
good, especially as far as the Allens were concerned. Try as they might to
fend off MFD’s counteraction, the Allens began to see its corrosive effects.
Ham and Eggs remained in part a movement for pensioners, and trying to con-
vince these supporters that their political cause was greater than the physical
confrontation awaiting them at each meeting grew more difficult as lines of pick-
eters and policemen steadily lengthened. These mounting concerns certainly
depleted Ham and Eggs, but internal divisions became insurmountable as
well. As spring wore on Ham and Eggs seemed less likely to secure the
number of signatures required to place its initiative on the fall ballot.
92 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

The Allens knew that lost momentum stemmed from their movement’s
squeezing out by the labor Left and anticommunist Right. Survival now
seemed predicated on their commitment to one or the other side.
Though battered by political circumstances beyond their control, many Ham
and Eggers remained more convinced than the Allens that they could maintain
the middle ground. Their confidence might have been unfounded, but it grew
naturally from an authentic desire to protect their interests as workers and
Christian converts. Perkins was one who operated under this premise.
Although supportive of Smith, Perkins grew weary of his influence when, as a
result, Ham and Eggs became less of a grassroots movement concerned with
the plight of rank-and-file laborers. In spring of 1946 Perkins voiced displeasure
with his mentor by stepping up correspondence. “I fear that some of your
recent statements concerning strikes are unfortunate, and that they sound
Anti-Labor,” Perkins soft-peddled to Smith in one of many letters written at
this time. But “in your heart I know you to be a friend of Labor. I intend to
oppose Communism as strongly as ever, but I also intend––God willing––to
defend the right of Labor. . ..”50 Perkins was less reticent in public venues
where he declared in Smith’s absence, “I don’t want Communism, but I don’t
want the rich standing with their feet on the necks of the poor anymore, either.
We are being foolish to defend the rich against Communism. We have been fight-
ing to protect the rich and not ourselves.”51
Unfortunately for Perkins, the Allens grew deaf to his proclamations. As
spring turned toward summer, the Allens decided that the Smith alliance was
too risky for maintaining healthy relations with the AFL and CIO. In a letter
to Smith, Willis Allen laid it out in blunt terms: “As you know, many leaders
of both A.F. of L. and C.I.O. are strongly opposed to you. It is essential that
we have their friendship and support if we are to win and we have found it
necessary to assure both these organizations that we are not expecting to
have you out here for our campaign.” Cognizant of his plans to return to Los
Angeles for additional meetings that summer, Allen finished with one last
plea that Smith “not come to California now because it would not help your
cause any and certainly would in all probability prevent us from gaining our
position on the ballot.”52
The Allens followed this maneuver with another bold move when they
agreed to back one of MFD’s own in the upcoming Democratic primary:
Robert Kenny. On paper the move seemed to make sense for all involved.
While Kenny pledged a constitutional amendment that would “provide an ade-
quate system of pensions and work opportunity,” thereby gaining the support of
the purported 492,000 Ham and Egg members, the Allens were guaranteed
important government posts; it would be Lawrence who would become state
Attorney General should victory come for Kenny in the June primaries and
for the Democratic Party in the November election.53
For rank-and-file Ham and Eggers, however, the Allens’ private and public
declarations for the labor Left made no sense at all. As word spread that the
Allens and Kenny had struck a deal, Ham and Egg members became
Christ and the CIO 93

confrontational, demanding that their leaders explain the motives behind their
backroom deal. Tensions flared at a meeting in mid-May when Lawrence Allen
tried to justify the new course of action that would optimize the Ham and Eggs
political position for the fall election. Already agitated by rumors that Kenny
had paid off the Allens, the overflow crowd of supporters became even
angrier when it was revealed that Perkins had resigned in protest of these
latest developments. Although passionate about Ham and Eggs, Perkins
explained, he was certainly not willing to “be swallowed up by Kenney[sic],
the Pal of the Commies.”54 Evidently neither was Ham and Eggs’ blue-collar
evangelical majority.
With Perkins gone and their movement aligned with those who once
opposed them, these Christian workers made their own decision by abandoning
the cause. Appropriately laced with the apocalyptic imagery of Revelations, the
last two sermons they heard on behalf of Ham and Eggs were delivered to half-
full auditoriums in late May and early June. One was titled “Goodbye
Capitalism,” the other “Goodbye Communism,” but they might as well have
been titled “Goodbye Ham and Eggs,” for the movement’s fate was sealed
shortly thereafter in the Democratic primary on June 4.55 Thanks to a peculiarity
of California’s political system, which allowed candidates to cross-file, the
Republican incumbent Earl Warren outpolled Kenny in his own party and in
the process became the only governor in state history to win the office in the
primary.56 With Kenny and the Democratic Party ticket dead before even
getting to campaign for the election in November, Ham and Eggs once again
found itself on the outside looking in. This time, however, it was for good.
So ended the uneasy alliance between grassroots labor and plain-folk reli-
gion that had propelled Ham and Eggs into the spotlight for a short while. In the
end, Ham and Eggs was forced to confront a new political reality that compelled
it to choose between rather than for Christ and the CIO. Meaning to bridge
these interests, Ham and Eggs effectively did the opposite by helping accentuate
evolving divergences between them. Larger political forces in this way overrode
this organization’s best and worst intentions. By inviting Smith to join their
crusade, the Allens hoped to unite their movement but in fact immediately
embroiled it in fierce ideological warfare between two sides with radically differ-
ent plans for postwar America. In hopes of salvaging their organization and pol-
itical careers, the Allens decided that turning to the Left was their only option.
For the blue-collar evangelicals the decision was not so easy. They had set
off with grand expectations that Ham and Eggs would carry on the fight heroes
like William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long had started by realizing a society of
common folk organized in vibrant, local communities centered around home,
church, and work, and grounded in principles of popular democracy and
Christian morality. Ham and Eggs’ tussles with an aggressive Left finally con-
vinced these evangelicals that their vision for tomorrow was not the same one
shared by those vying for control of their unions and their political party––
those who, in their mind, wanted hardworking plain folk to renounce their
rights as white, Bible-believing Christian Americans for the singular cause of
94 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

labor hegemony and a permanent welfare state. This realization was a troubling
one for religious working folk because it meant they now had to revisit long-held
assumptions about their place in American politics.

Jefferson and Jesus Turn Right

Just where they repositioned themselves in postwar politics would, of course,
play out in various ways. Like other Americans trying to make sense of the
complex domestic and global order the Second World War created, these citi-
zens struggled to find their bearing. The string of work stoppages, anticommu-
nist campaigns, and geopolitical crises immediately surrounding Ham and
Eggs only accentuated the tentativeness of their situation.57 Blue-collar evange-
licals spent the rest of the 1940s wrestling with all of these tensions, and though
they usually did so while gathered as community in church, in the end, answers
were sought (just as evangelicals preferred it) on a deeply personal level. For
this reason generalizations are dangerous when trying to measure their
post-Ham and Eggs response. By the 1950s, however, it was clear that they
were most comfortable following two parallel political paths, both of which
pointed to the Right. Historians usually emphasize the racial backlash of the
1960s or culture wars over gender and the family in the early 1970s as the
point at which hard-hat and church-going voters headed in these two directions.
But for California’s blue-collar evangelicals, who wore both labels, the impera-
tive came earlier in response to the labor question, not civil rights or abortion.58
Those, in the first place, who remained resentful of progressive liberal
Democrats and empowered by racist solutions enlisted in the reactionary
Right, which thanks to Smith’s continued presence, operated with surprising
authority in postwar California. After participating in statewide campaigns
against fair employment and open housing and leading a charge against
California Democratic Party leader James (“Jimmy”) Roosevelt, Smith
decided that relocation was in order. In the early 1950s he and key staff
members packed their belongings and moved to Los Angeles. Upon arrival
they made their move known by carrying out a fifteen-week crusade that
drew packed auditoriums across the region. The same left-wing spies who had
monitored Smith’s activities with Ham and Eggs attended as witnesses and
what they saw troubled them. “Lest this be complacently dismissed as merely
‘another rabble-rousing affair’ ” one agent ruefully reported, “this time his audi-
ence was not rabble; it was an aggregation of cross-section Americans with all its
many implications.”59
Now subtler in platform manner and conspicuously sure of himself, Smith
followed up on these meetings by establishing a third-party ticket for the 1952
federal election. With General Douglas MacArthur as his write-in presidential
candidate and State Senator Tenney as running mate, Smith’s Christian
Nationalist Party succeeded at stirring up a surfeit of notoriety if with only
limited electoral success.60 Smith’s ability at one point to rival the state
Christ and the CIO 95

Republican Party in campaign funding sent a clear message, however, that his
prospects in California remained bright.61
And remain bright they did. Over the course of the next fifteen years Smith
nursed connections with local benefactors whose virulently racist conservatism
meshed with his and whose open pocketbooks facilitated networking with like-
minded segregationists across the South. These networks were put to use in the
early 1960s when Smith’s political apparatus––staffed by some of the same
women’s groups and blue-collar evangelical preachers that supported Ham
and Eggs––helped generate a surprisingly high level of support for George
Wallace during his 1968 California campaign.62
Smith’s presence in Southern California would be constant throughout the
Cold War years but his influence increasingly negligible within the evangelical
subculture. In the main, blue-collar evangelicals worked their way along a
second political path toward the respectable Right. By the early 1950s, in fact,
most had heartily denounced Smith. Whereas earlier many had seen Smith’s
racist vitriol as an excess necessary to endure for their greater interests, by
the 1950s, with expanded economic and political horizons now in clear view,
they broke ties with their former ally. Although race would remain embedded
in their political consciousness it would no longer be foregrounded. As
Perkins’ postwar metamorphosis illustrates, a genuine softening of prejudices
helped nudge them in this direction. In the two decades after Ham and Eggs,
Perkins purged the extremism that stained his convictions by seeking redemp-
tion in family and community, and ministry to California’s largest (and most
Republican) Pentecostal congregations. At his death in 1974 he was serving at
Mayor Thomas Bradley’s request on Los Angeles’s Committee on the Aging
which, among other things, monitored pensions for the elderly.63
For its part, California’s increasingly formidable conservative coalition
welcomed Perkins and his blue-collar evangelical friends into the GOP. To
be sure, not all veterans of the 1940s’ labor wars responded quickly or decisi-
vely to these Republican overtures; some needed further coaxing and even
then many remained registered Democrats while identifying as independents
at the polls. But as Shuler’s monthly proclamations in The Methodist
Challenge consistently made clear, the “working men” who occupied
California’s Pentecostal, Baptist, and fundamentalist churches were clearly
the Republican Party’s for the taking.64 Throughout the 1950s they hinted
at this by supporting Republican-friendly causes that impacted their own
work place. During this decade’s heated battles over right-to-work (RTW)
legislation, for example, blue-collar evangelicals often backed GOP argu-
ments that to allow closed shops (or oppose RTW legislation) was to allow
union racketeering and bureaucracy to override the rank-and-file’s best inter-
ests. Still grounded in principles of autonomy that shaped their worldview,
these workers felt their actions did not spell disloyalty to their unions but
rather dedication to the greater good for which they stood, namely the protec-
tion of workers’ economic and political freedoms. The need for such vigilance,
they believed, was a lesson learned during the 1940s.65
96 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

By the early 1960s those blue-collar evangelicals who remained reticent in

their endorsement of the GOP shed their last inhibitions. The state’s heated
culture wars, along with renewed concern about communist expansion, weaken-
ing national defense, civil rights legislation, and liberal Democratic leadership––
all of which they continued to see playing out dramatically in the workplace as
much as in their neighborhoods and national culture––pushed the hesitant
across the Republican threshold. In 1964 they helped ensure Barry Goldwater’s
nomination as the GOP’s presidential candidate, then two years later voted for
a gubernatorial candidate they thought held even more promise: Ronald
Reagan.66 Reagan’s pull with Californians was extensive, but his genius shone
through in the way he wooed unions and churches, two worlds bridged by blue-
collar evangelicals. An uncanny ability to invoke Jefferson and Jesus (though in
noticeably watered-down form) by blending antistatism with calls for strong mili-
tary, law and order, and Christian morality helped seal his relationship with this
constituency.
Yet the dealmaker was his testimony. When Reagan reached out to
California’s evangelicals he not only wore his spiritual commitments on the
sleeve but also spoke passionately about conversion from the Democratic
Party to the GOP. Undoubtedly both salvation stories touched a nerve, but blue-
collar evangelicals seemed especially drawn in when the Republican referred to
the labor wars of the 1940s as his crucible and awakening. Like their new cham-
pion, they had been transformed by this profound experience; now, twenty years
later, they embraced the opportunity to channel frustrations behind a candidate
and a party that seemed to understand them. To be sure the appreciation cut
both ways, with Reagan frequently heaping praise on his new allies, and it
was not hard to see why. When Reagan made his bid for governor, California
was home to a more affluent and active evangelicalism than seen anywhere
else; Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and other blue-collar evangelicals once
relegated to the margins dictated the terms of this subculture.67 Recognizing
this, Reagan eagerly gathered them into the fold then turned them loose as com-
batants for a conservative “popular front” that soon would extend its reach
across the rest of the nation.68

NOTES
1. Perkins to Smith, April 25, 1945, Perkins folder, box 16, Gerald L. K. Smith Papers
(GLKS), Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Sketches of Perkins’ life are
revealed in his correspondence with Gerald L.K. Smith, the full run of which are documented
in boxes 16 and 19 of the GLKS.
2. Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order
1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989), 56–57.
3. Within the rich body of literature dealing with labor and New Deal liberalism’s rise and
fall, a few stand out, including Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Gary Gerstle, Working-Class
Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York, 1989); James
Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners
Transformed America (Chapel Hill, 2005); David Halle, America’s Working Man: Work,
Home, and Politics among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago: 1984); Meg Jacobs,
Christ and the CIO 97

Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2004);

George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1994); John
McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century
Urban North (Chicago, 1996); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the
Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and
Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002);
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003);
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, 1996).
4. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression
(New York, 1983), xi, 141. For insight into Bryan’s political fusion of Jeffersonian democracy
and popular evangelicalism see Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings
Bryan (New York, 2006), xiv–xvii. On “populism’s” turn to the Right after World War II see
Michael Kazin The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995).
5. Jackson K. Putnam, Old-Age Politics in California (Palo Alto, California, 1970), 79–96.
Lists turned over to California Secretary of State Frank Jordan by the Retirement Life
Payments Association to petition constitutional amendment on the 1938 state ballot contained
789,104 names, roughly 25% of the state’s registered voters. See Tom Zimmerman, “ ‘Ham and
Eggs, Everybody!’ ”, Southern California Quarterly (Spring 1980), 80.
6. The typical storyline of these cartoons unfolded in predictable fashion: kind elderly
employee voluntarily retires, young associate receives promotion allowing him to buy a
home for his family and permit his wife to raise their kids, and delinquent teen finds a way
off the street and into the workforce.
7. A 1939 poll found Ham and Eggs’ most critical support in Los Angeles’ blue-collar
suburbs. See “Second Survey of Public Opinion Regarding California Retirement Life
Payments Act, October 1939, Ham and Eggs folder, Freedom Center Collection (FCC),
California State University, Fullerton. For an account of 1930s radicalism in Los Angeles’
working-class suburbs see Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, especially Chapter Four.
8. See, for example, “Resolution Adopted by the Inter-Denominational Ministers
Alliance, September 24, 1939,” and “Hoaxing California, published by Southern California
Citizens Against 30-Thursday,” both in Ham and Eggs folder, FCC. In addition, critics also
painted Ham and Eggs in highly racist undertones, suggesting that if passed, Ham and Eggs’
pension plan would hand state power to white indigents from other parts of the country,
black folk, and the uneducated. See Report on “Ham ‘N Eggs” in Rob Wagner’s Script,
October 1939, Ham and Eggs folder, FCC.
9. “A New Declaration of Independence,” Ham and Eggs folder, FCC.
10. Los Angeles Examiner, November 3, 1939, Pt. 1, p. 1.
11. “Address of William Schneiderman,” Ham and Eggs folder, FCC.
12. For example of labor support for the movement see People’s World, November 2 and 4,
1939. Winston and Marian Moore, Out of the Frying Pan (Los Angeles, 1939), 156.
13. Zimmerman, “‘Ham and Eggs, Everybody,’” 86– 91; Putnam, Old-Age Politics in
California, 105.
14. For a useful secondary analysis of Townsend’s Midwestern Protestant sensibilities see
Putnam, Old Age Politics, 19–20, 54– 55. The Townsend movement’s religious appeal is
evidenced by a cursory survey of local press coverage in the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Long Beach Townsend Clubs met regularly, for example, in Trinity Baptist Church and Zion
Evangelical Church. See Long Beach Press-Telegram, August 25, 1936. Townsend’s closest
allies included Rev. B. Barr, Townsend manager of the Eighteenth Congressional District,
and Rev. Joe Nation, pastor of Trinity Baptist. See Long Beach Press-Telegram, April 10, 1937.
15. See “Don’t Go Back to Oklahoma,” in “Out on a Limb,” Ham and Eggs pamphlet filed
in box 15, Ham and Eggs folder, GLKS. For detailed analysis of this migration and its effect on
California religious and political culture see Darren Dochuk, “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain
Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Southernization of Southern California, 1939–1949”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005).
16. See Southern California District Council of Assemblies of God, Annual Report 1941,
1946, Pentecostal Collection (PC), Vanguard University, Costa Mesa, California. Maps of
Southern California industry provided by James Wilburn, “Social and Economic Aspects of
the Aircraft Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles During World War II” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1971).
98 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

17. F.C. Woodworth to Rev. J.R. Flower, October 9, 1946, and November 29, 1946,
Southern California District Executive Files, Flower Collection (FC), Assemblies of God
Archives, Springfield, Missouri.
18. On popular evangelicalism’s role in helping fuse Populism see Joe Creech, Righteous
Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana and Chicago, 2006).
19. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 111– 112; Kazin, A Godly Hero, xiv.
20. Correspondence about the California Pastors Committee between J. Roswell Flower,
General Secretary of the Assemblies of God, and the liberal-progressive Committee for Church
and Community Cooperation are located in the Minutes of Committee for Church and
Community Cooperation, June 14, 1945, box 23, Committee for Church and Community
Cooperation Correspondence and Minutes, April-July 1945 folder, Los Angeles County
Federation of Labor Collection (LACFL), Urban Archives Center, California State
University, Northridge, Northridge, California.
21. Lawrence Allen to Gerald L. K. Smith, September 15, 1945, box 15, Ham and Eggs
folder, GLKS.
22. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, November 11, 1945, box 67, folder 12, Jewish
Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles Community Relations Committee (CLA),
Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge.
23. Report on Earl Craig’s “Public Affairs Forum,” November 6, 1945, box 67, folder
12, CLA.
24. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, December 3, 1945, box 67, folder 12, CLA.
25. Jonathan Perkins, The Preacher and the State (Los Angeles, 1946), 7, 12, 40– 49. Copy
of booklet can be found in box 19, Perkins folder, GLKS.
26. Reports on Ham and Eggs Meetings, March 3 and March 24, 1946, box 67, folder
11, CLA.
27. See “Invades Los Angeles Area,” in box 10, folder 11, Papers of the Los Angeles Civil
Rights Congress (CRC), Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los
Angeles, California; “Editorial on Gerald L.K. Smith, Ham and Eggs Movement in Los
Angeles,” Prophecy Monthly (August 1945), 11–12.
28. Smith to Dr. Will Durant, July 11, 1945, box 15, Ham and Eggs folder, GLKS.
29. See Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, February 17, 1946, box 67, folder 11, CLA.
30. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, November 3, 1945, box 67, folder 12, CLA.
31. Chapter One of Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997) provides insight into the “progressive-labor”
alliance. For more complete treatment of liberal cosmopolitanism and working-class ethnic
culture in Los Angeles see Shana Bernstein, “Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global
Conflict: Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933–1954”
(Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). For deeper analysis of blue-collar southerners and
their engagement with northern and western liberal and labor culture see Gregory, The
Southern Diaspora.
32. As part of its education on blue-collar evangelicalism, progressive church leaders con-
tacted the Assemblies of God headquarters in Missouri to find out more about what
Pentecostalism was and how many in California practiced it. See Minutes of Committee for
Church and Community Cooperation, June 14, 1945, box 23, Committee for Church and
Community Cooperation Correspondence and Minutes, April-July 1945 folder, LACFL.
Letter from J. Roswell Flower, August 16, 1945, box 86, folder 1, CLA.
33. Gene Tipton, “The Labor Movement in the Los Angeles Area During the 1940s”
(Ph.D diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1953), 343– 345.
34. Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of
the CIO (Philadelphia, 1988), 107–112. For further insight into battles between religious and
labor leaders during postwar union drives in the South see also Michelle Brattain, The
Politics of Whiteness; Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (Princeton, 2001);
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism
1945–60 (Urbana and Chicago, 1994).
35. See “California Council Builds Democracy,” excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor,
July 19, 1947, box 69, Relations; State Relations; California Council; Federation for Civic Unity
folder, John Anson Ford Papers (JAF), the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
36. McWilliams summarized the argument of MFD activists when he charged that to allow
Smith to speak was “tantamount to saying that we tolerate at home what we summarily punish
Christ and the CIO 99

abroad; that fascism is a criminal doctrine under the American flag in Cologne but that it can be
propagated in the public schools of Los Angeles.” McWilliams in Los Angeles Against Gerald
L.K. Smith.
37. Tom Sitton, “Direct Democracy vs. Free Speech: Gerald L.K. Smith and the Recall
Election of 1946 in Los Angeles,” Pacific Historical Review 57 (August 1988): 292.
38. See “McClanahan Faces Recall” and “Why Smith Has Come to Los Angeles” in Los
Angeles Against Gerald L.K. Smith; Anonymous letter to Smith, March 19,1945, box 18,
McClanahan folder, GLKS.
39. See “Committee of 500” in box 18, McClanahan folder, GLKS and letter from Smith to
McClanahan, January 17, 1946, box 18, McClanahan folder, GLKS.
40. McClanahan to Smith, March 24, 1946, box 18, McClanahan folder, GLKS.
41. Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1945.
42. Bob Shuler to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, October 18, 1945, box 44, folder 3, American
Civil Liberties Union of Southern California Papers (ACLU), Young Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.
43. M.J. Heale, “Red Scare Politics: California’s Campaign Against Un-American
Activities, 1940– 1970,” Journal of American Studies 20 (1986): 10.
44. Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1944.
45. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, May 19, 1946, box 67, folder 11, CLA.
46. Shuler to Bowron, October 18, 1945, ACLU.
47. Ibid.
48. “That Mass Meeting,” The Methodist Challenge, October 1945.
49. Anonymous letter from woman (signed “Disillusioned American”) to Smith March 19,
1946, box 18, McClanahan folder, GLKS.
50. Perkins to Smith, February 21, 1946, box 19, Rev. Jonathan E. Perkins folder, GLKS.
51. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, January 20, 1946, box 67, folder 11, CLA.
52. Letter from Willis Allen to Gerald Smith, March 28, 1946, box 18, Ham and Eggs
folder, GLKS.
53. Press Release from Lawrence Allen, May 10, 1946, box 18, Ham and Eggs folder,
GLKS.
54. Perkins to Smith, May 10 and May 14, 1946, box 19, Perkins folder, GLKS.
55. Report on Ham and Eggs Meeting, May 26, 1946, box 67, folder 11, CLA.
56. Jackson Putnam, Modern California Politics (Nevada, 1996 [fourth edition]), 35.
57. For thick description of the “mid-century earthquake” that rocked American labor at
this time see Denning, The Cultural Front, Chapter One. See also Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight,
especially Parts Two and Three, and Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in
World War II (New York, 1982), especially Chapter Eleven.
58. The literatures on working-class conservatism’s racial backlash and the Christian
Right’s social politics are too extensive to cite fully here. For an overview see Darren
Dochuk, “Revival on the Right: Making Sense of the Conservative Moment in American
History,” in History Compass: An Online Journal 4 (July 2006): 975–999.
59. See “Report on Gerald L.K. Smith Meeting, April 5, 1951,” Hollywood High School
Auditorium, box 41, folder 1951–36 and “Report on Gerald L.K. Smith Meeting,
Wednesday, March 12, 1952,” box 41, folder 1952–63, CRC.
60. For insight into the MacArthur-Tenney-Smith alliance see “Platform: Christian
Nationalist Party,” and Jack Tenney, “The Fight to Save America,” Acceptance Speech as
Vice Presidential Nominee, Christian Nationalist Party, box 44, folder 2, ACLU. “G.L.K.
Smith Pledges Drive to Elect Tenney,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1954, 25.
61. Warren B. Francis, “Gerald L.K. Smith’s Party Given More California Money Than
GOP,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1950.
62. Smith’s ties to racist conservatives and those involved with the Wallace campaigns are
well documented in boxes 43– 45, CRC. At his highest level of popularity in California during
the 1968 campaign, Wallace polled eleven percent of the popular vote. Leading Wallace’s
California campaign was William K. Shearer, a Republican consultant, and Reverend Alvin
Mayall, a Baptist pastor from Bakersfield. For a detailed account of the California campaign
see Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism,
and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), 307–344.
63. Perkins’ memoir, publications, and obituary are available in the Jonathan Ellsworth
Perkins file in FC.
100 ILWCH, 74, Fall 2008

64. For a sampling of Shuler’s views see, for example, “Labor and Religion,” The
Methodist Challenge, October 1949; “Herein Is Tragedy,” The Methodist Challenge, July 1952;
“A Democratic Denial,” The Methodist Challenge, May 1959.
65. On evangelical views of RTW battles see, for example, “Right to Work,” The Methodist
Challenge, June 1955; “The Rightness of the Right to Work,” The Methodist Challenge, May
1959. On the importance of RTW campaigns to the rise of western conservatism see
Elizabeth Shermer, “Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt: Right to Work Campaigns and
Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943–1958,” Pacific Historical Review (forthcoming). For national
perspective see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
(Ithaca, 1999); Gilbert Gall, The Politics of Right to Work: The Labor Federation as Special
Interests, 1943–1979 (New York, 1988); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor,
and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003).
66. See Dochuk, “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt,” Chapter Seven.
67. Ibid. By the late 1960s the Southern Baptist Convention counted 250,000 members in
California; within another decade it would be the largest Protestant organization in the state.
The Assemblies of God claimed similar statistical triumphs in California.
68. On California’s role in the nation’s rightward turn see especially Mary Brennan,
Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning
Point in American Politics (New York, 1995); Keven Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The
Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945– 1966 (Armonk, N.Y., 1998); Lisa
McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001).